From the desk of Steve Shultz:
Mahesh and Bonnie Chavda are incredible teachers filled with rich instruction. As you will read in this article, they have done their research and have studied past revivals in depth.
Here are a few of my favorite lines from the article:
"America as a nation was birthed out of a revival."
"It's time for another real revival."
"The land and its people are ripe for revival."
"It's time for a new awakening."
I think we would all agree that it's time for a new awakening!
May we all be encouraged to take our places and join in together to bring a new awakening in our midst!
Blessings,
Steve Shultz
Mahesh and Bonnie Chavda:
"40 Days 4 America Update #2:
For There is Hope for a Tree: Pray for the Rains of Revival"
Biblical Revival Rains
Isaiah describes revival in the book of Isaiah, Chapter 60: "Arise, shine; for your light has come! And the glory of the LORD is risen upon you. For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and deep darkness the people; but the LORD will arise over you, and His glory will be seen upon you. The Gentiles shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising." The next verses go on to describe harvest and abundance with blessing, peace and joy.
The prophet Habakkuk prayed, "O Lord, revive Your work in the midst of the years!" (Habakkuk 3:2). The short work he records is a plea for revival in the midst of a time that the fruit of men's hands have produced nothing but judgment, leanness of spirit, and oppression. The famous end of Habakkuk's words, shigionoth, is a musical notation indicating they be sung as a song with emotion and a sense of victory!
"Though the fig tree may not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines; though the labor of the olive may fail, and the fields yield no food; though the flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls - yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The LORD God is my strength!..." (Habakkuk 3:17-19).
Bible revivalists such as Habakkuk were typically those who found themselves in the midst of a time of dark oppression, the sharp terror of impending judgment, and doom from invasion by marauders. Their personal lives were not necessarily filled with ease or temporal happiness. Jeremiah was told not to marry because of the trouble to come in his generation. He had few friends, and he witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem during her surrender to Babylon.
Ezekiel was a contemporary of Jeremiah. Ezekiel's wife died simultaneously with the destruction of Jerusalem. A priest who carefully kept himself according to the law, one of his most significant encounters with God was in a graveyard. The surrounding of the dead was an anathema to such as he, but like apostle Peter's vision on the rooftop, it took a visitation to adjust the man's view and ministry. Ezekiel languishes in Babylon while the second siege takes place in Jerusalem. He can only witness it by revelation and is helpless except to become a supernatural bridge between the will of God in Heaven and the works of men on the earth.
Joel came to his prophetic pinnacle immediately following a great natural plague that completely devastated Israel's economy. John the Baptist arose while Israel was under the boot of pagan occupiers and corrupt religious leaders. The thing they all had in common was a connection into the supernatural river coming from the throne of God. Their message, their perspective, and their power came from Him. Life and circumstance were such that the prophets' revelations were just that: revelation. They were suddenly plugged in to a realm that enabled them to see clearly and proclaim the work God was doing in the circumstance of their day.
The perfect manifestation of revival comes, however, not from earth, but from Heaven. Before the throne, and from there to the corners of the earth, Isaiah and Ezekiel describe the four living creatures. Mysterious, yet as powerful as the wind and something like it in nature, they wheel to and fro while lightening flashes and great joyous tumult surrounds them. Holiness effuses from every bit of their beings. Shekinah fills the air around them and the incense of Heaven's temple is thick. They are in revival.
Revival in America: At the Scent of Water the Tree Buds
America has experienced several periods of revival. Four specific periods of intense religious revival were: the Great Awakening (c. 1720), in which Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield played major roles; the Second Great Awakening with Charles Finney and its aftermath (c. 1787 - 1860); the period of Dwight L. Moody, the Holiness Movement and the reaction to liberalism (c. 1870 - 1926) which peaked with Azusa; and the renewal of mass evangelism in the 1950s, characterized by Billy Graham.
Since that time, the wave of the charismatic renewal has washed ashore; in its wake - a revival of the Word and worship cresting in what has been called the refreshing. True revival produces something. Biblical revival causes the turning of a nation and brings about restoration in a society. It has long-lasting effects. In the 21st century we are in desperate need of a genuine revival of Biblical proportions.
The common threads of America's revivals have been to bring about a general sense of harmony, fellowship, and energized ardor for justice and social reform. The Great Awakening during the 18th century and the Second Great Awakening in the 19th century were times of mass spiritual revival spawning new interest in religion, the advent of new denominations, large-scale social activism, and new modes of religious expression. The Great Awakening was ushered in with a contemporary of England's Wesley brothers, George Whitefield, and brought nearly seventy-five percent of Americans together in a common understanding and practice of the Christian faith and life.
Not unlike the days of the separatist Pilgrims who left England's hearth, where revival had once burned brightly and brought about the Reformation, religious dissent and dissenters became fashionable. God was doing something new and living. The now dry bones of past century renewal had become tradition and had begun to produce lifeless conformity that resisted new growth. But at the scent of water the tree buds.
America Was Birthed as the Result of Spiritual Awakening
Religious awakening taking place around them impacted America's Founding Fathers. It is part of the reason they made such an emphasis on Scripture as they laid the foundation of this nation and fashioned her garments of law. Among those stirred to chart the course of the nation were devout men who breathed in the clean air of return to God and vibrated with the sounds of Heaven picked up in revival meetings.
The other part was the seed already sown in colonial soil by Columbus' mission and the Pilgrims' undertakings. Ben Franklin walked backward from Whitefield's preaching stand to the edge of the crowd in one meeting in order to calculate the number in attendance. He concluded it was 30,000; but Whitefield drew larger crowds than that. Rain was falling on revival's seed again.
Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, James Madison, Washington, and many others had ears opened to the sound of the rain when it came. The first decisions to support revolution were made in gatherings in church halls where community leaders, and common folk we now call patriots, sought direction for the colonies amidst strange stirrings. Those meetings oft saw the men upon their knees in prayer for guidance and blessing. From that came the present traditions of opening our House and Senate in prayer.
For anyone to propose the removal of faith, especially the faith of the Bible, from American government and society, is traitorous to her origin. What historians call "the First Great Awakening" can be described as a revitalization of religious piety sweeping through the American colonies between the 1730's and the 1770's, but it produced something. In 1776, a tyrant, an earthly king was rejected in favor of the rule of the King of Heaven. America was birthed as the result of spiritual awakening.
Social Changes of American Revivals
Among the social changes of American revivals has been great emphasis on public education. Christians, who realized the need to eradicate ignorance in their society, founded America's first public schools. It is a travesty that our learning institutions have become bastions of philosophers and their ilk who deny God and seek to ensure that future generations of Americans, at their most formative and influential threshold, turn their backs on Him by the time they have run the dark gauntlet of college. It's time for a real revival. Like Ezra and Nehemiah, preaching was only one rudiment of Whitefield's work. He was proactive among orphans and suppressed minorities.
Awakening to the plight of Native Americans and slaves and society's responsibility came as a result of spiritual revival. George Whitefield was among the first to preach to African Americans in his day. Black, white, and brown found common ground, brotherhood, and honor for one another at the foot of the Cross. In many denominational circles slavery was denounced as sinful, and the First General Conference of Methodism concluded owning and keeping slaves was grounds for immediate expulsion from society.
This theme was revived a century later under the preaching of Finney, which burned through the Union states just prior to civil war. An abolitionist and promoter of women in ministry, Finney redrew lines of such religious fundamentals as covenant and how one receives salvation. They were revitalized with lasting effect in American theology. The same way Luther spawned Protestantism with a living word that "the just shall live by faith" at a time when God Himself was breathing out those very words in Heaven, the prophet simply let his mouth be used to give God voice as he spoke. Church history changed forever.
It's time for another real revival. Far from cultism or heresy, true revival is typified by something "new" to existing tradition, be it in emphasis or practice. It's not spawned in some newly rationalized set of ordinances. Revival is a coal of burning fire bursting from off Heaven's altars, coming right out of the furnace of the belly of God Himself, as seen by Daniel, John, and Isaiah. It lands in the heart of the messenger and leaps to flame in his mouth.
A New Understanding of Salvation Covenant and More Social Changes in the Awakenings
The understanding of salvation covenant in the Awakening reversed the emphasis of the Puritans from what God has done for man to turn it around and enflame what man can do in response to God. This affected the understanding of salvation and how to receive it. Suddenly, man had power over his destiny, enabling him to lay hold of God Himself and become like Him, if man so willed. In a way, it was the beginning of the democratization of Christianity in America, with much more of an emphasis on the individual than had been before.
Partly out of evangelical opposition to the deism associated with the French Revolution, the Second Great Awakening, led by preachers like Charles Finney, swept the northern United States. Finney said, "Above all, revival is not a miracle in the sense of a physical change brought on solely by God, but a change of mind which, through influences of the Holy Spirit, is ultimately a matter of the individual's free will."
The "burned-over district" of New York State was the cradle of modern Pentecostalism. Women as well as men led crowded, nightly prayer meetings. At "the anxious bench" sinners and backsliders confessed their sins. The preachers used plain language, including humor from the pulpit, in an effort to reach the common man with the uncommon message of the Gospel.
Armed with Calvinist influences, suggesting all men are "moral free agents" who could obtain salvation through their own efforts of faith toward God at any moment, Finney persuaded many to believe, as he did, that time was running out for men to decide about their eternity. He ushered hundreds of thousands into the Kingdom. Perhaps prophetically, Finney foresaw an approaching apocalypse of a more immediate sort. In the afternoon hours of Finney's ministry, civil war boiled over in America.
The Second Great Awakening was known as "shopkeeper's millennium," as influence of the church meetinghouse affected churchgoers' work ethic and social habits outside the Church. The rise of equality for women, respect for "the Sabbath" at the end of six work days, temperance, abolition, public education, and many other social reform influences were spawned by that revival.
There is Hope for a Tree
America as a nation was birthed out of a revival. Before that, the wind of the Holy Spirit set Christopher Columbus sailing to the New World. The Pilgrims, the framers, and a century later the industrialists and educators, from each to each voices began to harmonize with Heaven and make that joyful sound in their day and changed the fabric of contemporary culture, returning men to God and awakening Christian faith.
You may insist America is not a Christian nation, but know this: An apple seed makes an apple tree. "For as the earth brings forth its bud, and as the garden causes the things that are sown in it to spring forth, so the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations" (Isaiah 61:11).
This nation may be in temporary custody of surrogate parents who did not birth her and refuse to acknowledge the truth of who she really is for fear that her features, fully developed, will betray her true heritage and prove she is not the child of futile philosophies and vain attempts at secularism or moral anarchy, but that God is in our national genes. Revival will bring us to our true mother: a nation under God.
Like the prodigal son, America may have insisted on the whole fortune of our inheritance to be wasted upon itself in riotous living for a time. But now, nearly face down in the pig's trough, our sides ache with emptiness. The pods have left our eternal stomach hungry. Rife with division, darkness, disease, destruction, sin and confusion, America is ready to return home. The land and its people are ripe for revival. It's time for a new awakening.
The answer to welfare, stumbling economy, racism, and moral decline is a Third Great Awakening, a genuine outpouring of the Spirit in our day to bring about metamorphosis in our land. It's time for revival in America. Revival is as eternal as God Himself, and as present, if we will but step into it, it's time for light to shine forth in the darkness.
The seed is in the ground, and God, as rain, will come to us. The former rain of revival marked dramatic social, economic, and political reform from ancient Israel to the present day. But this revival will not be a passing one. It shall burn brighter and brighter as it ushers in His coming.
"For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease. Though its root may grow old in the earth, and its stump may die in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and bring forth branches like a plant." Job 14:7-9
A Prayer for America and a Third Great Awakening
Lord, we ask for rain in the time of the latter rain. Pour out Your Spirit on America, renewing the face of our families, our churches, our schools, our cities, our economy, our courts, and our government. Let the rains of Your Spirit water the seeds sown in revivals past, and revive the roots of our nation's Godly heritage.
May America be a city set on a hill, proclaiming the glory of Christ to the nations with signs, wonders, and miracles confirming the word. We pray for a Third Great Awakening of genuine outpouring to fall upon America in Jesus' mighty name. Amen.
Mahesh and Bonnie Chavda
Mahesh Chavda Ministries
Email: info@maheshchavda.com
About Mahesh and Bonnie Chavda: Drs. Mahesh and Bonnie Chavda have served together in full-time ministry for over thirty years, reaching the nations with the Gospel accompanied by signs and wonders. Hundreds of thousands have come to salvation, and thousands have received healing from critical diseases like AIDS and cancer through their ministry. Many of these miracles have been medically documented, including healings of Stage IV cancer, the lame, deaf and blind as well as the resurrection from the dead of a six-year-old boy. Through The Watch television program produced by Mahesh Chavda Ministries, Mahesh and Bonnie reach a potential audience of a billion households every week with the saving message of Jesus and are equipping Believers to walk in the power and anointing of the Holy Spirit.
In addition, Mahesh and Bonnie have produced many useful tools for Believers including their books, Only Love Can Make a Miracle, The Hidden Power of Prayer and Fasting, Storm Warrior and The Hidden Power of a Woman. Together, the Chavdas pastor All Nations Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. They also spearhead a global prayer movement, The Watch of the Lord™, where they have been leading their congregation in weekly corporate prayer for more than a decade.
September 25-29, 2008
Fuel Youth and Young Adults Conference
Bonnie Chavda
Orangevale, CA
Contact: 916-988-6606
November 6-8, 2008
Eagles' Wings Conference
Mahesh and Bonnie Chavda
Buffalo, NY
Contact: 800-519-4647
November 13-16, 2008
Open Heaven Conference
Mahesh & Bonnie Chavda
Charlotte, NC
Contact: 800-730-6264
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Mahesh Chavda |
Not only is this a great teaching by Mahesh Chavda, it also carries a strong anointing that ministers to you while you listen!
Get ready to be blessed as Mahesh releases the deep healing anointing that rests so heavily on his life!.... (more)
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