“A revival, among other things, is a sudden manifestation of God’s presence. It is not the coming of the sun, but the sun breaking through the clouds. Although the sun may be hidden, it is still there until it breaks through the clouds. A revival is not God coming to us; rather it is God breaking through the obstacles hindering us from experiencing Him.“
A.W. Tozer in My Daily Pursuit
I love this analogy of what revival is by A.W. Tozer. It brings it home because we all need revival. Not in the sense of mass conversions with signs and wonders, although we need that too!
From time to time we need the sun to break through the clouds that seem to keep gathering above us. We need God to break through the obstacles that hinder us from experiencing Him. Like the sun, He is there all the time. He even indwells us. We know that, but so often we are not experiencing His presence. Perhaps that is why so many travel to places where a move of the Holy Spirit has broken out. What drives them is that they feel like He is absent, and they long for a tangible touch of His presence, a confirmation that He is still there and loves us.
But we don’t need to travel to other places to experience God’s presence. We just need to realize that we have come under a spiritual cloud cover that has obscured our sense of His presence. The only difference between clouds obscuring the sun and obstacles hindering our sense of His presence is that clouds are external and the obstacles lie within us.
Those will vary with each person, but, according to Tozer, they all amount to one thing: selfishness. I have another name for it: self-indulgence. If we’re really honest with ourselves, we are obsessed with our creature comforts. That often even extends into our expectations of God: we want Him to solve our problems, ease our pain, and “go before us” to smooth the way. Meanwhile, we spend a lot of time, effort, and money to entertain ourselves with what the world has to offer. Perhaps that is our modern-day version of what James warns against: You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. (James 4:3)
I speak of this with a measure of conviction in my heart. I find my attention veering toward my phone before it veers to my Bible. I’m inclined to seek escape from the stress of everyday life into visual entertainment before I would pause to pray and worship. The call to self-indulgence is everywhere around us and it is loud. It’s easy to yield to it instead of indulging God with a whole-hearted pursuit of His presence. The more we nibble at the table of the visible self-indulging world, the more we lose our appetite for the invisible things of God’s kingdom.
So, if you find yourself yearning for God’s presence and feel like He is absent, you need not despair. Instead, ask Him to break through the obstacles in your heart and soul with His divine light and illuminate what you need to confess, renounce, and repent of.
The sun will break through the clouds again, and you are experiencing revival right where you are! It turns out that God never left. You just crowded Him into the background. That’s easy to do in our busy, entertainment-crazy, self-indulging, material world.
But God will have nothing less than the uppermost place in our hearts. He won’t usurp that spot. He wants us to give it to Him voluntarily and eagerly and keep Him there. And if we inadvertently re-assigned that spot to ourselves, He will wait and let the clouds roll in until we realize our mistake and restore Him to His rightful place in our hearts. As the saying goes: “If God feels far away, guess who moved?”
I hate clouds. I love the light of the sun. Even more the light of the Son. How about you?