Jesus’ heart is all about God. It’s about advancing His Kingdom, healing the broken and sick, freeing the prisoners, hope for the hopeless. It’s about orphans and widows being taken care of. It’s about people worshipping God in a thousand tongues and languages. It’s about people falling in love with Him.
It’s about an adventure. It’s about life. It’s about depressed people no longer being depressed! It’s about blind people seeing and praising God. It’s about satan being defeated and all of his works being destroyed. It’s about God and His indescribable love. It’s about Heaven on earth because His Kingdom is here.
It’s about justice for the oppressed. It’s about seeing murderers come to repentance. It’s about dreaming big and seeing those dreams become realities. It’s about restoration, restoring what’s been broken, reconciliation, bringing people back to God. It’s about people in Darfur being relieved from their suffering. It’s about His humility and strength to obey even when it was hard because His focus was so firmly fixed on His Father that His struggles weren’t a threat.
It’s about passion and purpose and freedom. It’s about power and authority and a waging war in the spiritual realm that is so much more intense than anything we see with our physical eyes. And God wins!
Love God. Love people. That’s the face of revival. I believe revival starts small, one person at a time. It begins when we, like Jesus, start doing exactly what we see our Father doing. John 9 starts with “As He went along, He saw…” Jesus lived life walking with His Father and as He went He saw people and He ministered to them.
So, what does that look like for us? It looks like loving our elderly neighbors. It looks like seeing the waiter at the restaurant… not just physically acknowledging that they are there, but actually seeing them and being kind to them. It looks like being patient in line at the grocery store. It looks like speaking graciously about those in the institutionalized church.
It means seeing people; seeing hurt and pain and being broken over it. It means genuinely listening to an angry person gripe about their day. It means being joyful always so as to brighten others’ days. It believes in people who don’t look like they have it all together and sees potential in them. It never looks at people like obstacles or lost causes.
It means being quiet when others don’t understand and not feeling like you have to justify. We never stop living life to follow Christ. We simply let our circumstances be gateways for God to let His love flow through. An extreme life of power and love is available but it’s in the context of real life. Our job is to love recklessly. And this love covers over a multitude of sins. Love is what Jesus used to ultimately defeat satan and love is what He has called us to use to destroy his works now.
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