Renaissance
You, God, showered abundant rain; you revived your inheritance when it languished.
-Psalm 68:9
God is going to do a new thing (Is. 43:19) in the church (1 Tim. 3:15). It is going to be a renaissance. It is going to be completely new.
New birth (1 Pet. 1:3, 2 Cor. 5:17) is going to happen with God's church (Gal. 1:13). It is going to be so new that we need to get it that the structure has to change or become new, so that we can participate in the new thing God is going to to. This is Jesus' lesson of the wine and the wineskins.
New wine requires new wineskins. The new wine will burst the old wineskins. We are tempted to take our old containers or our old and present structures and go forward, to God, and say, "Yes, fill me up", or "Yes, renew our church".
But Jesus says that we need new containers for the new wine. The new thing will simply break the old container. And there will be a mess and the new thing will not work.
Many of us want revival and another great awakening in America. And it is coming. But it will be so new and so different, that we need to understand that it's not going to be like God helping us or joining in on what we have been doing.
God is going to do a completely new thing. It is going to be like when the children of Israel entered the promised land. God said, "You have not traveled this way before" (Jos. 3:3-5).
The church is going to be reset or reborn. God not coming to re-model the church, but do something completely new. It is going to be so different and so powerful and so life giving that it will be a rebirth of everything that God wants to do with the church. Renaissance.
Renaissance is clearly revival, but the newness makes it clear that God is not reviving the old ways. God is not going to bring back the past ways and days. God is going to do a new thing that will be reviving to the body and put it back on the playing field that it was designed for.
A portion of believers have missed the move of God, every time, because they were unwilling to move into the new. Zoom in to any portion of church history or salvation history. See the portion of people who became flexible, perhaps because of hunger or humility, and moved with God, into the move of God, that was different from the standard bearing people of God around them.
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