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Thursday, February 19, 2015

What is a Revival?

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)[1]. 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)[2]
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[3]. 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[4] 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[5]. 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, hearts and spirits, speaking words of love and eternity though prophecies, casting out darkness 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 the 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[6], 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[7], 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 perfectly 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 children 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




[1] Revive is a translation of shouv (שוב) in the ESV for these verses: 1Sa 30:12, Ps 19:7, La 1:11,16,19
[2] Revive is a translation of hayah (חָיָה) in the ESV for these verses: Gen 45:27, Jdg 15:19, 1Ki 17:22, 2Ki 13:21, Neh 4:2, Ps 69:32, Ps 71:20, Ps 85:6, Is 57:15, Ho 6:2, Hab 3:2.
[3] Psalm 36:9 (v 10 in Hebrew): For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.
[4] Genesis 2:16b-17: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (ESV)
[5] John 17:3: “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (ESV)
[6] A Christian is a ‘little’ Christ, a Christ-like disciple of Jesus.
[7] This corresponds to what is described as Entire Sanctification in the Church of the Nazarene.

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