OBTAINING Real REVIVAL

OBTAINING Real REVIVAL
-Leonard Ravenhill.

Revival..... another definition would be to recover, repair or restore.
Hosea 10:12 says: "Sow to yourself in righteousness, reap in
mercy; break up your fallow ground; for it is time to seek the Lord
till He come and reign righteousness upon you." What is fallow
ground? Fallow ground is ground that has been fruitful, and then
it has been plowed over, and no seed has been sown in it, and
therefore it has become unproductive.

Notice, there is a human emphasis here -- it says that we are to
break up -- you break up your fallow ground.

Now take another aspect of it here in Psalm 85:6 - "Would Thou
not revive us again: that Thy people may rejoice in Thee." So,
there is an absence of joy, of vitality -- there is an absence of
ecstasy. The very word "revive" presupposes life. You can only
revive what has already had vitality -- life that has become sick,
weak, or apathetic. I think the nearest analogy I can give you is
a recent case of a man who apparently drowned. He had been
under the water for an incredible amount of time. Then somebody
pulled him out and worked and worked on him, and eventually life
came again. This is actually what it means to revive,
It means to revitalize.
It means to restore lost power.
It means to recover lost energy.

In the Acts of the Apostles 3:19 we read, "Repent ye therefore,
and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the
times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord."
Whatever else we say about revival we have to recognize this,
that revival is an act of mercy in the sovereignty of God. There
is a vast difference between revival and evangelism. When we
speak of revival in America we think of church advertising, "Our
revival will begin next Sunday night at a certain time and it is
going to finish the next Sunday night at a certain time."
Obviously this is something purely mechanical, it is something
which men have engineered. I think that one of the offenses of
revival, in the historic sense, is that it cannot be organized.

As Doctor Tozer said, "When revival comes it changes the moral
climate of a community." You can have revival that covers a church -
Spurgeon had that. You can have a revival that covers a city. You
can have a revival that covers the whole nation -- and I am thinking
in this context more than in the other contexts (though sometimes
revival spreads from here to there -- like fire spreads.) Revival
cannot be organized -- evangelism can be organized. Revival cannot
be subsidized --evangelism can and usually it must be. Revival
cannot be advertised --evangelism can.

It may cost millions of dollars, as it often does, to have one of our
huge, modern, so called revivals. You have to pay vast sums of
money for time on TV, for example -- perhaps a million dollars a
night. That's incredible, that's unthinkable to me in the context of
Biblical revival, or even historical revival. Why doesn't revival need
to be advertised? For the simple reason, that fire is the most self
advertising thing that there is, whether it is a physical fire or a
revival fire. It draws people like a magnet. To bring this down to
modern technology -- revival cannot be computerized. There is
information thatyou can put in computer and presto, you get the
answer predicting an outcome according to the facts that were put
in. But you cannot computerize or predict revival.

There are periods in which one thing predominates.
Sometimes revival is totally taken over by sorrow.
Sometimes revival is totally taken over by joy, ecstasy 'till
you don't know whether you are in the flesh or whether you've
gone out of the earth. Sometimes revival is taken over by
stillness.

There are times when you go to a prayer meeting and the power of
God is there. There is stillness and you feel it is creative. You feel,
"Now something is building up around here, somebody is going to
come out shortly with a heart bursting... with some agonizing
prayer..." Revival cannot be rationalized. Again, one of the offensive
things about revival is you can't put your finger on the spot, usually,
as to how or why or where it began. It is supremely an act of God.

You find a man would go with a series of messages to a community
and before long that community is alive, it's throbbing. He goes to
another town with exactly the same group of men, the same type
of prayer is poured out, the same sweat and soul travail and there
is no response. You can't predict and you can't organize revival.
Why? Because you can't organize where the wind is coming from.
The Spirit, the wind, bloweth where it listeth. If you say it's going
to come this way, it comes that way. If you say God's going to use
that man, very often He doesn't even bother with that man. Revival
so often comes through unknown characters.

I don't think the world has ever been in a greater sense of turmoil
than it is in this moment. I don't think our nation has. Whatever we
shall say about revival we have to recognize this: There are three
things about natural life: conception, gestation, and birth. You can't
alter the program. There has never been revival, that I can trace,
that has not been preceded by agonizing prayer. You might say,
"I haven't got to that stage yet of agonizing prayer. How does is
come?" Well, it comes through VISION. If we are really going to
get a concept of revival we have to get a vision of God's sorrow over
sin. We have to get a concept of how, day by day, we offend God.
As a nation we offend God in millions of ways.

When I was praying in the Bahamas one day, I saw a great
column of smoke, which happened to be coming from tires that
were being burned. It was as black as could be, and over there
I saw a wisp of smoke going up from the ground. I didn't think
much of it until about a year after, I was praying and the Lord
said, "That volume of black, thick smoke is like the volume of
sin that goes up every day." All the blasphemy, all the unbelief,
all the dirty stories, all the lying, all the deception, all sex-
perversion, all drunkenness-- this tremendous column of iniquity
goes up in the sight of God. And here you have a little wisp -- of
what? That is the praise that God gets out of His people. If we are
going to realize how much we need revival we need to recognize
the dimension of sin. We have to recognize that sin offends God.
Psalm 85:4 says, "Turn us, O God of our salvation and cause
Thine anger towards us to cease. Wilt Thou be angry with us
forever?" Psalm 80 verse 3, "Turn us again, O God, and cause
Thy face to shine." Notice, it's repeated again in verse 7 and in
verse 19, "...cause Thy face to shine"..."cause Thy face to shine."

[AMEN!! - This is what we so desperately need today! -ed.]