What would happen if revival were to break into our lives and our churches today? I am sure of one thing. At the heart of that revival would be a trememndous outpouring of the Holy Spirit. To begin with, people would have a new vision of the majesty of God. We must understand that the Lord is not only tender and merciful and full of compassion, but He is also the God of justice, holiness, and wrath. Many Christians have a caricature of God. They do not see God in all of His wholeness. We glibly quote John 3:16, but we forget to quote the following verse, "he who does not believe has been judged already"(verse 18). Compassion is not complete in itself, but must be accompanied by inflexible justice and wrath against sin and a desire for holiness.
What stirs God most is not physical suffering, but sin. All too often we are more afraid of physical pain than of moral wrong. The cross is the standing evidence of the fact that holiness is a principle for which God would die. God cannot clear the guilty until atonement is made. Mercy is what we need and that is what we receive at the foot of the cross.
In her book, The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, Hannah Whiall Smith tells us "... what we need is to see that God's presence is a certain fact always, and that every act of our soul is done right before Him, and that a word spoken in prayer is really spoken to Him, as if our eyes could see Him and our hands could touch Him. Then we shall cease to have such vague conceptions of our relations with Him, and shall feel the binding force of every word we say in His presence."
