Revival:
Jesus’ Call for His Beloved
Church,
and the whole Creation
Online etymological
dictionary:
Revival: 1650s, "act of reviving;" 1660s, from revive +
al. First in sense "general religious awakening in a
community" by Cotton Mather, 1702.
Revive: early 15th century, from Middle French revivre (10th
century), from Latin revivere "to live again,"
from re- "again" + vivere "to
live".
Revival is a word composed of two parts: “re” and
“vival”:
- ‘re’ stresses a coming back (again), like in the
words return or repent. This is why the term ‘revive’ in the Bible is
sometimes a translation of the Hebrew verb shouv (שוב) (to return from exile or to repent are also
possible translations).
This reminds us that we have often wandered away from God’s purpose and desire
for us as humans, as children of God called to an eternal communion with our
Heavenly Father. This touch of eternity is what makes our lives worth living,
peaceful and joyful.
- “vival” comes from the latin root vivere ,
to live - living (vital). The verb ‘revive’ in the Bible is also sometimes a
translation of the Hebrew verb haiah (חָיָה) (often translated: to live).
Therefore the meaning of the word “revival” is
‘re-living’, coming back to life.
This life, in most of the Christian uses of revival,
is the life of God, the life in God, the life with God, the life for God.
This is what God created us for, to live for him, to live with Him, to live in
Him. It can therefore be called a ‘holiness’ revival, although the
‘holiness’ element (separation for God) is already present in the word
‘revival’.
Through sin, the vital union with God of the first
human beings was damaged in a major way. It was not completely broken or we
would have died and disappeared, cut from the source of life which is in God.
God left just enough of His life in us to search Him, to search our way back to
our loving Father, to find again this life of peace and Joy that was initially
experienced by Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.
The fundamental revival - when this life came again
fully in a human being - was and is in Jesus. It had been prepared with much
love and grace by God in Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and later in Moses, David and
the prophets until John the Baptist. Yet the perfect revival was in Jesus or,
to be more precise, it was and is Jesus. His name, Jesus, Yeshoua in Hebrew
(most probably the way His disciples pronounced his name) means “God saves”.
But God saves from what? From sin, from the suffering that leads to death, from
the death
that we begin to experience when we drift away from the love of God, away from
the faithful obedience to His love.
Yeshoua came to deliver us from this evil downturn,
and showed us how as humans we could experience a revival in the depth of our
being. He exemplified and taught us how we can have the life of God return in
us, renew us, rebirth us as children of God. We have indeed to be born again,
revived in a very deep way that only God through His Holy Spirit can do. This
is our only way to experience again this communion with the eternal God, the
only way to receive eternal life in us. Eternal life is not first about a
distant moment in the future when we will die, but a very practical experience
of God living/reliving in us, reviving us, and continuing in this blessed union
with God.
Eternal life is to know Jesus and the Father.
Here we have to remind ourselves what is meant in our translation by “to know".
It comes most probably from the Hebrew verb yada (יָדָע), often
translated in Greek ginosko (γινώσκω), and
means not an analytical “head-knowledge” but an experiential and practical
knowledge - something that in our present culture is often stressed by the word
“relationship”. It is not any kind of relationship but a loving relationship, a
relationship of love. It is not an abstract relationship “in the head”, but a
relationship in which there are words shared, smiles, emotions, joy, peace and
tenderness. It is to this kind of relationship that we are called, this loving
and true relationship with God that will lead us to have loving relationships
with our neighbor.
Our modern culture focuses often on love, but forgets
that any real love implies obedience and trust. A mother who does not obey to
the cry of her hungry baby is not a loving mother. It is true, she can delay
her coming for a good reason sometimes, but in the end she will always come to
give what her child needs. Love also implies trust, as Paul mentions in 1
Corinthians 13: love believes all things. This trusting love can be developed
only in relationships where there is safety and security. This cannot be
achieved in the fleeting moments of sexual encounter that the world depicts
falsely as perfect love - thus confusing the fulfillment of a desire that can
be very selfish with the perfect love that commits itself to the other not for
a moment but for the long term.
It is for this perfect love, faithful and obedient,
that we are created, because that is the kind of love Jesus has come to reawaken
in us so that we can relive it, revive it in us. We are indeed called to love,
a love communion with God that embraces all our days, all our hours, a tender
passion that we will then express in the love of a married couple (a couple
which has decided to live a faithful and obedient relationship of love that
represents the more perfect love of God), of a loving parent, of a faithful and
obedient child that loves her/his parents, of friends that love each other and
support each others when one is weak of sad, a love that speaks of eternity and
of fulfillment, a love that calls many to their knees in humble gratefulness, a
love that is both eternal and practical, a love that can only come from God and
flow through His Spirit.
To revive us, to bring us back to life, to eternal
life, to a loving and eternal communion with God, Yeshoua came to show us the
way, because He is the way, the truth and the life. He is the Way - he has
lived all his life this constant love-relationship with the father. He is the Truth
because he speaks to us of sin and how to really be delivered from this trap
and enter into this eternal life that is a loving relationship with Him and
with God. He is the Life because in Him was and is the life of God - the only
long-lasting life, the eternal life that comes from God and is possible only
with and in God.
This miracle of love that took place in Yeshoua -
that is Yeshoua - this is the origin, the foundation of the Church. The Holy
Spirit, since Pentecost and up to now has reproduced this miracle of love in the
life of many believers in Jesus - in Yeshoua, because God saves from our
darknesses, from our lacks of love for Him, faith in Him and obedience to
Him.
Thus, through the church, God began to revive
humanity. New living and vibrant communities of believers in Jesus began to
spread. Communities in which the life of God was ruling, so that this love was
expressing itself in all the fruits and gifts of the Spirit, healing bodies and
hearts, speaking words of love and eternity though prophecies, casting out
darknesses and demons from the hearts of people.
If this community - the Church - began to experience
the miracle that first happened in Jesus, many often slided back to sinful
ways, so that some local churches - small expressions of the universal church
of Jesus-Yeshoua, began to reflect more bickering and bitterness than the
all-powerful and miraculous love of God showed in Jesus. This is why often
churches have recognized their need to go back to their birth vocation of living
the life of God, the life with God that the Holy Spirit still offers to us all
today.
To experience again fully the fruits and gifts of the
Holy Spirit, manifestations of this real and shining love, churches have for
centuries used the term revival.
The original revival in Jesus is the best any church
can hope, this revival of a loving, faithful and obedient relationship to God.
For this to happen, a few steps are needed:
- first, we have to recognize that we are not in a
vibrant and constant loving communion with God. It is a time of confession.
We stop looking at others and recognize our need of a holy transformation, of
revival.
- second, we have to express our desire of coming
back to this foundational calling of every Christian,
repentance, returning to God and asking for His help in humility and
prayer.
- third, we have to wait in trust for His love
to be reignited in us as individuals.
- fourth, as different individuals begin to
experience this renewed communion of love and tender grace,
this revival, out of love they pray and witness to others of this very revival
– like ripples on the surface of water - in the loving hope that their
communities of faith will experience this revived relationship with God.
In my denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, as
well as in many denominations and churches around the world, a few days are
often dedicated to this important task of reviving churches. We call ‘revival',
in a restricted sense, these few days of meeting, because their purpose and goal
is to help reignite this love and stable communion with God that was in Christ.
Like a match that will bring fire to dry wood. The hope and prayer is that the
fruits of these few days of ‘revival’ will allow a church or community to
spread the fire of Holy Love to many and that it will last weeks, months and
years, thus touching even other churches and whole cities, regions or countries.
This is a holy endeavor, that aims to light fires of God’s life and love that
will last until the last breath of persons on this earth - as a bridge that
leads beyond death to resurrection, because this eternal life has been burning
in us - thus breaking the power of death and preparing us pefectly to continue
to live this eternal love forever.
Revival, as defined above, is not limited to
Christians and churches, but goes deeper to all humans and the whole creation
called by God in Jesus to come back to its original and perfect vocation to be
full of the life of God, full of the Holy love of God. And this is accomplished
through the revived Christians who live fully in the life of God – the children
of God. Paul writes in Romans 8:19-21: For the creation waits with eager
longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not
willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from
its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children
of God. (ESV)
Let us pray that each of us we shall experiment a
personal ‘revival’ - a reawakening that kindle or rekindle the fire of God’s
burning love in our hearts, through the power of the Holy Spirit, and that we
dedicate our lives to live with the Living Word of God – Jesus – leading us
with tenderness, and that we shall then spread this revival fire of love to all
we meet. Thus, we will experiment corporate revivals of whole churches and
communities and lead the creation to fulfill its calling to shine with God’s
perfect love.
This is God’s passionate call for each of us in Jesus
the Messiah. He wants to and will do it as we seek Him in humility and prayer.
Then we will each become little burning fires of God’s love, and together we
will be able to warm others, encourage others, and bring the shining light of
God’s life and love in Jesus that this dying world desperately needs.
Johannesburg
Saturday,
September 13, 2014
In the Living Messiah
Stéphane Tibi
