September 26 Daily Devotional

Humble yourself in the sight of God

The Hebrew word ‘revive’ has the primary meaning of ‘preserve’, or ‘keep alive’. Habakkuk’s great fear was that the Church was going to be destroyed altogether, so he prayed, ‘Preserve it, O God, keep it alive, don’t let it be overwhelmed’. But to revive means not only to keep alive or to preserve, but also to purify and correct, to get rid of the evil. This is always an essential accompaniment whenever God revives. In the history of every revival, we read of God purifying, getting rid of the sin, the dross, and the things that were hindering His cause ... while the Church is being preserved, purified and corrected, she is at the same time being prepared for deliverance. The prophet looks at the approaching calamity and says, ‘O Lord, even while we are being chastised, prepare us for the deliverance that is to come. Make all thy people worthy of Thy blessings’....

Habakkuk’s final appeal is most touching [chapter 3, verse 2] —’In wrath’, he says, ‘remember mercy’.... He does not ask God to remember them because of any of their merits. The only thing he does is to remind God of His own nature, and of that other aspect of His holy being—His mercy. He seems to say, ‘Temper wrath with mercy. We have nothing to say but to ask that Thou shouldest act like Thyself, and in the midst of wrath shouldest have pity upon us.’

Here we have the model prayer for just such a time as this.* In all our ‘national days of prayer’ during the last war there seemed to be an assumption that we were all right, and all we had to do was to ask God to defeat our enemies who alone were all wrong. No place seemed to be given for any real humiliation, or confession of sin.

The message of this book [Habakkuk] is that until we truly humble ourselves ... until we see ourselves as we are in the sight of God ... we have no right to look for peace and happiness. Until the world learns these mighty lessons from the Word of God there is no hope for it.

From Fear to Faith, pp. 64–6