A Blessed First Anniversary!
As I'm writing it's a year after the 105th hour of the Asbury Outpouring. We arrived on the 14th, and that -- we believe -- is the first day they started to have a line to get in, and as the 374-hour service rolled along that line eventually wrapped around most of the campus. Greg Haseloff, University Pastor at Asbury University, told me if someone saw that line they'd never believe it was to get into a church service.
He first sensed something was different about 20-30 minutes after chapel let out on February 8, 2023: About a dozen of the 35 students who had lingered after chapel was officially released went forward, and there was a shift.
We allude to this moment in our new "singing play" Songs of Revival: Hungry After God Himself, as we do for the next shift...
During the 2:00 p.m. hour students started to pray people outside Hughes Auditorium would experience the intense presence of the Lord that they were enjoying, and others went out to let the rest of the campus know something was happening. In Songs of Revival we portray our friend Dr. Jim Shores, a professor at Asbury, when his class was interrupted by Zeke Atha (who we also represent in the story), a senior who had been praying for revival since he was a freshman.
We hope you'll bring Songs of Revival to your community to experience what happened next and many of the details that preceded last year's 16-day revival.
We're super excited about our new artwork!
What do you see?
Which way is the fire traveling?
When we first saw it, we thought it was going up, but the artist's vision is that it's coming down through the roof and burning up the sacrifice on title, which is an altar. We're hoping it "sparks" discussion, because revival goes both ways!
Can you see the word "Word" in the flames? Revivals are not just about feelings, but about a people returning to the Word of God and repenting of everything that puts them out of alignment with the Holy One. I just finished writing a series about that: "The Importance of Repentance in Revival."
Can you see the Hebrew letters?
If you have the time, do yourself a favor and do a little sleuthing. When I figured out what it meant I was BLOWN AWAY.
I'll give you a hint: One definition of the noun form means “Word,” so the poster says, "Word," whether you're reading left to right or right to left (or in this case, top to bottom).
Still don't get it or have the time to figure it out?
It's דבר.
I found this at Abarim-Publications.com:
The root דבר (dabar) is complicated. It occurs about 2,500 times in the Bible and is most commonly translated with "to speak". Yet it rather means to formalize, i.e. to transcend the realms of subconscious intuition, the mental equivalent of muscle memory and the subliminal governance of experience, and to consciously describe what is going on with very precise words that everybody can understand and take to heart without having to accumulate years of experience and mental muscle memory. This verb is obviously a very big deal. It sums up the essence of human awareness... it allows years, decades, centuries, and millennia of human experience to be compressed into data (concrete units of information), and to rise above the mind that produced it [human authors of Scripture] and settle into a mind that hasn't.
That's our heart with Songs of Revival!
We want to bring our experience of the Lord to settle into minds that have never known Him, or haven't known Him as long as we have.
After the 1970 Asbury Revival the college received many requests for students to travel to communities around the country and beyond to talk about what happened during that 185-hour service, and in many of the places where they spoke, revival broke out! It's our prayer that by telling the stories of the Welsh and Asbury Revivals that we'll help people to see what's possible and become desperate for it. As G. Campbell Morgan -- the author of Lessons from the Welsh Revival -- wrote, "We cannot organize revival, but we can set our sails to catch the wind from Heaven when God chooses to blow upon His people once again.”
We'd love to share the production with your community!
Visit www.SongsOfRevivalLive.com for more information and to schedule a performance.
And now, here's my article that finishes the series "The Importance of Repentance in Revival":
Anniversary of Asbury Outpouring
Lord, thank You for leading souls to repentance during the Asbury Outpouring! May Your Spirit continue to move hearts into radical humility, so they’re ready for more of Your Presence!We’re tracking the importance of repentance in revival in this series, and on this anniversary of the start of the Asbury Outpouring we’re looking at what happened in Hughes Auditorium this time last year.[Click to read the whole article...]
Here are interviews embedded in the article...
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