Brokenness

After learning about the then on-going Welsh revival, well-known British Bible teacher F.B. Meyer traveled by train from London to the city of Cardiff to investigate the reports. Accompanied by a friend who was somewhat skeptical regarding the religious fervor sweeping through the land of Wales, Meyer attended a service in which the young evangelist…

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Thinking About Revival (4): Reverence and Revival

Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 When we first hear that revival is when the fear of the Lord comes upon us corporately or individually may not sound like good news. After all, fear does not sound like something we want. We work hard to escape our fears, alleviate our fears, remove our…

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Thinking About Revival (3): The Character of Revival

If I told you that there would be a worship service for the God of Scripture, to seek His blessing on us, led by a well-known preacher, with many churches working together, at great expense and organizational effort, and the music and the preaching is going to stir us up to intense zeal and passion,…

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Thinking About Revival (2): A Test Case

The Bible does teach the need for God’s gracious intervention to change the spiritual apathy in His people: sometimes individually, and sometimes corporately. Revival is the reawakening of God’s people, the repentance of spiritual dullness and laziness and disinterest and renewal of love for God. It is needed because of inevitable decline, because of sins…

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Thinking About Revival (1)

Right now,1 something is happening on the campus of Asbury University in Kentucky. What began as a chapel service has now turned into a several-day worship service of singing and prayer. People from other universities have been busing in to see and to participate. People are queuing up outside the chapel. There are both people…

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How Many Christians Does It Take to Change an Empire?

Roger Olson, in his interesting The Story of Christian Theology, remarks on p. 137, “No one can say just what percentage of the citizens and subjects of the empire were Christians by that time [c. ad 301], but a fair estimate would be about 5 percent.” Olson is remarking on the incredible sea change that…

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What Is Revival?

F. W. Boreham described the time when he tried to comfort a distressed woman in an Australian railway station. Upon leaving the train she discovered that she had lost her parasol, and it moved her to tears. He felt a compassionate urge to assist her in finding it. He inspected every carriage. He looked on…

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How to Come Back from the Dead

Revelation 3:1-7 How can we come back from the dead? What steps would we, as a church, take to return from near lifelessness? We can learn a great deal from the dangerous difficulties present in a church described in Revelation 3:1-7. They had once been a living church, but were in peril of becoming “the…

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Revive Us Again

September/October 2021 | VOLUME 31 | NUMBER 5 Wilt thou not revive us again: that thy people may rejoice in thee? (Ps. 85:6) Throughout the history of the Church, individuals and groups of believers have longed and prayed for the moving of God, and God in His grace and His timing has responded. Today we…

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Revive Us Again

In 1983 Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn provided a concise explanation as to why, in his opinion, the horrors of Soviet communism occurred. He said, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Those with any spiritual perception at all are burdened – yea, alarmed – by the accelerating moral and spiritual decline of…

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