Rediscovering what faith is

In my dealing with the faulty paradigms that were blocking me from experiencing God's best for my life I will proceed from the general to the more specific ones, in the order as I experienced it. As I was reflecting on this during the week, I became very aware of the fact that it is actually quite difficult to put them into words. There is so much room for misunderstanding, misinterpretation and false judgments that it will need the help of the Holy Spirit for me to write it down right and for my readers to understand it in a way that will be helpful and encouraging for them.

Let me make this statement right at the start: I don't think, that I am better than other Christians, or that I have now arrived and know it all. This is not to put down or condemn anybody who doesn't agree with the way I see things. This is simply a testimony about how God has changed my life by revealing faulty paradigms of thinking and replacing them with more accurate biblical ones. My life has become so much better, so much more victorious, joyful, confident and consistent that I simply want to share that with my readers. And it is my hope and my prayer that this will be helpful. That's all.

The deception of the modern and post modern worldview
For me it all started, when God showed me through the Freedom in Christ course that even though I was a believer in Jesus, I was mostly operating from a modern and post modern world view in many practical areas of my life. I professed to believe the bible and what it says about God and reality, but when it came to day-to-day living, I by default acted according to the modern and post modern world view. What do I mean by that? Let me explain using the points from the Freedom in Christ course. This will be a very concise and simplified treatment, because I don't have the space here to go into much detail, but it will certainly show the main points.

The modern or western worldview can be summarized like that:

- It divides reality into 'natural' and 'supernatural' but focuses only on the natural.
- It sees spiritual things as irrelevant to daily life.
- Reality is defined only by what we can see, touch and measure

Having grown up in the modern world I had internalized it's worldview without even noticing it. God showed me that in my daily life I also divided reality into natural and supernatural and was focusing mainly on the natural. The supernatural got some attention in the morning during my quiet time, but the rest of the day I was operating in the natural, with God not really playing a big part of my daily experience.

Why was that? I really wanted to experience God. I even got up one or two hours before everybody else to pray and read my bible, and that still didn't lead me to a joyful and victorious life. There were a few things involved, legalism being a big part of it as well, but one major thing was: I came to define reality by what I can see, touch and measure. But I couldn't see God. So I had to feel him, in order for him to be real to me. If I didn't feel anything, He felt distant and unreal. So I begged and pleaded with God to pour out his Spirit and touch me, give me something "real"... When I got a feeling of God's presence I was happy, when I couldn't feel his presence, I felt down and condemned and guilty. So I was praying and hoping for revival that would just bring this overwhelming sense of his presence and glory and that would never leave me. I was deceived.

The post modern worldview can be summarized like that:

- There is no such thing as objective truth
- Everyone has their own version of "truth"
- Each person's "truth" is as valid as everyone else's
- If you disagree with my "truth" or disapprove of my actions, you are rejecting me

Now this is so obviously diabolic that I didn't really fall for most of it. It is an ingenious trick of the father of lies to invent a worldview in which there is no truth, because everything then becomes some sort of a lie. In that way there is no foundation for any faith to be exercised, because real biblical faith is being "sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Hebrews 11:1 NIV). How can you be sure and certain if there is no truth to base your certainty on? It all is left to subjective guesswork and hoping. And it flies in the face of the words of Jesus, who said that "I am the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:6). "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." (John 8:32), and "Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth."(John 17:17). Although as a Christian I was convinced that truth existed and that Jesus was the truth, I had unconsciously accepted the post modern assumption that we are not really able to know and perceive truth as humans. That weakened my trust in the bible as a reliable guide through life and faith without me noticing it.

The Freedom in Christ course contrasted these two worldviews with the biblical worldview, or "how it really is":

The Biblical Worldview: 'How it really is'
- Truth does exist
- God is truth
- Faith and logic are not incompatible
- God's word, the bible, is truth.

Now the Bible presents us with a very distinct and elaborate worldview. It states very confidently that God is the ultimate reality and the source of all being. But God is spirit. He is not perceivable by our senses unless he chooses to make himself seen or felt by us. In fact there is a whole spiritual world that is as real as our physical world, but it is not accessible to our senses. It exists, but we cannot prove it's existence by physical means. We have to access it by faith. We have to believe. How can we be certain that what we believe but cannot prove is true? We need reliable revelation from that spiritual world to tell us, how things really are. The Bible claims to be that revelation, the reliable and infallible word of God that can be totally trusted.

The way things work in the spiritual world of faith is radically different to the way they work in the physical world. In the physical world you first prove that something is actually true, and then you believe it. In the spiritual world it works the other way round, you first trust God and believe him without physical proof, and then you see it manifest in the physical realm. That was the huge breakthrough for me and the beginning of radical change in my experience.

Rediscovering what faith is
Faith is believing God, believing that what He says is true. Even if it contradicts the physical realities, how we feel. Steve Goss gives an example in Freedom in Christ about how he first learned that truth. He had a problem with watching bad stuff on television and not being able to stop it. He would feel guilty, confess it and stop for a while, but then would fall for it again. It was one of these sin-confess-sin-confess cycles that he seemed not to be able to overcome. One day a preacher came to his church who said, that he had the answer to that problem. Steve was all ears. The preacher said - all you have to do, is just stop it. Because you are no longer a slave of sin. The word of God says in Romans 6 that you can do it. Believe it, and you will be able to do it. So he went home and knelt down at his bed and said to God: "God, I know that your word says that I am no longer a slave of sin. I feel that I can't stop it. But your word says that I can. I am going to believe your word..." After that he didn't have that problem anymore. It actually really worked. As soon as he exercised faith on the Word of God and decided to trust the word more than his feelings, he could overcome his problem.

Wow, that opened a whole new world for me. I didn't have to wait for God to make me feel his presence, before I could believe that He was with me. His word says that he will never leave me nor forsake me. So I can go by that and just believe it. As soon as I started exercising that kind of faith and believing what God says over what my circumstances and my feelings said, my life started to change.

My problem was mainly emotional. I used to have the tendency to have feelings of discouragement, inferiority, weakness. And when I felt that way, I was taught that I had to be "real" and just express these feelings and live them until they would go away. Now I actually saw that that was completely wrong. Feelings don't reflect reality. They reflect the way I think about the reality. So if I choose to believe God and His word rather than my feelings, the feelings would soon change. That was a major pointer to victory and a great liberation for me.

I remember driving in my car feeling very down and discouraged one Saturday night. It was after midnight, and I had to pick up my son from somewhere and I had to preach the next morning. I felt tired, frustrated and down. That's when the Holy Spirit reminded me of the truth of God's word. I remembered what I had learned about faith and I said to God something along these lines: God, I feel rotten and miserable, but I decide not to trust my feelings but to believe your word. Your word says that I am a loved and cherished son of God, I am strong and courageous, because greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world. I have not received the Spirit of Timidity, but the Spirit of Power, Love and a Sound Mind... And I started praising God for that. Within 10 or 15 minutes my feelings changed from discouragement to excitement and joy. Wow, I thought, that was quick. It is fantastic...

That was the beginning - making the conscious choice to unmask the ways I acted inconsistently to the Biblical worldview and choose to believe God. From here many other paradigms started to show up where I had accepted beliefs that were actually inconsistent with what the Bible teaches. An exciting and very fulfilling journey started...

In closing I have to clarify, that intellectually identifying a faulty paradigm is only the beginning. The truth has to get into our heart, before it can really start to change us. It will take time and effort. Jesus compares the word of God to a seed. A seed doesn't produce the harvest immediately. It takes time to germinate, take root, grow and develop. The harvest will come later. But while it's growing you know, you are on the right path and it is exciting, fulfilling and rewarding. And you know that the harvest will come. Likewise with these paradigm changes it takes time for them to penetrate to the heart level, where you can actually operate in them freely. But it is very worth while. Because they reflect truth, the way it really is. And it works. Life makes sense, God becomes very real and the walk with him is just wonderful!

So from this general huge paradigm shift I want to now proceed to some more specific ones that I discovered in the bible. Until next week. Be blessed everyone. God is awesome, good, merciful and loving. Trusting Him is the best thing we can ever do. Be blessed and encouraged!

A Shift in my Thinking

Last week I ended my post by promising to come back and talk about mental paradigms and how they influence our lives and our experience without us even noticing it. And that the current revival that has already started here in Ireland is a silent "reformation" of theological thinking, a paradigm shift in people's perception of God, His word and reality. I am going to expand on that further, and I am going to do it by way of personal testimony. I hope this will help my readers to connect with what I am saying and maybe apply it to their own lives.

How paradigms work
Steven Covey explains the power of mental paradigms and how they function in his classic "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". I am indebted to him and also Neil Anderson (Freedom in Christ) for the following insights. As human beings we have this incredibly powerful ability to take in and process information through our senses about the world, about ourselves and others and then interpret this information by way of thinking. We form a world-view, a philosophy of life, that consists of our main mental paradigms, i. e. the way we think about reality, about the world, life, God, relationships, the purpose of life and how life works. Mental paradigms form the framework within which we interpret reality. But they are not reality itself. They are a representation of reality. Steven Covey likens them to a map of an area. If you want to find a certain destination in Dublin, an accurate map of Dublin can be incredibly helpful to get you to where you want to go. Our mental paradigms are maps of reality. They help us interpret the reality we encounter each day of our lives. But what happens, if we operate from a wrong map? If the map isn't accurate, or completely wrong?

The source of frustration
Imagine that an error occurs in the printing shop and an actual map of Limerick accidentally gets the title "Dublin" printed on it. So you have this map, it says Dublin on it, and you are in Dublin trying to find a certain street. But without you knowing it you are trying to find this street by actually looking at a map of Limerick. You are bound to be frustrated and lost and you won't be able to find your destination. Because you are operating from a wrong paradigm. If you don't know that you've got the wrong map, you will probably try harder, put in more effort to reach your goal. It won't work. You will still be lost. Or you may end up saying - the main thing is to have a positive attitude, not to reach a goal. So you can go through Dublin with the wrong map and sing this song "Don't worry be happy" and just have a bit of craig and a good time - but you would still be lost and disoriented. The only thing that would help you, would be to change your map. If you exchanged your wrong map of Dublin, which is actually a map of Limerick, for a real map of Dublin, things suddenly would start to make sense and start to work. That's why Jesus said - the truth will make you free. If your thinking lines up with how things really are, with reality, life suddenly starts to make sense. If it doesn't, you'll be lost and frustrated.

A frustrated pastor
Most of my life in pastoral ministry I was frustrated because I was operating from a whole bunch of wrong, distorted mental paradigms. But I didn't know it. I had a real heart for God. I wanted people to get to know God and be born again. I really believed that he was real, and yet my Christian life somehow didn't seem to work. When I read the bible, especially the Acts of the Apostles, the frustration reached sometimes nearly unbearable levels. There I read how God was real, present, active, how these first Christians were joyful in the midst of terrible persecution, how they could heal people in Jesus' name, experience miraculous deliverance out of prisons and turn their world right side up within a lifespan of a generation. Compared to that my life was just not matching up. It was not in the same league. And I didn't know how to change it.

When I turned 40 I decided to have my midlife crisis. I was so fed up with always trying harder and harder, seeking God, praying, fasting and getting nowhere. I started to rebel against God. Started to question his goodness and love to me. I reasoned, "God, if you are real and care about me, you would let me succeed, you would let me know what's wrong, you would show up and change my life." I remember at the beginning of that phase attending a pastor's conference in Germany. One morning I poured out all my frustration to God in prayer in my room, telling him how disappointed I was that he just didn't answer my prayers and let me experience more of his power and victory in my life. And then I turned to the bible passage that was selected for that day. And it turned out to be Matthew 17 - the healing of a boy with a demon. When Jesus hears that his disciples were not able to heal the boy, he vents his frustration in verse 17 "O unbelieving  and perverse generation, how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy to me" - Wow. It felt like God was talking back to me. And he was not at all compassionate with me and my frustration. He was frustrated about me. I felt like Jesus turned around and stuck his finger in my face and said - you faithless and perverse generation... It didn't make sense. I couldn't wrap my head around it. I went on and had my crisis anyway... God was very gracious and he gently restored me back to himself, but this memory remained. The only solution for me to ever experience God's power and reality, I decided, was to live through a revival. A mighty and powerful move of God's Spirit. So I went back to seeking God and praying and hoping for revival. When God would decide to open the heavens once again and pour out his Spirit, I hoped to be right in the midst of it. With this hope I came to Ireland in November 2008 and started working as pastor of the Nazarene Church in Greystones.

Unmasking faulty paradigms

It was a few years later when I finally started to get a clue about the solution to my problems. A good friend of mine invited me to take part in a course called “Freedom in Christ”. He had experienced major breakthroughs while on that course, so he asked me to join in as he was doing it in a friend’s house. I agreed. The course is based on material written by an American, Dr. Neil T. Anderson, and presented on DVDs by the Englishman Steve Goss. It is a very good course. My major breakthrough came with Session 4: “The world’s view of truth”. In it the author discusses the effect a worldview has on our perception of reality - it lined up with what Steven Covey taught about mental paradigms. He explains the main world views that are prevalent in the Western hemisphere at the moment. The modern world view, the post modern worldview and contrasts them with the biblical world view.

In this session the Lord showed me that in my practical day-to-day living I was operating from a humanistic, materialistic paradigm. My theological beliefs were like an icing on a cake that underneath was almost completely rooted in a materialistic world view. Spiritual reality was kind of distant and somewhat “unreal”. I went by what my senses and my feelings told me was true, not by what the bible says is true. I was operating in unbelief. I was an unbelieving believer. I trusted God with my salvation, but as far as the daily life was concerned, I totally relied on my senses, my knowledge, common sense and experience. And where my senses or my feelings were contradicting biblical truth, I definitely went with them and against what the bible was saying. I thought that was normal, that there was no other way to live. I pleaded with God to change my feelings, to overwhelm me with his Holy Spirit, to influence my feelings and senses directly. But that would be walking by sight, not by faith.

 Neil Anderson opened my eyes to the fact that all biblical faith is – is believing that what the bible presents as truth is really true, and then acting on it; even if it feels untrue, even if there is no physical evidence for it. Spiritual things can’t always be perceived by our senses. Our feelings are not an accurate reflection of reality – they are a product of our thinking. We must trust God and accept what he says is true and act on it. Then we find out that they are actually true and that it works. Man – that was huge. Liberation came to me at last. I could choose how I felt. That meant that I did not have to feel rotten, guilty and inadequate anymore, because the bible says that I am a loved and cherished son of God. I could stop believing my feelings, I could choose to believe the truth and act on it. That started me on the journey that I am on today. It opened up completely new possibilities for me: The life of the Spirit. Little did I know that that was only the beginning. My entire world was about to change.

Reorienting my thinking

Suddenly life started to make sense, my Christian life started beginning to work. It was incredible. I can't even begin to describe the liberation and freedom that started to flood my soul. God wasn't the problem, my faulty paradigms were the problem. Being part of an unbelieving and perverse generation was the problem. Now I was ready to take a close look at my thinking and get rid of every wrong and inaccurate paradigm and replace it with a right one. With the help of some very gifted bible teachers I was able to identify a whole bunch of wrong paradigms in my thinking that were keeping me from experiencing the life of abundance that the bible was talking about. And the more I progressed in that direction, the freer, richer and fuller my life became, and my relationship with Jesus was revolutionized. 

So from next week I would like to take a closer look at each of these wrong paradigms that I discovered in my thinking, describe them and then show the more accurate biblical alternative to it.

Until next week. Be blessed and encouraged everybody! God loves you. God is not the problem! God is awesome and good and faithful and loving. If you are frustrated and disappointed with your Christian experience, I hope you will receive revelation while reading this blog that will lead you to see the truth and embrace it. There is nothing in the whole world like it. 

REVIVAL IS HERE - BUT DIFFERENT

Picking up the threads where I left them

               I am returning to this blog after a 2 year break. Just read through my last entry and realized once again how much I have changed. In the course of these two years I have undergone a profound change in my perception and my thinking, which led to dramatic changes in my life, my family, my work. I can truthfully say that scales have been removed from my spiritual eyes. The truth does indeed set us free. Life feels totally different now. Victory has superseded defeat. Joy, love and peace are no longer rare phenomena in a life mainly characterized by struggle, ups and downs and loads of guilt and condemnation. They are permanent now, it's awesome. I think it is fair to say: I have been revived. Revival is here. It is spreading in Ireland and the whole world. Excitement is bubbling up within me even as I am writing these words. But it is completely different from how I expected it to be. And it is different to all the stories I read about past revivals. Two years ago, God told me it would be different. I didn't understand it then, but I am slowly beginning to see it now. Let me explain.

Forget about the past
              Two years ago, in the fall of 2012, we conducted a week long evangelistic outreach with the evangelist Tony Stone here in Greystones. Tony is a friend and coworker of Reinhard Bonnke and a great evangelist, so I really hoped to experience some kind of a breakthrough in the church with him. The week went well, we saw a few people born again. The highlight for me was the conversion of my youngest son David during one of the meetings. But no huge breakthrough occurred. It was after that week that during my devotional bible reading God spoke to me through the words of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah 43:18-19 "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland."

A new approach
               In my preoccupation with revival and the things that happened in the past I have come to expect God to do a similar thing in our time. But obviously God was up to something else. With this scripture he redirected my attention. I have been expecting something to happen on the outside - some kind of movement, outpouring of the Spirit, churches uniting in prayer for revival... Instead, things began to happen inside of me. I've come to realize that the major hindrance to revival was not a lack of prayer on our part, not a lack of repentance, nor a lack of willingness on God's part to pour out his Spirit. The main hindrance is wrong thinking, wrong paradigms in our world view that make us blind to the truth of God's word. That came first as a shock, but then started to really liberate me. Without knowing it, I had been operating from a wrong "mental map" over the past 20 years of my ministry. Could that be possible? An evangelical pastor, with a real heart for God, with the bible in my hands and a fervor to serve God, could I be so wrong and not see the truth for all these years? - Well, that's exactly what had happened to me.

A change in my thinking
               Our thinking is a very powerful thing, paradigms of thinking have enormous consequences for our lives. They determine whether we connect to truth or are lost in deception and error. Because I had studied evangelical theology at a renowned seminary and read the bible for myself, I've come to think that I knew the truth. But my life didn't reflect that. There was not much joy and excitement left, I very rarely experienced the power of God that I read about in the bible, and most of the time I felt inadequate, guilty and like a failure. The gospel that I knew and believed somehow didn't deliver on the promises it made. It didn't really feel like good news in my experience most of the time. God was about to open my eyes to why this was so and to radically change my thinking in many areas. That was the best thing that had happened to me since my first encounter with Jesus and His Spirit when I was 11 years of age.

A silently spreading Reformation
               And I am not the only one who has undergone such a change. It is spreading here in Ireland and also in Germany and other parts of Europe. I recently heard about an elderly man who was a believer all his life. For 50 years he sat in his Methodist church and kept quiet, enduring quite a miserable life and suffering from depression. Then he got in touch with the truth, was healed of depression and became a happy Christian who couldn't stop talking about God. He got kicked out of his church for that. I believe there is a paradigm shift happening in the church today that is similar in scope to that of the Reformation. Truth that has been lost for nearly 2000 years from the main stream of Christianity is being rediscovered and is changing lives. But it is also being resisted and persecuted by many a bible believing Christian. This is the new thing that God is doing. Instead of pouring out his Spirit in a massive eruption that would sweep over a country and then die out after a few months or years he is bringing about a fundamental change in people's thinking that has the potential of bringing the whole Christian church back to operating in the same degree of power and authority as depicted in the Acts of the Apostles. We live in exciting times!

The purpose of this blog
               I am picking up this blog to explain these paradigm shifts that God has revealed to me in sequence and in an orderly and structured manner. It is my heart's desire and my prayer that God will use these words to bring about the same liberation in many of my reader's lives as he has brought about in mine. Jesus' statement is still true. The truth does set us free. But it is only the truth that we know, that will have this effect. My people perish for a lack of knowledge... is also a true statement today. And it has to be heart knowledge - not merely intellectual agreement. Here lies a real problem - our hearts are much slower and much more stubborn than our minds. They have been hardened and conditioned by so many factors that even for very sincere Christians it can take quite a lot of effort and focus to really connect to the truth and go with it. That's why a halfhearted approach will never do. God's promise that Jeremiah wrote to the exiles is still true today for every one of us: "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart!" (Jeremiah 29:13)

So next week I hope to continue by dealing with mental paradigms and the way they determine our perception of the world and of truth. How it is possible for a Christian to be reading the same words in the bible all their life and not be able to connect with the truth that they convey... Paradigms are very powerful. They can make you to be seeing, but never perceiving, hearing but never understanding... And the liberation that a shift from a wrong paradigm to a right one brings is beyond description. It is awesome. So bear with me.

Until next week,
Be blessed and encouraged!

Book recommendation: Sounds from Heaven

As I am returning to this blog I must admit that I have nothing new to add from my personal experience. Still praying, still waiting, still hungering and thirsting for God to pour out his Spirit. I have come across a very good book about the Revival on the Isle of Lewis, written by Colin and Mary Peckham. The title of the book is "Sounds from Heaven". Great reading, very challenging, though. The amount of prayer that went up to God prior to the revival seems to have been colossal. Those Scottish Presbyterians knew how to persist in prayer. I don't see this intensity yet anywhere around me here in Ireland. Another fact that I learned the past week about the revival here in Dublin in 1967: There was a blind man who was the leader of the Nazarene Church at that time. He and another guy in the congregation fasted and prayed for 40 days prior to the outbreak of the revival. There seems to be a very high price attached to this special blessing of revival - a price of persistent and sacrificial intercessory prayer. And who is able for that? How do you "go through with  God?" How do you persist in God's presence without being legalistic? Without trying to twist his arm? Without trying to impress him with your good works, with your good prayers? How do you learn to be a true intercessor? - You can only learn it by doing it. By entering into this dangerous, lonely and demanding place before the face of our holy God. Only he can teach you how to pray while you are praying. To bear the burden of unsaved souls, to feel some of the pain HE is feeling in view of so many people perishing in their sins. In Ezekiel 22 God laments the fact that he sought one person to stand in the gap between him and the people so that he would have a reason to stop his judgment - and he found none. Intercession is a lonely and very demanding calling. Who will heed the call? - My prayer is: Here am I, Lord, take me. But can I really do it? With God's help I will try - that's all I can say. Anybody want to join in?

Revival starts with Us

It's been a while since my last blog entry. A few days after I wrote it my father passed away - unexpectedly and suddenly. Life has been challenging and intense since then. But in the midst of it all I sense God working mightily in me.

A few weeks ago God started to move on my heart in an unprecedented and unusual way. The hunger for revival, the hunger for his manifest presence in my life and in our church grew so strong that I couldn't shake it off anymore. In addition to that God sent confirmation through different sources and different people all across the spectrum of the Christian Church. One weekend I wasn't able to prepare my sermon that I had intended to preach. Hunger for God and conviction of my own sin gripped me so hard, I had to spend hours in prayer before God, seeking his face in tears and repenting of all known sin and my idols. Instead of preaching on the intended text of Acts 1, 1-8 I just gave a testimony of what God is doing in my life. Those of you who would like to hear about it can log on to www.nazarene.ie and listen to the sermons of the last couple of weeks. The importance of and the urgent need for repentance gripped my consciousness and penetrated my thinking. God is on the move. And he starts with us. After the service where I couldn't preach my intended sermon one of the members of my congregation forwarded to me the following email that she had received from Simon Guillebaud (A Christian Author whom God had used to speak to me):

I'm feeling very challenged of late, and the below hit me hard:

This man was born in a gypsy tent, of humble origins, and yet ended up being invited to the White House by two presidents. Rodney ‘Gypsy’ Smith came into the world in 1860 in Epping Forest, just outside London. Forty five times he crossed the Atlantic to preach the gospel to millions of people on both sides. His passion was almost unparalleled, and there was great fruit in what he did. What was his secret? Private prayer. His praying was even more powerful than his preaching.

A delegation once came to him to enquire how they might experience personal and mass revival as he had. They wanted to be used the way Gypsy was. Without hesitating, he said:

“Go home. Lock yourself in your room. Kneel down in the middle of the floor, and with a piece of chalk draw a circle round yourself. There, on your knees, pray fervently and brokenly that God would start a revival within that chalk circle.”

How badly do we want it?

SG

It is good to pray for revival in Ireland, or Germany, or Russia or the world. But the start of it is very personal: revival starts with us. I don't have a piece of chalk to draw a circle around myself, but there is a rug in my study that I often kneel on to pray. My intense prayer now, as I kneel on this rug, is  - Lord, send revival to this rug.

Revival and Prayer

Now I come to a subject matter that is very close to my heart: prayer. Not that I am an expert on prayer - far from it. But I have always been fascinated by it, drawn to it, often disappointed and tired and exhausted because of it. I don't fully understand how it works. I don't understand why it is so important, I only know that it is very important and that it works in a mysterious and hidden kind of way. When it comes to revival prayer plays a decisive, if not THE crucial part, in bringing it about. As far as we know all revivals in history have been preceded by seasons of intense and persistent prayer - either by individuals or by groups of people, or both.

Just a few examples from history: the first revival of the New Testament era started with a prolonged time of communal prayer of the first followers of Jesus. Before the Holy Spirit was poured out on them in power they spent 10 days waiting in Jerusalem for it, no doubt most of the time they spent together was spent in prayer, waiting on God, seeking his face, preparing themselves to receive the gift he promised. And all throughout the book of the Act of the Apostles prayer plays a crucial part in reaching out to the world in power.

There is a fascinating talk by Dr. J. Edwin Orr (originally from Belfast) entitled, "The Role of Prayer in Spiritual Awakening." He is an expert on American Revivals and in this talk he shows from history how every spiritual awakening in America has started with intense prayer.

Before the Dublin Revival in 1968 that I mentioned earlier in the blog regular prayer meetings across denominational barriers were held every Wednesday for several decades in that city, praying to God for revival.

The revival in Indonesia of the 1960-s and 1970-s - with two German Theologians playing a prominent part in it (Detmar and Volkhard Scheunemann) - started with two month of intense prayer at a bible institute in Batu. The burden for prayer was so strong that many students and teachers prayed through whole nights. They stopped the regular school routine and devoted all their days and many nights to seeking God's face, repenting of lukewarmness and sin, and praying for revival. When God sent it, it strongly resembled the accounts of the Acts of the Apostles in its intensity and spiritual power.

Reuben R. Torey, a preacher who was mightily used by God in spiritual awakenings around the world at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, even went so far as to give a prescription how to start a revival. He writes: First: let a group of Christians get thoroughly right with God. If this isn't done, the rest will come to nothing. Second: Let them bind themselves together to pray for revival until God opens the windows of heaven and comes down. Third: Let them put themselves at the disposal of God for his use as he sees fit in winning others to Christ. That is all. I've given this prescription around the world... and in no instance has it failed. It cannot fail.

The promise of Scripture is very clear: 

if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. (2 Chronicles 7, 14)

Still I am sure revival is the sovereign work of God. It is God who initiates it by his holy Spirit. But he always uses prayer of his children as a means to this end. That's why we have started this year with a week of prayer in our church. That's why we are organizing United Prayer Nights in our church each month. That's why I have often prayed in my individual prayer times to the point of physical and emotional exhaustion. So far this is the weak point here in Greystones. There is no movement in prayer yet. And sometimes the temptation to give up is very strong. And yet, there are signs that God is moving. Yesterday I was at a united  prayer and worship event in Hillside Evangelical Church in Greystones - and it was very encouraging and uplifting. So I want to get up, start praying again, with effort, with faith, with intensity, with conviction.

Anybody reading this wants to join in? The United Prayer Nights in our church are happening every first Sunday night of the month at 7 pm. So the next one is on the 5th of February. Let's come together for praise, prayer and intercession. There is no way around it if we want to see revival come to this land.

What is Revival?

I am aware of the fact that the word "revival" has taken on a variety of meanings in our days. So it is about time to try and come up with a definition of the word as I understand it. I would like to start by stating what I don't mean by it:
* I don't mean a series of meetings that are aiming at renewing the church. Sometimes the word is used in that sense, as in "our church is having a revival from the 1st to the 10th of January". Revival as I understand it cannot be organized by us. It is something that only God can do. It may or may not start with or include organized meetings, but they are not an essential part of what revival is.
* Revival is also often associated with emotional piety and public hysteria, which is not what I mean when I speak of revival.
The best theological definition or description of revival that I could find was written by James Packer in his book "Keep in Step with the Spirit". Here it is in it's original wording:

"Scripture points to a recurring process whereby, following upon coldness, carelessness, and unfaithfulness among God's people, God himself acts in sovereignty to restore what was ready to perish by means of the following set of events:
God Comes Down. (See Isaiah 64,1) He makes known his inescapable presence as the Holy One, mighty and majestic, confronting his own people both to humble and to exalt, and reaching out into the wider world in mercy and judgement. Other biblical words of saying this are that God "awakes", "arises", "visits", and "draws near" (See Psalm 44:23-26; 69:18; 80:14 KJV). God's coming forces folk to realize, like Isaiah in the temple, the intimacy of the supernatural and the closeness, majesty, and knowingness (that is, the heart-searching omniscience) of the living Lord (see Isaiah 6:1-8; Revelation 1:9-18).
God's Word Comes Home. The Bible, its message, and its Christ reestablish the formative and corrective control over faith and life that are theirs by right. The divine authority and power of the Bible are felt afresh, and believers find that this collection of Hebrew and Christian literary remains becomes once more the means whereby God speaks to them, clears and changes their minds, and searches and feeds their souls.
God's Purity Comes Through. As God uses his Word to quicken consciences, the perverseness, ugliness, uncleanness, and guilt of sin are seen and felt with new clarity, and the depth of each person's own sinfulness is realized as never before. Believers are deeply humbled; unbelievers are made to feel that living as they do with sin and without God is intolerable, and the forgiveness of sins becomes the most precious truth in the creed.
God's People Come Alive. Repentance and restitution, faith, hope and love, joy and peace, praise and prayer, conscious communion with Christ, confident certainty of salvation, uninhibited boldness of testimony, readiness to share, and a spontaneous reaching out to all in need become their characteristic marks. There is a new forthrightness of utterance, expressing a new clarity of vision with respect to good and evil; and a new energy for reformation - personal, ecclesiastical, and social - goes along with it.
While all this is happening, outsiders come in, drawn by the moral and spiritual magnetism of what goes on in the church.
(J. I. Packer: "Keep in Step with the Spirit - finding fullness in our walk with God. New extended edition" IVP. Nottingham, 2009, Page 194-195)

This description by Packer summarizes the essentials of what happens in times of revival. Often revivals are accompanied by extraordinary miracles, signs and wonders like in biblical times. But these are not the essence and centre of revival. They are given to show that God is indeed present with his people and to confirm the preaching of the Gospel. Also some hysterical or emotionally extreme reactions among people may occur in revivals as well, but they also are not what it is all about. Revival is the mighty presence of the Holy God among his people. This is what I long for in my life and in the life of the church.