Are We Asking for the Wrong Thing?

As long as I have been a Christian the churches I have attended have held revival meetings. The evangelists have all prayed for God to send heaven sent revival and the pastors have longed for that type of revival in their churches. I confess to having spent years

• Praying for that sort of revival
• Reading about many of the great revivals of the past and
• Preaching to the church I pastored about revival

I still hear many pastors looking for a revival like those of old days, I think often motivated by the desire to have a large church congregation. (I wonder if the men who pastor large churches feel as compelled for revival as those who pastor struggling churches?)

But as the years have moved on and I have studied the Bible and church history  more, I have noticed:
That those revivals of the past were drastically not Baptist.

The Baptists of that era even opposed them. For the longest time I assumed it was because there was something wrong with those Baptists. But that couldn't have been completely true because, although the Baptist's would not take part in the revival meetings themselves, their own churches grew as a result of those who were genuinely converted searching Scriptures and ending up in Baptist churches because they were the ones preaching the Bible. I am beginning to believe, there was more wrong with the revivalists than the Baptists and perhaps the reason modern Baptist pastors now so quickly side with the revivalists is because we are hungry for the large crowds we envision accompany revival.

That revival is not the norm of the Bible but the exception
God did grant "a little reviving" here and there through Israel's history. But with the exception of the book of Acts the New Testament is devoid of revival type language; and you have to make some assumptions to call Acts a revival era. It is more of a beginning than a reviving.

This all leads me to question whether we are asking God for the wrong thing. Maybe we dream of something that has never been the priority of God. Maybe that statement I have so often heard that “God is more interested in revival than we are” is not, in fact, true. I am coming to believe that the work that brings glory to the Lord is that

• Long term
• Consistent
• Stick by the stuff
• Day in and day out

growth in Christian graces as we look for the blessed hope kind of Christianity. Any other seems to tend toward compromise or the work of the flesh in order to get large groups.

Maybe we should stop asking for revival so that our church can grow bigger and start asking for a Christians to grow in faith and doctrine. Can any seriously deny that the average Christian in America is a hobby Christian at best? What we really need are some pastors who will roll up there sleeves and dig in to the hard work of building believers in the most holy faith instead of building their churches.