A hundred years ago, in the midst of the (so called) Spanish Flu worldwide pandemic, the Irish Poet W. B. Yeats wrote those famous lines: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
At the time, his pregnant wife had caught the virus and was very close to death. (The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women – in some areas, they had up to a 70 percent death rate.)

He had also witnessed the disintegration of a Europe, once united by the blood ties of its royal families, now dissolved in the blood of an estimated 20 million dead in the Great War. Meanwhile the rapid and brutal rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia had seen the execution of (among many others) its own royal family there.
Back home, in his native Ireland, the 1916 Easter Rising had been crushed, followed by the bloodshed of the Anglo-Irish War – soon to be followed up by the even greater horrors of the Irish Civil War.
But worse would come: the rise of fascism, an even bloodier Second World War, the Holocaust, Stalin, Mao etc.

.          “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
.            Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
.            The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
.            The ceremony of innocence is drowned…”
.                                                          – W. B. Yeats The Second Coming

It all sounds so familiar.
Our world falls apart: Whether it be the current worldwide pandemic, devastating floods and fires, bloody warfare and civil disobedience, crippling disease and death itself – ever since the Fall, our world has been falling apart.

Entropy

The Bible describes the physical world falling apart in Psalm 102:25-26,
.          “Of old You laid the foundation of the earth,
.            and the heavens are the work of Your hands.
.           They will perish, but You will endure;
.           yes, they will all grow old like a garment.”

In science, this gradual running down of the physical world is termed “entropy”.
In simple terms, this just means everything tends to falls apart. Everything tends to disintegrate, from a state of order to chaos.

Which raises the question: How did the original state of order come about in the first place?
The Bible tells us it was by the Spirit of God; He originally created order out of chaos.
“The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.
“And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” (Gen 1:2)
The Spirit of God created order out of chaos.
More generally, it was God the Father (Gen 1:1, 1 Cor 8:6) who created the world, through the Son (Joh 1:3, 1 Cor 8:6, Heb 1:2), by the Spirit (Gen 1:2)
“And God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.” (Gen 1:31)

But this “very good” created order did not last. The Fall plunged the world into a new state of chaos.
Thankfully God prevents the world completely falling apart physically, eg. “[Christ] is before all things, and by Him all things hold together”, Col 1:17.
Not only does God stay the disintegration of the physical world, but He also continues to create order out of chaos, eg. witness the wonderfully intricate miracle of a newborn baby being formed in the womb, Psa 139:13-16, Eccl 11:5, Luke 1:35.

The Fall also plunged the world into moral chaos. There is a spiritual entropy: this world is falling apart morally and spiritually.
Spiritual entropy afflicts not just unbelievers. We would all fall apart spiritually, if it were not for the intervening creative work of the Spirit in our lives. (2 Cor 3:18)

The older I get, the more I become aware of the effects of such spiritual entropy – in my own life, but also in the Christian world around me.
For, notwithstanding many inspiring examples of faithfulness I see, I am also witnessing, eg.

• once strong Christian churches disintegrating,
• others, weak, divided and struggling,
• prominent Christian leaders that fall into gross sin,
• others that have let power go to their heads,
• once loyal Christian friends betraying precious relationships,
• worship that (in Don Carson’s words) has given in to “buffoonery, gimmicks, and entertainment”,
• prayer meetings that, in many cases, have all but disappeared.

How can such spiritual entropy be resisted, or even reversed?
Only by the power of the Spirit of God – He alone can create order out of our spiritual chaos. We need to pray daily for fresh outpourings of the Spirit of God.
Jesus said: “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!” (Luke 11:13)

We need to pray for revival.

What exactly are we praying for?

We are praying for what Paul prayed for, for the believers in Philippi (Phil 1:9-11):.

“This I pray:
.      that your love may abound still more and more
.      – in knowledge and depth of insight,
.             so that you may be able to discern and approve what is truly excellent
.            so that you may be pure and blameless and filled with the fruit of righteousness,
.                …all this, with a view to the day of Christ.”

(I am using Don Carson’s translation/paraphrase here, as well as in the following quotations, from his classic, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: priorities from Paul and his prayers ch 8)

Revival comes as:
1) We “abound in love more and more” – this is basic. “To discern and approve what is excellent Christians must be characterized by this abounding love.”
2) But such love is not mindless. “Without the constraints of knowledge and insight, love very easily degenerates into mawkish sentimentality or into the kind of mushy pluralism the world often confuses with love.”
3) Abounding in this type of love enables us “to test and approve what is best. So ‘what is best’ must be delicate or subtle or difficult to spot to those whose love is not abounding in this way.”
4) The effect is that we more and more become “pure and blameless and filled with the fruit of righteousness”, i.e. that our lives become  “characterized by the conduct – the actions, words, and thoughts – that God himself judges to be right.”

All this is “with a view to the day of Christ”.
Some translations have “till the day of Christ”. But as Carson points out, the Greek eis “suggests rather… Paul is telling them that they must live ‘with a view to the day of Christ’ – that is, they must live in such a way that they show they remember they are moving toward that day and are utterly constrained by it. On that day, in ‘a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness’ (2 Pet. 3:13), the fruit of our lives will be entirely righteous. Even now, Paul says, Christians will live with that day in view and will produce much righteous fruit in anticipation of that day. That is part of the call toward excellence.”

Carson continues (and the remainder of this post is his words from A Call to Spiritual Reformation):

The church is to see itself as an outpost of heaven. It is a microcosm of the new heaven and the new earth, brought back, as it were, into our temporal sphere.
We are still contaminated by failures, sin, relapses, rebellion, self-centeredness; we are not yet what we ought to be.
But by the grace of God, we are not what we were. For as long as we are left here, we are to struggle against sin, and anticipate, so far as we are able, what it will be like to live in the untarnished bliss of perfect righteousness. We are to live with a view to the day of Christ.

That means, of course, that Christians constitute a kind of intrinsic missionary community. Our proper citizenship is in heaven; positionally, we have already been seated with Christ in the heavenlies (Eph. 2:6).
But until the consummation, we live out our lives down here, a heavenly, missionary outpost in a lost, dying, and decaying world. We are to see ourselves as an outpost of a new heaven and a new earth in an old world that stands under the judgment of God.

This means that when Paul prays this prayer, he is praying for nothing less than revival.
He is praying that Christians might be, right now, what we ought to be, what we certainly one day will be. The text teaches us to pray that we will test out and approve for ourselves the highest and best and holiest things – all with a view to the day of Jesus Christ.
Even now, Paul’s prayer insists, Christians are to be as holy as pardoned sinners can be this side of eternity. And we are to pray toward that end. It is in this way that Paul’s prayer for what is excellent is tied to the long view, to the day of Jesus Christ.

It does not take much reading in the history of revivals[1] to discover that:

• When true revival dawns, resentments are dissolved.
• When revival comes, self-promotion is seen to be ugly, and withers away.
• When revival comes, men and women are concerned to be holy, they are serious about integrity, they embrace genuine self-denial and learn to love.
• When revival comes, our worrying sense of unreality disappears, and heaven seems more real, and certainly more important, than this transient world order.
• When revival comes, worship is no longer an exercise but one of the chief characteristics of our lives. Buffoonery, gimmicks, and entertainment fade away; the day of Jesus Christ seems to draw near.
• Out of this fresh experience of the grace of God powerfully working in our lives, evangelism becomes not only a passion but immeasurably more fruitful.

Inevitably, some soon imitate the revival by applying techniques and tests, trying, as it were, to codify grace and domesticate the power of God. Abuses occur, and sometimes multiply so quickly that the revival is quenched or diverted to a pale imitation of itself.
Still, those who have witnessed even a little of the powerful work of the Holy Spirit in times of blessing are often stamped with peculiar unction. As one revival convert put it, “I was born again in the fires of revival, and I do not intend to die in the ashes of its memory.”

The point to stress in this context is that although Paul’s prayer for what is excellent is equivalent to praying for revival, what he is doing is praying. He is not simply exhorting people to be better, nor is he trying to organize revival, still less is he berating fellow believers for lack of revival.
What he is doing is praying for revival.
[Elsewhere Carson notes: God expects to be pleaded with; he expects godly believers to intercede with him. Their intercession is his own appointed means for bringing about his relenting, and if they fail in this respect, then he does not relent and his wrath is poured out.]

[But] if true revival is a work of God, if transforming and discerning love that enables believers to approve what is best is at bottom the fruit of God’s work in our lives, if true righteousness is fruit that comes through Jesus Christ, then however much God may use means, the means themselves do not guarantee anything. Only God can produce transformation; only God can grant a revival.
Judging by Paul’s example, however much we must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, we must also acknowledge that our best efforts in this regard are nothing other than God’s working in us both to will and to act according to his good purpose (2:12–13).

So it is urgent that we ask God to work in us; it is vital that we learn to pray this prayer with Paul.
The Western church needs nothing more urgently than groups of believers, unknown, unsought, privately, faithfully, without promotion or fanfare, covenanting together to seek God’s face, praying urgently for what is best as we contemplate the day of Jesus Christ – praying, in short, for revival.

[1] Carson notes: “I use the term revival in its historic sense, not in the modern usage found among such groups as the Southern Baptists, where revival is more or less equivalent to ‘evangelistic meeting.’ In this latter context, it is possible to speak of ‘holding a revival’ or ‘planning a revival’; in the historic use of the term, such usage would be grotesque.”