Start It Here

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2 Chronicles 7:13-15 "'When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place.'"

Think

Nobody wants to be first on an empty floor.

The music is going. It is a good song. Everybody in the room wants the same thing and every single person is waiting for somebody else to make it not awkward. And it stays empty for four minutes that feel like twenty, until two people finally go, and then it takes about eleven seconds for the whole room to fill.

It was never that people did not want it. It was that everybody was waiting for somebody else to start.

That is a decent picture of how most Christians handle revival.

We want it. We talk about it. We would show up for it. And we are all quietly waiting for it to break out somewhere else first, through somebody else, at a bigger school, with a more spiritual group of students, and then we will get in on it.

Look at what God says to Solomon. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven.”

“My people.” Not the nation in general, and not everybody else. The ones who already carry his name.

Revival does not start with the people who do not know God. It starts with the ones who do.

That means the starting point of everything you have hoped for at your school is not a stadium. It is you, this morning, humbling yourself and praying and turning from something.

This is the last day of a four-week series, and here is how the four weeks fit together.

Week one was Isaiah 6, where a man sees God high and lifted up, sees himself honestly, receives grace, and says, “Here I am. Send me.” Revival starts when a revelation of God produces a surrender to God. The prayer was, “God, change me.”

Week two was Acts 3 and 4, where a man who denied Jesus at a fire became a man who told a courtroom he could not help speaking about what he had seen and heard. The prayer was, “God, use me.”

Week three was Acts 5, where two people wanted the reputation of surrender without the reality of it, and God made it clear he is not building a crowd, he is building a holy people. The prayer was, “God, purify me.”

Week four is Acts 1, where before Acts 2 had a crowd, Acts 1 had a prayer meeting. The prayer is, “God, move through me.”

Change me. Use me. Purify me. Move through me.

Every one of those is about the same person. Not the school, not your friends, not the students who are harder to reach than you. You.

Because a revived school is not a concept. It is a number of revived students walking into the same building on the same Monday.

So here is where this ends, and it is not with more information.

Tomorrow morning you are going to walk into a building with hundreds of people in it. Some of them are lonely. Some of them are pretending. Some of them have not heard anybody talk about Jesus in a way that made sense in their entire life. And you are going to be standing in the middle of it.

We are done waiting for revival to happen somewhere else, through somebody else.

God, start it here. Start it now. Start it in me.

Pray that today and mean it. Then go to school tomorrow like somebody who did.

Apply

Pray it and go – Pray those four prayers out loud today, one line each, then commit to one specific thing you will do at school tomorrow because of them. Tell the person you have been praying with what it is.

Pray

God, I am done waiting for you to move somewhere else through somebody else. Change me, use me, purify me, move through me. Start it here, start it now, and start it in me, and let my school be different because I walked in tomorrow. In Jesus’ name. Amen.