A Recipe for Personal Revival

 I love it when I can have a recipe for a dish that I really love to eat. I can know that if I follow the recipe my food will turn out the way that I enjoy it every time. That is what I do with my red cabbage. I have a large frying pan, and I will fill it up with shredded red cabbage. I pour one quarter of a cup of balsamic vinegar over it with about 2 cups of water. I add about 8 small spoons of Stevia and mix them in. Finally, I add a cup of unsweetened applesauce with about 2 more cups of hot water and stir it in well. I cover it and cook it for an hour and a half to two hours on medium heat. Then, I have enough of my favorite red cabbage for a week,

I believe Hosea gave the people of God in His day a recipe for revival. This recipe will work for any individual or group of people, like a church, who will follow the recipe exactly.(Hosea 12:6) "So now, come back to your God, act with love and justice, and always depend on Him." That is pretty clear, isn't it? Let's make sure we get the ingredients right, so they will result in a great revival when we need it or our church needs it.

We must make sure that we know Jesus as our Lord and Savior. Jesus must be our personal Lord and Savior, or we can never have a revival. We can't come alive again which is a revival, because we are still dead in our sins. So after we know Christ, and we have drifted away, so that we need revival, we must return to Him with a sincere heart. We must admit the sin of going our way, and decide to go back to following Him closely.

When we do that we will act with love, because that is how Jesus always acts, and we will act with justice because Jesus always does the right thing. When we balance living with love and justice, things will work together well for us and those around us. Finally, we have to always depend on Jesus. Yes, I mean 24/7. I mean every day of the year. We don't start depending on ourselves or on others, only on Jesus. We do this by reading the Bible, praying, and doing whatever we read and hear from Him. If we put together these ingredients well, we will experience a great revival of the presence of God in our lives with the love and hope only He can give us.

Tomorrow, I intend to read Hosea 13-14 and Joel 1.