Seeing a Need for Revival
Anytime God acts, He does it through the lens of mercy. Pastor Joel Solomon from New Life Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia, encouraged students, faculty and staff as they gathered for Regent University’s weekly chapel service Wednesday, March 15.
“The moment we think that God interfaces with us over anything and with anything outside of mercy, we’ve either brought Him a little bit lower, or elevated ourselves a little bit too high,” said Solomon.
Solomon stressed the importance for Christians to always be asking God for mercy. He says that oftentimes, Christians will not do this because they don’t believe they need it. Yet, he says, when God thinks about His people, He does so out of mercy.
“Nobody asks to be revived if they don’t think they need to be revived,” said Solomon. “Revival, implicit in its word, is that you are dead and you need to be revived. How do we possibly even begin to ask for revival if we don’t think we even need it?”
Solomon believes that people fail to find revival not because God doesn’t want to bring it, and not because people don’t ask for it, but because people fail to see the need for it. Psalm 85, he says, shows people who know they need God and ask Him for revival. He challenged the audience to identify areas of their lives where they have become too confident and blinded from the areas where they need mercy.
In Isaiah 6, Isaiah sees the throne room of God in the year King Uzziah died. He was a king who accomplished much and became prideful, took on the role of a priest, and died of leprosy. Solomon believes this is a prophetic message that shows God is revealed when pride dies. It was then that Isaiah, a righteous prophet, confessed he was a man of unclean lips and lived among a people of unclean lips. Christians, Solomon says, must do the same.
“The sole purpose of being revived is so that we will find pleasure in Him, joy in His heart,” said Solomon. “I think that sometimes we don’t find the other end of revival because we make revival about getting to somewhere, to something, rather than making revival about getting to someone. If your revival doesn’t end with an encounter with His mercy and His grace, His heart and pleasure, you are on the wrong street and asking for the wrong kind of revival.”
Biblical revival, Solomon says, is finding pleasure in God in a deeper way. He left students with a reminder to look at themselves with humility and seek and search for revival from a good father who wants to grant it for the purpose of simply finding Him.