Listen to the promise. "Many peoples and the inhabitants of many cities will yet come, and the inhabitants of one city will go to another and say, 'Let us go at once to entreat the Lord and seek the Lord Almighty. I myself am going.'"

We know that the God of Love is after our hearts. There is no “Revival” that doesn’t begin in the hearts of God’s people, personally.

But, the Lord isn’t JUST after our heart.

Before the Lord visits, he sends agents ahead to prepare us. John was one of these. And Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, told us to expect him: God would send his messenger before his coming, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to ready a people for the Lord. One task in particular marked this servant out. He would "turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers" (Malachi 4:6).

We live in a divided age. We are divided by politics and by ethnicity, divided by class and income, divided by the very algorithms that decide what we see and whom we fear. And yet the whole reason Jesus went to the cross, the whole reason he rose again, was to break down the dividing wall of hostility, to make out of a fractured human race one new humanity in himself.

Judges 2:10-19 traces what theologians call the Deuteronomic cycle. We can read human history as an interplay: on one side, the downward pull of sin and death on the human heart and human culture, set loose at the fall and pressed on by the passing of time; on the other, the mercy of God, who will not let the descent run forever.

When the captives came home to Jerusalem after their long exile in Babylon, they did remarkable things. They rebuilt the temple. They raised the walls of the ruined city. But maybe the most important thing they did to rebuild the city of God is right here in Nehemiah 8.

We have been building the altar of the church, laying down the landing pad for the helicopter of the Spirit. And we have said that a strategy for building the regional altar in preparation for a move of God is a shared rhythm of united, extraordinary prayer. But there is other work required to build the altar and it is the work of reconciliation.

On the night before he died, Jesus prayed … “that they may be brought to complete unity”. But that oneness feels far off, doesn’t it? We have been sliced and diced over the centuries - atomized into a thousand pieces. Our experience of church is not the one Jesus saw. When the New Testament speaks to the church in Ephesus, the church in Smyrna it addresses them as one. One Jesus. One church.

When the chips are down, what do we do? Do we binge Netflix? Pour ourselves a drink? Take a nap? Reach for the phone and start scrolling? Text a friend to vent? Bury ourselves in busyness so we don't have to feel it? Lie awake at night and worry? Everyone has a reflex when the pressure comes.

Witnessing the advent of the New Testament Church as it is recorded in the book of Acts, something very basic should strike us. Namely, that the Church is a spiritual organism. She is BORN by the Holy Spirit. She LIVES in and by the Spirit, and it follows that the Church would/will PERISH for want of the Spirit. 

I am all for strategic planning, and I even enjoy it. I teach our interns a tool I picked up in college ministry, the planning cycle: vision, mission, goals, strategies, plans, execution, debrief, coaching. I've led whole leadership teams through it. There is real value in planning. As Eisenhower put it, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."

When Jesus arrived at the temple that first Holy Week, He walked into a flurry of religious activity. Animals were being sold, money was being changed, sacrifices were underway — a veritable three-ring circus of religious devotion. And yet Jesus was displeased. So displeased, in fact, that He deliberately fashioned a whip of cords and set about disrupting the whole enterprise.

The Biblical strategy for intergenerational revival involves families. The primary vehicle of intergenerational discipleship is not the youth group or the Sunday sermon. It's the home. The minivan. The dinner table. 

Beyond dealing rightly with our own hearts, what follows next? Moses continues in Deut. 6:7 “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” 

Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine, Jon Tyson, set out to study revival. He took his family on a world tour of past revival sites, visiting site after site - well over a dozen places around the world where God’s spirit had genuinely moved. He was looking for underlying principles. Is there something we can learn about how to pray for revival and how to prepare for it?

Duncan Campbell put it plainly: revival comes when the fire of God falls on the altar of the heart, the home, the church, and the region. These are the concentric circles. And the New England Revival Covenant is, at its core, a strategy for building the altar in each of those domains.

I spent years building the machinery of ministry. Mostly on college campuses. Planting chapters. Evangelism strategies, evangelism stations on the main green, getting and filing contact cards, vision talks, involvement fair outreach funnels. Small groups and manuscript Bible studies. None of it was wrong. It was all good, necessary work. It was the nuts and bolts of ministry. But here is the standing temptation - at least it was mine.

As we are drawn up to share in the life of Jesus, we will find ourselves sharing in the work of Jesus, as we come to share the heart and desire of Jesus; for his people, and for the world.

Before the church became the church, there was a prayer meeting.

Eleven disciples. The women. Mary the mother of Jesus. A hundred and twenty other souls crowded into an upper room in Jerusalem. There was no agenda, no program, no order of service, no certainty about what came next. There was only this: they all joined together constantly in prayer.

"Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?"

The question reveals how little the disciples actually understood about what would happen next. Even after forty days of being taught by the resurrected Jesus, the disciples were still thinking in old categories. A national hope. Political and perhaps military restoration. Of ethnic Israel. 

They were not totally wrong. But they were mostly wrong.