Text: Joel 2:12-18, Title: Prescription for Revival, Date/Place: NRBC, 10/28/07, AM
Opening illustration: Tell the story of the revival of the Hebrides Islands in 1949-ill file, What is Revival? 1. Revival is not a week worth of meetings. 2. Revival is not started in one day. 3. Revival is not controlled by man. 4. Revival is a heart thing. 5. Revival is always brought on by REPENTANCE. 6. Revival is renewed zeal to obey God
A. Background to passage: The people of Joel’s day had become complacent, apathetic, and backslidden from the days when they truly served God. And God had sent a plague of locusts to bring them to their knees and back to Him. Explain the seriousness of a major locust plague. Our text this morning is the specific instruction given by God to begin to remedy the situation and usher in the return of God’s presence.
B. Main thought: We will see what people are supposed to do individually, corporately, and the reason for it.
A. For You (v. 12-14)
1. Right in the middle of this awful destruction and the realization that the death sentence for many people and livestock was being handed down, God says turn to me. The word that He uses means to make an immediate linear motion back to a point from which you departed. It means to turn from the evil things and turn to God. It means to forsake backsliding, disloyalty, and faithlessness. And God says that he wants all of their heart. He says to rend your heart, meaning to tear it to pieces revealing sorrow over sin. And he expects to see genuine brokenness over their sin. He desires that they truly be sorry.
2. Matt 9:13, Deut 30:2, Josh 24:23, Jer 4:4, 14, Hos 10:12,
3. Illustration: Once a man asked an evangelist “how can we have revival?” The evangelist answered by asking “Do you have a place where you can pray?” Yes the man replied. Tell you what to do, go to that place and take a piece of chalk along. Kneel down there, and with the chalk draw a complete circle around you and pray for God to send revival on everything inside that circle. Stay there until He answers, and you will have your revival, "Have you noticed how much praying for revival has been going on of late - and how little revival has resulted? I believe the problem is that we have been trying to substitute praying for obeying, and it simply will not work. To pray for revival while ignoring the plain precept laid down in Scripture is to waste a lot of words and get nothing for our trouble. Prayer will become effective when we stop using it as a substitute for obedience." -Tozer, A.W. I have a very good friend who recently shared with me that on one occasion she, out of sincere concern over sin and desire to be what God wanted her to be, she prayed, "God, show me the sin in my life. Show me what I really am." She said that in a couple of weeks she began to pray, "Lord, I’ve seen enough! Please, Lord, don’t show me any more. I can’t stand myself!"
4. Do not believe the lie that you are “fine.” Hear me when I say that we are all in need of repentance. Everyday we fail to love Him with all our heart, everyday we fail to honor Him with our lives. Everyday we live and move in a culture that ignores God at every turn. And most of the time we follow suit, making decisions, having interactions, and carrying on with life without a thought toward Christ. Everyday we worship at the altars of materialism, sports, education, recreation, at the expense of the greatest Treasure in the universe. This is not simply an acceptable failure, it is treason! And until we see that, we will never experience revival. All the real revivals in history had a major them of repentance, contrition, and confession. And most were accompanied by external displays of such repentance (however, not those that are disjoint from inner sorrow). We must mourn over sin, beat our breasts and wail and how utterly we have failed to live the radical Christian life that is close to Jesus. We must humble ourselves! We must truly examine where we are, not in relationship to others, but to God and His Word. We must commit individually to radical obedience. We must confess our sin! We must look at every area of our lives—our family, our job, our money, our goals, our priorities, our loves, and our desires. Does He have all of you? Are your highest affections aimed at Christ? Is Christ the preeminent being or thing in your life? If not, tear your heart to bits to rid it of the sin which he reveals. Weep and wail and fast, even during FCW, so that God may lay your heart bare. Ask Him to break you, open your eyes, and help you commit all that you are to Him.
B. For Us (v. 15-17)
1. The next couple of verses speak in similar terms and yet to a different audience. All of the language in these verses is corporate, instead of individualistic. It describes a time where the whole congregation (elders, nursing infants, wedding couples, etc) gathers together for a specific purpose—to seek the Lord. The solemn assembly was a special time of self-humbling and setting apart as holy. The shofar would blow signaling to all Israel that they needed to seek the Lord together. And in single-minded, unified purpose, God will hear! And so God tells them what to do when they come together with this purpose: let the priests (remind them who the NT priests are) weep in the temple and beseech the Lord for blessing and deliverance for the people. And this assumes that individuals have turned and repented already. And so this indicates that there is something very special and unique about a entire congregation seeking Christ.
2. 1 Kings 8:33-34, Jonah 3:5-9,
3. Illustration: “Revival is the church falling in love with Jesus all over again.”- Vance Havner, Leonard Ravenhill said this in his book “Why Revival Tarries” “No man is greater than his prayer life…Poverty–stricken as the church is today in many things, she is most stricken here, in the place of PRAYER.
We have many organizers, but few agonizers; many players and payers, few PRAYERS.
The ministry of preaching is open to few; the ministry of PRAYER- the highest ministry of all human offices is open to all." Jim’s belief that "God can’t resist those who humbly and honestly admit how desperately they need him" (p. 19) guides his work. It is Prayer, not preaching that brings Revival.
4. The exhortation for revival today is to want it, but not simply as five or six or even twenty or thirty individuals. We need to seek God as a congregation. We need to have the same heart. We need to get right ourselves, then all come together in a chorus of prayer for revival to come. We can do this for rain, or natural disasters, or war, but not for a fresh move of God. Some of you don’t care if we have real revival or not. As long as things keep on keeping on about like they are, you are fine with that. In fact you would rather have it that way. Some of you won’t come. You barely come regular on Sunday mornings, let alone on other nights of the week. Your lack of concern for the body of Christ and the advance of the kingdom is sabotaging New River Baptist Church. WE must want revival for it to come. WE must intercede! WE must consecrate ourselves! WE must seek the Lord!
C. For Him (v. 18, 27)
1. Lest we get overly focused upon ourselves and what we can do to have revival, we must remember that all of this is about God, not us. The plague of locusts was not about revival, but about God. All the repentance called for in the first two verses of this text is based on the character of God. Explain those. Verse 18 tells us that after individual and corporate repentance, God will be a husband unto them again, and His mercy will be put on display. And then in verse 27, God is explicit to why all this occurred—so that they will know and the nations will know the fame of the One True God. The fame and name of God are preeminent in God’s priorities. And they are the things for which we were created.
2. Ezek 39:25, Rom 11:36, 2 Tim 2:25,
3. Illustration: Bill Hybels writes in “Fit to be Tied”, God knows “unless we give Him the place of preeminence he deserves, we will be frustrated, empty people.”
4. All tragedy, all victory, all pain, all loss screams a message to us: turn back to God with all your affections so that He may be known and praised and loved and treasured in all the nations, in all the cities, in all the offices, in all the farms, and in all the families of the earth. God desires that He has our absolute loyalty, and He will settle for nothing less. Second place for God is first loser. He wants the opportunity to lavish His love and blessing upon people, so that the whole earth will know that there is One True God, and He is the greatest Treasure ever conceived of. We must be careful not to let our seeking before improper motives that would honor our self-centered bent and cause people to look at us and not a our Savior. So in this seeking God for revival, and when the revival comes and our hearts are turned toward him, remember to depend on Him, focus on Him, rejoice in Him, exult in Him, fall in love with Him, magnify Him, desire Him, delight in Him, and bring honor to Him. For it is all about Him!
A. Closing illustration: One day she was reading the newspaper and came across an article about the ministry of D.L. Moody and the Revival that was taking place in the United States. Even though she had never heard of him before, she began to pray and ask God to send Moody to her church in England. Some time later, Moody decided to take some time off and go to England on Vacation. He really hadn’t planned on doing any preaching while he was there. But he met a pastor in London, who persuaded him to come and preach in his Church one Sunday. That afternoon the invalid woman’s sister came home from church and told her that D.L. Moody had preached during the morning service and would also be preaching in the Evening service. When she heard this, she spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in prayer, praying that God would do something special. In his journal Moody made the statement that the people of that church were the deadest group of people that he had ever preached to. But that night, as He stood to deliver the message he could tell that something was different. That night several people confessed their sins to the Lord and accepted him as their Lord and Savior. Moody left town the next day to go to Ireland, but received a telegram from the pastor of the church begging him to come back and preach some more because Revival had broken out. Moody got back on the train and went back to London, where He preached 10 consecutive nights, and hundreds of people were saved. All because of the powerful prayers of one invalid woman who couldn’t go to church, but wanted to see and experience a Revival.
B. Recap
C. What if we all came to the altar this morning who are able, and some rent their hearts before Him, and some that have already done that begin to seek the Lord as a body.
Additional Notes
• Is Christ Exalted, Magnified, Honored, and Glorified?
