Another definition would be that it means to
recover, or repair, or restore.
In Hosea, chapter 10 and verse 12, it
says, So to yourselves 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.
That's Hosea, chapter 10 and verse 12.
So to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy,
break up your fallow ground.
Now, the question is, what is fallow ground?
Well, fallow ground is ground that has been
fruitful, and then it's been ploughed over, and
no seed has been sown in it, and
therefore it's become unproductive.
Now, notice there's 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.
Psalm 85, verse 6 says, So therefore,
there's an absence of joy, there's an absence
of ecstasy.
Again, the very word revive presupposes life.
There has been life which has become, oh,
what could you say?
Thick, or weak, or apathetic.
You can only revive what has already had
vitality.
It means to revitalize.
I think the nearest analogy I can give
you is somebody who's, well, been drowning, and
they're on the edge of death, and somebody
comes along and resuscitates them.
Now, you don't do that with a corpse.
You've never seen anybody resuscitate a corpse.
You don't go when somebody's been dead a
day or two and try and revive it,
you say it's dead.
But if there's still life there, you can
resuscitate life.
It's amazing how many cases there have been
of people who have sometimes been declared to
be clinically dead, and yet somebody has worked
on them.
Recently, there was a case of somebody who
apparently was drowned, had been under the water
for, you know, an incredible amount of time,
and somebody pulled him out and worked on
him and worked on him.
People said, give up, he's dead, he's dead.
And eventually, life came again.
Well, this is actually what it means to
revive, means to revitalize.
It means to restore lost power.
It means to recover energy.
In the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 3,
I think the verse is 19, Acts 3,
19, repent ye therefore and be converted that
your sins may be blotted out when times
of refreshing shall come from the presence of
the Lord.
Now, whatever else we say about revival, we
have to recognize this, that revival is an
act of mercy in the sovereignty of God.
Again, if you want to put it in
another context, Paul made plants and abolished water,
but God gave us the increase.
Now, there's a vast difference between revival and
evangelism.
When we speak of revival in America so
often, we think of a, well, in fact,
you see a church advertising, our revival will
begin next Sunday night at a certain time
and it's going to finish the next Sunday
night at a certain time, which obviously is
something which is purely mechanical.
It's something which men have engineered.
I think one of the offenses, there's more
than one offense of revival.
I am not thinking, when I talk about
revival, I'm thinking of revival in the historic
sense.
As Dr. Tozer said, when revival comes, it
changes the moral climate of a community.
You can have revival which, shall we say,
this is the spire of a church, all
right, this is the church.
You can have a revival which covers a
church like that.
Spurgeon had that.
You can have revival which will cover maybe
a city like this and you can have
a revival which covers a whole nation.
And I'm thinking in this context more than
in the other context, though sometimes one spreads
from there to there to there, you know,
like fire spreads.
One offense, again, I say of revival is
this, that one thing, it cannot be organized.
Revival in the historic sense I'm talking of,
it cannot be organized.
Evangelism can be organized.
Revival cannot be organized.
Now, look, again, if you make an abbreviation
like that, if you put R-E-V
for revival, like that, and then over here
you just put a E, Eva, and remember
it's not a girl, it's evangelism.
You can put all your notes under here
on revival and all under here on evangelism.
All right.
Revival cannot be organized.
Evangelism can.
Revival cannot be subsidized.
Evangelism can, and it must be, usually.
It may cost millions of dollars, as it
often does, at least one or two millions,
to have one of our huge, modern, what
are sometimes called revivals, for the simple reason
you have to engage the media.
You have to pay vast sums of money
for time on TV, say.
You know, somebody says, I'm going to have
three meetings this week on national TV, a
million dollars a night.
That's incredible.
That's unthinkable to me in the context of
biblical revival or even historic revival, either in
America or again there in Europe.
So revival cannot be organized, revival cannot be
subsidized, revival cannot be advertised.
Evangelism can.
Why doesn't revival need to be advertised?
For the simple reason that, again, to use
the definition of Mr. Chadwick's, there is nothing,
there is nothing anywhere more attractive than a
fire.
You wait till the coal knights come and
see.
You put a fire in the room, it
somehow seems to change the whole of the
room.
Fire is the most self-advertising thing that
there is.
Whether it is a physical fire or whether
it is a revival fire, it is self
-advertising.
It is magnetic.
To bring this down to modern technology, revival
cannot be computerized.
There's information you can put in computer and
hey, presto, you get the answer like that.
But you cannot computerize it.
Evangelism, it cannot be computerized.
It cannot be regularized.
There are high spots and low spots, even
in revival.
There are periods in which one thing is,
alright, the revival is totally taken over sometimes,
shall we say, by sorrow.
There are times when a revival is taken
over totally by joy, ecstasy, till you don't
know whether you're in the flesh or you've
gone out of earth or not.
There are times when revival is taken over
by stillness.
There are two kinds of stillness.
One is killing.
The other is creative.
You go to a prayer meeting sometimes and
suddenly the praying stops and it's like an
icy bath.
There are times when you go to a
prayer meeting and the power of God is
there and there's a stillness and you feel
it's creative.
Now somebody's building up round here.
Somebody's going to come out shortly with a
heart bursting, with, you know, some agonizing prayer
or something so there's a killing, a stillness
or a silence which is killing and there's
a silence which is creative.
We'll come to some of these things of
course later.
It cannot be rationalized.
One of the offensive things about revival again
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 say to a community and
hey presto, before long, that community's alive.
It's throbbing.
He goes to another town with exactly the
same group of men, shall we say.
The same type of prayer is poured out.
The same sweat, if you like, soul travel
and there's no response.
And if you're not careful, you get introspective
and say, why, now what have I done?
And the old accuser comes, but wait a
minute, remember, there were some places where Jesus
went and he did nothing because of what?
Their unbelief.
And when these boys talk about faith can
do anything, faith can't do anything, are you
going to charge God, Jesus with having no
faith?
As a matter of fact, he went to
Nazareth which was where he was raised and
they turned him down.
A prophet is not without honor saving his
own country.
Again, it cannot be denominationalized.
I don't think the world has ever been
in a more, in a greater state of
turmoil than it is at this given moment.
I don't think our nation has.
Now, whatever we shall say about revival, we've
got to recognize, as I've said previously, there
are three things about natural birth, conception, gestation
and birth.
You can't alter the program.
There never has been revival that I can
trace that has not been preceded by agonizing
prayer.
Well, you might ask, I haven't got to
that stage yet of agonizing prayer.
How does it come?
Well, it comes through vision.
Well, then you may ask, how does vision
come?
It comes from various sources.
About 15 years ago, my dear wife and
I and the boys worked with Teen Challenge
in New York.
Not a very desirable place, working in Brooklyn.
It's a very hot spot, very wild spot.
And I remember one night talking with David,
and he said, you know, I'm beginning to
feel a bit of coldness.
I've got to get out and walk the
streets.
I need to get down, you know, 111th
Street or West 44th or West 42nd Street
and see human degradation.
See, it's one thing to sit and read
about it, though that can be helpful.
There's nothing more disturbing, I think, than reading
some of the modern missionary magazines, something like
World Vision or Brother Andrew's book, what's his
paper called, Open Doors or something, and getting
first-hand information of not only the condition,
the tremendous challenge that there is, but also
of how people have been able to penetrate
into these areas already that are cells operating
in what are called closed countries.
Well, you know, it's like somebody said, you
know, I've discovered this, the devil can wall
me in, but he can't roof me in.
That's a good thing to keep in mind.
And folk are very stupid when they think
they're going to keep the Holy Ghost out
of any country, whether it's Russia or China
or anywhere else.
Again, I said that you can't, you can't
predict, you can't organize revival where?
Because you can't organize where the wind is
coming from.
Now, yesterday there was a forecast, it's going
to be a cold day and it will
get down to 25 today.
It was 71 degrees yesterday.
Somebody missed it by a long spot.
Well now, by the same token, the wind,
the spirit, just as you can't say the
wind will be this, it may be, it
may not be.
There's nothing more sad, I think, than a
bigger job than being a weather forecaster unless
it's being a preacher, because they're always making
predictions that don't come off.
Well then, the wind blows where it lives.
If you say it's going to come this
way, it comes this way.
If you say God's going to use that
man, very often he doesn't even bother with
that man.
Revivalists so often come through unknown characters.
It's impossible to think in that gap between
the Testaments, which happened to be 400 years,
which again, could be again classified as fallow
ground.
They had known the glory of God.
Have you ever wondered, you know, when you
got into a cold spot, have you ever
wondered when you got there, how did I
get here?
And then when you wondered how, you wondered
why.
I mean, you know, God delivered you there,
God delivered you somewhere else, God did a
miracle in your life, and now you're sitting
under a tree, you know, like poor old
Elijah.
Elijah says, oh, you know, I wish you
could die, get out of this, and the
Lord says, all right, I accept your resignation.
I've got Elisha in the wings.
I don't think he expected that, so you'd
better not serve your notice to the Lord.
He may take you up on that.
But when you think that this, let me
go a bit further back.
You see, if we're going to really get
a concept of revival, we've got to get
a concept of God's sorrow over sin.
We've got to get a concept of how
day by day we offend God.
As a nation, we offend God in millions
of ways.
I used an illustration before, I think, of
when I was praying in the Bahamas, and
one day I saw a great column of
smoke.
Shall we say it's like this?
Of course, it will be all wriggly, wriggly,
wriggly like this.
But here it was, it was going up,
and it was as black as black could
be.
And over here, I saw a wisp of
smoke like this going from the ground.
I didn't think much of it until about
a year after I was praying, and the
Lord said that that volume of thick smoke
which happened to be coming from tires that
were being burned, and you know how horrible
they are, they smell, and they look terrible.
And that black smoke going up there was
a volume of sin that goes up every
day, well, from England, but America, since we're
in America.
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 thin wisp
of what?
What is that?
That's the praise that God gets out of
his people.
Now, if we're going to realize how much
we need revival, we've got to recognize again
the awesomeness of sin.
We've got to recognize that sin offends God.
Again, going back to, is it Psalm 85?
Yeah, in Psalm 85 verse 4, Turn us,
O God, of our salvation and cause thine
anger toward us to cease.
Wilt thou be angry with us forever?
The 80th Psalm, Psalm 80 verse 3, Turn
us again O God, cause thy face to
shine.
Well, therefore, God's face had turned away.
Notice it's repeated again in verse 7, O
God of hosts, cause thy face to shine.
Notice it's reiterated again in verse 19, O
Lord of God of hosts, cause thy face
to shine.
You know, I think one of the awesome
tragedies of our day is this, that the
people of Israel could not live if God
turned his face away from them.
It seems now we can't live if God
turns his face on us.
The awesomeness of God's presence, the awesomeness of
God's majesty.
We had meetings in the last month particularly,
where I would sit down at the end
of a meeting, I didn't know what to
do with it.
And the pastors close said, well, I can't
handle a meeting like this, what do you
do?
The invasion of God's power was so awesome
that there was no way you could handle
it.
So you just let the meeting ride itself
out.
So we were having meetings five hours long.
Beginning at seven at night and finishing at
midnight.
With college students, university people, business people.
But you see, when God comes your social
distinctions don't matter, your intellectual distinctions don't matter.
There's an overwhelming sense that God is dealing
not with my intellect, not with my body,
not with my emotions so much as the
inner man, the inner being, the inner temple.
Which he wants to indwell.
I said to the editor of one of
the most famous magazines in this country, three
or four years ago, why doesn't your big
chief or some other big chief call together
500 pastors say, in the Los Angeles area,
Los Angeles and San Diego and Frisco.
Bring in 500 pastors for prayer.
Bring in 500 in St. Paul, 500 in
Chicago, 500 in Philadelphia, 500 in New York,
500 in St. Louis, 500 in Atlanta, 500
in Dallas, 500 in somewhere in Florida, 500
in Houston.
Bring them all together at quarter of five
on Monday.
And tell them that we're not dismissing till
a quarter of five on Friday.
And tell them the only comfort they have
is to bring a sleeping bag and get
a local motel.
And there's going to be no meals except
a cup of coffee and donuts.
And there's going to be 24 hour day
service, 24 hour a day waiting on God.
For the simple reason the nation is in
the sad station.
Isn't it amazing that with all this insane
man, as they say, Ayatollah Khomeini has done,
he's done some good things.
He kicked liquor out of the country.
We didn't, our president didn't do that.
Born again and not born again.
He doesn't kick it out.
He told the women, get some skirts on
and don't get these modern style dresses showing
half your body and get back to the
office.
And then another thing he did last week,
he called the whole nation to five days
of prayer and fasting.
And we consider he's a heathen.
Do you think there's anybody in Washington that
has enough insight to do that?
With all the talk of spirituality there's not
enough sense to do that.
I say that the pastors should go because
if you look there in the prophecy of
Joel, where is it, in about the, about
the third chapter of Joel, isn't it?
Or Joel chapter two?
Where it speaks about the priests, the ministers
of God.
Look at Joel chapter one and verse thirteen.
Gird yourselves and lament ye priests.
How ye ministers of the altar come lie
all night in sackcloth ye ministers of my
God.
Now every bit of literature I get from
around the world on revival always has the
same old thing on it.
2 Chronicles 7, 14.
If my people who are called by my
name will humble themselves and pray and seek
my face either God will hear from heaven.
Well that's a valid scripture.
I don't think it's a scripture for today.
This scripture very definitely has a time tag
on it.
Because it speaks in the great and terrible
day of the Lord.
If you read through the chapters.
But notice there in verse thirteen.
Gird yourselves and lament ye priests how ye
ministers of the Lord.
Come lie all night in sackcloth ye ministers
of my God.
Now go over to verse eleven of the
second chapter.
And the Lord shall utterly utter his voice
before his army for his camp is very
great he is strong and executes his word
for the day of the Lord is great
and very terrible and who can abide it.
Therefore also now saith the Lord turn ye
even to me with all your heart and
with fasting and with weeping and with mourning.
Verse thirteen and rend your heart and not
your garments and turn unto the Lord your
God for he is gracious merciful slow to
anger of great kindness and repenteth of evil.
Now come down to verse seventeen let the
priests the ministers of the Lord weep between
the porch and the altar and let them
say spare thy people O Lord and give
not thine heritage to reproach that the heathens
should rejoice over them or rule over them
therefore wherefore should they say among the people
where is your God.
Now how do you get to that state
I mean if you're not in that state
this morning you won't get in that state
at the end of this lecture for sure.
I mean there's no way you can jump
from this level to that level in ten
minutes.
It's an operation it's a process it's a
preparation there has to be individually breaking up
a fallow ground in me.
What is there in my individual life that
obstructs the flow of the spirit have I
for instance got some secret grudges.
You see when we talk about revival the
average people want revival.
Why?
To fill up empty pews that's not what
God wants.
He's not concerned about filling empty churches he's
concerned about filling empty hearts and empty lives
and empty eyes that have no vision and
empty hearts that have no passion and empty
wills that have no purpose.
But there's no way of getting there unless
there comes previously brokenness.
If you're going to break up fallow ground
well there you've got it.
It doesn't say brokenness it's implied obviously.
You break up that fallow ground.
You've got to get your own life into
a state of discipline and we're the most
undisciplined generation of believers ever.
You see the danger even in a lovely
school like this or any other school is
you go along with the herd we're all
going to watch a ball game and the
Lord says listen you haven't had enough prayer
to go watch a ball game.
And how long is a ball game to
be and how long have you meditated?
Now I say vision which in turn turns
into burden comes how?
Well you go down into some hell hole
that there is where there's prostitution and vice
and drugs and liquor and obscenity and everything
else be sure you're in a good state
of health to do it.
And then from that vision begins to come
or again you read magazines and from those
magazines you realize the awesomeness that two thousand
years after Jesus Christ came into the world
that there are more lost people at this
moment than ever in history.
More lost people at this moment than ever
in history.
Now while we're totally dependent upon the sovereignty
of God and the mercy of God we
At the same time there is a responsibility
given to us as a people of God.
Let me step back a minute.
Have you ever sat down in your meditation?
Have you ever thought of the grief of
God after Adam wrecked the purpose of God
in the Garden of Eden?
Have you ever meditated over that?
And then when you meditated over that have
you thought about the enormity oh I can
use, I can use, oh sorry, I can
use this here.
ASA is the Jewish Association and the Jewish
system, the Old Testament Jewish system, a great
monolith of what is it, priests and Levites
and offerings and sacrifices and new moons and
Sabbaths and Urim and coming.
And God lets that go on and then
there's a period here of 400 years between
the Testaments.
B.T. Between the Testaments.
And then suddenly God puts one solitary individual
there.
One solitary individual.
And he has one commission.
You go and prepare the way of the
Lord.
Now he's got all this against him.
A whole stack, at least 2,000 priests.
And a senior priest.
An elaborate temple.
A system of buying and selling cattle and
other things for sacrifice.
An altar court where you could come to
a priest and tell him of your sin
and your guilt and I need to make
an offering for you.
And this little fellow comes on here and
he's saying that that thing's all obsolete.
That God is going to manifest himself independent
of all that and there's somebody else.
And when they say well you must be
the man he says oh no no no
no I'm not the one.
I'm just coming to prepare the way of
the Lord.
Now think of the sorrow of God after
Adam failed.
Think of the sorrow of God after the
whole system that he'd inaugurated failed.
And then think of something that may be
even more awesome still.
Think of the fact that two thousand years
have lapsed since Jesus came and did a
full work of redemption and the church is
still dragging its feet today.