Revive Us Again!

Psalm 85

Our psalm this week is one that was written by the Sons of Korah.  These Sons of Korah were Levites, descended from the tribe of Levi through his son, Kohath.  The Levites were set apart to carry out special religious duties with the Tabernacle and Ark of the Covenant, and later in the Temple, and it was from this tribe that the priests and High Priest came.  The duties of the Kohathites were gatekeepers in the Tabernacle, and later the Temple.  They were also musicians, particularly the Sons of Korah.  There are eleven psalms attributed to the Sons of Korah in the Book of Psalms - Psalm 42, 44 - 49, 84, 85, 87, and 88.

This psalm is a prayer for God to bring about a national revival, and for Him to display His mercy on His people.  In their prayer to God, the Sons of Korah remind Him of all of His past favors and blessings that He had bestowed on them (vs. 1-3).  When we come to God in prayer it is always good to remember His past answers to our prayers, and the blessings He has given us.  This helps us to remember and be thankful for all He has done for us.  Specifically remembering and vocalizing God’s answers to our prayers will also help boost our faith, knowing that if He answered us in the past, He can and will now, as well.

In verse 6 our psalmists pray that God will bring revival to the people.  That is a prayer that we urgently need today, as well.  So many believers today have let the fire that they once had for the Lord die down to a barely discernible ember. They have strayed away from Him and His Word, and become too much a part of the world.  Christians need to pray that God would send a new outpouring of His Holy Spirit, and breathe new life into His children, stirring up those flickering embers into a fire again.  Revival is restoring a right relationship with God, and returning to a place where we delight and joy in Him.  We, individually, need to have spiritual revival in our lives, which will then spread to our churches.  From there it will spread around our communities, and throughout the nation.  It starts with each one of us, though.

One positive by-product of a great revival in the lives of Christians and our churches is that it spreads into the hearts of the lost in our neighborhoods, and many souls come to Christ, accepting Him as their Savior.  The lost cannot be “revived”, as they are spiritually dead, just as a physically dead body cannot be revived.  They need to be born-again themselves.  When the spiritual fire in our souls gets revived, and we are “on fire” for the Lord, actively living for Him, obeying and following His Word, the Holy Spirit starts to move in the hearts of the lost around us.  In many of the great revivals of past ages, one of the signs was great and large numbers of the lost coming to accept Jesus as their Savior.

The psalmists in verse 8 advise us to listen to what God is saying to us.  How do we do that?  God speaks to us today through His Word, the Bible, so to hear His message, we need to be in that Holy Book, reading from it every day.  God also uses godly men and women to bring us a message from Him.  Their words are not inspired, as the Bible is, but He can still use their words to give us counsel and guidance.  He warns us, though, that as we listen for His Word, we are not to turn back again to folly or the foolishness that we have been involved in previously.  If we are praying for and seeking a spiritual revival in our life, we need to be listening to God and abandoning sin and folly.

As I look around this world today, I see how desperately we need revival, how desperately we need God’s Holy Spirit to come down upon us with His power, like He did at various points in time in previous centuries.  Let our prayer be that of the old 19th century hymn writer William MacKay, “Revive us again, fill each heart with Thy love; May each soul be rekindled with fire from above. Hallelujah, Thine the glory! Revive us again.”