Daily Devotionals

Evening Thoughts

Devotional: July 23rd

"Will you not revive us again; that your people may rejoice in you?" Psalms 85:6

A fresh baptism of the Holy Spirit forms the great secret of all personal revival. This a declining soul needs more than all beside. Possessing this in a large degree, he possesses every spiritual blessing; it includes and is the pledge of every other. Our dear Lord sought to impress this, His last consoling doctrine, upon the drooping minds of His disciples: His bodily presence in their midst, He taught them, was to be compared with the spiritual and permanent dwelling of the Spirit among them. The descent of the Holy Spirit was to bring all things that He had taught them to their remembrance; it was to perfect them in their knowledge of the supreme glory of His person, the infinite perfection of His work, the nature and spirituality of His kingdom, and its ultimate and certain triumph, in the earth. The descent of the Spirit, too, was to mature them in personal holiness, and more eminently fit them for their arduous and successful labor in His cause, by deepening their spirituality, enriching them with more grace, and enlarging them with more love; and fully did the baptism of the Holy Spirit, on the day of Pentecost, accomplish all this: the apostles emerged from His influence, like men who had passed through a state of re-conversion; and this is the state, dear reader, you must pass through, would you experience a revival of God’’s word in your soul-you must be re-converted, and that through a fresh baptism of the Holy Spirit. Nothing short of this will quicken your dying graces, and melt your frozen love, and restore your backsliding heart. You must be baptized afresh with the Spirit; that Spirit whom you have so often and so deeply wounded, grieved, slighted, and quenched, must enter you anew, and seal, and sanctify, and re-convert you. Oh, arise, and pray and agonize for the outpouring of the Spirit upon your soul; give up your lifeless religion, your form without the power, your prayer without communion, your confessions without brokenness, your zeal without love. And oh, what numerous and precious promises cluster in God’’s word, all inviting you to seek this blessing! "He shall come down as rain upon the mown grass; as showers that water the earth." "Come, let us return unto the Lord; for He has torn, and He will heal us; He has smitten, and He will bind us up. After two days will He revive us; in the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord: His going forth is prepared as the morning; and He shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth." Seek, then, above and beyond all other blessings, the renewed baptism of the Holy Spirit. "Be filled with the Spirit;" seek it earnestly-seek under the deep conviction of your absolute need of it-seek it perseveringly-seek it believingly: God has promised, "I will pour out my Spirit upon you;" and asking it in the name of Jesus you shall receive.