This is Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton,
Illinois.
This week's sermon is by Bishop Stuart Ruck.
Nearly thirty years ago I set out on
what would end up becoming a life-defining
adventure.
I made a decision to solo backpack through
Europe and the United Kingdom and through Ireland.
I had a lot of adventures, I've told
some of those stories over the years in
my teaching and preaching, but there was one
experience that God used most powerfully out of
everything that I experienced.
I was hitchhiking in Ireland, I'd had a
bad day hitchhiking because somehow I kept ending
up about a quarter mile down the road
farther from two young female Australians who were
also hitchhiking and they would get the ride
and the car would go blowing past me.
So I did a lot of walking that
day and very little actually sitting in a
car doing anything.
At the end of the day I had
a seven mile walk to get to my
youth hostel.
It was Ireland, it was grey that day,
it was raining, it was cold, I was
hungry.
I was coming around the corner just a
quarter of a mile from where I'd finally
get some dinner and I saw what I'd
seen throughout my entire journey in Ireland, an
abandoned stone church.
That in itself was not unusual if you've
had the privilege of traveling in a beautiful
place like Ireland, but something happened to me
and there was a drawing I at the
time would have described it as an intuition.
Now if you heard my teaching last week,
I would describe it as a kind of
prophetic experience.
There was a drawing toward that empty church.
I walked up to it, I looked in
the now open windows that once held glass.
I imagined people worshipping the living God there
and I felt this compelling push toward this
church.
Now I was not a follower of Jesus
at that point, I had known the Lord,
I had walked away from Him and I
was in a season of very deliberate rebellion.
I was in a place of great arrogance,
I was religion tired.
I still wanted Jesus, but I wanted a
consequential Christ.
I wanted a Jesus that was so full
and so real and so embodied that He
would change my life, that He would even
confront the life that I was living, that
I didn't want more vague impressions about Jesus
or worked out in sort of habits of
religion.
I wanted a consequential fullness of Jesus.
I wanted something like that was stone built.
I wanted something that powerful and that unmistakable.
I didn't know then that what I was
being drawn to was not just Jesus, that
is what was happening there.
And I believe His Holy Spirit drew me
to that church as a kind of early
icon, like a picture of what God wanted
to do in my life, but I wanted
Jesus and His church.
I didn't even know that you needed to
combine those two.
I had known a personal relationship with Jesus,
I had grown up in different churches, both
had been fine, but neither of them, due
to my own decisions and sinfulness, had been
consequential.
And God set me in that moment on
a lifelong seeking, a lifelong hunger for Jesus
and His church.
And that little stone built church had become
a picture for me of a deep hunger
to see the church fully revived, to see
the church in a place of revival, a
place where the power of God is overcoming
the power of death and of sin.
And I would like to bring you along
through the Scriptures into that reality today.
And I would like, at least in some
capacity, for some of you to revive the
word revival.
If you have impressions, and this could be
positive or negative, I haven't had positive ones
of them, but you may have impressions of
a tent meeting.
You may have impressions of that which is
set up and taken down again.
You may have impressions of emotionalism.
You may have impressions of an anti-intellectualism.
You may have impressions of being manipulated in
revival or of seeking out for something that's
an experience rather than the foundational, historical, supernatural
reality of Jesus risen from the dead.
I don't know what it might be, but
as we look at the Scriptures and we
look at the history of the people of
God and the Word of God and of
the history of the church, we will find
the word revival revived.
Robert Coleman, evangelical scholar and a student of
revival, describes revival this way.
Revival is the return of something to its
true nature or purpose.
What is the true nature or purpose of
the church?
To be the body of Jesus, the resurrected
body of Jesus.
Revival, as I will define it this morning,
is simply this, the application by the Holy
Spirit of the resurrection of Jesus in our
time.
Revival is the application of the resurrection in
our time.
I've known this revival personally.
It would be a year after that interesting
encounter with that stone church in Ireland where
I would have what I would call a
catalytic revival experience in my own life.
It was catalytic.
Catalytic is to spark something, to start something.
It had the dynamism to it.
I had this dynamic encounter with the risen
Jesus Christ, the story I've told in different
places in these sermons.
It was catalytic.
I came into a belief and an understanding
and an experience all at the same time
that the power of God's resurrection was greater
than the power of my own death and
my own sin.
But I can tell you thirty years later,
after that catalytic revival, I have lived in
a kind of continuous revival in the church,
actually in this church.
So you may think, oh, catalytic revivals are
good, but they come and go.
Not when they're lived in their life in
the church.
You may think, oh, this liturgy, don't you
ever get tired of it?
I can tell you, I'm thirty years in,
I'm not tired of it.
Well, the same pattern is all the time,
you ever get tired of it?
No, no, no.
I don't get tired of it.
It's a continuous living in Jesus' resurrection.
So I want to talk about how we
plant a continuous revival, I'll define that, how
we plant a continuous revival based on the
resurrection of Jesus, hence the resurrection passage being
read this morning.
And isn't it kind of a joy to
have it read on a Sunday other than
Easter Sunday?
Every Sunday, the church has understood, every Sunday
is Resurrection Sunday.
Every Sunday we come into the resurrection of
Jesus.
You want to come to a revival meeting,
welcome, you're here.
You're at a revival meeting.
You want to come to a revival week,
it's called Holy Week.
It's all part of continuous revival.
So we plant, I'll explain that, you're going,
what is that?
I'll plant continuous revival, we'll talk about that.
Second, we pray for catalytic revival, and we'll
look at Habakkuk's beautiful prayer in the third
chapter of this prophet of the people of
God, where he prays for a catalytic revival,
Habakkuk 3.
Look with me at Luke 24, that's page
884 if you have a resurrection Bible, and
here we have Luke's account of the resurrection
of Jesus.
We see that women have gone to prepare
Jesus' bodies, there are women followers of Jesus,
women disciples of Jesus, pupils and students and
leaders that had known Jesus, they go to
prepare His body.
They're perplexed, there's two men who appear to
them, they're dazzling, it says.
They're frightened, they bow their faces to the
ground, and these angels, these men say to
them, verse 5, why do you seek the
living among the dead?
He is not here, but has risen.
Remember, it's an important word for revival understanding
biblically, remember how He told you while He
was still in Galilee that the Son of
Man, that's referring to Jesus, you may not
be familiar with that title, that Jesus must
be delivered into the hands of sinful men
and crucified, and on the third day rise.
And they remembered His words.
Then we see later in the text, verse
12, but Peter rose.
That's describing what he did, he got up
and he ran to the tomb.
But we, the readers, the believers in the
resurrection of Jesus understand that in Jesus' rising,
He has risen.
So He is now, by the power of
the Holy Spirit, applied the resurrection to our
lives.
As Jesus rose, so we, like Peter, a
sinful human being, rise.
Revival is the application of the resurrection by
the power of the Holy Spirit.
Revival is when the power of God overcomes
the power of death and sin.
And revival is rooted in Jesus and in
His resurrected body.
If it is rooted in some experiential thinking,
or it's rooted in some emotionalism, we should
have concerns, and maybe even some fear around
it.
But if it's rooted in Jesus, His resurrected
body, which is the church, then we can
understand how revival is first and foremost personal.
And I taught on this.
I didn't use the language personal revival because
I hadn't worked on that word with you
yet, but I taught on this in the
first sermon in this Holy Spirit series, The
Holy Spirit and Power, out of Romans, chapter
8, and there you can hear my teaching
on personal revival, which is when we live
not by the sin nature, but we live
by the Holy Spirit.
There's a continuous power that we see released,
unleashed, ministered in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It's so powerful and profound that one of
the ways to understand it is that it's
a returning of the church to its true
nature, which is to be a resurrection movement,
a resurrection body, to be filled with resurrection
power.
Just the fact that many of our church
experiences haven't in some way reflected that does
not mean that that's not the true nature
of the church.
You can't understand church first and foremost by
what you've experienced in church.
You must understand it first and foremost by
what you read in the Bible, as Jesus
calling the church His body.
So how do we engage this resurrection power?
I talked to you several weeks ago.
We live into the reality.
I taught you to pray out of Romans
8, the resurrected one lives in me, and
it's only one way that we engage is
through an understanding of our identity and the
power of Jesus and His resurrection.
But I also want to say there is
an action that we can engage, and the
best way for me to describe that action
would be the way Apostle Paul describes Christian
acting, Christian action.
He describes it as planting.
And one of the ways to go about
our lives in the church, to go about
our Christian lives, is actually one of the
Apostle Paul's main words to help you understand,
how do you live as a Christian?
How do you act as a Christian?
Because we get confused.
We understand from the Scriptures absolutely that we're
saved by grace alone, by faith alone, in
Jesus alone.
And we think, oh, OK, He's done it
all.
He has done it all.
And yet, then we read things in the
Bible about living out our faith, making decisions
for our faith, and we get confused.
I think planting is the way to understand
this.
Let me explain this.
I love planting.
I love vegetable gardening, and I had my
best summer ever this summer.
I won't go into details.
I'll tip into hubris and pride.
I won't describe the rich red of my
rhubarb.
I won't go into that.
It's crunchy kale, sweet, so well developed.
I'm not going to do that.
But here's what I'm going to say, is
that planting and gardening is such an imbalanced
work.
It is work.
You prepare your soil.
You've got to weed.
It's work.
You work when you plant.
But if you've ever put a seed in
the ground, like, let's say, just for theory,
a zucchini seed.
They're very, very small.
OK, you put it in the ground.
I put it there right around Mother's Day.
I put it in the ground, and I
cover it, and even though I've been doing
this for years, I never leave enough room
between zucchini plants, because I think, it's not
going to get that big.
I mean, it's that tiny.
It's teeny tiny.
I've got to find it in the seed
envelope.
It's not going to get that big.
So I put it in there.
It gets massive.
Some kind of soil explosion occurs in there.
So I do my work, but the miracle,
the wonder is inside the seed, which has
nothing to do with me.
I'm not responsible for zucchini the size of
my thigh.
We plant.
How else do we say it?
How about this?
God does everything.
We do something.
I use that phrase when I'm taught on
baptism.
God does everything.
We do something.
We plant our lives.
Jesus will say, you know what your life
is like?
Your life is like a seed.
Your life is like a seed that is
planted into the ground and dies.
It goes into the dark, but there it
bursts forth in fruitfulness, that when we plant
revival, what it is is to say, we
give our lives to Jesus' resurrection.
We believe in His resurrection.
We live under the power of His resurrection.
We live under the authority of the scriptures
that have testified to the resurrection.
That's what it means to plant our lives.
We bury ourselves.
We die, Jesus says, that we may live
in His power.
Or you could be about the work of
revival.
You plant continuous revival, which is to say
you live your life in the church.
The church is the seat of revival.
This is where the ministry of the resurrection
primarily happens.
So in some ways revival is something we're
waiting for.
I'll talk about that.
But in others, I want to be really
clear, it's within your reach because of the
gospel of God in Jesus.
And maybe you just didn't know that's what
church was.
Maybe you never thought about it that way.
I'm not exaggerating when I say Holy Week
is revival week.
It's where the ministry of God is done
from Palm Sunday all the way through to
Easter Day when the miracle of God is
done is miniatured to us now.
That all that happened in history and all
that's an absolute fact is brought to bear
now by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Oh, we are at the Last Supper by
the power of the Holy Spirit.
We are at the cross by the power
of the Holy Spirit.
Oh, we are raised again by Jesus and
His resurrection on Easter Day.
It's why over a thousand of you pack
out this place and run around in absolute
jubilation and joy.
I hope none of you are ever embarrassed
after you've done that.
You're just not aligned with the reality of
the resurrection when you do that.
It is the way the Psalms say, you're
just shouting to God because you came to
believe that the resurrection is a continuous revival
in and through the church.
Norman Grubb, English Christian student at Cambridge University,
where there was a movement revival among him
and his friends.
He and many others had hearts broken for
the work of God and the nations.
He ended up going to East Africa.
He experienced the most sustained revival that I'm
aware of in the history of the church
from the 1920s to the 1970s.
Someone argues still has significant impact on Eastern
Africa, starting in Rwanda, having influence in Uganda,
Kenya, then Tanganyika, now Tanzania, Congo, Burundi.
This revival spread, and it was sustained because
it started in the Anglican church, but it
spread throughout all churches that were open to
the work of the gospel.
It lasted for years and years and years.
It changed a generation, and what Norman Grubb
saw there is that there are times of
catalytic revival, and it started in a very
catalytic way, but he also saw a continuous
revival there in East Africa.
Norman Grubb says this, quote, I had a
misconception of years that revival could only come
in great soul-shaking outpourings of the Holy
Spirit.
He'd seen those miracles, wonders, signs.
I saw defeatism and almost hopelessness that so
many of us had fallen into by thinking
that we could do nothing but pray, and
we do pray, but we could do nothing
but pray, but now I see revival in
the truest sense in an everyday affair right
down within our reach when it does break
forth in greater and more public ways.
Thank God.
The East African revival began in the 20s
through an English leader, Dr. Joe Church, and
a newly converted Kenyan, non-ordained, they began
to preach the power of repentance, preach the
power of conversion.
There was a deep, sustaining work that happened
there.
Grubb was so blown away by the way
he wrote in 1951, oh, that the Africans
would one day come as missionaries to the
United States.
Oh, that one day, he said, it's impossible
to imagine the teams of revival Africans would
come to the United States.
Well, if you know anything about our history,
our current movement was sparked in 2000 by
a Rwandan archbishop and by a Singaporean bishop
who sparked the work that we are in
right now in this work of gospel Anglicanism.
Grubb's prayer in 1951 was answered at least
in part in 2000 and will be answered
again when we have Africans, Brazilians, and others
here in a month, bringing the ministry that
they are singing of revival to this place,
to resurrection, to our diocese.
This is why Tim Keller, one of the
great minds and hearts and missionaries of the
mid to late 20th and 21st century, says
this, Tim Keller says, Revivalism is the work
of the church.
It's why the diocese, our mission that we've
embraced, is to plant a revival of word
and sacrament infused by the Holy Spirit.
And yet, and yet, as beautiful as continuous
revival is, and as much as I believe
it in the life of the church, there's
still more.
Oh, there's an ultimate more that I know
without question will come when our Lord returns
and establishes the new heavens and the new
earth.
There's an ultimate more.
The Bible says every tear is going to
be wiped away.
Every evil is going to be righted.
Every injustice is going to be justly brought.
We're waiting for that.
Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.
But as we wait for that, there are
moments of catalytic revival when that more that
we still long for in this moment amidst
continuous revival are asking God for.
I was talking to one of our priests,
Father Aaron Damiani, who planted a church for
resurrection five years ago, and he said, I
want revival, Stuart.
I just want to see barriers come down.
And when he said that, I knew exactly
what he meant.
That we feel these barriers that are up,
barriers between us, the church, and the culture.
Barriers between us who know the Lord and
those who haven't yet converted.
Barriers where we're just not seeing yet enough
conversions.
A kind of holy discontent that gives you
a hunger to cry out for revival.
To cry out for God to do a
new work in our day that has even
greater power.
The barrier between African-American church and white
church.
We become so used to it, so familiar
with it, we think it's just how things
are.
But we need revival to come and tear
down that barrier in the name of Jesus.
The barrier between Jew and Gentile, one of
the oldest barriers that's ever been established among
the people of God.
The barrier between male and female.
Do you know that we're to live in
union with one another, in unity with one
another, reflecting the image of God, male and
female, is to be a beautiful thing.
But there's a sword between the sexes.
It's a scandal to the church, it's a
scandal to the world, it's a scandal to
our own hearts.
Don't you want to see that barrier torn
down in the name of Jesus?
When this begins to stir in you and
you realize the least, the poor, like we
don't even see them, we don't even listen
to them.
We don't hear the voice of the refugee
or the immigrant.
We don't hear the voice of the unborn,
what has happened to us?
Why are we so numb?
God, revive us.
Tear the barrier down between us and the
least.
Humble us.
Oh, Father, humble us.
So yes, we plant continuous revival.
We do the work of the church and
of giving up our lives, but we pray
for catalytic revival.
Habakkuk is praying for that in Habakkuk chapter
three.
He's coming out of a long tradition of
the prophets who pray out of a covenant
confidence.
Covenant means promise.
Out of a covenant confidence that God will
be true to His covenants, God will be
true to His promise.
God said, I will be your God and
you will be my people.
And again and again and again, we forsake
and betray God by not being His people,
but He has never not been our God.
And Habakkuk and the prophets of the Hebrew
scriptures and the people throughout the life of
the church have said, yes, it's true, we've
not been your people, but oh God, we
repent.
Oh God, we confess.
And now, God, remember your covenants.
We remember your covenant now, oh God.
We remember your resurrection.
We remember these things now, God, please come
in power yet again.
The Hebrew scriptures have this pattern of revival.
You'll see the people of God, they decline,
there's decline in the culture among the people
of God.
Then they imitate the other gods of the
other cultures.
Then a voice comes to say, repent, return
to the Lord.
And in the seasons as they repent, we
see a revival of the living God in
His presence and power.
Judges 6, the Gideon revival.
Second Chronicles 7, the Solomon revival.
Second Kings 22, the Josiah revival, a revival,
I would add, of word and sacrament, as
our canon often points out.
Nehemiah 9, the Ezra revival.
The first chapters of the Gospels, the John
the Baptist revival.
1730s, a revival so profound, it spread out
into the farthest reaches of culture and society.
A revival so powerful, it only happened within
the church, but it's called an awakening because
it moved out from the church here in
America, there in Britain.
George Whitefield in Anglican, John Wesley, part of
our heritage, brothers and sisters.
Jonathan Edwards.
1859, Wales and Northern Ireland knew a great
revival.
1904, Wales again.
1949, on teeny tiny islands, full of folks
that people didn't even know existed in the
Hebrides Islands in Scotland.
A revival happened among Scottish Presbyterians.
Now you may be new to Christianity, but
when I say that, that's funny.
They're just not known for this.
Why?
But why did they do it?
Because they knew the covenant.
They knew God.
They knew the Bibles.
They said, remember your covenant.
They would sit there and they would cry
out in these tiny prayer meetings on these
forgotten islands of the Hebrides.
Remember your covenant, Lord.
You're our God.
We will be your people.
And God came in power.
Oh, God came in so much power through
those islands.
The stories and the accounts that are written.
1949, you have all kinds of accounts of
what God did, deeply biblical, deeply full.
Isn't it amazing?
You can't get denominations and traditions in Christianity
to agree about much, but you get Reformed
folks, Methodist folks, Lutheran folks, Catholic folks, Anglican
folks, and all of us have a history
of revival.
Why?
Because Jesus is our history.
Because the resurrection of Jesus overcomes the power
of sin and death.
That's why.
That's why you may hunger for it yourself,
not even know why you hunger for it.
1920s to the 1970s, the East African revival.
And similarly in West Africa, based in Nigeria,
which is a huge place of importance for
me personally, revival is still spreading.
I will preach at four revival meetings, so
-called by the Anglican leaders in November with
Father Matt, Tim Keller again.
Revival is not a historical curiosity.
It is a consistent pattern of how the
Holy Spirit works in a community to arrest
and counteract the default mode of the human
heart.
And when catalytic revival comes, it appears spontaneous
to us, but to God is part of
His sovereign plan.
There is a sovereign power of God mystery
to catalytic revival.
We don't know necessarily why it comes when
it comes.
We don't know how He chooses.
Isn't that powerful and beautiful and right?
We will never control catalytic revival.
God will not be controlled by us.
But Habakkuk prays for it.
Oh, Lord, I have heard the report of
you.
I know the history of the people of
God and your work.
Oh, Lord, do I fear in the midst
of the years?
And it's implied in the midst of our
years.
Revive your work.
So there's a proper position of crying out
to God to revive His work.
We do so with covenant confidence, but we
do so with a cry of the person.
The barriers must come down.
We say, Father, this is glorious.
We are so thankful for all that you've
given us, but Lord, we dare ask for
more for the sake of the lost and
the least and the barriers that exist.
We dare ask for more.
We ask for more, knowing that we may
be the generation that prayed for a catalytic
revival that will come after we've gone to
be with the Lord.
Or we may be the generation that experiences
that catalytic revival.
We do so all with joy, all trusting
in the Lord.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, great preacher of the mid
-20th century, Reformed preacher, had a passion and
power for revival.
He would say he never saw it, as
he'd hoped to see it in his Welsh
homeland.
And as he knew the stories of revival,
he said this, To not care and to
not seek revival can quench the spirit.
Why?
Because to not care and to not seek
the power of the resurrection over the power
of death and sin can quench the spirit.
Revival is when the resurrection of Jesus is
applied by the Holy Spirit to our lives,
our churches, our society, our culture.
Let's plant with discipline and joy a continuous
revival.
Let's pray.
Let's pray for catalytic revival.
In the name of the Father and the
Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Thanks for listening.
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