I am sitting here preparing for Sunday and at this moment I have the Newsboy’s song “God’s Not Dead” playing. The words are so powerful. “My God's not dead, He's surely alive. Let love explode and bring the dead to life, a love so bold. To bring a revolution somehow, He’s not dead, He surely alive, He’s living on the inside roaring like a lion. Let heaven roar and fire fall. Come shake the ground with the sound of revival.
As I prepare for our weekly Revival Talk (These are found in the order of service under Worship Resources on our website) I am sitting here literally weeping as I read these stories of God’s intervention. I know I am in trouble on Sunday when I read it. They are so powerful and moving I can hardly contain my emotion, okay so I am crying like a baby. As I read them my heart aches for that power to move among us. But at the same time I am repenting for my own lack of belief and faith and the lack of faith and belief of others. It saddens me how far away we are from God and what little effort there is being made to return to Him. In our own denomination we talk of holiness but look to leadership training and business principles to grow the church. The powerful anointing of the Holy Spirit is not present the way it should be, we of all people (a history of revival and scriptural holiness) should be on our faces calling out to God for a resurrection of the Holiness movement and scriptural centeredness. People get all excited about any church that is growing but is it really anointed. When you talk about revival, it is the power of God falling on a community, so much so that people wherever they are fall on their faces (not backs by the way) and call out to God to save them from hell. Many times when I talk about revival (my church is getting used to it I hope) you get the deer in the headlight look and “that’s great Paul”. You can sense the disbelief or what’s worse is the lack of desperation for God to move as He once did. My prayer is that the power of God will fall in such a powerful way that it will make people’s heads spin and causes them to fall on their faces in such an overwhelming sense of remorse, guilt and shame (myself included). When will we get it? Isaiah 47:4 “Our Redeemer—the Lord Almighty is His name— is the Holy One of Israel.”
