4 Pillars of Revival. (part 3)
If we are really going to get a concept of revival we have to get a vision of God’s sorrow over sin.
- What God wants is not to fill up empty pews.
- He is not concerned about filling empty churches,
- He is concerned about filling empty hearts.
- And empty lives, and empty eyes that have no vision;
- Empty hearts that have no passion,
- And empty wills that have no purpose.
People say to me all over the country, “I am interested in revival.” I say, “Yes, so are a million other South Africans.”
I find all kinds of people interested in it. I don’t find many people burdened for it. People are very interested in revival, but we don’t start to break the fallow ground.
We don’t prepare the way of the Lord.
As Gordon Lindsay in 1952 wrote in the “Voice of Healing” magazine:
“For many years, I was disturbed by the relative inability of ordinary evangelism to get the people of a community to take a revival seriously. The evangelist, with countless other evangelists, felt keenly the handicap of preaching to a handful of people in some church, usually located on the outskirts of the city, while the great mass of people plunged recklessly on in sin, ignoring the revival effort, or passing it by with supreme contempt. How different things have been in recent years! Rarely have we been in a campaign that did not number into the thousands, and we have seen people literally fight for seats.”
One thing was noticeable in that era:
“The ministry of healing gives the evangelist an authority that he does not have otherwise.’