Longing for a New Normal

Longing for a New Normal

Psalm 85

Main Idea: God invites his people to ask him to work in ways that upset the status quo and display his glorious power and grace.

Sometimes it can feel like the Bible is pulling you in two different directions. Take contentment, for example. There are places in Scripture that encourage us to be content with normal life—not to fixate or panic about things that are less than ideal.

I don’t say this out of need, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I find myself. I know both how to make do with little, and I know how to make do with a lot. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being content—whether well fed or hungry, whether in abundance or in need. (Phil 4:11-12)

Paul seems to be saying that not having everything is an inevitable part of normal life.

But think about your spiritual life. Is it OK that it largely feels normal? I suspect that for many of us, our prayer times this week were normal. No angels singing. No burning bushes or audible voices. No. You prayed, sipped your coffee, read some Scripture, and went to work. It was meaningful but relatively unmiraculous. So there’s a lot of normal in our spiritual lives.

There’s a lot of normal when it comes to ministry we’re involved in. Paul told Timothy to be ready to minister “in season and out of season” (2 Tim 4:2). In other words, Timothy, the pattern of ministry is not a steadily rising curve throughout life. It has “average” in it.

Well, here are a few updates on normal life in a fallen world. Hard-to-reach places Christians and churches have been praying for are, by and large, still hard-to-reach places. The number of professing Christians in this country is huge, and yet it is difficult to find a clear line between the church and the world when it comes to lifestyle choices, spending habits, sexual purity, and healthy marriages. Welcome to life in the normal world, under the fall. What’d you expect? This is what happens here, right?

But Psalm 85 is about revival. It’s about a new normal. It’s filled with an expectation of something beyond the realm of what we see every day. This psalm was not written in a time of spiritual awakening, yet here we will pick up on a holy discontentment with the way things are. We see someone asking for God to usher in a new set of conditions and realities. And I pray it makes us long for a new normal as well.

Verse 6 captures the deep longing of the psalmist: “Will you not revive us again?” The revival spoken of here is not a sign in front of a church building announcing, “Revival services beginning next week.” It’s something God sovereignly does when he sovereignly wants to. Yet it’s something the psalmist asks for.

Psalm 85 urges us to a kind of holy discontentment with the status quo. The psalmist is not saying, “It is what it is.” He’s saying, “No, it needs to change. God, come!” And he starts asking for big things. We need renewal. We need joy in God. We’re lifeless.

In verse 9 he’s asking for a work of God so unique that it can only be described as salvation coming near and glory dwelling in the land. Against a backdrop of widespread unrighteousness, righteousness and peace embrace (v. 10). Rampant idolatry marked the whole of Israel’s history, but here is the prospect of truth (or faithfulness, ESV) springing up from the ground (v. 11).

There are moments in biblical history where we see this sort of thing happen. The New Testament book of Acts chronicles the extraordinary work of God through his Word and Spirit in the first century. But this kind of work isn’t just confined to the pages of biblical history.

We read summary accounts like this one, which describes what happened in the 1640s in Kidderminster, England, under the ministry of Richard Baxter:

When [Baxter] came to Kidderminster he found it a dark, ignorant, immoral, irreligious place, containing, perhaps, 3000 inhabitants. When he left it, at the end of fourteen years, he had completely turned the parish upside down. ‘The place before his coming,’ says Dr. Bates, ‘what like a piece of dry and barren earth; but, by the blessing of heaven upon his labor, the face of Paradise appeared there. . . .” The number of his regular communicants averaged 600. ‘Of these,’ Baxter tells us, ‘there were not twelve of whom I had not good hope as to their sincerity.’ The Lord’s Day was thoroughly reverenced and observed. It was said, ‘You might hear a hundred families singing psalms and repeating sermons as you passed through the streets’ When he came there, there was about one family in a street which worshipped God at home. When he went away, there were some streets in which there was not more than one family on a side that did not do it. (Ryle, Facts and Men, 278)

During those years, Baxter called Kidderminster a colony of heaven.

That’s not normal. The psalmist isn’t seeing this in his day, but that doesn’t keep him from asking. Have you ever asked for things like this? Things this big?

The great preacher Charles Spurgeon talked much about praying prayers that are commensurate with God’s almighty power and abundant generosity:

We do not come in prayer . . . to God’s poorhouse where He dispenses His favors to the poor, nor do we come to the back door of the house of mercy to receive the leftover scraps, though that would be more than we deserve. . . . But when we pray, we are standing in the palace on the glittering floor of the Great King’s own reception room. . . . And should we come there with stunted requests and narrow and contracted faith? No, it does not become a King to be giving away pennies and nickels; He distributes pieces of gold. (Spurgeon, Spurgeon on Prayer and Spiritual Warfare, 72)

Legend has it that Alexander the Great wanted to marry a certain man’s daughter. The father demanded a large dowry in exchange for his daughter. Alexander said, “Just tell my treasurer, and he’ll take care of it.” The treasurer came back to him saying that the price this man asked is way too much. A fraction of that price would be more than sufficient. And Alexander is said to have replied, “He does me honor. He treats me like a king and proves by what he asks that he believes me to be both rich and generous” (Gray and Adams, Biblical Encyclopedia, 547; emphasis added).

Church, what do our prayers say about our belief in the character of God? That he is rich and generous, or that he is reluctant and economical? What a phrase Paul uses in Ephesians 3! Look how he stacks the descriptive modifiers: “Now to him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us” (Eph 3:20; emphasis added).

This psalm is meant to cultivate in us a longing for a new normal—a longing for the inbreaking of God’s mercy and power in our lives, in the church, and in the world. One of the ways we cultivate this longing and anticipation of God’s reviving work is by recalling the past.

Recall

Psalm 85:1-3

These verses are pointing back to a time the psalmist wants to experience in his own day—a time in which there were clear demonstrations of God’s power, mercy, and grace. We can read the Bible and get the impression that the front page of the Jerusalem paper always had a miracle on it, but that’s not the way it was. The majority of miracles clustered around a few particular moments of biblical history: Moses, Elijah, the ministry of Jesus, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the early church.

Consider Moses and the exodus. That’s a unique period of time. God speaks through a burning bush. The staff turns to a snake. The water turns to blood. Then you have Red Sea partings, a pillar of cloud and fire for a GPS device, water from rocks, meals falling from the sky. Much of that happened in the space of about a year. What a year! Here’s the thing. Not every generation in Israel was there to see God do that, but every generation was meant to recall these spectacular demonstrations of God’s saving power. And when Israel falls into unbelief and idolatry, it is often linked with forgetting the saving intervention of God in their midst.

So the psalmist here resolves not to forget. He calls to mind the saving activity of God on Israel’s behalf. Verses 1-3 show God in action. He showed favor; he restored (v. 1). He forgave guilt and covered sin (v. 2). He withdrew wrath and turned from burning anger (v. 3). The God of Israel didn’t put his attributes on a chart to be analyzed. He said, “You want to know me? Watch this.” He acted in history. The Old Testament is theology in action. God works, speaks, feeds, subdues, lifts up, brings down, leads, loves, saves! This wasn’t a distant God who, as some modern theologians say, established a policy of noninterference with the world. God has his hands all over history. He turns even the hearts of kings in order to accomplish his will (Prov 21:1). When Israel recalled God’s mighty acts, this was meant to instill a deep-running hope in the power of God. And, as we read Psalm 85, it seems Israel needed that hope right about now. The dark backdrop of this passage becomes more obvious when we move from a remembrance of the past to prayers for the present.

Pray

Psalm 85:4-7

Some commentators think this psalm may have been written during the exile, when Israel had been conquered and the people were kicked out of their homeland. Others believe it may have been the period after, where some of God’s people were allowed to go back home to Jerusalem, but they were still under the thumb of foreign rulers, and unbelief and idolatry continued. In either case the move didn’t change their hearts, just their zip code. It didn’t revive the people spiritually. So the psalmist cries out for revival (v. 4). The prayer could be translated, “Turn us.” I love how big a prayer that is.

In one sense the ultimate judgment would be for a sovereign God to refuse to overcome that which is most normal about life here, namely, global and personal idolatry—for God to give us over to our cravings. Romans 1 describes God’s judgment this way. Three times it says that he gave them over. It is God taking his hands of mercy off and letting fallen humanity run, unhindered, charging in the direction of our idols. The psalmist is saying, “Don’t let that happen. God, turn us.”

However, if you know Christ, if you’ve been revived (made alive) by God’s grace, it’s not because he merely said, “Turn!” because he would’ve been saying “turn” to someone who by nature does not seek God (Rom 3:11). He would’ve been shouting “turn” to someone who was “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph 2:1). But Ephesians 2 tells us what God did to counteract our unresponsiveness. He turned us! He answered this prayer in Psalm 85; he straight up turned you to himself!

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace! He also raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus. (Eph 2:4-6)

If you have a hard time believing in the possibility of revival, look no further than your own personal testimony! You were dead, and he made you alive. You were running for your idols, and he turned you.

The psalmist doesn’t merely pray, “Help us to turn.” He says, “Turn us! Revive us again so that your people may rejoice in you” (vv. 4,6 author’s paraphrase).

This is not a God who is locked outside. This is no Deism. This is gospel-charged theism. It features a God who breaks in on planet earth, who breaks into living rooms, college dorms, bedtime prayers, dark nights of the soul. He breaks in among unreached peoples. He does things that are not normal.

I love the result of this reviving work of God in verse 6. This is a revival unto joy! And verse 7 seems to be the means God often uses in reviving his people. God revives his church by revealing himself afresh. He shows us his faithful love. Paul talked about Christian transformation this way: “We all, with unveiled faces, are looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory; this is from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18). Moses’s life-changing request in prayer wasn’t “Change me.” It was “Let me see your glory” (Exod 33:18).

This faith-filled prayer for a new normal is a kind of rebuke. It’s as though it’s saying that if you don’t believe personal, societal, national, even global revival is possible, you have forgotten the power of God.

Christian friends, if we don’t pray for things that might set us up for disappointment, we’re not doing it right. We are not called to merely pray safe, self-protecting, “realistic,” face-saving prayers. So often I pray prayers that match the normal patterns I see in life. In my everyday life, hard-to-reach people continue to be hard to reach. In my everyday life, the church exerts little influence on the world around us. But on page after page of Scripture, God is seeking to convince us that he has options! He intervenes. He brings life where there was death. He brings beauty from ashes. He removes fear while we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. He can cause his word to not return void. He can bring reviving grace to any person you know, any resistant people group, and he could do it by the end of the week.

Charles Spurgeon spoke of the poor condition of the church one hundred years prior. The Church of England, Spurgeon said, was asleep.

It looked as if the living church of God would be extinguished altogether; but it was not so, for God did but stamp his foot, and, from all parts of the country, men like Mr. Wesley and Mr. Whitefield, came to the front, and hundreds of others, mighty men of valor, proclaimed the gospel with unusual power, and away went the bats and the owls back to their proper dwelling-place. (“On Expectations”)

When is the last time we were audacious enough to ask God to stamp his feet? We are to pray and hope as though God had options!

Trust and Obey

Psalm 85:8-13

Do you hear this note of trust in verses 8-13? He will speak. He will give peace. Salvation is near. Truth springs up. The Lord will provide what is good. Trust is all over these verses. But there’s also a call to obedience. Verse 8 warns us not to go back to foolish ways. Whatever this reviving work of God is, it’s not something that renders the believer passive. There’s an assertive stance, a posture of readiness we’re called to. There’s a preparation for God’s work. Recall. That is, stay in his Word. Let it frame our expectations. Pray. Ask, seek, and knock, and keep knocking. Strive for godliness. Don’t turn back to foolishness.

I read a great book on revival several years ago, called When God Comes to Church by Ray Ortlund Jr. I love it because it makes sense of all God’s Word has to say about what to expect in life and ministry. Listen to how he describes revival:

Revival is a season in the life of the church when God causes the normal ministry of the gospel to surge forward with extraordinary spiritual power. . . . Revival is seasonal, not perennial. God causes it; we do not. It is the normal ministry of the gospel, not something eccentric or even different from what the church is always charged to do. What sets revival apart is simply that our usual efforts greatly accelerate in their spiritual effects. (Ortlund, When God Comes to Church, 9)

Don’t you long for that? Wouldn’t it be awesome if we didn’t alter the method? If we shunned gimmicks of every kind? If we instead continued to lean in to the normal ministry of the gospel and, suddenly, our usual “efforts greatly accelerate in their spiritual effects”? What might it look like to ask God to greatly accelerate the spiritual effects of his ministry through our lives and our witness?

Turn to Psalm 126. Verse 1 in each text points to the same thing. In Psalm 85 he’s longing for God to restore the fortunes of Jacob, as though he’s never experienced it. The author of Psalm 126 talks about having seen God restore the fortunes of Jacob; then he tells us some of the effects:

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Our mouths were filled with laughter then, and our tongues with shouts of joy. Then they said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them.” (126:1-2)

Church, what do you want? I’m not talking about what you can live with and be content with. What’s the dream?

We want to see lives marked by such love and faith and joy that there’s an impact beyond our own lives, relationships, marriages. Then this city and the nations of the world will say, “The Lord has done great things for them.” That’s a scale big enough for God to be honored, for God to say, “They must believe I’m awesome. Here’s what they asked: They asked for the ‘earth [to] be filled with the knowledge of the Lord’s glory, as the water covers the sea’ (Hab 2:14). They must believe I’m both rich and generous.” When believers live with hope and boldness in the face of impossible circumstances, we demonstrate our belief in the bigness of God.

Concerning the vision of Isaiah 64, Raymond Ortlund Jr. writes:

The prophet envisions God taking the sky, which he has spread out like a curtain, taking that cosmic veil, which hides him from our view, grabbing it in his strong hands, ripping it apart from top to bottom, and stepping down into our world! It’s a thought to make every believer tremble with joy. . . . But the prophet is not thinking of a literal earthquake. The “mountains” symbolize long-established, well-positioned, difficult-to-remove resistance to God. That’s the world we live in. And that’s what the church cannot change by her own efforts and programs and good intentions. But the Lord’s presence (“before You”) changes everything. The evil that we cannot budge is, to God, like mere twigs before a fire or water set to boil. It has no power to resist. (When God Comes to Church, 30)

The presence of fallenness in this world assaults our senses every day. We see it, we hear it. It’s all around us. Will we recall the power of God? Will we pray reckless prayers to a God who is “rich and generous”? Will we trust and obey, not only with our personal lives in view, or our local church life in view, but with a scope that is big enough to demonstrate that God’s global mission is in our hearts?

We don’t need some new initiative, as if that would trigger revival. What we need is renewed confidence in the power of God’s Spirit working through the gospel.

Reflect and Discuss

1. What is the difference between being content with your life and being apathetic toward spiritual growth and calling?
2. How can we keep a desire for more of God’s work in our lives without becoming burned out in efforts and affections?
3. How can we allow the things that make us weary in this world to drive us to a desire for more with God?
4. What keeps us from asking God for “big” things in our lives?
5. What do our prayers and attitude toward prayer reveal about our beliefs in the character of God?
6. How can we practically remember the ways God has worked in our lives? How can we lead our families to be a people of remembrance?
7. About what issues of idolatry and sin in our lives do you need to pray, “God, turn me”?
8. How would your prayers change if you prayed with respectful assertiveness to the God who is sovereign over all and good in character? How do we not get weary in praying those prayers, even if they aren’t answered as we wanted?
9. How can prayers to a rich and generous God renew our confidence in the power of the gospel?