Lecture I
by Leonard Ravenhill
Revival......another definition would be to recover, repair or
restore.
Hosea 10:12 says: "Sow to yourself in righteousness, reap in mercy;
break up your fallow ground; for it is time to seek the Lord till
He come and reign righteousness upon you."
What is fallow ground?
Fallow ground is ground that has been fruitful, and then it has
been plowed over, and no seed has been sown in it, and therefore it
has become unproductive.
Notice, there is a human emphasis here -- it says
that we are to break up -- you break up your fallow ground.
Now take another aspect of it here in Psalm 85:6 "Would Thou not
revive us again: that Thy people may rejoice in Thee." So, there is
an absence of joy, of vitality -- there is an absence of
ecstasy.
The very word "revive" presupposes life. You can only revive what
has already had vitality -- life that has become sick, weak, or
apathetic. I think the nearest analogy I can give you is a recent
case of a man who apparently drowned. He had been under the water
for an incredible amount of time. Then somebody pulled him out and
worked and worked on him, and eventually life came again. This is
actually what it means to revive,
It means to revitalize.
It means to restore lost power.
It means to recover lost energy.
In the Acts of the Apostles 3:19 we read, "Repent ye therefore, and
be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of
refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord." Whatever else
we say about revival we have to recognize this, that revival is an
act of mercy in the sovereignty of God.
There is a vast difference between revival and evangelism. When we
speak of revival in America we think of church advertising, "Our
revival will begin next Sunday night at a certain time and it is
going to finish the next Sunday night at a certain time." Obviously
this is something purely mechanical, it is something which men have
engineered.
I think that one of the offenses of revival, in the historic sense,
is that it cannot be organized. As Doctor Tozer said, "When revival
comes it changes the moral climate of a community."
You can have revival that covers a church -- Spurgeon had
that.
You can have a revival that covers a city.
You can have a revival that covers the whole nation -- and I am
thinking in this context more than in the other contexts (though
sometimes revival spreads from here to there -- like fire
spreads.)
Revival cannot be organized -- evangelism can be organized.
Revival cannot be subsidized -- evangelism can and usually it must
be.
Revival cannot be advertised -- evangelism can.
It may cost millions of dollars, as it often does, to have one of
our huge,
modern, so called revivals. You have to pay vast sums of
money
for time on TV, for example -- perhaps a million dollars a
night.
That's incredible, that's unthinkable to me in
the context of Biblical revival, or even historical revival.
Why doesn't revival need to be advertised? For the simple reason,
that fire is the most self advertising thing that there is, whether
it is a physical fire or a revival fire. It draws people like a
magnet.
To bring this down to modern technology -- revival cannot be
computerized.
There is information that you can put in computer and presto, you
get the answer predicting an outcome according to the facts that
were put in. But you cannot computerize or predict revival. There
are periods in which one thing predominates.
Sometimes revival is totally taken over by sorrow.
Sometimes revival is totally taken over by joy, ecstasy 'till you
don't know
whether you are in the flesh or whether you've gone out of the
earth.
Sometimes revival is taken over by stillness.
There are times when you go to a prayer meeting and the power of
God is there.
There is stillness and you feel it is creative. You feel,
"Now something is building up around here, somebody is going
to
come out shortly with a heart bursting... with some agonizing
prayer..."
Revival cannot be rationalized. Again, one of the offensive things
about revival is you can't put your finger on the spot, usually, as
to how or why or where it began.
It is supremely an act of God.
You find a man would go with a series of messages to a community
and before long that community is alive, it's throbbing. He goes to
another town with exactly the same group of men, the same type of
prayer is poured out, the same sweat and soul travail and there is
no response.
You can't predict and you can't organize revival. Why? Because you
can't organize where the wind is coming from. The Spirit, the wind,
bloweth where it listeth. If you say it's going to come this way,
it comes that way. If you say God's going to use that man, very
often He doesn't even bother with that man. Revival so often comes
through unknown characters.
I don't think the world has ever been in a greater sense of turmoil
than it is in this moment. I don't think our nation has. Whatever
we shall say about revival we have to recognize this: There are
three things about natural life: conception, gestation, and birth.
You can't alter the program. There has never been revival, that I
can trace, that has not been preceded by agonizing prayer. You
might say, "I haven't got to that stage yet of agonizing prayer.
How does is come?" Well, it comes through VISION.
If we are really going to get a concept of revival we have to get a
vision of God's sorrow over sin. We have to get a concept of how,
day by day, we offend God. As a nation we offend God in millions of
ways.
When I was praying in the Bahamas one day, I saw a great column of
smoke, which happened to be coming from tires that were being
burned. It was as black as could be, and over there I saw a wisp of
smoke going up from the ground. I didn't think much of it until
about a year after, I was praying and the Lord said, "That volume
of black, thick smoke is like the volume of sin that goes up every
day." All the blasphemy, all the unbelief, all the dirty stories,
all the lying, all the deception, all sex-perversion, all
drunkenness -- this tremendous column of iniquity goes up in the
sight of God. And here you have a little wisp -- of what? That is
the praise that God gets out of His people. If we are going to
realize how much we need revival we need to recognize the dimension
of sin. We have to recognize that sin offends God.
Psalm 85:4 says, "Turn us, O God of our salvation and cause Thine
anger towards us to cease. Wilt Thou be angry with us forever?"
Psalm 80 verse 3, "Turn us again, O God, and cause Thy face to
shine." Notice, it's repeated again in verse 7 and in verse 19,
"...cause Thy face to shine." "...cause Thy face to shine." You
know, I think one of the awesome tragedies of our day is this: the
people of Israel could not live if God turned His face away from
them and seems now we cannot live if God turns His face on
us!
