Revival // 6 September 2006

Scott

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There's people uh this morning singing weak made strong but actually want to feel that. There's people here singing weak made strong but actually want to feel that. This they're they're on the inside, they're feeling I'm weak and I'm singing this, but I but I don't know how to do that. I don't know what that looks like, I don't know what that feels, I don't know how that happens. I just want to tell you that God is listening, that God knows. And just bear with us for a minute, because I think we're gonna speak to that this morning. It's good to be back into September. Who's excited about September? I I get excited about September, and I I was um dancing home from the school gate on Wednesday, high-fiving strangers. I'm sorry if you're a teacher, but seven weeks of parenting is tough work. I want to go back to part-time parenting where they go to school for the other part-time, but no, it's good. I want to speak this morning about drift. The kind of drift to begin with, I know we're gonna get to revival, but I want to start with drift. The kind of drift you experience when you're in the ocean. Anyone experience drift when they're swimming? Yeah, I mean your your beaches are a lot narrower, but like you can go into the water in Australia, put your stuff on the beach, swim around, splash about, come out and think someone stole your stuff. Because you can't find it anywhere, but you're actually about a kilometer down the beach because you drifted, and your stuff is just up here if you're lucky. But I think a boat is a better example of drift. So if you're in a boat and you're like, we're gonna stop here, we're gonna have some dinner, we're gonna sleep, if you don't drop your anchor, in the morning you're not gonna still be there. Because the ocean has tides, it has currents, it has a pull, and it pulls you away from where you try to be. Now, a boat is a great example because the boat is in the ocean, but it's not of the ocean. Jesus tells us we are to be in the world, not of the world. And we have to understand that the world has a pull. The world has a tide, it has a current, and it will pull you away from the things that you are not anchored in. And that's why drift is important, as well as echo. I don't know what we just lost me. All right. If we are not anchored in the things that are important to us, and hopefully that's God, then we will be pulled away. We will experience drift because we are in the world, but not of the world. And we can drift spiritually. It's called spiritual drift. We can experience spiritual drift. And see, the thing about spiritual drift is we can be drifting and not even realize that we're drifting. So we need to learn to know what spiritual drift looks like. And one of the first signs of spiritual drift is I like to call it a spiritual neglect, but it's actually more of a spiritual apathy. It's all the actions, all the motions, but with none of the intimacy. So we go to church, we worship, we pray, we look at our Bible, we go to life group, it's all the activity, all the action, but with none of the fire, none of the heat, none of the intimacy. That's the first sign that you're drifting. The second sign is distraction. And distraction happens subtle, like a drift, because life is crazy. We quickly get distracted by our circumstances, our responsibility, uh, our interests, our jobs, our screens. And before we know it, that time we put aside for God starts to deplete. It starts to vanish. And before we know it, we've gone a little while down the track, and we're like, I can't remember the last time I prayed or I read my Bible or etc. But then the problem with distraction is the more we're distracted by our life, the more we start to compromise and conform. You see, that fire, that conviction we felt to live the way of Jesus starts to get a lot quieter because we start to conform with what we're distracted by. And then finally, the really frightening sign of spiritual drift is we start to remove ourselves from accountability. We start to disconnect from our spiritual community. Now, drift can be identified. We can start to recognize that we're drifting, although we can start to drift without knowing. However, we don't drift forever. You only drift for a while. Because if you drift for too long, you start to feel barren. It's when you start to feel empty, you start to feel dry. We're called to bear fruit, but when we're barren, we bear frustration. And when we're frustrated, we start to isolate ourselves because we feel forgotten, or we start to point the finger at those around us. And when we're in barren for too long, we start to feel bound and blocked. We start to go, you know what? It feels like there's this massive cloud, this barrier between me and God. But the problem is you've drifted for so long, you're now dry, you're now empty, you're now barren. And you see the thing, the problem with barren is when you start to feel dry and empty, when you start to feel frustrated, you start to feel guilt. And once guilt gets in, then we start to feel shame. Like we've let ourselves down, we've let God down, we've let others down, and shame very quickly becomes this feeling disgrace. And then, you know, when we're in that space, it's withdrawal. We want to withdraw from things. We want to withdraw from those healthy things in our life we wanted to give ourselves to. Drift begins to create apathy. But if we drift for too long, we become barren. And barren leads to shame and guilt. Drifting and barrenness cannot be broken without intentional action. Without intentional action. And what we need to all understand this morning, every one of us, including myself, is every one of us can drift. We all can drift. The reality is some of us in this room are currently drifting. And what's sad to say is some of us are currently feeling barren, dry, and empty. However, we can go to the Bible. See, there's a verse that I want us to learn if we're feeling like we're drifting, if we're feeling like we're barren. It's a great little verse, and it's a psalm because we spent the summer in Psalms, and I'm still in them. And and Psalm 85, 6 says, Will you not revive us again that your people may rejoice in you? Can we learn that one? When we're feeling like we're drifting, when we're feeling dry, when we're feeling empty, can't we just look up at God and say, Will you not revive us again? Let us rejoice in you again. You see, that word revive used in that scripture is kaya. It means to restore, it means to live again. God's people throughout the Old Testament would use that word to cry out for spiritual renewal. That is the word they would use. They would ask for kaya, revive me, let me live again, God, restore me. They're calling out for spiritual renewal. But we live in a post-resurrection world. And you know what? We talked about this a couple of months. You know what that means? God's love's been poured out. It means our hope cannot be put ashamed because God's love has been poured out in you through the Holy Spirit that dwells inside of you. We need to know that and hold on to that. So when we're feeling dry, when we're feeling empty, when we're feeling like we're drifting, we can cry out because we know his love has been poured out. And we can be revived. We can feel that personal spiritual renewal. But that's a that's a personal situation. Throughout history, though, this can happen en masse, and that's called revival. See, where revival goes beyond personal is it's a spiritual outpouring, a sovereign act. When I use that word sovereign, I mean it's of God, but it's en masse. Beyond just an individual. It's en masse across a whole, a large amount of people that that corrects a drift. It's en masse in such a way that it that morally and socially changes the fabric of a geographical area. You know, throughout history, the body of Christ has drifted away from what God's called them to be. And if you look at those moments in history where the body of Christ has drifted, you'll also see these moments of revival where the body of Christ is put back on track. You know what's powerful about that? Those historical moments of correction of the whole body away from a drift reminds us whose church it is. He's gonna correct, he's gonna revive. But the thing is though, I really felt that we meant to talk about revival in the next month until conference. But I was hesitant to use that word because I don't want people to go, oh, we're trying to make a revival happen because that's not what we're doing. But I also don't want a congregation that sits in a church that is a part of a movement that was started by a historical revival to not understand what revival is. Because the problem is when we talk about revival, sometimes we try to see revival and measure revival through the wrong things. Sometimes we try to look at something and say it's revival because we're feeling something emotional and some some sort of sensory excitement, and we're like, that's revival. Or sometimes we see, look, there's large crowds and packed churches, that must be revival, or maybe it's maybe it's viral content, or maybe it's performance. We're like, that's revival. It's not revival. Why would we want to water down what God can do to just that? Revival is much bigger than that, it's a sovereign act. Now, when God moves, there can be packed churches and large crowds, but it's not limited to that. There's something more to a move of God. You see, the marks of revival, the true marks of revival, is deep repentance and confession. That's what leads to such a significant moral change across a geographical area. The result of that deep repentance and confession turns to a unified, urgent prayer, a bold witness, and an overflowing joy. You see, the revival that started this movement over a hundred years ago in Wales, and we're gonna spend a Sunday morning looking at this in a couple of weeks, but it started with a group of people in a service that first and foremost felt that they needed to confess all their known sins, that they were no longer going to hide what was going on inside, they were no longer gonna live with what was going on inside, they were gonna confess it, they were gonna give it up to God, and they were gonna live free of it. And that's where it started. But then they went beyond that because they said, we're gonna remove all doubt. If there's anything iffy in our life that may cause us to compromise, we're cutting it out. And from that place, they then decided to surrender wholeheartedly to the Spirit. If the Spirit prompted, we're gonna go with it, and that led them then to go out of that building and confess with pride that they know Jesus, that they follow Jesus, that they love Jesus, and Jesus is for everyone. That that was the root that started to brew up and become the revival that started this movement over a hundred years ago. But revival is not something we can manufacture. So this series isn't because we're trying to create revival. Revival's not man-made, it's sovereign, it's a move of God, it's an outpouring of his spirit. So we can't manufacture it, we can't make it happen, but we can desire it. We can desire it. It's okay for us to want to see revival. It's okay for us to desire revival. And then that happens from us finding a place in ourself to have a little holy discontentment. That we feel so broken by what we see around us, so broken by what we feel ourselves, so broken from what we see around us that we want nothing more than God. And that brokenness then leads us to a different level of prayer. So when prayer when we find out there's going to be a global week of prayer, we're like, I thought every week was a global week of prayer. We got every hour covered every week. The world, the globe's just catching up. But it also leads to deep repentance. So from now until conference, which is on the 11th of October, it's Sunday morning, but the night before, Saturday night, we're having a praise party. We don't know what that means. We just thought it was a cool name. Um, no, it's not. We got this speaker coming from Dublin. His name's Matt Rills, he's fantastic, but one of his biggest gift things is leading praise. He leads praise for all our conference, uh, big church, all our movement gatherings. And so we wanted him to come and speak at conference, but we didn't want him to try to lead praise and speak, so we said we'll just give him a night or we'll give him a sleep between the two, and we'll do a praise party on a Saturday night. So we're gonna have a praise party on a Saturday night, then we're gonna have conference on a Sunday morning. But from now until then, we're gonna look at revival. So the next couple of weeks, we're gonna look at the early revivals in Acts as the early church expanded, then we're gonna look at for a Sunday the Welsh Revival and then the Alay revival, the two revivals that happened over a hundred years ago that birthed what we call Pentecostalism. We're not doing this to create revival because we said we can't do that. But I felt like we need to talk about it. We need to understand it. We need to understand what's happened historically, what's happening today, and what could happen in the future and will happen in the future. And maybe get a little uncomfortable together. But just where I'm at right now is I want to just veer a little bit because I feel like I have a word for us as a church here this morning, and I just want to speak to that, if we're all right with that. The word comes from this passage I want to look at. Isaiah 54, 1 to 4. It says, Sing, barren woman, you who never bore a child, burst into song, shout for joy, you were never in labor, because more are the children of a desolate woman than of her who has a husband, says the Lord. Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your curtains wide, do not hold back, lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes, for you will spread out to the right and the left, your descendants will dispose of nations and settle in the desolate cities. Do not be afraid, you will not be put to shame, do not fear disgrace, you will not be humiliated. I started to get a sense on Monday that God wanted to speak to us through this passage, that He has a word for us. I I tried to share a little bit of that, what I had on Wednesday night at encounter, but I I wanna I want to unpack that in full with you right now. And so I'm gonna skip the first part and jump into the second part to start out with, the part that calls us to enlarge our tent, to widen our canvas, to lengthen our ropes, and to deepen our stakes. And I want to start there because I feel like God is speaking to us practically first through that. He's speaking to our preparation for the season ahead. This is a word for us now as a family going into the next couple of months. And so there's there's there's a word of preparation for us, and it's not disconnected from this concept of drift and barrenness. So the first thing that I feel like he's speaking to us this morning is that we need to widen our canvas. That we need to widen our canvas. Now, if you've got a tent, what does the canvas do? It provides covering, it protects you and the little ones from rain and wind and the elements. The tent is covering. And so what God's saying to us through that, when he says widen your canvas, is he's saying we need to take our spiritual covering seriously. We need to widen it in the season ahead. You see, we're a part of the body of Christ. This spiritual community is the church, but it's also our covering. We cover each other, we protect each other from the elements. We're the people that should notice each other. We should see if someone's drifting, we should know if someone feels barren. And in this season, God is challenging us to widen that canvas, to make more space. Because I think there's still some in this room who's like, I got it. I don't, I can do this myself. I don't need others. Well, our capacity is limited by our well-being, and our well-being is limited by allowing others to help us. People want to know you, people want to care for you, people want to love you. That's the body of Christ. I got a great example of it. Um, yesterday we were driving to the park, and my wife, wife, and I were having an argument. That's the word I'd choose to use, argument. She'd probably use the word fight. And and who can relate to this? You'd get to the place you gotta go and you're still in it. You look at each other, it's like we're gonna put on a face now with our friends. Gotta love my wife. She stands out of the car, slams the door, looks across the roof at me, she goes, I don't put on a face. Stumps off towards the park. I follow nervously behind, and I notice that there's no seating at the playground. So I dart back to the booth to get the chairs, which means my wife gets to our friends first, and I think she opens with, We're in the middle of a fight. I was like, Well, if you can tell my friends, I can tell the church. Because I'm preaching the next day. She did the right thing. She did the right thing. We weren't doing well in that moment. It wasn't a big thing. But our friends care about us. We don't need to be perfect, we don't need to put it on a face. We don't have to pretend. We're having a bad time. Let our friends love us. Let our friends care for us. How much do we hate finding out that someone we love has been going through something and they didn't tell us? So why would we do the same to them? Wide in your canvas, widen your covering. Let more in. Let more people love you. Let more people care. Let more people know what's going on before it's too big. Before it's too insurmountable. I promise you, you'll be more surprised by how much they love you than the embarrassment you feel by telling them. The second word God wants you to know is lengthen your ropes. See, that's about holding the tension of the tent. The ropes have to be the right distance, but the right angle. Because there's a vertical tension and a horizontal tension. So if the angle's wrong, it won't hold that tension. Your tent will either collapse or it will be pulled away. That's the reality of being in the world, not of the world, is we live in tension. We've got to hold that tension right. So that we can be anchored in the things of God, but we can actually take the love of Christ into the world. God wants to remind you that when Jesus prayed in the garden, he didn't pray for his people to be taken away from the world. He didn't pray for them to be taken away from the tension. He prayed for his followers to be of God, but in the world, to love and serve the Lord, to love others as you love yourself and love him, to share the good news, to baptize others. But we have to understand and prepare for the reality that we live in attention every day. And we've got to get the angle of those ropes and the distance of those ropes right. But he's put us in this tension. So remember we can do all things through God who gives us strength. So then the final bit of this tent is it's alright if we've got the ropes at the right angle and the right distance, but they've got to be in stakes that are knocked deep enough into the ground. We've got to have the right roots, the right anchor into the things of God. Do you feel like you're deep enough into the things of God? It's not about quantity. You can have a lot of quantity and no quality. You can have a lot of action and no intimacy. A lot of activity. God is calling us to the kind of intimacy with Him that creates depth. Not obligation and activity. And so now I want to come back to the first part of that song, to speak to the intimacy. He says, Sing, barren woman. You who never bore a child, burst in a song and shout for joy. God is speaking to Israel in one of its toughest times, one of its darkest times, one of its driest times, empty time, it's in captivity, away from its promised land. God calls them a barren woman, but he says, Sing. Sing again. Sing in this moment, in this place, shout for joy. Exuberantly, without abandonment, shout out. He's calling his people to praise again. Now we're going to be talking about praise a bit amongst revival because praise is the theme of our conference, but because we started this conversation on Celebration Sunday, we have one English word for praise, which robs us of the seven different types of praise. The seven different types. And if we can know those types, we can know which one to use at which time. On Celebration Sunday, we talked about the praise to helia, which is this spontaneous bubbling up in response to what God's done. That's not the praise we're going to talk about this morning. Because we're going to talk about the kind of praise that we need when we feel ourselves drifting, the kind of praise we need when we feel barren. The kind of praise we praise we need when we feel like hope is lost. That can pull us back from withdrawal, guilt, and shame, and that's Shabak praise. Shabbak. Shabuck praise. This is not a praise of response. This is a praise of anticipation. This is the praise that's known as a loud shout. But it's actually kind of spoken about a praise that shouts at. So it's a praise of anticipation that shouts at. It shouts at your feelings. It shouts at your circumstances. It shouts at your worries, at your fears, at your dryness, at your embarrassment, at your barrenness, at your apathy. It's a praise that shouts at because it's a loud tone of triumph that believes God is going to prevail. It's not a praise that responds to God already prevailing. It's a praise that shouts at because we are confident in what He's going to do. And you know what they nickname this kind of praise? They nicknamed it a holy roar. Shabbat is a holy roar. And I'm going to be really honest with you guys for a minute, and we might not like it, but I make this joke all the time. I understand I'm dealing with a southern crowd. But I think our roar's been silenced. Now, maybe it is because we're southern and we're a little bit more timid, we're a little bit more quiet, we're really a little bit more reserved, but I don't remember that in the Bible. Maybe it's a fear of rejection or embarrassment. Maybe it's we like being in our comfort zone or it's a false humility, but we've lost our roar. And if we're gonna face the world, if we're gonna handle the tension, if we're gonna fight the drift, we've got to learn to shout praise at it. We've got to find our holy roar, we've got to shift our focus to God and move in his authority. Someone asked the band to come up. So we can land this, please. They're gonna lead us in a song called Oh Come to the Altar. Trying to do this in a way that works to southerners, but at the same time challenge your southernness. So I'm not gonna say let's stand up and roar and shout. I'm gonna say let's sing this song. And in this song, let's find our roar again. As we sing this song, let's sing to our situation, let's sing to our circumstances, let's sing to our emptiness, our dryness, our barrenness, our pain, our hurt, our frustration, our shame, our guilt, whatever you're feeling, let's sing to it in this song. Let's find that holy roar. Let's have that anticipation in us that the power of God can prevail, will prevail, because you know this is the praise that they knocked down the walls of Jericho with. Church, it's time to live again, so why don't we stand up? It's time to revive again. The last thing I'm feeling to say from God this morning is God's asking us to stop acting like we have time and understand that we don't. We need to stop acting with the assumption we have time because we don't know. We don't know if we have time. And when you act that you have the assumption of time, you end up with apathy over urgency. And God this morning is calling you to urgency over aposaphy. He's calling you to desperation over complacency, he's calling you to certainty over security. He wants us to hear the words of the verse. Do not be afraid, you will not be put to shame. Do not fear disgrace, you will not be humiliated. Because hope does not put to shame, because God's love has been poured out into the hearts of us through his Holy Spirit that dwells within us. Church, I'm looking to find out. Do we still have a holy roar? Well, let's see.