In this concluding message to the life-study of the Minor Prophets, I have the burden to speak a word concerning the revival revealed in the Minor Prophets. We may say that this matter of revival is the “kernel” within the “shell” of the books of the Minor Prophets.
Habakkuk 3:2a speaks of revival: “O Jehovah, revive Your work / In the midst of the years.” Among God’s elect there has always been an aspiration to be revived. As long as you are a saved one, every day, consciously or unconsciously, there is an aspiration with a spontaneous prayer within you: “O Lord, revive us.” Although we may not realize it, such an aspiration has been within us through all the years of our Christian life.
We may think that Habakkuk’s prayer for revival was good for him but has nothing to do with us. However, regarding his prayer, we need to realize that with God there is no time element. In the eyes of God, one person among His elect represents the whole. God always considers His elect as a corporate Body. This means that Habakkuk and we are one in the unit of God’s elect. Thus, when Habakkuk prayed for revival, we also prayed. We prayed for revival twenty-six hundred years ago. Such a prayer is an everlasting prayer.
Many times in the last six years I charged the saints to put the God-ordained way into a living practice, but without a revival, how could we have anything living? If we endeavor to practice just the first step of the God-ordained way—to visit people for the gospel—without being revived, this will be a heavy burden that no one can bear. We all need to realize that we have been saved and kept on earth to do one thing—to go to disciple the nations, beginning from “Jerusalem” and spreading to “Judea,” to “Samaria,” and to the uttermost part of the earth (Acts 1:8). If we live for our education, a career, a good marriage, or a nice house, that is vanity of vanities. We are living here for the spreading of the Lord Jesus, not merely to our neighborhood but to the entire world. If we would do this, we need to be revived. This is why the Lord has led us to practice the morning revival.
This matter of morning revival is according to the natural law in God’s creation. God created the universe so that there is a sunrising every twenty-four hours. We believers should follow the sunrising to be revived every morning. Every day we need a “sunrising,” and this sunrising is a revival. If we experience a daily revival, then we will be living and qualified to practice the God-ordained way and to help the church to take this way.
On the one hand, Habakkuk prayed for revival; on the other hand, Hosea spoke of the desolation of the “two days” and the resurrection on the “third day”: “He will enliven us after two days; / On the third day He will raise us up” (6:2). Since to God a thousand years are as one day (2 Pet. 3:8), these “two days” may refer to a period of two thousand years. For almost two thousand years, from the time Titus destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in A.D. 70, Israel, our representative, has been desolate. From that year Israel lost the priesthood, the sacrifices, the prophets, the king, and the temple. Eventually, there will be the “third day”—the thousand years of the millennial kingdom—when Israel will be raised up, that is, restored.
The principle is the same in our Christian life. At a certain time we became desolate. After the two days of desolation, there is the third day, which signifies the pneumatic Christ in resurrection. Today we may receive the pneumatic Christ in resurrection and thus enjoy the reality of His resurrection. If we have the resurrected Christ, we are in the morning, the sunrising, and this is a real revival to us.
In 1984 I realized that the recovery was in a dormant condition, like the desolation of the two days in Hosea 6:2. However, if we experience a real revival, we will be in the third day.
Joel 2:28 and 29 speak of the outpouring of the Spirit. Every day we need the outpouring of the all-inclusive, consummated, compound, life-giving Spirit as the processed and consummated Triune God. This all-inclusive Spirit includes Christ’s divinity and humanity, the effectiveness of His death, and the power of His resurrection. This Spirit is our portion, our inheritance.