Would you take your Bibles, please, and turn again to Isaiah 2 chapter 63 through 65. We have here a perfect text for Sunday, Easter Sunday evening, and it is Isaiah's prayer for revival and the Lord's answer to that prayer. Our hope for revival is rooted in the reality of the resurrection. And I say this is the perfect text because when Jesus Christ said that he was going to the Father and greater works than he has done, we will do because he goes to the Father. He was pointing to all the riches that belonged to him in his resurrected life. God, according to the New Testament, in Paul's writing, says, placed all things into the hand of his Son and in his resurrected state, nothing is impossible for Jesus Christ. So our hopes for revival are rooted in the reality of God's resurrection in Jesus Christ. I say that because number one, the Bible says that the resurrected Christ always lives to make intercession for us. So he is constantly filtering our prayers through him as we pray in his name, in his benefit and his power and for his purposes, he is answering our prayers, exceeding abundantly all beyond all that we could ask or think. Secondly, any hope for revival we cherish is rooted in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Revival is simply loved ones another dimension of this new life in Jesus Christ. New life, not just for individuals which we call regeneration, or not for people who are born again, kind of get stale in the faith in need renewal, but new life for entire bodies of believers called revival or religions, different denominations and sex and branches of Christianity called reformation. Peter pointed to this. He said in his great sermon in Acts 3 that Jesus Christ suffered as was appointed by the Scripture, and therefore he said that there was afforded to us times of refreshment from the presence of the Lord through Jesus Christ whom God had sent for this purpose. And we also know that the restoration of the world, the new heaven, the new earth that we long for, flow out of Christ resurrection life. New life, new humanity, new society, and a new world. We're talking about the renewing and refreshing that comes from the presence of the resurrected Christ. Peter identifies that Christ as he whom heaven must receive until the time for the restore of all things takes place. So this whole subject of resurrection has greater, more massive and expansive applications than most of us could ever imagine. If our religion, if the Christian faith was only a philosophy of life, it would have simply a theology about God and man and sin and salvation. If it was just a personal piety, then we could not hope for much more than we already have. But it is the promise of Jesus Christ making all things new because He is Himself, part of this new humanity, this new creation, and this new world in His resurrected life. There is so much in this wonderful statement of Paul, if any man is in Christ, He is a new creation. The old things have passed away and behold, new things have come. In Isaiah chapter 63, beginning in verse 15, all the way through chapter 64, we have one of the great and classic prayers for revival in the Old Testament. Its most famous line is in 641, all that you would rent the heavens and come down, a phrase that is synonymous now with revival and often is the title of books on revival, Rending the Heavens. In his commentary on Isaiah, Barry Webb says there have been plenty of incentives for intercession since the beginning of the book of Isaiah, especially since chapter 62. But now, so far, intercession has only been talked about, but here it is actually done. Now however, we move from declaration of intent and exhortation to prayer itself. And what a prayer it is. There are many fine intercessory prayers in the scripture, but this present prayer of Isaiah, though it is less well known, has the same stamp of greatness to it. The intercessor is Isaiah himself. He stands in that long prophetic tradition of intercessory prayer which goes all the way back to Moses. And like Jesus Christ after him, he prays with prophetic vision, not just for himself and for his own generation, but for future generations to come as well. So I want to look tonight at the prayer of revival beginning in chapter 63, verse 15, all way to the end of chapter 64, and then Christ's answer, the promise of revival in chapter 65. When Isaiah prays, he prays for three things. The God would return, the God would reconcile, and that God would restore. Those are the three paragraphs of Isaiah 63 through the chapter 64. First, Isaiah asks for the return of God, Isaiah 63, verse 15, look down from heaven and sea from your holy and beautiful habitation. Where are your zeal in your might? The string of your inner parts and your compassion are held back from me. You are our Father, although Abraham does not know us and Israel does not acknowledge us. You, O Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from a bold, is your name. O Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so that we fear you? Return for the sake of your servants, the tribes of your heritage. Your holy people held possession for a little while, and our adversaries have trampled down your sanctuary. We have become like those over whom you have never ruled, like those who are not called by your name. Isaiah acknowledges that God is in heaven looking down and seeing the predicament and the circumstances that the Old Testament church find itself in eight centuries before Christ. God zeal in might, he said, have been withdrawn, so the church was powerless. God had treated them as strangers and not as his children, so that the church was pitiful. God caused them to wander from his word and harden their hearts so that Isaiah says the church had become polluted. And finally, he says God allowed them to be afflicted by the nations and his holy sanctuary and said to the temple into foot so that the church was plundered. Frankly, at the opening of this prayer, things look fairly hopeless, and this is always the case when people stop pretending and face the reality in times just prior to a revival. One man who did that was the Reverend Nathaniel Leonard, who in 1744, as the first great awakening was beginning to dawn in America, was pastoring the first congregational church in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Now remember, that was the first church established by the pilgrims when they came to our nation shores. And he wrote in 1744 to another minister, religion was then under a great decay. Most people seem to be taken up principally about the world and the lust of this life, though there appeared to be some serious Christians among us who had the things of God on our heart, who greatly bewailed the growth of impiety and profaniness, Sabbath breaking, gaming, tavern haunting, and temperance, and other evils which threatened to bear down all the good and sacred before them. We were sensible of an awful degeneracy, and kept days of fasting in prayer year after year, the God would pour out His spirit upon us, especially on the rising generation. At these times, we invited the ministers of the country to join with us who readily gave their assistance, the authority of this town endeavored to put a stop to the growing in temperance by clearing the taverns at nine o'clock in the evening and punishing loose and disorderly persons that frequented them. But all the methods used one way or the other proved of little effect, iniquity prevailed, in weaned were in danger of losing the very heart and form of our Christian Godliness. Back in the 1990s, I actually believe that revival was just around the corner. I had the privilege to be invited, and I don't know how I got invited, but I was, along with Archie Perish, to the Convocation on Revival 1 in 1994 and another in 1995 at the first Baptist Church in Little Rock, Arkansas, where one wonderful speaker after another expounded upon the hope yet to come. Bill Bright was there, and K. Arthur spoke, and Richard Owen Robertson, Jim and Bill Elif and Joseph Thon from Romania and Vernon Hayam from Wales and David Bryant was there. We had this sense of excitement, that a great awakening was just around the corner. So many people and the pulpits were preaching about it, so many people had seen we're praying about it, very next year in our General Assembly, something very unprecedented for us to do. We invited David Bryant to hold a concert of prayer, and he did so for our General Assembly, but a decade later by the dawning of the 21st century, all this hope of a Bible had dissipated. And our evangelicalism, including the PCA, in my opinion, sank into a spiritual negativity of anger and pessimism brought upon not only by our own circumstances, but kind of hyphenated and exaggerated by the rising generation. Now I doubt sincerely that I will see a great awakening in our land in my lifetime, but I do believe that revival will come. It's just going to take longer for people to come to the end of themselves and begin to face reality. Folks, listen, as long as going back to what I said this morning, as long as our perspective is always on the horizontal. As long as we're comparing ourselves to other people to the generation ahead of us, to the young people behind us, to that church, to that church, we're always going to be caught up with the things of the self. But when we step back and we look from heaven's perspective, we look down on the church from the vertical perspective of God, as Isaiah says, as he looks down from heaven and seas, it becomes at first disconcerting. It is unpleasant to face the reality of what we are. I mean to tell you the truth. If I wrote a general letter along with some of my other pastors my age and said to the people today, we need to call the church to repentance and fasting in prayer because we are Sabbath breakers. We no longer have Sunday evening services and most of our churches, our people are arguing about the third use of the law on sanctification. We're waffling on whether or not homosexuality is a center of fornication is that bad. The response or the majority of ministers and predominantly the young ones would be so what? Isn't that preferable to the old legalism? And that's because they see things horizontally. They never look at the church, it appears, from the perspective of God. But Isaiah does. And so he sees it from the top down, mainly because God has given him the prophet's vision. And he prays with that same vision into the future. I think Isaiah realizes that the very thing he prays for, he will not see in his own time and he did not. It would come 200 years after he was dead. But he prayed and he asked God to rent the heavens, 641, oh, that you would rent the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil to make your name known to your adversaries and that the nations might tremble at your presence. When you did awesome things that we did not look for, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence from of old no one has heard or perceived by ear. No eye has seen the God beside you who acts for those who wait for him. You meet him who joyfully works righteousness. Those who remember you in your ways, behold you are angry and we sinned and in our sins we have been a long time and shall we be saved? We have all become like one who is unclean and all of our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf and our niceties like the wind take us away. There is no one who calls upon your name who rouse in herself to take hold of you if you have hidden your face from us and have made us melt at the hand of our equities. Isaiah asked God literally to unzip, to tear open, he's talking about the action and Hebrew of ripping open a sheet or a veil, tearing something in half and stepping into the other side of things. O that you would tear open the heavens and come down. My friend Derek Thomas writes about this little request in his commentary on Isaiah, all revivals are marked by a mysterious irresistible sense that God is near. His power is felt in an awesome way like the way he has shown himself in the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. Someone who witnessed a revival in Eastward Connecticut in 1818 said it was so evident the work of God was present that not a dog dared to move his tongue and bark. We tend to think that God is far away. We are so caught up with the relational that we forget how near God is to us. We tend to think that God is far away, but that's not what the Bible says. James tells us behold the judge is at the door. There is a thin veil invisible but real that separates us from the presence of God right now. It's just as close as me reaching into it right now. The only difference is we cannot reach into it. God must run that veil open and step into our time. It's as if James says the judge is right at the door. All he has to do is turn that knob and step into all realm and as the hymn writer said heaven came down and glory filled my soul. That is what Isaiah is asking God to do. To part that veil between the invisible and visible world and to step into his reality like he did when he made the bush crackle with fire and spoke to Moses on the mountain. As he did when he came down to give the commandments and the covenant in the mountain chuk, as he did when he interjected himself time and again in some miraculous and sometimes some painful ways in the life and history of Israel, supernatural things happen when revival comes which may be one of the reasons why we are uncomfortable with the whole subject many of us. There are people in whales whom I've talked to who in times of revival back in the 30s and 40s heard what they called the heavenly singing. They heard choirs that sounded like for a brief moment in the sky. Helen Roosevelt who was a missionary in Zaire for years talked about how the East African revival that spread all over South Africa left fire in the sky on some nights and what she called pentecostal winds that would blow through a village and instantly the presence of the Lord would be manifest. I talked to some Scottish folks now with the Lord who lived on the aisle of north and south U.S. and the 1950s when revival came and they told how they were unconverted to young people. But one night independent of each other in houses four miles apart, two high school boys and girls in love with each other heard a voice waking men up, get up, get up the voice would say. And as they woke up it just kept saying go to the church, go to the church. The man said, I said out loud at three in the morning but I went to the church, only to find unannounced that it was overflowing with people and the spirit of the Lord had filled that place. He told me he went to that church every night all night for 17 straight days until God met him and brought him to saving faith. The ways of the earth are unsettled and shaken when God comes down. That's what Hosea says. That's what Isaiah says, what's what hey guy says. For thus says the Lord of hosts yet once more and a little while and I will shake the heavens in the earth and the sea in the dry land and I will make all the nations so that the treasures of the nations shall be shaken and I will fill this house, the house of the Lord, my house, with glory once again. So Isaiah prays for that. He also prays for restoring a favor in verse 8. But now, O Lord, you are our Father, we are the clay and you are the potter, we are all the work of your hand, be not so terribly angry, O Lord. And remember not the iniquity forever, behold, please look, we are all your people, your holy cities have become a wilderness, Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation, our holy and beautiful house where our Father's praised you has been burned by fire. And all of our pleasant places have become ruins. Will you restrain yourself at these things, O Lord? Will you keep silent and afflict us so terribly? Isaiah acknowledges that there is still hope in this dire circumstance that God ever remains the same as we do. He is the Creator, the potter, we are the clay, his creatures and God can shape us as the work of his hands and reform us whenever he wishes. Here he pleads for God's restoring grace, that God would overlook our pet sins and hold his restraint back no longer. Will you restrain yourself at these things, meaning our sins, O Lord? Will you keep silent and afflict us so terribly? What folks, would you think? If I told you that God could visit your life in this church and our times in such a way, that your secret sins and your lifelong bondages and all your roots of bitterness and that anger of soul that dominates your life could be gone in a split second, immediately, powerfully and painlessly, no years of therapy or treatment, no 12 step programs, no need for drummedic programs and long-term accountability groups. Heaven could just reach down and change you in an instant. There would be many, perhaps in this room, who would say, Pastor, that's inappropriate, that is pie in the sky thinking, you're giving people a false hope and you don't know what you're talking about. This is impossible and unhealthy to tell people these things and raise up their false hopes and I would say, don't be foolish. Don't speak out of ignorance. Don't be so firm in the conviction of things you know not. How many of you have ever read a book on revival? How many of you have made it the study of his life for almost 40 years? How many of you have talked to people who have been in Canada and Africa and England and Wales and Scotland and experience times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord? It is not impossible. These are the things that God does when He rends the heaven and comes down, when He restores people, when He returns and His presence is felt. To prove that Jesus Christ does not deny any of the things that Isaiah asked for, in fact, He answers them even more than Isaiah asked for, for if the prayer for revival is astounding and it is, the promise of revival in chapter 65 is even greater. That first of all says that He will promise to redeem them. I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me. I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, here I am, here I am to a nation that was not called by my name. I spread out my hands all day to rebellious people who walk in a way that is not good following their own devices, a people who provoke me to my face continually, sacrificing in gardens and making offerings on bricks who sit in tombs and spend the night in secret places who eat pigs flesh and broth of tainted meat in their vessels who say, keep to yourself. Do not come near me, for I am too holy for you. These are smoke in my nostrils, a fire that burns all the day. Behold this written before me, I will not keep silent, but I will repay. I will, indeed, repay into their lap both your niggas and your fathers and equities together says the Lord, because they made offerings on the mountains, and the salt of me on the hills, I will measure into their lap a payment for their former deeds. Now God begins to speak. Christ will begin to speak in chapter 65 verse 1. He will speak all the way through the end of the book and the end of chapter 66. First in answer to prayer, chapter 65 and second in anticipation of prophecy in chapter 66. God says the most amazing thing here, I was ready to be sought after, to be called upon and to visit with renewing grace, my people Israel, but they said, get away from us. So I will be found by a people who are not looking for me, and I will visit the Gentiles while I leave Israel to their own ways and their own self-destruction for a long season. Imagine saying to God, keep to yourself, do not come near me, for I am too holy for you. You will say, pastor, when did Israel ever say that they said that to Jesus Christ? The leaders of Israel said that to their God in the flesh, keep to yourself, view the vagabond little carpenter or itinerant preacher, do not come near to us. Remember how many times they warned our Lord to stay out of Jerusalem, his holy city? Remember how they pursued him to death in his own temple, the place of his own throne on the earth, for we are too holy for you. Our righteousness exceeds your message of grace, and we're not interested. Jesus Christ warned them, the Monday before he was crucified. The that temple would be rendered so that not a stone was left upon a stone. Jerusalem in the temple he said would be trampled underfoot until the times of the fullness of the Gentiles was complete. That's what Isaiah is talking about here. What Paul talks about in Romans, that there will be a time when God has appeared to walk away from the Jews and bring in the fullness of the Gentiles while there is yet just a small trickle called a remnant of Israel that seems to come in. Jesus told many parables about this, the man who had two sons, whom he asked to go into the garden in the one son, the older boy said, sure, but he didn't do it. The younger son said, I don't want to, but then he did. The older boy was Israel, the younger son was the Gentiles. His sons lived in a house, a younger boy who was a prodigal, an older brother who was angry, Israel, the Gentiles. But perhaps his most stunning parable about this was about a vineyard. How the man owned a vineyard and it was time for him for the harvest to come and so he sent his messengers to those who worked in the vineyard and they beat them up and sent them away. So the man being a gracious man said, well, perhaps there was a misunderstanding. I'll send some more messengers and he did. This time they killed him. Being a man of such a good heart that he couldn't conceive of this said, there's something wrong here, but I'll send my only son there. They will love and honor him and they killed him through his body out of the vineyard and said the vineyard is ours. Jesus said, what will that vine dresser that vineyard owner do? I tell you what he will do. He will take away the vineyard and give it to another who is willing to bearing forth the fruits of repentance. And Matthew says, when the chief priests in the Pharisees heard this parable, they were angry because they knew that Jesus Christ was speaking about them. So Jesus Christ now talks about a remnant, thus says the Lord, as the new wine is found in the cluster and they say, do not destroy it, for there is a blessing in it. So I will do for my servant's sake and not destroy them all. I will bring forth offspring from Jacob and from Judah possessors of my mountains, my chosen shall possess it and my servant's shall dwell there, share and shall become a pasture for flocks and the valley of a quarter place of herds to lie down from my people who have sought me, but you who forsake the Lord, who forget my holy mountain, who set a table for fortune and filled cups of wine mixed for destiny, I will destined you to the sword, all of you shall bow down to the slaughter because when I called, you did not answer. When I spoke, you did not listen, but you did what was evil in my eyes and chose what I did not delight in. Here's a great contrast. Jesus said that he will go after those in the previous paragraph who did not call upon him or look for him, the Gentiles, and yet he will leave in Israel what he calls a remnant in other places, a small group of people within the greater people of Israel who will call upon the Lord and believe in him. This what we call an Old Testament prophecy, Remnant Theology is a huge theme, huge into the prophets. Isaiah speaks of a remnant 14 times in his prophecy, Jeremiah 22 times, Ezekiel 5 times, Amos 3 times, Micah 5 times, Zeffaniah 3, Hey guy 3, Zechariah 4, and Malachi 1. Malachi says, Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, you have been born by me from before your birth, carried from the womb, even to your old age, I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you, I have made and I will bear, and I will carry you and save you. Paul picks up this imagery and says in Romans 9, Isaiah cried out concerning Israel, though the number of the souls of Israel be as a sander, the only remnant will be saved, so too, at the present time, there is a remnant that is chosen by God. Just a tenth of the people, a tithe as God had said in Isaiah 6, when Isaiah was called to the ministry, God said keep on preaching, but they won't hear, keep on calling out, but they won't listen until a tenth, the stump, a terabrent, the stump of the tree is left, and the remnant remains. We may think, folks, that the gospel has a shelf life with any people, and that over time it eventually dies out, but you don't want to believe that for a second. The church never dies out. In every place that the church has ever been, there was always a remnant that remains. Just a small tenth, a piece of what was once the great church that can receive a reviving outport of the spirit and grow up to be a veritable army for the Lord. We see that all around us today, if we had eyes of prophetic faith. We can see it in Germany, where Stephen Mueller and Munich, Daniel Bartz and Hamburg, and some young men that we support in Berlin are planning churches and young people in significant numbers, being grown up with a dead and compromised Lutheran church under a communist regime or experiencing times of refreshment from the presence of the Lord. We have in our congregation redeemed Jews who are members of our church. In our discovery class, right now there's a Coptic Christian. How many have you ever heard of the Coptic Church of England? One of the oldest churches outside of Palestine. We have Palestinian Christians attending our church, and a number of Roman Catholics who worship with us and many who have joined our church and believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. They are the wine that is hidden in the cluster, Isaiah says, don't destroy the vineyard. God says, for in these clusters is still the new wine of living faith. Mr. Jesus talked about when he talked about the people he was bringing out of Israel to himself to be the endupliest of the New Testament church. He called them new wine in old wine skins. Many he say would say, the old is good enough, but not the remnant. They wanted the new wine, the sweet wine of Jesus Christ and His grace, and they are responding. And that leads Jesus Christ to his final and great promise, which is the promise of reconciliation, not the final one, excuse me, but one that he talks about here, how this remnant will receive all these marks of favor. Look what he says in verse 13, therefore, thus says the Lord God, behold my servant shall eat, but you shall be hungry. Behold my servant shall drink, but you shall be thirsty. Behold my servant shall rejoice, but you shall be put to shame. My servant shall sing for gladness of heart, but you shall cry out for pain of heart, and shall wail for a breaking of spirit. You shall leave your name to my chosen for a curse, and the Lord will put on you death, but his servants will be called by another name, so that he who blesses himself in the land shall bless himself by the God of truth, and he who takes an oath in the land shall swear by the God of truth, because the former troubles are forgotten and are hidden from my eyes. Five things he says, the remnant will eat as the rest go hungry. They will drink as the others die of thirst. They will rejoice as others are overcome with sorrow and pain. They who are revived will sing for joy when the others mourn and lament, and they will receive God's new name. The name of the redeemed while the others are cursed in the name of death. We don't have time tonight, but if we were to go to the book of Revelation and see what all the seven promises were to the seven churches of Revelation, every single one of them comes out of Isaiah's prophecy, as marks of people who have been reconciled to God through Jesus Christ. God says, I will show favor, and I will reconcile my remnant, my elect people to God and to one another. Behold, I stand at the door knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him and he with me. Calvin says this wonderful text that only talks about the remnant being reconciled to God but the presence of Christ in revival, dividing the church between those who truly believe and those who don't, between those who will perish and those who will be part of the new humanity. That is the last thing that God promises to Isaiah, the promise of restoration in verse 17. For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mine. Be glad and rejoice forever, and that which I create, for behold, I create Jerusalem to be a joy and to her people to be gladness. I will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in my people. No more shall be heard in it, the sound of weeping and the quiet distress. No more shall there be in it, an infant who lives but a few days or an old man who does not fill out his time. For the young man shall die a hundred years old and the sinner a hundred years shall be accursed. They shall build houses and inhabit them. They shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build in another inhabit. They shall not plant in another eat. For like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor and vain or bear children of calamity. They shall be the offspring of the blessed of the Lord and their descendants with them. Before they call, I will answer. While they are yet speaking, I will hear them. The wolf and the lamb shall graze together. The lion shall eat straw like an ox. The dusch shall be the serpent's food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain. Says the Lord. It will not dwell in detail or give the explanation of what Isaiah says because that's for next week. Suffice it to say that God does exceeding abundantly beyond all we could ask or think. We pray for new life and the resurrection and God promises to return to us, to rend the heavens and come down and restore us to favor. We ask for revival. God promises redemption, a remnant reconciliation and the restoration of the entire creation. This is where Isaiah and the New Testament meet. For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth for the former things shall not be remembered or come into mine. John writes in chapter 21 of Revelation that I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth have passed away and the sea was no more. And I heard him say, behold, I am making all things new. This is what our God is like. We begin to pray for revival and we end up with a new world. Are we praying for revival? Most of us are not. The war generation is too near to the city of God to worry much about the future of the church. I think the silent generation is preoccupied with retirement and aging parents to be concerned about awakening. My own generation experienced a touch of this revival in the 60s and 70s and early 80s and now we are disillusioned and even discouraged with the prospect of seeing such a wonderful thing happen again, generation X, what can I say? They are dominated by three powerful forces of anger, pessimism, and resentment. Such feelings render them both unwilling and incapable of any vision for the church that is glorious and the millennials, although they may be in many ways the most spiritual generation we have seen in a long time, our young people are steeped in sexual immorality, in gender confusion and evolution and gay rights and so the revival is probably not even on their radar screen or better yet their computer screen. There remains one group in the church, the children. They are the hope, they are the hope of revival for the future. That is why Jesus Christ said, do not hinder these little children from coming to me. For to them belongs the kingdom of heaven, perhaps it is this last generation that will see God rent the heavens and come down, my grandchildren, experiencing what their grandfather prayed for and thought he might see in his own time. There was once a revival taking place in Wales back in 1859 and 60. And all around that countryside, under some of the great preachers of the English language, spiritual awakening was coming to town, after town, after town, and revival to church, after church, after church. There was one little town tucked away at the foot of the mountains called Dalgalau. And all around it, all the churches had experienced revival, but even though the people in the church Dalgalau long for revival, they didn't pray for it, so it didn't come. Then one night a young man, 11 or 12, resolved who was the son of the clerk of session, sent a message, a secret message to all of the children in the village, that on Sunday night, when their parents were asleep, they were all to sneak out of their house, gather at this one place, and hold their hands together as they walked through the graveyard, which they were afraid of, into the church. He had stolen out of his father's pocket the key to the session room where children were not allowed and he opened it up. And there around the table, the little children gathered with a candle in the middle, all afraid of the night, all uncertain of what to do. And the little boy said, well, we've got to pray, our moms and dads won't pray, but Jesus said, let these little children come to me and do not hinder them for to them belongs the kingdom of God. And I think we ought to pray that the kingdom of God would come to us tonight. But one little fella said, what do we pray? He said, I don't know. But let's hold hands. And then he said this, our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. At that moment the spirit fell upon that church. And the children filled up with the joy of the Lord, flew open the doors and ran across the graveyard, jumping over the graves and shouting, and at that moment they saw their parents coming out of the village, running towards the children, all of them sang at the same time, he has come, he has come, Jesus has come to dog allow. True story, remarkable answer to prayer, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. May our little children come to see that day the hope of their grandfather's that God would rend the heavens and come down. Let's pray. Father, we, like Isaiah, ask you to look from heaven on us and see what we have become, to see what dire straits we are in, to judge the state of our souls and even our reaction to this message, how it insults us and troubles us, even angers us, all indications that you must stand up from your throne, open the veil and step down in the presence of Jesus Christ to revive us again that your children might rejoice in you. We would ask you to do this for our sake, and if not in our own time, then in the near future so that our children and grandchildren might know these seasons of refreshment that come from the presence of the Lord through Jesus Christ who has been given to them. And do it most of all, we pray, for your child, your son, for Jesus Christ who deserves a church who loves him, revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you. May we pray in Jesus' name, amen.