In the spirit of revival, God is pouring out the power of resurrection to renew His Bride and prepare her for His coming. We are being drawn as a lover after Him out of our graves and into His image. This is God’s purpose in sending times of refreshing.
The story of Abraham and Sarah is taken from Genesis 20
The heat of summer approached, and Abraham’s vast herds quickly consumed the grasses. He was compelled to move them often to preserve the land itself. And so they migrated again, this time towards Kadesh. The king of the place where they were going was a Philistine from the coastland, and a descendant of Canaan’s brother Mizraim. As their great entourage came into Gerar, King Abimelech sent men out to investigate the new arrivals and see if they had come in peace.
They returned to Abimelech with news that the master of the household was called Abraham, and he was peaceful and very wealthy in gold as well as animals and servants. Abimelech had heard of the Semite and his God. But he had also heard of the beauty of the Semite women. His messengers had reported that among the women in Abraham’s house was one who was particularly beautiful. She was the man’s sister, a woman called Sarah. When Abimelech heard how desirable she was, he sent gifts to Abraham and asked to have her as a gift for his harem!
Abraham dared not refuse and offend Abimelech. That could result in an attack on the entire camp. He had thought the same thing as a young man before they left their homeland. Sarah’s beauty was a blessing and a curse!
Abraham told her of the news.
“How many times will you pretend I am not your wife?” she demanded. “You have flocks and gold enough for seven!”
“All the more reason,” he said. “I will do so as many times as necessary to save us from men who do not fear God. You swore when we began to sojourn from Haran, before our father died, to say you were my sister to the kings of this strange land. Abimelech’s men could easily have overpowered our house and taken you and the rest away! Ishmael, myself, and likely Eliezer would have been left as food for the vultures. This act has bought us protection for the time being while I discover what I can do against this king. If he desires to make you his wife, it will be days before a wedding occurs. In the meantime, I will decide what to tell him when I come.”
He paused, “Besides, in truth you are my sister. Terah was father to both of us.”
Sarah resigned herself to his argument and prepared to go with Abimelech’s men, just as she had gone to the Pharaoh in Egypt. She fearlessly steeled herself with the knowledge that God had promised an heir to Abraham from her own body. Until God’s promise was fulfilled, she needn’t fear for her own life or that of her husband! Despite how the situation appeared right now, she was confident that she would return and the king’s hand would not touch her.
Abraham and Eliezer stood on the brow of the hill beyond the newly pitched tent city as Sarah gave her “brother” one last look and covered her face against the desert wind. Then the men of Abimelech took up their camel’s rein and turned to lead her away.
It would be many days before Sarah would see her house again.
The inheritance that we have all received from our father Adam is apparent down through human history. Even the righteous father of our faith struggled with the broken nature that came at the beginning in the garden. In his literary classic, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson paints a graphic portrait of the dual nature of man. In the end of Dr. Jekyl’s famous experiment, one nature sought to overcome the other entirely, and in a letter to his friend he explained the strange battle that had taken place between the two sides of his own nature. He says, “Though so profound adouble-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when laboured, in the eye of day, at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering….I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both” In the end, rather than allow the evil that lurked within to ultimately have its way, Dr. Jekyl devised his own end. Dying to our old sin nature and being made alive in Christ is the only way to win this battle. The apostle Paul spoke of the” Jekyl/Hyde” conflict that wrestles within the heart of every human: “I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:23-25). The apostle goes on to speak of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit who comes into the heart over everyone who puts their trust in the ransom provided through the blood of Jesus. While Abraham looked forward to this redemption, and circumcised himself and the males of his household through faith in God’s covenant, it was not until Christ that the Promise of the Spirit came to us. The prophet Ezekiel spoke of this day when he said, “I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new Spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes and be careful to obey My rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be My people, and I will be your God. And I will deliver you from all your uncleanesses.” (Ez. 36:24-27) As we inherited a heart of stone to serve the flesh, the miracle of the new covenant is a new “heart of flesh” to serve the Spirit. Sadly, too many Christians live in the past, having never fully received the blessing of this new covenant. Still living under the old law of sin and death, we give way to the cycle of compromise we see in our fathers from Adam to Abraham. While justified before God because of his faith, looking forward to Christ, Abraham appears to have struggled with the weakness of compromise. The willingness to mix truth and lie, spirit and flesh, has affected the whole world down to today.
In the spirit of revival, God is pouring out the power of resurrection to renew His Bride and prepare her for His coming. We are being drawn as a lover after Him out of our graves and into His image. This is God’s purpose in sending times of refreshing. We note that Scripture says as we return we are renewed. Abraham’s fear of death justified using half-truth as an escape clause. How often do we do the same? The urge to save his own skin compromised the one he loved the most. Sarah was placed in the ultimate position of compromise. The wonderful back story of Abraham’s weakness is Sarah’s strength. Calling him her “lord,” Sarah rode away on faith. She returned uncompromised. Her part of the story inspires us to realize that even our weaknesses or the weaknesses of others do not need to control our destiny. Ultimately God reveals His faithfulness as He intervenes and speaks to Abimelech through a dream. It was pure grace that brought Abraham and Sarah through this potential disaster. And they came out richer for it! “Then Abimelech took sheep and oxen and male servants and female servants, and gave them to Abraham, and returned Sarah his wife to him. And Abimelech said, ‘Behold, my land is before you; dwell where it pleases you.’ And to Sarah he said, ‘Behold, I have given your brother a thousand pieces of silver. It is a sign of your innocence in the eyes of all who are with you, and before everyone you are vindicated’” (Genesis 20: 14-16). In this season where revival is evident everywhere we turn we are laying hold of renewal. Our hearts and our minds are being conformed to Christ. We must not simply return for blessing again and again without allowing the purpose of His outpoured blessing to have its effect. The purpose of revival is sanctification. The energetic presence of the Holy Spirit in every believer is that we may all come to a unity of the faith in a perfect man. This perfection, literally maturity, is individual and corporate. As Paul said, “Who shall deliver us?” Thank God through the Lord Jesus Christ, He has!
If revival only begins and ends with us, even our own sanctification, it has only been allowed to have half its work. The new covenant was intended to create for God a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a peculiar people. That we might show forth the praises of Him who has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light. Revival carries its own dual nature. Not two parts struggling against one another, but the one finding its purpose in the other. The second part of God’s purpose for revival is witness. Our light is meant to shine so that those who sit in darkness might see Christ and come to His light. Revival is not meant to end in us. The washing of God is to become a rushing river finding no hindrances to the Spirit in our hearts but rather a conduit through which He flows out to water the lives of others from pure springs. In His high priestly prayer in John 17, Jesus prayed the Levitical pattern offered on the day of atonement. First for Himself, that God might be glorified thoroughly in Him and then that out of that glory, sanctification for those closest to Him, and out of their sanctification the glory of God demonstrated to the world. Revival is for testimony. At the end of His prayer Jesus said, “I made known to them Your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved Me, may be in them and I in them.” Our greatest testimony is the love we have for others, poured out through our hearts as Christ’s nature is conformed in us: “By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:35). Let us walk under the rain of the Spirit. Let us submit to the washing of the Word. Let us be renewed.
You can enjoy the rest of this story of Abraham and Sarah in our book, The Original Sin, a collection of biblical fiction for your summer reading enjoyment. Click here to order in our bookstore.
