Restoration and Revival (Part III)

By Peter Tsukahira

Offering the Sacrifice

Revival is not just a feeling. Revival fire is when sinners get saved, those who have left their faith come back to God, the sick get healed, and even the dead are raised to life. True revival always starts with a powerful return to the Lord. This takes place at the altar of the cross. The cross is the ultimate expression of God’s love for us. It is the place, the chosen altar, where God Himself offered His own Son as a sacrifice for our sins. This cross is where we meet with a holy God. He has provided the accepted sacrifice for us! It is crucial to believe that God’s Son is your sacrifice and the One who has mediated a New Covenant with both Jews and Gentiles. However, there is more to the gospel than simply believing those vitally important facts. Through Jesus’ sacrifice we ourselves become children of God, and in turn, live lives that emulate His.

Paul the apostle wrote:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:1-2)

We follow Jesus by making ourselves a sacrifice too, but we cannot crucify ourselves. Think about it – you may be able to nail one hand down, but that’s all. God works this liberating death in our self-centered lives by using our enemies and our environment. Our death to self is so important that God will even use our friends, families, pastors, and teachers. Other people are so often God’s instruments of our crucifixion. If we recognise the altar of sacrifice and embrace it in the midst of our pain, struggle, suffering, affliction, or difficulty, we will find freedom and be saved. The altar is the end of our suffering because it is the place of death to our flesh, but it is life to the Spirit in us. To embrace suffering and humiliation may seem foolish in the eyes of the world, but God’s way is hidden from the proud and is revealed to the humble.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Corinthians 1:18, 22-25)

The cross is foolishness, and we are perishing if we say, “Lord, You don’t know what they did to me!” or “It’s wrong, it’s unfair! I quit!” or “Lord, what You are telling me to do is too difficult!” Some people go to the cross with their burdens, but when it begins to really hurt, they get down from it. After a while it’s easy to come down from our cross, and our actions become like the false prophets’ trivial cuts in their flesh. Selfish human nature will never be transformed that way. Our fleshly selfishness must die so that the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead – the spirit of revival – can come upon us!

After Elijah gathered the people around him at his altar, he prayed a simple and short prayer. The false prophets had taken all day, but Elijah’s prayer took no more than a few moments. He had actually spent more time restoring the Lord’s altar, and there he prayed for revival.

And it came to pass, at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that Elijah the prophet came near and said, “Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that You are God in Israel and I am Your servant, and that I have done all these things at Your word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people may know that You are the Lord God, and that You have turned their hearts back to You again.

(1 Kings 18:36-37)

Revival Fire

As soon as the last word of the prophet’s prayer left his lips, a mighty flame hurtled down from the sky and consumed the sacrifice and the altar itself. Immediately, the hearts of the people were turned back to God, and they cried out in repentance and worship.

Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood and the stones and the dust, and it licked up the water that was in the trench. Now when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces; and they said, “The Lord, He is God!” Then Elijah said to them, “Seize the prophets of Baal! Do not let one of them escape!” So they seized them; and Elijah brought them down to the Brook Kishon and executed them there. (1 Kings 18:38-40)

I used to think that God had many kinds of fire: fire for judgment, fire for purification, fire for revival, pillars of fire for guidance and worship. Now I realise that there is only one fire of God, and that fire is God Himself! The Bible says that God is a consuming fire! (Hebrews 12:29) When God comes near, it is both a judgment on sin and a vindication of righteousness. When the fire of God fell on Elijah’s altar, it was a fire of revival for the people, a vindication of God’s spokesman, and a death sentence upon the false prophets.

There is a principle here for understanding how revival works. If we restore the altar of the Lord as a place where real self-sacrifice can take place, and if we make that inner sacrifice in faith, God will meet us there. The fire of revival does not fall randomly or by accident here or there for no reason. The fire that comes from heaven falls on the altar to consume the sacrificial offering! Jesus’ death on the cross is a clear picture of the sacrificial altar that God requires.

When Jesus rose from the grave to sit at the Father’s right hand, He then sent us the Holy Spirit. The fire of God

subsequently fell on His disciples on the Day of Pentecost. This is the fire of revival that came to consume the sacrifice of their lives on the altar that Jesus had restored. It is time for the fire of the Holy Spirit to fall on us today, but first we must restore the altar of the Lord in Israel and throughout the nations.

We restore the altar of the Lord by gathering the living stones of God’s scattered people. We are all just like the rough stones that Elijah found on the ground; we are just waiting to be used for something useful by God. The sacrifice that the Lord requires is restored when we make our own lives a meeting place for God. It is here that we can bring Him every weak and worthless thing – every idle and critical word, every selfish motive, every lustful thought, every cruel remark or deed, everything that is cowardly, every pain, affliction, and hurt. We must also bring to that same altar every noble and good thing about us as an offering to God – our talents, our gifts, our future plans, our dreams. We bring them all to the Master as an irrevocable, non-returnable offering, and we let Him make of our entire lives what He desires – His good and perfect, eternal will.

This is the place where true revival begins.

This article is an excerpt from the book, God’s Tsunami by Peter Tsukahira. It has been reprinted with permission from the author. To go back to part 2 of this article click here.