The Lord has been moving at Ren and in the city. I believe it’s more than just the excitement of the pandemic fading and being able to gather in-person again. The pandemic season has tested God’s people to the core. It’s been a sort of wilderness experience. We’ve been isolated and the “rains” have been withheld for a time. All this hardship has not been in vain though. The Lord has been humbling and breaking us; He’s been preparing us. Hosea 10:12 comes to mind:
Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap steadfast love; break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the LORD, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you.
The breaking up of fallow ground is a metaphor that speaks of things that once were soft but now are hard—our hearts. It refers to a past season when the people of God were humble, surrendered, and near to God but have drifted into a certain dullness. The call is essentially to return to the former ways of dependence on the Lord.
A few weeks ago I visited The Branch ministry at Brown University and witnessed over 100 students hungering and thirsting for the Lord. It made me realize that God is at work not just at Ren—but throughout the city. I gathered with city pastors this past Tuesday and, again, heard the sounds of groaning for a fresh move of God. I attended The Potter’s House on Sunday evening in our space and was moved by the intensity of their worship. There’s an atmosphere of anticipation in the region for an outpouring of the Spirit.
Throughout church history you see an ebb and flow of the waves of God’s Spirit. It seems like more ebb than flow! The reasons for this pattern are not always clear. Sometimes the Lord orchestrates the ebb as discipline or testing. It could be divine judgment upon his people who have strayed. Whatever the reasons may be, there’s only one way out: groaning. By groaning I mean the possession of godly discontentment in the heart. It’s when God’s people come to their wits end and start crying out desperately to the Lord. It’s when the people hear the call of the Lord to—
... return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning (Joel 2:12).
Historically, this is always the starting point of a fresh flow of revival. It’s when we get to a point of being sick and tired of watching Satan have a field day on our generation, on our watch. It’s when God begins to seep a holy anger into us to contend for revival like a bulldog taking hold of a piece of meat. Are you feeling those
stirrings?
The fact is that the present state of things is not even close to what our God desires. The glory of the Lord has either departed or diminished in most New England churches. Even churches that seem to have a measure of glory compared to other churches, pale in comparison to what the Church has looked like in times of revival.
Oh that we’d cry to the Lord day and night until he restores glory upon the Church!
On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have set watchmen; all the day and all the night they shall never be silent. You who put the LORD in remembrance, take no rest, and give him no rest until he establishes Jerusalem and makes it a praise in the earth (Isaiah 62:6-7).
It is God’s desire to make Jesus famous in our city. I know it bothers us that the name of Christ is reproached and the Church at large is viewed with disdain. I know many of us are seriously concerned about our children growing up in a culture that has cast off the God of the Bible. False gospels and false teachers abound. How will our young people stand firm against the flood of anti-Bible, anti-Jesus, anti-Church persuasions? Brothers and sisters—we need a move of God! We need a fresh outpouring of the Spirit in such a way that restores power, restores relationships, breaks the power of idols, frees from bondage, and sets us ablaze with holy love to spread the message of Jesus.
Maybe you have been feeling these things stronger than I have. Maybe you are just beginning to feel them stirring within like a tiny well springing up. Or maybe you would confess you have fallen into spiritual dullness. Wherever you are at doesn’t matter. It’s time for all of us to unite and cry to the Lord for a fresh outpouring of His Spirit. In times of revival, God accomplishes more in a year than happens in 50 years of ordinary Christianity. We cannot settle for ordinary. Oh that we would seek him night and day for an extraordinary moving of the Holy Spirit that shakes our city and causes the nations to tremble (Isaiah 61).
Consider the above a taste of my message for this Sunday. I’ll be preaching from Acts 13 if you want to take a read through to prepare. Be praying that God would use his Word to ignite passion and resolve within us. We aren’t looking for shallow, frothy spiritual thrills. We aren’t looking for things to be whipped up only to dissipate like the morning dew. We aren’t looking for crowds of people. Our cry is for the Lord to be glorified in his Church. That the Church would be the dwelling place of God and a house of prayer for all nations. That when people see the Church, they would be stunned by the reflection of Christ’s beauty and holiness. Let’s not grow weary in believing God to send a mighty revival in our generation!
—Scott A