Hook of Galatians, and we're going to start
in chapter 5, verse 13.
For brethren, ye have been called unto liberty,
only use not liberty for an occasion to
the flesh, but by love serve one another.
For all the law is fulfilled in one
word, even in this, Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself.
But if ye bite and devour one another,
take heed that ye be not consumed one
of another.
This I say then, walk in the spirit,
and ye shall not fulfill the lusts of
the flesh.
For the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and
the spirit against the flesh, and these are
contrary the one to another.
So that ye cannot do the things that
ye would.
But if ye be led by the spirit,
ye are not under the law.
Now the works of the flesh are manifest,
which are these, adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry,
sorcery, hatred, strife, jealousy, wrath, factions, seditions, heresies,
envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and the like of
which I tell you before, as I have
told you in the time past, that they
who do such things shall not inherit the
kingdom of God.
But the fruit of the spirit is love,
joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness,
self-control, against such there is no law.
They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh
with the affections and lusts.
If we live in the spirit, let us
also walk in the spirit.
Let us not be desirous of vainglory, provoking
one another, envying one another.
You may wonder why do we have in
the middle of our missions conference a message
on personal revival.
There is a book, by the way, back
there on the table, called Personal Revival.
It's in magazine form, and it's the best
possible follow-up on this morning's message.
Again, whether you can leave a donation or
not, since it's a magazine book that costs
us a few pence to print, just take
it.
And even if you leave a postage stamp,
you'll cover the cost of that book.
It's a miracle that we are able to
publish these books in magazine form, a hundred
thousand at a time.
It's an answer to many years of praying.
Because you see, there are four and a
half thousand million people out there.
And if we just publish little editions of
5,000 books, 10,000 books, it's going
to be a long road.
And so we're producing these in a printing
press that's about as long as this building.
Christian Printer does this a hundred thousand at
a time.
So you take one.
Personal revival.
The ministry of O.M. from the very
beginning has been revival first and mission second.
And so it is fitting that on this
mission's weekend we consider the subject of personal
revival.
We've already read those verses in Galatians 5.
Now maybe I could just read three of
them again, starting at verse 22.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love,
joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness,
self-control.
Against such there is no law.
They that are Christ have crucified the flesh
with the affections and lusts.
Let me read it also in this living
paraphrase, just to amplify the thoughts to some
degree through different wording.
But when the Holy Spirit controls our lives,
he will produce this kind of fruit in
us.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,
and self-control.
And here there is no conflict with Jewish
laws.
Those who belong to Christ have nailed their
natural evil desires to his cross and crucified
them there.
Personal revival is the privilege of every believer.
And I would beg of you to consider
carefully this subject from the word of God
with me this morning.
Because I believe that if you grasp all
that you have in Jesus Christ, that you
will be able to experience from now on
personal revival in your life.
I really believe that.
As a result of my first book, one
that you can pick up free this morning,
I've had about 14,000 letters.
And I've seen through those letters and of
course through constant contact with people how easy
it is for Christians to get discouraged.
Discouraged in their prayer life, discouraged in their
witness.
Continually feeling guilty, never good enough, never praying
enough, never going to church enough, never doing
this enough.
And this is not the plan and the
purpose of God.
Not a Christian just live in discouragement and
in guilt.
We read that the joy of the Lord
is our strength.
And here this morning we've read about the
fruit of the Holy Spirit.
We have the Spirit.
We are commanded in Acts and in Ephesians
to be filled with the Spirit.
Therefore it is clear that God wants us
to be living in personal revival.
Not in discouragement, not in the endless syndrome
of guilt and failure, but in the joy
of the Lord.
Sometimes because we often listen to testimonies of
people who get away from the Lord and
come back to the Lord, we get the
idea that this really is the normal Christian
life, isn't it?
You come to the Lord and you're excited
for a while and then you sort of
drift away and you get lukewarm or you
get blown away by some problem or some
misunderstanding and then somehow maybe at Philly or
Keswick or at some summer Bible camp you
come back to the Lord again and in
September you're allowed to give your testimony in
church of how you wandered away from the
Lord, but you're back again and everybody's happy.
Now I'm thrilled when I hear the testimony
of somebody who's come back to the Lord.
Of course, that's good.
That's wonderful.
But I know something better.
Don't ever get away from him in the
first place.
You say, oh, but then I won't be
asked to give my testimony.
It's interesting how sometimes we gravitate toward wanting
testimonies of people who have gone through some
special difficulties and there's nothing wrong with that,
but sometimes, spiritually speaking, a wonderful testimony can
be almost boring.
Of course, I guess it depends how you
share it.
I'm convinced that it's the purpose and plan
of God that when we come to the
Lord Jesus Christ, we never go away from
him anymore.
We don't go into sort of the back
garden of spiritual defeat, but we stay out
in the battlefront, living day by day in
the Holy Spirit.
As we see here in verse 16, walk
in the Spirit and you shall not fulfill
the lusts of the flesh.
Now, revival is a term that sometimes people
don't understand, and for a while I hardly
used the term because it was so misused.
And people often think of revival only as
that which happened like over in Wales in
1904, the Welsh Revival, when there was this
special movement of the Spirit, almost as if
the Holy Spirit was forcing people.
We hear stories of, you know, a drunkard
walking down the street and suddenly, zap, the
Lord hits him and he falls on the
ground and throws his bottle into the woods
and gets converted.
It's easy to become infatuated with the spectacular.
After all, as Christians, we're interested in the
spectacular.
But I believe that there are different kinds
of revival and that the Scriptures put a
greater priority on personal revival than on large
group or corporate revival.
We're not against anything that the Holy Spirit
is doing.
And to see that which happened in 1904
and that which happened in other parts of
Britain at different periods of history, praise the
Lord, we can pray for that, we can
work for that.
Probably, as Christians, we'll never fully agree about
it.
It was interesting to read, as I was
doing a little homework in preparation for speaking
at Keswick, to read about when the Welsh
went up there during the Welsh Revival to
the Keswick Convention.
And they sort of attempted to somehow get
Keswick going into the revival.
And they had nights of prayer and they
had different things happen, but it didn't break
out in the same way that it broke
out in Swansea and other parts of Wales.
You can't force it.
You can't crank it up like an old
car.
You know the old cars used to have
to go around the front room and get
it going.
You're not going to get revival going that
way.
There's an element of mystery in revival.
There's an element of God's timing.
Then there's an element of providence.
I've seen people going through sort of a
revival purgatory, praying year after year that God
would send a revival and sort of castigating
themselves, blaming themselves or blaming their church.
It's always easy to blame the church for
anything.
That's a good scapegoat, the church, for why
we don't have revival.
I believe there's another side to this coin.
It's our inheritance in Jesus Christ.
That as individual believers, we don't have to
sit back and wait for a warm special
wind to blow through the church or a
dove to break through the window.
In Christ, we have all that we need
to live a life of joy and revival
and spiritual power day by day.
Not just for a couple of years, because
let's face it, that revival in Wales and
in other parts of the world, for many
of the people involved, it was one or
two years and it was over.
Many of them backslid.
Many of them even left the Christian faith
afterward.
The spiritual warfare continued.
Even Evan Roberts, the human leader of the
Welsh revival, went through deep times of struggle
and extremism came in.
And out of that, Jesse Penn Lewis wrote
War on the Saints, a book that I
don't really recommend to too many people, which
got many people discouraged, confused, and depressed.
And that spread into the writings of Watchman
Nee.
Watchman Nee, one third of his writing is
rehashed, Jesse Penn Lewis, and a few other
things thrown in.
We think it comes from China.
But, you know, it can be a dead
end street.
As believers, we have the Holy Spirit.
And as believers, it is our privilege to
live day by day in the fullness and
the power of the Holy Spirit.
Now, a lot of people don't understand this
because they're looking for something spectacular.
They think when the Holy Spirit comes upon
them, something really weird is going to happen.
Their eyes are going to change color, or
their hair is going to stand straight up,
or they're going to get a new voice.
Have you ever been in a prayer meeting
when a brother with a real gruffy, huffy
voice comes in?
But when he prays, suddenly, he has a
different voice.
You know, God's not going to change your
voice.
I wanted to get mine changed.
I can't stand listening to mine.
The filling of the Holy Spirit is not
only for the pulpit, it's for the kitchen.
It's not only for the door-to-door
visitation, it's for the driving.
It's not only for the work in the
church, but the work in the factory.
The filling, and the living, and the power,
and the energy of the Holy Spirit is
not firstly a spectacular experience.
It is a whole new way of life,
which is very down-to-earth, and which
will not just function one or two years,
but it will function the rest of your
life.
And the filling of the Holy Spirit, in
personal revival and reality, will not destroy your
humanity.
I was helped in this particular area because
so many of the people that I've met,
and as you can imagine, I've been in
thousands of churches, some of the ones who
claimed to be, and others felt were spirit
-filled, I found a bit strange myself.
Some of the real hyper-spiritual types, they
really, to me, something plastic, something unreal about
them.
And yet I realized that that was just
their human factor.
They were a little eccentric, they were a
little different.
We're all different, aren't we?
But some are more different than others.
And that's what my wife says about me.
But I realized that this treasure, this is
what the Bible says, this treasure is in
an earthen vessel.
And as you're filled with the Holy Spirit,
as you learn to live in revival, that
doesn't destroy your humanity.
And it's dangerous to repress ourselves or to
try to be somebody else in our effort
to be more spiritual, to try to be
Andrew Murray or F.B. Myers, or to
try to be George Duncan or Alan Redpath,
two very different men.
Their method of preaching, if you've listened to
them, is completely different.
George Duncan, quiet, short, beautiful, Redpath, like a
storm, you know, one hour long, you're shaking
the whole time.
God uses different people in different ways.
God doesn't, as you're filled with the Holy
Spirit and learn to live in revival, destroy
your humanity, liquidate your personality, obliterate your temperament.
If you're the shy kind of quiet person,
soft-spoken, as you're filled with the Holy
Spirit, you're not going to become like me.
Relax.
You'll probably be still relatively quiet and shy,
but you will experience God's grace to open
your mouth at the right time.
And the fruit of the Holy Spirit will
become more and more a reality in your
life.
There's nothing that represents revival more than the
fruit of the Holy Spirit in the life
of a believer.
That's why again and again, I've meditated on
those words.
I went to a home some time ago.
I was a little hungry and I saw
some fruit.
And I should have asked, but I sort
of reached for it as I was asking
whether I could have some.
And as it got near my mouth, I
discovered it was wax.
Have you ever seen these fruit displays?
They have plastic ones as well.
The wax is a little more digestible than
the plastic.
And so oftentimes as Christians, the fruit, it
isn't real.
You know how we can tell when the
fruit is plastic or wax rather than the
fruit of the Holy Spirit?
Under pressure.
That's what really counts, isn't it?
It's not what we're like when we're sitting
in church on Sunday morning, though that's important.
Everything is important with God.
But what are we like when we're under
pressure on the M1 sitting in the same
place for two hours, listening to the radio
that tells you that a large lorry has
just overturned with 1000 apples rolling down the
M1.
And that will be several hours before you're
cleared.
And there's no exit anywhere in range.
How do you handle that?
Yes, it's pressure that brings to the surface
what we're really made of.
It's pressure that determines whether that blessing we
got three weeks ago in church is still
a blessing today.
And I want to just share from my
own experience that ever since my conversion, I
have known personal revival every day.
That's 29 years.
You say, wow, what cheek this preacher's got.
Tell us he's been living in revival for
29 years.
But you see, it's a normal Christian life.
I don't believe that's any great boast.
I don't believe that's any special statement.
That's God's provision.
That's not me.
I can't maintain revival even 20 minutes.
But when I was converted to Jesus Christ,
the Holy Spirit came to live in me.
Jesus, by His Spirit, came to live in
me.
I'm the earthen vessel.
He's the treasure.
And it is now the normal experience that
every day He lives in me.
He doesn't die for several days and then
come back to life again.
Now, we can grieve the Holy Spirit.
We can quench the Holy Spirit.
And I have to be honest, I've had
moments.
I've had hours.
I've even had half days, to be quite
honest, in some cases, almost whole days in
which I was not living in revival.
But somehow I learned as a baby Christian
that there was cleansing in the blood of
Christ.
There was forgiveness when one sinned.
And so, as far as I can remember,
each day, even when there's been difficulty or
sin or failure or discouragement throughout, maybe part
of the day, somehow through the Word and
prayer, I got my cord back plugged in
to the right source of power.
It's very clear.
In 1 John chapter 2, the first part
of the verse says, Sin not.
That's my goal each day.
And as I spend some time early in
the day, in the Word and in prayer,
my goal as I launch out in that
day is to live a life of love,
holiness, fruit may be seen in my life.
But the second part of the verse is
the reason I'm still here.
If you sin, that's me.
If you sin, you have an advocate with
the Father Jesus Christ, the righteous.
You see, we sort of have this idea
that Christians who live in revival, they don't
sin.
Well, we don't say that, but we expect
that.
It's sort of the way some churches treat
their pastors.
Theologically, they don't believe the pastor is perfect.
I mean, that would be bad theology.
But through insinuation and implication, they expect the
pastor more or less to be perfect.
I mean, he's allowed little things.
And the pastor's wife, I mean, oh, my.
Thank you, Lord, that I'm not the pastor's
wife.
Of course, that would be difficult.
But in so many places I go, the
pastor's wife seems to be really put on
the spot.
If the pastor's a dynamic sort of extrovert
evangelistic preacher and teacher and has an out
in ministry, sort of the people expect the
wife.
She's going to be a teacher.
She's going to be an exhorter.
She's going to be at every meeting.
She's going to be encouraging the elderly, taking
care of the young ones, teaching in the
Sunday school, and of course, taking care of
the pastor.
And a lot of pastors have big families
for some reason I've never been able to
explain.
It's changed these days.
More balance in the theology.
And of course, no wonder many a pastor's
wife has landed up with a nervous breakdown.
People have the idea that missionaries, these are
the real super saints, really.
And they can get away with more because
the local churches don't see that.
They just come sailing in on a weekend,
give their spiritual messages, people are like, oh,
a man of God.
He gets out of town before the dust
falls.
Or maybe they never see the dust.
He's back in the Congo, the same loudmouth
carnal missionary upsetting all the Africans.
And back home, they're thinking he's a great
man of God and the Holy Spirit is
so wonderfully using him.
Perhaps out there in that town where he
lives, half the town can't stand him and
are praying that he'd return to England.
Missionaries are human, incredibly human.
We have enormous problems on the mission field.
There's moral problems, there's divisions, there's carnality, there's
plastic fruit.
There are all kinds of things.
This is why when a missionary prayer meeting
is called, the Lord's people need to mobilize
because I tell you it's total war.
So maybe the church needs a new remembrance
service.
Once a year to remember the missionaries who
have fallen in action or who have been
wiped out on the battlefronts in the spiritual
warfare.
Because just as in the Falklands, there were
casualties, though it was kept to a minimum.
So in the work of God, on the
front lines of spiritual action, there are casualties,
there are mental and emotional breakdowns, there are
often physical and health breakdowns, and there are
spiritual breakdowns.
And when we see this happen out on
the mission field, we need to realize that
sometimes it's linked with a weakness in our
heavy artillery program back in the home country.
What do I mean by that?
The heavy artillery, one great Wycliffe Bible translator
said, was the intercessory prayer.
I was reading this morning in 1 Timothy
chapter 2, how first of all prayer and
supplication and intercession with thanksgiving should be made
unto all men.
How is your heavy artillery ministry?
Is your home an arsenal for spiritual warfare
in which the big guns of intercessory prayer
are aimed out to the unreached parts of
the world where the strongholds of the enemy
are still holding back the missionary forces, as
we'll be talking more about perhaps this evening
or tomorrow?
Yes, being filled with the Holy Spirit, first
Bible doesn't destroy your humanity.
You know, about 20 years ago when I
was first living here in Britain, many people
were coming into new experiences with the Holy
Spirit.
The Holy Spirit, of course, works in different
ways in different people.
Some of the people that I've seen live
in revival for long periods of time have
never had any great one spectacular, mind-bending,
foot-tingling experience with the Holy Spirit.
But they've had the ongoing work of grace
in their hearts by the Holy Spirit.
In all fairness, others in our work have
had very shattering experiences with the Lord.
It may have been in the context of
the working of the Holy Spirit.
It may have been in the context of
what we've read here in Galatians, the crucified
life.
Many have come into a new dimension in
their spiritual walk when they realized the reality
of the crucified life and they've begun to
understand that it wasn't only Jesus who was
crucified, but they, as believers, are to reckon
themselves as being dead unto the world and
as being crucified, spiritually speaking, with Jesus Christ.
That's how this revival is maintained, an ongoing
work of the cross, day by day.
That's why Jesus said, if any man come
after me, let him deny self, take up
the cross, and follow.
That's Jesus speaking, not me.
Therefore, it is the privilege, it's the plan
of God that every Christian knows continuous revival
in his life.
The human factor will still be there.
Failure will still be there.
Tears will still be there.
You know, as I thought of those who
gave their lives in the war and listened
to a remembrance song this morning there in
the back of my old coach, I just
wept.
Now, maybe I weep easy.
My wife's father was killed in that war.
Some of you have loved ones and friends
who were killed in that war.
Nothing wrong with weeping.
I see it as a greater problem that
many Christians no longer weep.
We've been emotionally brainwashed by overexposure to violence
and bloodshed on television and in the media
so that we become hardened and no longer
do we have the softness of heart and
the tenderness of heart that we can weep
with those who weep and yes, rejoice with
those.
The fullness of the Holy Spirit does not
destroy the human factor.
It will not turn you into me or
me into you.
That's why it's so foolish to spend too
much time judging other people or running around
measuring everybody spiritually to see who is the
spiritual or the most spiritual of all.
We're all God's children if we are born
again.
We all have a blank page in the
book of heaven.
It's not a matter of Billy Graham being
10 times more important than you or Hudson
Taylor having 50 pages in the book and
you have only a small inch in the
index.
God has created every one of us.
God has a plan for all of our
lives.
God has a totally different way of measuring
things than the Daily Mirror or the Gospel
Gazette.
And he looks at the faithfulness of your
heart.
He looks at the fruit on your spiritual
tree and his burden is firstly quality not
quantity.
It's not how many nations you can take
for Christ or how many souls you can
win though those things have importance in the
context of Christian and world evangelism but are
you abiding in Jesus?
Are you living in personal revival?
And I know that if a weak struggling
often confused person like myself can experience this
grace and power to varying degrees every day
for 29 years then this nobody that cannot
know this way of life.
I've seen this also in my own wife.
My own wife who was greatly affected by
her father's death.
So she spent part of her life in
sort of an orphanage.
And then there was some other difficulties in
the home.
Don't want to go into detail.
I talk a little bit about this in
my book.
And after she was converted to Christ she
still had a lot of difficulties as a
result of these these sort of damaged emotions.
There's a book on the table there called
Healing for Damaged Emotions.
And you know in a day when it's
more and more possible to have good physical
health through medicine and other things preventive medicine
there are more and more people with damaged
emotions who need spiritual healing.
That's a beautiful book.
And long before that book was written my
wife in the quietness of her own room
had an experience with the Lord Jesus that
brought beautiful healing to her emotions and in
her case also the healing of three physical
diseases which were linked with emotional damage.
I'll never forget that day.
And if God hadn't moved in her life
and brought her into that healing though it's
an ongoing process and she would be the
first one to say that it's just got
to keep going on because old memories come
up old hurts come up the old humanity
whatever you want to call it still there.
But I've lived with her for 23 years
and I've seen reality in her life as
a very very home spun ordinary shy quiet
woman who often feels inferior to almost everybody.
God works in different ways in different people.
Don't try to be somebody else.
Don't read too many biographies at once spend
more time perhaps in the word and understanding
from the scriptures God's purpose and God's plan
for your own life as a beautiful original
creation of a glorious omnipotent God.
Yes it's the purpose of the Lord for
all of us to be rejoicing in his
grace for all of us to be abounding
in his work for all of us to
have the fruit of the spirit in our
lives and a vision for others and a
lost and dying world.
This is not the exception for a few
people who go to missionary conferences but this
is the privilege of all believers who have
a bible and can read it and appropriate
this way of life.
For me it's meant a lot of repentance.
So quickly I grieve the Lord so quickly
my eyes wander to places they should not
go so quickly my heart gets cold so
there's no interest in the souls of men.
I'm a natural backslider.
What about you?
Maybe some of you just automatically go uphill
spiritually.
I'm always looking for those kind just spiritual
life for you is just automatic you're just
going up from victory to victory and abounding
day after day automatically more and more spiritual.
Many of you are in that category I'd
love to really see you after the meeting
and get your autograph here in my bible.
I've got a special section I write here
in the top of the page for hypocrites.
The fact of the matter is for all
of us it is an ongoing spiritual warfare
if we're going to go forward if we're
going to go forward and it will remain
at times that we sin we fail and
it's at that moment we need more than
at any other time to know God's love.
He does not abandon us at that moment
of sin or failure for we are his
children we are bought with a price and
therefore we have no excuse but to bounce
back to drink afresh from the fountain of
never-ending water and to claim in his
power and grace revival, daily revival, personal revival
from now till we meet him at the
end of the road.
Let us pray.
Let's just take a few moments to just
again have silent prayer this time in remembrance
of what Christ has done for us and
our inheritance in Christ.
Let us have confession if we have failed
to claim that inheritance that Holy Spirit daily
reality.
Let us confess our unbelief.
Let us confess that sometimes we have been
deceived into discouragement into a way of life
that's plastic and not real.
Let's turn, let's turn afresh to the fountain
of living water.
Let's return to the cross and spiritually allow
those nails again to go into our own
hands so that we can say we're crucified.
Will you say that with all your heart?
If you will by faith day by day
and you will know personal revival.
Tis your privilege.
Tis your inheritance in Christ.
Just pray.
Father, we do remember the death of your
son the Lord Jesus on the cross for
our sin.
We thank you for forgiveness.
We thank you for cleansing.
We thank you for the privilege of living
in revival and in victory and in the
power of your Holy Spirit.
We realize afresh that this doesn't destroy the
human factor.
It doesn't liquidate our humanity but it brings
us into balance and into crucified living.
Thank you Lord.
We believe that world missions will grow from
a heart that's revived by your Holy Spirit
and from a church that's experiencing revival and
grace by your Holy Spirit.
May we be that kind of people.
May this be that kind of church for
your glory and for your honor.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.