REVIVE ME AGAIN! -- Devotional for February 3, from "Good Seeds"

O God, will you not revive us again, that Your people may rejoice in You? Psalm 85:6
This beautiful hymn was written back in the mid-1800’s by a Scottish pastor named William Mackay. Before he was a pastor he was a physician (like good old Dr. Luke of Bible times). One day he was meditating on Psalm 85. As he was no doubt preparing to preach on this passage, no one was more surprised than he was when his ponderings resulted in a hymn rather than a sermon! Verse 6 supplied the title: “Revive us Again!” You air a subject, but you aim a sermon! This sermon in song is a passionate prayer-arrow aimed straight up: “O God, will you not revive us so that we may once again rejoice in You!” The word revive comes from vive: life, and re: again. So the word means, “to cause to live again.” Every time you go to sleep at night and then wake up in the morning, you are revived. When someone faints, or is knocked out cold, or goes into a coma, and then is brought out of it, he is revived. Just so, when someone who is dead spiritually enters the family of God through faith in Christ, he is revived. He is brought to life from the dead, even as Jesus was revived when He arose from the grave three days after dying on the cross. But even those of us who have been revived once and for all from spiritual death can still, at times, be little more than death warmed over in our faith. If not knocked out cold, at least we can get mighty sleepy, and we need to be awakened – to be revived again. The fact that Pastor Mackay was a doctor of bodies as well as of souls made him realize just how closely connected these two are. I think he probably suspicioned what we now know to be true about psychosomatic illness: when something happens to us physically we are greatly affected, and infected, spiritually. One man described it this way: “Our bodies and souls are so closely related they catch one another’s diseases.” Sometimes when things don’t go right on the outside – our finances or our friends fail us, or our bodies just don’t cooperate any more – we start feeling pretty sick way down deep in our hearts, past the pump to our spiritual control center. Yes, when our bodies drag us down, our souls can get pretty droopy. We may be tempted to think God has stopped caring about or even noticing us, that He’s gotten Himself busy with the truly needy ones – and He certainly has His hands full with this old world that’s going to hell in a handbasket! Why would He take time for me anyway? If you catch yourself thinking like this, it’s time to shut off the worry valve and turn on the prayer spigot, which starts like this: O LORD, REVIVE ME AGAIN!