“The voice of one crying in the wilderness:Spiritual awakenings in the church are called revivals. From the beginning of the Church, God has chosen to keep His church alive by renewing believers with fresh faith, fresh fire, and fresh devotion—with fresh stirrings of the Holy Spirit in believers who have grown week, distracted, or spiritually indifferent. Revivals are new beginnings of obedience to the Word and will of God. Pastors and elders in every congregation should remain sensitive to the spiritual condition of the members of their congregations in order to know when to call the church to meet God’s conditions for a fresh spiritual awakening.
‘Prepare the way of the Lord;
Make His paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled
And every mountain and hill brought low;
The crooked places shall be made straight
And the rough ways smooth;
And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”
John the Baptist was sent by God to prepare Israel for the coming of her Messiah. As the forerunner of Jesus Christ, John quoted Isaiah to show the urgency of preparing the way. Preparation meant repentance, and the Baptist spelled out its meaning: to straighten up one’s heart and life in line with the Word of God.
In ancient times the city fathers would send a delegation to the royal court to petition the king to honor their city with a personal visit. But those attending the king would send out a forerunner to that city to test the sincerity of the invitation. Did the people in that community realize the significance of a royal visit? Were they aware of all the necessary preparations? Would they be willing to prepare the kind of roads over which the royal chariot could roll? Would they fill in depressions, level high places, straighten sharp curves, and smooth out the rough places? The king would be delighted to visit the city, but there must be more to a visitation of the king than a mere invitation.
Revival talk can be cheap, but genuine spiritual awakenings come about when Christians are willing to pray and pay the price. In II Chronicles 7:14 (NKJV), we read: “if my people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
Filling in the Valleys. For New Testament Christians, valleys represent breaks, divisions, and depressions in our daily Christian lives—lives lacking what God has promised when we are not maintaining our devotion, obedience, and worship daily. Our New Testament clearly rings with the promise of abundant life in the power of the Holy Spirit—victory over selfishness, worldliness, and many kinds of temptations. We Christians must take responsibility for our emptiness, carelessness, and indifference to the Word and will of God in our fellowship with Christ. So many Christians are lacking in love and feel free to criticize and hold grudges. Careless and prayerless believers are apt to lose their love for Christ and one another, their sense of a need to pray, and their need to be faithful to the worship services. Some professing believers seem to have no conviction about never sharing their faith with an unbeliever, seeming to forget that the Word of God reminds us that we must never be ashamed to witness for Christ.
The Valley of Disobedience. Jesus associated obedience and joy in a cause-and-effect relationship. “If you keep My commandments,” He told His disciples, “you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full.” (John 15: 10-11, NKJV) Christians who continue day by day with little or no joy must examine their hearts for possible disobedience. Professing Christians should be praying and searching their hearts daily to allow the Holy Spirit to make them conscious of any weakness they have, and if it has become a sin, ask for forgiveness. I’ve made it a practice to daily ask the Spirit to make me aware of anything going on in my mind and heart that God cannot bless. I want to know if there is a command in the Word of God that I’m overlooking. I can’t count the number of times I’ve prayed Psalms 139:23-24, NKJV: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me, and know my anxieties; And see if there is any wicked way in me, And lead me in the way everlasting.”
The Quicksand of Doubt. Disobedience and doubting are twins that must be dealt with before spiritual renewal can be realized. Perhaps it is time to hear more about this from Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an Evangelical Lutheran Pastor in the mid-1900s: “Some who may not have deep valleys to fill in or high mountains to level or crooked paths to straighten up may have some dislocated areas of their lives that need to be brought into alignment with God’s Word. Relationships can go awry and hinder fellowship. The human spirit can get infected and break forth in looseness of tongue—a rash judgment, a bit of gossip, an unwise statement. Christians sometimes give in to the flesh by allowing themselves to get mentally and spiritually lazy. Or for some unexplained reason they can withhold devotion and service to the Lord. Such unattended rough places will put us on a spiritual decline. Such neglect has consequences. All too soon we go below the spiritual poverty level.”
Smoothing the Rough Ways. Some do not have deep valleys to fill or high mountains to level or quicksand to remove. But all of us who have repented of our sins, trusted in Christ as our Savior, and received the Holy Spirit to help us live the Christian life should remember that we have been given the Holy Spirit to empower us for an abundant life! (John 10:10). All who have received Christ as Savior are promised “everlasting life.” Jesus promised His apostles and some early believers that if they would go back into the city of Jerusalem and begin praying, then He and the Heavenly Father would send the Holy Spirit upon them. We read this in Acts 1:8, NKJV: “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
The Holy Spirit is given in our new-birth experience of faith. But so few go on to hunger, thirst, and ask for the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Too many just want fire insurance against Hell, and they fail to seek the cleansing, yield to God in surrender, and seek His promise to FILL THEM WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT OF POWER!
Churches need Spirit-filled prayer warriors to pray down the mighty revival that will deliver the Church from its bondage to the world and the flesh in these last days. May the Holy Spirit come upon more of us to feel the burning in our hearts for the kind of spiritual awakening that will prepare the Church for Christ’s return. This kind of revival will allow the Holy Spirit to draw lost souls to the churches experiencing revival where they will hear the Gospel and many will believe.
In these last days, my prayer is that all Christian churches in America will experience the kind of prayer revival that will prepare them for the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the history of the church!
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