Getting Right with God Faith Series — E.A. Johnston

Revival as a Sovereign Work of God

In the book of Habakkuk, in chapter 3 and verse 2, we read, O LORD, revive your work in the midst of the years, and the midst of the years make known in wrath, remember mercy. Well, there are several vital truths mentioned here in this power-packed verse of Scripture, friends.

First, there is a recognition of the Lord. To say, you know, Jesus is one thing, but to be utterly surrendered to him as Lord of your life is altogether something else. The first words out of the prophet's mouth is a fear of God in acknowledging him to be who he says he is.

Lord, O Lord. Secondly, an interesting word is used. It is a word seldom found in Scripture, but here it fits perfectly in this setting. It is the word revive. The prophet knows the deplorable condition of the people of God.

The southern kingdom of Judah was in distress concerning its destruction by the Chaldeans, who the prophet mentions as the instruments of God's judgment. The three brief chapters of the book of Habakkuk deal primarily with the invasion of the land of Judah by the Chaldeans, who brought spoil upon the people of God, and consequently great hardship and suffering to them.

It appears to them that God is a million miles away. They are in desperate need of him. They need a touch from heaven. They need reviving. Also, notice how the prophet points this work as being God's work.

He says, revive your work, which is pregnant with several layers of meaning, that the work of revival is not something man drums up or produces on his own. It's a sovereign work of God that only he can do.

Also, revive your work is a plea to God for him to look down from heaven concerning the work of his hands in regard to his people. Whatever the direct appeal of the prophet is, one thing is certain. They need reviving.

Spiritual Decline and the Need for Revival

They need revival. Well, when is revival needed? Charles Finney wrote that a revival of true Christianity presupposes a fallen away. Finney goes on to say, Look back at the history of the Jews. God maintained devotion among them by special times of great awakening when people turned to the Lord.

But soon after, they had been revived. The Jews faced opposition, and their spirituality declined until God had time, so to speak, to shape events to produce another awakening and again pour out his spirit to convert sinners.

When the opposition began afresh, religion degenerated, and again the nation was sucked down by a whirlpool of luxury, idolatry, and pride. So says Mr. Finney. It kind of reminds me of the sad, deplorable condition the church is in today.

I'm often asked to define the term revival. I would say revival is needed in the church when spirituality has declined and the people have become desensitized to sin, particularly their own, and although they operate works for God through religious activity, their hearts are far away from God as they are in a backslidden condition.

They must get right with God. There is a deep need for revival. That's where we are today, friends, and the title of my message today is Getting Right With God, for the life of faith must be lived in a red-hot love relationship to Jesus.

When we grow cold towards him, we go cold on everything else, regarding things of eternal worth. Our daily testimony suffers. Our daily witness suffers. We lose our burden for the souls of men and fail to promote and advance the gospel in our day.

We become self-sufficient, self-reliant, and have little need for God to work a miracle in our life or else we perish. Therefore, our faith suffers. Our faith stagnates. We need reviving. We need revival.

For to be involved with the activity of heaven concerning men, we need to maintain a close walk with God so he can reveal more of himself to us as we exercise our faith toward him. Well, what does it mean to get right with God?

Honest Self-Examination Before God

That's what we're going to look at today, friends. It means to look in the mirror and see ourselves as God sees us, sinful, lustful, prideful, ambitious for personal gain and self-recognition, full of the world and full of self.

There must be this revelation of our own badness before we see a need for help from above. The truth about ourself hurts because we normally measure our spiritual life in relation to other men. So we use a perverted yardstick to measure ourselves by.

We say to ourselves something like, Why, I'm not as bad as other men. So we flatter ourselves and deceive our own hearts. But God sees what scoundrels we really are. He sees our self-satisfaction and self-reliance, and so he will produce situations to try us, to show us our true condition and our need of him.

Divine Discipline and the Danger of Spiritual Stupor

If we are still in such a spiritual stupor that we don't hear God speaking to us, as in Amos chapter 4 where God brings a series of remedial judgments upon his people, one right after another, and each one more severe than the preceding one.

Yet God laments, Yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord. But then God eventually just steps away and will say, Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone. When God withdraws himself from our midst, he leads us to our own devices, and this is where we are right now, right now in the state of the church.

Bringing Hidden Sin into the Light

The first step to a life of faith and a deeper walk with God is to realign ourselves to God for this to occur. We must be transparent with ourselves and honest with ourselves before God. We must ask him to shine his searching spotlight upon our lives by his Holy Spirit and reveal to us the sin areas that lie like snakes beneath the rock bed of our religious life and need to be driven out and exposed.

I used to live on a property out in the woods in the south and my land was just crawling with poisonous snakes. I'd have to go out each year onto my property to find them and destroy them because I had a young child that liked to play in the yard.

I had a rock bed at the foot of my front yard that served as an irrigation ditch and I would have to strap on my boots and go down there and straddle those rocks with a can of gasoline in one hand and a shovel in the other.

I would pour gasoline down on those rocks and every time I did several snakes would slither over the tops of my boots. They were cottonmouths and very venomous and as they came scurrying I would slam the shovel down on their heads to stun them and then cut their heads off with the blade of that shovel.

It was hard work but it was necessary work. It had to be done because I loved my little daughter and I wanted to protect her from getting bit by a poisonous snake. God the Father loves us. He knows that sin is harmful to us and he wants to help us drive that sin clean out of our lives.

At times we must strap on our boots and face our enemies, face our sins, root them out and get rid of them if we ever want to go further with God. He won't go one skinny inch further with you, friend, if you have sin in your life and you are coddling it.

Personal Repentance as the Beginning of Revival

Getting right with God is uncovering and exposing sin areas that need to be dealt with and addressed and given to Jesus. If you want personal revival, friend, if you are a pastor and you want your church to see revival, then you, you must get right with God and repent.

A Pastor’s Repentance and the Call to Revival

I'll close this message with the following story. Years ago I received a telephone call from a pastor in my community and he said he had read my book on revival entitled Realities of Revival and he wanted to meet for lunch to discuss it further.

Well, I'm always open to a free lunch so I agreed to meet him at a local restaurant. He was an elderly saint and I was a much younger man. He told me he had been a pastor for nearly fifty years but he wanted to see revival in his church.

He asked me if I could call and get Henry Blackaby to come to his church for some meetings on revival. I looked him in the eye across the table and said, If you are really serious about seeing revival at your church, then the first thing you must do is to repent and get right with God.

Revival has to start with you getting right with God. Well, I thought I had offended him. He got up abruptly and paid the check and I thought I'd never hear from him again. He must have thought to himself, What's this young whippersnapper telling me I need to repent?

Well, a week went by and he called me again and again he invited me to lunch and this time he brought two more pastors with him. They asked me if I wouldn't mind meeting with them on a monthly basis to pray for revival.

Of course I didn't mind. I was glad to do it. We met for several months, praying to the Lord to show us revival. I'll never forget it. As we sat in a circle with our chairs facing each other, this elderly pastor bolted up from his chair like a bolt of lightning and stood straight up stiff.

Then he crumbled down on the ground before us and while he was on his hands and knees, he cried out in a loud voice, Lord, forgive me for my dirty, rotten sins. I need revival. Let it start with me. Well, that man was getting serious with God and if you want to go further with God in a life of faith, friend, you must get right with God and ask Him to give you personal revival.

There's no other way but to trust and obey.