7 RESOLVES FOR PERSONAL REVIVAL – Various Passages
Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on December 29, 2019 under 2019 |
Bethany Bible Church Sunday Message; December 29, 2019 from Various Passages
Theme: There are certain personal resolves we can make this year that will help us grow as God’s instruments in revival.
(All Scripture is taken from The New King James Version, unless otherwise indicated).
Click HERE for the audio version of this sermon.
Many people make them. Then, many people break the ones they make. And for the most part, that’s alright; because they are usually pretty innocent and inconsequential. But this morning, I would like to present some ‘resolutions’ to you that are very significant and that will have a very important impact if kept.
They are truly the greatest resolutions we could make.
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Let me share with you why I think it’s important that we embrace these particular resolutions as a church family in the coming year.
Over the past month or so, there have been a couple of remarkable occasions in which someone has come to me and shared with me—as an impression from the Lord—that something significant is about to happen in the city of Portland. On one occasion, it was someone I do not know. They came up to me after church and told me that the Lord had laid it upon their heart that there is about to be a great number of people who will come to Christ in the city of Portland. They shared that the churches in Portland need to be ready for the increase. And then, later that very same week—without their knowing about what this first person said—someone else came to me and shared basically the same impression they had from the Lord. Their concern was that the church needed to increase its capacity for what God was about to do, and to get ready.
Now; what do I do with these two experiences?—both distinct from one another?—both within just a few days of each other? Were these genuine messages from the Lord? I can’t say for certain. But I do know this: We as a church family—along with other church families—have been thinking about and praying for a significant spiritual awakening in the city of Portland for some time now. And if we pray such a thing, we need to expect that the Lord is hearing our prayers, and to faithfully get ready for the answer.
And so; with that in mind this morning, I want to propose seven specific resolves that we should make together as individual members of this church family for this coming year. They are not resolves that we make in order to ‘bring about’ revival. We can never bring about revival in our own power; because that’s something that only God the Holy Spirit can do. Rather, they are resolves that we need to make in order to recommit ourselves personally to being the kind of devoted followers of Jesus that we need to be in order to be His instruments in revival. You might say that they are things that help build up our capacity personally for what God may yet want to do in our city and in our region.
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Now; these are not things that are unusual to the Christian faith. They are things that the Bible already encourages us to do. But my hope and prayer is that we will—each one of us together—recommit ourselves to these things, and intentionally grow in them.
The first—and as the foundation for all the others—is that we resolve this year …
1. TO GROW IN OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH JESUS CHRIST.
No matter what we do as a church family in the coming year—no matter what may be demanded of us in our church’s ministry—it is essential that each one of us grows in a deep, personal, dependent relationship of love with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We need to be sure that we have placed our faith in Him for our salvation; and then that we are walking with Him in an ongoing and personal way every day.
The apostle Paul learned this. As dynamic and powerful a man as he was, he testified that he could not perform his ministry in his own power. Instead, he said, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). The same is true for you and me. And it can be stated in the reverse—that apart from Christ you and I can do nothing.
Jesus Himself taught us this. In John 15, He told His apostles;
“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me” (John 15:1-4).
Think of what would happen if you drove along and saw a grape branch hanging over a fence somewhere. Suppose you pulled over, cut it off, and threw it in the backseat of your car—so you can take it home, put it on the kitchen table, and grow your own grapes. Whatever else might happen from you cutting down someone else’s grapes, one thing is certain: You won’t grow any grapes in your kitchen. The branch has to remain attached to the vine, and draw its strength and life from it, in order to produce any fruit. And the same is true for you and me. Jesus went on to say;
“I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned. If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you. By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples” (vv. 5-8).
And so; as a matter of first importance, let’s commit ourselves in the coming year to intentionally, deliberately ‘abide in Christ’. Let’s grow in an increasingly dependent, personal relationship of love with Jesus Christ Himself in the coming year.
It is only by doing so that we can do anything of any value for His kingdom.
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Now; a second resolve grows out of that one. The closer you draw to the Lord Jesus Christ—and the more faithfully you follow Him in love—the more the Father will prune things from your life that don’t belong. The more you grow in your relationship with Jesus, the more you will feel the need to turn from the things in your life that displease Him.
And so; another resolve that we need to make is …
2. TO GROW IN OUR REPENTANCE FROM SIN.
Do you know what the word ‘repentance’ really means? It means more than just being sorry about our sin. That should be the case, of course. But true repentance means much more than that. To ‘repent’ really means ‘to completely change your mind’ about something. It may be that we used to think that certain practices and habits were alright. After all, everyone else does them. But when we draw closer and deeper with Jesus—and as we embrace His ways and His thinking more and more into our lives—we find that we must change our mind about our sin. We won’t be able to walk with Him as He wishes unless we turn from it and repent of it.
This is essential if we are going to be prepared for revival as we should. The apostle John wrote about this in his first letter; and said,
This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us (1 John 1:5-10).
To confess our sins to God our Father, and to repent of them, is not a big ‘one time only’ kind of thing. Really, when Jesus calls us to follow Him, He calls us to a life-long habit of ongoing confession and repentance. And the good news is that Jesus has paid for all of our sins in order to make us completely clean in God’s sight. As John went on to say;
My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation [that is, the atoning sacrifice that satisfies God's just anger] for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world (2:1-2.)
And so; another resolve that we need to make in the coming year is to an ongoing attitude and practice of repentance from sin. As we go through this year in close fellowship with Jesus, may it be that we find ourselves leaving more and more of the sins of the old life behind.
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Now; the fact is that we cannot even turn from sin in our own power. We need divine help in knowing how to live a holy life; and we need divine power to actively live it. And that leads us to yet another resolution that we need to make this year …
3. TO GROW IN OUR RELIANCE UPON THE HOLY SPIRIT.
Our Lord never meant for us to live the Christian life in our own power. Instead, we have been given a divine Helper in living that life. Just before He went to the cross for us, the Lord Jesus told His disciples;
“If you love Me, keep My commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever—the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you. (John 14:15-18).
After Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to the Father, He sent the Holy Spirit—who came at Pentecost—to serve as “another Helper”. And we need to understand that when Jesus used the word “another”, He didn’t use the word that meant just “another” in a ‘vaguely-similar’ sort of way; but rather “another of exactly the same kind” as Himself. That is how it’s possible for you and me to walk with Jesus today. We are enabled to do so through the indwelling ministry of this “another Helper”, who is a helper to us just as Jesus was to His disciples.
It is essential, then, that you and I walk in a relationship of ongoing reliance upon the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The apostle Paul once wrote in Galatians 5;
I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law (Galatians 5:16-18).
If we try to walk with Jesus in the power of our own abilities—trying to keep His holy principles for living in the power of the flesh—we will only end up sinning before Him all the more. But if we walk in the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit Himself will live the life of Jesus in us. We abide in Jesus as our vine; and the Spirit produces the fruit of Jesus own life through us. As Paul went on to say;
… the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law (vv. 22-23).
How do we do this? We intentionally and ongoingly yield ourselves to the Holy Spirit and allow Him to bring His empowering influence to bear in our lives in a prevailing and pervasive way. It’s what Paul called being ‘filled’ with the Spirit. He wrote in Ephesians 5;
And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation [or as it is in the New International Version, 'debauchery']; but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God (Ephesians 5:18-21).
And so; another resolve we need to make in the coming year is to grow increasingly in an ongoing reliance on the help of the Holy Spirit in our lives—both individually and as a church family.
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And because the Holy Spirit works though His inspired word, we also need …
4. TO GROW IN THE READING OF THE BIBLE.
It’s amazing how all of these important resolves are related to one another. The apostle Paul in Ephesians 5 told us that we must be filled with the Holy Spirit, so that certain results would come about in our lives. And in Colossians 3:16, we’re told that the same results come from letting God’s word dwell richly in us. Paul wrote;
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord (Colossians 3:16).
Dear brothers and sisters; we absolutely cannot be the people that God wants us to be in the coming year—and we cannot be ready for what the Lord may want to do through us—unless we have a daily habit of reading and studying and obeying the Bible. In Psalm 1, King David wrote these words;
Blessed is the man
Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly,
Nor stands in the path of sinners,
Nor sits in the seat of the scornful;
But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
He shall be like a tree
Planted by the rivers of water,
That brings forth its fruit in its season,
Whose leaf also shall not wither;
And whatever he does shall prosper. (Psalm 1:1-3)
The Bible is given to us by God as the means by which He leads our lives and equips us for service. Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 3:16-17;
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
And it’s a remarkable thing that the closer you draw to Jesus, and the more you lay aside the sins of the old life, and the more you live in reliance upon the Holy Spirit, the more you will then crave the word of God! Peter once wrote;
Therefore, laying aside all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all evil speaking, as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious (1 Peter 2:1-3).
So; make it your resolve in the coming year—along with these other things—that you will spend time reading and studying the word of God every day. You’ll be amazed at how you’ll grow in the coming year if you will do so.
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Now; many today think that this next resolve would be optional. But it is not. There needs to be a resolve …
5. TO GROW IN OUR REGULAR ATTENDANCE AT CHURCH.
Jesus once said, “I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18). And many have mistakenly thought that Jesus was only speaking of the ‘Church universal and triumphant’—the Church with a capital “C”; and not with respect to the local church. And this is simply not true. It is the Lord’s will that, if we are at all able, we be faithfully and regularly connected to a local assembly of believers. The apostle Paul once wrote this about Jesus, in Ephesians 4;
And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ—from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love (Ephesians 4:11-16).
The writer of the Book of Hebrews saw the matter in terms of the promised return of Jesus; and he put it this way:
And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10:24-25).
Some of us—because of physical limitations or illness—cannot be in church in a regular way. But if you can, make it your resolve—as much as you are able—to grow in your regular attendance to and participation in the life of the church family.
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Now; some people hesitate to come to church because they had been hurt by someone. That’s understandable. But those hurt relationships need to change too. And so; another resolve that we need to make—a very hard one for some of us—is …
6. TO GROW IN THE RESTORATION OF RELATIONSHIPS.
It is displeasing to our Lord—and it hinders His ability to use us in times of revival—if we are in bad relationships with one another, or if we are bitter toward one another, or if we harbor unforgiveness toward one another. We cannot be walking with Jesus in the way that He wants and—at the same time—be at odds with others of His followers. The apostle John wrote;
If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also (1 John 4:20-21).
If we want to walk in a growing relationship with Jesus, then we need to take care of this matter. If we have a strained relationship with another fellow believer, it’s our Lord’s will that we do as much as we humanly can—on our part—to make that relationship right again. Jesus once said;
Therefore if you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First, be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift (Matthew 5:23-24).
Do you have resentment toward another fellow Christian? Or does another fellow Christian harbor unforgiveness toward you? Then, in the coming year, make it your resolve—if you at all can—to restore that relationship. Do it soon; because we cannot walk with Jesus—and we cannot be used by Him as He wants to use us—until we are reconciled together in love.
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Now; we’ve discussed several important resolutions. And as you can see, they’re not things that are unusual to the Christian faith. They are things that ought to happen. We ought to be growing in personal dependency upon Jesus, and repenting of sin, and relying on the Holy Spirit, and studying our Bible, and participating in the life of our church family, and restoring our relationships with one another.
And if we are doing those things—and growing in them—people will see a difference in our lives. They will see that there is something unusual about us; and they will want to know what it is.
That leads us to one more resolve …
7. TO GROW IN OUR READINESS TO SHARE OUR FAITH.
To do all these other things is to actively set Jesus Christ apart as Lord over our hearts. He proves Himself to be our strength and help and guide through life—in times of ministry, or in times of trouble, or in times of revival. And when that happens, people want to know what it is about us that makes us so different.
The apostle Peter once wrote;
But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear … (1 Peter 3:15).
And so; one of the essential resolves we need to make—along with the others—is to be always ready to share our faith with other people, and to tell them how to enter into a personal relationship with Jesus themselves. Are you ready? Are you prepared to point others to the Lord Jesus and to show them how to place their faith in His cross? We need to get to know the Bible, and always be praying about our daily circumstances and encounters, and know how to invite someone else to trust Jesus.
And you don’t ever have to fear that you have to do this in your own power. Just as with everything else, the Holy Spirit is our Helper in this too. Just before He ascended to the Father, the Lord Jesus told His disciples;
“But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
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Now, dear brothers and sisters in Christ; I suggest that, over the next year, we keep this list of resolves somewhere where we will see it repeatedly. Let’s keep praying about these things. Let’s make them our own resolutions.
And by doing so, let’s become ready for revival by experiencing personal revival in our own lives in the coming year.
Click HERE for the audio version of this sermon.
EA
