This is a kind of but not at all two-parter. I forgot to post last week’s message, and they are sort of related.
It’s almost a little strange to be up here. I mean, we’re all gathered here outside in the park; there are a few tents around; we’ve been singing songs praising God. All in all it feels kind of like an old-fashioned revival! The only problem is I’m a Lutheran. We don’t really do the whole revival thing. To us, an altar call means we don’t have anyone to help out with Communion this week and I need to ask for volunteers. If we’re really into a worship service we don’t clap, or shout out “Hallelujah” or “Amen!” or “Praise Jesus!”, we just smile as loud as we possibly can. Maybe, if we’re feeling really adventurous, someone might raise a hand about halfway, but just one, and never all the way up.
We Lutherans tend to be a little on the restrained side, but we also tend to be somewhat intellectual. This stands to reason, seeing as the guy whose name we use happened to be a college professor, as well as a priest. But, because of the environment we find ourselves in today – a very “revival-y” one, that is – I spent a lot of time thinking about revivals. Where’d they come from; what are they like; things like this.
Now many of you here are probably old hat about revivals. You come from traditions where revivals are something that happen on a regular basis. The Methodists, for example, started out as a revival within the Church of England to counter a growth of secularism during what became known as the “Age of Enlightenment” in the early- to mid-1700s. It was a time when people were turning away from faith and seeking to find answers elsewhere; in this case people were looking toward the scientific method. So in this environment, John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield began what turned into the Methodist church.
Around the same time, in what was then the American Colonies, the First Great Awakening was going on. This was a time in which people experienced a resurgence of faith, and out of this time period there was a good deal of growth, especially within the Baptist church.
About one hundred years later, there was another “Great Awakening”, named rather uncreatively the “Second Great Awakening”. One of the biggest names from this period of revival was Charles Finney, and it had a similar effect to the first. However there was a noticeable difference, while the First Great Awakening was primarily people within the Church turning back to God, the Second Great Awakening was primarily people from outside the Church turning to God for the first time.
The Second Great Awakening spawned something called the “holiness movement”, and this group held a good deal of responsibility for the even more uncreatively named “Third Great Awakening” in the late 19th Century. It was out of this movement many of the various Pentecostal groups had their beginning, in places like the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles.
Then in the early 20th Century, following in the footsteps of Dwight Moody and others, you had the rise of revival preachers like Charles Spurgeon, Billy Sunday, Oral Roberts, Robert Schuller, and Billy Graham. These men held vast revival meetings preaching the gospel to large numbers people in sometimes unexpected places.
While the specifics of all these revivals were all a bit different, they all followed a similar kind of pattern: an individual had a new experience of God, then a group of individuals with these experiences led to their congregations having a new experience of God, which led to their surrounding community having a new experience of God. These “Great Awakenings”, especially the Second, let to vast changes within our whole nation – the temperance, abolition, and women’s rights movements all had their start in the Second Great Awakening.
But all this change had to start somewhere, and it all starts with one person experiencing God in a new way. This is actually fairly typical. I’m going to move kind of fast through some Bible verses now, so you can try and follow along but you may want to hold off for a bit. Let’s first go to Genesis 12:
The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” So Abram left, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated, and the people hey had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.
Now there’s a lot going on here, but here’s what I want you to notice. Abram followed God, and through that following he will become a great nation, and all people on earth will be blessed through him. There’s individual, “church”, and community revival – though at this point, the latter two are promises that weren’t quite fulfilled. Abram soon becomes Abraham, and in the book of Hebrews is mentioned as one of the “heroes of faith.” His descendants became the people of Israel, named after a guy named Jacob who, after starting out as a liar and a cheat, became the father of 12 sons, including one named Judah.
Now, Judah wasn’t a very nice person either. When he was angry at his brother Joseph, he had the bright idea that they should sell him into slavery, basically because he decided that he and his other brothers could make some money off him that way and killing him wouldn’t get them anything. Immediately after that, Judah did something else rather unfortunate, but it’s not exactly PG, so I’ll skip over it. But later in his life Judah stood up for another of his brothers, showing repentance, and Judah’s descendants included such rather important people as King David and even Jesus.
There are many more examples of God reaching out to individuals, bringing them new life, and then having amazing things happen around them. Moses was just one man, but he ended up freeing his whole people from slavery. Samson, for all his faults, freed the Israelites from Philistine oppression. David had his problems, but his songs of praise are still used today, thousands of years later.
Of course the best description of this individual revival is from Paul, in 2 Corinthians 5. He writes:
“[If] anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.”
This has been the same for as long as there have been people – God has always been calling humans back to himself, but in Christ that reconciliation reached its fulfillment. So each of us, through faith, have our sins forgiven and are given new life – both now and in eternity. God brings revival to all who believe in him.
But Paul doesn’t stop there – he continues, saying:
“[He] has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” Just like with Abraham, Jacob, and uncountable others, God uses individuals to do His work on the earth. It’s not enough for us to just sit on our hands and enjoy our own salvation. As James writes in chapter 2 of his letter, “I will show you my faith by what I do.”
Like I mentioned earlier, when God brings revival to a place, He doesn’t stop with just bringing people to Him. He doesn’t stop with reconciling individual after individual; God has bigger plans than that. In previous times of revival, God used the Church (capital C). Let’s look at what might be safe to call the first “revival” in history shall we?
Now, those of you in more liturgical circles may have just heard this 2 weeks ago, so if you have, too bad. Picture this scene. You’re one of around 120 believers gathered together praising God continually in the temple and in a room that one of you has rented. It’s been ten days since Jesus ascended into heaven, and around fifty days since his resurrection. You know what he told you – “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about.” – but you’re still not entirely sure what it’s going to look like when it happens.
So you and your 120 or so fellow believers are meeting, as you do, on the Jewish Feast of Pentecost, when all of a sudden there’s a sound like a violent wind filling the house, and what looks like fire coming and resting on your heads. Everyone starts talking in other languages, a crowd gathers, and everyone is a little perplexed.
Eventually Peter stands up. You remember Peter, right? He was the sort-of leader of the disciples, but never seemed to get anything right? He tried to walk on the water with Jesus, but got scared and fell in. He wanted to build tents when Jesus was transfigured. He proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah, then tried to chastise him when Jesus said what the Messiah was supposed to do. He tried to protect Jesus at his arrest, cutting off a man’s ear, only to have Jesus stop him and heal the man’s ear. He swore never to deny Jesus, but instead denied him three times the very same night.
So Peter stands up, and starts to preach to the people. It’s a relatively short sermon, really, and he basically says, “This is what Joel was talking about when he mentioned the day of the Lord. You know that Jesus guy that’s been going around teaching and doing miracles? The one that you killed? Well God raised him from the dead, because he is the Messiah we’ve been waiting for. God sat Jesus at his own right hand, then poured the Holy Spirit out on us. God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
Now, what happened after this was pretty intense. The people were “cut to the heart” and asked, “What can we do?” And Peter said, “Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the Holy Spirit.” It says he preached many other words to them, but the end result was about three thousand people becoming believers that day.
Talk about revival! The church grew to 26 times its original size in the course of a day. But they didn’t stop there. The believers spread out, first to the surrounding region, then a little farther, then all the way to Rome, and finally all over the known world. The biggest persecutor of the church, a guy named Saul, ended up becoming one of the greatest missionaries of all time. In a very real way, something that started with a few individuals influenced the whole world – because the Holy Spirit brought revival to their lives.
Is it time for a revival in this place? Are we ready to be revived by God, becoming the new creation He means for us to be? Are we ready, really ready, to be His ambassadors, to our churches, our city, and our world? It all stars with you. It starts with each of us turning back to God. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never heard about Jesus before today; it doesn’t matter if you’ve walked with Him your whole life. It doesn’t matter how big you think your sins are, or how far you think you’ve wandered. When we turn back to God, our sins are forgiven through Jesus Christ – completely washed away.
But we also have to remember, we’re not called to be “frozen chosen”. We’re not forgiven so that we can sit around and enjoy how forgiven we are. Paul writes in Ephesians 2:
“You were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world… But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions… For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it’s the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance to do.”
Having been revived with God, now we have a job to do. It’s up to us, as we follow Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, to do the Father’s work – to be his ambassadors. It’s up to us to spread, through the Holy Spirit, the revival that God us done in us to those around us: to love God with everything we are, to love our neighbor, and to show and teach others what God has done for us. We are his ambassadors, his witnesses, his revival preachers, his evangelists. It’s time we do God’s works – the works he’s already prepared for us to do – and bring revival to this place as he has plans for us to do.