Hunger

"Blessed are they that hunger." Bless God! What are we hungering for, a LITTLE BIT of God? Enough to take us through this old world where we will have the dry rot and be stunted and then squeeze into heaven? "Blessed are they that HUNGER," for the NATURE and POWER and LOVE and UNDERSTANDING of God. Why? "They shall be FILLED."


-- John G. Lake (emphasis mine)

A Good Foundation

For the Church of God and Christian faith to become strong and to be built up in God, it is necessary to get a good foundation. It is a greater problem with most builders to get the old rubbish out of the way than to do the building. If we will look at our own lives, we will observe this: that the things that have been rooted and grounded in our hearts -- some tradition of the Fathers, some of it misconception of the meaning of the Word of God; much of our teaching is fragmented -- these form the greatest obstacles to the engrafting of the living Word of God. Every one of us who have progressed in God have found that the difficulty was not in believing the Word of God, but the difficulty was to get away from things that were settled in our own being as facts, though untrue. How hardly have we struggled over the matter of, "If it be Thy will," concerning sickness. From our babyhood and all down through the generations, we have been taught that if you are sick, the proper thing to do is to pray, "If it be Thy will," forgetting all the time that the Lord has forever demonstrated and declared His eternal will concerning the subject of sickness by healing all that come to Him.


-- John G. Lake

A Good Foundation

For the Church of God and Christian faith to become strong and to be built up in God, it is necessary to get a good foundation. It is a greater problem with most builders to get the old rubbish out of the way than to do the building. If we will look at our own lives, we will observe this: that the things that have been rooted and grounded in our hearts -- some tradition of the Fathers, some of it misconception of the meaning of the Word of God; much of our teaching is fragmented -- these form the greatest obstacles to the engrafting of the living Word of God. Every one of us who have progressed in God have found that the difficulty was not in believing the Word of God, but the difficulty was to get away from things that were settled in our own being as facts, though untrue. How hardly have we struggled over the matter of, "If it be Thy will," concerning sickness. From our babyhood and all down through the generations, we have been taught that if you are sick, the proper thing to do is to pray, "If it be Thy will," forgetting all the time that the Lord has forever demonstrated and declared His eternal will concerning the subject of sickness by healing all that come to Him.




-- John G. Lake

Exalted Place

Indeed, I have this in my heart, that the low state of Christian experience that is common among men is mostly accounted for by this one fact: that Christians have failed to grasp the exalted place into which Jesus Christ puts us when we have been made sons of God.


-- John G. Lake

Unspeakable Hunger

As I went on with the Lord I felt an unspeakable hunger springing up within me for more of God. I hardly knew how to pray, but would sometimes turn to my Heavenly Father and say to Him, ‘What dost Thou want?” ; because it seemed to me it was more His desire to obtain full possession of me than my desire for Himself.


-- Carrie Judd Montgomery, legendary early missionary of The Christian and Missionary Alliance and The Assemblies of God

Notes for Community Prayer Meeting 10/1/2012

If you know me, you know that I'm better at finding quotes than at being original, so I'd like to share a number of quotes from Flames of Freedom, by Edwin Lutzer, a book about the Canadian Revival in 1972.




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Revival is God purifying His church. Revival is God bringing His church back to the dynamism of the book of Acts. Revival is nothing more than having our experience catch up with our theology.



Revival only seems extraordinary because we have drifted so far from what God has intended for us.







Revival is God's finger pointed at me!





People everywhere in the Canadian revival were discovering that their commitment of God was shallow and in some cases meaningless. Before the revival came, believers did not know how worldly they actually were.



Those who had prayed for revival did not know what they had been praying for. No one expected God to deal so personally and thoroughly with them.



Christians are calling sin 'sin' in their lives.



What was the chief sin that surfaced most often in the Canadian revival? Pride. There was much repentance of pride, jealosy, and lack of love. They confessed that they loved themselves more than they loved God.



Scores of pastors confessed the sin of pride, self-effort and frustration in their ministries



Are you ever conscious of any of the following?



a secret spirit of pride in your success or position, your gifts and abilities

love of human praise, desire to be noticed, love of supremacy

stirrings of anger or impatience, a dislike of being contradicted

self-will; a stubborn, unteachable spirit; an arguing spirit; a disposition to criticize

carnal fear: a man-fearing spirit;

a jealous disposition, envy of the success of another

evading and covering of the truth

unbelief, discouragement, lack of faith and trust in God; disposition to worry and complain



The key to local church revival is the pastor. If he is cool, the church will adjust to his temperature.



If everyone in your church was in your spiritual condition, would you have a revived church?



Revival is a personal and also a corporate experience. It is "God at work, restoring His church to health." It is God visiting a segment of His people with cleansing from sin and the filling of the Spirit.





Like Elijah, we have seen a cloud the size of a man's hand. We ought to pray that the shower we have seen will become a downpour to give life to our parched religious soil.





If one believer can be restored to spiritual health, two can be; and if two, then five; and if five, then ten. In other words, any church can be revived if the believers meet the conditions individually.







We need not wait for the "fire to fall". What we need to do is ask Am I revived? Fire usually spreads.



We ought to pray for revival, work for revival, and be revived ourselves.