Brokenness
We want to be very simple in this matter of Revival. Revival is the life of the Lord Jesus poured into human hearts. Jesus is always victorious. In heaven they praise Him constantly for His victory. Whatever may be our experience of failure and barrenness, He is never defeated. His power is boundless. If we want to see His power demonstrated in our hearts, our lives, our service and experience a victorious life we must be in a right relationship with Him. If we are in a right relationship with Him, His power will fill us and overflow through us. We will experience Revival in our attitudes and actions.
However, to be, or come into a right relationship with Him, the first thing that must happen is that our will must be broken to His will. To be broken is the beginning of Revival. It may be painful and humiliating, but it is the only way. The Lord Jesus cannot live in us fully and reveal Himself through us until the proud self within us is broken. This simply means that the hard unyielding self, which justifies itself, wants its own way, stands up for its rights, and seeks its own glory, at last bows its head to the Lord’s will, admits it’s wrong, gives up its own way to Jesus, surrenders its rights and discards its own glory – that the Lord Jesus might have all and be all. In other words, it is dying to self and self attitudes.
As we look honestly at our Christian lives, we can see how much of this self-will there is in each of us. It is so often self who tries to live the Christian life (the mere fact that we use the word ‘try’ indicates that it is self who has the responsibility). It is self, too, who is often doing Christian work. It is always self who gets irritable, envious, resentful, critical, and worrisome. It is self who is hard and unyielding in our attitudes towards others.
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It is self who is shy, self-conscious, and reserved. No wonder we need breaking. As long as self is in control, the Lord can do little with us, for all the fruits of the Spirit (they are enumerated in Galatians 5), with which God longs to fill us, are the complete antithesis of the hard, unbroken spirit within us and presupposes that it has been crucified.
Being broken is both the Holy Spirit’s work and ours. He brings His pressure to bear, but we must make the choice. If we are really open to conviction as we seek fellowship with the Lord He will show us the expressions of our proud, hard self that cause Him pain. We can stiffen our necks and refuse to repent, or we can bow our head and say, “Yes, Lord.”
Brokenness must be a continuous daily experience and this can be very costly when we see all the yielding of rights and selfish interests that this will involve. Jesus was the prime example of humility and surrender.
The prime example of this was Jesus as He yielded to the will of God. The willingness of Jesus to be broken for us is the all-compelling motive in our being broken too. We see Him, Who is in the form of God, counting not equality with God a prize to be grasped at and hung on to, but letting it go for us and taking upon Him the form of a Servant – God’s Servant, man’s Servant. We see Him willing to have no rights of His own, no home of His own, no possessions of His own, willing to let men revile Him and not revile in return, willing to let men tread on Him and not retaliate or defend Himself. Above all, we see Him broken as He meekly goes to Calvary to become men’s scapegoat by bearing their sins in His own body on the Tree. The whole Sermon on the Mount with its teaching of non-retaliation, love for enemies and selfless giving, must be our position and it must not be a one-time experience but a continuum of our lives.
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In having a broken spirit (living in spiritual revival) thousands of choices must be made. In all those choices we must seek the Lord’s will first forsaking our own will. To live in the will of God and be pleasing to Him we must be filled with His Spirit and surrendered to Him.
So, we should each ask ourselves, how am I doing?
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“He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him” (John 3:36)