The Country in Peril — Ronald Glass

With us this morning. And we are coming now to the word of God. I begin today a new series of sermons. I don't know how long this will take us to get through all of this. But I'm excited about this. I think this is one of the most important series of sermons I probably will have ever done here.

Biblical Revival in 2 Chronicles 15

And I hope that you will make this a subject of intense interest and prayer as we move through it. Biblical revival. I'm asking you to turn this morning to 2 Chronicles, chapter 15. 2 Chronicles, chapter 15.

And I want to consider the first 15 verses of this chapter today. 2 Chronicles 15, follow in your Bible as I read, please, beginning in the first verse. Now the Spirit of God came on Azariah, the son of Oded, and he went out to meet Asa.

And he said to him, listen to me, Asa, and all Judah and Benjamin, the Lord is with you when you are with him. And if you seek him, he will let you find him. But if you forsake him, he will forsake you.

For many days, Israel was without the true God and without a teaching priest and without law. But in their distress, they turned to the Lord God of Israel, and they sought him, and he let them find him.

In those times, there was no peace to him who went out or to him who came in, for many disturbances afflicted all the inhabitants of the lands. Nation was crushed by nation, city by city, for God troubled them with every kind of distress.

But you, be strong and do not lose courage, for there is reward for your work. Now when Asa heard these words and the prophecy, which Azariah, the son of Oded, the prophet, spoke, he took courage and removed the abominable idols from all the land of Judah and Benjamin and from the cities which he had captured in the hill country of Ephraim.

Then he restored the altar of the Lord, which was in front of the porch of the Lord. He gathered all Judah and Benjamin and those from Ephraim, Manasseh, and Simeon who resided with them, for many defected to him from Israel when they saw that the Lord his God was with him.

So they assembled at Jerusalem in the third month of the 15th year of Asa's reign. They sacrificed to the Lord that day 700 oxen and 7 ,000 sheep from the spoil they had brought. They entered into the covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart and soul.

And whoever would not seek the Lord God of Israel should be put to death, whether small or great, man or woman. Moreover, they made an oath to the Lord with a loud voice, with shouting, with trumpets, and with horns.

All Judah rejoiced concerning the oath, for they had sworn with their whole heart and had sought him earnestly. And he let them find him. So the Lord gave them rest on every side. I believe that the United States of America is a country in peril.

National Peril and the Loss of Christian Foundations

We are living in dangerous times. We are facing an even more dangerous future. Under the Declaration of National Crisis, the United States of America is being propelled by an ambitious administration in Washington into progressivism and atheistic socialism.

These changes are possible because we have lost our foundation as a Christian nation, that is, a nation based upon Christian principles and principles upon which our forefathers based their original documents.

Where these ominous developments may lead, well, they may seem uncertain. But the destination is clear from the annals of Western civilization. A problem today, however, is that we don't know our own history.

The French Revolution and the Consequences of Atheism

And so that's where I want to begin today, in Europe in the 18th century, in two nations, France and England. We know it as the Age of Enlightenment, the search for a perfect social order among the 18th century French intellectuals.

That search led to a new social order in which Christianity was denounced. The traditions of the home, and of the church, and of government were rejected. So was the Bible. And so was belief in the deity of Jesus Christ.

The philosopher Voltaire declared that reason was the source of all truth. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another of the philosophers of that day, opted for romanticism with its deification of nature. Rebellion against the status quo, the exaltation of the will of the people, progressive education, and environmentalism swirled around a popular uprising, an uprising of the common people of France, who were protesting against unfair taxation and the privileges of the rich.

And eventually, it all fell apart. In 1792, the ruling Committee of Public Safety, that was the main government body of that day, headed by the infamous Robespierre, declared France to be, quote, the country in peril, unquote.

The king was executed, and France experienced a horrific reign of terror, all in the name of liberté, liberty, égalité, equality, and fraternité, brotherhood. The French Revolution was firmly grounded in atheism.

Humanism replaced Christian values and morality. The revolutionaries wanted rights without responsibilities, and they wanted liberties without restraints. And the result of all of that was anarchy and tyranny and bloodshed.

It was a disaster for freedom and human rights. The French writer who had come to America, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in his famous book Democracy in America, and I quote, despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.

And then he went on to say, what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the deity? Cannot govern ourselves without first submitting to God. Now let's move to England.

England's Moral Decline and the Evangelical Revival

Conditions there were similar to those in France. The king was oppressive, and as the nation moved through the 17th century, the economy was bad. Conflict led to civil war. For years, the Puritans, who upheld biblical Christianity, battled the monarchy.

The monarchy won. And England fell into moral decay. By 1740, every sixth house in the city of London had an illegal still. The government was pervaded by bribery. Gambling was probably the greatest recreational activity.

The literature of the day was crude and immoral. The people had more freedom than they had ever had before, but they were in bondage to their passions. Deism reigned in the churches, and the churches were mostly empty.

The French Enlightenment crossed the English Channel as the age of reason. Christianity was all but dead, and England was ripe for rebellion. But something happened on the way to the revolution. Revival.

It began with a young Oxford University student named George Whitefield and his two friends, brothers, John and Charles Wesley, who began preaching in the fields and the coal mines and the streets of the cities, preaching everywhere the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And above all, there was the Holy Spirit. And God came down on England with power. The churches were crowded. Prayer meetings were packed. Thousands of Christians got right with God. Multiplied, thousands of unbelievers were swept into the body of Christ, wonderfully converted.

Spiritual life of the churches was restored. Biblical morality was embraced by a large part of the English population once again. The nation averted a bloodbath. The results were amazing. They included a sharp decline in drunkenness and in immorality.

They included prison reform and the abolition of the slave trade and universal education, including the initiation of the Sunday school. And of course, the modern missionary movement was born out of that revival.

At the same time that God was using Whitefield and the Wesleys and other evangelists and preachers in England, Whitefield also had come to the colonies of America. And he, along with Jonathan Edwards, were used by God as a powerful instrument in the revival that we know as the Great Awakening here in the American colonies.

And the revival here in the American colonies shaped the course of American independence. Now, the condition to which both France and England had sunk in the 18th century should resonate with us. We see those same dynamics today.

We see it in the increasing acceptance of atheism, the increasing acceptance of humanism and rationalism, reason as supreme, and pushing out the word of God from the public debate. The question that we have to ask today is, which direction are we going to go?

Are we going to follow France? Are we going to follow England? Today, I'm beginning a series of studies on the subject of biblical revival. It's a wonderful subject. It's actually a fairly significant subject in God's word.

And it's a subject of great urgency in our day, and yet one about which many Christians, most Christians, I dare say, know very, very little. Yet throughout history, God has periodically intervened to energize a languishing church, a church that is asleep, and to reform declining nations.

At this point in our nation's history, I believe that we are ripe for revival. Or we may be otherwise destined for repression, for unrest, and even for revolution. What we learn from God's word over the next several months in this study could literally transform this church.

It could transform this community. And should the Lord be pleased, even this nation. So today, I want to begin by looking back about 2 ,700 years before those revivals in England to another nation that was in peril.

Judah's Spiritual Apostasy and the Three Conditions of Peril

It was the kingdom of Judah. They were ruled by Solomon's great grandson, Asa. He had proved himself to be a capable military leader and he had proven himself to be a good man, a man of God. But the people of Judah had fallen into spiritual apostasy and into a national crisis.

And as a result, God sent a prophet to the king with a message. And as we begin this study of biblical revival, we begin, as we always must in this subject, with a country in peril. Now, such a country faces three conditions.

Let me share them with you today. First of all, a country in peril has a problem with deterioration. I see that here in the first seven verses. Now, let me just explain something at the beginning. What you're going to find in our study of revival is that revival is primarily an Old Testament concept.

Why is that, you say? Well, it's because in the New Testament, remember, the canon closed. That is, the last New Testament book was written before the end of the first century. And though in those letters to the seven churches in the book of Revelation, we see the inroads of apostasy, we see that there was beginning to be a need for revival, we don't record any revival.

So there are no revivals recorded in the New Testament. But there are in the Old Testament. And the principles that are valid right across the board from the Old Testament nation of Israel to the church today are laid down clearly in the Old Testament.

Now, the prophet Azariah reminds Asa of what happened in the past. In fact, that's the main heart of these first seven verses. Israel had a history of declension and revival. By the way, I will use that term a lot.

Declension. What do I mean by that? That is a state of decline. Declension means things are going downhill. Israel had a long history of that. Declension and revival. Declension and revival. Things would deteriorate, and then God would bring awakening.

And the nation would get back right with God once again. Now, what Azariah does here is he reminds King Asa of the nation's history. Primarily, a history that you can read if you go back to the book of Judges and then into the books of Samuel.

You will see that pattern of decline and revival. Now, what I want to say to you today, and I've begun on this theme this morning, is that we need to know our history. We need to know the history of the Christian church and how God has taken a declining church and revived it over and over again.

Why do we need to know it? For the same reason Asa needed to know it, as an incentive to see God do that work again in our present hour of crisis. Now, the dynamics of this deterioration can be measured this way.

The Causes of National Deterioration

First of all, there are causes for the nation's deterioration. And Asa points to them here in verses 2 and 3. Especially look with me at verse 3. For many days, Israel was without the true God. A nation deteriorates when God's people forsake him.

God is no longer at the center of the nation's life. God is pushed out of public life, out of government, out of justice, out of education, out of the arts, and so on. And though we still pay lip service to the great motto, in God we trust, that principle, as for all practical purpose, has been lost.

Since 1962, 1963, when the Supreme Court issued two landmark decisions, forcing the Bible out of the public schools and prohibiting prayer in the public schools, America has marginalized God. And you trace the history of America from 1962.

What happened after those two infamous decisions? The Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the Martin Luther King assassination, riots in the cities, the Robert Kennedy assassination. It was a time of chaos, and the culture went right along with it.

The degeneracy of the culture, the drug scene, the hippie scene, and all of that, marches and protests in the streets and on the college campuses. And I believe you can trace that all back to 1962 and 63, when the Supreme Court said, no God in the schools.

We marginalized God. And a generation, my generation, the first one to go to high school under those Supreme Court decisions, my generation and every generation since then has become progressively less committed to God.

God has become progressively irrelevant to our young people. Till today, God matters nothing at all. And our schools have become dens of iniquity. They've become unsafe in many cases, unsafe morally, unsafe from the standpoint of violence, and unsafe intellectually as well.

No wonder there is a movement, especially among God's people, towards Christian private schools and homeschooling. God's people have forsaken him. Secondly, we see that God's people neglect his word. Again, verse 3, they also, in addition to not having the true God, they have been without a teaching priest and without law.

The people were ignorant of God's word. Why? Because those who were responsible to teach it and preach it had abandoned their duty. That was the responsibility of the priests under the Old Testament law.

They had abandoned that responsibility. Here in America since the 1920s, biblical preaching has been dying a slow death as the church has absorbed so much of the liberalism that crept in back there. And the institutions of theological learning throughout America have drifted into infidelity.

And much of this is affecting even evangelical churches to this day. Evangelical churches today, at least bearing that name evangelical, are holding to principles and beliefs that were characteristic of liberals a century ago.

And so today, you have popular preachers, preachers who have earned the respect of people all across America, telling those in ministry and telling students in seminaries to dumb down the sermons. People can't take more than four or eight sermons in a series.

People can't listen more than 20 minutes at a time. Dumb it down. And yet, here is Asa being told by the prophet that the problem with Israel was they'd been without the true God and without a teaching priest and without law.

There are causes for a nation's deterioration. We have suffered them. Today, God is pushed out of our society. God's word is marginalized. And there are consequences for this. And that's the second thing I want to point out.

The Consequences of National Deterioration

There are consequences for a nation's deterioration. These are pointed out by the prophet in verses 5 and 6. Notice, in those times, there was no peace to him who went out or to him who came in, for many disturbances afflicted all the inhabitants of the land.

An apostate nation will embrace false religion. I want you to look for a moment at the 14th chapter, beginning of verse 2. Asa is spoken of here. At the beginning of Asa's reign, he did good and right in the sight of God.

For he removed the foreign altars and the high places, tore down the sacred pillars, cut down the Asherim. That was a female deity, a goddess. And commanded Judah to seek the Lord God of their fathers and observe the law and the commandment.

And he removed the high places and the incense altars from all the cities of Judah. And the kingdom was undisturbed under him. When Asa first came to the throne of Israel, he found there was religious apostasy.

But the people don't give it up easy. Why? Because the absence of scripture creates a vacuum which is going to be filled by false religious systems. They were without the true God. They were without a teaching priest and without law.

They've created a spiritual vacuum that will fill up with false religion. And that's why, when we come to this chapter, we find the same situation exists again. Judah still has its idols. And we're seeing this here in America.

Respectable people in the media, in academia, and so on, are telling us that it's pluralism. No, it's a spiritual vacuum that is being filled up by other religions. And it's going to get worse. You can say, well, we can take the true God.

We can take the God of the Bible, the evangelical, the fundamentalist God out of our schools and out of our society. Yes, but it is in the nature of humanity to replace it with something else. They pushed God out in England a long time ago.

And now, the courts in England are showing a willingness to adopt Sharia law because of the large number of Muslims there. England is moving in a direction of actually instituting Islamic law as part of their judicial system.

You see, there's a vacuum. And it will be filled by something. The apostate nation will not only embrace false religion, but we'll see also that the apostate nation will experience turmoil. That's what Azariah tells Asa here in verses 4 and 5.

In those times, there was no peace to him who went out or to him who came in. There were many disturbances that afflicted all the inhabitants of the lands. Internal disturbances, national unrest. There were international conflicts.

The language is very vivid here. There was much confusion or panic. Literally, nation was shoving against nation, pushing each other around. Internal turmoil, international chaos. Now, Israel didn't need to be surprised at this.

Because if you go back to the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy and you read there the passage that contains the great covenant, the Palestinian covenant, we call it, the covenant that God made with Israel in the wilderness before they entered into Canaan.

If you read in the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy, verses 15 to 68, and I can't read all those verses today, but God promises certain things if Israel disobeys, if Israel violates the covenant. Among those things are famine, and drought, and disease, pestilence of all sorts, and poverty, and internal chaos, and defeat at the hands of their enemies.

Those are the things God promised Israel if they disobeyed him, if they turned their back on him. These are the consequences for a nation's deterioration. As we look at our own nation, you have to wonder.

I mean, we look at our situation and we see. Even look at the panic that we have had this past week over this swine flu thing. You realize that if God so ordained it, that could have been a vicious, fatal flu.

God's sort of telling us what he can do if he wants to do it. It's reason for us to stand up and pay attention to what God is saying. There are consequences for a nation's deterioration. But this is the good news.

Revival Through Repentance and Courageous Leadership

There is a cure for a nation's deterioration. And Ezraiah says that here three times in this passage, verses 1 to 7. Three times. Did you notice it in verse 2? If you seek him, he will let you find him.

Verse 4, they sought him and he let them find him. Verse 7 again, be strong. Do not lose courage. And then if you go down to verse 15, you find it again. They sought him and he let them find him. The cure for this deterioration is revival.

And what is at the heart of revival? By the way, the word revival means new life. It means life again. It means the restoration of life. Where once was life, and now the life has gone out of it, God breathes life back into it again.

Now, how does that happen? It happens with repentance. Now, this repentance is seen in two ways here. A repentant nation turns back to God. Again, verse 2 and verse 4. They sought God and he let them find him.

A nation in decline becomes so tired of their distress, so tired of the conditions, that in desperation they turn back to God. That's a major concept in the whole teaching of the word of God with regard to revival.

It involves God's people turning back to God. Revival is always a work that is done among the people of God. And it means a turning from their apostate ways and a turning back to God again. How is that repentance seen?

Well, we'll have plenty of opportunity in the weeks to come to point out to you that it is seen in the brokenness of confession of sin. We will see how time and time again God has broken his people and they have confessed their sins.

Without the confession of sin, without repentance, there is no revival. That's a given. The other thing we see here is that a repentant nation is blessed with courageous leaders. Notice in verse 7, but you, says Azariah to Asa, you, King Asa, be strong and do not lose courage, for there is reward for your work.

Men who are resolute in their determination to honor God, men who are looking for God's future blessing, who are not driven by the present political expediency. That's what we see in Washington today.

That's not. But we'll bring awakening. So a country in peril has the problem of deterioration. Now, let me move to the second thing I see here, this second condition. And that is that a country in peril has the prospect of reformation.

Reformation by Rejecting Idolatry and Restoring True Worship

Has the prospect of reformation. In verses 8 through 11, revival calls for decisive action on the part of committed men. Now, we've just seen Asa exhorted to act. Now, I want you to notice what that means.

This prospect of reformation means two things here. First of all, reject the culture of false religion. Verse 8, Asa heard these words in the prophecy which Azariah, the son of Oded the prophet, spoke, and he took courage.

And it did take courage. And he removed the abominable idols from all the land of Judah and Benjamin, from the cities which he had captured in the hill country of Ephraim. Then he restored the altar of the Lord, which was in front of the porch of the Lord.

Ladies and gentlemen, he did not look at the Jerusalem Post and decide what polls indicated as to whether the people wanted those idols removed or not. He did not look at his own popularity. The prophet said, get right with God, and he did.

And that took courage. It meant getting rid of all of these graven images that had been set up in his land again. And for modern America, including us as Christians, it means a whole variety of false gods have to go.

Primarily in America today, it is the god of wealth. You say, well, we're not idolaters. Listen to the last words of the first epistle to John, which I think were the last words written in the New Testament.

Little children, keep yourself from idols. Obviously, we Christians can have idols. The Lord Jesus was unequivocal. He said, you cannot serve God and wealth. You're either going to cling to God and turn away from wealth, or you're going to cling to wealth and turn away from God.

But he said very, very specifically, no man can serve two masters. Whether that's money or whether it's some other idol, the same principle is true. We cannot serve two masters. But we as Americans have become slaves to our wealth.

We have become slaves to our possessions. We've become slaves to our lifestyle. They've become our masters, our gods. Reject the culture of false religion. Turn away from the apostasy of idolatry. But there was something else that this courageous leader had to do, and that was turn away from the immorality of false religion.

Now, our text doesn't tell us this here in 2 Chronicles. But if you go back to the parallel account in 1 Kings chapter 15, you have it. 1 Kings 15, verses 11 and 12. Asa did what was right in the sight of the Lord, like David his father.

He also put away the male cult prostitutes from the land and removed all the idols which his fathers had made. Part of that idolatry with the male, that means homosexual prostitutes. That was part of the worship of these deities.

Some of the sins associated with the idolatry were sexual, and specifically the sin of homosexual prostitution. Asa had to clean up that mess. That took courage. You see, it takes courage, as we've seen recently.

And I don't necessarily endorse beauty pageants, but you've all heard the situation that resulted from Miss California a couple weeks ago. We have the courage, apparently a Christian, a courage to stand up for marriage as being between a man and a woman and has been crucified in the media for this.

You don't think it takes courage today to stand up against the homosexual lobby. It does. And our politicians won't do it. Today, we have become obsessed with toleration for every form of perversion. Now, listen, we expect that of the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the church, that should be different. And so reject the culture of false religion, the apostasy of idolatry, and the immorality of idolatry. But there's a second element to this Reformation, and that was restore the practice of true religion.

And here in our text, verses 9 through 11, we see how Asa did this. He took positive steps to promote the practice of true religion. What did he do? He gathered all Judah and Benjamin and those from Ephraim and Manasseh.

Now, remember, he was king over the two southern tribes. That was Judah and Benjamin. But also people from Ephraim, Manasseh, and Simeon who resided with him. Many defected to him from Israel when they saw that the Lord is God was with him.

See, there were faithful people in that pagan, hopelessly lost, pagan northern ten tribes. There were still faithful people. There were still people who wanted to worship God. And when Asa restored the worship of the true God, they rejoiced.

They said, we're going down to Jerusalem. We're going to worship with Asa. When revival comes, God's people will respond. They respond with their presence over and over again throughout the history of the church.

When God has revived his people, the churches weren't big enough to hold the crowds. And we'll see that as we proceed through our study. And then notice what happened in verse 11. They sacrificed to the Lord that day 700 oxen and 7 ,000 sheep from the spoil they had brought.

When a man and a woman get revived, their wallets and their pocketbooks get revived as well. They opened up and offered generously sacrifices to God. Asa rejected the culture of false religion. He restored the practice of true religion.

Thus, a country in peril has the prospect for reformation if these criteria are met. Now, that brings me to the third condition. And that is that a country in peril has the promise of restoration. But that restoration is based on a two-way commitment.

Restoration Through Covenant Commitment

And I want you to notice that here in verses 12 through 15. First of all, restoration will come when we embrace God's promise. That's what happened here in verses 12 and 13. They entered into, notice the word the here.

They entered into the covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart and soul. They entered into the covenant. This is a specific covenant. This isn't a covenant they made. What does this mean?

It means that they publicly committed themselves to the covenant that God had established, the relationship that God had established with his people. In fact, way back with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, with the patriarchs.

And what did they say about it? They would, they entered into the covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart and soul. Again, let me go back to the Hebrew concept of heart. Primarily that of the mind, the power of reasoning and thinking.

This idea of the soul is the life. What it is saying, they were giving their minds and their whole way of thinking, their whole approach to life, and then their lives and everything that had to do with their lives.

Their family and their possessions and everything in their lives, they were going to seek God with these things. That means putting away sin. That means living righteously according to God's requirement.

God had made that covenant with the patriarchs. Then he made the covenant that I mentioned a while ago in Deuteronomy 28, before they went into Canaan. He said, I'll bless you if you obey me. I will curse you if you disobey me.

They said, we're going back to the covenant. God has made a promise. For a moment, come back to 1 Chronicles 16. I want you to hear a prayer here that was passionate. This is David had given the task to Asaph to write a hymn of praise and listen to these words in 1 Chronicles 16, beginning in verse eight.

Oh, give thanks to the Lord. Call upon his name. Make known his deeds among the people. Sing to him, sing praises to him. Speak of all his wonders. That's what God's people ought to be doing. Glory in his holy name.

Let the heart of those who seek the Lord be glad. Seek the Lord and his strength. Seek his face continually, not just on one day of the week. Remember his wonderful deeds which he has done. Do you see that?

Circle that. Remember his wonderful deeds which he has done. His marvels and the judgments from his mouth. Oh, seed of Israel, his servant. Sons of Jacob, his chosen ones. He is the Lord, our God. His judgments are in all the earth.

Here's the word again. Remember his covenant forever. Remember the word which he commanded to a thousand generations. The covenant which he made with Abraham and his oath to Isaac. And he confirmed it to Jacob for a statute, to Israel as an everlasting covenant.

That's what Israel said they would do. They would remember the covenant that God had made. They would remember the works of God. And they would seek the Lord and his strength. And they would do so continually.

Now listen, God's promises never change. And the same God who revived his people in that day. The same God who revived his church in the 18th century in England and in the colonies of America. That same God who has proven himself over and over again to be a God who revives.

That God is willing to revive his church. I believe so. Restoration will come when we embrace God's promise. Secondly, restoration will come when we honor our own promise. You see, they did something else.

Back in our text, verse 14. Moreover, they made an oath to the Lord with a loud voice, with shouting, with trumpets and with horns. And all Judah rejoiced concerning the oath for they had sworn with their whole heart and had sought him earnestly and he let them find him.

They make a formal and public promise. They said, we're going to go back and accept the promise God had made. We are going back to the provisions of the covenant. But they said, we're gonna do something else.

We're also going to make a promise to God. To seek the Lord earnestly and sincerely. And their worship, shouting with trumpets and horns and Judah rejoicing, they worshiped God. Now notice what happened.

Verse 15. They had sought him earnestly and he let them find him. God is always the ultimate source of revival. Now listen to the words of Isaiah 55. Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near.

Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to the Lord. And he will have compassion on him and to our God for he will abundantly pardon. Seek the Lord while he may be found.

Revival as God's Sovereign Work and the Need to Seek Him

Now revival is not a matter of using God for selfish reasons. It's not saying, well, we're in a pretty bad shape right now. We need God. Some of the old evangelists and revivalists have sort of implied that there is a prescription for revival.

That is like, it's like a mathematical formula. If you put in the right numbers, it comes out right. But there really is no formula for revival. God never does things the same way twice. Revival comes when God decides to give it.

And that's why those revival teachers, preachers who have preached on this subject who really understand it, always point out that revival is a sovereign work of a sovereign God. But what's the requirement here?

God said through the prophet, if you seek him, he will let you find him. See, there's the point. He doesn't say, if you seek him, you will find him. No, if you seek him, he will let you find him. God's in control in this situation.

Yes, revival comes when God decides it's time, but God's people must seek him. Let me also point out that the Lord blessed them as we see in verse 15 as well. So the Lord gave them rest on every side, literally all around, all around.

Israel sought God and the Lord responded with blessing that impacted all of society. Notice verse 19 of the chapter, and there was no more war until the 35th year of Asa's reign. This was in the 15th year of his reign.