An Old Fashion Revival

We will be in the book of Hosea today, friends. You can turn in your Bibles there now. I don't think I've ever preached a message more timely than the one I'm bringing before you today, friends, so pay attention and get the wax out of your ears so you can hear it because it's a red hot message God has placed on my heart that comes out of personal testimony, and I must unburden it before you.

The Jews in the days of Hosea were living in a period of material prosperity, much like our day, and it was during this time of prosperity that fell under the reign of King Jeroboam II of Israel that sets out the record of the book of Hosea, which portrays a people who have turned their backs on God. The nation of Israel was spiritually bankrupt. Their religious leaders permitted them to practice idolatry and commit spiritual harlotry against the Lord.

Though the people were in a time of material blessing, they refused to recognize that God was the one that had provided them with the wealth that they possessed. Even worse, they attributed their prosperity to idols. The Jews had become covetous and greedy, oppressing those who were least able to defend themselves.

This is the backdrop, friends, of the debauchery and sins against the holy God as it's set against the narrative of the personal story of the prophet Hosea, who brought back his unfaithful wife. We see the beginning of the spiritual downgrade as seen in Hosea 3.7, where God declares about the Jews, As they increased, so they sinned against me. Therefore, I will change their glory into shame.

God says they sinned against Him. All sin is against a thrice holy God. When King David finally acknowledged his sin with Bathsheba in Psalm 51, he declared to God, Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight.

So our text from Hosea declares that the more the people increased by prosperity, the more they sinned against God. This was an aggravated sin. To turn away from God when He has brought blessings upon them.

Whenever we are in a period of favor from God and we sin against Him, it's more grievous, a more grievous sin because it's an aggravated sin. And this was the sin of the Jews in the days of Hosea. God had given them multiple blessings and all they did was sin against Him.

Well, God punishes Israel with some remedial judgments in the hope of bringing His unfaithful people back to Him. We read in Hosea 5.6, They shall go with their flocks and with their herds to seek the Lord, but they shall not find Him. He hath withdrawn Himself from them.

The withdrawn presence of God is a terrible judgment upon any people. The church in Arde, the indifferent Laodicean lukewarm church of Arde, is experiencing the withdrawn presence of God. Let me ask you, friend, when was the last time you felt the power of God in a meeting? I remember being in churches years ago where the manifest presence of God was so prevalent you could feel it like a heavy curtain.

It made you weep. Now we just try to reach folks with lectures or through entertainment. Arde is very similar to the time of the Jews depicted here in Hosea.

We see that the people of Israel under punishment from God attempted to turn back to God, but their repentance wasn't sincere. In Hosea 6.1, we read, Come, let us return unto the Lord, for He hath torn, and He will heal us. But God points out the inserity of their hearts.

In verse 4, we hear God speak of their temporary return that doesn't last. Oh, Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? Oh, Judah, what shall I do unto thee? For your goodness is as a morning cloud, as the early dew it goeth away. Here, God tells them that they have not returned to Him with all their heart.

They are trying to serve Him with a divided heart. They quickly go back to sinning against Him and serving their idols. And that's true of ourselves as well, friends.

We may acknowledge that we are out of step with God. In our relationship with Him, it's not as it could be. And we attempt to turn back to Him, but soon we are off in our hogwallow of sin once again because our own repentance was not sincere.

God compares their false repentance to morning dew that's on the grass that soon evaporates and is no more. The people keep on sinning against God, and God views this as spiritual adultery. He declares that they have gone a-whoring from under their God.

And this is exactly what the prophet Hosea is experiencing in his domestic life with his unfaithful wife, Galmer. God tells Hosea, go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress. So the prophet buys his wife back out of harlotry.

So I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver and for a homer of barley and half a homer of barley. Here, Hosea acts out God's buying back his straying people. It's a heartbreaking depiction of God's love for his backslidden people.

It makes me think of Calvary and a bloodstained Christ hanging there because of my filthy, wretched sins. And God's word cries out herein is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. The Jews in the days of Hosea were backslidden and away from God.

They were even unaware and ignorant of their spiritual condition. In Hosea 7, 9 we read, strangers have devoured his strength and he knoweth it not, yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him. Yet he knoweth it not.

This is very similar to the church of Laodicea in Revelation where the risen Christ says the same about them. He says because thou sayest I am rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing and knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. This very thing occurred to me recently, friends.

I'd been in a series of health issues and financial issues that wouldn't go away. It'd been a very long time of bearing these burdens and because of these outward and inward weights upon me, I caved in beneath them and got away from God because of disappointment and discouragement. Oh dear friends, what good are we preachers if we cannot be honest before you? Have you never gone cold on God yourself? Have you never looked away from him to only concentrate on the personal trials you were going under? When we take our eyes off of God, we begin to sink like Peter out on the water.

Listen to me, friend. The devil does his best work among the saints of God through discouragement and disappointment. Are you a pastor whose flame has gone out for God? Are you still going through the motions of ministry but Jesus is no longer wonderful to you? Somewhere in your ministry duties, you look more to the problems in your church, perhaps a problem with a person, perhaps a deacon, and you've taken your eyes off God.

And if you are brutally honest with yourself, you could admit that you were out of step with God and you desperately need an old-fashioned revival. You need an old-fashioned revival, friend, where God comes and invades your life like Moses at the burning bush and you have a fresh encounter with him and it ignites your entire life and ministry with a new fire. But God has to speak to us.

God has to reveal to us our backslidden condition. If we are away from him in heart, how can we hear him? Listen to my personal testimony on this very thing, friends. Like the Jews in Hosea, I couldn't see the gray hairs on me which spoke of my backslidden condition because I was out of step with God.

He had to speak to me by way of a vivid dream. In my dream, I was hanging out with Adrian Rogers and he said something to me that shook me to my core. He made a spiritual statement to me and I delighted in it and it drove me to worship God and praise him.

And then God showed me that my walk with him was no longer vital like it had been. I had gotten in a backslidden condition but was not acknowledging it. Well, I woke up and I couldn't wait to get in my Bible and get on my knees before my God and thank him for loving me enough, showing me mercy enough to reveal to me that I needed to get right with him from his perspective.

And that's the important thing, friends. We can be out of step with God and not know it because we're not looking at it from his perspective. He once knew how we couldn't wait to get in his presence, how we couldn't wait to read his Bible and pray with him.

But now it's no longer that way. Well, the Lord wants us to stay in a red hot love relationship with Jesus. But our natural tendency is to drift away.

The flesh, the world, the devil gets in the way. But God gets serious with those who get serious with him. I've seen God turn men's lives completely upside down, including my own friends.

We all could use a old-fashioned revival where we have a fresh encounter with God and it ignites us once again to go all out for him and the sake of the gospel. And that's the title of my message today, friends, an old-fashioned revival. Vance Abner once said, so many folks are talking about having revival.

It's about time somebody let loose a one. Well, let loose of it in your own life, friend. You see, the church is only a composite of its members.

And if her majority is in a red hot love relationship with Jesus, then the world will feel the heat, see the intensity of that love for Christ who suffered and died on a bloody cross for sin. But if the majority of the church lies in a backslidden state, then there'll be apathy towards spiritual things, indifference to the lost and the gospel. A backslidden church has no power or influence upon society.

The world mocks the powerless church of our day, but it doesn't have to be this way, friends. God declares in Malachi, return to me and I will return to you, but we must do the work necessary for this to occur. My mind goes back to a certain group of men.

It was about 25 years ago. These men came to my house once a week on Tuesday evenings for a time of discipleship. I had about 14 men in my living room each Tuesday and God began to work among us in remarkable ways.

I had prayed to God about how God wanted me to lead these men. I even asked Henry Blackbee for his advice on how to do it. Henry Blackbee told me to go through the gospels and see what Jesus taught his men, that Jesus kept repeating the same truths to his men over and over again.

Henry Blackbee said that'd be a good line of approach. Take those truths and repeat them again and again. Well, I finally settled on my Bible and Charles Finney's book, Lectures on Revival, as an accompaniment to that, and I bought a big stack of these books and made the men each buy a copy of Finney's book and read it, and each week we would meet for prayer and discuss the topic of revival as shown in Finney's book.

Charles Finney had chosen for his text Hosea 10-12, which states, Break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and reign righteousness upon you. Then Finney went on to explain, The Jews were a nation of farmers. Scripture, therefore, commonly draws illustrations from that line of work, and from scenes farmers and shepherds would know well.

So when the prophet Hosea addresses Israel as a nation of backsliders, reproving their idolatry and threatening them with the judgments of God, he uses fallow ground as his illustration. Fallow ground is ground once farmed, which now lies waste. It must be broken up again before it is ready to be planted.

Well, that's how Finney described it, and I tend to agree with him here. So the next question should be, what does it mean to break up the fallow ground? And this is the meat of my message today, friends. There may be someone here right now listening to this message, who suddenly come under conviction that they are indeed in a backslidden state, away from God.

Listen, friend, if you want the reality of God in your life, how do you go about it? How do you break up the fallow ground of your cold heart? Well, that's what I did with these men. I was discipling. We went through Finney's book, and we went through our Bibles to passages on true repentance to find out how to get into a more vital walk with a thrice holy God.

I watched these men each Tuesday evening, one by one, get serious with God. Tears were shed, barriers broken down, sins were confessed, restitution was made when necessary. But it was obvious to each of us that God was in our midst, and he was there quite suddenly.

He was dealing with us and changing our lives in a dramatic way. Listen to me, friend, if you want more of God, he has to have more of you. A self must go the way of the cross.

Christ must become a complete master where your time is not your own. Your money is not your own. Your body is not your own.

Jesus has it all. He has all of you, lock, stock, and barrel. And to get there means to break up the fallow ground of your heart that's been away from God in your affections and in your obedience to his lordship.

A self must be dethroned and another enthroned there, the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, how God began to deal with that man's discipleship group was quite remarkable. These were all men who were active in church.

They were faithful and regular church attendants serving God in some capacity, and they wanted to go deeper with God to find a deeper reality of God. Soon their families were witnessing the power of God in their lives. I would get a phone call in the middle of the night from a concerned wife whose husband was in a crisis of distress from wrestling with God in prayer.

She would plead with me to drive over to their house immediately and help her distressed husband. When I got there, I'd find a man crumpled on the ground next to his chair with a Bible beside him and a concerned look on his face. A look as if he'd been peering into eternity, and he knew if he didn't have a breakthrough with God, he was sunk, sunk.

That's how it was with me here recently, friends. I had to get closer to God. I was sunk.

The best approach is to go through the Bible, find passages that speak of turning back to God in heartfelt repentance. What some of these men in the discipleship group encountered was not so much the sins they were committing, but how the Holy Spirit brought to their minds their sins of omission. That's what really broke their heart.

What they didn't do for God when they should have. Sins of neglecting their Bible and prayer. Sins of unbelief.

Sins of not having a vital witness for Christ in the community. Not sharing the gospel as they should. Not being concerned over the lost and perishing and not crying out against the evil in their community and the sins in the land.

Not even praying for God to send revival. While an old fashioned revival was transpiring in the hearts of these men, Jesus became more real to them. Their prayers took on power and influence.

It began to be answered. Their personal testimony for God was undeniably impacting to all who knew them. God had simply gotten hold of that group of men and shook them upside down.

And it made them better husbands to their wives, better parents to their children, and better witnesses in their community. Let me ask you friend, how is it with you? How is it with you? Let us pray.