Every once in a while, something is going on with Christians or the world and I think it is important to explore it with the kids so that they understand better what everyone is talking about. This week we’re going to learn about revivals and outpourings of the Holy Spirit and what we can learn about them from looking at Ezekiel, Acts, and the ministry of Jesus.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible modified a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context).
Everybody is talking about something amazing going on at a Christian University in Kentucky called Asbury. Now, there are two different schools in that town by that name, one is a Theological Seminary where people study to become ministers, but the school I am talking about is just a four minute walk down the road. On Wednesday morning two weeks ago, all the students of the University were gathered for chapel to hear a message from God’s word. In fact, they all go to chapel on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then have church services on Sunday. These kids seriously love God! And by kids, I mean that most of them are under 25. To me, that’s kids even if they sound like old people to you. They are definitely grown ups but they are also kids compared to me because when I was their age, they weren’t even born yet. But I am going to tell you something important—God doesn’t care how old you are when He wants to do something amazing in your life or when He wants to use you to do something for Him.
Anyway, like I was saying, they were all gathered for Chapel (so, if you don’t like going to church four times a week then this is not the school for you!) and the leader for that day gave a sermon from Romans on the sins that keep us from truly loving each other. I thought it was a really good sermon and that he did a great job. It wasn’t a flashy sermon, and he seems just like a normal person like you and me. But then after the sermon, the choir sang and after they stopped, people just kept on singing and never stopped—and they are still singing even as I am typing this on Monday morning, twelve days later. They had to fill extra buildings, and there are people lined up all over the place wanting to join in worshiping God. And the people in line are worshiping, and people have flown in from all over North America and from all over the world to come and see what is going on. I haven’t been there but I do know two people who have been there the entire time—one teaches French at the University and the other teaches New Testament at the Theological Seminary down the road. They are husband and wife and he comes from America and she comes from the Republic of the Congo where she escaped as a war refugee and the story of how they came to be married is a really great one!
We know from the Bible that worship is very important to God, and we are supposed to be worshiping Him all the time, with the things we do and the choices we make and even how we treat our bodies and especially in how we treat each other. In Bible times, everything was religious. Going to the market to buy food was religious, farming was religious, which means that everything in their lives was about God or about the gods—depending on who you were and how you believed. In ancient Israel, they saw God as part of absolutely everything they did, from sleeping and eating to what they wore and what stories they told. Just everything was about God and His relationship with them. They believed that God was involved in every part of their lives and the people who didn’t? They were called wicked and foolish because they actually thought they could hide things from God and He wouldn’t see what they were doing and so they could be hurtful to others. But God does see us and sees everything and knows everything. It’s actually nice because we can be absolutely honest with Him and nothing we say can surprise Him. Like, we could say, “Lord, I was being a real jerk to my baby sister yesterday,” and He’s never going to respond with, “What? I can’t believe you did that! I never would have guessed!” Nope, but He might say something like, “Oh yeah, I noticed. You need to go make it up to her and make things right again. And then come back to talk with me about it!”
Now, I have to share with you why I believe God chose young people and not older people like me. These people are at the beginning of their grown up lives and they love God so much that they go to a college where they are surrounded by people who also love Him and who worship together at least every other day. Do you think that makes God happy? That young people are doing this on purpose instead of going to a school with a lot of parties and drugs and really bad stuff going on? This school doesn’t allow any of that and they kick out people who behave that way—they send them back home so they can go to the kind of school that lets their students do absolutely anything they want to do. Like the school I went to—and some messed up stuff happened to people I know and especially the girls. But when I was the age of these young people, I didn’t love God. I knew He was there and sometimes He would talk to me but I just really didn’t like Him very much, didn’t trust Him, and was very angry at Him. He didn’t hate me because of that. He knew why I felt that way and He did a lot of work to change me enough that I could love Him and not be so sad and angry all the time. If the me from today went back to college, I would definitely want to be in a place where I go to church four times a week!
A lot of older people like me are just stubborn and set in their ways and very judgmental. They don’t like it when something is happening to anyone who isn’t exactly the same as they are. They think that if people don’t believe this or that, then God doesn’t want to use them or bless them like this. Others believe that God shouldn’t do something like this with young people at all, that it should be older people who have been Christians longer. But God doesn’t care what we think and who we think deserves to be a part of something like this. In fact, none of us can say we deserve something so wonderful because that is very prideful and we are not supposed to be like that. We aren’t supposed to be bragging, or even thinking that we are all that and a bag of chips, or that we have everything figured out so God should use us instead of someone else. Jesus told His disciples that everyone who exalts themselves would be humbled but whoever humbles themselves would be exalted. But what does that mean? That means that people who brag and think they are really awesome will be sorry because they are going to be very embarrassed, and that God will make the people who are quiet about themselves very great in His Kingdom! Next week, we’re going to look at the Book of Esther and how Esther was very humble but the evil Haman was very prideful and exalted himself. She ended up as Queen and he ended up dead. After being really embarrassed in front of everyone.
And some people call this a revival and others call it an outpouring of the Holy Spirit so I want you guys to understand what those words mean. First of all, the word revival is not a Bible word—it’s a word that people have made up to describe when certain things happen. Now, we do see words like revive in the Bible a lot. Dang, there is this one spot where God is talking to Ezekiel the prophet and something totally freaky happens: “The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by his Spirit and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. (can you even imagine God picking you up and putting you down into a valley full of bones??!!) He led me all around those bones. There were so many of them laying right on the ground of the valley, and they were very dry. Then God said to me, “Son of Man (which means “human being” here), can these bones live?” I replied, “Lord God, only you know.” (which means, I have no clue and I don’t even want to try to guess) God said to me, “Prophesy about these bones and say to them: Dry bones, you pay attention to the word of the Lord! This is what the Lord God says to these bones: I will make it so you are breathing again, and you will be alive. I will put tendons on you, make muscles grow on you, and cover you with skin. I will make you breathe again so that you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.” So, I told the bones everything I had been commanded to say. While I was talking to the bones about God and His promises, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. As I looked, tendons appeared on them (to hold them together), muscles grew, and skin covered them, but they still weren’t breathing. God said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man. Say to it: This is what the Lord God says: Breath, come from the four winds and breathe into these dead people so that they will be alive!” So, I told the bones what God told me; the breath entered them, and they came to life and stood on their feet, a huge army.” (Ez 37:1-10)
Well, dang, I bet you didn’t know there was anything like that in the Bible! But God did that to show Ezekiel that he was going to bring His people to life again. You see, they had been conquered and were living in a foreign country where everyone around them was an idol worshiper. The people wondered if their lives as Jews were over, and if they would ever be able to go back to Jerusalem or be at the Temple ever again. It was a sad and scary time to be alive and they didn’t know if things would ever change, but God was showing Ezekiel that not only can He make a huge pile of dead bones into a living group of humans again, He could also bring all of his people back home again and make them a country again and rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple. But this is where we get the idea of revival—that word I promised to explain to you. Revival can mean when someone or something that is asleep, or very sick or dead, wakes up, or gets better, or comes back to life. In Church life, we call something a revival when God does something amazing to the people who worship Him. One day, everything is normal and then BOOM out of nowhere it is like God has breathed into them and they become more alive than they were before. In the Bible and especially in the book of Acts, which tells the story of the Apostles traveling around preaching about Jesus, this is called an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. This is what happened fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, when He came out of the tomb that they had laid Him in after He died on the Cross. Three days later, He was revived—not dead anymore but alive and more alive than He had ever been before!
On Pentecost that year, all of Jesus’s followers (120 of them) were gathered together and were worshiping God and all of a sudden they heard a huge noise and the Holy Spirit entered the place they were in and filled them up inside and they even had flames over their heads! And they started speaking strange languages that none of them knew and they were all telling people about God—and the people visiting Jerusalem from all over the Roman and Scythian Empires were just shocked that they were hearing about God in their own language from back home. And they were so amazed that three thousand people became believers in Jesus that day and they took the message of Jesus back to their homes after the festival! Now that’s definitely what I call a revival. These people were all Jewish and they accepted Jesus as their King, and when that happened, they were filled with God’s spirit too! Just like all those dead bones. Without Jesus, we are a lot like those dead bones that Ezekiel talked to about God’s promises. Some parts of us are just as dead as those dried out bones. But God revives us, gives us life in His Spirit, so that we can be His people.
What happened in Acts 2 was just huge and affected a lot of people all at once and there were also miracles so that is called an outpouring of the Spirit, because God took His Spirit and poured it into everyone who believed Jesus. Just remember that to be revived is to change someone from being dead or almost dead, to being filled with life. And an outpouring of the Spirit is just a pouring out of the Spirit into people. But there are also times in the Bible where God makes it so that everyone around can feel that He is there, really strongly. And that’s just an amazing feeling. For me, it’s like I can feel every little cell in my body. I feel like a bottle of fizzy soda. And I know He is right there with me. I feel it most often when I am really sick. That’s really nice, it’s like a hug from God and I know that He is helping me to get better. But what about when God does that with an entire place? That’s kinda what has happened at Asbury University. It started with a few people continuing to sing after the choir ended their song and then it spread and spread and people could feel that God was there right with them, enjoying their company and the songs they were singing to Him. He has special angels who do nothing but sing to Him, that’s what they were created for, but when we worship Him—when we can’t even see Him—that’s extra special. Humans choose to love God and to worship Him and to obey Him and serve Him and trust Him. We also choose to do really messed up stuff! But when we all come together, and when we don’t care which Church we go to or what we look like or what language we speak or how much money anyone has or where we all come from, then it is an amazing thing. It’s what God wants, and at the very end of the Bible, that’s what God’s city looks like. People of all kinds, all shapes and sizes and colors and languages, all gathered together—loving each other and loving God. We will all sing, so happy to be together like we were always supposed to be, worshiping God together the way we were created to do. When people do that here, it looks a lot like the Kingdom of Jesus will when He rules over all of us as King. No wonder God would want to come down in a special way to be part of it.
And the people I know who are there tell me that the ministers of all the churches there are talking to the crowds in line and people who didn’t used to believe that Jesus was even real are believing in Him. Sick people are being healed and miracles are happening. The professors at the schools are praying with the people who want prayer but no one gets up in front of the people to talk unless they are a student. God visited young people who were doing this and the adults decided that they needed to just let them keep doing it because God seems to be really happy about it. Isn’t that cool? A lot of times, adults really mess up a good thing by stepping in and trying to take control over it. They decide to do it a better way and everything falls apart. And so, all these grownups decided to let God do what He wants to do for as long as He wants to do it. Big time preachers and singers have asked if they can come and preach and sing in front of the church and the University people said, “NO!” No one is getting famous. No one can even see who is up in front of everyone singing or reading Bible verses. No one is allowed to do anything except worship God and Jesus. Everyone is praying and singing. No one there is better than anyone else. Only Jesus is better than anyone else. Only Jesus is perfect. Only Jesus deserves all of the attention.
Just like in the book of Acts when all of those Jews who believed Jesus went back to their countries and preached about Jesus, the same thing is happening with the students who have been visiting Asbury—they are going back to their schools and the same thing is happening there too! You can think of it like the churches and schools are catching on fire because they got close to someone who came back. Or like a virus that everyone needs to catch. But just like in the Bible, not everyone is happy about it. In the Bible, although everyone who believed in Jesus at this point was Jewish, all the enemies of Jesus were Jewish too and they didn’t like what was happening. Even before Jesus died some of them were saying, “All the world is going to Him!” And they weren’t happy about that because it meant that Jesus was becoming more popular and important than they were. There were so many Pharisees, and Scribes and Priests, and normal, everyday Jews who started believing Jesus but there were also very powerful people who didn’t and especially the Chief Priests and the High Priest. And they had been spreading rumors and telling lies even before Jesus died because they were jealous of all the attention that Jesus was getting and because of all the miracles He could do when they couldn’t do any. It would have totally been okay if they were concerned and they were asking Him questions, like Nicodemus did, but they hated what was happening and wanted to stop it.
Jealousy is a terrible thing. It can turn even nice people into monsters and the Sadducees, who were the head honchos of the Temple, weren’t nice people to begin with. They were greedy, liars, cruel, and corrupt—which means that they weren’t doing their jobs honestly. And if the High Priest was supposed to be anything, it would certainly be honest in serving God and the people, right? But all they could see was that Jesus was stealing the honor that they thought belonged to them. They thought, even with what low down dirty skunks they were (and we know that about them because all of the Jewish writers who wrote about them just hated how awful they were)—well, they thought that they deserved to be respected and admired by all the other Jews. They thought they were the best and that what they believed was the best and how they did things was the best and more than that, they figured that being rich and powerful was just proof that they deserved it and God loved them more than anyone else. How come it is always those types of people who think that the awful things they do are okay to God???
So, they were lying about Jesus before He died and after He rose again. And today, the exact same thing happens—even with Christians. It wasn’t long after they began worshiping God all day every day at Asbury that some religious leaders started spreading nasty rumors about the student leaders, rumors that have been proven to be false but lies spread faster than the truth. But the people I know who are there are very trustworthy and good people. They have even helped me with this radio show! They have said that none of the bad rumors are true and that the people saying those things haven’t even bothered to come and see for themselves. I have been playing their worship on YouTube all day and there is nothing fancy going on and there is nothing crazy going on. God is just being worshiped and people are being blessed.
Some grownups are saying, “Unless these people do this or that (the same way that I do) then this isn’t a real revival!” Or another person said, “Those women aren’t wearing skirts so God is not a part of this!” And how about, “They let women teach there, and God hates that!” It seems like a lot of people think that their churches are the only ones that have everything right and that God should have chosen them for this but God chooses who He chooses and doesn’t have to tell us why. I am going to be really honest, I think that God would rather do something like this with people whom everyone else thinks doesn’t deserve it because they will accept it as a gift that they don’t deserve. Grownups, when something like this happens to us, we tend to decide that it happened because God wants everyone to be like us and that He is putting His great big stamp of approval on us. And that is the worst attitude in the world but I have heard it from a lot of grownups. Of course, they don’t think that’s what they are saying but everyone who is listening to them knows the truth. It isn’t God’s job to make everyone like us. He wants everyone to be like Him and to do that we have to be like Jesus. We have to do things like forgiving the people who have hurt us, even when we have to stay far away from them, and not taking revenge or getting even when someone hurts us, even when we have to call the police. We are supposed to treat other people like they are better than we are and not like we are better than they are.
But when grownups say things like, “They aren’t the right sort of people,” what they are really saying is, “that should have happened to people like me instead!” When they say, “God wouldn’t do anything that way,” they are telling God what He can and cannot do. When they make up lies and are quick to believe gossip and rumors, they are showing that they have evil thoughts and envy and jealousy in their hearts toward anyone whom God wants to bless and use. We need to have a different attitude. When something amazing happens and God is being praised and praised and praised and people are coming to know Jesus and miracles are happening, we just need to be glad it happens. It doesn’t matter who it happens to, only that it is happening and that God and people are being blessed and lives are being changed. We still don’t know all of what will happen but deciding that something is bad right away can get us into a lot of trouble with God. I am sure you have heard of the young man named Saul, who went out arresting and hurting the Jews who were following Jesus. He decided that Jesus couldn’t be the Messiah and that his followers were criminals and that God would never use Jesus or them for anything. But then, on his way to the great city of Damascus to arrest Jesus’s followers there, he suddenly became blind and he heard a voice from Heaven. That voice belonged to Jesus, and Jesus said that when you hurt His followers, you are hurting Him. It’s something we need to think about.
I love you. I am praying for you. Next week we are going to talk about Queen Esther.
Good explanation! ❤️