The Altar of the Heart

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?

Here’s what he found. Revivals erupted across every stream of the Church — Pentecostal and Presbyterian, Catholic and charismatic, evangelical and mainline. And predictably, each tradition tended to credit its own emphasis. The Presbyterians pointed to sound doctrine. The charismatics pointed to openness to the Spirit. Others named repentance, or unity, or extraordinary prayer. And without question - these are all important elements of revival. 

But beneath them all, Jon found a single common thread. Desire. A desire for God. A longing for God. A hunger for him. A thirst for him. Wherever revival came, it came to people who wanted it — who wanted Him. God comes where He is wanted.

Which brings us to one of those passages Martyn Lloyd-Jones said ought to be printed in letters of gold. It is the last and greatest day of the Feast. By long tradition, the priests would draw water from the pool, carry it in procession up to the temple, and pour it out on the ground — a prophetic enactment of Ezekiel's vision, a river flowing from the house of God to heal the ends of the earth. Into that charged moment, Jesus stands and cries out: Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Not come to religion, temple, ceremony, but to a person…to Him. Those who are thirsty for God Himself, will experience rivers of living water, flowing from within them. 

This is revival in a sentence: an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that starts from human hearts. And revival is available to all - to anyone. But notice the qualifier hidden in plain sight. While living water is offered to all, only the thirsty will come. The fountain is available to everyone; it is received by the thirsty.

This is why the altar of the heart is the wellspring of revival. Before doctrine, before strategy, before technique, comes thirst. Our great task is, friends, is to stay thirsty — to keep in touch with our own longing for God rather than numbing it, rather than slaking it on the thousand lesser streams that promise to satisfy and never do. We must not forsake him, the fount of living water for broken cisterns (Jeremiah 2). As Isaiah said - the invitation is to the thirsty to come to the waters (Isaiah 55).

This is also why we gather. Covenant community is, in part, a holy agreement to keep one another thirsty — to fan into flame the longing, to refuse the numbness, to keep each other longing for God Himself, until he comes. 

As Ron Burgundy said to San Diego, stay classy.

I say to New England, stay thirsty. 

Rev. Greg Johnson
Director, Revive New England