Revive us Again?

I’ve grown up in church my whole life. I was born on a Wednesday, and that next Sunday there I was. I’ve been employed by a church almost all of my adult life. I’ve been to thousands and thousands of church services.

This is not to brag; most of my childhood, I did not have a choice. As long as I’ve been going to church, I’ve been seeing people asking, praying, and believing for the same thing.

I’ve heard so many people say that they believe that revival is coming. What is revival? For our purposes, I’ve defined it as a spiritual awakening or outpouring of God’s presence which leads to a newfound passion for the gospel and purpose for holy living. 

As much as I’ve heard people say that we desire it, I really haven’t seen it. And that bothers me.  

In Chronicles 16, Solomon prays at the dedication of the temple of God. After he finishes praying, chapter 17 begins: fire falls from heaven. God‘s people are floored, and the priests of God (the most holy people) are frozen in awe and wonder. 

This type of outpouring of God’s presence is something that I’ve prayed to see my whole life. An undeniable movement of God’s spirit. Growing up in church, we would sing a song called, “Revive us again.” It is my prayer that God would do this. But I think it’s important that we understand what we’re really saying.

What does it mean to desire revival? What is required of you and me if we are going to see a great move of God in this generation? To experience an uncommon and miraculous move of God in this day, it will require faithfulness to God’s plan and a complete dependence on God.

So how do we see revival in 2026? First, we need to be humbly surrendered. Solomon had the opportunity to experience this move of God, but it was dependent on his willingness to surrender to God’s plan. 

Surrender is not easy because God does not always work on our timetable. Sometimes God answers our prayers immediately, like he did in chapter 7, verse one. Sometimes it might be a little later. (See 2 Chronicles 7:12). Sometimes we wait for God to answer our prayers. 

It might be easy to overlook, but initially, King David Solomon’s father had planned to build the temple. God told him that his son Solomon would do so. David isn’t even present to see the fulfillment of his prayers, but that doesn’t mean that God didn’t answer.

I think sometimes we don’t see a move of God like we desire because we get tired of waiting on God. We like to be in charge and in control. Ultimately, what holds us back from God‘s best is that we’re not ready to surrender control to him.

We want to see God move. We’ve gotta be willing to lay down and surrender everything to God. This means our schedule and timetable. This means surrendering our idea of success. To see true revival, we must be ready to lay down our desires and wants fully surrendered to the will of God. 

If we want to experience a fresh outpouring of God’s spirit. We must also have a holy dependence. God is the one who does the heavy lifting, not us. We can plan revivals, we can program good experiences. We can work our whole lives, but until we understand that it’s God’s to do, we are wasting our time.

We’ve got to get to a place where our hearts are truly relying wholly on God. Not our self-righteousness or our affluence or wealth, not even our hard work.

He studied great revivals in history from Acts 2 to Azusa Street, the 1904 Welsh revival to the Hebrides revival in the 1940s, the first and second grade awakening in the 1700s and 1800s, the Jesus people, prairie revival, and Asbury revival in the 1970s. The people who led them have a lot of differences. 

These moves of God were led by people of different ages and different ethnicities. Some happened in city centers, and others in rural communities. These moves touched both the rich and the poor. And while some are remembered, many have been forgotten. 

Throughout the great moves of God in history, all of them have this one thing in common: Every time God has poured out his power. There has been a group of people who are desperate for him to do so. People who want nothing else and have no other desire.

And if we’re honest, I believe this is where we fall short. I think if many Christians in the West were honest, we don’t really want revival. We just want spectacle. I think a lot of pastors and leaders were honest: they don’t want revival. They just want to be remembered by history.

In the gospel of Luke chapter 14, Jesus instructed his followers to count the cost of following him. So this is true for our desire to see God’s spirit pour out. There is a cost.

Revival comes at the cost of our willingness to humbly surrender to God and to completely  depend on God