Twenty-five years later, the experience remains vivid. The Lord still whispers the lyrics of that time across my heart, “this is My church”. Church as He intends it to be. It was an ordinary church retreat, until He touched us with His presence. Five hours later, we were closer to each other. We were closer to Him. He had come. It was only a small taste of what happens in the presence of God. Why do we need revival? Because we need Him!
Revival is essential. Revival is the restoration of God’s presence to His people. In Exodus 33, God threatened to remove His presence from His people. Understanding that there is no real life apart from God’s presence, Moses pleaded for God to return to His people. In verse 15, Moses said, “If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here.” God’s presence is essential. We need Him, and we were never intended to do life or church without Him.
Revival is also experiential. In other words, when God is present, life is different. In Acts 3:19, Peter said, “Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.” Peter understood that the presence of God alone could refresh and renew the hearts of His people.
Why do we need God’s Presence?
- We need Him if we are ever going to recover a biblical sense of fear and awe. In Revelation 1:17, John fell on his face in the presence of God. He simply could not stand. More than a physical response, the bowing of our bodies reflects the yielding of our hearts to His rule in our lives. When God is present, our lives are reoriented around Him and not ourselves.
- We need Him if we are going to do real battle with sin in our lives. In Isaiah 6:1-5, the prophet had a life-defining encounter with the holy presence of God. The result was that he became intensely aware of his own sinfulness. Like raising the lights in a darkened room, God’s holiness will highlight all the impurities in our lives. Isaiah wanted to deal with the sin in his life and so will we!
- We need Him if our land is going to be healed. In 2 Chronicles 7:14, God says that if His people are repentant, then He will “heal their land.” Our land is suffering. Secularists are forecasting the loss of U.S. economic and military influence around the world. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods… from natural disasters to national debt, it seems clear our nation is in trouble. Not only has infertility doubled in the U.S. since 1992, the World Health Organization believes the infertility will be the third most serious disease of the twenty-first century, following cancer and cardiovascular disorders. Is God getting our attention? This was similar to what the people of Israel were experiencing in the days of Haggai the prophet: “You have sown much, and bring in little; you eat, but do not have enough; you drink, but you are not filled with drink; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and he who earns wages, earns wages to put into a bag with holes.” (Haggai 1:6)
- We need Him if we are going to love the world the way He does. In Luke 9:36-38, Jesus has compassion on the masses of people without God. He feels something that is visceral, engaging all the emotions in a desire to release others from spiritual darkness and disorientation. When He is present among us, our hearts will come into alignment with His heart.
- We need Him if we are going to answer the heart cry of our generation. All around us, people have questions about God. Who is He? What is He like? Can He forgive me? Can He help me? They are interested in talking to someone who really knows God, but studies indicate that they are not looking to churches for those answers. They are not moving away from an interest in God, as much as they are running away from the institutional church. They have questions about God and a real hunger for spiritual reality, and they want those answers from people they know and trust.
- We need Him if we are going to recover the hearts of students and young adults. Recently, I was talking to a young couple I met in a coffee shop, asking them to share their thoughts about God and church. He was a second-year law student; she was a nurse. Although they had been raised in evangelical churches, they understood very little about God or the gospel message. They had not been discipled by parents or the church to walk with God. Youth are “graduating” from church at the same time they graduate from high school. Last November, Barna Research reported that almost 60 percent of young people age 15 to 29 have left active involvement in a church. Only God’s presence can turn this around.
- We need Him if we are going to see more people giving their lives to Christ, trusting Him for salvation. In the presence of God, lives are changed and resistance to the gospel melts away. However, today we are seeing the fewest number of people coming to Christ since the 1950s. In 2010, Southern Baptists baptized 332,321, the lowest number in sixty years. Baptisms in Southern Baptist churches have been in decline for over a decade.
- We need Him if we are going to impact our nation for Christ. During the First Great Awakening, 20 percent of the colonial population came to Christ and joined churches. Today, less than 20 percent regularly attend church. Discussed at length in his book The American Church in Crisis (Zondervan, 2009), David Olson conducted research showing that only 17.5 percent of the population attends church on any given weekend in America. In their book Comeback Churches (B&H Publishing, 2007), Mike Dodson and Ed Stetzer explain that less than 5 percent of churches are experiencing significant conversion growth—most churches are simply reshuffling existing members. Although Southern Baptists boast having more than 16 million members, only one-third will attend church this coming Sunday. One observer concluded that the church has become nothing more than a symbolic place for “hatching, matching, and dispatching” (i.e., baby dedications, weddings, and funerals).
Everything changes when God comes among us! Let us pray that He will revive each of our hearts with Himself, transforming our nation as we are transformed as His people.
