Gospel Outreach

‘Revival is more than big meetings.  It is more than religious excitement.  It is more than the quickening of the saints, or their being filled with the Holy Spirit.  It is more than a great in-gathering of souls.  One may have any of these without Revival and yet Revival includes them all.

It is God revealing Himself to man in awful holiness and irresistible power.  It is such a manifest working of God that human personalities are over-shadowed, and human programs abandoned…’

Revival is therefore essentially an experience first of all in the Church amongst the people of God.  It is restoring life where it has ebbed away.  It brings the Church to a spiritual state in which it can effectively live its God-designed life.  It enables the Church to give proper execution to the Great Commission under the manifest power of the Holy Spirit.  It is also doubtless the way in which God would prepare His Church to be as a spotless Bride, eagerly awaiting her Lord’s return.

As we proceed in these articles it shall be shown very clearly that Revival is not a ‘nice-to-have’ in addition to what the Church has but it is a Divine imperative.  Therefore the Church not walking in true Holy Ghost Bible-based Revival, is in fact disobedient to the Lord.

Dr Johannes van der Colff quite correctly says: ‘Revival…is a Divine attack on society through a restoration of God’s people’.

Jesus Christ handed over the running of His Church into the hands of the Almighty Holy Spirit.  Dr Samuel Chadsworth says: ‘No other religion has anything corresponding to the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and in the Christian religion there is nothing so vital, pervasive and effective’.

Any true Biblical Revival will be one performed by the Holy Spirit and it will be Christ- centered and Calvary-based.  It is essentially a Covenantal issue, not a Covenant with us as much as it is one between Father and Son and we are simply being drawn into this as beneficiaries.  These aspects we shall pursue further as time goes on.  Sufficient to say that if a Revival is not Calvary-based as well as Christ-centered, it will be a spurious Revival.

Someone may well say: ‘I am convinced my Church has Revival.  Ever so often we see miracles happening, people are filled with the Spirit and we have a great outreach program.’  Dr Johannes van der Colff has the following to say and we endorse it: ‘If all the professed ‘baptisms of the Spirit’ and ‘fillings of the Holy Spirit’ in our Churches were real then the whole country would already have been set on FIRE FOR GOD BY THE HOLY SPIRIT.  If just one pastor received the anointing Divine then the towns for kilometres around him would be swept by a mighty Revival’.  He also quotes Emil Brenner who says: ‘Fire kindles fire.  What looks like fire but does not spread is probably only pyro-technical display and should be avoided’.

Roy Hession says it very aptly: ‘Revival is just the life of Jesus poured into human hearts.  And we…have only to get into right relationship with Him and we shall see His power demonstrated in our hearts and lives and service and his victorious life will fill us and overflow through us to others’.

Revival is a distinct Supernatural intervention from above and cannot be generated by man.  Therefore, it can and always will be exclusively the work of the Lord our God.  This dispels every human effort, and spells death to the big ‘ I ‘ and all that ’self’ can achieve with own intellect, gifts, programs and other means which are purely man-made.  It is the evidence of the Supernatural that makes the Church attractive and gives credibility to the message it proclaims.

Gideon had the correct idea when we read in Judges 6:13 where he says about the Presence of the Lord: ‘…if the Lord be with us, why then is all this befallen us?  And where are all His miracles which our fathers told us of…?’  We are living in the dispensation of ‘Emmanuel’ but we see precious little evidence thereof in the Church of God .  No wonder, Revival must start in the Church of God because after all the Lord tells us clearly that this is also the place where judgment will commence.  See I Peter 4:17.