Avoiding The Eighth Day

A little over a year ago, God birthed a desire in my heart that I had never felt before. It began as I was reading classic Christian books by A.W. Tozer and Charles Spurgeon. It was a desire for revival but not some pop-corn revival where only a hand full of churches experience it. I wanted to see a national move of God, another great awakening that changes the religious landscape of our nation and the world! I found myself praying daily, "Lord, let me be the spark that starts a revival that spreads throughout America and the world!". Some would call that a presumptious prayer, Stephen Furtick in his book Sun Stand Still calls it a Sun Stand Still prayer that is made possible by audacious faith, a faith that dares to ask for the impossible.

In our day and age the word revival has lost it's effectiveness. We think of it as a series of meetings. We tend to think that it is an evangelistic crusade to win the lost. Evangelists base their effectiveness on how many souls come to Christ. But true revival always begins with one person's desperate cry for change in their personal situation. A cry to be revived and once again feel the joy of fellowship with the Lord. Once revival comes to that one person, it will spread to those around like wildfire. There is no magic formula that starts it. You don't have to be blessed by a message of a great orator. It may begin in a church but it will be perfected in the quite place where only one man and his God meet.

I want to be a part of a move of God. Not the cliche move of God that we proudly proclaim to boost our church's street cred to others. I'm not talking about some marketing program that promises big but delivers little. I'm talking about the move of God that the early church experienced when new followers were added every day! When miracles were common place and they considered themselves blessed to be counted worthy to be tortured for the sake of a move of God!

I want to be THAT man! I want to be a Peter who stood up and preached a message which resulted in the church doubling in size in one day! I want to be a Paul who plants churches throughout the known world and whose written words inspire others to do the same! I want to be a Stephen who stood while being stoned to death and saw Jesus sitting on the right hand of the father and had the moral fortitude to pray, "Father forgive them"! I want be a Charles Wesley, a DL Moody, AW Tozer, Charles Spurgeon. I want to be my generation's Billy Graham or John Piper!

I want to be that man!

Moses, was one of those men and yet he almost didn't make it into the club. There is a little known verse that reveals a great truth of what may be keeping each one of us from our destiny of becoming men of God!