This heart rending cry (Isa 64:1) goes up from the lips of the prophet Isaiah as he surveys the desolation that has come, and is about to come even more severely, upon the people of God.
Derek Thomas, commenting on these two chapters (Isaiah 63 and 64), gets to the heart of the matter: “At the heart of [his] prayer is the church’s need for revival.”
What lay behind his desperate cry? Derek Thomas explains:
God had withdrawn. God was angry (63:10; 64:5). He had stood outside the door of the church (cf. Rev. 3:20). The people’s hearts were hardened (63:17). They had grown insensitive to the demands of God. There was no fear of God in their lives. Moreover, they were downtrodden (63:18). They had reached a point where it had become impossible to distinguish them from their enemies. God’s people cannot sink any lower than that! The church is, by turns, described as a ‘desert’, ‘burned with fire’ and ‘in ruins’ (64:10-11)…
The church had declared a truce with sin and had brought about God’s displeasure. God’s tenderness and compassion had been withheld from them (63:15). There could only be one remedy: the mercy of God… ‘You, O Lord, are our Father,’ pleads the prophet (63:16; 64:8). The covenant God is a Father…
Yes, the Lord is ready to bless.
For You, Lord, are good, and ready to forgive,
And abundant in mercy to all those who call upon You. (Psalm 86:5)
The question is, will we “call upon” Him in these desperate times?
Are we those who will “wait upon” Him in prayer?
For since the beginning of the world
Men have not heard nor perceived by the ear,
Nor has the eye seen any God besides You,
Who acts for the one who waits for Him. (64:4)
More than ever, today, we need to pray for the revival of the church.
As Matthew Henry wrote: “When God intends great mercy for His people He first sets them praying.”
Prayer and Confession
Yes, it is all of grace.
But we dare not come before God carelessly. We must not use grace as an excuse to neglect having our own lives in order when we come to pray. (Rom 6:1)
The Psalmist acknowledged:
If I regard iniquity in my heart,
The Lord will not hear. (Psa 66:18)
In Isaiah it is the same:
You meet him who rejoices and does righteousness,
Who remembers You in Your ways. (64:5a)
“First we must rejoice in righteousness; then we must practise it.” (Roger Ellsworth)
But Isaiah laments how ill-prepared his countrymen were in “righteousness” to come before God to pray for any kind of blessing:
You are indeed angry, for we have sinned—
In these ways we continue; and we need to be saved.
But we are all like an unclean thing,
And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags;
We all fade as a leaf,
And our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. (64:5b-6)
As a result, just when prayer is needed more than ever before:
There is no one who calls on Your name,
Who stirs himself up to take hold of You;
For You have hidden Your face from us,
And have consumed us because of our iniquities. (64:7)
So, we first need to examine our hearts and come confessing our sin.
We need to come before God in genuine repentance.
Again, Roger Ellsworth:
The Lord wants to come and visit us. He wants to fill our lives and our churches with His glorious presence. But we must prepare the way.
Each one of His people has work to do.
Each one of us has a valley of sinful involvement that needs to be filled in.
Each one has a high place of pride to be brought low.
Each one has a crooked place where our lives have deviated from His will.
Each one has an accumulation of the stones and roots of lust, envy, resentment and greed to be removed.
There is work to be done! “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it” (Isa. 40:3,5).
Repenting, we cast ourselves upon the mercy of a loving heavenly Father who is “good, and ready to forgive, and abundant in mercy to all those who call upon Him”:
But now, O Lord, You are our Father;
We are the clay, and You our potter; and all we are the work of Your hand.
Do not be furious, O Lord, nor remember iniquity forever;
Indeed, please look—we all are Your people! (64:8-9)
Then we can cry out to God to look upon the sad state of His church:
Your holy cities are a wilderness,
Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation.
Our holy and beautiful temple, where our fathers praised You, is burned up with fire;
And all our pleasant things are laid waste. (64:10-11)
“Come, and let us return to the Lord”
Come, and let us return to the Lord;
For He has torn, but He will heal us;
He has stricken, but He will bind us up. (Hos 6:1)
Let us take our eyes off ourselves.
Let us re-focus on the Lord.
Let us not be seeking God’s blessing, so much as God Himself.
Revival comes when “our chief end” truly is “to glorify GOD and enjoy HIM forever”.
As Adrian Rogers put it:
Revival is meeting with Almighty God.
Most of us seek God to do something for our church, our family, our nation. But we’re seeking God’s hand and not His face.
Our heart needs to yearn for God. We should be saying, “O God, will You come down?”
D.M.Lloyd Jones commented (the audio version is found here):
The church has been trying to attract 
people to herself for fifty years and more, putting on popular programmes, dramas, music, this, that and the other, trying to entice the people, especially the young people, but they do not come.
Of course not. They never will until they know the name of the Lord, and then they will come. The reason why men and women are outside the Church is that they do not know God, they do not know his name; “to make thy name known to thine adversaries,” says Isaiah [64:2]. And they will never know it until they see a manifestation of it.
And, so, we pray, “Descend, come down, rend the heavens that these adversaries may know thy name.” Nothing will make them listen but that.
We have tried everything else, have we not? The church has never been so brilliant in her organisations as she is at the present time and as she has been during the whole of this [20th] century, she is using every means that the world can use and can give her, but the statistics go on repeating their miserable tale. One Church conference after another reports a serious decline in the membership of her body, and on it goes. What is the matter?
These people do not know the name of the Lord.
And there is only one thing that we can do, we must pray to him to rend the heavens and to make his name known, so that not only may they know it, but further, so that the nations may “tremble at thy presence” [64:2], that knowing the name of the Lord, they may begin to fear him, and to desist from sin.
He Must Increase; Our Churches Must Decrease
Recently I read the following “Thoughts on the Desire for Revival” on the Gospel Coalition’s web site, by Jared C. Wilson:
There is one thing that the churches experiencing historic revival have in common: they seemed overrun with the sense of the glory of God. They preached the gospel and the response was, as some describe, that “glory came down.”
Now that’s not something you can schedule. You can’t advertise it on the church signboard: “Every Sunday: Glory comes down.”
But it is something we can aim for, yearn for, cast a vision for, desire, crave, proclaim. You can’t program the glory, but you can plead for it.
See, nobody ever said, “We changed our music style and revival broke out.”
Nobody ever said, “We moved from Sunday School classes to small groups and the glory of God came down.”
Nobody ever said, “You would not believe the repenting unto holiness that happened when our pastor started preaching shorter sermons.”
No, all those things and more can be good things. Done for the right reasons, those can be very good moves to make, but the glory of God is best heard in the proclaimed gospel of Jesus Christ. So that’s where the glory-aimed church is going to camp out.
We all talk a big game about the glory of God, but it is a rare church that takes God’s glory seriously as the purpose of everything.
Even our desire for strong fellowship and “life-on-life” community must have God’s glory as their purpose, above the desire for personal fulfillment which so often dominates the internal conversations about such things. The servant-hearted harmony and burden-bearing of Romans 15, for instance, isn’t aimed primarily at becoming an impressive or accumulating church. The exhortations of Paul in Romans 15:1-5 are there so “that together,” verse 6 reads, “you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Consider the vision cast in Ephesians 1. Why has God blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places? Why has he chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him? Why has he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will? Ephesians 1:6: “For the praise of [God’s] glorious grace.”
Reflect on 1 Peter 2:9. Why did God make us a chosen race? Why did he make us a royal priesthood? Why did he makes us a holy nation? Why did he call us a people for his own possession? “That we may proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
Over and over again, from Old Testament through New, we learn the foundational truth echoed by the Westminster divines, that “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” We make realized the 5th of the Reformational solas: Soli Deo Gloria, “to God alone be the glory.”
A gospel-centered church makes that not just a spiritual slogan but her spiritual blood.
A gospel-centered church is not aiming to be the nicest church in town. That’d be nice.
A gospel-centered church is not aiming to be the most popular church in town. That’d be cool.
A gospel-centered church is not aiming to be the smartest church in town. That’d be okay.
No, a gospel-centered church doesn’t aim to be the anything-est church in town because it’s not comparing itself to other churches, but to the holiness of God, which will shrink the church down to size in its own estimation and make her hunger for the holiness that only comes from the riches of Christ in the gospel. A gospel-centered church aims to be a gospel-proclaiming church in town. Because that would be glorious.
A gospel-centered church is okay with its own decreasing – in reputation, in acclaim, in legacy, even in (gasp) numbers, but especially in self-regard – so long as it serves the increasing of the sense of the glory of God.
“Whatever it takes, Lord – do with us as you will.”
“Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” Romans 15:7
Lord, we are few, but you are near;
nor short your arm, nor deaf your ear:
O rend the heav’ns, come quickly down,
and make a thousand hearts your own.
. – Wlliam Cowper