What Does Spirit-Filled Reival Look Like?

Review

Pastor Chad reminded us in week 1 that the Holy Spirit leads us into three big truths:

The TRUTH of Salvation (people getting saved)

The TRUTH of Sanctification (people becoming more righteous/holy)

The TRUTH of God’s Power (healing, tongues, deliverance, gifts of the Spirit, etc.)

This is what the church should be about! We should want to spend as much of our time and resources as possible on helping people come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, to root out the sin in their lives to become more righteous, and to see the power of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives and in our community.

Last week, we talked about how the Holy Spirit and revival are connected and about the history of revival in the Methodist movement. We read the story of Ezekiel and the valley of dry bones. We saw that the Spirit of the Lord met Ezekiel through PRAYER and then it was the Holy Spirit’s LEADING of Ezekiel to the valley and Ezekiel’s willingness to follow that leading that was essential to seeing the POWER of the Holy Spirit at work.

We looked at the story of John Wesley and others in the history of the Methodist movement and how PRAYER and following the LEADING of the Holy Spirit precipitated a great outpouring of the POWER of the Holy Spirit in the mid to late 1700’s, seeing almost 1 million people come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ through the ministry of those present at the meeting of the Fetter Lane Society.

Again, do you see a pattern at work here?

It starts with PRAYER, opening ourselves up to hear what the Holy Spirit has to say.

Next comes the LEADING of the Holy Spirit, showing us what HE would have us do and where He would have us go.

Then, IF WE FOLLOW the leading of the Holy Spirit, we can see and outpouring of the POWER of the Holy Spirit in our own lives, in our churches and communities, and in the world.

THIS should be our goal. This should be what we are all about as Christians and as the Church.

Pat Puffer

I want to tell you a story where I have seen this at work in our own congregation just in the past couple of weeks. We have been blessed as a church to have Pat Puffer as our accompanist for the past 12 years or so. I have been blessed to get to know Pat just in the couple of months that I have been here. A week ago, Pat informed me that she will be leaving our congregation and no longer accompanying our worship. Of course, we will miss Pat and her incredible talents, and I will miss her willingness to help plan and practice and lead worship here at the Downtown Campus.

But I want you to know that Pat isn’t leaving us because she’s unhappy, or because she has a better job offer somewhere else. Pat is leaving because she is a woman of prayer. If you know her well, you probably already know this, but she prays often and seeks to follow the will of the Holy Spirit. Over the past 12 years, she has prayed from time to time asking whether or not she should leave and each time the answer was “NO.” A few weeks ago, Pat was awoken in the middle of the night and she heard, “It’s time for you to go.” She was not happy to hear this, but through more prayer she received confirmation that this was, in fact, the leading of the Holy Spirit and so she followed that leading and handed in her resignation.

We don’t know the rest of the story yet. We don’t know how God is going to work in this next chapter for Garry and Pat, and we don’t know who will come and replace Pat as our accompanist, but we trust that as we continue to seek the leading of the Holy Spirit, and as we continue to FOLLOW the leading of the Holy Spirit, we will see the POWER of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives and in our church.

Jesus had to go so the Holy Spirit could come.

Jesus made a point to tell his disciples that he had to leave so that the Holy Spirit could come. Jesus had come and taken bodily, physical form so that he could live a human life among us in order to become the perfect sacrifice for our sins. Because he had taken bodily form, he could not be in multiple places at the same time, so he needed to leave in order that the Holy Spirit could come.

We read this in John chapter 14, where Jesus tells his disciples that He must leave in order that the Holy Spirit can come to them. The word that is used here by John is παρακλητος, or paraclete, which means advocate, counselor, or helper. Jesus said that the “Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”

Again, I do not fully understand this relationship between the three persons of the trinity, but I believe that it is incredibly important that we learn all that we can about who God is; God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

IN some ways, the Holy Spirit is the MOST important part of the Trinity for us to understand. Why do I say that, because if we understand Jesus’ words in John 14 correctly, the Holy Spirit is the member of the Trinity that is here with us. The Holy Spirit is the one that helps us understand the Scriptures when we read them. The Holy Spirit is the one who teaches us. The Holy Spirit is the one who guides our conscience. The Holy Spirit is the one who nudges us and leads us and at times tells us where to go and what to do.

And again, I want to be very clear that I do not fully understand how all of this works. God is amazing and powerful far beyond our human understanding, and this concept of the Trinity, three persons as one God, is, I believe, beyond our human capacity to fully understand. But I also do believe that we must not use that as an excuse to give up on learning about the Trinity, rather we must learn as much as we are able and celebrate the fact that we serve a God who is far beyond our comprehension.

I think that this is something that we struggle with especially as Americans, and especially as citizens of a 21st-century world. We live in a world where we are able to explain a lot about how our world operates. We have studied the human genome, sent men the the moon and un-manned rovers to other planets, we have visited the deepest depths of the oceans. We pride ourselves on our ability to have all of the answers. I believe that our curiosity and our desire to learn more about our world is healthy and God-honoring. I believe that our pride in ourselves and in our achievements is very much less so. I think that we need to regain a sense of AWE in who God is. We need to regain a sense of WONDER when we look at the world around us; when we look at nature and the changing of the seasons, when we look at the discoveries that are being made in our solar system and beyond, when we see the vast diversity of peoples and languages and cultures around the world. We need to celebrate the fact that God is beyond our comprehension, because if God were simple enough for us to fully comprehend, then He would not be worthy of our worship.

Holy Spirit is essential to Revival

As we come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of who God is and how powerful and amazing He is, we need to come to a deeper understanding of who the Holy Spirit is and how the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives.

Unfortunately, Christians have long misunderstood or downplayed the importance of the Holy Spirit. If we are going to experience revival, we must work to have a deeper understanding of who the Holy Spirit is and how the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives. For some Christians, that is discomforting because the thought of the Holy Spirit brings thoughts of televangelists promoting questionable healings and suspect slayings in the Spirit while asking for your donations to pay for their luxurious lifestyle and their vast television production budget.

But we need to be clear, and this is also something that is difficult for us as Americans living in a cancel culture, that just because we see something that we don’t understand or don’t agree with doesn’t mean that we should just throw the baby out with the bath water. Sometimes, the Holy Spirit will do things that are totally foreign to us. Sometimes people with do things inappropriate in the name of the Holy Spirit. What is important is that we stay connected to the Holy Spirit through prayer and reading the Bible so that we can discern between the two and that we continue to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit regardless of what we see happening elsewhere and with other people.

What does Spirit-Led Revival Look Like?

Acts 2:1–12 NRSV

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”

Setting aside our own agenda

This is SO important. When I was first putting this message together, I had this wrapped up in the same point as Prayer, but I believe that way too often we miss this part, and our prayers become less about hearing from the Holy Spirit and trying to be LED and more about hearing what we WANT to hear and convincing ourselves that we already have all of the right answers and are doing the right things.

If you haven’t heard the term confirmation bias before, that is exactly what we’re talking about here. We already have all of the confirmation bias that we need on the internet and social media. Whether or not you realize it, if you and I search the exact same search term on Google, we will get different results. If we pull up our Facebook news feeds, they will look nothing alike. Most places on the internet use some form of tracking to know who you are and what your interests are before you click on a link or execute a search on their website. They feed us information that lines up with what we have searched before, what our purchase history looks like, what groups and pages we are members of and who in on our friends list.

This is how many of us approach prayer. We don’t want to hear anything new from God, we just want confirmation that what we’re thinking right now is correct and anyone who disagrees with us is wrong and we can go tell them that God is on our side and they better figure that out real quick before something bad happens.

We need to set aside our agendas. We may feel really strong about some things, and we may even be right about those things. But we need to have the courage to set aside our need to be right and ask the Holy Spirit to guide us in all TRUTH. As I have done this in my own life, I have received confirmation about some things, and other areas the Holy Spirit has revealed where I have been wrong. We must approach the Holy Spirit with an open mind and a willingness to be wrong and to change our way of seeing things if He leads us in another direction.

Prayer

This is also something that we need to continue to get better at in our age of instant gratification. We have so many technological inventions in our possession whose sole intent is to make our lives simpler, or allow us to do things quicker and with less effort. If I wanted to give you money 20 years ago, I had to go to the bank or ATM, make a withdrawal and give you the cash, or I could write you a check and let you do the work of going to the bank to get your cash. Now, all I have to do is pull out my phone, open an app like Venmo or the Cash app and send you the money. You get an instant notification that the money has been transferred.

More and more, we approach prayer in the same way. We want to make prayer a 30 second affair where we rattle off a few things that we need and expect God to be our personal ATM, giving us what we want as quickly as we can ask for it.

If you remember our story about John Wesley and the Fetter Lane Society and the revival that started there in 1738, the Holy Spirit showed up at 3 in the morning! I haven’t read any account that says what time they started praying, but I will bet that it wasn’t 2:55am… I think sometimes God needs to know if we’re serious about what we’re asking for before he’s going to go on with fulfilling our requests. I used to work with a pastor who we affectionately called an “idea hamster.” He was throwing out new ideas about ministry sometimes multiple times a day. I learned that working with him I had to think differently about how I reacted to all of his ideas. If he had an idea for the you ministry, I would write down the idea, but I would set it aside and give it no more thought. Sometimes, he would never bring that idea up again and I would never look at it again. Other times, he would come back a couple of days later and remind me about that idea and want to talk more about it. THOSE were the ideas that I took seriously and considered implementing. I wonder if God approaches our prayers like this sometimes. We ask for something, and we waits to see if we’ll ask again, or if we’ll do anything to bring about that reality in our lives, and if he sees that we’re really serious about something, he’ll start answering.

What I do know is that we have evidence, both in Scripture and historically, that the Holy Spirit often shows up in times of prolonged, passionate prayer.

FOLLOWING the leading of the Holy Spirit

This is where the rubber meets the road. When the Holy Spirit shows up and gives us leading and direction. WE NEED TO FOLLOW. We need to be willing to do what he is asking us to do and go where he is asking us to go.

The results of doing these three things is what we have been talking about all along:

People getting saved

People getting sanctified

Seeing the Power of the Spirit at work

Benediction

The New International Version Jude

24 To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy—25 to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.