Why God Will Not Pour Out His Spirit on a Satisfied Church

Sydney Elton spent fifty years in Nigeria as a British missionary and died here in 1987. He mentored hundreds of young men and women during the Civil War Revival, and he believed God was about to send a greater revival across the country. In 1982 he told students in Ibadan that something mighty was coming. The sowing and witnessing and handing out of tracts would suddenly come alive by the Spirit.

Yet Elton also sensed something holding it back. He named the problem in a speech Professor Gary Maxey quotes.

God's one big problem

Elton said God's difficulty is not Satan, whom God has finished with. It is not sin, which he has dealt with, and it is not the world or the nations. God's one big problem, Elton said, is that he cannot get his people to want what he wants. We want naira. We want business. We want money, success and a good name. God says he has something better, and once we have it we will want nothing else.

Professor Maxey adds that, more than three decades later, he cannot say Nigeria is any closer to the revival Elton expected.

The substitute that feels like blessing

Professor Maxey sees the same problem in today's church. The prosperity message, he writes, has taught a generation that one of life's main goals is material prosperity and that giving to God is the surest road to it. Giving becomes a way of getting.

He puts it bluntly. God cannot send revival to people who are focused primarily on material gain. The two desires cannot share a heart. Revival begins with a deep sense of spiritual need. A person who thinks his greatest need is a house, a job or a visa will not feel the need that revival requires.

He also warns about a quieter form of the same problem: a self-focused spirituality. Church becomes the place where I go to receive. Prayer becomes what I do to get. We have, he says, entered a narcissistic era in which everything is about me, myself and mine.

Why satisfaction blocks the Spirit

The point is not that God dislikes blessing. Professor Maxey repeatedly says God desires to bless his people. The point is the order of our wants. When we want God's gifts more than God, we stop hearing his voice.

Notice how it works. A person who feels satisfied does not seek. A person who does not seek does not repent. A person who does not repent stays where he is. The satisfaction itself is the obstacle.

The Old Testament knew this. In Hosea, Israel grew full and forgot the Lord. In Revelation, Jesus tells the church in Laodicea, which said it needed nothing, that it was wretched, poor and blind. Professor Maxey says repeatedly that revival comes to people who feel their destitution.

The cure is a change in wanting

Elton's diagnosis points to the cure. Our wanting has to change.

Try this for one week. Each morning, write down what you plan to ask God for. Then add one line at the bottom: Lord, give me more of yourself. Watch which list gets longer.

Professor Maxey closes his own book on revival with a prayer that Nigeria will see the revival Elton expected. A change in what we want is where that prayer starts.

Drawn from the teaching of Professor Gary S. Maxey.