Re-digging the Wells: A Call to Spiritual Renewal

The problem confronting us is not a problem of methods or of organization or of making a slight adjustment here or there or improving things a little bit or keeping them up to date or anything like that. It seems to me that the whole position is one in which we're rarely are down to this basic issue. [00:02:32]

Isaac digged again the wells of water which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father. Now here again is a message surely that is sorely needed because the whole outlook seems to be the very reverse of that. As one looks at it in the church in general, the kind of thing you read constantly in the books and the religious journals is this. [00:07:09]

Isaac realized that his situation was such that it was no time for experimentation. The position I say was so urgent that if they didn't have water and that very quickly they would all perish. And what how does he argue in such a position? Well, he argues like this: he says there is no need for us to prospect and send for the water divers. [00:09:48]

There is nothing that I know of that is quite so foolish as to ignore the past, and a man who does assume that does ignore the past and assumes that our problems are quite new and that therefore the past has nothing at all to teach us is a man who's not only grossly ignorant of the scriptures but he is equally ignorant of the greatest lessons even of secular history. [00:12:49]

God is still the same. There is no difference in God as between today and 100 years ago. Indeed God is the same today as he was a thousand years ago and 2,000 years ago and way back 6,000 years ago in the time of Abraham. God is from Everlasting to Everlasting. He doesn't change at all. [00:16:13]

Man is still precisely the same as he always has been. It is to me almost incredible and incomprehensible that anybody who has ever read the Bible at all or indeed even human history could possibly dispute this even for a second. What superficial thinkers we are. [00:17:12]

The story of the church has not been a straight line, a level record of achievement. It hasn't been that at all. The history of the church has been a history of ups and downs and ups and downs. It's there on the very surface. You go back into the history of the past and you'll find that. [00:20:31]

These glorious periods of Revival and of Reawakening have often followed periods of great drought, great deadness, apathy, and lifelessness in the history of the church. Everyone of as you find these great Peaks you will find the troughs. You will see that the church as many a Time been as she is today. [00:23:42]

Every time you do get one of these great and glorious and mighty periods you will find that in every instance it seems to be a returning to something that had obtained before. Indeed, I go further, you will find that every one of them seems to be a returning to what you can read and find in the book of The Acts of the Apostles. [00:25:18]

The Philistines had stopped them and filled them with Earth so that when they went back to their to these old Wells that is what they found. In other words, we can put it like this: they went back to the old Wells, yes, and the water is still there in the old Wells but they couldn't see it and the water wasn't available. [00:28:56]

The troubles confronting the church today, the problem confronting her is not the new circumstances in which we find ourselves. You see, that's what we're always being told, isn't it? Until we're all, I hope, sick and tired of it. The wireless, the television, the motor car and all the things that are being offered to the Modern Men. [00:32:14]

There were endless divisions in the church 100 years ago in America and in Northern Ireland. They were divided up into the same denominations as to today and even more so. Yet though that was the fact, God sent his Blessing and poured out his Spirit. It is a lie to say that the division of the church is the one cause of a lack of blessing. [00:38:29]