The Longing for a New Normal

If you would open your Bible to Psalm 85. If you happen to take notes, the title of our study is, “The Longing for a New Normal.” I can’t encourage you enough to go and get the sermons that were preached previously in this series, and get in on the grace that God has already brought through His Word.

Psalm 85 encourages us in trials

It was just tremendous encouragement, tremendous clarity from God’s Word on His justice and what we’re to do with that, and how we’re to respond to it, how we act in our lives in response to what God’s revealed about His justice as the judge of all the earth. And then in Psalm 84, just particular encouragement in the midst of trials. People were just down here praying and experiencing God’s ministry and grace and comfort. So go get those for the good of your soul. Listen to those messages.

We’re going to begin reading in Psalm 85 in just a moment, but before we do that I want to invite you to think with me for just a minute about some tensions that we find in the Word, where there’s almost a tug in two different directions, where it may seem from time to time like the Bible is saying two different things.

So for example, take the issue of contentment. There are places in Scripture that give us a sense of comfort and contentment with normality, with normal life in an everyday world. Sometimes it sounds like the Bible wants us to be content with life as it is. Not as we want it to be or life even as it should be—not to fret, or panic, or fixate on the things in our lives that are less than ideal.

So Paul, for example in Philippians 4:11–12 says, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.” In 1 Timothy 6, Paul was talking to Timothy and he says if you’ve got food and clothing, with that be content.

So in our everyday lives there’s a sense in which the Bible says, “Don’t insist on life all being perfect. It’s okay. It doesn’t have to be ideal. You can be okay with that. That’s normal, and normal is fine.” But think about our spiritual lives. I mean, is it okay that much of our spiritual lives may feel normal, may feel average? That probably—if we took some time to ask around the room, “Imagine your prayer life this week”—it was a fairly normal, uneventful, relatively un-miraculous kind of thing.

I doubt that anybody in this room knelt down in prayer and you looked over in the corner of the room at the potted plant, and you noticed that it was burning and yet not being consumed—and it began to speak to you…that probably didn’t happen. I mean, that’s a Moses-burning-bush kind of thing. It’s pretty unique. If you didn’t have any Isaiah 6 kind of experience—you look up, angels covering their face, their feet, “Holy, holy, holy,” tongs burning your lips, setting on fire—that’s probably not what you experienced.

Is that all right? I mean, probably most of us—we went to pray, we had some various things we wanted to pray for, some various people that we wanted to pray for, we read a couple chapters of the Bible, we got dressed, and we went to work. Is that all right? In one sense the Bible wants us to say, “It’s okay for much of life to be normal.”

But what about ministry? There’s a lot of normal in our personal lives, but what about when it comes to personal ministry? Whether that’s a ministry position that you might have in a local church, or a ministry organization, para-church organization—or just your personal life of ministering to others, sharing Christ, showing Christ to them—what should we expect in this regard?

Well, Paul says to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:2, to be ready to minister “in season and out of season.” That is, when the gospel is yielding much fruit, Timothy, “Preach the word.” When it’s not yielding hardly any fruit, “Preach the word.” Don’t panic. The pattern of ministry is not this steadily rising curve that goes through your whole life and it just keeps getting better and better and better. It has average in it.

“There will be years,” Paul is saying to Timothy, “there will be years where the crop and the fruit of gospel ministry will be so large, you’ll have a hard time sorting out how to bring it all in. And there will be years, Timothy, when you’ll be preaching and it will seem like there’s no fruit at all. Don’t panic. Stay the course. You’re not a failure. This is normal. Don’t grow weary in doing well. It’s okay.”

I know of a tenured pastor who’s been pastoring for many years—by tenured, I mean old— and he—in his last email to me—he just said, “I’m old.” He’s a tenured senior pastor. And one of the things he said over the course of decades of ministry to his leadership team in particular, especially when they’re going through a difficult season in the life of the church, is he has said on many occasions—he just pulls him in and he says, “We need to remember time and truth are on our side.”

In other words, chill out. Don’t go running, sounding the alarms and running everywhere, screaming with our heads… Right. We don’t have to do that. This is okay. This stuff happens. God’s got us. We can trust Him. You don’t have to make drastic panicky kind of measures—just keep your head down and be faithful, and trust that He’s going to pull us through this. Time and truth are on our side.

Quiet providences

So sometimes the work of God in our own personal lives, in our ministry lives—it’s more like the book of Ruth, right? Where it’s kind of quiet providences, where God is invisibly, quietly at work underneath things. Sometimes our lives are more like the book of Ruth than they are like the book of Exodus, with all the pyrotechnics and fireworks of supernatural activity.

It’s normal. There’s a sense in which the Bible wants to acknowledge and affirm that reality.

But then…so I said there was tensions, so you knew this was coming…but then on the other hand, there are places in Scripture—and Psalm 85 is one of them—that exhort us to a kind of holy discontent with the way things are, holy discontent with the normal rhythms of life in a fallen world. And there’s clearly tension here, right?

Wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier for our lives if we could just do one or the other? If we could just lean all the way in and say, “Be ambitious. Strive. Ask for more. It’s not enough. It’s not good enough. Seek harder. Pray harder. Experience more.” If it could just either be all that—and we would know what to expect—or if it would all be, “Just rest. Just kick back. He’s got us. We can just chill out. Everything’s going to be fine.”

But there’s this tension because it seems like the Scripture is saying there is going to be normality in life, and yet at the same time there should be discontent, there should be a holy desire for more, a spiritual ambition for more. But as it is, with this tension, it makes it hard to manage our expectations, doesn’t it, if you think about expectations as it relates to all kinds of doctrines.

Think about it in relation to one of the most prominent doctrines in the New Testament, which is the return of Jesus. The New Testament’s talking constantly about the return of Jesus. When I was a kid, there was a period of time where—I said this a couple weeks ago— my favorite two books of the Bible were Psalms and Revelation. Psalms because so many of the songs were things that I had recognized from singing in the church as I grew up. And Revelation because of the battle scenes. So that’s where I started out in my love for the Word.

But as I read the book of Revelation, I had this growing anticipation of the return of Jesus, even as a young boy. And I remember thinking on a regular basis, “He’ll probably be back by the end of the week, if not this afternoon.” And I really—I mean, I know we’re all supposed to say that—but I really said it, and to such a degree that I remember thinking, “Why is my mom buying school supplies? Like that school year’s going to happen. I mean, seriously—that’s three weeks away. Look at the signs of the times! He’s coming back any moment, Mom.”

I remember looking my grandma in the eye, “Mawmaw” I called her, and just saying, “Mawmaw, you think that Jesus is going to come back in your lifetime?” And she looked like that was the most softball question she ever heard. She said, “Absolutely He’s going to come back in my lifetime.” And I vividly remembered that when I spoke at her funeral three years ago.

Anticipations are hard to manage. Expectations are hard to manage. I didn’t have to read books by skeptical people who doubted the authenticity or authority or truthfulness of the Bible to begin to lose my sense of anticipation and excitement about the return of Jesus. All I had to do was live out another day without it happening, and it becomes normal. And the fact that it didn’t happen proves that life is normal.

And what happens in life is what you saw today you’ll see again tomorrow. What you saw yesterday you’ll see again today. It can end up warping our sense of biblical anticipation. If you think about reality, of the normal, of the 21st century… so a few updates from life in this world. None of these will be surprising. Hard-to-reach places that we’ve been praying for are by and large still hard to reach. And in many of those places it’s like the gospel is moving at a snail’s pace, if that. The death toll for abortions in our country is moving right along, seemingly unhindered by the fact that thousands of Christian are praying for the protection of the innocent.

The number of professing Christians in this country is huge, and yet it’s difficult to find a clear line between the church and the world when it comes to lifestyle choices, spending habits, entertainment options, health in marriage and sexual practices. Welcome to life in the “normal” world under the Fall. What’d you expect? Something else? I mean, this is what happens here.

Psalm 85 teaches us about revival

This Psalm we’re about to read, though, is about revival. It’s about a new normal. It’s about a new kind of anticipation of something that’s beyond the realm of what we see every day. Revival wasn’t happening—and you’re going to pick that up as soon as we start reading—it wasn’t happening when this Psalm was being written.

And yet here we discover throughout this Psalm a sense of holy discontentment with the way things were on the ground in Israel. And we see someone asking for God to intervene in miraculous, not-normal kinds of ways. And I pray it gets on us. So as I read, follow along with me in God’s Word. Psalm 85:

LORD, you were favorable to your land; you restored the fortunes of Jacob. You forgave the iniquity of your people; you covered all their sin. You withdrew all your wrath; you turned from your hot anger. Restore us again, O God of our salvation, and put away your indignation toward us! Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations? Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you? Show us your steadfast love, O LORD, and grant us your salvation. Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints; but let them not turn back to folly. Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him, that glory may dwell in our land. Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs up from the ground, and righteousness looks down from the sky. Yes, the LORD will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase. Righteousness will go before him and make his footsteps a way.

You see right there in the middle, in verse six, he pleads, “Will you not revive us again?” The revival spoken of here is not—it’s not a sign out in the front of the church building that you saw somewhere, and it just announces, “Revival services starting next week.”

You know, my mom married a revival preacher when she was just out of high school. She graduated, and they got married. She was 17 years old, and she was an organ player, and he was a preacher. And they would go and travel around, they would do different revivals in churches and tent revivals, and Dad would proclaim the gospel and Mom would tune them up on the Hammond B-3 behind him.

And you know, then they had the three of us and my dad died when I was 12. And then just a few years later, some years later, my mom married another revival preacher. You can see a pattern forming here. And he literally made the tents that he would use to go and travel around to do his itinerant evangelism and itinerant preaching in various places before he went and planted, as a missionary, planted a church in Costa Rica.

And I heard…over the years I heard many stories of what happened in those meetings, of things that God did, drawing people to Himself, exposing them to the gospel, comforting hearts and convicting people of sin, and just all kinds of things. But you know, the revival that we find here in Psalm 85 is of a different order. It’s a different kind of thing. It’s not something you can schedule. It’s something that God sovereignly does when He sovereignly wants to.

And it’s powerful. I mean, the effects of these kinds of revivals that we read about in the Scripture are the stuff of history-making. Whatever this is, the effects of this revival are so unique—this is such a holy moment in history—that it can be described in verse nine as salvation coming near and glory dwelling in the land.

We might assume, for example, that unrighteousness and disunity were everywhere. And it says in verse ten, righteousness and peace come together, “righteousness and peace kiss.” We might assume that there was rampant nominalism and unfaithfulness, and verse 11 says, “Faithfulness springs up from the ground.” I mean, what an image—it just comes up out of the ground. When people were, just before, going through religious motions, it says in verse six that this revival stirred people’s affections such that they rejoiced in God. They have this new-found joy in God, delight in God.

You look at biblical seasons of revival, and you see amazing things happening. Read the book of Acts. It’s really just the story of revival, that God is doing such amazing things. I mean, you find this ragtag group of disciples huddled up, hiding in the upper room in chapter one. Just a few weeks back the prominent leader, namely Peter, was denying Christ.

And so they’re up in the upper room, they’re timid, they’re praying, they’re waiting, and then the Holy Spirit comes upon them. They leave this room with a bullhorn and a death wish, and they are proclaiming loud and proud. I mean, they are grabbing microphones and saying, “Jesus is the only way of salvation.”

Peter—the same one who denied Christ in a conversation with a school girl just outside of Jerusalem—I mean, now he’s looking into the face of the people who could take his life, the ones who conspired to kill the very Jesus that he was denying just weeks ago. This Peter, the same one, is looking at those same leaders and he’s saying, “You know, you’re trying to build the Kingdom, but you’ve rejected the Cornerstone. This isn’t going to work. You killed the prince of life, and He’s alive again. Oops.”

I mean, he is pushing the envelope, and they’re saying, “Don’t you ever say this again. We’re going to beat you.” And he says, “Well, you decide whether it’s right in the sight of God for us to obey you or Him. This is a no-brainer for me. As soon as you let me go, I’m going to start preaching.” I mean, who is this? What has God done? It’s a revival! God has changed hearts. He has brought a new-found boldness into the life of these people. They didn’t conjure this up in the upper room—it came upon them.

God revived His people. He did something miraculous. In one sense, Acts 4:31 could be a banner over the entire book. “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.” It’s exactly what happened on every page of the book of Acts. It was revival in motion.

You fast-forward 1600 years and you move a little west. You go to Kidderminster, England, in the ministry of Richard Baxter. And Kidderminster, England, was a spiritual dead-zone in the 1600s. But God steps in, and the history reads like this. I’ll just read you a small selection. “When Richard Baxter arrived at Kidderminster, it had a population of about 3,000 weavers who were reckless, ungodly, and content to remain that way.” It’s not the way you thought about weavers, but they were reckless weavers, and ungodly, and content to remain that way.

“By the end of Baxter’s stay,” so here’s the transformation, “By the end of his stay, the entire community was miraculously transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit. Dr. Bates reported that, ‘The place before his coming was like a piece of dry and barren earth, but by the blessing of heaven upon his labor, the face of paradise appeared there.’ Richard Baxter himself wrote this, ‘As you passed along the streets on the Sabbath morning you might hear a hundred households singing psalms at their family worship. In a word, when I came to Kidderminster, there was only about one family in a whole street that worshipped God and called upon His name. When I left, there were some streets where not a family did not do so.’”

Baxter would call Kidderminster during that time “a colony of heaven.” That’s not normal. I mean, that just doesn’t happen all the time. That doesn’t happen. Every generation is not guaranteed a society-shaking, nation-shaking, earth-shaking revival, anything like this. But

when you read Psalm 85… I’ve just got to ask you the question, “Do you ever long for that?” Have you ever asked for that? Do you ever pray—if you read texts like this in the Bible, read things in the book of Acts—and say, “Yeah, that could happen here”?

God could do that in this community; God could do that in that community or that community. God could do that in North Africa, where J.D. and J.J. are serving. We were praying together this morning in Pastor David’s office, and the image that I had in my mind when I was praying for J.D. and J.J. was just like they had this pickaxe, and they were just slamming it into the ground, and it was just bouncing right off. Just complete resistance to the gospel.

Psalm 85 and so many other passages in Scripture tell us, you know God could make that a thing of the past. God could completely revive. He could do something awesome in our day, in our generation. We’re so tragically normal in the way that we pray. We pray as though it’s just always going to keep being the way that it’s been. God never breaks in, He never intervenes, He never does something surprising, He just does what He did yesterday. And yesterday was not that miraculous.

That doesn’t reflect biblical anticipation. It doesn’t reflect what we see in God’s Word. I love this provocation from Charles Spurgeon, where he’s speaking about prayer. He says:

We do not come in prayer to God’s poorhouse, where He dispenses His favors to the poor. Nor do we come to the back door of the house of mercy to receive the leftovers scraps, though that would be more than we deserve. But when we pray, we are standing in the palace, on the glittering floor of the great King’s own reception room, and thus we are placed on a vantage ground. In prayer we stand where angels bow with veiled faces. There, even there, the cherubim and seraphim adore before that self-same throne to which our prayers ascend. And should we come there with stunted requests and narrow and contracted faith? No. It does not become a King to be giving away pennies and nickels. He distributes pieces of gold.

Spurgeon goes on to say, “Ask for great things, for you are before a great throne.” You know, there’s a legend about Alexander the Great, that he wanted to marry a certain man’s daughter. And so he’s having a conversation, and the man said, “Well, the dowry price is going to be huge.” And Alexander said, “Well, so is my treasury. So it’s going to be fine.

Just talk to my treasurer.” So the man goes and talks to the treasurer.

And the treasurer comes back to Alexander the Great and says, “He’s asked for an unprecedented amount of money. I mean, nobody in history on record has ever asked for this. It’s absolutely audacious. It’s ridiculous.” And the treasurer says, “A fraction of that would be more than sufficient.” And legend has it that Alexander’s response is, “Let’s give it to him—he does me honor. He treats me like a king, and proves by what he asks that he believes me to be both rich and generous.”

What do our prayers say about our belief in God?

What do our prayers say about our belief in the character of God? Do our prayers assume that God is both rich and generous? What are we asking for from this God? Or is He reluctant, is He economical? If you ask him for $2.00, He gives you $1.50. Is that the kind of God that we pray to? Paul uses this phrase in Ephesians 3:20. God is able to do—look at how he stacks the adjectives! God is “able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us.”

That’s Paul’s way of saying, “Ask for great things, for you are before a great throne.” One hymn writer said that we are supposed to make great petitions of a King. “Thou art coming to a King, great petitions with thee bring.” Now this psalm is meant to cultivate in us a longing for a new normal, a longing for the in-breaking of God’s mercy and His power in our lives, in the church and in the world. And one of the ways that we cultivate an anticipation for this in-breaking of God’s power in our lives and in the world is by recalling the past. So really there are three sub points here, if you’re taking notes, and it’s “Recall, Pray, Trust and Obey.”

Recall

The first thing we’re going to do to cultivate this longing and anticipation for God’s reviving work is recall the past. Look at verse one through three. “Lord, you were favorable to your land; you restored the fortunes of Jacob. You forgave the iniquity of your people; you covered all their sin. You withdrew all your wrath; you turned from your hot anger.” Clearly these verses are pointing back in time. They’re pointing back to a time that the psalmist wants to experience in his own day. And it’s a time where there were clear demonstrations of God’s power, of His mercy, of His grace.

You know, we could read the Bible and we can assume—you get the impression—that miracles were always happening in Israel. It’s like the front page always had a miracle on it. But that’s actually not the case. I mean, if you… There were clusters, there were moments where there were clusters of miracles that all kind of came in one short period of time. So the ministry and life of Moses—wow! And then Elijah, and then Jesus, and then the early church. Clusters of just fireworks and power acts and mighty deeds were happening in there.

And then there were peppered mighty deeds and saving acts and miracles that happened in other periods. But they were clustered around these. So Moses in the Exodus, for example— I mean, that would have been the great redemptive event. If you were in Psalm 85 and you’re writing this, that’s the big one that you’re looking back to.

And you think about what happened that week. Right? God speaks through a burning bush on Monday. Staff turns to a snake on Tuesday. Water turns to blood on Wednesday. Right, not literally in a week like that, but I mean, just in a short period of time. And then the people leave and they’re in the Exodus. They leave Egypt behind, and the Red Sea parts, pillar of cloud and fire as a GPS device—I mean, just crazy stuff is happening. Water is coming out of rocks, meals are falling from the sky just outside your tent—I mean, that’s quite a year.

But here’s the point. Not every generation in Israel was there to see that happen. But every generation was meant to recall these incredible demonstrations of God’s saving power— particularly in the Old Testament, the Exodus. So you have throughout the Old Testament this phrase is repeated, time and time again. As you move through history, all the faithful Jews in Israel were constantly repeating this phrase.

So let me just walk you through it real quickly here. So Moses is talking, Deuteronomy 5:6, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” there it is, “out of the house of slavery.” Then Moses dies, and Joshua is leading the people. Joshua 24:17, “For it is the Lord our God who brought us and our fathers up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Don’t you ever forget what God did. You weren’t there, but it was awesome. Don’t you ever forget it.”

Then Joshua dies, and we’re well into the period of the judges. Judges 19:30, “And all who saw it said, ‘Such a thing has never happened or been seen from the day that the people of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt until this day.’” And then the period of judges is almost over, the last judge anoints the first king. The last judge’s name is Samuel, and he says this. 1 Samuel 12:6, “And Samuel said to the people, ‘The Lord is witness, who appointed Moses and Aaron and brought your fathers up out of the land of Egypt.’”

Pastor David took us through Psalm 78 just a couple weeks ago, in which we find out that the psalmist read a connection between Israel’s apostasy, Israel’s idolatry, and forgetting her covenant stories, forgetting what God did in bringing up the people out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. It says, for example, in Psalm 78:40–42, “How often they rebelled against him… They tested God again and again and provoked the Holy One of Israel. They did not remember his power or the day when he redeemed them from the foe.”

And so, later on in history, 722 B.C., when Israel is conquered by Assyria and they’re carted off into exile—David’s been dead for 200 years at this point—the narrator of that history tells it this way. “You want to know why the Exile happened? Do you want to know why the people were taken out of their homeland and pulled off? This occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.”

So it makes sense that the psalmist here, at the beginning of the Psalm where he’s going to ask for revival, he says, “I don’t ever want to forget the mighty deeds of the Lord.” And he calls to mind the saving activity of God on Israel’s behalf. You see that in verses one

through three. God is in action in every statement of this. “You were favorable.” You see it? “You restored.” “You forgave.” “You covered.” “You withdrew.” “You turned from your hot anger.”

This is a far cry from deism. Have you ever heard of deism? Deism is the idea that God winds up the universe like a watch at the beginning of history. It’s like He winds up the watch of history, and then He sets it down and He takes His hands off, and He lets it play out. Deism has this kind of policy of non-interference. God is not going to get involved. He started it, and then He lets it tick. It plays out on its own.

This is not what we see. This is not the biblical vision of God at all. But how often, friends, how often we pray as deists. Think about it. We pray as though God has this policy of “hands off.” “I am a gentleman. I’m not going to get involved in this. I’m not going to mess with this.” Right? We assume that God is not active among His people.

But that’s not the God of Israel. I mean, Yahweh, the covenant Lord of Israel—that wasn’t just a name in the rabbinical textbooks. They saw Him as relational, active, sovereign, in control. He was an ever-present help in time of trouble. He wasn’t passive. The prophets had this saying that Yahweh’s arm was not so short that it could not save. And generation after generation—they all had their legendary stories of the right arm of God.

So one generation of Israelites, they said to their sons and daughters, they said, “If you only would have seen the size of the walls of Jericho. Son, they were massive! But they just crumbled. You would not have believed it! But I saw it.” And then another generation says, “If you would have seen…children, if you would have seen the size of the Assyrian army, you could feel them stomping inside the gates of the city. You could feel them outside, the tremors underneath your feet. And we looked out, and they just fell dead. Angel of the Lord swept them down.”

Another generation says, “There’s this valley of dry bones. There’s no life. And there was no water. It was just bones on top of bones on top of bones. And the prophet preached, and the Spirit moved, and the bones began to rattle, and they began to come together, and then they were clothed with flesh, and then they stood as an army before God.” These were their covenant stories. God was active in the midst of His people. He was not passive, on stand-by.

So the Old Testament is theology in action. God doesn’t put His attributes on a chart somewhere for us to analyze. He says throughout the Old Testament… He says, “Do you want to know me? Watch this!” And He speaks, and He feeds, and He subdues, and He brings down, and He lifts up, and He loves and saves and conquers and empowers and enables and answers. He does so many things. He’s God with verbs. God doing stuff. God in action all over the Old Testament.

And can’t we begin to sense why this is in the Psalm about revival? Can’t we begin to sense how this would have cultivated and stirred faith in their hearts, to say, “Maybe He might do it again. Maybe He actually loves to be involved with His people, to show His power, to bring His name glory by acting on behalf of His people. Maybe He delights to do this. Maybe He’d do it again.”

Psalm 85 Reminds us to pray

And the dark history behind this becomes obvious as he turns from recalling to praying. You see that in verses four through seven. You know, some commentators think that the period in which this psalm was written may have been the period of Exile. Not the Assyrian Exile, but the Babylonian Exile, when Israel had been conquered and the people were kicked out of their homeland. And other commentators believe that it was after the period of the Exile, after some of the people were allowed to trickle back into Jerusalem—maybe 45-50,000 people came trickling back into Jerusalem.

But they arrived, and the realization that they were still under the thumb of foreign rulers, that the temple built by Solomon was still in ruins. And there was plans, talk about building another temple, but it was halted for 20 years. And when they got there, it was like, “Temple? Temple—awesome.” And then 20 years later, still no temple.

Can you imagine the blow to your faith? And unbelief and idolatry meanwhile continued everywhere around them, despite the fact that they were now back in Jerusalem. In other words, the move back from Babylon to Jerusalem didn’t change their hearts; it just changed their zip code. It didn’t change their hearts. Just like the move from Egypt to Jericho—they brought Egypt with them. Egypt was still in their hearts when they went to Jericho, and Babylon was still in their hearts when they came back to Jerusalem.

There was no spiritual revival. It was just a change in location. And they saw that, and it was a blow to their faith. And the psalmist cries out, verse four, “Restore us again, O God of our salvation, and put away your indignation toward us! Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations?” It’s a prayer for revival.

 

And notice that this prayer in verses four to seven, it’s bookended with these kind of audacious commands. It begins in verse four, “Restore us…put away.” Verse seven, “Show us…grant us.” In verse four, this “restore us” could literally be translated “turn us.” I love how big a prayer that is. Turn us. In one sense the ultimate judgment is for a sovereign God to refuse to overcome that which is most normal about life here, namely global idolatry, personal idolatry. This is an act of judgment, for God to give us over to our cravings.

And this happens in Romans 1, where Paul writes and talks about God three times, and “He gave them over. God gave them over. God gave them over.” God—this is a frightening thought—God taking His hands of mercy off, and letting fallen humanity run and charge in the direction of our idols. And the psalmist is saying, “Please, don’t let that happen. Please turn us.”

If you’re a Christian believer, if you’ve been revived, you’ve been made alive by God’s grace, it’s not because God merely said, “Turn.” Because He would have been saying “turn” to someone who according to Romans 3, does not seek God. Does not understand God. Does not desire God. Romans 8 tells us that “the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.”

He would have been shouting, “Turn!” to someone who was, according to Ephesians 2, dead in transgressions and sins, wholly unresponsive to God, “following the prince of the power of the air.” But Ephesians 2 tells us—it tells us what God did to counteract our unresponsiveness. He turned us. He answered this prayer in Psalm 85. He straight-up turned you to Himself. Here’s how Paul says it in Ephesians 2, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ— by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him.”

If you have a hard time believing in the possibility of revival, look no further than your own personal testimony. You were dead, and He made you alive. You were running for your idols, and He turned you. That’s what the psalmist is asking for. The psalmist doesn’t merely pray, “Help us to turn.” He says, “Turn us. Bring us back. Restore us. Do more than invite us—revive us. Give us life, that we might call upon Your name, that we might rejoice.”

This is not a god locked outside. This is not the god of deism. This is gospel-charged theism, and it features a God who breaks in on planet Earth, a God who breaks into living rooms, He breaks into college dorms and bedtime prayers. He breaks into dark nights of the soul. He breaks in among unreached people groups in Bihar, India. And He does things—left, right and center—that are not normal, things that are supernatural. This is our God.

And I love the result of this reviving work in verse six. “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice?” This revival is a revival unto joy. It’s a revival unto rejoicing. And verse seven seems to be the means by which God often uses in reviving His people. It says that God…and “Show us your steadfast love,” it says in verse seven, “Show us your steadfast love, O Lord, and grant us your salvation.”

Isn’t it true, if you think about it, that God revives His church by revealing Himself? God revives His church by showing us His steadfast love. Sam Storms said, “That sinful habit,” in his book Pleasures Evermore, “That sinful habit you struggle with daily, that low-grade addiction that keeps you in the throes of guilt and shame, that inability to walk with consistency in the things you know please God—ultimately will only be overcome when your heart, soul, mind, spirit and will are captivated by the majesty, mercy, splendor, beauty and magnificence of who God is and what God has done.”

All Sam Storms is doing there is unpacking 2 Corinthians 3. “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” We’re changed by beholding God. When God shows us His steadfast love, revival is already in the works.

We pray, believing that God is distant. You know, this faith-filled prayer—this has been my experience all week, just studying for this passage—that this faith-filled prayer for a new normal is a kind of rebuke. It’s as though it’s saying, “If you don’t believe that personal, societal or even global revival is possible, you have forgotten the power of God.”

I think when it comes to prayer, if we don’t pray for things that might set us up for disappointment we’re not doing it right. We’re praying safe. We’re not called to pray merely safe, self-protecting—you might say realistic—prayers. So often—this is so convicting for me—so often my prayers just match what I see in everyday life. And in my everyday life, hard-to-reach people continue to be hard to reach. It’s what I’m seeing. In my everyday life the church exerts very little influence on the world around us.

But page after page of Scripture, God is seeking—get it—He’s seeking to convince us of the fact that God has options. He has power. He intervenes. He brings life where there was death. He brings beauty from ashes. He removes fear while we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. He can cause His Word to not return void. He can bring—can you believe this? I mean, He can bring reviving grace to any person that you know, any resistant people group, and He can do it before the week is out. That’s the power of God. He has that ability. He’s sovereign. We’re to pray and hope as though God has options.

Psalm 85 reminds us to trust and obey

And that leads us then to verse eight through 13: trust and obey. Listen to this trust in verse eight:

Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints; but let them not turn back to folly. Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him, that glory may dwell in our land. Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs up from the ground, and righteousness looks down from the sky. Yes, the LORD will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase. Righteousness will go before him and make his footsteps a way.

Hear this trust. He’s saying, “He will speak.” “He will give peace.” “Salvation is near.” “Faithfulness springs forth.” “The Lord will give what is good.” God is at work among His people. There’s trust all over these verses.

And there’s also a call to obedience. That’s why we say trust and obey. Look at verse eight. “For he will speak peace to his people, to his saints; but let them not turn back to folly.” In other words, whatever this reviving work of God is in Psalm 85, it’s not something that renders the believer passive. We’re to be actively leaning forward, recalling, praying, longing, anticipating, not turning back to folly, pursuing godliness. That’s all here underneath these words of this text. It’s calling us to do these things, all the while trusting that God knows, that God is wise.

I read a great book on revival several years ago. It’s called, When God Comes to Church, by a guy named Raymond Ortlund. And part of the reason I love it is because it makes sense of expectations. It makes sense of what that Bible broadly says about what’s normal and the extraordinary work of God in the midst of our normal lives. Listen to how he describes revival. He says, “Revival is a season in the life of the church when God causes the normal ministry of the gospel,” the normal ministry of the gospel, “to surge forward with extraordinary spiritual power. Revival is seasonal, not perennial. God causes it, we do not.

It’s the normal ministry of the gospel, not something eccentric or even different from what the church is always charged to do. What sets revival apart is simply that our usual efforts greatly accelerate in their spiritual effects.”

Oh, don’t you long for that? Wouldn’t it be awesome, if your “usual efforts,” what you’ve been doing—sharing, showing, teaching, serving—if suddenly you just did that again, and you found that there was a great acceleration in the spiritual result? What would happen if God took 4,000 or so believers at The Church at Brook Hills, and greatly accelerated the spiritual effects of our ministry?

I mean, that would be a massive practical problem, that Dennis Blythe and Donnie Arrant would be up all night—and it would be awesome. They would have to be sorting out, “How do we account for all of this growth, all of these conversions and salvations, all that God is doing here?”

You have to see just one more thing before we’re done. Hold your place in Psalm 85, and flip over to Psalm 126. There’s a common beginning, back in Psalm 85, “Lord, you were favorable to your land; you restored the fortunes of Jacob.” Same thing in Psalm 126, except it’s slightly different. Instead of just looking back and saying, “This happened and I want it to happen. I’ve never seen it, but I want it to happen,” Psalm 126 almost sounds like this person was inside it, saw it.

He says, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.” And look what happened when revival came. Joy, just like what Psalm 85 said. “Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.” And here was a new effect of revival that we didn’t pick up on in Psalm 85. “Then they said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’” What an awesome prospect that is.

And I think back to the days that I heard about my dad’s tent revivals and all that was going on in that era. Yet Dad was never satisfied. He never would have been happy to just find out that the work of God could fit in the sides of that tent in New Orleans. He always wanted it to be bigger. But we wouldn’t be satisfied here at The Church at Brook Hills for a work of God that could fit in this building. We want God to do something awesome in our midst.

If our expectations are informed by God’s Word, we want a revival that will cause the nations to say, “The Lord has done great things for them.” That’s biblical revival. That’s a scale big enough for God to say, “Wow. They’ve asked for something big. They must believe that I’m awesome. They must believe that I’m big. Here’s what they asked—they asked for the earth to be filled with the knowledge of my glory like the waters cover the sea. They must believe me to be both rich and generous.”

Friends, this earth is a valley filled with dry bones, and God wants prophets. He wants proclaimers to preach the gospel over this death, this deadness everywhere, so that when He says the word, His Spirit moves and bones begin to rattle together and an army of the redeemed stand before our God to exalt the Lord of the nations. Would that not be a most welcome new normal? Wouldn’t that be awesome? What a prospect!

This comment that Ray Ortlund has in his book—he’s talking about Isaiah 64. He says:

The prophet envisions God taking the sky which He has spread out like a curtain—taking that cosmic veil which hides Him from our view, grabbing it in His strong hands, ripping it apart from top to bottom, and stepping down into our world. It’s a thought to make every believer tremble with joy. But the prophet is not thinking of a literal earthquake. The mountains symbolize long

established, well-positioned, difficult-to-remove resistance to God. That’s the world we live in, and that’s what the church cannot change by her own efforts and programs and good intentions, but the Lord’s presence changes everything. The evil that we cannot budge is to God like mere twigs before a fire, or water set to boil. It has no power to resist.

Don’t you long for this? Will we pray for this—individually, as a church? All of this relates to Christ and what He accomplished on the cross. Every grace comes to us from the cross. All grace is purchased grace, bought grace. In that sense the recollection of the cross is the best fuel for our hope of revival, for creating an anticipation for revival.

Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” If you think about expectations for your own life. Will God leave you, as a believer, as you are? Will God leave the church as it is? And the cross says, “Not a chance. He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him pursue His Bride, pursue you, turn you, restore you, bring you back, revive you, seek you out?

Will God leave this world as it is? And there again the cross says, “Not a chance.” We know this because we read Revelation 5, where there were people from every tribe and tongue and nation, singing the praises of the Lamb. Which means God will have wrought revival among every people group on the planet before that Day comes.

And the response of the redeemed from every tribe and tongue will not be a song about revival. It’s going to be a song about the cross. “Worthy is the Lamb who purchased men for God out of every tribe and tongue and people.” This is where reviving grace comes from, regenerating grace comes from, convicting grace—all of these graces were purchased by Christ on the cross. You know, in this sense God preached His most powerful revival sermon—not from a tent, but from the cross.

Jesus said, “If I be lifted up, watch what I’ll do. If I be lifted up on the cross, I will draw all men unto me.” What an image of Jesus on the cross pulling rebels out of their rebellion, Jesus on the cross, from the cross, pulling people from death to life. He said, “If I’m lifted up, I’m going to revive the world, revive the nations. Through this gospel I will bring revival.” And may we see it in our day. And may we have a holy discontent with anything short of God acting with power and mercy in our lives, in the church, in our community, in this world, for His glory.

Who God Is…

• He is the sovereign King over all.
• He is the good Judge of all.
• He is the merciful Savior for all.

What We Do…

• We plead for God’s justice to reign.

• We anticipate God’s kingdom to come.

• We spread God’s salvation to the needy.

How We Pray…

For The Poor…

• Pray for provision of food for the hungry and clean, safe drinking water for the thirsty.
•  Pray for medical provision for children and adults suffering and dying of   preventable diseases.
• Pray for refugees who have been separated from their homes due to natural   and moral disasters.
• Pray for the church to give generously, sacrificially, and cheerfully to the poor.

 For The Orphan…

• Pray for children and their parents in the foster care system.
• Pray for children and their caregivers in orphanages.
• Pray for foster care and adoptive families.
• Pray for the church to show the love of the Father in heaven to the fatherless on earth.

For The Enslaved…

•  Pray for victims…

  • For their strength and salvation

  • For their protection, freedom, and justice

  • For their hope and healing

• Pray for traffickers and customers…
  • For conviction, repentance, and salvation
  • For criminal networks to be dismantled
  • For oppressors to be arrested and punished

• Pray for governments…
  • For implementation of just legislation
  •  For discernment in forming alliances
• Pray for the church…
  • To awaken to this issue and to unite against injustice
  • For advocates and laborers to emerge
  • To flee sexual immorality

For The Persecuted…

•  Pray for persecuted believers…
  • That they would hold fast to the hope God gives
  • That they would know the depth of God’s love for them
  • That the Holy Spirit will strengthen them and their families
  • For their boldness in sharing the gospel amidst persecution

• Pray for persecutors…
  • That they would see Christ in the saints they are persecuting and be saved
  • That they would be brought to justice

For The Unreached…

• For more laborers to go to them.
• For open doors to share with them.
• For receptive hearts among them.
• For eternal salvation to come to them.