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Revival, according to J. I. Packer is…
Revival is God accelerating, intensifying, and extending the work of grace that goes on in every Christian’s life!
“Confidence that one’s impressions are God-given is no guarantee that this is really so, even when they persist and grow stronger through long seasons of prayer. Bible-based wisdom must judge them.”
~ J.I. Packer
Revival: What it is and Who Needs it
by Derek Gentle
Revival is certainly a word in the Baptist vocabulary. In Baptist life, it is usually used to describe a series of worship services in which a visiting preacher, and sometimes a visiting choir director, come to a church to lead special worship services. These services have a special emphasis placed on leading people, who do not yet have a relationship with Him, to Christ. The church members often help out by doing such things as singing in the “revival choir,” bringing their friends to “pack a pew night,” or serving pizza to teenagers before the service on “youth night.” Sometimes the services are preceded by “cottage prayer meetings,” where the members go to a member’s home to pray together for the services. This is pretty much what the word meant as as we heard it growing up. Because of this tradition, there remains a “terminological inexactitude” (to borrow a phrase from Churchill) among many Baptists concerning the meaning of the term, revival.
Evangelism is not that to which the word revival refers. Revival is what God sends, not to the lost, but to His own people, the church. The dead can not be revived; they require resurrection. In revival, God does a fresh work in those who have life, yet who have grown weak through sin or neglect. It is true that evangelism will inevitably flow out of revival. Evangelism is important! But in terms of methodology, more and more, we are having to learn how to do that work outside the walls of the church. Unbelievers are not going to come and hear as often as they did in earlier generations. We are having to learn to share the faith in natural ways with those with whom we have relationships.
Here are some better definitions of revival; these will be found to be more consistent with biblical teaching:
“Revival is that sovereign work of God in which He visits His own people, restoring and releasing them into the fullness of His blessing.” – Robert Coleman “Revival is a return to spiritual health after a period of decline into sin and broken fellowship with God… Revival is for God’s people when they need to be forgiven and restored to life, spiritual health, and vitality” -Blackaby & King (Fresh Encounter, Lifeway, 1993)
“Revival is an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit producing extraordinary results.” – Richard Owen Roberts
Look in the Bible. Notice how many times it says, “me” or “us” when speaking of revival. Here are some examples:
Psalm 119:156: “Great are Thy mercies, O Lord; Revive me according to Thine ordinances”
Psalm 119:37: “Turn away my eyes from looking at vanity, And revive me in Thy ways.”
Psalm 119:88: “Revive me according to Thy lovingkindness, So that I may keep the testimony of Thy mouth”
Psalm 85:6: “Wilt Thou not Thyself revive us again, That Thy people may rejoice in Thee?”
Habbakuk 3:2: “Lord, I have heard the report about Thee and I fear. O Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years, In the midst of the years make it known; In wrath remember mercy”
Like the old song says, “It’s me, it’s me O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.”
When is revival needed among God’s people? When they have their left first love. God’s people need to be revived when they find themselves going through the motions, having “a form of godliness but denying its power” (2nd Timothy 3:5). God’s people need revival when they are wallowing in sin, perhaps regretting their sins, but unwilling to thoroughly repent of them. God’s people need revival when they are neglecting their relationship with Christ. Revival is needed when we are low on zeal and have grown lukewarm.
J. I. Packer lists five Marks of Revival:
(1) Awareness of God’s Presence
(2) Responsiveness to God’s Word
(3) Sensitiveness to sin
(4) Liveliness in Community – A revived church is full of life, joy, and power of the Holy Spirit
(5) Faithfulness in testimony – an evangelistic and ethical overspill into the world.
We can all agree with Spurgeon as he described the kind of revival he wanted to see:
“We need a work of the Holy Spirit of a supernatural kind, putting power into the preaching of the Word, inspiring all believers with heavenly energy, and solemnly affecting the hearts of the careless, so that they turn to God and live. We would not be drunk with the wine of carnal excitement, but we would be filled with the Spirit. We would behold the fire descending from heaven in answer to the effectual fervent prayers of righteous men. Can we not entreat the Lord our God to make bare His holy arm in the eyes of all the people in this day of declension and vanity?”
Is there a “formula for revival”? Sometimes, you hear 2nd Chronicles 7:14 used as a recipe for revival:
“If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
But that’s the whole deal, isn’t it? Getting God’s people to humble themselves, to pray, to seek God’s face, and repent? It would seem that if all that is happening, you have revival! The condition being met in this passage leads to forgiveness and restoration; at least that’s what it says after the word, “then”.
So, should we pray for revival? Of course! That’s what we see the Psalmist doing in the verses above. But can we reduce the work of a sovereign God to a man-dependant formula? No. Revival is the work of God. We pray for it because we are dependant upon Him to send it.
Justin Taylor|1:07 pm CT
What Is Revival?
Here is how J. I. Packer answers that question in his essay, “The Glory of God and the Reviving of Religion” in A God-Entranced Vision of All Things (pp. 100-104):
Revival is God touching minds and hearts in an arresting, devastating, exalting way, to draw them to himself through working from the inside out rather than from the outside in.
It is God accelerating, intensifying, and extending the work of grace that goes on in every Christian’s life, but is sometimes overshadowed and somewhat smothered by the impact of other forces.
It is the near presence of God giving new power to the gospel of sin and grace.
It is the Holy Spirit sensitizing souls to divine realities and so generating deep-level responses to God in the form of faith and repentance, praise and prayer, love and joy, works of benevolence and service and initiatives of outreach and sharing.
What is the pattern of genuine revival? Packer suggests the following ten elements:
- God comes down.
- God’s Word pierces.
- Man’s sin is seen.
- Christ’s cross is valued.
- Change goes deep.
- Love breaks out.
- Joy fills hearts.
- Each church becomes itself—becomes, that is, the people of the divine presence in an experiential, as distinct from merely notional, sense.
- The lost are found.
- Satan keeps pace.
For more on revival, keep your eye out for the book coming out this Fall from ZondervanA God-Sized Vision: Revival Stories that Stretch and Stir, by Collin Hansen and John Woodbridge.
INCARNATION GOD SENT HIS SON, TO SAVE US
by J.I. Packer
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. JOHN 1:14
Trinity and Incarnation belong together. The doctrine of the Trinity declares that the man Jesus is truly divine; that of the Incarnation declares that the divine Jesus is truly human. Together they proclaim the full reality of the Savior whom the New Testament sets forth, the Son who came from the Father’s side at the Father’s will to become the sinner’s substitute on the cross (Matt. 20:28; 26:36-46; John 1:29; 3:13-17; Rom. 5:8; 8:32; 2 Cor. 5:19-21; 8:9; Phil. 2:5-8).
The moment of truth regarding the doctrine of the Trinity came at the Council of Nicaea (A.D.325), when the church countered the Arian idea that Jesus was God’s first and noblest creature by affirming that he was of the same “substance” or “essence” (i.e., the same existing entity) as the Father. Thus there is one God, not two; the distinction between Father and Son is within the divine unity, and the Son is God in the same sense as the Father is. In saying that Son and Father are “of one substance,” and that the Son is “begotten” (echoing “only-begotten,” John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18, and NIV text notes) but “not made,” the Nicene Creed unequivocally recognized the deity of the man from Galilee.
A crucial event for the church’s confession of the doctrine of the Incarnation came at the Council of Chalcedon (A.D.451), when the church countered both the Nestorian idea that Jesus was two personalities—the Son of God and a man—under one skin, and the Eutychian idea that Jesus’ divinity had swallowed up his humanity. Rejecting both, the council affirmed that Jesus is one divine-human person in two natures (i.e., with two sets of capacities for experience, expression, reaction, and action); and that the two natures are united in his personal being without mixture, confusion, separation, or division; and that each nature retained its own attributes. In other words, all the qualities and powers that are in us, as well as all the qualities and powers that are in God, were, are, and ever will be really and distinguishably present in the one person of the man from Galilee. Thus the Chalcedonian formula affirms the full humanity of the Lord from heaven in categorical terms.
The Incarnation, this mysterious miracle at the heart of historic Christianity, is central in the New Testament witness. That Jews should ever have come to such a belief is amazing. Eight of the nine New Testament writers, like Jesus’ original disciples, were Jews, drilled in the Jewish axiom that there is only one God and that no human is divine. They all teach, however, that Jesus is God’s Messiah, the Spirit-anointed son of David promised in the Old Testament (e.g., Isa. 11:1-5; Christos, “Christ,” is Greek for Messiah). They all present him in a threefold role as teacher, sin-bearer, and ruler—prophet, priest, and king. And in other words, they all insist that Jesus the Messiah should be personally worshiped and trusted—which is to say that he is God no less than he is man. Observe how the four most masterful New Testament theologians (John, Paul, the writer of Hebrews, and Peter) speak to this.
John’s Gospel frames its eyewitness narratives (John 1:14; 19:35; 21:24) with the declarations of its prologue (1:1-18): that Jesus is the eternal divine Logos (Word), agent of Creation and source of all life and light (vv. 1-5, 9), who through becoming “flesh” was revealed as Son of God and source of grace and truth, indeed as “God the only begotten” (vv. 14, 18; NIV text notes). The Gospel is punctuated with “I am” statements that have special significance because I am (Greek: ego eimi) was used to render God’s name in the Greek translation of Exodus 3:14; whenever John reports Jesus as saying ego eimi, a claim to deity is implicit. Examples of this are John 8:28, 58, and the seven declarations of his grace as (a) the Bread of Life, giving spiritual food (6:35, 48, 51); (b) the Light of the World, banishing darkness (8:12; 9:5); (c) the gate for the sheep, giving access to God (10:7, 9); (d) the Good Shepherd, protecting from peril (10:11, 14); (e) the Resurrection and Life, overcoming our death (11:25); (f) the Way, Truth, and Life, guiding to fellowship with the Father (14:6); (g) the true Vine, nurturing for fruitfulness (15:1, 5). Climactically, Thomas worships Jesus as “my Lord and my God” (20:28). Jesus then pronounces a blessing on all who share Thomas’s faith and John urges his readers to join their number (20:29-31).
Paul quotes from what seems to be a hymn that declares Jesus’ personal deity (Phil. 2:6); states that “in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Col. 2:9; cf. 1:19); hails Jesus the Son as the Father’s image and as his agent in creating and upholding everything (Col. 1:15-17); declares him to be “Lord” (a title of kingship, with divine overtones), to whom one must pray for salvation according to the injunction to call on Yahweh in Joel 2:32 (Rom. 10:9-13); calls him “God over all” (Rom. 9:5) and “God and Savior” (Titus 2:13); and prays to him personally (2 Cor. 12:8-9), looking to him as a source of divine grace (2 Cor. 13:14). The testimony is explicit: faith in Jesus’ deity is basic to Paul’s theology and religion.
The writer to the Hebrews, purporting to expound the perfection of Christ’s high priesthood, starts by declaring the full deity and consequent unique dignity of the Son of God (Heb. 1:3, 6, 8-12), whose full humanity he then celebrates in chapter 2. The perfection, and indeed the very possibility, of the high priesthood that he describes Christ as fulfilling depends on the conjunction of an endless, unfailing divine life with a full human experience of temptation, pressure, and pain (Heb. 2:14-17; 4:14-5:2; 7:13-28; 12:2-3).
Not less significant is Peter’s use of Isaiah 8:12-13 (1 Pet. 3:14). He cites the Greek (Septuagint) version, urging the churches not to fear what others fear but to set apart the Lord as holy. But where the Septuagint text of Isaiah says, “Set apart the Lord himself,” Peter writes, “Set apart Christ as Lord” (1 Pet. 3:15). Peter would give the adoring fear due to the Almighty to Jesus of Nazareth, his Master and Lord.
The New Testament forbids worship of angels (Col. 2:18; Rev. 22:8-9) but commands worship of Jesus and focuses consistently on the divine-human Savior and Lord as the proper object of faith, hope, and love here and now. Religion that lacks these emphases is not Christianity. Let there be no mistake about that!
From: Concise Theology: A Guide To Historic Christian Beliefs
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