“Our Hope Is In You, LORD!”
By Elmer G. Klassen
As I am writing this there may be more people fasting and praying for our nation in North America than ever before in History. We know that millions are now humbling themselves, praying and confessing their sins and turning to God for not only the purpose of the healing our land but for the fulfilling of our Lord’s Great Commission. For many of us this month will go down in history as being the turning point of a life lived for God. How many it will be we do not know, but we do know that the world will notice the difference in some way. We are praying for a sovereign work of God in answer to sincere prevailing prayer which will grip God’s people with deep conviction, repentance, forgiveness, and deliverance from personal sins. We are praying that Christians will be filled with the Holy Spirit and will manifest His fruits and graces. We are praying that young and old Christians will have a passion to bring the lost to Christ at home and abroad and that non-Christians will earnestly seek Him. Is this too much to ask?
This did happen in Wales in a very dramatic fashion. It began in 1904 when Evan Roberts preached in a small Wednesday night church service presenting the following to the people willing to attend. You must confess every known sin to God; you must remove every doubtful habit from your life; you must obey the Holy Spirit’s prompting; and you must go public with your witness for Christ. In a short while the nation changed and was singing Gospel songs instead of cursing.
Revival is looking to God rather than looking to man. It is putting our trust in God rather than putting our trust in man. It is desiring God’s fellowship more than the fellowship of man. It is intercessors being more satisfied with God than seeking the satisfaction in the flesh. It is as Wesley Duewel writes in his book, “God’s Power Is For You,” having a greater hunger for God than for food and sleep.
There are many Christians in our land who have a hunger for God such as they have never had before. This is a work of the Holy Spirit. However some of us have experienced too soon that hunger can be satisfied with things, successes, and power. In the above mentioned book we read that this hunger for God can continue and should continue.
“How often God has given you the privilege of hearing wonderful sermons by choice servants of His! How often He has touched your heart through the words of a beautiful Christian hymn or chorus! How often you have been blessed by the fervent prayer of a Christian brother or sister! How often these things have caused sincere thanksgiving in your heart, filled you with a sense of God’s presence, and given you comfort and hope! But why do the results seem so insubstantial? Why does your life seem so uniformly average? Why is it normal to be subnormal?
“Undoubtedly your spiritual process is slow, your spiritual victories so incomplete, and your spiritual blessings so quickly forgotten because you have so little spiritual hunger. We often become content with the way things are. We welcome an occasional sense of God’s nearness and blessing as we would welcome a passing quest. But we don’t really expect God’s presence to be constantly with us. We praise God for occasional fresh anointings in His service, but we are not constantly hungering for such anointing. We are happy for the Spirit’s assistance in prayer, but so often it is as easy not to pray as it is to pray. How seldom is our soul so drawn out in prayer that we hunger more for prayer and intercession than we hunger for food or sleep! How rarely do we really have thirsty souls!
“So much is dependent upon spiritual hunger and thirst. God has made it a spiritual law that in order to receive one must ask. Doors do not open unless you knock, and you find only that which you really seek (Matt. 7:7). And how seldom we spiritually seek with all our heart! God’s greatest spiritual blessings are indeed free, but they are nevertheless often secured only after a spiritual price is paid. This price is not related to hard effort, to vociferous praying, or to attempted earnestness. The price is not the price of effort, it is the price of hunger.
“There is a sense in which God is always satisfying the spiritual hunger. There is another sense in which He longs to make us more spiritually hungry and thirsty than ever. David was a man after God’s own heart because he was one whose soul literally thirsted for God, even as a deer pants for streams of water (Ps. 42:1). His soul longed for God more than watchmen long and wait for the morning (Ps. 130:6). God sets apart for Himself those who share such Godlike holy desires (Ps. 4:3).
“Moses was granted a vision of God’s glory because he was so insatiably hungry to see and know more of God (Ex. 33:18-19). The reason why God’s glory clothed the face of Moses was that Moses was so inexpressibly hungry for more and more of God’s presence, for a deeper revelation of God’s very nature and being. To this day God touches with His glory those who deeply and constantly know an insatiable hunger for Him, His presence, His beauty, His holiness, and His love.
“It is folly to seek God’s power as one would seek an ‘it.’ It is a mistake to seek a gift from God rather than God Himself. When we have Him, we have all. The quickest way to God’s power and glory is not to seek more of ‘it,’ but rather to hunger and thirst for closer and closer communion with Him. It is He the Holy Spirit whom we need in all His perfect indwelling.
“Oh, let us know more of Him! Let us not hunger for ‘success,’ for ‘power,’ or for any other kind of ‘it.’ Let us hunger for more of Him, because if we hunger for Him with an insatiable hunger, God will flood our lives with Himself and we will have more than we have ever asked or thought. No eye has seen, no ear has heard all that God longs to be to us, but He reveals this to us by His Spirit (I Cor. 2:9-10).
“Lord, make us really hungry, insatiably hungry, for You!”
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