PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: Why Revivals Never Last-It’s Got To Be a Matter of the Heart.
By: Ron Woodrum
The message of the Book of Malachi should be quite different than it is. God’s people had returned from 70 years of miserable captivity and defeat in Babylon. Their inheritance from the hand of the LORD, their nation and Temple and been devastated and destroyed, due to their unfaithfulness to a very faithful God. But that was all in the past. Exiles had returned home under Zerrubabel and Joshua to rebuild their Temple in 515 B.C. They had experienced revival under Ezra, rediscovering the Word of the Lord reading and worshipping around the Holy Scriptures. 458 B.C. With Nehemiah, they experienced the Sovereign grace of their God, who used a foreign Persian King, Artaxerxes, to enable them to rebuild their city, with its forrified walls. 445 B.C. Twelve years into his governorship, Nehemiah was required to to return to Persia. During his absence, the revival was short-lived. Many of the abuses that Nehemiah addressed had resurfaced. A friend of mine, Roger Ellsworth, who teaches at Union University at Jackson, Tennessee has written a comentary of this magnificient prophetic book. In his book Opening Up Malachi, he writes, “It was a depressing time. People and Priests, both of whom had been enormously blessed by God, were shuffling through their religion, muttering all he while how burdensome it was. They were questioning God’s love, dishonoring His name, sighing over His service, breaking His laws, and doubting His promises. These were the orders of the day. A wake-up call was needed and God provided it in the person of His man Malachi”. What had happened? Why were they in such a spiritual condition? What had gone wrong? Why didn’t their revivals under Zerrubabel; Ezra; Nehemiah last longer? The reason? Perhaps a disconnect between their head and their heart. When it comes to serving the Lord, in the real world, with all the challenges and temptations simply intent to “do our best” is not enough, even if we have the good intentions in the world. Only a live, vibrant, on-going encounter with the passion of the God who we know beyond a doubt really loves us, is enough to enable us to enjoy Him to the fullest. St. Augustine put it this way, “We are restless until we find our rest in thee Oh God!”. Without that relationship, our faith becomes a hollow empty routine that soon ends in doubt, disappointment, and disillusionment. H.L. Mencken used to say, “The problem with life is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore!”. That is certainly true of religion without a relatiohsip. Going through the motions, because your head tells you so, without the motions going through you, because your heart tells you so-spells spiritual disaster. Only a real, genuine, on-going encounter with the God who loves you, can keep you inwardly fulfilled. Everything else, as Solomon would say, “is chasing after the wind”, Someone has said, “the older you get the more it takes to fill your heart with wonder, and only a relationship with the True and Living God is satisfying enough to do that!” That is what the people of God had lost!
That was crowning discovery of that great mind and genius, the poet Francis Thompson. His most famous and enduring work was the poem that described how he had run from a relationship with God for years-The Hound of Heaven. That marvelous poem recounted how all of his running from God ended in his being “found by the one” “whom thou seekest!”. What you may not know is that Thompson lived a very turbulent life. Having left his home in conflict, he lived the life of a vagabond on the streets of London, rather than go to college. His life was centered around two areas of the city. During the day he lived among the losers and opium addicts of London’s Charing Cross District, trying to satisfy his addiction. At night he would saunter over to the River Thames and lie down to sleep by its banks. Periodically he would pick up a newspaper from the overflowing trash in the area and scrounge for a piece of paper on which he would write a letter to the editor of the newspaper in response to some article he had read. The editor became frustrated and at his wit’s end because he recognized the genius of a Milton behind the writing, but there was never a return address. But throughout his continual running from God, Thompson kept in touch with the Scriptures, and there was one passage in particular that haunted him. It was the story of Jacob, who spent most of his life on the run too. The Scriptures tell of a dream that Jacob had one night in which he saw a ladder between heaven and earth and the Lord Himself at the top of the ladder. When he awakened from the dream he said, “surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it” (Gen. 28:16). As Francis Thompson continued to dwell on that story, something remarkable happened, and what can only be called a dramatic conversion of his life took place. Listen to these incredible words from his poem The Kingdom of God:
Oh world invisible, we view thee
Oh world intangible, we touch thee
Oh world unknowable, we know thee
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air-
Do we ask the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!
The drift of pinions, would we harken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors!
The angels keep their ancient places;-
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
Tis ye, tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.
But when so sad thou canst not sadder
Cry-and upon thy sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt heaven and Charing Cross
Yea, in the night, my soul, my daughter,
Cry-clinging heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Gennesaret, but Thames!
God, in love, met Francis Thompson, His modern day Jacob, right were he was. Lowering Jacob’s ladder right into the addictions of Charing Cross- and walking into His life, not on the waves of Gennesaret, (Sea of Galilee), but the Thames where he spent his nights! That encounter brings revival and reality of the Love of God that transforms lives. That is what was missing in Malachi’s day…and far too often also in ours!