Personal Revival

Text: “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you”. – Psalm 85:6

What does it mean to be revived? What is a revival?

A person’s spiritual life, ministry, business, finances, marriage, or even your car can be in need of a revival.

To be revived or to experience a revival means:

– To impart new strength and vigor into a person or thing

– To bring back to life; to return or restore to consciousness or life

– To become reinvigorated

– A reawakening

– A restoring back to use after a period of being forgotten, unused, or inactive

– An improvement in the condition or strength of something

Linking it with our walk or relationship with God, personal revival can be defined as a person or individual becoming fully awake and alive spiritually. It is being revitalized or reinvigorated spiritually. It is a significant growth and improvement in your relationship with God. It is becoming a vibrant believer who is fully charged, fully awake, fully alert. It is being full of the strength, power and anointing of God which keeps you from sin, frees you from Satanic yokes and makes you a heavenly minded and focused believer. Personal revival empowers you to continue with the great works Jesus started while here on earth (John 14:12).

My prayer is that this month, God will cause everyone of us to experience a personal revival.

WHY DO WE NEED PERSONAL REVIVAL?

1. Personal revival is the only road to true revival in the body of Christ as a whole

It is when the church is filled with people who in their personal walk with God are alive spiritually and are filled with the power and anointing of God that the church will be revived. Often times we hear that the church is not the building. This is very true. The church is simply an outward expression of what you and I really are on the inside. If for instance the prayer life, worship life, evangelism or commitment level of the church is low, it is because in the personal lives of those that make up the church, there is a very low level of prayer, worship and study of God’s Word.

It is good to have anointed guests ministers and programs that can stir up a revival, but there’s a limit to what those services and programs can do. If after such programs, the people ministered to don’t do anything about their own personal relationship with God, then the purpose of the revival service has been defeated. If after a revival meeting you personally don’t do anything to remain vibrant and alive spiritually, after sometime, things will return back to normal. The spiritual dryness and emptiness will return back. The result is that the church continues to be in need of a revival even after a revival service or meeting.

Hasn’t it happened to you that after a very powerful ministration you are charged up; you become prayerful and very active in church, then after two weeks or a month, the spiritual dryness, the prayerlessness and lukewarmness returns. It is because we have not experienced a real personal revival. What simply happened was that you were just excited and motivated by the speaker, program or service but deep within you, you haven’t really experienced a personal revival.

2. Personal revival will keep us from being a yo-yo Christian. Who is up today then down tomorrow. Up this month, down the next. Up this year, down next year. Which in itself brings a lot of spiritual frustration, dissatisfaction and guilt that weighs people down.

3. One person that is personally revived can make a big difference before God. When God wants to do a new thing, bring about a turnaround, mighty deliverance or transformation in a family, He doesn’t need everybody in that family to be spiritually alive, vibrant and on fire before He can intervene and bring about a change. With just one person, God can do what He wants to do. One person that is personally revived can make a big difference before God.

– In Ezekiel 22: 30 – God was in search of a person who was personally revived. A person who was awake and alive spiritually and could stand in the place of prayer. With just that one vibrant, spiritually alive, personally revived person, God was ready to bring about a mighty deliverance to the whole nation.

– In Genesis 18:26– 33 – when God was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, He told Abraham that if He found just 10 people in that city that were in right standing with God, were living right, were personally revived, He wouldn’t destroy the city. God wasn’t waiting for the whole city to be personally revived before He would bring deliverance and restoration to the land. In fact, if Abraham had gone on to pray to God that what if it was just one righteous person in the land – God would have spared their lives.