Revival

And Shaphan the scribe shewed the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest hath delivered me a book. And Shaphan read it before the king. (2Kings 22:10)

I want us to get a background of this groundbreaking moment.

Remember Hezekiah and his fifteen added years?

The Bible says that he backslid (to use our term) after that momentous answer. It therefore means that the book disappeared from the public realm.

Then we have Manasseh and his fifty-five-year reign where things became even worse.

He was replaced by Amon who also had no regard for God and so cared nothing for the book.

By the time Josiah came to the picture, we have seventy-two years of the book’s absence in Judah.

But he loved God and His ways even without the scriptures.

By the time he was able to raise adequate resources to repair the temple, it was a whole ninety years of the book’s absence. You really wonder the condition of the same when it was found in the ravaged ruins of the temple. How much dust covered it? How much dust can accumulate in ninety years?

But amidst all that rubble it had somehow survived in a readable state.

And that is where I want us to start.

What happens when the king hears what the book says?

He is able to accurately diagnose his nation’s spiritual position and destination.

He therefore starts weeping, knowing that judgment was long overdue.

God due to that repentance defers judgment.

Yet, unlike his forebear Hezekiah, he does not relax just because it was deferred to after his death.

He starts to follow what he reads in the book.

No wonder he is able to oversee a Passover unlike any since Joshua’s time.

What am I saying?

God’s word is the foundation of true revival.

There of course are other essentials to revival, but as with a building, we cannot have any stable building without a solid foundation however beautiful it might look above the surface.

The longevity of a building is determined by the stability and depth of the foundation.

In the same way, the reach and depth of a revival is determined to its fidelity to scripture as a whole.

A revival that picks verses to support its doctrine has no capacity to sustain itself as it lacks a foundation.

Some already have an idea of one such and so I will not proceed.

Josiah’s revival was able to defer judgment because the king exposed the scriptures as the basis of the same.

And the community was able to change as it responded to what they read in the scriptures.

The spiritual reality is that no revival worth its salt can be centered on anything but God’s word. And no such revival can last beyond a generation.

I have written elsewhere about the three generations of revival.

These three generations happen because a revival did not base sorely on God’s word but on an experience or series of experiences.

Otherwise, there will only be three rules, or ten or a hundred, that will be unquestionably followed by the second generation.

The third generation will most probably rebel against that straightjacket that is rules without explanation.

Yet that could have been avoided had the revivalists exposed their followers to the scriptures at the personal level as the protestant revival did.

You see, no amount of motivation can result in revival. No fanfare is required for revival to happen or proceed.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Only a transformation of the person from deep within the spirit as he responds to the revelation from a clear understanding of scripture.

A revival that is not followed by discipleship is very short term, however deep it appears to run.

That is why for a long time I have been spending in the availability of everything Bible; from reading plans to Audio Bibles to physical Bibles.

That is why I do not tire from challenging people to read their Bibles and preparing materials for the same.

I love revival. But even better, I love lasting revival.

Do you?

Then join me in making the Bible your constant companion?