Revive Us Again pt 5 - Serve the Lord Only
Revive Us Again (pt 5)
Serve The Lord Only
1 Samuel 7:1-13
Read 2 Chron. 7:14
Read Revival Fire pg 53-54
In our Keys to Spiritual Revival we have looked at getting rid of our idols and confessing our sin today we are going to see that we are to serve the Lord only.
Israel had slipped back into their old ways and corruption, injustice, and immorality ran full steam. These sins could be found everywhere even in the high priest’s office and home. Eli was the high priest and not only was he ignoring the sins of the Israelites he even turned a blind eye to the sins of his sons. We are told in 1 Samuel 2:12 that: Eli’s sons were wicked men; they had no regard for the Lord. (1 Samuel 2:12) They insisted on having the sacrifices to God done to their own specifications rather than God’s, and even worse, they slept with the women who served at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting or the Tabernacle. But Eli never attempted to stop his sons Hophni and Phineas and for this he was reprimand by God. It’s bad when the evil that society is guilty of is also common in the household of faith.
As wickedness took over society, the word of God became scarce. 1 Samuel 3:1 says: This was at a time when the revelation of God was rarely heard or seen. (The Message) When sinners and believers find it convenient to substitute almost anything in place of the reading, hearing and proclamation of the Word of God we must beware because trouble is just around the corner. That’s the way it is for us now and that was the way it was for the Israelites, but revival was coming and the person who would usher it in was Samuel.
Samuel gives three challenges to Israel and to us if we want to be revived in our spiritual lives. First, we must commit ourselves to the Lord. Let’s look at the first four verses of 1 Samuel 7:
So the men of Kiriath Jearim came and took up the ark of the Lord. They took it to Abinadab’s house on the hill and consecrated Eleazar his son to guard the ark of the Lord. It was a long time, twenty years in all, that the ark remained at Kiriath Jearim, and all the people of Israel mourned and sought after the Lord. And Samuel said to the whole house of Israel, “If you are returning to the Lord with all your hearts, then rid yourselves of the foreign gods and the Ashtoreths and commit yourselves to the Lord and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.” So the Israelites put away their Baals and Ashtoreths, and served the Lord only. (1 Sa 7:1-4)
Walter Kaiser writes: The revival began as many revivals begin: with loud weeping and mournful lamentation over the heavy load of guilt and its effects. So it was, for example, in the revival of the Indians in the whole area of Susquehanna under David Brainerd. As he commenced proclaiming the message “Herein is love,” John Shearer reported that men fell at his feet in anguish of soul. These were men who could bear the most acute torture without flinching. But God’s arrow had now pierced them; their pain could not be concealed and they cried out in their distress, “Have mercy on me.”
So it was with Israel too: and all the people of Israel mourned and sought after the Lord. (vs. 2) The NIV uses the word “mourned”, the King James uses “lamented” David Erdmann in describing this is “that of a child that goes weeping after its father and mother, that it may be relieved of what hurts it.” It means to mourn, wail, sob and cry and that is what Israel was doing now crying out to God, wailing and sobbing wanting its pain to go away. It had been twenty long years that they had been without God or had they?
During those twenty years someone had been proclaiming God’s word but the children of Israel did not or would not hear it. Samuel had been telling them to return to God and now he challenges them and says: “If you are returning to the Lord with all your hearts, then rid yourselves of the foreign gods and the Ashtoreths and commit yourselves to the Lord and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.” (vs. 3) And did you notice what Samuel said them? The same thing that Jacob said to the people in his day when they turned back to God, he told them: Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, (Ge 35:2). Isn’t strange how this keeps coming up? We’ve seen it in each of the revivals that we’ve looked at so far – Jacob told the people to get rid of their idols, Moses came down off the mountain to find the people worshipping a golden calf, an idol and now Samuel has to tell them again if they truly want to return to God then they need to get rid of their idols. I don’t think things have changed that much because we still have idols among us and we may not even realize it. We cannot fellowship with the living God if there are any competing loyalties.
The second part of Samuel’s message from God was that they to commit themselves, they needed to fix their hearts on Him. Our hearts need to be fixed or established, firm, solid so that we cannot be tossed around by the waves of the world.
The third part of his message in this one verse is that they needed to “serve Him only”. We cannot just empty our lives of all the false things the world offers and all the idols that we’ve set up; we must be willing to have that place we just emptied filled with glad service to the one true and living God.
The fourth part of Samuel’s message was that if you do these things, if you get rid of your idols, if you commit yourself to God, if you serve only Him, then “He will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines”. This is our promise too! If we will get rid of our idol, commit ourselves to God and serve only Him and not mankind, then He will deliver us from whatever opposes us, whatever it is that Satan would like to use to enslave us – we can be free!
We may wrongly think that if man cannot read our minds and know what is truly in our hearts, neither can God. But as we saw last week, God knows all things, even the things that we bury deep down in side. As a matter of fact there are 25 Old Testament texts that teach us that the inner most thoughts and motives of humans are clearly seen and read by God and that He holds us personally responsible for responding to Him with nothing less than total commitment.
If we want to be revived in our spiritual lives we must commit ourselves to God and we must confess our sin and pray to the Lord. Here again we are told that we must confess our sin for revival to come, nothing can happen in our lives without doing these two things.
Then Samuel said, “Assemble all Israel at Mizpah and I will intercede with the Lord for you.” When they had assembled at Mizpah, they drew water and poured it out before the Lord. On that day they fasted and there they confessed, “We have sinned against the Lord.” And Samuel was leader of Israel at Mizpah. When the Philistines heard that Israel had assembled at Mizpah, the rulers of the Philistines came up to attack them. And when the Israelites heard of it, they were afraid because of the Philistines. They said to Samuel, “Do not stop crying out to the Lord our God for us, that he may rescue us from the hand of the Philistines.” Then Samuel took a suckling lamb and offered it up as a whole burnt offering to the Lord. He cried out to the Lord on Israel’s behalf, and the Lord answered him. (1 Sa 7:5-9)
The conditions were changing and revival was starting. Samuel had everyone assemble at Mizpah which itself had nothing to do with the revival because revival first takes place in the heart and moves to outside to wherever you’re at this just happened to be Mizpah, which means “watchtower.”
This is the place that all Israel came and the time was ripe and in the fullness of time God visited His people once again. A couple of things took place here. First, there was an act of dedication. In his call for assembly, Samuel promised to intercede for the people. This is important because there can be no lasting work of God in revival without genuine work of intercession on behalf of the people of God. Samuel was going to stand in the gap and intercede for the Israelites. This is still important for us today. Most people think it’s the job of the pastor to intercede for the people but God has called true prayer warriors who stand in that gap – it could be the pastor but many times it’s someone else who fills that gap. We cannot take this lightly there has to be someone or a group of people who will call out to God on behalf of His children.
Then we are told they did something that is recorded nowhere else in the Old Testament, they they drew water and poured it out before the Lord. (vs.6) In the Targum, Aramaic translation of the OT puts this verse this way, it says, “They poured out their hearts in repentance before the Lord.” Maybe what was being said was just as water that is poured out on the ground cannot be collected again, so the commitment of the people’s lives indicated a similar desire. We need to pour out our hearts and never try to collect those things up again. When we go to the altar and lay all our burdens down before God we are to leave them there but so often we put them on the altar and then as we leave we collect them up and take them with us. Pour your burdens out so that they cannot be collected again!
This was followed by a self-imposed fast. Their sorrows were more than just words they were backed up by action; they wanted their bodies to physically join in the grief of their souls. This is an act of devoting mind, soul and body to God.
Verse 6 also says that they confessed, “We have sinned against the Lord.” Even though they had poured out water and had voluntary fasted they still needed to confess that they had sinned against the Lord. Why would we think that things are different today? We still need to confess our sins against God to Him. Here is a definition of sin that I read, it says “sin is a falling short of, a going beyond, or a straight-forward violation of the command and/or Person of the living Lord.” At its root it is opposition to the holy will of God and this is what blocks our relationship with God and separates us from His love and favor.
We’ve already talked about how important prayer warriors are to the church and to revival because with them, without petitioning of the Lord, revivals are dead before they get started. In verse 8 we see that Israel was concerned that Samuel would stop praying on their behalf. They were afraid that the Philistines would over take and attack them but there is something we can learn here, revival is meant to be a continual reviving of the life. Why? Because whenever there are deep stirrings of the Spirit of God in the renewing and reviving of lives, there the evil one will also be just as active in attempting to counter all the good work that has been done.
We need to continual pray for each other, not only in the bad times but even more so in the good times because Satan does not want us to be happy, not truly happy. We may be able to gain things that we think give us happiness but true happiness can only be found in a live devoted fully to God.
Lastly, if we want to be revived in our spiritual lives we must count on God’s help and act boldly! What a powerful statement. If we are to serve God only, then we cannot look at circumstances with too much alarm. If we do we will become crippled and immobilized spiritually, physically and emotionally.
Look at what verse 10 says; While Samuel was sacrificing the burnt offering, the Philistines drew near to engage Israel in battle. But that day the Lord thundered with loud thunder against the Philistines and threw them into such a panic that they were routed before the Israelites. (1 Sa 7:10)
Because the people came back to the Lord, because they committed themselves to Him and confessed their sins to Him, they could count on Him to be there for them and He was that day. God Thundered with loud thunder against the Philistines and threw them into such a panic that they were routed before the Israelites. That is a promise for us too! If we would only commit, confess and trust in God all things would become small and insignificant and we would be able to go boldly into the world proclaiming the wonderful power of God.
There are few in society, government, or crime fear our prayers or sense the dynamic power of the resurrection to the degree they should. Let’s call down the fire of God and allow it to fall fresh on us again. Many the nations of the world see once more the power of our Living God. May the Lord of the church come and revive us again!