One consequence of our failure to see clearly the true nature of revival is that we wait for years for supernatural manifestation that never comes, overlooking completely our own individual place in the desire awakening. Whatever God may do for a church must be done in the single unit, the one certrain man or woman. Some things can happen only to the isolated, single person; they cannot be experienced en masse. Statistics show, for instance, that 100 babies are born in a certain city on a given day. Yet the birth of each baby is for that baby (and its mother) a unique experience, an isolated, personal thing. Fifty people dies in a plane crash; while they die together they die separately, on at a time, each one undergoing the act of death in a loneliness of soul as utterly as if he alone had died. Both birth and death are experienced by the individual in a loneliness as complete as if only that one person had ever know them.
Three thousand persons were converted at Pentecost, but each one met his sin and his Savior alone. The spiritual birth, like the natural one, is for each one a unique, separate experience shared in by no one. So with that uprush of resurgent life we call revival. It can come to the individual only. Though a visitation of Divine life reaches many at once, yet it comes to each one singly. There can exist no collective body of believers that can be revived apart from the units that compose the body.
1 Corinthians 12:11 all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.
Psalm 85:6 Wilt thou not revive us again: that thy people may rejoice in thee?
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