How to Continue Revival

A few days ago I planted some seeds in potting soil in some containers in the house to prepare for warm weather for my garden. I planted tomato seeds, pepper seeds and broccoli seeds. Nothing has sprouted yet, and I’m impatiently waiting for that first something to come out of the dirt. These tiny plants will require water and sunlight to grow and become strong. Then once they’re moved outside they’ll require even more water, which we hope will mostly come in the form of rain. They’ll still require sunlight, of which they’ll have an abundant supply. One thing that requires hard labor, though, is keeping the weeds out of the garden. If the weeds are allowed to grow at will, they’ll choke out the plants that have been put there and they’ll not bear much fruit.

Beginning in the last week of February, we had a great youth revival at our church that lasted for two weeks. During that time, there was some hard preaching and some encouraging preaching. Each night, however, caused us all to search our hearts and draw a little closer to the Lord.

During those two weeks there were some seeds planted in our hearts. In some hearts those seeds even already began to sprout. The preaching we heard is what planted those seeds, and even provided the nourishment (water, which is a type of the Word of God). We were even exposed to a little bit of Sonlight when the Lord visited with us during the meeting. These were all of the requirements for those seeds to begin to grow in our hearts.

Now the revival meeting is over and we’re out in the ‘garden’ of the world. These tiny little plants still require a lot of care, and always will as they grow. The only difference between these ‘plants’ in our hearts and the ones in a regular garden is twofold:

1: The rain (water, again a type of the Word of God) isn’t going to always come all by itself. We’ll have to manually water those plants by getting in the Bible ourselves and saturating ourselves with it to get that same nourishment.

2: The Sonlight is always readily available, but we have to be sure we’re in a position to receive it, and let it shine on us. We have to always be willing and ready to let the Lord work in our hearts and lives.

The third thing again is that there are ‘weeds’ that we’ll have to deal with. There will always be things in our lives that try to spring up and take away from what our purpose in life is – to bear fruit in God’s service. We have to always be on the lookout for these ‘weeds’. Some of them look like real plants and look like they’ll be ok if we leave them alone and let them grow. Others are more obvious, but it’s tempting to leave them alone because it’s such hard work to get them out of our way.

All of these things are necessary if we want the great revival meeting we’ve just had to do us any lasting good. For all of us, no doubt, God showed us some specific things we needed to do – that is the seed. The preaching we heard continually watered that seed, and God confirmed it in our hearts when He made His presence known in the services.

Now it’s up to us to continue to seek God and keep giving those plants nourishment as they grow. If we ignore them, they’ll die and it will have all been in vain.