The Spirit of Restoration - Part 1

Now, dear friends, let's turn to Isaiah chapter 61. What a comprehensive statement we have here of the Spirit which is upon our Lord Jesus. The first verse reads, The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all that mourn, to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the Spirit of heaviness, that they might be called the trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified. Now, note this fourth verse, And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations. You know, to build something from scratch, something which never existed before, is relatively an easy business compared to taking up a desolation, someplace that has been wrecked and restoring it.

You know, dear friends, there is a strong strength in our makeup, which says, get all that you can get, putting in the least effort. Now, as anybody knows from history, or should know, if such an attitude had characterized the early pilgrims and the Puritans who followed, if this was their mental makeup, then many of those freedoms that we enjoy today, and which the rest of the world enjoys, could be used as an outcome of what these forerunners purchased with their blood and toil and tears. You know, my dear friends, as those who are in this age of delusion, disappointment, and despair, think of the very spirit of Jesus.

It is a spirit of restoration, a spirit of redemption. It is a spirit of recovery, of rebuilding the waste places. Now, if this has been your heart experience, then you know that this is what has happened inside of you.

And you know that the Lord Jesus Christ is all about this revolution from within, not just the outward, external facelifts. This world gives facelifts, but the Lord Jesus gives heart lifts. You become a new person, totally restored, and the later building is more glorious than the former.

Now, that redemptive power comes to us from the cross of Jesus. That prize, the cost of which we shall never be able to understand, leaving heaven's glory, coming into this world, taking the form of a servant, dying the ignoble death of a condemned, innocent, but condemned criminal outside the city walls. See, we never tasted any of that ignominy or pain, so it's all a kind of easy-go-lucky type of life that we manage to live, a very poor outlook and motivation that gives us.

So, we are really to deal, when we are talking of a recovery or revival, let it be even an economic revival, we are really going to the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is an imprisoned soul, a soul which is imprisoned, bound, fettered with all kinds of wrong ideas. Let's get God out of the school system.

Let's get God out of the seat. This kind of heart rebellion is at the root of the malaise. Let it be in the senate, or let it be on the streets.

Let it be on the work, in the workplace, or the factory floor. It is a rebellion against acknowledging the Lord, who is the giver of every good and perfect gift, and to talk of a thanksgiving without knowing to whom we give thanks seems a very absurd kind of thing. To whom do we give thanks? To some image? To some monkey? You know, there are people clamoring today to bring the monkeys in.

All kinds of images and all kinds of idols, which they feel they have a right to set up, and so you're going to ascribe all the blessings, which as an immigrant you have received from a monkey, the absurdity of such a concept. And you see, if the heathen choose to worship gods of their own creation, now it is our duty to be able to tell them, this is fundamentally wrong, this is ill-conceived, this is a perversion that comes from a deep darkness. The idea of jihad, which is enshrined in the teachings which you are given, is a concept of hate.

It is a concept of murder. It is a concept against the very attributes of God, which tell us that God is love, and we want to banish untruth from our shores. Well, that seems to be quite a job today, you see, because liberty without truth leads to license, and men want license.

License to be lewd, license to be vulgar, license to be heartless, license to murder, license to disclaim all responsibility for murders and killing, which you do under the influence, my dear friends, and to shun a recovery, and to shun a restoration, is something incomprehensible. How can you account for this, that there should be in the heart of man such a strong street belly up against the living God? Oh, that's the tragedy that we are facing today. Is there a cure? Yes, there is.

If you turn to 1 Corinthians in the first chapter and verse 30, this is what you will see. But of him are you in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness, right living and sanctification, redemption from all our native vices and proclivities that tend to baseness and redemption, Christ our redemption, Christ our wisdom, Christ our righteousness, and sanctification and redemption. According as it is written, he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.

So wherever I go around the world, I see this desperate need for redemption. Redemption in its real connotation or meaning is recovering from a cap, from captivity, recovering from somebody's iron grip or a retrieval of something which is lost. Now, it's not easy to think of retrieval for a broken relationship, for a dysfunctional family, from perverted mind.

You know, certain minds have never been exposed to the basic truths. God is love. God is holy.

God teaches us to love our neighbor. You see, we see this great contradiction today. We talk of humanism.

We talk of human values. We talk of personal liberties. But we simply do not know how to even acknowledge that the civilizations, the pre-Christian civilizations never accomplished any such restoration or retrieval.

You know, half the inhabitants of Rome were slaves. Three-fourths of the inhabitants of Athens when the gospel went there were slaves. Just think of such a situation.

And if you see certain areas right across the Middle East and so on, the very rich and the hangers-on, that's all. That's their life. In many parts of Asia, nobody to question that kind of oppression.

No one. Is there no hope for an underdog? Is there no hope for an underprivileged person? No. A person born in obscurity? Very little.

And it continues to this day. Well, you can understand when they think of, you know, of a situation where you can quickly arrive at some riches where you had none before. You can account for all the rush that there is to possess the liberties that are taken for granted in this nation.

Why? Why? You mean to say there's no natural wealth elsewhere in the world? Plenty of it. As a matter of fact, preaching in South America and knowing how those countries, some of those countries are getting depopulated by simply the onrush to attain even illegal entrance into the U.S. Is it because there is no natural wealth? Oh, there's plenty of it. But what is lacking? The character, the application is lacking.

Whereas some of these new immigrants find that there is a vacuum in this country for motivation, for hard work. Why is this? These are not the roots. These are the outcome of a misuse of the liberties that came so easily.

The fruit of other people's hard work easily accessed with little pain makes the equation very desirable. But for all the natives, the dwellers here, what is the problem? The problem is one of indolence on the one hand and a surfeit of too many good things which have been taken for granted. Everybody owes these things to us.

You know, I cannot see that Christian character will ever get you into that kind of thinking. Why does anybody owe anything to me? Isn't there a God? Isn't there a provider of every good and perfect gift? Isn't there not a redeemer? Is not my focus to be upon him? Many of our hurts and many of our wrong attitudes spring from this also. We begin to focus on somebody.

It is a negative kind of look. It is not looking through Jesus and saying there is a redemption for this situation. There is a savior who is sufficient for this need.

Now that is faith. There is a cross which answers for this down, which is a restorer of this down from this downfall. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, we humble ourselves. We can be so full of the spirit of criticism and denunciation of the faults of others. But the spirit of retrieval, of redemption, of repentance is so far from us.

Forgive us. And yet the spirit which you give us is the spirit that restores, that rebuilds, that raises out of the ashes the fallen desolations. Won't you cause that spirit to dwell upon us, upon this whole land in Jesus' holy name.

Amen.