Granted that the man who seeks revival has stopped thinking in plurals and has narrowed his faith down to one single individual, himself, what then?
How can he find that after which his soul is yearning?
How can he cooperate with his hungers to the end that he may indeed be filled?
He must rid his mind of the false notion that prayer alone will bring the blessing.
Normally all transactions between the soul and God are carried on by prayer. It is right and scriptural and according to the testimony of all the saints that any spiritual advance on any front, any deliverance, any purification, any enduement of power, comes by the prayer of faith.
Our error is that we try to secure these benefits by prayer alone.
The correction of this error is extremely difficult for it entails more than a mere adjustment of our doctrinal beliefs; it strikes at the whole Adam-life and requires self-abnegation, humility and cross-carrying.
In short it requires obedience.
And that we will do anything to escape.
verse
He replied, 'Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.'
— Luke 11:28
thought
Prayerful Bible study exposes us to God's will for us. Knowing His will, praying about it, is not enough. Personal revival comes as we obey His will.
prayer
Forgive me, Lord, for trying to substitute prayer and other religious activity for simple obedience to your will as You reveal it to me.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
In nature everything moves in the direction of its hungers.
In the spiritual world it is not otherwise.
We gravitate toward our inward longings, provided of course that those longings are strong enough to move us. I
Impotent dreaming will not do. The religious urge that is not followed by a corresponding act of the will in the direction of that urge is a waste of emotion.
The awe-inspiring power of a discharge of lightning may dissipate itself in the atmosphere and accomplish nothing, while a flashlight battery may provide illumination for a miner hours on end.
One is a dramatic display of immense power without direction and the other a quiet application of modest energy to an intelligent purpose.
It is my conviction that much, very much, prayer for and talk about revival these days is wasted energy. Ignoring the confusion of figures, I might say that it is hunger that appears to have no object; it is dreamy wishing that is too weak to produce moral action.
It is fanaticism on a high level for, according to John Wesley, "a fanatic is one who seeks desired ends while ignoring the constituted means to reach those ends."
verse
For he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.
— Psalm 107:9
thought
God satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things. Are we really heart hungry and thirsty for Him or is ours a mere superficicial desire to be filled without obedience commitment?
prayer
Lord, I do want to be satisfied by You but I seem to lack intensity of hunger and thirst for You. Help me, Lord!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
These words are addressed to those of God's children who have been pierced with the arrow of infinite desire, who yearn for God with a yearning that has overcome them, who long with a longing that has become pain
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled" (Matthew 5:6).
Hunger is a pain.
It is God's merciful provision, a divinely sent stimulus to propel us in the direction of food.
If food-hunger is a pain, thirst, which is water-hunger, is a hundredfold worse, and the more critical the need becomes within the living organism the more acute the pain.
It is nature's last drastic effort to rouse the imperiled life to seek to renew itself.
A dead body feels no hunger and the dead soul knows not the pangs of holy desire. "If you want God," said the old saint, "you have already found Him."
Our desire for fuller life is proof that some life must be there already.
Our very dissatisfactions should encourage us, our yet unfulfilled aspirations should give us hope. "What I aspired to be, and was not, comforts me," wrote Browning with true spiritual insight.
The dead heart cannot aspire.
verse
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.
— Matthew 5:6
thought
Few of us seem to suffer from intensity of hunger and thirst for God. We regularly endure long "spiritual fasts." We won't be filled if we do not hunger and thirst. Rather we will become victims of spiritual malnutrion without hardly being aware of it.
prayer
As the deer pants for for streams of water so may my soul pants for you, O God. Only You can satisfy.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
The man that will have God's best becomes at once the object of the personal attention of the Holy Spirit.
Such a man will not be required to wait for the rest of the church to come alive.
He will not be penalized for the failures of his fellow Christians, nor be asked to forego the blessing till his sleepy brethren catch up.
God deals with the individual heart as exclusively as if only one existed.
If this should seem to be an unduly individualistic approach to revival, let it be remembered that religion is personal before it can be social.
Every prophet, every reformer, every revivalist had to meet God alone before he could help the multitudes.
The great leaders who went on to turn thousands to Christ had to begin with God and their own soul.
The plain Christian of today must experience personal revival before he can hope to bring renewed spiritual life to his church.
verse
. . . Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, 'If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.' By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. . . .
— John 7:37-39
thought
Any one of us may experience personal revival whether or not anyone else does. How intense is our thirst for God? Are we willing to wholly surrender ourselves to God no matter what others do? Then, let's begin today!
prayer
Teach me what it means, Lord, to be wholly surrendered to You that I might know the filling of Your Spirit.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
One consequence of our failure to see clearly the true nature of revival is that we wait for years for some supernatural manifestation that never comes, overlooking completely our own individual place in the desired awakening.
Whatever God may do for a church must be done in the single unit, the one certain man or woman.
Some things can happen only to the isolated, single person; they cannot be experienced en masse.
Statistics show, for instance, that 100 babies are born in a certain city on a given day. Yet the birth of each baby is for that baby a unique experience, an isolated, personal thing.
Fifty people die in a plane crash; while they die together they die separately, one at a time, each one undergoing the act of death in a loneliness of soul as utter as if he alone had died.
Both birth and death are experienced by the individual in a loneness as complete as if only that one person had ever known them.
Three thousand persons were converted at Pentecost, but each one met his sin and his Savior alone.
The spiritual birth, like the natural one, is for each one a unique, separate experience shared in by no one.
And so with that uprush of resurgent life we call revival. It can come to the individual only. Though a visitation of divine life reaches seventy five persons at once (as among the Moravian Brethren at Dusseldorf), yet it comes to each one singly.
There can exist no collective body of believers that can be revived apart from the units that compose the body.
Understood aright these are truths full of great encouragement and good hope. Nothing can hinder you or me from experiencing the revival we need. It is a matter for God and the solitary heart.
Nothing can prevent the spiritual rejuvenation of the soul that insists upon having it.
Though that solitary man must live and walk among persons religiously dead, he may experience the great transformation
as certainly and as quickly as if he were in the most spiritual church in the world.
verse
. . . And I pray that you . . . may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
— Ephesians 3:17, 19
thought
Today can be the beginning of personal revival whether or not it is for anyone else. We can open ourselves to the Spirit of God. We can make the changes He indicates and do it by His enablement. We can live by the Spirit!
prayer
This day take full control, Lord. Show me what needs to be confessed and discarded. Fill me and change me, Spirit of God!
That "glorious band, the chosen few, on whom the Spirit came" at Pentecost, were not wraiths nor were they composed of an extract of pure humanity dwelling on another plane. They were people.
The names of some of them are listed by the Holy Spirit.
Though it did not suit God's purpose to furnish us with a complete roster of every one present, those mentioned were certainly human enough.
When the Spirit came on that memorable day He could only fall upon persons who were present, who could be identified, who were known to each other and to the community.
There was no invisible body for Him to enter. He entered the bodies and souls of the men and women who were in that prayer meeting.
No church is any better or worse than the individual Christians who compose it.
To look beyond the known members to some mysterious group which is imagined to be there, secretly prepared for a revival, is to err seriously in a province where error can be costly.
verse
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? . . .
— First Corinthians 6:19
thought
A church is spiritually revived only as the people who compose it are spiritually revived.
Each of us is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19) and together as church we are the Spirit's temple (1 Cor. 3:16).
Is He controlling us individually and as church?
prayer
Forgive me, Lord, for blaming others in the church for unChristlike living.
I am church. I must know the Spirit's filling if the the church is to know it.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Revival may be experienced on three levels, viz., in the individual, the church or the community.
It is impossible to have a community revival where there has not been a church revival, and unless at least a few individuals seek and obtain a spiritual transformation in their own hearts, there can be no hope for their church, for a church is composed of individual Christians.
It is a mere commonplace to sing or pray, "Lord, send a revival, and let it begin in me."
Where else can a spiritual quickening take place but in the individual life?
There is no abstract "church" which can be revivified apart from the men and women who compose it. The vague notion that there is somewhere a mysterious Body of Christ whose members are unknown, an invisible company upon whom the Holy Spirit can fall in answer to prayer, is a grand fallacy.
It serves as a hiding place from reality to believe that such an unidentified superchurch actually exists apart from the plain ordinary people we see in our Christian gatherings and in our churches from week to week.
But we may as well face the truth: Christians are people and people can be identified.
They have names and faces and homes and friends and jobs.
They keep house, go to school, drive trucks, buy, sell, travel, eat and bathe and sleep exactly as other people do.
The seed of God is in them and their names are written in heaven, but they are not invisible.
The world knows who the Christians are.
verse
On arriving there, they gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles.
— Acts 14:27
thought
We don't go to church. We gather as the Church. There is no Church without redeemed people. Revival must come to us, not to them. For lack of revival we cannot blame them.
prayer
Lord, for Your Church to be revived people like me must be revived. It is redeemed people ? me people who must experience the blowing of the Wind of God.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
It will take more than talk and prayer to bring revival.
There must be a return to the Lord in practice before our prayers will be heard in heaven.
We dare not continue to trouble God's way if we want Him to bless ours.
Joshua sent his army up to conquer Ai, only to see them hurled back with bloody losses. He threw himself to the ground on his face before the Ark and complained to the Lord.
The LORD said to Joshua,
"Stand up! What are you doing down on your face? Israel has sinned; they have violated my covenant . . . That is why the Israelites cannot stand against their enemies . . . because they have been made liable to destruction. I will not be with you anymore unless you destroy whatever among you is devoted to destruction" (Joshua 7:10-12).
If we are foolish enough to do it, we may spend the new year vainly begging God to send revival, while we blindly overlook His requirements and continue to break His laws.
Or we can begin now to obey and learn the blessedness of obedience.
The Word of God is before us. We have only to read and do what is written there and revival is assured.
It will come as naturally as the harvest comes after the plowing and the planting.
Yes, this could be the year the revival comes. It's strictly up to us.
verse
We are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.
— Acts 5:32
thought
Our tendency is to resist obedience to God's will as revealed in His Word because it is so painful to self. But when we obey we discover the blessedness of obedience and the empowerment of the Spirit.
prayer
Father, teach me the blessedness of obedience.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Our mistake is that we want God to send revival on our terms.
We want to get the power of God into our hands, to call it to us that it may work for us in promoting and furthering our kind of Christianity.
We want still to be in charge, guiding the chariot through the religious sky in the direction we want it to go, shouting "Glory to God," it is true, but modestly accepting a share of the glory for ourselves in a nice inoffensive sort of way.
We are calling on God to send fire on our altars, completely ignoring the fact that they are our altars and not God's.
And like the prophets of Baal we are working ourselves into a frenzy as if we could by violence command the arm of the Almighty.
The whole error results from a confused notion of revival and a failure to recognize the moral laws that underlie the kingdom of God. God never moves whimsically; His ways are never impulsive or erratic. He never sends judgment unless there has been a violation of His laws, nor does He send blessing apart from obedience to those laws.
So precise are His movements both in justice and in mercy that an intelligent observer, aware of the circumstances, could predict with complete accuracy any visitation of judgment or grace God might send to a nation, a church or an individual.
Of this we may be certain:
We cannot continue to ignore God's will as expressed in the Scriptures and expect to secure the aid of God's Spirit. God has given us a complete blueprint for the Church and He requires that we adhere to it 100 percent.
Message, morals and methods are there, and we are under strict obligation to be faithful to all three.
Today we have the strange phenomenon of a company of Christians solemnly protesting to heaven and earth the purity of their Bible creed, and at the same time following the unregenerate world in their methods and managing only with difficulty to keep their moral standards from sinking out of sight. Coldness, worldliness, pride, boasting, lying, misrepresenting, love of money, exhibitionism all these things are practiced by professedly orthodox Christians, not in secret but in plain sight and often as a necessary part of the whole religious show.
verse
For this is what the high and lofty One says ? he who lives forever, whose name is holy; 'I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.'
— Isaiah 57:15
thought
God sets the conditions for revival. It is for us to meet those conditions. We cannot revise them or substitute for them. Revival comes only on His terms.
prayer
Lord, teach me genuine contrition and lowliness of heart that my heart may be revived!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/