True Revival
The Gospel of John • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Let’s start today with our verses and prayer.
The Jewish Passover was near, and so Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling oxen, sheep, and doves, and he also found the money changers sitting there. After making a whip out of cords, he drove everyone out of the temple with their sheep and oxen. He also poured out the money changers’ coins and overturned the tables. He told those who were selling doves, “Get these things out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a marketplace!”
And his disciples remembered that it is written: Zeal for your house will consume me.
Let’s pray!
As you seen, the title of this message is True Revival. Our prayer for this year is to see revival break out. Our 21 days of fasting was centered on the message of revival.
To first discuss true revival, we must understand what revival is.
Revival:
-is a spiritual reawakening that restores a believer's interest in God and their spiritual life.
It can also mean a return to a previous state of faith.
Revival is something churches desire, something they long for, but few understand what it takes to have true revival. People see it as a church thing. As a requirement of the the physical church to produce. When in all actuality, it must start in the heart and in the home, before it can start in the church and the community. It has to be in that order or there will be no revival.
According to our verses today...
True revival requires two things:
Righteous Anger
Remembering
Righteous Anger
Everyone here knows that I love the Peanuts comic strip and animations. In one Peanuts cartoon Lucy says to Charlie Brown, “I hate everything. I hate everybody. I hate the whole wide world!”
Charlie says, “But I thought you had inner peace.”
Lucy replies, “I do have inner peace. But I still have outer obnoxiousness.”
Righteous anger-outer obnoxiousness.
I know that my beautiful wife will say that every time I get anger, I am actually just being obnoxious. And that every time she gets angry it is of righteous intent.
We laugh, but you have no idea how many times I have heard, but Pastor my anger was righteous because I was right.
And you do not know how many times I want to say, No! Your anger made you out to be an obnoxious fool.
Don’t let your spirit rush to be angry,
for anger abides in the heart of fools.
So what is righteous anger? How does this apply to true revival?
Those are very good questions, I am glad you asked them.
The great AI generated definition says that biblical righteous anger is:
Righteous Anger- a controlled anger that is motivated by a sense of injustice or moral wrong. It is a godly emotion that is tempered by reason and humility, and that is expressed in ways that are pleasing to God.
So in other words, righteous anger doesn’t make you right...It is what is right in the eyes of God!
Back to our verses, Christ comes in and sees that His Father’s house is being used to line the pockets of those in authority.
Let me give you some historical context here.
We know from previous discussions, during Jesus’ ministry, the Roman Empire was in control.
For people to conduct business, they had to get permission from the Roman Empire. The way they did that was to bow down and pledge worship to the Emperor.
To wrap your head around this, they had to worship the Emperor before they could sell sheep, goats, incense, or doves in the temple to worship Yahweh! The very things they were using were already tainted because it was pledged to a false god.
And not only that, the sellers were having to pay a tax to the Roman’s on what they made, they also had to pay a tax to the temple to conduct their wares on temple grounds.
And then on top of that, look at this picture here.
I know pictures do not do it justice, but bare with me while I explain. The temple was not just a building for worship, like a church building.
The whole area was considered the temple. It is estimated to be approximately 17 acres in total. To understand the size, you could fit 17 NEC’s in the area.
Now, that we have a better understanding of the size, look at this area around the main temple. It is called the court of the Gentiles. This is where those who were not of Jewish dissent, could come and worship the one true God. It is believed that this area could hold up to 50-100K people and venders.
So when we see this story of Jesus, it is not someone going into our fellowship hall and tipping over a table or two. This is a man with a whip driving out the whole stadium at Death Valley in Baton Rouge.
So why tell you all this, one we read this story and truly do not understand the magnitude of the feat. Two, what these vendors were doing, in their minds, were providing a service for the people. These people came from everywhere and needed different currency changed. They were traveling with their whole extended family, so they did not want to carry livestock too. So the vendors, were providing a service by selling the sacrifices for the people.
Now let’s turn this around, and look at it from a revival standpoint. I feel today, we do not have enough righteous anger. We have plenty of self righteous obnoxious anger, but not enough righteous anger.
We should be angry about sin in our hearts, homes, churches and communities. We should be taking on the feat of removing sin in our lives. We should be angry at the things that take us away from worshipping God.
We need to take a nice long look at ourselves in the mirror and get angry at the things we see that take us away from God. True revival starts with the man in the mirror and I am not talking about the Micheal Jackson song. That is righteous anger. When we see what is making this new temple, the dwelling place for the Holy Spirit, cluttered with marketplace junk.
When we are done with our own hearts, we need to look at our homes. What in our homes take us away from worshipping the Lord? We are people who love our comforts, and in itself is not wrong. I love my chair. It is my comfort spot. Some of us like our 85’ 4k smart TV. Some of us love our spot on the couch, curled up with a good book or our holy mobile.
What I hear from most people, I don’t have time to read my bible. Pastor, I don’t have time to worship God in prayer. You have time. You are just so comfortable that you made your home into a marketplace.
Sit in your comfortable chair, but instead of turning on the TV, read your bible. Pray! Worship!
Instead of sitting on the couch reading 50 shades of gray, read a 50 day devotional.
Revival starts in your heart and in your home. get righteous anger and clear out the things that stop you from worshipping, praying and studying God’s word. Get back to what the priest Ezra did.
Now Ezra had determined in his heart to study the law of the Lord, obey it, and teach its statutes and ordinances in Israel.
Righteous anger starts with determining in your heart that you will worship, pray and study.
Revival starts with getting angry with what takes you away from God in your heart and in your home, then it can happen in the church and in the community. We desire true revival, but we do not desire to take on the feat of clearing out, flipping the tables of sin, making a whip and driving out the darkness in our lives.
So it starts with Righteous Anger, then it is
Remembering
Let’s look back at the last verse in our text today
And his disciples remembered that it is written: Zeal for your house will consume me.
This verse is from the Old Testament
because zeal for your house has consumed me,
and the insults of those who insult you
have fallen on me.
Pay attention to this carefully.
Righteous Anger brought about remembrance of God’s Word.
Can you imagine being one of the Apostles and seeing Jesus’s anger, His zeal for proper worship in His father’s house?
I’d be like, he just cleared out 100k people with a whip and some zeal...I picked the right Rabbi.
Now let me ask you church, can you imagine if each and everyone of you would get angry at the darkness in this world and then have the zeal to worship, pray, and remember God’s Word, the way Jesus did here, what kind of revival could happen in the church and the community?
Going back to the priest Ezra, let’s see what happens when people hear and remember God’s word
On the first day of the seventh month, the priest Ezra brought the law before the assembly of men, women, and all who could listen with understanding. While he was facing the square in front of the Water Gate, he read out of it from daybreak until noon before the men, the women, and those who could understand. All the people listened attentively to the book of the law.
He read to them 6 hours!!! We can’t even get through 10 verses without falling asleep.
But the bible is clear that they listened attentively. They had zeal for the Word of God. These people were ready for revival.
Ezra opened the book in full view of all the people, since he was elevated above everyone. As he opened it, all the people stood up. Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and with their hands uplifted all the people said, “Amen, Amen!” Then they knelt low and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground.
They didn’t look at their watch and wonder if the pastor will finish before 11 so we can get a good seat at le Haceninda’s.
They heard the Word of God and they knelt low and worshipped the Lord.
There is actually a story of Paul preaching for so long, that a young man fell asleep in the window and fell to his death. What does Paul do...He goes down and in the name of Jesus Christ brings him back to life..and you want to know what he does next, he goes back to preaching.
We need that kind of zeal if we want to have true revival. But it doesn’t start with the length of my sermons, it starts with the zeal you have for His word in your heart and in your home.
True Revival is the clearing out of all the evil in your life and then worship, prayer and bible study. The only way to remember God’s Word is to be in God’s Word.
Do you have the zeal for the Lord as you did when you first came into a relationship with Him?
To have that burning again for Him, first get angry and then have zeal to worship, pray and seek His word.
Revival will not come without the desire of the Christian seeking to clear out this temple in which the Holy Spirit dwells. Will it be perfect? Absolutely not. But it starts with the desire to remove the things that stop worship...to get angry.
Then it is up to the christian to get back the zeal to remember God’s word . To remember the zeal you had for the Lord.
It has to happen first with you and your home.
It is only then will true revival break out, everywhere!
