I. INTRODUCTION
If your visiting with us we want you to know -studying this fall on the subject of revival and beginning next week we’ll be looking at some of the greatest revivals in the Bible. This week we will conclude our study of that great verse in the Bible telling us what God is looking for before he sends healing and revival to a land in 2 Chronicles 7:14. We’ve seen that we must humble ourselves, and we must pray and seek God’s face, and this morning we’ll look at the third thing God is looking for before revival comes.
STORY: Wife goes with husband to doctor. Not good, husband has but one week to live. Extend time by cooking, rubbing feet, back, take golfing, fishing, etc. Be as affectionate as when you were first married. This might extend his life. “Honey, what did doctor say?” He said you’ve got one week to live. You see many people do not get healed, not because their condition is incurable, but their not healed because they do not want to follow the doctors orders. And I want to suggest to you that many nations are not healed for the same reason. God is his word has said clearly, “I am the Great Physician and I can heal the land.” The question really is do we want to follow the doctors orders. Because here’ what they are 2 Chronicles 7:14. READ.
The issue is not whether or not God can heal a land. The issue is whether the people will swallow the prescription and the last pill is the hardest of all. The first piece of medicine wasn’t easy: humbling ourselves is not something we do readily. The second was no easier to swallow: Pray and earnestly seek the face of God. But the third pill is the hardest of all to get down: We must turn from our wicked ways, and God says “Then, after you turn, then will I hear.”
So write this down: We need to learn that God will tune in when we turn around. That’s what he said. God wants us to understand that there is a connection between his seeming distance between Him listening to us and our sin. God wants us to see the connection and this is something that America has steadfastly refuses to do. We will admit anything else is the problem. We will try anything else except confessing sin and asking God for forgiveness.
National Day of Prayer. Every May in this nation. Let me tell you some history about that day. Begun as act of Congress in 1952, first day in 1953. President Dwight D. Eisenhower made declaration in which he quoted Abraham Lincoln. Now Lincoln was our most theological President. In 1863 with our country in midst of horrible Civil War Lincoln called on the people to turn to God and ask for His deliverance. And Lincoln said we need to pray and confess our sins to God so that he will heal this nation. And Eisenhower quoted Lincoln. Since then 45 more National Days of Prayer. Every President, both Republ and Democr all have called for us to pray. Not one time since Lincoln was quote in 1953 has any President used the word “sin”. How politically incorrect, how immensely unpopular and offensivel it would be for a national leader to tell us as Americans that our problem is sin. And so we as a nation arrogantly presume we can pray and ask God for all kinds of intervention while refusing to admit our sin.
We arrogantly assume we can turn our backs on God and it will not affect our communication with him. And what we forget is that when we choose sin God turns his back on us. God will not look at sin. That’s why on the cross his own son, as the sky went dark, screamed, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” What Jesus feared most about the cross was not the pain of the nails or the taunts and insults of the crowd. What made him tremble was the thought that when sin was on him, God would turn his back. God will not look at sin, even when it is on his own son. And until America, and until you and I come to grips with that basic truth, we won’t have revival. Because we wont have revival until God comes, and God is going to turn back when we turn around.
II. TURNING BACK TO GOD
God said in Malachi 3:7, “Return to me and I will return to you, says the Lord Almighty.” You cannot reverse that order. Word in the Bible for this turning around: REPENTENCE. And I want to talk to you today about what it means to turn from wicked ways back to God. And I think it would help us to understand what it means to turn around if we understood what it means to turn away.
I want to show you a verse in Deuteronomy 30:17 where God explains the people how they will be abandoned if they turn away from Him. God says, “If your heart turns away, and you are not obedient, and if your drawn away to bow down to other Gods and worship them,” And I want to stop right there and show you the progression of turning away according to God.
A. The Progression of Turning Away from God
1. It begins with a radical shift in the heart. That’s where it starts. That fire for God that burns in your heart starts to wane, The embers start to cool. And what always happens is when you let your heart start to drift.
2. You will start to tolerate disobedience in certain areas of your life. There are things that before when your heart was full of God you would have been disgusted by and turned away from, but now that your heart is getting cold, suddenly you are tolerating disobedience in your life.
3. You find a substitute for God. God says you will find something to substitute for me. May be an altar made out of gold or silver. May be an altar made out of leather called your wallet. It may be an altar with 27” of color in between. But God says, if you let your heart stray, you’ll start to tolerate disobedience and you’ll find something to take my place.
B. Turning Back to God. So what does it mean then to turn back?
1. First, that thing that is taking God’s place you deal with and tear down.
2. Second, it means that stuff in your life you’ve been tolerating that you know God hates you start to confess and get rid of, and most important....
3. Third, it means you get that heart back on fire for God. You start to love God again with all your heart. And that’s why God said in Joel 2:12-13, “Even now”, declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart with fasting and weeping and mourning. Rend you heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.”
That’s how revival comes. We turn our hearts back to God. And let me tell you, the turning in America needs to begin with the church of God. We can’t expect America to turn until the church turns. I don’t know if we have ever had a moral majority, but America desperately needs a holy minority. And I think one thing that is keeping revival from coming to America, God would love to send it, but there’s too much sin in his church.
Henry Backtably, in his book “Fresh Encounter” talks about church in 1994 in south that wanted to have two weeks of praying for revival. The church got together and made a list of the sins of America to pray about. 41 sins. Became so convicted prayed for five weeks. But here’s what happened: eventually every single one of those 41 sins in America was confessed by someone in the church.
Revival can be painful. I think sometimes when churches pray for revival what they really want is the fruits of revival. And the fruits of revival can be wonderful: Closer communion with God, Deeper fellowship with brothers and sisters Lost people getting saved The fruits of revival can be wonderful but revival coming can be painful. Always there is remorse before there is rejoicing. Because before revival can come God must reveal to his church the sins they need to turn away from. And that will be hard.
And I think there’s some stuff in this church with attitudes towards each other and towards people that are lost that needs to get dealt with. And although this church has a great history of preaching the gospel there has been many years that we have been too interested in just doing church instead of being the church. If we all pray like we have talked about for God to send revival to this church, that we might again be a light in the darkness and salt in this community, then God is going to show us the business he wants done in our lives.
III. WHAT GOD IS GOING TO SAY TO US
I can tell you now, in two general ways what God’s going to say to us:
A. Turn Away from your “Dead Religion”
The first thing he’s going to say is I want you to turn away from dead religion. Michael Carter is probably not going to make anybody’s list of ten smartest men in America. He was arrested just last February in Connecticut for theft. The police tried to take him back to the scene of the crime to see if witnesses could identify him. He refused to go, finally insisting, “It wouldn’t do any good anyway. I had a mask on.” You see, isn’t it absolutely foolish to think you a put on a mask and keep what you really are from being revealed. Because that’s what people want to do with religion. They want to where the mask of religion to conceal the fact that their heart is cold toward God.
So look with me at Hebrews 6:1-2 at the first thing we’ve got to repent of. READ. Now these are things that are basics to Christianity that you should be grounded in if you’re going to grow as a Christian. And the first thing the writer mentions is “repentance from acts that lead to death”.
Now literally in the Greek it says, “Repentance from dead works.” And if you have a KJV, RSV, NASV that’s what it says in your Bible. Literally, he says the beginning point with Christianity, a foundational principle is this: You must learn to repent from dead works.” In otherwords, one of the first things you need to know as a new Christian is that God is unmoved by the dutiful performance of religious deeds if the heart. Is not engaged. You need to know that no matter what you do, no matter what you perform in the name of religion, if your heart is cold and dead toward God, God is unimpressed with the activity. Listen, if all that mattered was external cleanliness Jesus didn’t have to come and die. If all we needed was a religious system to perform then Judaism was good enough. We could just keep doing that. If all we needed was something to make us look good on the outside. But the writer says in Hebrews 9:13-14, “The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences (here it is again) from dead works, so that we may serve the living God.” The blood of Jesus reveals the fact that the problem isn’t on the outside, it’s on the inside. And we need to be cleansed, we need to repent, we need to turn away from church that just goes through the motions with a heart detached from God.
STORY: Huge tree. Don’t know what kind it is, but it is really big and massive. A very strong looking tree. During a strong storm one of the main limbs was torn off of it. So I went to investigate and guess what I saw? That tree was an imposter. Now on the outside that tree looked big and strong, but inside it was hollowed out with corruption and decay. It only looked to be strong. I want to suggest to you this morning, that some of us are using coming to church as a cover for a decaying, spiritual life. You sing the songs on Sunday but your heart doesn’t jump when you sing. You put money in a plate, but there’s no joy when you give it. You may sign up to do something every now and then at the church, but your heart isn’t full of love. And you need to know, it’s one of the very basic things a new Christian learns, if you can do works for God with your heart detached, those works are dead. And you need to repent. You need to repent from going through the motions of church and religion when you don’t love God.
Revival’s got to come to the church before it comes to the land. And if you’ve been going through the motions when the fire in your heart is out, God says, “I want you to repent from your dead works.”
B. Turn Away from your “Proud Rebellion”
Both those word are important. Sin is rebellion and we do it because we’re proud. Straying hearts always lead to tolerated disobedience. Now we tolerate sin because we’re able to re-classify it.
Sin as humanness; we’re all just humans
Sin as disease; you know it’s just the condition I have, I can’t help myself.
Sin as ignorance; if we would just teach people more they’ll do better.
Sin as victimization; I’m just a victim of my circumstances, I didn’t have a choice.
Sin as inability; I’m just genetically disposed to this kind of behavior, there’s nothing I can do about it.
As long as we can re-classify sin we can tolerate it. I want you to understand, God sees sin too, not as disease, not as humanness, not as inability, but as rebellion. And so he says in Isaiah 53: “We all like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way.” Now that’s sin. Sin is turning to a way that you prefer more than God’s way. And that’s all sin, ultimately, whether it’s gossip, whether it’s lust, whether it’s greed, or envy or anger, all sin is ultimately rebellion against God. Because you have rejected his way.
Now if someone is visiting today and thinking, “My goodness, they must believe in hell, fire and damnation at that church!” Well, I don’t preach like this every Sunday but let me tell you something else. I have not preached anything today nearly as hard as the Lord Jesus. Look at what Jesus said about sin:
Matthew 5:29-30, “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It’s better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.”
Now Jesus knows that we’re sinners. He knows that we stumble. That’s not what he means. What Jesus means is if there’s something going on in your life that is consistently against God and you’re living in rebellion, you had better deal radically with that area of your life, do whatever it takes.
It’s better to limp into heaven than leap into hell.
Revival will come when the church starts hating sin as much as Jesus did.
SUPER BOWL: The plan was that from the very top of the ceiling a bungy jumper was going to jump and perform an amazing jump to the delight of the crowd. Dorito in his mouth and down into a jar of salsa. They were having rehearsal and the poor jumper over-estimated the length of rope and so rather than getting caught by the tension and swinging back up he went straight to the ground, hit head first on the 50 yard line, killed instantly. He made the horrible mistake of giving himself too much slack with something that was deadly. Now that’s what we do with sin. Something that is deadly, something that can send us to hell, and we play games and we give ourselves an amazingly scary amount of slack. I wonder if you’ve been doing that? You don’t need me right now to name the sin, God has already put in on your heart, and the question is why are you giving yourself so much slack with something Jesus died for?
The Bible say in Isaiah 55:6-7, “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God for he will freely pardon.” God will tune in when we turn around
Great story: preacher Crysostum, one of great preachers of church history. Arrested in the 4th century by the Roman Emperor-called in his council to ask how he could most appropriately punish Crysostum. Emperor said, “Shall I put him in a dungeon?” Counselors: “No, he won’t mind that. He would enjoy the quietness so that he could revel in the mercies of his God.” Emperor: “Then I will have him executed!” They said, “No, he won’t mind that. He would delight to go sooner to be with his Lord.” Emperor said, “So what can I do to cause him pain?” And the counselors said, “The only way you could cause him pain is to make him sin. Sin is the only thing he’s afraid of.”
Now brothers and sisters I want a heart like that. I’m not talking about a heart that says, “Well, one time I repented.” I am talking about a heart that says, “I am repentant. That’s how I live each day. That’s the atmosphere of my life. A heart that is looking for idols to smash. A heart that is looking for rebellion to cease. A heart that is constantly turning to God to be on fire for him.” I want a repentant heart. And I want to tell you how you can start to have one if that’s what you want. Three things very quickly:
1. Ask God to do a thorough search of your heart. I want to show you the hardest prayer in the Bible to pray. It’s a prayer of David in Psalm 139:23-24, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Why don’t start be giving God permission to show you anything in your heart right now that displeases him.
2. Be sensitive to the Spirit’s prompting. Because one of the ministries of the Holy Spirit is the conviction of sins. John says in 16:8, “When he (the Spirit) comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin.” It might be through a sermon I’m preaching one Sunday. It might be through a song we sing. Or it might be through the example of a godly man or women in Christ, or it might just be sometime the Holy Spirit puts into your heart and mind the awareness of what it is you need to turn from.
3. Confess immediately anything that God reveals as displeasing to him. If God shows yu something that is displeasing to him don’t you wait a moment in admitting it and saying, “God, I’m going to turn from it. Right now.”
I want you to understand something brothers and sisters. I am aware that we cannot be perfect. I am aware what I John teaches: “If anyone says he has not sinned he is a liar and the truth is not in him.” I am not saying this morning that we can live lives without sin, I’m saying that we can live lives without staying in sin. It’s like to story of the guy who was going fishing one time and he went up to the dock to an old man. And he wanted to know how deep the water was and he asked in kind of a strange way. He said, “Sir, if I was to fall off right here would I drown?” And the old man said, “No you wouldn’t drown if you fell in. You’d drown if you stayed under.” And folks, it’s not our occasional stumble with sin that hinders revival. It is staying under. You confess immediately to God and tell him you’re getting rid of that sin.
And I’ll tell you what the greatest barrier is going to be. I tell you right now it’s going to be pride. Pride is going to keep you from wanting to confess to God and to confess to your church what your sin is. That’s why God said the very first thing you have to do before revival can come is to humble yourselves. If you’re not humbling yourself before God you’re never going to deal with sin.
I wonder this morning if we’re ready to follow the doctors orders? There’s a lining around your heart that’s very, very thin that’s called the pericardium. Sometimes that lining will expand up to ¾” thick. When that happens your heart is constricted. it simply cannot beat and function like God designed it. doctor has to do something radical: open up your chest and take his knife, and slit that pericardium so that the heart can be released to expand and beat like God wants it to. Now sin in your life is like a wall around your heart. And your not going to be able to love God, and feel for God, have a passion for God, have a fire for God until that heart is released to beat for God like he intended. Until you get radical about sin. And that’s why the Bible says in Acts 3:19, “Repent then and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, so that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.” My guess is this morning that there’s many of us who need to be refreshed from the Lord. And the refreshing comes after the repentance. It’s time to do business with God.
INVITATION
(Fashioned for my audience from a series by Rich Atchley)
