What the Cross Made Unnecessary

Lazarus was revived. Jesus was raised. The difference between those two words settles what the church should be asking for.

Lazarus came out of the tomb with the grave clothes still wrapped around him, and no one standing in that road ever forgot it. He went home. He ate dinner with his sisters. He appears once more in John's Gospel, at a table, with a crowd pressing in to look at him.

And then, at some point the Gospels do not bother to record, he died again. Whatever life came back into that body came back on the same terms it had held before, with the same ending still waiting at the end of it. He was revived, and nothing about his situation had been permanently settled.

Jesus walked out of a tomb too. Was it the same event?

knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. (Romans 6:9, NKJV)

Revival returns something to the condition it was in. Resurrection puts it permanently beyond the reach of whatever killed it. These are not two intensities of the same act. They are two different acts, and only one of them ends the argument. Lazarus needed help again. Jesus never will.

The Verbs the Apostles Chose for You

So which of those two words does the New Testament reach for when it describes you? Paul walks past Lazarus entirely and takes his vocabulary from Easter morning.

even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:5-6, NKJV)

Made alive. Raised. Seated. Every one of those verbs points backward to something already finished, and the last of them puts you in a chair. Paul is describing where you live and he is describing it in the past tense, which is a strange way to talk about a spiritual peak you touched once at a conference.

Colossians says the same thing from another angle: your life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). Hidden things are out of the weather. They do not rise and fall with the temperature of the room they are kept in, and Scripture has no category anywhere for a resurrected life that requires periodic resuscitation.

And the alternative will not survive being stated plainly. If life in Christ can fade, then Christ's work was partial. If righteousness can weaken, then the cross was provisional. If His presence can withdraw, then union was never secure in the first place. Nobody wants to sign any of those sentences, and every one of them is required for revival to be necessary now.

Paul Never Prayed for More

Paul writes to churches with real problems, division, immorality, doctrinal confusion, exhaustion, and he has every right as an apostle to ask God for anything a struggling church could need. If any man had the standing to call down a fresh outpouring on a dry congregation, it was him. So what does he actually ask for?

that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints. (Ephesians 1:17-18, NKJV)

He asks for eyes. Not a fresh outpouring, not the return of something withdrawn, not more of what they already have in full. He prays that they would see what is already theirs, and then he prays essentially the same prayer again in the next chapter, and again for the Colossians, and again for the Philippians.

The pattern holds everywhere you look for it. The problem was never that life disappeared. The problem was that life went unnoticed. Paul's answer to a church running on empty is sight, which is why he tells the Romans that transformation comes by the renewing of your mind (Romans 12:2). What changes is your perspective on something that has been true the whole time.

Roots Instead of Sparks

You have watched what the alternative produces. A spike, then a crash, then hunger for the next spike, and the crash gets read as evidence that something was lost. So the cycle restarts, and it restarts on people who are already worn out from the last one.

Why are the people most committed to pursuing revival so often the tiredest people in the building? I have watched sincere people spend years seeking something they were already holding, and the seeking costs more than the ordinary Christian life has ever asked of anyone. A framework that requires you to keep generating life will never let you rest inside it, because by its own logic the moment you stop generating, the thing begins to fade.

The New Covenant grows people. Paul tells the Colossians to walk in Christ as they received Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith (Colossians 2:6-7). Those are agricultural words and construction words. A tree needs roots and time, and it bears fruit in season without anyone lighting a fire underneath it.

What happens in a person when the framework changes is quieter than a revival meeting and lasts considerably longer. Pressure dissolves because there is nothing left to generate. Guilt loses its grip because a fading feeling stops functioning as evidence of a fading God. Obedience stops working as a lever and starts working as an overflow, and it does so because you have finally stopped trying to restart something that was never switched off.

The Life You Were Already Praying For

Go back to the prayer. The hunger in it was right, and the wanting was right, and the only thing wrong with it was the direction it faced. It was asking God to send back something that had never gone anywhere, and the life it was reaching for was already seated in every chair in the room.

For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. (Colossians 3:3-4, NKJV)

A life hidden with God is kept the way a deed is kept, signed and filed away by the hands that finished the work, and those hands have never once reopened what they closed. Whatever you feel on any given Sunday, that is where your life is, and that is where it stays.