Why You Aren’t Experiencing Revival
A few years ago my spirit was crying out for more of God, but I felt the sting of the moment: fallen ministers, impotence in the Church, and a lethargic spirit that seemed to pervade the entire Body of Christ.
That summer I locked myself away to pray and seek God.
After days of travail in my spirit, I heard the Spirit of the Lord speak to me, “Son, I am going to show you the missing ingredient to revival.” Everything in my body rose with excitement. Then in a very simple voice the Lord continued, “The missing ingredient to revival is momentum.”
I was almost disappointed at what I heard. “Momentum,” I thought to myself. That is not even a biblical term. How could that be the key to what is missing in revival?
I was vacationing in Ohio at the time in the home of my wife’s parents. I scrambled to find a dictionary to see if I could get any clarification on the term. This is the way it defined momentum: “A property of a moving body that determines the length of time to bring it to rest when under the action of a constant force. . .” Suddenly, I understood what God was saying: The impact of a continued force of an entity, as the Church, is in direct correlation to the action against it.
Let me say it another way:
The devil is unconcerned about individual victories against his action as long as they do not become continuous. Such actions will develop momentum. Anything in motion creates friction. A church in motion will be confronted by Satan. Momentum is the quality that overcomes the opposition of the enemy.
Mario Murillo says it this way, “Satan does not fear revival nearly as [much as] he fears our discovery of the fact that revival can be permanent.”
I like to express it this way, “Momentum is the ongoing force of the Spirit that transforms momentary victory into a perpetual move of the Spirit.”
This is why the devil fights this progression so vehemently. The number one weapon of the devil to halt momentum is discouragement. If he can preoccupy the Church with momentary defeat, hurdles, or problems, he can reduce God’s move to sporadic victories interspersed with devastating defeats.
That is how the momentum of the Lord is halted. That is why the Church goes from victory to defeat, often taking three steps forward and two backward. The devil is never discouraged by momentary defeat. He simply waits for “a more opportune time” in his long-range plan.
It should be the same way in the Church. We should never be discouraged by a temporary setback. We should simply draw closer to God, reload, and continue forward in greater momentum. Momentum takes the Church from defeating the devil’s works to destroying the devil’s work.
As I continued to pray over the weeks of that summer vacation, I cried out to God, “If momentum is the missing ingredient to revival, what is the key to momentum?”
In a flash the Holy Spirit led me to Matthew 5:6: “...those who hunger and thirst for righteousness...will be filled.” Hunger is the true missing link. The word hunger is defined this way: to have an appetite, to crave, to demand, to yearn, to be famished, or to be starved for.
Hunger is not a mental craving to see the spectacular. That is merely a “soulish” desire. True hunger is an appetite for God that becomes a driving force. It is a divine yearning for what is missing in life. It becomes a driving force to see anything that is not like God touched by His hand and transformed. It is this hunger that is one of the prime prerequisites to revival.
When you and I become aware of what is missing in our spiritual life, it should never be an opportunity for discouragement. “Missing links” are instead a divine call to hunger to see them restored.
Hunger is the greatest driving force on the face of the earth. If you do not believe it, look at reports of the actions of starving men. Some time ago, a newspaper article included an item about a man caught stealing from a grocery store. This was an individual whose character made such an act of dishonesty highly unlikely.
When asked why he had stolen, he responded, “My family is starving, and I am out of work. What else could I do?”
Desperate people will do desperate things.
Hunger in the Great Revivalists
Hunger is the one dominating characteristic I saw emerge from accounts of all the great revivalists. They were desperate for God to do something. They were hungry for God to be what they knew Him to be. They were divinely starved for the lost to be saved, the sick to be healed, and the oppressed to be set free. They longed for the joy of the Lord. They felt a burden that only a manifestation of the heart of God could relieve.
Look at the words of Kathryn Kuhlman:
I can only tell you with my conversion there came this terrific burden for souls. When you think of Kathryn Kuhlman, think only of someone who loves your soul, not somebody who is trying to build something — only for the kingdom of God, that’s all — souls, souls, souls. Remember! I gave my life for the sole vision of lost souls. Nothing, nothing in the whole world is more important than that, lost souls.
Miss Kuhlman hungered for lost humanity to come to the reconciling, saving knowledge of Jesus.
Men like John Alexander Dowie hungered for God’s touch in humanity. In 1877, Dowie left the organized church, because he felt it was misdirected. Dowie “felt an increasing burden for the ignorant, uncared for, perishing masses” of lost souls. He dreamed of the formation of a church which would work day and night for the reclamation of the perishing.
It is this hunger that formulated his passion for ministry. Just before he left Australia to come to America, Dowie recorded these words concerning a vision he had from God:
...Then suddenly, the earth seemed to be vocal. I could hear the wave of pain and the cries of the dying, rising from all continents, swelling up from all cities and hamlets, villages and solitudes, from ten thousand times ten thousand homes where babes in mothers’ arms, and children lay dying, breaking loving hearts. Oh, how can I tell it? I could hear the cry of the suffering coming up from all the earth, from millions of beds in weary pain crying, “Oh, Lord, how long, how long?” and my heart was broken. I wept bitterly and threw myself down in agony. Was there no help?
It was his passion to be a vessel in the hands of God to help that became the motivating force in Dowie’s life.
Other men, such as Smith Wigglesworth, demonstrated an insatiable hunger for God. Wigglesworth was far from being discontented, but the more he had of God, the more he wanted. There is an adage that says:
All of self, none of God.
Less of self, more of God.
None of self, all of God.
That little saying summed up Wigglesworth’s perspective on Christianity for his friend, Albert Hibbert. Wigglesworth was a man hungry for all that God had. He was conscious that God’s plan for mankind involved power, and he was unrelenting in his pursuit of everything of God. He so longed for this power, that when the concept of the baptism with the Holy Spirit did not meet his doctrinal criteria, he laid down his pride to receive the truth. Real hunger will always crucify pride, so that which is real can manifest itself.
When the multitudes pursued Jesus in John 6, after He had miraculously fed the five thousand men (perhaps as many as twenty thousand people in all, if we include the women and children), He rebuked the crowd. He did not rebuke them, however, for following a miracle as we saw in the last chapter. He rebuked them because their appetites were wrong. They hungered for the easy way, instead of for God Himself. They hungered for the by-product and not the product.
Many people will substitute fellowship with men for fellowship with Jesus. Lots of churches are content with the atmosphere of the music program instead of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Churches will fill their calendars with social events rather than filling their hearts with the love of God.
Wigglesworth was never willing to settle for a substitute, he wanted the authentic — even if it meant reevaluating his set of truths. He was hungry! He wanted nothing but God, and would settle for nothing less.
Wigglesworth once wrote a letter to W. Hacking. The opening read as follows, “Pleased to receive the news of much blessing in your ministry, especially in souls being saved and God keeping you in a very hungry and needy place.”
Hacking himself would say of Wigglesworth, “Wisdom, brokenness, purity, and spiritual hunger characterized his ministry.” Wigglesworth was always burdened in his heart for the sick, the afflicted, and the oppressed.
John G. Lake was another revivalist who demonstrated an intense hunger for God. He so longed for the power of the baptism with the Holy Spirit that he described it this way:
When I approached this matter of the baptism [with the Holy Spirit], I did so with great care, but I approached it as a hungry soul; my heart was hungry for God.
Lake, himself, was not only personally motivated by his hunger for God, but also ministered in accordance to the hunger he saw in other people. Once, while in South Africa, he began small open-air meetings in Doornfuntein. He described a segment of people there as “hungry for God’s best at any price.” He would minister with these people in the harmony of the Lord.
Often when Lake was preaching, one of his associates would step forward and intimate, “I believe I could amplify on that point.” In this way, frequently each one of these brothers would speak five or six times in the course of a meeting, and no one could tell where one message ended and the other one began. The results were astounding. Those meetings became a launching pad for seven hundred thousand people to be converted in South Africa. Hunger for God’s best at any price will lead to an irrefutable momentum that will be enduring.
