The Purpose of Revival

In 1992, Billy Graham issued a book entitled STORM WARNING. As the title suggests, he believes that we are headed for considerable turbulence in every arena of life. While he's probably right about this, we should not allow that to frighten us. Instead, we should consider it an opportunity to cleave closely to the Lord, who is the only one who can protect us in the coming time of trouble.

Intense trials are coming, but it is necessary for us to pass through them in order that we become overcomers. God will allow many things to rise up in great fury against us--things which will appear to consume us completely. Yet at the very moment at which this happens, God will give His people a strong ability to overcome and not be defeated.

God is in the process of stripping everything away, so that we will be forced to lean only upon Him, or else perish. He is doing that now, but this process will intensify, and it is becoming more and more incumbent upon us to take our refuge fully in Him. As we do this, to a greater and greater degree, we begin to possess Him, and He begins to possess us.

What does it mean to possess God? Certainly, part of it is to trust in Him, just as an infant trusts in its mother. It means to have an utterly complete reliance upon Him throughout whatever trials or tribulations we may experience. Part of possessing God is to see the hand of God in everything, and to know that His hand is good. This is the sort of thing that was expressed by Joseph when he told his brothers, "you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good." We are told in no uncertain terms in Romans 8:28 that all things work together for good to those who love God and who are called according to His purpose. To believe this fully through every circumstance is to trust God, and, in a sense, to possess Him.

If we are totally yielded to Him, then it is also the case that we are in His possession. His possession of us actually determines how we will think and act. We begin to return good for evil, and to do the right thing, even if it means suffering or persecution, or personal loss. When He possesses us, then we are so deeply in love with Him that we begin to obey Him regardless of the cost. We then no longer have the heart to take offense when we are wronged or betrayed, and we begin acting according to conscience, whatever the consequences. As He enables us to do these things, then, we, also, possess Him. These are the riches in Christ which the world considers to be foolishness.

One can be possessed by the things of God, or by the things of the enemy. Although it is possible to be possessed by a fear of the things that are about to come upon the world, we have the Spirit of Christ within us, and He is not the author of fear.

There is a storm coming--a time of suffering and persecution. We must be very careful not to allow ourselves to see only the storm. We must enter into a place of possessing God intimately. Otherwise the storm will actually come into us to possess us. How do we come into a place of possessing God? We must start by recognizing the sovereignty of God over our lives and knowing that all things do indeed work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose. We can possess, and be possessed by a fear of the storm, or we can possess, and be possessed by the goodness and love of God, even in the midst of the storm.

Before this storm breaks, God's people must possess Him in a very intimate and personal way. I'm not talking here about the conscious awareness of His presence, nor even of an emotional state, but a state of love abiding within the heart as the only constant and unfluctuating foundation of the inner being.

The storm that is coming can be viewed from a human perspective according to which it will bring great destruction, or from the perspective of God, who sees it as a most glorious and beautiful outworking of His perfect will, bringing forth great blessing.

In order for us to go forth in the power and the purpose of the Lord, it is vitally necessary for us to come into an attitude valor and courage, as opposed to the attitude of defeat, fear, and smallness. We must not be afraid to launch out in the new ways that God sets before us.

In October of 1978, Malcolm Muggeridge spoke at the University of Waterloo. His two addresses were later published in a book entitled THE END OF CHRISTENDOM, BUT NOT OF CHRIST. His thesis was that Christendom, or organized Christian religion, was coming to an abrupt end as a result of God's judgement, but that Christ would continue. By this, he meant not only that Jesus Christ will exist forever, but that the true followers of Christ will survive the disintegration of organized religion. The true church continues victoriously. The Body of Christ is neither an organization nor a group of organizations. It is a collection of people interspersed everywhere who truly trust in Jesus Christ. Calvin called it the "invisible church." Ed Plowman, an outstanding journalist, has referred to it as the "underground church."

Muggeridge asks, "How, in the shambles of a collapsed Christendom, stands Christ?" And the answer, of course, is that Christ's kingdom remains unscathed. His Church is marching on, and will continue to shine more and more brightly as darkness covers the earth. Muggeridge likened the fall of Christendom in our own day with the fall of ancient Rome, and this is a valid comparison. He said, "as for the decadent practices of Roman citizens such as the Corinthians--a general immorality so very reminiscent of today--these, Paul insisted, pertained to the dying world of paganism. Christians who had been reborn into the Kingdom proclaimed by Christ, a kingdom whose fulfillment they awaited with confidence, were not to contaminate themselves with the moral squalor of the pagan world. Now we see Christendom likewise sinking. But the true point I want to make is this: that Christ's kingdom remains. Indeed, it can be seen more clearly and appreciated more sharply by contrast with the darkness and depravity of the contemporary scene. . . ."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his commencement address at Harvard University on June 8, 1978, said much the same thing, and in the process, dealt a serious blow to the pride of modern secular culture. In his address, Solzhenitsyn observed that the truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. He complained that in the West, we have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating the law, to the extent that any conflict is resolved in accordance with the letter of the law, which is considered to be the supreme solution. There is no provision for the possibility of urging self restraint. Sacrifice, selfless risk, and the willingness to renounce legal rights are considered absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint, and everybody therefore operates at the extreme limit of the legal framework. "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. . . . . Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's nobles impulses. And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure. . . . destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counterbalanced by the young peoples' right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."

"There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy. But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

"Very well-known representatives of your society, such as George Kennan, say: we cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world.

"The American intelligentsia lost its nerve, and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. . . . No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. . . . To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concession, attempts to gain time, and betrayal. . . . This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development. . . . The next war, which does not have to be an atomic one, and I do not believe it will, may well bury Western civilization forever.

"The mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists. . . . This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher tasks than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material good, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. . . .

"In early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, . . . freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred, or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world would up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the nineteenth century.

"I am not examining here the case of a world war disaster and the changes which it would produce in society. As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

"To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on Earth. Imperfect man who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. One the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. . . .

"If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his tasks on Earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty to that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

"Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

"If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern Era."

If Western culture has lost its courage to do that which is right in the face of evil, then where can such courage be found? It can be found in God's holy remnant--those who have been prepared of God to stand in the day of evil. The opposition that inevitably rises up against revival is God's proving ground for the true spiritual warriors who will then overcome by the blood of the Lamb, by their testimony, and by their obedience, even unto death.

God permits persecution for the training of his remnant in the proper methods of spiritual warfare. It is for this reason that persecution is inevitable. On November 10, 1994, while ministering at New Life Christian Fellowship in Jacksonville, Florida, Rodney Howard-Browne delivered a prophecy in which he said that a time of greater persecution is coming for the present move of God, which, he said, would "not go forth unhindered"

In this prophecy, he also pointed out that wherever and whenever persecution is the greatest, the victory will also be the greatest. The stronger the persecution, the stronger will be the power of God in the midst of it. He said that God would have us not to be afraid when people attempt to stop us or hinder us, or threaten our lives. We should not be afraid under those circumstances, and we should not back down or compromise, because it is at those times that His hand will be the most strongly upon us.

He said that it is precisely during times of persecution that we will see tremendous manifestations of His Spirit, to the extent that even many of the things which are recorded in the book of Acts would happen to us, and perhaps even greater things. For those who have eyes to see it, we're living in a most unusual time of the outpouring of the Spirit of God. In times like this there are awesome glorious signs and wonders. God will manifest himself in unusual way, and nobody will be able to stop what He's doing. We will not be influenced, or held back, by that which man would say, but we will lose the fear of man. The fear of man brings a snare, but we will hearken unto the voice of the Spirit of the Lord, and He will deliver us in great power.

Rodney's prophecy predicts persecution and God's deliverance as we seek not to back down in the face of evil. This requires, among other things, that we be partakers of the reproach that revival necessarily brings. Sharing the reproach of Christ is very important, especially whenever a new move of God is in the process of being ostracized. This principle is not new; it has been evident throughout the history of the church. For example, at the beginning of the Reformation, to side with the reformers was to share in great reproach. During the Wesleyan movement, "Methodism" was a term of disdain. These are just two examples, but this sort of thing has happened time and time again both before the Reformation and after the time of John Wesley (as well as between these two eras, when the Separatists and the Puritans faced a great deal of ostracism and found it necessary to go to the New World to escape its effects).

The vicissitudes, persecutions, spiritual attacks, pains and troubles of this life are all God's fires which will serve to purify and beautify His own. All the wounding, pains and fires through which He permits us to pass will cause us to become progressively more beautiful until we become precious jewels of His making.

The world-shattering storm of evil that is coming will actually bring forth the government of God in and through His own reigning ones. They shall reign with the Lord and gather together all things into one, for the storm will have destroyed forever the power of things as they now are to sustain themselves any longer.