Revival starts when we are sick of what has been and start to pray with a desperate voice for can be. Revival is for when we long to see souls confess and repent more than we love the comfort of our own life. Revival starts when our hearts break for the things that break Gods heart…and I completely agree with Leonard Ravenhill when he says that the only reason we haven’t had revival is because we are content with the way things are.

He is right.

I was reading over the week an article from Time Magazine calling this decade the worst decade ever, they actually titled the article, “00-10 The Decade from Hell”…

Here is a condensed excerpt…

“At exactly two minutes after midnight on January 1, 2000 an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant in Onagawa, Japan. Government officials and computer scientists around the globe held their breath. Was this the beginning of a massive Y2K computer meltdown? Actually no, it was an isolated event, one of a handful of glitches to occur as the sun rose on a new decade. No. The dreaded millennial meltdown never happened.

Instead, it was the American Dream that was about to dim. Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post World War 2 era.”

The article goes on…

“The U.S. has endured not one but two market crashes — one at each end of the decade. You might recall the first Wall Street crash, when swooning tech stocks tanked the market from 2000 to 2001, not long after the Nasdaq hit an all-time high of 5049 on March 10, 2000. The economy went into a recession that now seems laughably mild. What followed wasn't funny at all: the most divisive and confusing presidential election in history, a discombobulated drama that we once thought could occur only in the Third World.

Then came the defining moment of the decade, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which redefined global politics for at least a generation and caused us to question the continental security we had until then rarely worried about. We waged war in Afghanistan that drags on and today is deadlier than ever. Then came our fiasco in Iraq. Don't forget the anthrax letters and later the Washington, D.C., snipers and the wave of Wall Street scandals highlighted by Enron and WorldCom.

Sometimes it was as if the gods themselves were conspiring against this decade. On Aug. 29, 2005, near the center point in the decade, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana, killing more than 1,500 and causing $100 billion in damages. It was the largest natural disaster in our nation's history.

There is nothing natural about the economic meltdown we are still struggling with as the decade winds down. A housing bubble fueled by cheap money and excessive borrowing set ablaze by derivatives, so-called financial weapons of mass destruction, put the economy on the brink of collapse. We will be sorting through the damage for years. Meanwhile, the living, breathing symbol of this economic sordidness, prisoner No. 61727-054, a.k.a. Bernie Madoff, rots away in a Butner, N.C., jail cell, doing 150 years for orchestrating the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of humanity.”

This isn’t my take on things…Time magazine is a worldly magazine. This isn’t bias opinionated church propaganda…this is all fact. There has never been a time like the time we live in now. We live in it and we are responsible for it. There has never been a greater moment than now for a revival…but we can’t have just a revival…we must also have a reformation.

It’s time for a resurgence of true gospel preaching. Even now I have been listening to countless other pastors out there saying that God is stirring them up to go back to the cross. Praise God! There lies all the answers! All of our hope, all of our strength, and all of our faith lies in the old rugged cross of Christ!

When we will be dissatisfied with the status quo? When will we get fed up with what used to be and chase what can be? When will the church rise up and return to her secret place with such a passion as to seek God for revival or die trying?