We Need Revival

Episode Notes:

Today's program comes from the series: "A Highway for Our God."

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Dannah Gresh: There’s been talk lately how people in our world need revival to fix all that’s wrong. But Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth says we need to think bigger when we use that word.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: The revival that we’re believing Him to send in our day is a glimpse of that ultimate day when King Jesus will return to this earth—the Man on the white horse—in all of His splendor and glory.

Dannah: Isn’t that exciting. If revival starts in our hearts we could catch a glimpse of what it will be. And we’ll talk about that today.

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh. 

The season of Lent began earlier this week. It’s a time when Christians prepare our hearts for Easter—a season of repentance and seeking God—and has me thinking of revival!

I know that might seem strange. But I want God to move mightily in many hearts this season. I want Him to change mine; I want Him to change yours, to make us more and more like Him. And He can do that! He can revive our hearts because Jesus is the resurrection and the life!

Do you believe this?
Do I?

It’s a really good question worth asking as we approach Resurrection Sunday.

Let me ask you these questions: When was the last time you saw God’s Spirit move through a community with revival? When was the last time you saw someone’s life radically changed? When was the last time you were changed?

I’m afraid that just maybe, a lot of us are just “playin” church.

I would love to see a revival. I’ve just asked you a lot of questions to ponder and I have one more. Where should revival start? Have you thought about that? 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth talks a lot about revival. She knows what it takes. 

Last year she spoke to us from Isaiah 40. You’re probably familiar with that passage. Here, let me read it to you. Isaiah 40, verses 1–5.

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

A voice cries, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” 

I want to ask you again, what does it take to experience revival? Here’s Nancy to answer that for us.

Nancy: Verse 4 gives us the answer. It tells us, “Here’s what’s required. Four things. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.”

Now, we see in this verse I think a picture of the preparation that needed to take place in the hearts of God’s people, the obstacles that needed to be removed to prepare the way for the coming of Messiah to earth. This was some heart work that needed to take place in people’s lives.

But I think that we also have in this, now that Messiah has come to this earth, we see now in this passage, a roadmap for revival. It's the preparations that must be made for Jesus to come and visit His people in revival.

If we want to experience His presence in our homes, our churches, our land, our world, if we want to experience His reviving presence in our hearts, we have to build what Isaiah calls in chapter 35 “a highway of holiness.” A highway of holiness. And that means that some changes have to take place. There are different issues that have to be dealt with.

Let’s look at these four things that are done that it said in verse four. Let me give you some possible applications of what it might look like to build this highway in our day. There will be other applications the Lord will put on your heart, maybe ways that He wants to speak to you about how to prepare a highway in your heart for a visitation of His Spirit in revival.

First of all, every valley needs to be lifted up. That’s a picture of low places, shallow areas that need to be built up and filled in. Those could be different things in our lives. It might be unfulfilled promises, things left undone, things we knew God called us to do but we just haven’t followed through, incomplete obedience. It might be complacency, spiritual laziness, drifting spiritually, frittering our lives away with trivial pursuits rather than being intentional about seeking the Lord. It might be lack of spiritual disciplines in our lives—Bible reading, meditation, prayer, fasting. We have time for Facebook, but we don’t have time for His Book. Maybe that’s a low place that needs to be filled in.

We have time for Facebook, but we don’t have time for His Book.

Now, believe it or not, I am pretty much an introvert. When you see people up on platforms like this you think, Oh, no. They just love crowds. They love people. Well, I have never wanted to be a public person. I have never wanted to be in the limelight. I knew when we started radio there would be some sacrifices involved. Anonymity and private life would be a thing of the past. There are demands and schedules.

There's a sense that it is never ending—260 radio programs a year. Something has to be in there. There are times when it’s late at night or long weekends studying. There are times that I have honestly wished for a more "normal" life, whatever that is, for an easier life. I know you've never wished for an easier life, right? Moms, you have these battles. It's not just me.

In those valleys of discouragement and doubt and, “Lord, is this really what You’ve called me to do? Can You just remind me why I’m doing this?” I'm not trying to get you to feel sorry for me. I'm just being honest that my flesh is weak, and there are times when I’m thinking, Could You call somebody else to do this?

In those times I cry out to the Lord, and I fight for grace and fight for joy, and He gives it, thank the Lord. But I will tell you a lot of what I do is not my natural bent. I have to keep coming back to Him and letting Him fill in those valleys of discouragement by bringing me to a fresh place of surrender and saying “Yes, Lord! If this is what’s involved, if this is what’s required, You are worth it.” Coming back to a place of dependency upon Him and realizing it’s for Him, and it’s about Him. By His grace, I can do this. So those valleys of discouragement need to be filled in.

Well, there are valleys in our culture. We have such a small, low view of God today, don’t we? A low view of His Word. There’s biblical illiteracy. There’s a lack of God-consciousness. There’s a rejection of absolute truth. We’ve sunk to such lows morally. I think some of us fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago could not have imagined that we’d be reading some of the things that we’re reading today that are taking place right around us. Those are valleys that need to be filled, and we need to elevate the objective, absolute truth of God’s holy Word and His character. The low places, the valleys, need to be lifted up and filled in.

"The mountains and the hills" need to be brought low. Mountains and hills . . . these are things that need to be lowered. These are barriers, roadblocks, hindrances to revival, and these are things that may seem large and immoveable. You have to tunnel under them or go around them. They don't just move. 

But God’s Word says if we’re going to have this highway of holiness, there are some mountains that need to be moved. Some of these mountains in our lives, and in our culture, have been there as for long as we can remember, and they need to come down.

What are the hindrances to revival in your life? The things that stand between you and the presence of God . . . the things that stand between you and other believers?

Fear can be a mountain. A wrong view of God can be a mountain. I suppose the biggest mountain of all is pride . . . an exalted view of self. That’s a mountain can grow up in a day, right? Even in an hour! You come out of your quiet time, having had a sweet time with Jesus, and five minutes later you’re a monster! Me, too! Pride.

The low places need to be filled in, those valleys, the mountains need to be brought low, and then the uneven ground must become level.

That word for uneven ground (your translation may say it differently) is the word for a knoll, a hill. It’s not a mountain, but it’s an uneven place that has come to represent, has come to be symbolic of something that is deceitful, fraudulent, crooked.

This can be ways of thinking that don’t line up with God’s Word. There’s so much confusion today and unbiblical thinking all around us . . . as it relates to the sanctity of life and sexuality and marriage. The world is only getting further and further afield from God’s way of thinking.

We can look around and we can see a lot of uneven places—deceitful, crooked places that don’t line up with this Book. But you know what? It’s not just out there in the culture. It’s more personal than that. We have things that play in our minds—ways of thinking that aren’t consistent with God’s Word. Some of you have had this tape playing in your head since you’ve been a little kid: “Nobody loves me. I’m not worth anything. God doesn’t love me; if He did, something would be different.”

You see, we have ways of thinking we’ve bought into, lies we’ve believed, that have put us in bondage. This is uneven ground, crooked places that need to be straightened out. Hypocrisy can be in this category–leaving a better impression of ourselves than is honestly true.

When we meet each other in a setting like this, I’m at my best, you’re at your best. We smile, we shake hands, we hug. “How are you doing?” “Oh, great. It’s so good to see you.” We’re all so spiritual. How much of the time are we lying? Maybe we’re not lying, we don’t intend . . . Maybe the first time you meet somebody isn’t the time to tell them everything that’s going on in your life—I understand that. But we go to church with each other, a lot of you go to church here, and you know each other, but we never get in to see the reality in each others’ lives.

I’ve seen marriages fall apart where everybody in the church thought it was a terrific marriage—but they were playing church, they weren’t being church. There was hypocrisy. We’re so concerned today about our image, our PR, and I’ll put my hand up on this. When you’re in a public ministry like this, you’re thinking, How do I look? How do I sound? What do people think? What are they saying? This can become deadly to our souls. This image can be dishonesty about our true spiritual condition.

When was the last time you got really honest with someone who knows the Lord and could pray for you? You said, “I need prayer. My marriage is falling apart.” Or you’re addicted to pornography or in an online relationship. “I’m playing with fire. I’m getting to know someone other than my husband.” Have you gotten honest?

There are these crooked places, the hypocrisy in our hearts. Everybody thinks we’re great Christians. Listen, the world knows we’re not, and that’s why they’re not really impressed with the brand of Christianity we’re putting out there.

The world's not really impressed with the brand of Christianity we’re putting out there.

When I hear that seventy to eighty percent of the kids growing up in our evangelical churches, by the age of twenty-nine will be out of there—does that not say we have some crooked places that need to be leveled out, that there has been hypocrisy?

It can be mixed-up priorities. We claim to belong to God’s kingdom, but what we really love is our kingdom, this world, our stuff, our pleasure, more than we love God. 

I look at Facebook posts or Tweets. I see believers getting a lot of sound and good things through the social media like that (we use it and try to use it well). But sometimes as I read these posts from people I know and love and respect . . . Sometimes it seems to me that a lot of believers—if you look at what they post—are more passionate about their favorite sports team or Duck Dynasty or American Idol or . . . you fill in the blank if I didn’t get yours. That’s not a comment on those things. It’s to say, “Why does it sometimes seem that we’re more passionate about those things than we are about Jesus, about His Word, His people, His kingdom?”

Is it any wonder that the world is not motivated to know and love and follow Jesus when they see so few of us really delighting in Him?

There’s a fourth thing we need to do, if this highway is to be built, and that’s that the rough or rugged places need to become a plain. Those rough places could be rocks or boulders or shrubs—things that can trip you up. They’re not mountains; they’re not hills, but they’re little things we may have allowed in our lives that keep this highway of holiness from running through our lives.

They might be rough relationships that need to be smoothed out, a lack of love, disregarding the needs of others, treating others (maybe because they’re different than us in some way) with contempt.

I think these rough and rugged places, for a lot of us, could be just distractions. We are hooked on games and entertainment and amusing ourselves to death. I’ll just tell you, this is an area where the Lord really speaks to me—this whole area of distraction. These are things that are not sinful or bad, but they can steal hours of time that might have been spent loving Jesus, loving others, building my spirit.

Dannah: You’re listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend. I’m Dannah Gresh, and we’re listening to Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth share about revival. She’s taking her cues from an unlikely place in the Word of God, from Isaiah 40, from that famous verse, the one John the Baptist quoted. 

A voice cries, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

How do building this highway and revival go together? Here’s Nancy sharing how we need to be thinking about preparing our hearts and how revival fits in.

Nancy: We’re seeking to help build a highway for our God. What’s the outcome, what’s the goal? Why should we be doing this? Isaiah 40, verse 5 tells us that when every obstacle has been removed, when the highway has been built, when the way has been prepared for King Jesus, then—and not until then—“The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

Why build this highway? So your town can see the glory of the Lord. So this country, so the whole earth, would be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. That is what we desperately need in our world! God has done it before. I think sometimes we think things have never been this bad. Yes, they have.

Do you think God could do it again? I believe He could. I know He could, and I believe He wants to do it again. You see, the revival that we’re believing Him to send in our day is a glimpse of that ultimate day when King Jesus will return to this earth—the Man on the white horse—in all of His splendor and glory.

We’re preparing for that day. The highway will be prepared. In that day, this highway of holiness will be lined by a great multitude of redeemed sinners from every tribe and language and nation and people, and the glory of the Lord will be seen by all flesh together. We’re preparing the way for the coming of Jesus in His final coming.

A number of years ago, I was part of a team from Life Action Ministries (which is the parent ministry of Revive Our Hearts). I was on a team that conducted a revival summit in a good-sized church in Ft. Worth, Texas. This meeting was scheduled to last for two weeks, which is unheard of today.

That pastor and the leaders got together and decided they wanted their church to take this two-week time-out and really seek the Lord. During those weeks, hundreds of believers got serious about seeking the Lord. They set out to build a highway for God. They started filling in the valleys, and pulling down, bringing down, those mountains of pride and sin in their lives, and dealing with the uneven ground and the rough places.

They got honest with God, and they got honest with each other and with themselves. They pulled off their masks of pretense and superficiality. People stopped playing church, and they got real about their true spiritual condition.

One man who said, “Everybody thinks I’m a super Christian, but I’ve really been spiritually dead.”

Another said, “I was proud, self-centered, and in desperate need of His grace.”

Another said, “It’s been years since I expressed my need for Jesus. I’ve been playing a game; I’ve been a phony.”

Then there was a businessman who was also a Sunday school teacher in that church. He said it this way: “My life was like the fake Rolex watch I wore. It looks good on the outside, but on the inside, there’s nothing of value.”

That man went back to all his family members, including a favorite uncle from whom he had stolen. He went back to former employees, to a former commanding officer in the military, to all these people to confess and make restitution for wrongs that he had committed against them.

Others began confessing sin that had been hidden for years—clearing their consciences. Thousands of dollars in restitution were made to former employers and the IRS and family members and businesses and banks. There was one CPA who stood before that congregation and confessed that he had stolen from his own mother’s estate.

There was an engineer in that church who confessed (and I’ve gotten to know him and his family since) that years earlier, when he was a student at Oklahoma State (OSU), he had stolen a calculator from the school bookstore. God convicted him of this. It seemed like a little thing, but God convicted him that he needed to make this right.

He wrote a letter, confessed what he had done, asked forgiveness, made restitution, and sent it to the school bookstore. Well, somehow, the school newspaper at OSU ended up getting a copy of that letter and printed it in the school paper . . . after which, the Oklahoman state newspaper saw it in the school paper and picked it up and printed it in the state paper.

Rick tells the story that one day he was sitting and—kid you not—(he’s from Texas, this happened in Oklahoma), he’s sitting in the Philadelphia airport. He picks up a copy of USA Today, opens it up, and there is his letter! He reads the story and said, “I’m looking around thinking, Is everybody thinking I’m this thief sitting here?”

This same man had worked for a large national defense contractor. He had a level five clearance. It turned out that he had lied on his application for that job. Whatever it was, he went back to his supervisor. He was under conviction, thinking, I need to make this right. He had to wait—it was a least a year, maybe two as I recall—as they went through this whole bureaucratic process to figure out if he could keep his job.

He knew that he might lose his job, that he might even go to jail—this was a serious thing. But he knew, “I’ve got to be right with God.” Well, they didn’t take his job away. Ultimately, he was able to keep his job—but he didn’t know that.

While they were waiting to figure all this out, they took away his security clearance. So he had the same job, but he didn’t have the security clearance to get into the office where he did his job. So they put his desk (this is a true story) out in the hallway so he could do his job without going into the area where he needed the security clearance.

People would walk by, and they would ask, “What are you doing out in the hall?” He’d tell his testimony—that he was a Christian, and God had convicted him that he had lied. He did a lot of witnessing that year sitting out in the hall.

Over those weeks at this church, relationships were reconciled, marriages were put back together, families were reunited. Every imaginable form of immorality was confessed, and God helped root out issues of various types out of people’s lives. Those meetings that were scheduled to go for two weeks ended up going for six weeks.

As people built a highway for the Lord in their hearts, in that church the glory of the Lord was revealed. I was there. I saw it—night after night, day after day, a moving of the Spirit of God. There was an overwhelming sense of God’s presence that came over that place. There was an amazing spirit of worship and freedom and grace.

People were getting saved. There was one youth service where over forty teenagers made professions of faith—and I think it had something to do with those kids seeing the adults get real and get honest and get right with God.

Now, some of you may be wondering, Does it last? I’ll tell you, eighteen months later a couple of our team and I went back to that church. We sat for a couple of days and invited people to come and tell us where they were now; to tell us where God had met them eighteen months earlier and where they were “now.”

We listened and recorded their stories. I’ll tell you, it was still so fresh in their hearts. I remember one of those women saying, “Revival is not an emotional touch. It’s a complete takeover.” And that’s what it was.

Dannah: Did you hear how God worked in people’s hearts and lives? Revival is not an emotional touch. It’s a complete takeover.

Oh, yes, Jesus, take over our hearts. Soften our hearts to hear from You. Show us where we’ve not thought of You enough, where sin has crept in, where we have failed to obey You. Prepare our hearts for Your return—clean and bleach what needs to be gone. Help us to live expectantly for the day You come again in all Your glory.

If you are listening today and not quite sure about revival, but even beyond that, maybe you’re wondering about salvation, if you’re really saved. Is heaven where you will spend eternity?

Friend, I want you to be sure. I want you to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus died for you. If you’re wresting with this question, then I want to send you a book. It’s called How You Can Be Sure You Will Spend Eternity with God. It’s a marvelous book that will answer questions and help you understand God’s heart for you. He is for you, friend, so much more than you or I can comprehend.

Call us today and request How You Can Be Sure You Will Spend Eternity with God. That’s 1-800-569-5959.

Something that many people face this time of year is excitement that spring is coming! But others are still stuck in the dreary and cloudy winter blues. Next week we’ll talk about depression and anxiety, and Nancy will bring us some hope from God’s Word. 

Thanks for listening today. Thanks to our team: Phil Krause, Blake Bratton, Rebekah Krause, Justin Converse, Michelle Hill, and for Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh

Revive Our Hearts, calling women to freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ.

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