Revival Can Transform Us. But It Can't Sustain Us.
How We Experience God and How God Reveals His Glory to the World
One of the most transformative spiritual events of my life happened when I was in the sixth grade. It was a normal Sunday morning at my small church in Grenada, MS. I sat on the back pew with my buddy. The preacher went through his normal sermon stuff, then asked anyone who needed prayers to come forward. He did this every Sunday. No big deal. Except this Sunday was different. As our church began to sing the Invitation Song, Just As I Am, one person went forward.
Then another. And another. And another.
I was bamboozled. Yes, I knew the meaning of that word when I was 12. I was smarter than most people. I began to feel the spiritual energy rising, filling every square inch of our humble sanctuary. As I breathed it in, I felt a rush of life, this mysterious awakening of my heart and mind. I had never experienced that before. I was twelve, after all. I felt a kinship with every person in that room.
Time stood still. The veil of reality ripped. Something like heaven descended on that space. It was equal parts eerie and exciting.
By the time the Invitation Song was over, half of our church was kneeling, praying in front of the pulpit. I watched as adults placed their arms around one another and cried and asked God to heal their brokenness, to awaken their tired souls, to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth.
You need to know, friends, this was not normal. Most Sundays, no one went forward. People just didn’t do that, not at my church. We weren’t the going forward kind of Christians. We were the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of Christians. But on this day, the facade shattered.
In all my years of following Christ, I’ve never experienced anything else like it. For days afterwards, I rode the spiritual fumes. I read my Bible (something I never did). I talked to my friends about God (who does that in sixth grade). I was on fire. The events of that Sunday morning awakened me.
REVIVAL TRANSFORMS US
That’s why I’ve followed the Asbury revival with great eagerness. I’m sure you have as well. The Christ-soaked energy resonating from that Kentucky campus has caught my gaze. And it’s caught my gaze because I’ve experienced on a small scale what those students are experiencing on a larger one. Deep in my bones, I can still feel the events of that day in my small Mississippi church. How it interrupted my apathetic, uninterested, adolescent existence. How it seared my consciousness. I wasn’t the same afterwards.
Revival is real. It’s transformative. It changes you. It’s a unique and mysterious outpouring of God’s presence. An experience impossible to describe unless you’ve been there, like the birth of a child or seeing Big Foot.
No wonder so many Christians pray for revival. We want a fresh outpouring of God’s spirit, don’t we? Of course, we do. Who wouldn’t? In our homes. Our churches. Our communities. We want God to unleash the floodgates of his power and grace, and we want to drown in its waters. And we want this because we’re tired. Weary. Stagnant. The monotony of 8-5 living has hypnotized our hearts and minds. We’re desperate for a shot of spiritual adrenaline. We want this because the world is increasingly self-centered, isolated, ungrounded.
If we could only experience revival, we think, we would awaken from our spiritual slumber. The world would awaken from its debauchery, turn to Christ, and we would all live happily ever after.
I wonder sometimes, though, if we want revival because we want a quick fix. We want God to swoop in and do the hard work of awakening our souls to his presence in our everyday lives. We’ve been to the mountaintop before. We want to ascend there again. And not come down.
But that’s not where faith happens, is it?
REVIVAL IS MORE THAN A MOUNTAINTOP MOMENT
One of the most transformative stories in Scripture occurs in Luke 1, when the angel Gabriel visits Mary. You know the story. This angelic being appears at Mary’s doorstep, interrupting her normal life, and tells her she will bear a son. But not any son. The Son. The Hope of the World. God has chosen Mary as the incubator for the world’s salvation. Can you imagine? One moment you’re preparing dinner. The next you’re standing in the presence of an angel. And this divine messenger delivers news that altars the trajectory of your life.
As I read this passage the other day, though, the final words of that chapter struck me. Here they are.
“Then the angel left her.”
One moment, the glory of God fills the room. The next moment it’s like nothing happened. The minutes and seconds after the angel’s departure must have hit Mary like a slap in the face. Gabriel shows up. He tells her that her womb will be the birthplace of Hope. Then he disappears. He doesn’t promise to return to check on her. He doesn’t promise to protect Mary from the ramifications of such a proclamation. He just leaves.
Mary is left to fulfill the promise of God on her own. Mary could’ve easily shrugged her shoulders, chalked up the encounter to hallucination or whatever. I would have. She could’ve gone about her daily life as if the encounter never happened. After all, if she was the mother of Christ, an angel wouldn’t just show and leave like that. There would be other signs, right?
But Mary didn’t do that. The encounter with Gabriel changed her. But the fulfillment of God’s promises occurred through Mary’s daily faithfulness.
REVIVAL OF THE ORDINARY
This story is an example of what faith looks like. What it means to trust God’s promises. We don’t primarily experience God in times of revival, in life’s spiritual highs. Those times are good and holy. Praise God for them. But revivals aren’t reality. And reality is where we cultivate a relationship with our Creator.
We learn to trust God in the ordinary, everyday, hum-drum events of life. In the seemingly insignificant. In the small, mundane. Playing games with our kids. Folding the clothes. Studying for a test. Going to work.
We find God in the mess and the muck of our failures and brokenness. In conflicts with our spouse. In the death of someone we love. In the tension of dealing with a terrible boss.
God is alive and active in our midst. He has poured out his love and grace and mercy on every inch of reality. Our task, then, is to look for God in every situation. To pay attention to the divine in front of us. To choose to see love and joy and hope at all times, regardless of the circumstances.
Right now, as I type this, creation is putting on a show. It’s resurrecting from the ashes of a winter’s death. Purples. Blues. Reds. You want to see the fullness of God’s glory on full display? Pay attention to creation.
We want God to pour out his presence on our land. And sometimes I wonder if God looks at us and says, “Guys, have you seen the dogwoods bloom? Have you looked up at the sky on a clear night? Have you thought about the intricacies of the human body? What more can I do?”
And God, of course, is right.
God is alive and active in our midst. He has poured out his love and grace and mercy on every inch of reality. Our task, then, is to look for God in every situation. To pay attention to the divine in front of us. To choose to see love and joy and hope at all times, regardless of the circumstances.
EVEN THE ROCKS CRY OUT
In Luke 19, as Jesus enters Jerusalem, the crowds “began to praise God for all the miracles they had seen.” The Pharisees don’t like this, and command Jesus to make the people stop. How does Jesus respond?
If the crowds remain quiet, he says, the stones will cry out.
That’s right. Those parts of creation we consider lifeless sing praises to God. The rocks and trees and grass and things like that. They all bow down to their Creator. If the pebbles can recognize the glory of the Lord, why can’t we?
Because we’ve lost our wonder. We have no capacity for awe. We’ve allowed the monotony and busyness of adult living to blind us from God’s presence in our midst. We want revival to do for our souls what jumper cables do for a dead battery. Jolt our engine back to life. And revivals don’t work like that. Mountaintop moments might jostle us from our slumber. But they can’t make a dead battery new again. Eventually the battery runs out of juice, and you’re once again stranded on the side of the road.
WHY REVIVAL CAN’T SAVE THE WORLD
And what about the sin and darkness in our land? Don’t we need a miraculous outpouring of God’s spirit for that? Maybe.
I wonder, though, if the world’s apathy towards God, the increasing bent towards self-sufficiency, the desire to please oneself above all else, I wonder if these things have less to do with revival and more to do with how the world sees us living.
Christians - and I say this with great sadness - are often the most cynical, bitter, greed, self-assured folks in the world. The world doesn’t care much for God because the world doesn’t care much for God’s people.
You want to bring revival to the world? Share what you have. Live for something more than a paycheck. Place more value in the humanity of the marginalized than the doctrines of your church. Stop using God as a holy wishing well, a cure-all for your petty problems, and start submitting the entirety of your being to him.
If God’s people begin walking in the footsteps of Christ, like really seeking to imitate Christ, we will see revival. I’m sure of it. The world will awaken to the presence of God.
But not until we awaken to the presence of God.
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Revivals, like the one in Asbury, can wake us up. But eventually the spiritual adrenaline subsides. Eventually, you must climb down from the mountain and return to reality. And it’s here, in the mess and mundane of daily living, that we find True Life. It’s here, in our ordinary life, that God reveals himself to the world.
Grace and peace, friends.