Isaiah 40

Isaiah 40:3-5

FOR REVIVALIsa_40:3-5I BRING you a text this morning which was urged upon me some years ago as I sat thinking upon the essentials to a revival, and enquiring of the Lord for a message for my people.It has often been my misfortune to select texts for myself, and now and then it is my good fortune to have the Holy Ghost select one for me, and so plainly and powerfully urge it upon the mind that to present else would be sacrilege and sin; and I think I can truly say that this text was given of the Holy Ghost at the time when I used it, and I beg your prayers that I may impart by print all that was imparted to me touching its truths.As a text, it is at once practical and prophetic. In its further reach it refers to the whole work of Christianity essential to the coming of the King. In its more immediate application, it looks to any field and labor where God’s people wish for His presence, whose presence is grace, and whose work is salvation.I heard B. Fay Mills, in the days of his professed loyalty, preach from this Scripture a sermon looking to the political and social changes which must come to the church, as he imagined, before Christ could return in person to the world. It was a sermon that gave ominous suggestion of the drift in Mills’ mind, and of the day when he should depart from the faith. I cannot, therefore, utilize ought of what he said, but shall seek instead to give to it the interpretation so naturally suggested by the Scripture, and attempt the immediate application to the closer event of having Christ come into this church, and into this city at this time, by His Holy Spirit, to do the work of saving souls.

I shall use it in a practical way today, rather than in its prophetic bearing. In that view I learn from it,THE LORD’S COMING IS “Prepare ye the way of the Lord”, that is the condition.The way must be prepared.

There is here an allusion to a custom of ancient times when the people preceded their kings in journeys and prepared a road straight and smooth for the royal chariot. They cut down trees, they removed stones, they leveled hills, they lifted ravines, and sometimes they strewed branches and flowers before his prancing steeds that he might find an easy passage and be greeted with beauty by the way. Surely servile fear, and patriotism, or personal love for a human king, should not shame our service unto Him for whom we are asked to make a highway, even our “King of kings”, the King of Glory.We know how to prepare that way. It is not by pick and shovel, but by prayer and self-examination. It is not by levelling hills and lifting valleys, but by seeking holiness and eschewing vice. It is not by going before in phalanxes, but by gathering together to renew spiritual strength in song, by prayer, in Scripture study; and, in dispersing to serve, that we prepare the way of the Lord.“Prepare YE the way of the Lord”.Christ’s people must prepare this way.

The question of Christ’s coming to Minneapolis at this time, of His visit to this church by His Spirit unto salvation, depends wholly upon what His people do in preparation.Away over in II Chronicles, seventh chapter, fourteenth verse, I read, “If My people, which are called by My Name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from Heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land”.Perhaps the most essential reason why churches enjoy revivals when an evangelist is engaged, is simply because they plan and prepare for such meetings. They talk about them, and pray for them for days before the Revivalist arrives, and by the time he comes the King of Glory has also arrived, and then Salvation is sure.

I was a student in The Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville, Ky., when Mr. Moody was invited to hold a month’s meeting in that city in 1887. They planned for three months for that meeting. They built a temporary tabernacle at an expense of $3,000, to hold 5,000 auditors. They appointed many committees on preliminaries, they met often to pray, and long before Mr. Moody arrived Christ came, and the revival began. Twenty-five hundred people came together on the Sunday preceding Moody’s arrival, and the Spirit moved upon all hearts, and hundreds were convicted. It meant that God’s people had prepared the way before the King of Glory, and He came to them.When a people are prepared for a revival, the revival will be on.

If they are not, preaching will be at once painful and fruitless.This preparation is a personal thing. It isn’t the church that is to get ready. It is the member of the church. The Church is only a name. The Christian is the unit of weakness of power, and responsibility is wholly with him, with her. “Prepare ye the way of the Lord” (Isaiah 40:3). That means me! That means you! There is no occasion, in an hour like this, for one of us to remind another of his duty.

He will have enough to do who sees to it that his own soul is right with God! I am not here to call on a one of you, this morning, to get ready. I am solicitous that you should be ready, but the one heart and spirit that costs me most anxiety now is my own. Whatever others may be or do, I want to be right myself. God knows I need to be. I want my heart right.

I believe there is just as much work as I can do “over against my house”.I speak the truth when I say I am more afraid of failing myself to prepare for His coming, than I am that any one of you will fail. I know that every heart that opens to Him will enjoy a revival, no matter what others experience.“Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me” (Revelation 3:20).Each of us is to determine for himself the question of Christ’s coming now.

If I am ready He will come to me. If you are ready He will come to you. If we are all ready, He will come to us all, and through us to others. “Prepare ye the way of the Lord”.THE IN THIS ARE PLAINLY STATEDThe first is this, “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (Isaiah 40:3).The mind must be spiritualized. Our minds are too often arid deserts, so far as the flowers and fruit of religion are concerned. The hot winds of haste to be rich, blow on them; the burning suns of unholy pride and passion scorch them, until “the peaceable fruit of righteousness” (Hebrews 12:11) has died away and they are trackless deserts. At least there is no King’s highway cast up, along which God is wont to go.

It is simply impossible for us to think and plan perpetually on how to get gold, or social station, or personal preferments of any kind, without being withered in spirit. The average Christian is not barren from want of ability to bring forth beautiful fruits, but from want of that interest that puts time and talent on God’s altar.

The man who hasn’t time to spare for Bible reading, daily; for private and family devotions; for prayer-meetings and Sunday services; time, even, for some personal work, will not, can not, keep a spiritual mind.If you haven’t had daily prayers, and it is hard to begin, begin now and make Heaven happy and hell sad by spending a week with God.I went into a house in Chicago where lived a family, the father in which had followed horse-racing and betting for years. But God had touched his heart, and he had quit the races, ceased from unkindness and profanity, and confessing his faults to his own had said, “And now bring the Bible and let us read and pray.” He said to me, “Mr. Riley, we have kept it up, and our house has been made more like to Heaven in consequence.” It was a benediction to me to find that man’s mind, so long Satan’s habitat, so changed by the Holy Ghost, that it was then a high-way for our God.One of the first reasons why we no longer enjoy such revivals of religion as Whitfield, and Wesley, and Livingstone, and Edwards and Moody knew, is because we don’t think enough on the things of God. Our minds are forever on the rack of business and professional enterprize, and we know not God because we don’t take time to cultivate His acquaintance. No wonder Luther was a power, after four hours of prayer and meditation daily. No wonder Wesley and Whitfield swept human hearts with blazing breath, when they brought the coal from the altar under which they lived.

We need now to get back to the blessed experience of the sainted John Glavel, who, more than two centuries ago, meditated one day on Divine love until he was lost, and had to inquire of passers-by his own name and home, and the glory on his face almost made his informants afraid. We cannot plead business as a reason for our neglect here.

I knew B. F. Jacobs to be one of Chicago’s busiest men, and yet God got his time, and the Word his prayerful attention. David had a whole kingdom to administer, and yet he said of God’s Word, “It is my meditation all the day” (Psalms 119:97).The heart must be rid of both despair and pride.“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low” (Isaiah 40:4).If one of us is entering upon special meetings despairing—doubting God’s willingness and power —then his unfaith is a serious fault, a ravine cutting the high-way of the King. If, on the other hand, any are over-confident in self, supposing themselves to be worthy, then that is a mountain that must be digged down before the coming of the King. “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low” (Isaiah 40:4). Unfaith on the one side, and self-confidence on the other side, are the Christian’s Cylla and Carybdis, in an hour like this; and as we prize an open passage to God’s presence, we must guard against going on either of them.Then all dishonesty and irreligion must go ere the King comes, for our text says, “The crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain” (Isaiah 40:4).The crooked shall be made straight!

Oh, for straight Christianity! That Christian whose business dealings will bear the inspection of Christ, and whose fair pretentions cover no foul motives, is the incarnation of the dear Master Himself.

We need to multiply his kind. Revival can’t come; mercy can’t continue while there is an Achan in the camp. One dishonest deal on the part of a professed follower of Christ often shuts up every inquiring heart that learns about it, and Christ’s coming is delayed, or, for those who study Christianity in church-members, made the basis of His rejection.I once preached to the men from a large Chicago concern. Several of them were converted, but never confessed Christ. They seemed to get just so far and with all my prayer and pleading, no one from that concern came into the church. At last I asked the head book-keeper, a fine Christian man, how he explained this.

Naming the chief man of the firm, a professed Christian and church-officer, he said, “The men stumble over his dishonest business methods.”Irreligion in secular matters, if practiced by professors of faith, is deadly to all revival in the sacred realm. The professor who is guilty of dishonesty or irreligion stands squarely in the way of a work of grace until removed by repentance and restitution. “The crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain” (Isaiah 40:4).

It is a time for heart-searching for sins great and small that, setting them aside, the Saviour may come in.UPON OUR THIS TEXT A PROMISE“And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it” (Isaiah 40:5).There is the promise of: the revelation of His Glory. We know how that is made good. God’s work in nature reveals His greatness, but this work of grace manifests forth His glory. It was a great thing when God made man. But greater far was that act by which man was and is redeemed. Men never saw the glory of God until they saw God saving the world through His Son.

But when the “Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).But only a few men saw that! The eyes that looked on Christ in the flesh were comparatively few, and yet you have seen God’s glory, and I have beheld it.

In an hour when some soul, saved from sin, stood before you with shining face, its radiance, the mark of its redemption, God’s glory appeared. Do we want to see that glory daily? If we fulfill the conditions of this text, we will. By God’s grace we will!That revelation is to appear to the saved and the unsaved alike.“All flesh shall see it together” (Isaiah 40:5).It is commonly so. Whenever one soul holds sweet communion with God, and comes into fuller sense of His grace, others see it. The Israelites took note of the glory on Moses’ countenance when he came down from the mount.

The prisoners heard Paul and Silas’ singing, despite the fact that they were seeing glory at midnight. When the Holy Ghost came upon the disciples in an upper room in the sacred city, the streets of Jerusalem were destined to see a Pentecost.

When the Church, worshiping in this house, is the host of the King of Glory, the unsaved about us for blocks shall see the glory of the Lord. Oh, men and women in Christ, when we go into the holy of holies and return, the glory of God will appear to the people.Dr. Field has painted with his facile pen, a picture of a scene that occurs at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Easter time. Thousands of Greek Christians crowd the building, and when the patriarch comes through the darkness, they fall back and open a pass for him to the holy place where the body of Jesus is supposed to have lain. Outside, for an hour, there is breathless waiting, until the patriarch reappears, with a lighted torch—a torch lighted by holy fire, as they suppose. Instantly there are a hundred hands stretched out for it, and they pass that torch from hand to hand, lighting others by its touch until a thousand torches burn with the light that comes from the tomb of Christ.

Out into streets of Jerusalem, out into lanes leading to villages, and then into their streets they go lighting torch upon torch until the whole land glows with the glory of illumination, and the unbeliever and believer alike behold it, and know that it celebrates His resurrection, who has power to redeem.Beloved, if we but kindle our hearts at the altar of holy fire, the unbelievers about us shall see the light and understand the revelation of grace and glory, and walk in paths illumined from heaven.That revelation is as sure as God’s own speech, if we prepare. The promise will not fail, “for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it” (Isaiah 40:5).Brethren, let us beg God to keep us from poverty of spirit and faith, when by His promise we are privileged to be rich in both.

Let us enter upon these meetings expecting great things from God, and attempting great things for God.It is told that Alexander the Great, in a fit of gratitude to a servant who had rendered a gracious act, said, “Go to the public treasury, and satisfy yourself for this service.” But the demand was so great that the treasurer denied that Alexander had ordered it, and called the King to dispute the claim. But Alexander said, “Give him what he asks. He treats me as a King by taking me at my word.” Our promise for the coming days is from the King of kings. It is, “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together” (Isaiah 40:5). Let us honor Him by taking Him at His word, “For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it” (Isaiah 40:5).Before Dr. Torrey arrived in Australia, careful plans were made for the revival that was expected.

The churches, in the first place, got together. That is the indispensable preliminary to any Christian progress.

Then, they held prayer meetings for weeks, imploring God for a great outpouring of His Spirit. No fewer than 16,800 cottage prayer meetings were held, attended by 117,000 people. Then, there was organization. The local committees numbered 700, the choir members were 2,500 and there were 2,000 personal workers. Fifty Australian pastors and evangelists were in charge of the work, under Dr. Torrey. No human provision and preparation was omitted. And then God added His blessing.The one thing this nation most needs is just such a desire, just such preparation, and just such a result.

If we can obtain the first two, the third is sure.—Exchange.