It's Time
It's Time
I recently went to a Presbyterian church to preach, taking with me a carefully prepared message on the Book of Revelation. At the beginning of the first meeting a text for the Call to Worship was displayed at the front of the church. I realised as I read it that this was my sermon subject. I quickly prepared a fresh message during worship.
At the end of the meeting, the pastor who had led the service said to me, "I used that text this morning because I had a dream recently and a voice said to me, 'Remember Hosea 10.12!' "
This text is a word from God for New Zealand this year.
"Sow with a view to righteousness, reap in accordance with kindness; break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord until He comes to rain righteousness on you."
This prophetic word indicates something of the utmost importance concerning the next and last great awakening of the Western Church and Western Civilisation.
"Until He comes to rain righteousness (salvation) on you."
And it is this, that such awakenings (revivals, outpourings, visitations) are normally (like rain showers) geographical ... not local church and denomination-based, as has become the status quo in the past 100 years or so.
At the beginning of the first New Covenant revival, the Apostle Peter began his message, "Men of Judea, and all of you who live in Jerusalem." (Acts 2.14) He clearly envisioned God employing his message to impact Jewish society totally...not fractionally. A vision which was justified by the end of that singular day, with the salvation through Christ of "about three thousand souls". (v41)
 George Fox |
Later Fox's confrere, William Penn, recounted, "He (Fox) saw people as thick as motes in the sun, that should in time be brought home to the Lord, that there might be one shepherd and one sheepfold in all the earth."
During the First Great Awakening in Britain in the 18th C, huge crowds mysteriously gathered together in market towns several days before John Wesley actually made his (innocent) decision to preach in those places. At the same time the Presbyterian Church of Cambuslang on the outskirts of Glasgow, found itself besieged during Quarterly Communion by hordes of the hitherto irreligious. For weeks on end they refused to return to their homes, preferring God above all else.
And later, during the 1940's Lewis Awakening (northern Scotland) it was reported to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, "The presence of God was in homes, meadows, moorland ... even public roads. The supreme feature of this God-sent revival (was an) awareness of and fear of God. Seventy five percent (awakened) were gloriously saved before meetings."
"And it shall be in the Last Days that I will pour forth of My Spirit upon all mankind ... before the great and glorious Day of the Lord. And it shall be, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved." (Acts 2.17-21)
It is an irony deserving our investigation that modern Christians much prefer local church revivals to geographical awakenings. They are seriously out of step with the Holy Spirit and history. Could it be that modernity has dangerously over-inflated many ecclesiastical egos, to that point where many can only conceive of Almighty God at work within the frame of their glittering programmes and ministries?
No man, no message, no movement is going to come within a bull's roar of containing or managing a national revival. It's going to take the whole Church to carry the whole anointing required to save the whole nation.
No doubt the Cambuslang Presbyterian Church's minister was un-nerved (even humiliated) to find himself overwhelmed by a besieging and uncontrollable congregation without number. But I believe he swiftly learned a profounder emotion; the joy of witnessing and participating in the sovereign, unfathomable and irresistible work of our omnipotent God.
