I found this excellent article on personal revival by A.W. Tozer and believe it will be a blessing to our church family. I have split it up to fit this format and it will appear over three weeks. May the Lord bless as you read. Pastor Wagenschutz
How To Have Personal Revival – pt.1– AW Tozer
“Any Christian who desires to may at any time experience a radical spiritual renaissance, and this altogether independent of the attitude of his fellow Christians
The most important question is, How? Well, here are some suggestions which anyone can follow and which, I am convinced, will result in a wonderfully improved Christian life.
- Get thoroughly dissatisfied with yourself.
Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul. When speaking of earthly goods Paul could say, ‘I have learned to be content;’ but when referring to his spiritual life he testified, ‘I press on toward the mark.’ So stir up the gift of God that is in thee.
- Set your face like a flint toward a sweeping transformation of your life.
Timid experiments are tagged for failure before they start. We must throw our whole soul into our desire for God. ‘The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.’
- Put yourself in the way of blessing.
It is a mistake to look for grace to visit us as a kind of benign magic, or to expect God’s help to come as a windfall apart from conditions known and met. There are plainly marked paths which lead straight to the green pastures; let us walk in them. To desire revival, for instance, and at the same time to neglect prayer devotion is to wish one way and walk another.
- Do a thorough job of repenting.
Do not hurry to get it over with. Hasty repentance means shallow spiritual experience and lack of certainty in the whole life. Let godly sorrow do her healing work. Until we allow the consciousness of sin to wound us we will never develop a fear of evil. It is our wretched habit of tolerating sin that keeps us in our half-dead condition.”
