Are you ready - 3

Preparing for Revival

“Be like the Irishman’s gun – go off, loaded or not.” – Gen. Wm Booth, Salvation Army

I am the first to admit that my blog writings, tweets on Twitter, and FB mutterings, can be very trite and sound very glib. Like the doctor, I can tell you the ailment and the best cure. What I rarely attempt to do is to help you with the remedy. For example, any doctor will tell a drunkard to give up drinking, but that’s his responsibility finished. He diagnosed the problem and prescribed the cure but he doesn’t have to consider ‘how’ to implement it – thats your next problem.

So it is that I received a little ‘nudge’ in my spirit this morning to try to be a little more helpful and, rather than continually repeat the problem and give an opinion on the cure, to give a little Godly guidance in the implementation.

Now, as with any ‘agony aunt’s’ column, I can encourage your prayer life, I can extol the virtues of getting your daily dose of scripture, and I can talk for hours without end on loving your neighbour as yourself. Yet the Lord didn’t nudge me about those things. Oh no. He spoke to me about preparing for revival – then He seemed to laugh at the non-plussed expression that must have come over my face.

So how does one prepare for revival? The really short answer is that we can only go so far in our preparations for revival because revival, when it comes, will completely destroy all your planning. Oh, we can have ‘New Christian’ courses ready and we can have 200 extra seats stacked neatly awaiting the great and glorious day. We can even have ‘reception classes’ stood by waiting for the flood of enquirers. Or, like most people and churches, we can simply pray and pray and pray but do very little.

I don’t know how much any of you know about the history of the Salvation Army? When Booth hit London he caused an enormous furore. Publicans, in particular, were so incensed by his preaching on drink that they hired hate-filled mobs to break up his meetings. As he spread further afield, the opposition was one thing but the ‘troops’ requests for assistance was quite another. Booth had no resources to speak of so his troops had to make do with whatever they could lay their hands on. It was at some time during this massive expansion process that Booth coined my opening quotation. When asked how to start new works he retorted that “You must be like the Irishman’s gun – go off, loaded or not.”

When it comes to revival, it seems to me that we, too, have to “Be like the Irishman’s gun – go off, loaded or not.” We can plan all we like. We can pray all we like. Yet when revival hits our church, or our town, we just will not be ready and we will have to run with whatever we’ve got to hand. We will not be able to dictate anything to the Holy Spirit as He brings His power and anointing to our meetings so we will have to follow His lead. That is what happened at the Smithton Outpouring, at Toronto, at Pensacola, at Lakeland, and in Argentina. That is how it will happen again in this coming outpouring.

Who can tell where, or when revival will come upon us? I can’t, and neither can you. We just know that it is coming, and that we will all have to “Be like the Irishman’s gun – go off, loaded or not.”