Revive your work
The Great Awakening
By the 1730s the churches of the American colonies had settled into a comfortable chill. The forms were intact, the pews filled on Sundays, the doctrine sound enough, and the life had quietly drained out of it all. Religion had become a thing inherited and managed rather than felt. Then something broke in that no one had scheduled. Under the searching preaching of Jonathan Edwards, who could hold a congregation over the edge of eternity until it trembled, and the open-air voice of George Whitefield, who preached to thousands in fields no church wall could hold, a great awakening swept across the land. People who had been nominally Christian their whole lives were jolted into something vivid and undone, weeping over sin they had never taken seriously, their settled lives reordered in a season. It looked less like a program than a flood. This is a kind of break the phase has to name, because it does not come by leaving. It comes by waking. Revival is a corporate disconnect, God breaking a sleeping church out of its own deadness, against the grain of its settled inertia. No committee voted for it. It arrived like weather, and the dry, formal religion it found could not stand in front of it.
“The LORD, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds. Renew your work in the midst of the years; in wrath, you remember mercy.”
— Habakkuk — Habakkuk 3:2 (WEB)
“Won't you revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?”
Disconnect, as awakening. Not every break is a leaving; this one is God breaking His sleeping people, and the sleeping heart within them, out of settled deadness, against their own inertia. The phase asks whether you will defend your numbness or ask to be woken, and whether you will let a disruption you cannot control reorder a faith gone formal.
Sometimes the break you need is not to leave but to wake. You have not walked away from the faith; you have simply gone numb inside it, your love grown nominal, your prayers gone formal, the whole thing running on memory and habit. That sleep is its own kind of captivity, and you usually cannot shake yourself out of it by trying. Revival is God's disruptive mercy for exactly this, the in-breaking that jolts a cold heart awake against its own inertia. It is not always gentle, and it is rarely convenient, but it is mercy. And here is what you can do with a numb and sleepy faith: you can ask for the disruption. You can pray the prophet's prayer over your own cold heart, that God would renew His work in the midst of your years, that He would revive you again. You cannot manufacture the fire, but you can stop defending the sleep and start asking to be woken, which is the one move a slumbering heart is still free to make.
Whole branches of the Church calcify, their forms intact and their fire quietly gone, and the LORD has a long habit of breaking in with revival, awakening a sleeping people against the establishment's comfort and often through unlikely preachers. In the colonies of the 1730s the pews were full and the life had drained out, until under Edwards and Whitefield a great awakening swept the land like weather no committee had scheduled. The awakening is a corporate disconnect, God shaking His people out of settled deadness, against the grain of their own inertia. No movement can manufacture such a thing; the whole Church can only seek it, pray to be revived again, and make room for the flood when it comes.
What cannot be shaken is the God who revives. Fervor rises and cools, awakenings pass into memory, the warmest church can drift back toward sleep. But the One who breaks in to wake the dead is unchanged from age to age, and the work He renews in the midst of the years is His to keep alive, not ours.
- Where has my faith gone numb and formal, running on habit and memory rather than life?
- Am I defending my spiritual sleep, or am I willing to ask God to disrupt it?
- What would it mean to pray honestly, renew Your work in the midst of my years, and then make room for the answer?
Lord, I have gone cold inside a faith I never left, and I cannot wake myself. Break in with Your disruptive mercy. Renew Your work in the midst of my years, and revive me again, that I might rejoice in You. I stop defending the sleep and ask to be woken. Amen.