The third chapter, Habakkuk chapter 3.
I mentioned earlier that this is the most
famous verse in the entire Bible on revival.
The Hebrew Scriptures contain a good number of
accounts of revivals where God stirred the people
out of immorality, where he stirred them out
of idolatry, where he stirred them out of
dead religion, where their hearts turned back to
seek him, and when they destroyed idols out
of the land.
There's an element of revival which is always
prophetic.
What do I mean?
It's always idol smashing.
It's always iconoclastic.
You say, what's iconoclastic?
Iconoclastic means you destroy all the images, okay?
It's not that you say, well, this temple
to Baal is very nice, really, and that
image to Asherah is so pretty, if we
could just kind of paint over it or
change it, we could use it.
No, the prophetic mentality is destroy it, smash
it, pulverize it, beat it into fine dust
so that it can never be used again.
So in the Old Testament revivals, there was
a prophetic idol smashing, cult destroying mentality.
There's not that much that you read about
in the New Covenant Scriptures about revival simply
because, as you read the book of Acts,
they were in a pattern of revival.
And Paul writes to the congregations that were
founded in the midst of revival.
So maybe by the time you get to
the book of Revelation and Yeshua is exhorting
the people to turn back, to get back
to the beginning, to their first love, that
they have a reputation for being alive and
yet they're dead, then you can see that
by the end of that first century there
was a lot of backsliding that had crept
in and there was need for revival again
in many of the bodies.
But Habakkuk chapter 3 verse 2 is recognized
as the classic verse in the Scriptures on
revival.
And I want to use that as a
foundation for what we'll be teaching on tonight.
So Habakkuk the prophet says, Lord, I have
heard of your fame.
I stand in awe of your deeds, O
Lord.
Renew them in our day.
In our time, make them known.
In wrath, remember mercy.
Habakkuk lived towards the end of the seventh
century, so he lived and ministered up towards
the end of the 600s.
We don't know his whole lifespan, but we
know when he ministered the things written in
this book.
There was not a whole lot good that
was happening.
What was the last great act that God
performed for his people?
Well, it was when God miraculously delivered the
children of Israel from the Assyrians.
So within less than 100 years of Habakkuk's
time, there had been this great supernatural act
of God.
And he had heard about things like this.
But in his own day, Josiah renewed the
covenant, smashed the idols out of the land.
There was a purging.
There was a purifying.
But a few more years go by and
the people are starting to fall away again
and national weakness is setting in.
And then the people are on the verge
of captivity.
So Habakkuk says, I heard about your deeds.
I heard about the great things you did.
Part of the Israelite confession of faith is
to constantly make reference to the great acts
of God, to the things he did in
the past.
When I was first saved, the rabbi said
to me, it's because the people in your
congregation are very weak.
They need to constantly have testimonies to reinforce
their faith.
But we don't need that.
Our faith is much stronger.
We'll just read the Hebrew prayer book.
Half of it, I'm not giving an exact
figure, but so much of it is just
recounting the acts of God, continual testimonies.
It's not a matter of weak faith.
It's a matter of having a living faith.
You need to continually remind yourself of what
God has done.
But what happens when it's just something that
you heard about?
Well, the first thing we want to discuss
tonight is that revival presupposes declension.
Those are Finney's own words that a revival
presupposes that there has been some type of
a falling away.
And just to quote a few lines from
Finney as a foundation, Finney says the revival
of religion by religion, he means faith.
He means the gospel.
A revival of religion presupposes a declension.
Almost all the religion in the world has
been produced by revivals.
God has found it necessary to take advantage
of the excitability there is in mankind to
produce powerful excitements among them before he can
lead them to obey.
Men are so sluggish.
There are so many things to leave their
minds off from religion to oppose the influence
of God that it is necessary to raise
an excitement among them to the tide rises
so high as to sweep away the opposing
obstacles.
They must be so aroused that they will
break over these counteracting influences before they will
obey God.
And then he says revival presupposes that the
church is sunk down in a backslidden state
and a revival consists in the return of
the church from her backsliding and in the
conversion of sinners.
So let's understand right up front that something
which is alive and flourishing does not need
to be revived.
Someone that has died needs to be revived
from the dead.
Some plant that you have you go on
vacation.
It wasn't water.
The thing is wilting.
You don't know if it can make it.
It's all dried out.
The thing needs to be revived and brought
back from the dead or a state of
near death.
So revival presupposes declension.
If we're going to say that we need
revival in our midst, then it's presupposing that
there is a major problem, that there is
death, that there is backsliding, that there is
sluggishness, that there is a falling away from
what previously was.
So I want to give us three basic
points under this heading tonight that revival presupposes
declension.
The first thing is that when revival is
needed, it's at a time when the acts
of God, the workings of God, have become
only a memory.
Let me say that again.
Revival is needed when the acts of God
become only a memory.
Turn over to Judges, the sixth chapter.
Judges chapter six.
Now, remember, if you're an Israelite, just if
you grew up in the family of those
that have been delivered from Egypt and they
talk about their family traditions and the things
that God had done and on and on
and you go back and you look back
and you think you have this history, you
have these stories and the further back in
time it gets, the more glorious and supernatural
and wonderful and impossible it would seem.
And you look around at your own life
and you say, hey, something's wrong here because
we're not experiencing any of these things we've
heard about.
So you go over to the sixth chapter
of Judges and it says in verse one
again, the Israelites did evil in the eyes
of the Lord and for seven years he
gave them into the hands of the Midianites
because the power of Midian was so oppressive
the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in mountain
clefts, caves and strongholds.
Whenever the Israelites planted their crops, the Midianites,
Amalekites and other Eastern peoples invaded the country.
They camped on the land and ruined the
crops all the way to Gaza and did
not spare a living thing for Israel, neither
sheep nor cattle or donkeys.
They came up with their livestock in their
tents like swarms of locusts.
It was impossible to count the men and
their camels.
They invaded the land to ravage it.
Midian so impoverished the Israelites that they cried
out to the Lord for help.
You have to understand that Israel was now
in a position where they were the tail
and not the head.
The exact opposite of what God ordained, and
you might say, look, it's bringing reproach to
the Lord.
God's name is being blasphemed.
God is being mocked.
These Midianites think that their gods are more
powerful than the God of Israel.
Why doesn't he act and do something?
Because he's not just going to do something
because things aren't going right because his name
is being blasphemed.
Finally, at a certain point in time, he
will work based on that.
But otherwise we say, well, what about your
reputation?
If we're sitting around doing nothing, if we're
sitting in his sight, his name will be
blaspheme.
You must understand that God's reputation is hurt
because of our backsliding, because of our sin,
because of our immaturity, because of our lukewarmness.
God's name and reputation are blaspheme.
The reputation of Jesus is brought low because
of our sin, and it's just going to
be like that until we get up and
do something about it.
Well, anyhow, God said, word of rebuke through
a prophet In verse 11, the angel of
the Lord came and sat down under the
oak in Ulphra that belonged to Joash the
Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat
in a wine press to keep it from
the Midianites.
That's basically like cooking in the closet, because
if anybody else sees you cooking, they'll come
in and steal your food.
The angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon,
and he said, The Lord is with you,
mighty warrior.
Now Gideon nails it perfectly.
He says, But, sir, if the Lord is
with us, why has all this happened to
us?
Where are all his wonders that our fathers
told us about when they said, Surely, the
Lord brought us up out of Egypt.
But now the Lord has abandoned us and
put us into the hand of Midian.
If God's really with me, then why am
I in the closet?
So to say, if God's really with us,
why are we under the oppression of our
enemy?
Where are the acts of God that we've
heard about?
There is no living experience of them in
our generation.
And notice, it's not where are the wonders
that we experienced when we were younger.
Real declension sets in when it's not the
people who are living who've experienced it, but
they've just heard of it by way of
mouth.
And many of us that have been saved
10, 15, 20 years have come to realization
and said something honestly.
We have never seen the things that our
fathers in the faith told us about.
We've heard about them.
We've experienced many things.
We've seen God do many things, but the
things that they talked about in the past,
we haven't experienced.
It's one thing to say, man, the things
I used to experience.
I don't have anymore, because then you know
you can do something about it.
You've touched it.
You've tasted it.
You can be stirred to pursue God.
But if you just heard about it, it's
not reality to you.
Where are all his wonders that our fathers
told us about?
And the Lord turned to him and said,
Go in this your strength and save Israel
at a millions hand.
I am surely sending you go in what
strength, the strength that you realize that if
God is truly with you, you want not
to be under the oppression of the Midianites.
The strength that you understand that this is
not the way it's supposed to be.
If God is really in your midst, this
is really a key revival text.
This concept in Judges six to ask the
big question.
If it's real, if it's true, then where
is it?
God says, I can use you because you've
asked the right question.
So revival is needed when the acts of
God become only a memory.
I read the account of one young man
during the Welsh revival of eighteen fifty nine,
where he says he says, you know, we
had heard about things and had questions because
our fathers used to tell us about the
reality of the presence of God and we
ourselves had never experienced it.
And then he talked about a service where
God supernaturally came down and they couldn't leave
it.
He said, from that point on, we never
questioned the reality from that point on.
We never questioned.
So what happens when the acts of God
become only a memory and understand this?
God does not make covenants with dead people.
God does not make covenants with people that
are not yet born.
Every person, every child of God must have
a face to face experience with God.
In other words, a personal experience with him.
You can't go based on the experience of
your father and you can't have it for
your child.
So what happens in this case?
Well, the first thing that's produced when the
acts of God become only a memory are
skepticism.
Skeptical attitudes is the first thing that's produced.
So how do I mean it?
When someone claims to have experienced the real
thing, our first reaction is skeptical because there's
hardness that's come in.
You would think our first reaction would be
thank God.
That's wonderful.
Glory to God.
It's just what I need.
Instead, it's the opposite.
When someone comes in, generally because there's been
a lot of counterfeits, because there's been a
lot of talk and the reality that when
someone comes along and says, I've got the
real thing, maybe we were first saved.
We ran around.
Oh boy, this is the real thing.
We're going to have it.
This guy's going to pray for us and
miracles are going to happen after enough going
from meeting to meeting.
You begin to say something's wrong here.
Something's wrong.
Something's missing.
A lot of talk, but no action.
So the first attitude that comes in people's
hearts is they're skeptical.
Like the man when Elisha prophesied that famine
in one day would turn to absolute abundance.
This man said, if the Lord opened the
windows of heaven, it couldn't be.
And Elisha said to him, you'll see it
with your eyes, but you won't partake.
Skeptical unbelief totally cut him out of the
blessing of God.
You've got to realize that skepticism comes from
a hardened heart.
And I would dare say that most of
us, unless there has been supernatural preparation by
the Holy Spirit, have somewhat hardened hearts to
the reality of the working of God, have
somewhat skeptical attitudes.
It's one thing to test something.
It's another thing to challenge it.
In other words, to say, well, thank God
you were really healed.
Yeah, the doctors gave me ten seconds to
live.
What happened?
Well, I fell down in front of the
train and my head was cut off and
I don't know how I did it, but
I ran quick and stuck it back on.
And well, it's okay to say, well, that's
wonderful, but let me get all the facts.
It's another thing to say if there are
twenty gods in heaven, it couldn't happen.
So skepticism is first and then what comes
next?
That skeptical attitude, that critical attitude, which cuts
you off from receiving anything.
You see, it's a self-destructive cycle.
It's a vicious cycle.
You don't see anything.
You begin to get skeptical.
The real thing begins to come.
You react against it.
Now you don't receive it.
You become even more skeptical, which leads to
a hardened state of unbelief.
Skepticism leading to hardened unbelief where people are
actually set in their hearts that they don't
believe that you give them reports and they
have already made quality decisions that these things
are not really taking place.
And then what happens after that?
Hardened unbelief leads to rationalistic doctrine.
What do I mean?
If you are going to walk around in
hardened unbelief and be a child of God
or claim to be a child of God,
when I say hardened unbelief, I don't mean
to the point of absolute backsliding, but I
mean to the point of spiritual ineffectiveness.
If you were going to claim to be
a child of God and have a hardened,
unbelieving state, then somehow you have to rewrite
the Bible because the Bible counteracts hardened unbelief
with constant challenges to faith and to believe
for the impossible, with constant challenges of what
God can do if you only believe him.
You have to rewrite your Bible somehow to
say that God doesn't do the miraculous anymore,
that miracles are for the past, that signs
and wonders are for the past, that supernatural
intervention of God doesn't happen anymore, and that
justifies your unbelieving position.
If someone said, you're a believer.
Yeah.
Oh, man, I just read the Bible and
I asked Jesus to come into my heart
and tell me what he's done.
Tell me the miracles you've seen because he's
just read it.
No one's told him that these things don't
happen.
As someone said, no one, you know, thank
God for new believers because no one's taught
him what God can't do.
You know, they come in and just believe
it.
Then we have to tell them, well, no,
it's really not so simple and it really
just doesn't happen the way it's written.
So what we do is we rationalize our
doctrines rather than saying we're missing it.
Something's wrong.
We better fall on our faces and repent.
So new doctrines are created.
Listen, nobody in the heat of a move
of God as a recipient of the miracles
of God, as a channel of the supernatural
blessings of God, comes up with doctrine that
the days of miracles have ceased.
Do they?
The ones who come up with that doctrine
are the ones who are living in a
mindset and in an atmosphere where nothing supernatural
is taking place.
So that rationalistic doctrine now does one other
subtle thing.
These people say, I believe that God did
these things in the past.
I just don't believe he's doing them today.
Today.
It's all by faith and no signs, no
wonders, no experience, no verification, no confirmation.
So their doctrine changes.
But now what happens is their whole faith
becomes a mere religious form.
And I'll expand on that in a minute.
So rationalistic doctrine leads to mere religious forms.
Nobody who denies the present moving of God
and the ongoing miraculous acts of God in
the present tense.
No one in that state truly believes that
God ever moved.
They may say, oh, I know he did
it in the past.
It's a deceit.
It's a pure and simple deceit.
If they don't believe that he is breaking
it in history today, it's because they're at
the end of that process of skepticism and
hardened belief in rationalistic doctrine.
So they've come to the point where they'll
say, oh, it's over.
Oh, God did this and Jesus rose from
the dead.
They don't really believe it.
They give mental ascent to it.
But in their heart of hearts, if God
worked a miracle in front of them, they'd
be absolutely, totally shocked.
Because anyone, anyone who believes this Bible literally
and has experienced in their own heart, forget
outwardly, but has experienced in their own heart
the reality of faith in this word, they
have to.
They have to believe in the present miracles
of God.
Because their whole mindset is a miraculous mindset.
So skepticism, hardened belief, rationalistic doctrine, mere religious
form, the past miracle stories just become stories,
nice religious stories.
And people who are soulish and who get
caught up intellectually and who are into religious
forms do not realize that they have totally
backslidden into those very things without the reality
of the ongoing experience of God.
So that's one result of a state where
the acts of God have become only a
memory.
But there's another alternate result.
There's another possibility because not everybody backslides into
dead religion.
You say that's right.
Yeah, most of us have backslidden into cheap
secondary.
Well, I don't want to call him counterfeits,
but let's just call him a cheapening of
the real thing.
Now, I'll be fair with us.
Most of us have never front slid.
So it might be wrong to say backslidden.
But what I mean is.
If you don't go the way of dead
religious form, then the other possible way you
can go is this.
You experience a little revival.
You experience a little drop of rain, like
somebody spitting on you on occasion.
You read in the Bible about the floods
and the outpourings.
OK, you hear people talking about the great
moves of God in the past, the great
revivals, and you experience something instead of like
somebody spitting on you.
It's like somebody pouring a little cup of
water over your head.
And when you get the cup of water,
you say it's revival.
When they talked about revival, I meant that
a tidal wave swept them off their feet
and swept huge buildings off their foundations and
move them 50 miles across the country.
When they talked about revival here, someone pours
a cup of water on my head.
We say it's revival.
We cheapen the real thing.
We call meat.
We call milk rather meat.
We say, oh, this is it.
This is this is the real meat.
Why?
Because what we've read about it in the
Bible, the Bible talks about meat and we've
heard our forefathers talk about the great meat
of what God's done.
And all we're experiencing is milk, but we're
doing the best we can.
So this milk must be me.
And somebody gets mad when you come along
and tell them, excuse me, brother, but that
milk that you are chewing on and cutting
with a knife and fork is not meat.
It's milk.
And the reason it's not read.
The reason it's white is because it's milk,
not meat.
They get mad at you.
They're insulted.
A lot of people would rather have their
cheapen experience and their half baked religious life.
They'd rather have that than have someone come
along and tell him, do you realize you're
half dead?
You realize you're more wrong than right.
You realize there's more God outside of you
trying to get in than inside of you
trying to get out.
People would rather that you pat him on
the back and say, man, this is real
revival.
I've said it before, but I'd be greatly
encouraged if the Lord came to me and
said to me, listen, kid, you don't know
anything that would bless me as opposed to
you have now achieved the ultimate height of
spiritual maturity and you have attained your ultimate
limit in God.
That would be discouraging.
I was praying about something last year while
I was ministering in Memphis, had a lot
of time to get along with God and
pray before ministering.
And as I was seeking the face of
the Lord, God spoke something very encouraging to
me.
I had been praying about something in my
life where I had in a big situation,
not done something exactly the way I wanted
to and just made a couple of mistakes.
And I was a little discouraged and I
was praying about it.
And God spoke to me and said, all
it was was a false start on the
marathon of your life.
I said, what an encouraging, wonderful, life giving
word.
If he said, oh, he just fell short
of the ultimate finishing line and that's it
forever, that would be tough.
But people want to believe that Bible days
are here again.
Well, I mean, let me ask you a
question.
How many accounts in the scriptures do you
read where somebody was ministered to for healing
and 19 years later they were still believing
for it?
I'm not saying God doesn't do that.
And if that's where we are, then let's
fight with all our minds.
But how many accounts to read about that
in the Bible or how many accounts to
read about where they took him by the
hand and pulled him up off his mat
and he still looked crippled and it was
horrible.
But thank God his eyesight was a little
better.
You don't read about that in the Bible.
What to me says Bible days aren't here
yet.
We're in the right direction.
We're moving towards it, but there's got to
be a total breaking through.
And yet people say it's revival.
We're experiencing revival.
We're not experiencing revival.
Maybe some parts of the world are some
parts of Messiah's body are growing rapidly and
supernaturally.
You say, yeah, but I know this guy.
He just started some work and in less
than five years, he's got 10,000 people.
Well, excellent.
How many can he get to fast for
a week with him?
How many could he get to endure persecution?
Some of the questions we asked last time.
How many can he get to come out
to early morning prayer?
How many can he get to throw out
their television on a moment's not how many,
you know, you go through it, you find
out what about 50.
Well, that's in 10 years.
He's only got a 50 committed people.
That's not revival.
So one thing that happens.
One thing that assures you that you're in
a state needing revival is when all the
workings of God and the miraculous accounts are
only a memory.
Now, let me ask a question here.
How many of you have seen someone born
totally blind in both eyes?
Did you hear that born totally blind in
both eyes instantly heal in front of you?
How many just raise your hand.
Okay.
Zero one.
Okay.
One.
I'm not skeptical, but I don't know if
it was born totally blind in both eyes.
How many of you have seen someone born
with severe cerebral palsy, severe cerebral palsy?
I mean, crippled in arms, crippled in legs,
drooling, able to communicate at all.
No muscle tone whatsoever.
How many of you seen someone in that
state instantly healed in front of your eyes?
Zero.
All right.
Let's ask another question.
How many of you have seen in front
of your eyes someone preach a message to
unsaved people who were against you or against
the preacher?
All right.
Unsaved, angry, and have seen one message preached
and have seen conviction come.
People fall under weeping, wailing, run up and
several thousand get right with God on the
spot and years later, still be walking with
God.
How many have seen that in front of
your eyes?
Several thousand.
That's what the man said.
Zero.
Now you say, oh, but you're making it
different.
I'm just taking possible excerpts out of various
biblical accounts.
Okay.
That's all I'm doing.
All right.
Well, Bible days are not here again.
Now you say, but don't we believe in
restoration?
Yes, that's the whole thing.
We are being restored, but let us realistically
look at where we are.
Now, if God restored everything at once, we
would instantly totally fall apart at the seams,
either through pride, through confusion, through questions, through
something or other.
Okay.
The fact of the matter is that we've
had the gifts of the Spirit with us
now for eighty, ninety years in some measure
restored to the body, and we still don't
know what we're doing with most of them.
Now, you may take that as an extreme
statement.
I know better.
It's not an extreme statement.
Okay.
We've had God's healing power back in our
midst for one hundred years or so, and
we're still frustrated with the results and arguing.
Is it faith or is it this or
is it that we've had Jewish restoration really
awoken or awakened in our midst, especially in
the last twenty or thirty years?
And God is my witness.
We've had a lot of Ishmael's, but no
Isaacs yet.
It takes a while for restoration to take
effect.
But when God moves, remember we said one
of the signs of revival is that it
will be sudden and spontaneous, uncontrollable and uncontainable.
God, in a few moments of time, will
do more than all of our years of
effort and striving and praying.
It will be as a result of our
crying out to Him for years that He
will suddenly come and move, and then we
will see it in front of our eyes.