So many in America are praying for our Nation and praying that revival would come, and rightly so, because we need it! One of the prayers I have recently seen many in social media land is this:
Lord, we need You! Please sweep through this nation and heal this land. Restore our strength, renew our minds, and cast out anything that's not of You. In Jesus Christ’s name we pray, Amen.
No doubt, this is an appropriate and powerful prayer and I give a hearty “Amen” to it myself! When I first saw the post/prayer, the line “cast out anything that’s not of You” immediately stood out to me and shot through my heart like a pointed arrow. There will always be people praying for spiritual renewal and revival every election cycle or when the country may seem to be in peril. There will always be more Christians calling on God’s mighty hand to rule and reign during personal crisis and times of stress.
But here’s the thing about revival and spiritual renewal, if we want Jesus to be Lord and reign during the extremities of life that press us to the core, He will also need to be Lord and reign in the mundane and median moments of our lives as well. Jesus is not a compartment. He is not a calendar event. He is not a whitewashed tombstone that we visit once or twice a year or when it’s convenient. He is the King of all kings and Lord of lords, the First and the Last, the Creator and Ender of it all, and yet, He desires to be relationally involved in every single aspect of our lives. He is the Living God who gave every part of Himself on a cross and was resurrected for every part of you and I. His passion for us knows no limits, nor should our passion for Him!
So, for Christians seeking revival, it means we’ll dust off our Bible and actually begin to read it each and every day, be obedient to what it says, and actually live it out so that the world will know it has the power to transform lives and is the objective standard by which all truth is measured against. It means that prayer won’t just be an emergency valve for us, but it will be part of our everyday existence and conversation with God. It means that we’ll tell others about the Christ who rescued us with the fervor of rescuing them from the flames of eternal darkness. We will serve, we will give, we will dedicate every ounce of our being to His glory and honor.
This means that the Church of Jesus Christ still matters to us because the Church is His Bride. If Jesus is to be our priority, then His Church, expressing itself in a local church body of believers, will be a priority. The Church is eternal, divine, and we are supernaturally called to be part of it. We are called to join a local body of believers and do life and faith with them. We will be willing to be prosecuted, persecuted, and suffer with them. We will labor and toil with them. We will live and die with them. We will experience life’s best and worst moments with them. We will not abandon them and we will be committed to them. We will be accountable to them, and in the end, we will stand victorious with them when everything else on earth has been shattered to crumbles and dust.
But we won’t do any of this simply because we ought to or because we have to, we’ll do it because the same passion that drives us to call on Him when we’re in crisis, also drives us to love Him and pursue Him in the day-to-day moments of our lives, and as we do, we’ll fall more in love with Him every single day, so much so, that we order our entire lives around His priority. That is actually what it means to be a Christian.
Of course we’ll still work hard, laugh, have fun, enjoy sports, and enjoy all the simple pleasures of life. It just means they play a secondary role in our lives now, and Jesus is no longer a buzzkill to those things. Instead, He brings joyful grace in the midst of those things, and we enjoy them more now because He owns it all and His life is fully on display through us.
But finally, when we pray prayers like “cast out anything that’s not of You,” we’ll recognize that some of those very things that need to be cast out most, live on the inside of us. We’ll humbly recognize that when we pray for revival, it always begins with personal repentance.
We’ll understand that revival is not something that magically falls from the sky. Revival was birthed on the inside of us the day we bowed our knee to Jesus and professed Him as Lord. We’ll understand that we are the candidate God actually intended to use for revival, not some politician, unless they have made Him Lord as well. As a result, we’ll take personal responsibility for it.
Revival is something we carry on the inside of us. The Bibles says in Ephesians 3:10 that “God’s purpose in all this was to use the church to display his wisdom in its rich variety to all the unseen rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” If you are a follower of Jesus, revival is intended to happen through you because it first happened to you. God intends the Church House to revive the world, long before He gets to the White House or the House of Congress. He will not abandon that purpose because Jesus said in Matthew 16:18:“Upon this rock I will build my Church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”
Revival is not magic dust that falls from the sky onto people. It is something that catches fire in other people because it first caught fire in you and I, His Church. It is something we spread because it is ablaze in us. It consumes everything else because our Lord is a “Consuming Fire” (Hebrews 12:29).
I have come to realize over the years in praying for revival that one of the biggest obstacles to revival is Mark Carnes. I have learned that when I pray for God to “cast out anything that’s not of You,” He must first start with me. I actually believe that if God starts with me, He can change a nation. Why not? He’s done it before with a dude who got swallowed by a whale (Jonah). Now, if millions of us get on board with that same thought, it will fall like fire, and consume everything else. Let it fall!
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