Dear Friend, I heard a story from a pastor about a town in the Northeast that was going to be flooded due to the construction of a dam in one of the local rivers. As soon as the news of this spread, the town essentially shut down. Oh yes, there were people there, but construction stopped, buildings were no longer painted, and no repairs were made to anything.
Hope is an interesting thing, isn’t it? While it comforts, many people I speak with are simply afraid to have it because they don’t want to be let down. Maybe they’ve hoped for so long that they would wake up one morning pain-free, yet it never happens. Or, perhaps they have hoped that God would take away their loneliness, yet they constantly find themselves feeling isolated.
A story is told about an evangelist named Gipsy Smith who lived in the late 1800s. Gipsy traveled all over the world, preaching on every continent and in many countries. And everywhere he preached, massive revivals would break out. So one day, people from a nearby community who had heard of Gipsy came to him and said, “Our town is spiritually dead. What can we do to start a revival?”
When it comes to personal revival, it seems there’s no end to the formulas and processes you can use for it to be achieved. And really, I think that’s a direct result of the culture in which so many of us were raised, a culture that loves to say, “If you do this, then this will happen.”
Every four years, it's such a treat watching athletes compete in the Summer Olympics. And one of our favorite events to watch is the marathon, where the runners begin in a stadium filled with onlookers, leave the stadium for a 26.2-mile run, and then return to the cheering crowd a few hours later to cross the finish line.
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