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/
There seems to be a notion abroad that if we talk enough and pray enough, revival will set in like a stock market boom or a winning streak on a baseball club.
We appear to be waiting for some sweet chariot to swing low and carry us into the Big Rock Candy Mountain of religious experience.
Well, it is a pretty good rule that if everyone is saying something it is not likely to be true; or, if it has truth at the bottom, it has been so distorted by wrong emphasis as to have the effect of error in its practical outworking.
And such, I believe, is much of the revival talk we hear today.
My reason for doubt of the soundness of it is that we appear to conceive of revival as a kind of benign miracle, a feverish renaissance of religious activity which will come upon us, leaving us morally just as we are now, except that we will be a lot happier and there will be a great many more of us.
It's a good talking point and it has an aura of superior godliness about it; but the trouble is that it is just not true.
verse
Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?
— Psalm 85:6
thought
Few of us have experienced real revival and so our understanding of it is flawed. But should we experience it we will know it!
prayer
Deliver me,https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/ Lord, from erroneous concepts of revival. May I experience real revival!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
The size of a man's soul is likely to determine his success or failure in the rough, competitive world of the twentieth century.
And after his conversion to Christ, it will go far to determine his usefulness in the kingdom of God.
Undoubtedly there are many genuine Christians who are not doing much for their fellow men nor for the Church into which they were born by the miracle of the Spirit's regeneration.
Such as these need to hear the words of Christ, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you" (Acts 1:8).
The only hope for a restricted heart is the mighty inworking of the Spirit. He can enlarge the mansion of the soul; but only He can do it.
verse
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
— Acts 1:8
thought
Are we aware of the indwelling Spirit? Are we utilizing in daily living the power He provides? The answer to these questions determines whether we live in spiritual poverty or in the riches of Christ Jesus.
prayer
Spirit of God, into my heart You have come to live. Fill me! Rule supreme! Empower me!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Sins of great magnitude may indicate an energy of soul which if turned in a right direction can lead far up the way toward spiritual perfection.
Conversely, there is a meanness of soul that inhibits and restricts the scope and intensity of even the most common activities.
When such a soul is converted, it may be only to mediocrity.
On his own testimony Paul before his conversion was a great sinner (1 Timothy 1:15). He persecuted Christians with great violence and wrought havoc with the followers of Christ. After his spectacular about-face he turned his magnificent equipment over to the Lord and the whole world knows the result.
The same energy of soul that had made him a dangerous enemy of the Christian faith made him a powerful advocate of that faith once his eyes had been opened.
From this we may learn that feebleness and timidity are not to be confused with righteousness.
To sin but weakly is not the same as to do good.
Lack of moral energy may prevent a man from enjoying himself in sin, but he is in sin nevertheless.
His weak effort at neutrality does not deceive God who knows the secrets of every man's heart.
verse
I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands.
— Psalm 119:10
thought
It takes years for some of us to discover that we can't seek God as a sometime recreation or low-priority value in life. Seeking Him in order to love and serve Him is the major purpose of life
prayer
O Lord, show me all that is involved in seeking You with all of my heart. I want to know You and serve You.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Persons out of Christ often try to comfort themselves with the remembrance that they have never in their lives committed any really great sin.
Little trifling acts of wrongdoing perhaps, but nothing of any consequence, so surely God will overlook their rather insignificant transgressions when He settles their accounts.
In the first place, a man's status before God is decided not by the number and enormity of his sins but by whether those sins have or have not been forgiven, whether he is on God's side or the side of the devil.
The soldier who mutinies is held responsible for his mutiny even if he does nothing more than stand up and let himself be counted among the rebels.
His crime lies in his break with his superiors and his willingness to go along with the enemies of his country.
That he performs no extraordinary feats of violence may mean no more than that he is an ordinary fellow incapable of great deeds of any sort for or against his country.
verse
For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
— Romans 6:23
thought
Unforgiven sin is never insignificant. The wages of sin ? terrible, awful sin or relatively insignificant ? is death, eternal death. It is eternal death we face unless we receive the gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus.
prayer
O Christ, thank You for paying the debt for all of my sin, all of it!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Surely we need a baptism of clear seeing if we are to escape the fate of Israel (and of every other religious body in history that forsook God).
If not the greatest need, then surely one of the greatest is for the appearance of Christian leaders with prophetic vision.
We desperately need seers who can see through the mist. Unless they come soon, it will be too late for this generation.
And if they do come, we will no doubt crucify a few of them in the name of our worldly orthodoxy. But the cross is always the harbinger of the resurrection.
Mere evangelism is not our present need. Evangelism does no more than extend religion, of whatever kind it may be.
It gains acceptance for religion among larger numbers of people without giving much thought to the quality of that religion. The tragedy is that present-day evangelism accepts the degenerate form of Christianity now current as the very religion of the apostles and busies itself with making converts to it with no questions asked.
And all the time we are moving farther and farther from the New Testament pattern.
We must have a new reformation.
There must come a violent break with that irresponsible, amusement-mad, paganized pseudo-religion which passes today for the faith of Christ and which is being spread all over the world by unspiritual men employing unscriptural methods to achieve their ends.
When the Roman church apostatized, God brought about the Reformation.
When the Reformation declined, God raised up the Moravians and the Wesleys.
When these movements began to die, God raised up fundamentalism and the "deeper life" groups.
Now that these have almost without exception sold out to the world ?
What next?
verse
Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly ? mere infants in Christ.
— 1 Corinthians 3:1
thought
Have we made the church a gigantic nursery full of spiritual infants, some of whom are well into their senior years? May God raise up those who can lead us out of infancy into maturity!
prayer
O God, open my eyes that I may see clearly what is of You and what is not, that I may grow into maturity. In Jesus' name.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
The great deficiency to which I refer is the lack of spiritual discernment, especially among our leaders.
How there can be so much Bible knowledge and so little insight, so little moral penetration, is one of the enigmas of the religious world today.
I think it is altogether accurate to say that there has never before been a time in the history of the church when so many people were engaged in Bible study as are so engaged today.
If the knowledge of Bible doctrine were any guarantee of godliness, this would without doubt be known in history as the age of sanctity.
nstead, it may well be known as the age of the church's Babylonish captivity, or the age of worldliness, when the professed Bride of Christ allowed herself to be successfully courted by the fallen sons of men in unbelievable numbers. The body of evangelical believers, under evil influences, has . . . gone over to the world in complete and abject surrender, avoiding only a few of the grosser sins such as drunkenness and sexual promiscuity.
That this disgraceful betrayal has taken place in broad daylight with full consent of our Bible teachers and evangelists is one of the most terrible affairs in the spiritual history of the world. Yet I for one cannot believe that the great surrender was negotiated by men of evil heart who set out deliberately to destroy the faith of our fathers.
Many good and clean-living people have collaborated with the quislings who betrayed us. Why? The answer can only be, from lack of spiritual vision.
Something like a mist has settled over the church as "the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations" (Isaiah 25:7).
Such a veil once descended upon Israel: "For their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read.
It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts" (2 Corinthians 3:14-15).
That was Israel's tragic hour.
God raised up the church and temporarily disfranchised His ancient people.
He could not trust His work to blind men.
verse
My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power.
— First Corinthians 2:4-5
thought
Our great need in the church today is to see the demonstration of the Spirit's power. Then our faith can rest on God's power not on human wisdom, entertaining preaching and worship-team creativity.
prayer
Lord, raise up leaders who are God seers and grant to Your people once again the clear demonstration of Your Spirit's power.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
When viewing the religious scene today, we are tempted to fix on one or another weakness and say, "This is what is wrong with the church. If this were corrected, we could recapture the glory of the early church and have pentecostal times back with us again."
This tendency to oversimplification is itself a weakness and should be guarded against always, especially when dealing with anything as complex as religion as it occurs in modern times.
It takes a very young man to reduce all our present woes to a single disease and cure the whole thing with one simple remedy. Older and wiser heads will be more cautious, having learned that the prescribed nostrum seldom works for the reason that the diagnosis has not been correct. Nothing is that simple.
Few spiritual diseases occur alone. Almost all are complicated by the presence of others and are so vitally interrelated as they spread over the whole religious body that it would take the wisdom of a Solomon to find a single cure.
For this reason, I am hesitant to point to any one defect in present-day Christianity and make all our troubles to stem from it alone.
That so-called Bible religion in our times is suffering rapid decline is so evident as to need no proof, but just what has brought about this decline is not so easy to discover.
I can only say that I have observed one significant lack among evangelical Christians which might turn out to be the real cause of most of our spiritual troubles.
Of course, if that were true, then the supplying of that lack would be our most critical need.
The great deficiency to which I refer is the lack of spiritual discernment, especially among our leaders. . . .
verse
Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law. Turn my eyes from worthless things; preserve my life according to your word.
— Psalm 119:18,37
thought
Are we sufficiently tuned into God to distinguish spiritual reality from that which falls short of it? Are our spiritual eyes fixed on Him?
prayer
O Lord, help me to fix my eyes on You and away from worthless things.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer