For many years, we have been praying for reformation and revival. As the years have progressed, the obvious need for such a work of the Spirit has become increasingly obvious, and as far as our natural eyes are concerned, decreasingly likely.
But this an illusion, the kind of spell that unbelief likes to cast. Have you been reading your Bibles for so long and not yet learned that God loves to take His children to the brink? God takes the Israelites down to the edge of the water before He divides the sea. God takes Abraham to the point of an upraised sacrificial knife so that we might all learn to say on the mount of the Lord it will be provided. God takes the disciples to the point where their boat was foundering before Christ acted on their behalf.
We would like for God to deliver us while we are all still in bed. We would like to avoid the long trek to Moriah. We would like to meditate on what Christ could do if He wanted, and have our meditations take place while tied up to the dock. But that, alas for our comforts, is not the lesson that God in engaged in teaching us.
“For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life: But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead: Who delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver: in whom we trust that he will yet deliver us” ().
2 Cor. 1:8–10 (KJV)
God does it this way because it is a good way to prevent us from trusting in ourselves—that perennial temptation. God does it this way so that He might display His resurrection authority to every generation. And it appears that the time is coming for our generation to see it.