Heart-Talk on Revival - Jim Cymbala — From the Pulpit & Classic Sermons

Welcome to From the Pulpit in Classic Sermons. Each week we bring you a different message from some of history's greatest speakers in the Christian faith, and powerful sermons for modern preachers too.

This week we have Jim Cimbala with his message, Heart Talk on Revival.

What Revival Means: A Fresh Visitation of the Holy Spirit

When I was growing up, and maybe you heard this expression too, churches would have a one week revival. What that actually meant was a series of meetings. Why would they call it revival? Because historically churches have stopped things from time to time to have protracted meetings, they were called, to focus on something called revival.

We need revival. And an interesting way of studying church history, especially the history of, let's say, from 1700 on, is an interesting way to study church history is to study the impact and the occurrences of revivals, not protracted meetings.

By having services you don't have revival. Revival is when the Holy Spirit comes in a new, fresh way, and manifests himself. Remember, he's a he, he's not an it. He is co-equal with the Father and the Son.

And what a revival is, is a visitation of the Holy Spirit in some new way. We know he's present with us, where two or three are gathered. Jesus said, I'll be there through the Holy Spirit's presence who is also called the Spirit of Christ.

But when the Spirit comes and manifests himself and shows himself in some spiritual way, although it's invisible almost always, but it can be felt and sensed and it affects people deeply, that's called traditionally a revival.

Revival, Evangelism, and the People of God

Now in the Old Testament, in Habakkuk and in other places, the psalmist would cry out and the prophet would cry out, oh God, come and revive your people. Revive your people. Now a revival is not evangelism.

Revival assumes that someone was alive, but they're dying, and you come and the Spirit revives them. So a lot of people think revival is evangelism, it's not. It always results in evangelism, but in itself it is not evangelism.

If my friend gets sick and he's in the hospital, someone goes and says, you know, they're trying to revive him. That means he's real sick, they're trying to revive his health, revive his breathing, his pulse, or whatever.

Revival is different than evangelism because evangelism is you were dead in your trespasses and sins, now Christ has made you alive. So this revival assumes that Christians can get lukewarm, can get carnal, that churches can get lukewarm and can get carnal.

Usually in the Old Testament, Israel was God's chosen people, so it would speak of national revival. Nowhere in the New Testament does it speak of any nation being revived. It speaks of God's people being revived, and God's people don't make up America.

God's people is not America. America is not God's chosen nation. God's chosen people are all those who have put their faith in Jesus Christ. But in different countries and in different churches, things can die out.

Brooklyn is called the borough of churches, but it has mostly empty church buildings because although the Word was preached in many of them, sometimes they went into false teaching or left the Bible, but in many places where the Bible was adhered to, converts would cease to be made, love ceased to exist between the believers, all spiritual energy and excitement and fervency died out, and the church became dead.

The glory departed. The only answer to that is a revival, not through teaching, although teaching is needed, but you need a visitation of the Holy Spirit. That's one of the most interesting studies that you can make is the history of revivals.

The Great Awakening and Revival in Church History

For example, before we became a nation and we were 13 colonies, speaking of America, swearing, cursing, stealing, immorality became so prevalent in the colonies, drunkenness, people not going to work, there was a total dissolution of the fabric of the society that was going on.

This is prior to 1776 and the Revolutionary War and all that. People in New England especially and other places began to cry out to God that God would send a revival to their churches because the churches were making no converts, nobody was coming to church, meetings were dead and dry, and they started to cry out, Lord, revive your people, speaking of the church, because they saw they were having, they were not salt, or if they were salt, they had lost their savor.

Their light was hid under a bushel. And the Bible, Jesus said, if salt loses its savor, it's nothing, good for nothing, but to be put on a dunghill. They began to cry out. Some interesting things happened in meetings where things were interrupted.

The spirit began to move in a deep way. And the next thing you know, churches began to pray. The gospel now started to be preached with new power. The ministers who had been just putting people to sleep, now they were commanding their attention.

Converts started to be made. And any historian will tell you that the Great Awakening changed the history of America. What was the Great Awakening? It was a revival of God's spirit among his people, which then affected society.

People who don't believe in Jesus Christ can't be revived. They need to be born again. Jesus said to people who are not Christians, you must be born again. There was a second Great Awakening. There was a revival in Wales in the early 1900s that transformed that part of the world.

But not only are there historic nation, there was revivals in China, there was revivals in other parts of the world. In Africa, there's an interesting study about revival. But revival not only happens on a big scale, revival can happen on a church scale.

Revival can happen in a local church where suddenly they get tired of the same old, same old, and they begin to cry out to God and say, God, unless you come, it'll just be music. It'll just be preaching.

Music doesn't change anyone. Preaching in itself doesn't change anyone. Send the fire, O Lord. Open up the heavens and come down and add your blessing to the work. For unless the Lord build a house, they that, what?

Labor, labor in vain. This is the reason why so much money is being poured in now to world evangelism. And there's so puny results when you think of the amount of money and amount of workers in certain parts of the world and other places.

Not always the case. Some mission fields are just hard and need a breakthrough. But someone has to break through to bring down some blessing of God. And that blessing of God can last for many generations.

It can continue on. It builds its own momentum where there's an outpouring of the Spirit. And sometimes the people who prayed it down have died, but the blessing goes on for the people who are still alive.

Revival in the Alianza Churches of Peru

I'm thinking of a situation right now where I know in Lima, Peru, among the Alianza churches, which are the Missionary Alliance churches. And if you took all the other denominations in Lima and in Peru and you stacked them all up, all the Baptists, all the Assemblies of God, all the people there, and it would come this high in terms of evangelism, people one to the Lord, and many churches just struggling, not a spirit of freedom and liberty in the services.

And I had made, let's say, 10 visits there. And then I went one day, I was in a hotel staying there, and a man asked to see me. And he was the highest official of the Missionary Alliance churches there in Peru.

And he said, I've always wanted to meet you. I've wanted to meet you for a while because your book, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, has been put in Spanish. And it's been ordered all pastors, all workers in Missionary Alliance in all of South America have to read this book.

So now I'm meeting the person, your book has blessed me. Would you come and speak at our Mother Church or at some of other churches? Would you speak at a conference? I said, let me pray about it. And then I felt this is something God wants me to do.

So my translator and I, my dear friend, Pastor Impaglia, we walked in the first time to the Alianza Church, the Alliance Church, and we just walked into the Mother Church. And they were just starting to sing.

And it was like you were in heaven. And it was just huge buildings packed. I heard about other big churches in the city. And this is where most churches have 30 people, 50 people, 40 people. These are 1 ,000, 2 ,000, 1 ,000, 1 ,500.

So I was watching it and discerning like, wow, there's like a flow of just God's Spirit, His grace, His blessing. So I started to ask around, and I found out that the Alliance Churches are not that strong in Chile, which is to the south.

I found that they're not that strong in Ecuador, to the north. They're not that strong in Argentina, to the east. So I started to ask and say, so what's the deal here? How did the gospel come? What's going on here in these Alliance Churches?

And they said, oh, some missionaries came like 40 years ago, 50 years ago, and there was hardly any fruit. And they got desperate, and they said, God, please open the heavens and come down. God, please visit the Christians, the handfuls that we have.

Lord, do something that will glorify your name. Do something so the gospel can be spread with power. Somehow they touched God, and now the people living and getting converted are still enjoying. They all said that.

And they were talking about American missionaries, and these were Peruvian pastors who are now doing all the leadership. But they just were happy to tell me, somebody broke through, and we're enjoying the blessing of God.

Now, we don't wanna grieve it. We wanted the Holy Spirit to grow and strength among us, and so on and so forth. So that's revival in a fellowship of churches, in local churches. You can have personal revival.

Personal Revival and the Necessity of Prayer

You can have a visitation of God in your life. You can be backsliding, getting drifting away from the Lord, getting insensitive to sin. Your love is waxing cold toward other people. It's just all mechanical.

The only thing that will bring you back is not teaching, not this. You need an invasion of the Spirit of God in your life who then quickens everything that was once there, and the love is back, and the hunger for God's Word is back.

And you know, wow, God. How many are with me so far? Put your hands together. That's what revival is. That's why prayer has always preceded revival. That's why we're gonna pray tonight. That's why this prayer meeting is so important, because whatever God is gonna do, it's almost always preceded by prayer.

You could say, well, he's gonna do what he wants to do, but no, it's not exactly that. Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you'll find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. What happens in revival? Like, how do you know how revival works?

How do you know when the Holy Spirit is really moving instead of just having church or doing mission work? When I came to the Brooklyn Tabernacle and there was this handful of people, Carol and I walked right by and peeked into the Muslim Center that used to be the first building we met in on Atlantic between 3rd and 4th Avenues.

And I was aware that I had known pastors who for 40 years had said, God did great things in the past. He did this in the Great Awakening. He did this at the Day of Pentecost. He did this in the, and then other people would say, and God, one day before Christ comes, he's gonna send a great revival.

The only unfortunate thing about that was I knew of people who had said that for 40 years and never saw any fruit come from their ministry. Few converts, no prayer meetings, no love among the people, no hunger for God's Word.

Young and naive and making a lot of mistakes, but sincere for the most part. I got desperate. I said, God, if you don't do something, and I did pray this prayer. I'm not repeating it for melodramatic reasons.

I did pray. I got so desperate because nothing was happening. My sermons were pathetic. There were a lot of adversaries, spiritual blockage. It was so hard. And I did pray, God, if you're not gonna break through and have Carol and I see something happen, if you're not gonna bear fruit through our lives, if you're just gonna send me to hold a fort here and be faithful, I wanna be faithful, but I see something more than being faithful.

I see fruit in the Bible. I see certain men from Cyprus and Cyrene went and the hand of the Lord was with them and multitudes turned to the Lord. Why did that happen? Because the hand of the Lord was with them.

So let the hand of the Lord be with me. Please, God, whatever you have to change in me, but if you don't, then take my life. I have one child. She's a little girl. I know you'll take care of Carol and her, but I cannot take the idea of me just living and having church and gathering 20, 30 people, 40 people, pay the bills and just run around the building and shout glory.

I can't do that, God. There's something better that you have. We began to passionately cry out, especially in the first prayer meeting on a Tuesday night where we started to emphasize it as a prayer meeting.

There were maybe 10, 11, 12 of us in the front of the church holding hands in the front of that little auditorium and we would just pray and say, God, please come and do something to glorify your name.

How will your name be glorified if nobody gets converted? How will your name be glorified if the people don't love each other? How will your name be glorified if there's no visitation of your Holy Spirit?

Spiritual Gifts and Order in Worship

In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul is teaching about indiscriminate tongue speaking in a church, that people who were gifted to speak in tongues and then usually in a meeting, it's to be interpreted by somebody into the language of the people so that the church can be blessed because the rule in a service like this is nothing can be done unless it blesses all the people.

Nobody can have a seizure or a fit and draw attention to themself and stop the meeting and then none of us understand what's happening and there's no blessing for us, no matter what you've seen or heard.

That is totally unbiblical. Everything must be done, Paul says, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he writes, everything must be done to edification. So in the Corinthian church, they had a lot of gifts and some of the people who were speaking in tongues, he doesn't say it's false, but they were getting carried away and they forgot that always God has you in control.

Anytime you see someone who's totally out of control, they are not in the spirit for the spirit of the prophets is subject to the prophets. God never makes you totally out of control. You're being used by him in some way, but you're under control.

People were speaking in tongues and the stranger and the unlearned person, the person maybe wanting to know more, but not knowing much or the unbeliever would come in and Paul is telling them, now look, if you all speak in tongues, just indiscriminately, you're yelling out in different languages that no one understands, he says in 1 Corinthians 14, you could look at it, he says the people who come in are gonna say, you're crazy, you're crazy.

Anybody who excuses that Bible, well that's the Holy Ghost. You gotta read the Bible a little careful. Chaos is never God's plan for a service or a life. So God is not the author of confusion. Things have to be done decently in order, but in God's order, in God's order and sometimes that's strange, but it always ends up edifying the people.

Anytime someone's out of control, it's never of the Holy Spirit. Anytime you see someone thrashing about, not there, but churches have planted that in people's mind that if you go crazy, that means it's the Holy Spirit.

It's not. The Bible teaches us that, it's not my opinion, it's not a white church thing or a black church or a Puerto Rican church, it's the Bible. The problem is, Paul says what's better is to speak in the language of the people, to be anointed and speak in the language of the people because when you speak with the Holy Spirit helping you in English, let's say, then the church is really built up.

So he says, here's the goal, and I wanna generalize this and say, this is what happens when the Holy Spirit moves, when the Holy Spirit is working in a service, through a choir, through a minister, through a person, this is the sign.

Conviction of Sin and the Secrets of the Heart

So if the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues and some who do not understand or some unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind? But if an unbeliever or someone who does not understand comes in while everyone is prophesying, let's summarize that and put, the Spirit is really moving, he will be convinced by all that he is a sinner, convicted, and he will be judged by all, and the secrets of his heart will be laid bare, so he will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, God is really among you.

I'll read that again. Let me summarize a little differently. If an unbeliever or someone who's pursuing God comes in, doesn't understand everything, while everyone is prophesying, in other words, anointed speech, the Spirit is really moving, and God is using words and his word and exhortation or sermons or whatever, he will be convicted by all, convinced that he's a sinner, he'll be judged by all, he'll know that the people see through him.

Notice why that happens, because the secrets of his heart will be laid bare, so what will happen? He will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, God is really among you. Notice what happens and what we really need in our lives and our churches, and in the body of Christ in America or the Philippines or Taiwan or Hong Kong or China.

We need to pray that the Holy Spirit will come in such power that people's hearts will be revealed. Whenever revival happens in your life or in a church's life, God helps us to live out of our heart. It's searched, he opens it, and you stop living out of the veneer, the complexes, the phoniness.

Whenever the Holy Spirit comes, he makes you real. That's for all of us. You don't talk religious, you don't act one way in front of one person, that is totally gone when revival comes. When the Holy Spirit comes, you start living constantly out of your heart.

Now that makes you vulnerable. You can be hurt, but it's the way it is. You live, Paul says, when people come in and the Spirit is moving, the secrets of their heart are laid bare. So when revival comes, all the secret stuff that's in our heart, God brings it to the service and he gets rid of it.

He helps us to deal with it. One of the signs of no revival is when people are living double lives. This is the great fear now in America that ministers have churches, even large ones, but the people, the congregants who come are living double lives.

They act one way in church, and then at home they're a totally different person. Trust me, as a pastor, that is the biggest heartache in the world. I feel like a total failure when I meet people in our church and I counsel or I hear things and I realize that there's a double life going on.

Lifting hands, swaying to the music, shouting glory, and then acting six days a week like God doesn't exist. When revival comes, he searches your heart and you get real. How many wanna be real? Lift your hand if you wanna be real.

The secrets of their heart would be made known. Notice, why is that important? Because they will be convicted of their sin. One thing, listen now, when revival comes, when the Holy Spirit is operating in new powerful ways, he opens up your heart and you stop living here and you start living from here.

You start always meaning what you say and saying what you mean. Otherwise, we all fall into some kind of phoniness because we're all phonies unless God is helping us to be real. Come on, that's true. Do I get an amen?

Only the Holy Spirit makes you real. When the heart is opened, we get convicted of sin. Paul says, now when the spirit is moving, the stranger, the unlearned will be convicted of their sin. They'll be convinced they're a sinner.

Conviction of Sin Leads People to the Savior

Brothers and sisters, when we pray tonight, we gotta pray, first of all, that God will convict us of sin because whenever you're convicted of sin, you know God is working with you. When you don't feel bad about anything you're saying or doing, you're in a terrible place.

When you justify everything you do and everything you say, you're in a bad place. One of the things of walking with Jesus is you become tender to sin. One of the signs of revival is you're careful every word that you say.

When the spirit isn't moving, we're talking all kinds of things, insulting people, hurting people, doing all kinds of stuff. Don't blame me, don't talk to me, don't correct me. But when the Holy Spirit's working, you become like a lamb.

A Personal Conviction About Judgmental Selfishness

You know, the Lord convicted me of something. The other day, I was in a restaurant and I was sitting at a counter by myself. Carol was working on music. And I sat down with my New York Times at a counter just gonna have a dinner all by myself.

And suddenly, some windows about 30 feet away, I hear a baby crying. But the baby just wasn't crying. The baby was, he just, rawr, like one of those. So I just looked over and I saw, I had my glasses for distance on and couldn't make out.

And I saw a woman trying to quiet this one-year-old. And then there was another little boy, look, about four years old. He was eating his food, but this one child. But have you ever been somewhere, like especially on an airplane, where the child not only cries, they have like the gift of crying, they have a ministry of crying.

This child would not stop crying. And two or three times, it so rattled me because the child had this kind of scream that would just cut through, right? And it threw me off and I'm thinking, oh my goodness.

I looked at the waiter and the waiter looked at me like, hey, what can I tell you? I only work here and I only eat here and I gotta eat with this going on. So I'm trying to eat my food, but it was hard.

It really bothered me and God knows, I thought, should I walk over and just say, ma 'am, could you please take care of that child? Because it wasn't going on for five minutes, I'm talking 20 minutes, right?

Then she held the child or something, the child stopped a little bit. I finished my meal, I went to pay my bill and I walked a little closer so I could see, it wasn't the mother, it wasn't the mother of the children.

It was the grandmother. And where I was, it could very well be that there is no mother on the scene. But some grandmother with gray hair was fighting to take care of a 10-month-old and a four-year-old.

And I was being bothered while I ate my steak. Steak, no less. And I had to stop and say, God, forgive me. Because I was judging that situation. And I was so selfish and into myself. Don't look at me like I'm unsanctified.

How many of you have ever been convicted by God about an attitude? Come on, lift up your hands, confession is good. One of the things about revival is not only we get convicted of sin, and this is what you have to pray for, that in the services when people walk in, they get convicted of sin.

Unless you're convicted of sin, you will never call on the Savior. Only people who feel they're drowning and are lost reach out for a Savior. If people feel they're fine, they're not gonna believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.

So when revival comes, evangelism is made possible because there's an atmosphere where people are convicted of their sins. And then falling on their face, they will say, surely God is among you. Notice what happens when the spirit moves.

You get into your heart and out of your complexes and your little charade that we all play. You live out of your heart. Number two, you become sensitive to sin. You don't make justification for it. You're convicted of it.

Lord, forgive me. Read the Psalms and see if David ever got convicted about his sins. See if Peter ever was convicted about his sin. Number three, you're humbled, falling on their face. Only the Holy Spirit can humble us.

Humility, Mercy, and Restoration

Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. But the humble God will lift up. But who's gonna humble me when I'm the one who's proud? How can the pride humble the proud person? But when the spirit comes and he shows you who God is and how awesome he is, when he shows you all the sins that you've been forgiven, who could judge somebody else?

When the Holy Spirit's working, he shows you all that God has done for you. Come on, up in the balcony, how many sins has God forgiven in your life? How about downstairs? How about 10 ,000? Maybe 50 ,000?

How about a million? Come on, how many have had mercy shown you? Lift up both your hands, right? But unless the Holy Spirit shows us, unless there's a spirit of revival, unless God is moving, we judge each other instead of saying, thank you, Jesus.

Instead of restoring somebody, we judge people and we think that's spirituality. So that's why we need a visitation of the Holy Spirit. And notice the testimony of a great church and it's the testimony of a good person.

Worship That Recognizes God's Presence

Notice what the unlearned and the stranger said. The unbeliever and the seeker walked out of the church. Paul said, if the spirit is moving, if there's revival, they'll say, I don't understand everything, but God is in this place.

I have prayed as God is my witness. I say this for his glory, not for any praise. I have prayed that a thousand times in my life. God, give Carol and I a church that we can lead where when the people leave, they don't know my name or the choir or the name of the church, but let them leave from Pennsylvania and when they leave, they'll go, God is in that place.

How many want that? Come on, can we put our hands together? God is in that place. Come on, let's really clap. God is in that place. God is in that place. God is in that place. Weren't the announcements done cleverly?

Wasn't the music good? Isn't the band good? Come on, Caleb, we've been churches like that where they're trying to impress by talent and the worship singers and the clothes and the pastor showing off. No, what we wanna see here is, oh, Holy Spirit, come.

So when the people leave, they go, oh, goodness, mercy. God is in that place. Oh, God, you are awesome. Can we do it one more time? Let's just say God. Every time I get an email where they say, I visited your church, God was there.

I met God. I just go, thank you, Jesus. I don't want them to say your sermon was so clever. I want them to say God was in that place. I don't want them to say Carol's chords and the way she leads. I wanna say when the choir sang, I knew God was in that place.

Praying for Revival and the Holy Spirit's Manifest Presence

Let's just lift our hands. Come on, praise God. Praise Him out loud, come on. Don't be embarrassed to praise Him out loud. We praise you, God. God, we need a revival. We want you to come and visit us, Lord, in our lives, in our church, Lord, in all the churches around New York City, in Pennsylvania, where my friends are from, Lord, in Colorado, Lord, where my friends are from, Lord.

Oh, God, in Haiti, where the missionaries are from, God, send a revival. Holy Spirit, come and manifest yourself. Come and manifest yourself. Show us how great you are, Holy Spirit. Forgive us our sins.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. If you're here tonight and you say, Pastor, I feel God has given me a burden to pray for revival, whether it's in your life, in this church, in a church that you go to.

Without revival, everything becomes dead. If you're here today and say, Pastor, I want to spend some time praying with you for revival. Personal revival, if you need personal revival, now's the time. Don't run now, don't go.

God says, when my people call, I will answer. When they humble themselves and say, we can't go on without a visitation of your spirit. We want a visitation of your spirit. Maybe you're here and you're involved in some ministry, but it's not producing fruit.

Just don't accept that. Say, God, there's more you can do. But send the Holy Spirit. Everybody just wants to come up and pray for personal, family revival, marriage revival, local church revival. Come on, get out of your seat and come up here.

These are the missionaries from Haiti, right? Yes. Need a revival in Haiti. The church has to be revived in Haiti or nothing's gonna happen in Haiti. I don't care if they pour seven trillion dollars, nothing will happen.

Revival by the Spirit, Not by Human Power

It's not by might nor by power, but it's by my spirit, saith the Lord. It's not by might nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord. Did you hear what the word says? It's not by might nor by power, but by spirit, saith the Lord.

Show us how to pray, Holy Spirit. Show us how to pray. God, send the Holy Spirit and revive our church. Revive my life. Revive my son. Revive my ministry. Revive whatever it is. God, Holy Spirit, come.

Revive your work. Revive a spirit of prayer. Revive a hunger for righteousness. Use your servants, Lord. Let there be a revival in Colorado, Lord, that will just go throughout the state. Let the fire catch, Lord, and spread.

Revive your work, Lord, in Colorado. Use my sisters, Lord. See the hunger they have, Lord. Help them to have faith, Lord, for more of the Holy Spirit. Help them to let go and believe you, Lord. Don't let them hold back and limit you, Lord.

Bless my brother and my sister, Lord. Revive their work in Haiti, Lord. Revive the church in Haiti. Revive the Christians in Haiti. Get rid of the false teaching and let the Holy Spirit come, Lord. Wherever there's something false, Lord, get it out.

Hold it back, Lord, so that the true word can go forth, Lord. Come, Holy Spirit. Let there be a visitation. Let them be desperate for you, Lord. Let her be desperate for you. Let them be desperate, God, that you will come and manifest yourself.

Conviction of sin. Humility of spirit. People brokenhearted, Lord. Tender hearts. We call on you, Holy Spirit. Come, revive. Revive us. Revive us, Holy Spirit. Come, fill us, revive us. Wind of God, blow on us.

God is awesome. Come on, can we give him one more hand cup of praise? Lord, let prayer for revival and sensitivity to your Holy Spirit continue starting this moment on. Make us sensitive when we lay in bed at night.

Take away sin. Make us sensitive to temptation. Help us to walk humbly. Help us to live out of our hearts, not out of our facades. Help us to speak sincerely words of truth and love. Come, Holy Spirit, we need you.

Thank you for this meeting. Thank you for helping us to pray. Get us home safely. No accidents, no anything except rejoicing in the Lord always. For this we pray in Jesus' name. And everyone said.