When Revival Comes There is Joy! — Roger Ellsworth

Revival Reveals God's Great Works

Powerful. The circumstances were all against Judah. And now here they are going back to their homeland and the nations are compelled to say God has done great things for them. And this psalmist adds his own word of testimony there in verse 3.

He says the Lord has done great things for us and we are glad. And I suggest to you now, brothers and sisters in Christ, that we have here in these characteristics of that time, we have here a picture of true revival.

Joy as a Mark of True Revival

I would go so far as to say that anytime that there is a genuine moving of the Spirit of God, you will find these things to be present. Anytime there's true revival, you will find the people of God saying it's just too good to be true.

It's like a dream. It's too good to be true. You'll find the people of God filled with joy, inexpressible and full of glory. Most of you have read enough of the history of revivals to know that anytime a revival breaks out, this is one of the most prominent characteristics, one of the most prominent features is joy among the people of God.

Revival's Unavoidable Public Testimony

And true revival does not fail to catch the attention of people around. This is another characteristic, I say, of genuine revival. It causes people around to take notice, unbelievers, and to say, God is really moving among those people.

He has indeed done great things for them. We today know all about churches promoting their ministries, and we know all about churches including in their budgets great sums of money for advertisement and promotion.

I say to you, when genuine revival breaks out, you never have to advertise it. You never have to promote it. People know about it. You can't keep them from knowing about it. And the people of God themselves give their own testimony.

They say, the Lord has indeed done great things for us. I hope just reading, and there are many other characteristics of revival as well, but this man is characterizing what was true of the people of God when they were released from captivity, and I'm simply saying to you that you will find these same things to be true anytime God moves in power upon his people.

The Gospel's Return Brings Great Joy

In times of revival, the people of God can join their voices to the voice of this psalmist and say, yes, it's like a dream. Yes, joy inexpressible is ours. Yes, the nations have been arrested by what God is doing in our midst.

These things are always found in every true revival. And I want to just say a word about this thing of joy for a moment. One of the reasons that joy is so characteristic of a genuine moving of the Spirit of God is because invariably, ladies and gentlemen, Christians get the gospel back in times of revival.

I say to you that this is one of the reasons that we should be earnestly desiring God to move powerfully in our midst is so we can get the gospel back. And when the gospel comes back to the people of God, it always brings great joy.

The Abandonment of the Gospel

You may find this hard to believe, but there is today, even among evangelical churches that profess to believe in the gospel, there is a large-scale abandonment of the gospel. It's almost impossible to hear the gospel in many so-called Bible-believing churches.

One of my...