When Jimmy Carter became president, the words born again suddenly became common in popular speech. Pastors were often asked whether America was undergoing a revival. George Gallup Jr., had reported that fifty or sixty million Americans claimed to be born again (today Pew research estimates it is more than 160 million).
Are there 160 million real Christians in America? I do not know; there may be. I think there has been a great deal of effective personal evangelism in my lifetime, particularly among the young who have been influenced by such evangelical student movements as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Navigators, and Campus Crusade for Christ (CRU), FCA, TPU and several others. That is good, but it is not the same thing as revival.
When revival sweeps over a people, the first evidence is a profound awareness of sin and sorrow for it. This was true of the great Welsh revivals of the 19 th century and of the revivals under the Wesleys and Jonathan Edwards the century before that. It was true of the Reformation and of the first revival in recorded history, the revival in Nineveh in response to the preaching of the prophet Jonah.
When revival came to that city, the people declared a fast and donned sackcloth, a sign of mourning. Even the king took part (Jonah 3.7-9).
The first evidence of a true movement of the Holy Spirit is an awakened conscience, leading to genuine sorrow for sin in God’s people. Only after that does revival come.
This is what happened in Jerusalem in Nehemiah’s day, and it is why it is proper to speak of this as having been a true revival. There were three parts to this revival: (1) preaching and hearing the Word of God (Nehemiah 8), (2) sorrow for sin and repentance (Nehemiah 9), and (3) a resulting change of life, formalized by the drafting and signing of a covenant (Nehemiah 10). We have already seen the first element, the prominence given to God’s Word. Now we will see its profound impact upon the people.
The working of sorrow for sin in the people as a result of the reading and teaching of God’s Word was observed in chapter 7, but there it was turned aside or held back by Nehemiah and the Levites. When Ezra read from the Law of Moses, the people must have recognized how far they had fallen from its standards and how guilty they were in the sight of Almighty God. This had affected them even to the point of tears: “The people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law.”
But that day had been intended as a day of praise and thanksgiving, and for that reason Nehemiah rebuked the tears and sent the people away “to eat and drink, to send portions of food [to those without] and to celebrate with great joy.” It was only after this – in fact, it was after the celebration of the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles from the fifteenth to the twenty-second of the month of Tisri (Sep/Oct) – that the special day of penance described in Nehemiah 9 occurred.
We find two very interesting things.
First, Nehemiah did not take advantage of the people’s first outburst of sorrow to manipulate them and thus push the revival forward. There might have been a temptation to do so. Certainly other religious figures have faced such temptations and have succumbed to them, resorting to tactics of mob psychology to produce apparent spiritual results.
Nehemiah apparently felt no need to do this. Rightly so, since if the observed sorrow for sin and repentance was truly from God, it would remain anyway and would not be able to be suppressed. Moreover, the governor wanted to direct the people’s thoughts to God and not have them centered on their own feelings, however proper their sorrow and repentance for sin might be. The feast Nehemiah prescribed was a feast of thanksgiving for who God was and for what he had done.
We see the same thing in chapter 9. Here, even after the day of penance is allowed to go forward, the prayer of the Levites, which occupies the bulk of the chapter, is still focused on the greatness of the acts of God.
The second thing we notice: although Nehemiah delayed the day of public repentance by more than three weeks, it did nevertheless occur. It was as strong and genuine then as it would have been at the beginning. This is a way of saying that this movement of repentance was wholly and genuinely of God. If it had been of man only, or if it had been only something that Ezra or Nehemiah had whipped up, it would have faded away.
Maranatha!
(mar-uh-nath-uh – “Our Lord Comes”)
Pastor Steve can be reached at PastorSteve@MaranathaBibleChurch.org