2008 Revival Conference

A few weeks ago my family and I spent several days in Alabama visiting with a ministry friend, Don Currin and his family.  During that visit, the Lord spoke to our hearts about what it meant to live out of an overflow in our relationship with Christ.  I was able to meet and spend some time with Paul Washer from HeartCry Missionary Society and saw the sweetness of a broken vessel in the hand of the master.  And while there Don told me about an upcoming “Revival Conference.”

I immediately went to the website and registered – thinking it would be a “stimulating” time hearing preaching related to genuine revival.  But I have to confess that in my heart I had no expectation of encountering God in a life changing way.  And secretly in my heart I held back the possibility of actually experiencing “personal revival” in my own life.  It was simply a “conference.”

What an unexpected shock when God showed up!  I cannot express in words the work the Lord has done in my own heart.  Our time began Tuesday morning with a concert of prayer that lasted for 2 1/2 hours.  No talking, no looking around, simply praying and listening for the voice of God.  And like an onion the Lord began to peel away and expose things in my own heart that were not right with Him.  During this time different men, mainly the speakers at the conference, would come and pray at the microphone as the congregation, in groups, continued to pray.  And the Lord would use each man, one by one, in his praying, to expose more of the hypocrisy and sin in my own life.  It was a time of searching and then confessing – again and again.

There were 12 men who spoke over the 3 days of the conference.  It was unlike any preaching I have ever heard – not because of the eloquence of the men, but because of the deep heart work that God did through the messages.  I left at 11PM the first night and was back at 8AM on Wednesday morning for prayer.  The Lord introduced me to several men from different backgrounds – Baptist, Mennonite, Non-denominational and others who had such a deep love the Lord Jesus and a communion with Christ that seemed otherworldly.  It was infectious.  About half way through the 2nd day during a time of prayer, I felt as if the Lord had loosed my tongue and I understood what it meant to walk “before his face,” to live in the “awareness of the presence of God.”  God broke through to my soul in a new and powerful way.  It was as if there was a thin veil between where I was in my walk with Christ and a deep intimacy with the Savior.   On the other side was the power, sensible presence and joy of God.  And my Christian life had been lived, for the most part, on the far side of the veil – looking through, knowing about it, living in proximity to it, but never experiencing what it meant to be immersed in the presence of God.  After the evening closed several of us met for prayer until after midnight.  It was during these hours of prayer that the spirit of God would ransack my heart.  God brought me to the place of transparency before Him – to a realization in my heart that my life and thoughts are an open book before Him.  And I confessed sins that to my knowledge I had never been aware of before. 

One of the things the Lord exposed and crushed during the first 2 days was my critical spirit.  Numerous times during the conference I would find myself standing during worship with a critical spirit because of the perceived “showmanship” of the worship leader or some other thing where I judged the motives of those around me.  And God freed me from this through confession and repentance – so that I had a freedom in worship that I have never experienced.  The Lord also showed me how much I desired the praises of men and how filthy my pride was before Him.

The last day of the conference was no different.  We began with prayer and a time of worship.  The speaker in the afternoon breakout session was Alan Martin.  During this session things began to “click” in my understanding as he went from verse to verse looking at the “Christ life.”  So many of the truths I had heard the last few days began to gel – the reason my life was not characterized by “joy unspeakable and full of glory” was because it is only in God’s presence we find fullness of joy.  And God’s presence to me was not this deep, abiding, walking before the face of God in my daily life, but something “out there.”  It is the difference between “walking in God’s statutes” and “walking before His face” in our relationship with God. That’s the only way I know to describe it. 

I learned that to abide in Him, to walk humbly with our God who is our life, is to be crucified with Christ – laid out as a sacrifice – filled with His Spirit to know his manifest presence.  My understanding of God has been much too “academic.”  As dear brother Leonard Ravenhill would put it, “too much paper puts out the fire.”