Sermon Central
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To Revive Or Not To Revive
Contributed by Richard Crow on Sep 4, 2004 (message contributor)
Summary: Just like tht people of Israel, we need to be careful not to let the world distract us from God. We need to be revived.
To Revive or not to Revive?
In 1857 there was a 46 year old man named Jeremiah Lamphere who lived in New York City. Jeremiah loved the Lord tremendously, but he didn’t feel that he could do much for the Lord until he began to feel a burden for the lost and accepted an invitation from his church to be an inner city missionary. So in July of 1857 he started walking up and down the streets of New York passing out tracts and talking to people about Jesus, but he wasn’t having any success. Then God put it on his heart to try prayer. So he printed up a bunch of tracts, and he passed them out to anyone and everyone met. He invited anyone who wanted to to come to the 3rd floor of the Old North Dutch Reform Church on Fulton St. in New York City from 12 to 1 on Wednesday to pray. He passed out hundreds and hundreds of fliers and put up posters everywhere he could. Wednesday day came and at Noon nobody showed up. So Jeremiah got on his knees and started praying. For two weeks, he prayed, and no one came. The third week, he began to pray. For 30 minutes he prayed by himself when finally five other people walked in. The next week 20 people came. The next week between 30 and 40 people came. They then decided to meet every day from 12:00 to 1:00 to pray for the city. Before long a few ministers started coming and they said, "We need to start this at our churches". Within six months there were over 5000 prayer groups meeting everyday in N.Y. Soon the word spread all over the country. Prayer meetings were started in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Washington D.C. In fact President Franklin Pierce started going almost every day to a noonday prayer meeting. By 1859 some 15,000 cities in America were having downtown prayer meetings everyday at noon and thousands were brought to Christ. The great thing about this revival is that there is not a famous preacher associated with it. It was all started by one man who began to pray.
What is revival?
1. Revival is the visitation of God that brings to life Christians who have been sleeping
2. Revival is an in rush of the spirit and a time of refreshing
3. Revival is the when the dry and thirsty receive a drenching from the Lord.
4. It is when one believer gets right with God and allows the Spirit of God to fill His/Her life without waivering.
5. When each believer begins to realize their sin and turn to God.
6. I believe that we truly need a revival in our lives today.
a. A soul searching, heart wrenching, old fashioned, heaven sent, Holy revival.
Who needs revival?
Do we as a church need revival?
The old song says, "Revive Us Again. Fill ’each’ heart with Thy love. May ’each soul’ be rekindled with fire from above!"
We always need to draw closer to God on a daily basis.
Yes. We need to be revived.
But I’m so busy!!! We should NEVER be too busy to be revived for Christ.
a. Revival meetings help us to focus in on God and challenges us serve Him.
b. You might say, “I’ve got enough challenge in my life already”
c. But are you challenged in the right areas of your life? Do your challenges have Eternal value?
• I believe that there are people who are good at not doing the wrong things – so they think they are good people.
• But true revival is people not just staying away from the wrong things, it is being bold enough and close enough to the Lord with the courage to do the right things.
It’s time to pray that the fires of revival might spread to each of us. May we be drawn closer to the Lord.
Let’s look today at a story in the Bible that shows the People of God in a place that they needed revival,
Let’s look at their actions.
Background on the text:
• In our passage, we see Israel (the people of God) waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain with the word from the Lord. It had been 40 days of waiting.......
• As they waited they became pretty discontented with their situation.
• They wanted Aaron to give them a god to follow, since Moses is no where in sight. (Vs 1)
• So Aaron built a calf out of gold and they began to worship something other than God.......
• So Moses comes down from the mountain to see the results of the sin of the people
Read Text: Ex. 32:19-33
Key Verse: Exod. 32:26 (KJS) Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who [is] on the LORD’S side? [let him come] unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him.