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There is a parable of Jesus that I wish to share to start off our topic today. Once there was a sower who went out to the fields. Some seed landed on the road where it was eaten by the birds. Others landed in fields with thorns but they were choked out. Then some more landed on rocky soil that prevented roots from forming and when the sun came out the plants withered. But still, some landed in good soil that produced a bountiful harvest. Later that day after the crowds had dispersed His disciples came to Him asking about the meaning behind the parable. Jesus explained that the seed was the message of the kingdom of God and the fields were the types of people who would receive it.
The path is the people who are not even receptive to the message and it is like the seed that is eaten by birds. The thorny soil represents people who have heard the message but the things of life crowd it out. Now we come to the two soils that had a plant prosper for a time. We all know that the good soil is the person who truly accepts the message. Digging deep into the word of God and growing from it. Rocky soil represents those who have accepted the message but do not have the depth needed to survive persecution represented by the sun that dries them up because they couldn’t reach down to the living water that would let them endure it with strength.
It is this point that we are talking about today, growing deep in your relationship with God and how there are two main ways a ministry can grow.
Our two available ways are to grow outwards or downwards. Outwards represents having a vast amount of people being reached by what you say or do but it never goes far in impacting them. Downwards is when the impact is deep and nourishing to a person.
For the vast amount of this media ministry, my goal has been to be deep in content but in that decision exists the understanding that your growth will not be as easy to track in numerical value. Take how this ministry started with me only doing a blog that was a bit all over the place in content style before becoming the precursor of Isaiah 1:18 Ministries.
That blog was started in 2020 and as God worked to deepen my understanding of who He is and of His word the prompting to share what I was seeing became stronger and stronger to the point of making it my focus. At the time of writing this, the blog has only 35 followers and of those followers, there seem to be only 3 people who read each one as it comes out.
If you know anything about internet pages it’s that they use trackers to determine how much traffic a person gets and thus show it to more people based on that demand for content. Because of this, my question was “How could I get more people to read this?”
I wanted the messages being written to get out there and be found by everyone because of their spiritual value. This breeds discouragement and causes the uphill downhill pattern that exists in anyone who is starting out something like this. As I have continued to keep this work in prayer I find myself needing to continually remind myself that this doesn’t belong to me but to God.
He has been kind enough to grant me these things but it all comes from Him. That means it is up to Him on how wide this message reaches out. And my focus is to be on working to do what I’ve been called to do.
This all ties into my title today, Sight of True Revival. When we think of revival we often times think of a church that is filled to the brim with people singing and coming before an open altar with people being prayed over.
People are getting healed by God through the working of miracles and we hear people speaking in tongues and then followed up by a translation for the congregation to hear the message. And while all of this is good and can be part of a revival we can’t forget that there is a different type of revival. One that comes from people within the church going deep in their scripture. I am classifying them as personal and congregational revivals for the sake of distinguishing between the two of them.
Before we go any further I need to make one thing clear about revivals. It requires openness and submission to the Holy Spirit for it to happen. The famous Azusa Street Revivals in the 1920s were first preceded by the members of that church spending dedicated time in prayer together begging for the Holy Spirit to be restored to them with the evidence of speaking in tongues. And this true desire for a deeper understanding and knowledge of who God is must be the core of a revival to happen genuinely.
I’ve been part of many churches growing up and my family eventually helped to found Stuttgart Missional Community Church. That church started as just a bible study but it grew into what we think of when we hear the word church. A place with people meeting on Sundays for service. As that church grew we wanted to have a family mindset where it was genuinely possible for people to grow. Thus the creation of “Growth Groups” came about and it’s because people are growing deep in their relationship with God that they are inevitably telling people about the church due to the genuine presence of the Lord that comes from truly seeking Him.
In our modern American, and even Western culture, we have become so focused on a congregational revival and forgotten that it is often preceded by a personal revival. That person is the one who begins encouraging growth in those around them. It is that deep growth that prepares a congregation for the revival that God wants to pour out on them. God’s desire is for His name to be glorified and when churches have the proper heart and mind they will do such in all things as much as they can. The outpouring of His Holy Spirit will enhance this to above and beyond natural ability as He empowers things that we never expected or could predict the details of. However, what we do with this outpouring impacts the world’s perception of us as Christians. This impact comes from more than just what we do with the outpouring but how we live our lives as well.
That is why the Bible has such a focus on us Christians living holy lives that are no longer common in this world. The fruits of the spirit listed in Galatians 5:22-23 are virtues that develop within our lives as we live seeking to become more like Christ in our personal character. In fact, the term Christian was used to describe how we were so much like Christ in our behaviors and mannerisms. It wasn’t until the people of Antioch started calling us Christians that the name stuck. Before then the Jews called us “Followers of the Way.”
And this all brings us back to the beginning with the parable of the sower and the types of soil that we can be. God doesn’t want a person to be a rocky soil that quickly abandons the teachings of scripture when things get hard. He wants them to be the good soil that lets roots grow and solidify themselves deep in the earth reaching the water tables that nourish it even in a drought. And that water is the word of God which Jesus describes as the living water when speaking with the Samaritan woman by the well in chapter 4 of John’s Gospel.
One thing about congregational revivals that I want to say is that people so often forget to follow them up with discipleship groups and focus on not letting the new word be abandoned. Maybe this is the reason why we don’t see congregational revivals that often anymore. God would rather have a hundred personal revivals that make a lasting impact rather than thousands of congregational ones that don’t last in the same way. (That last part is just my speculation but it is worth considering and wondering about.)
That’s all for this time. If you want to grow as a Christian I recommend choosing one of the four gospels to read through and then go to the book of Acts to read the history of the early church and then keep going through the New Testament for theological understanding. As you are doing this look for other Christians to talk about these things or you can send me an email using the contact form on isaiah118ministries.org and I’ll get back to you the best I can to answer those questions. Until next time, Courage and Godspeed.