Personal Revival Gal 5v13 — George Verwer

Galatians 5:13–26: Liberty, the Flesh, and the Spirit

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.

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 five thousand books, ten thousand 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. A Christian printer does this a hundred thousand at a time. So you take one, Personal Revival. The ministry of OM, from the very beginning, has been revival first and mission second.

The Fruit of the Spirit and Personal Revival

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's 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.

Freedom from Discouragement and Guilt

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.

That 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 Philey 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.

Walking in the Spirit as a Lifelong Pattern

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's 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. 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.

Revival as an Inheritance in 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 had 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.

The Holy Spirit in Ordinary Daily Life

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 of them are 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.

The Fruit of the Spirit Revealed Under Pressure

There's nothing that represents revival more than the fruit of the Holy Spirit in the life of the 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 1 ,000 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.

Personal Revival and the Normal Christian Life

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.

Well, 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.

Sin, Confession, and the Advocate with the Father

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, that the 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...

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.

Missionaries, Human Frailty, and Spiritual Warfare

And they can get away with more because the local churches don't see them. 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 loudmouthed 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.

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 battle fronts 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.

The Crucified Life and Ongoing Revival

Yes, being filled with the Holy Spirit for revival 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've 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.

For it is the privilege. It's the plan of God that every Christian knows continuous revival in him. 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 ten times more important than you or Hudson Taylor having fifty 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 twenty-nine years, then there's nobody that cannot know this way of life.

Healing, Humanity, and God's Work in Individuals

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. Then there were some other difficulties in the home.

I 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 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 homespun, 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.

Repentance and Perseverance in Spiritual Warfare

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 kinds. 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.

If any 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 at 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 and 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.

Returning to the Cross and the Fountain of Living Water

From now, 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 Him. 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. 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 with Christ.

Will you say that with all your heart? If you will, by faith, day by day, then you will know personal revival. It is your privilege. It is 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.