 Check. This is, I think, Google Meet College. OK, welcome. My name is Smitha Narona, and I'll be doing Christian History and Missions with you all. So I serve with APC part-time. I work with communications and content work. So the website, content on the websites and official communications that we receive. And I teach at the Bible College. I'm married to Manohar Raj, who works full-time with APC. And we have a two-year-old daughter. So she's my full-time job, and this is my part-time work. So I really want to hear from each of you because I haven't been teaching at Bible College for a few years. I was teaching before COVID, and then I've come back. So I'm also a little bit new to the whole online-in-class kind of setting. So if you all have issues with anything, just let me know online if you are not able to hear me. If you have any comments, feel free to post on the chat and or raise your hand or unmute and say whatever you need to say. So yes. So online students, please feel free to share whenever you need to share. And yeah, we'll try and keep the class interactive. I do want to hear from you all. So let's just start with everyone using themselves. We'll start with the online students first. So if you can just say your name and where you're from and what you do. And then once we finish, the online students will do everyone in class here. So online students, feel free to unmute yourself and just share your name, what you do, and where you're from. Hi, ma'am. It's me, Chira. I'm from Assam and I'm doing ministry at my church. I'm helping my church in ministry. Thank you, Chira. Hi. Good morning, everybody. I'm Ravali. So I'm working as an IT professional. And I'm basically from Andhra Pradesh, but I live in Bangalore, Garenke. Nice to be here. Thank you. Thanks, Ravali. Hi, everyone. My name is Jackin. I'm a homemaker. So we are part of ATC and we worship at Whitefield location. Welcome, Jackin. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Hello, can you hear me? Hello? Yes, Anthony. Sorry, I think I heard a few people speaking. OK, good morning. My name is Anthony Suleyman. I'm from Nigeria. I worked with Covenant World, Christian Center International full-time. And I'm the media assistant. Welcome, Anthony. Welcome, Anthony. I'm Suleyman, my name is Shivkumar. I'm Shivkumar Suleyman. I work with Shivkumar Suleyman. OK, welcome, Shivkumar. Sorry, I couldn't hear. What do you do? I work with Shivkumar Suleyman. OK, it's not very clear. I did understand that you're from Mysore, though. Welcome. Thank you. Hi. Sorry, I can't see who's speaking. Is there anyone else? Yeah. Hi, I'm Nina John. I belong to Kerala, but live here in Bangalore, attend APC North. I help coordinate Bible study for women. Welcome, Nina. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. OK, anyone else online? I understand that some of you may be unable to talk right now, but OK, let's move to those in class. If you can just share, I think you'll have to pass the mic around. Can you hear me? OK, OK. Can you all hear now? Oh, so sorry, OK. OK, we'll just do names for those of you who've already finished. My name is Rinchanthi. I'm Nina Santosh. My name is Sri Radha. I'm Nikhil from Phurukabad, serving with my pastor. I'm Francis from Kerala. Francis, right? I'm Sean, and I live here in Bangalore, and I'm a second year at BC. I'm Prince Vinaydeep. I'm from Andhra Pradesh. Sorry, can you say your name again? Prince Vinaydeep. Prince Vinaydeep. I'm Anand. I'm from Andhra Pradesh. OK, thank you. Sorry. I had muted it here, so you all couldn't hear. OK, I think everyone's in the classroom. I just got a notification that someone was trying to join, but I can't see them anymore. Was that you? Can you just take a look? It's saying someone wants to join the call. OK, wait, wait, wait. I saw them. OK, sorry. So I think we have one more person who just joined the call. Samuel, hi. Would you like to introduce yourself? Just say your name, where you're from, and what you do, if you're able to talk right now. OK. OK, I think everyone is introducing themselves. So I'll just go over a little bit of some things on Google Classroom, and then we'll go into our lesson. So I've posted on Google Classroom a few things. I've posted the online student guidelines, so that would be specific to all of you who are online. I've also put in course information and assignments, which would be applicable for everyone here. So are you all on Google Classroom? Yes, yeah. So you can go in there. It would be kind of our schedule of what we'll be covering each week, and what are the assignments for the semester. I've not given you too many details about the assignments, but just for you to know the dates when we'll have it and what we'll be doing. So there'll be student presentations, and we'll do that over three weeks. So I'll ask each of you to present on somebody who is a Christian leader in the revivals. Okay, so I've given you all various topics there. If you're going to classroom, you all can see that under the assignments. So you can choose a topic of who you'd like to present on, and if you tell me sooner, the sooner you tell me the better so that we're not overlapping. So if somebody has chosen a specific person or a specific thing to present on, then we won't have another person present on the same topic for the in-person students. For Google Classroom or for those joining us online, I think you all may still be able to present and then we'll project it here. So yes, so for those who are joining us on Google Classroom, on Google Meet, and for the in-person, you all can just share what topic you would like to present on, and we'll do short presentations. So it'll just be like a maybe a five-minute presentation on a specific topic. Okay, so I'll give you all a little more details next week or maybe, yeah, next week on how you can plan and prepare for your presentation. So that's on September 4th, 11th, and 18th. Those three weeks, we'll have the presentation. So a few people present each week. For those joining us on eLearning, we'll have a different set of instructions for you on that platform. For the reflection paper will be the second assignment and then I'll give you more details about what you'll have to do. Then we'll have a quiz and we'll have your final papers. So there are four assignments through the semester and all of those four assignments will add up to your final grade. Okay, and I've also asked on Google Classroom for you to introduce yourself. So you can just introduce yourself and especially for the online students for y'all to be interacting with each other. Like, I feel like learning from one another is a big part of the learning process and so we shouldn't miss out on that. So for those who are primarily online, the way to do it to be able to interact with each other would be through Google Classroom. So you can introduce yourselves. Please share online in response to the lectures. You can share what you've been learning and please interact with one another also. I will respond to your post, but also if you can be responding to one another that would be really good. Okay, so I think I've covered all of the basic information. So please do go into the Classwork section of Google Classroom and read through all of the introductory information that's there and then y'all can come back with questions if you have any tomorrow when we meet. Okay, so in this class, we're going to be talking about how God has moved through church history, through Christian history. The main reason for us doing this is for us to be prepared for what God might want to do in our present situations or what God might want to do in the future and how we can prepare ourselves for a move of God. What I really love about this book is that it's entitled, Revivals, Visitations and Moves of God. So it's not just boring history. It is how has God moved powerfully in history? What has God done that has impacted the world? That has built his church and that has caused people to know him. And then it's saying, what can we expect as a church today from history? Looking at history, what can we be pursuing God for? What can we be expecting from God? And how can we be preparing ourselves for a move of God? So how many of you like history? Oh, good. Online class of y'all can feel free to raise hands or post on the chat. So we have a few people who like history. I really love history. I'm very bad with numbers and dates, but I like the stories. And so it'll be really, really interesting and inspiring for us to look at some of these events that happened in Christian history and for us to learn from them. So before we begin, we're just going to look at what is revival. So when we say revivals, visitations and moves of God, what does revival mean? What is your basic understanding of the word revival? Anyone? A supernatural move of God, okay? So if we just take the revival as a word separate from the Christian context, revival means bringing something back to life. It means like bringing about something new or something bringing life to something that is dead. So would you say that the church is in need of revival? Yes? Do you see a lack of what would the word be what would the word be of life in the church? In many ways, right? In many ways. While we see God moving powerfully through the church around the world, there is also a lot of Christianity that is dead in many ways. There are lots of our own understanding of who God is that still needs to be awakened, right? So when we are saying we're not pointing to some other church or to some other people somewhere out there, we are pointing at ourselves and we're saying there's so much of ourselves that needs to be brought to life. There's so much of ourselves that needs to be awakened. It's because of lack of understanding, lack of knowledge, lack of exposure, whatever may be the reasons. There is a lot that God still needs to do in our lives. And so we come into this course recognizing that we are the ones who need to be revived. We are the ones who need to be awakened. So when God, when revival happens, God comes in a way that is, like Rain said, in an unusual, in a supernatural way, in a way that God has not been experienced or revealed in the past, okay, in that specific context. Now we see a lot of what was seen in acts or a lot of what was described in the early church, now coming back to life in the church today. So this was not experienced by the church presently and we're experiencing it now. So that is revival where we are experiencing it for the first time. Maybe somebody many, many years ago has experienced it, but the current present church has not experienced it and we are experiencing it for the first time. So it's an experience of God's presence and along with his presence, what naturally comes is his power. So when we experience God's power and his presence, we call that God's visitation, where God himself is coming to us and he is meeting with us in a special way. So what we want to do is when God comes and meets us in a special way, we want that to become a way of life for us, a new way of living. So it's not that God comes and visits us, we have this amazing experience and then life goes on as usual. What we are saying is when God comes, we want him to stay. So we want to become a place where God dwells in that new way. So when we look at the Old Testament and we see in the tabernacle, God's presence coming down to the tabernacle, right? The cloud of his presence on that place, his glory covering that place. We want that to be the kind of experience we have as a church where his glory is covering us, his presence is in our midst. So not only when we gather as a church, but also wherever we are as believers that we are carrying that glory that we are carrying that presence wherever we go. Any thoughts, any questions over? No? Okay. Anyone online want to share anything? Okay. So we want to move from a place of great experiences of God to a place of great everyday living with God. Okay. A visitation should move to become a habitation, a dwelling of God's presence, where we are abiding in his presence and we are carrying his presence, we're carrying his glory, we're carrying his power as a church and as individual believers. And beyond that, we want God to move through us. So we say, revivals where God reveals himself supernaturally, where God reveals himself in a new way. And then visitations where God comes and his presence and power is revealed in our midst. And then from that visitation, when we start to carry the power of God, we then see God's move through us. Okay. So what God is revealing in the church then starts to affect the community around us, starts to affect the society around us and starts to impact the nation and the nations. Okay. So that's what the full effect of a revival is. If we fully receive what God is doing in a revival, if we fail to receive it and fail to allow God to move through us, then it just becomes a great experience for that one day or however long the revival lasts. Okay. But the thing is, this is the nature of revival where revival is where God moves so supernaturally that it is beyond what human effort involves. Okay. So it's not our agendas, our plans, our efforts. It is God just like coming in power and completely transforming us and completely transforming our communities and our nations through us. We are going to look at many examples of different revivals and how we see all of these things happen through those revivals. But right now we're just gonna look at some of these basic introductory words and then we'll go into the stories through the semester. So one thing that is a result of revival is that people start to go out sharing the gospel. Those who have been touched by God in whichever setting. So God comes to a specific church. The people from that church start to then go out with the gospel. And so there is a lot of evangelization. There's a lot of missions. There's a lot of fulfillment of the great commission happening because God has met that specific church or those specific people. So we see from Acts through all of the centuries that have passed since then how God has done that and how God has brought about the church that we have today. From a small set of believers in the Middle East to now have in the ancient Near East to now have believers around the world, churches around the world from all countries, from all kinds of places is because God has moved in this way throughout the centuries. Okay, so why we want to look at all of these stories in history? Why do we want to look at what God has done in the past? It's because as we look at that we can learn from what happened. What was it that caused that revival? What can we learn from that? What can we take away from that? How can we prepare ourselves in the present so that whatever God does in the future we are ready for, okay? So we will draw, we look at all of these stories. We're going to hopefully be inspired by these stories. We will get insights and lessons from what God has done and we look at specific things like what can we learn about what God has done in the past? What does it take for us to receive such a visitation from God? Like how can we prepare ourselves? What are signs of true visitation? So there are lots of experiences, lots of people who talk about lots of ways in which the spirit comes and we can see so many things online of people displaying like what apparently is a move of the Holy Spirit. But how do we know that that is a true move of the Holy Spirit? How can we title it revival? What we learn about that? And then how do we become good stewards of revival? So when we experience revival how do we then fully facilitate that in a way that will allow it to grow and expand and reach other people? We look at James 5, 7, and 8. Can somebody read that? You can read it from your notes or from your Bible. James 5, 7, and 8. Online students also y'all can feel free if one of you wants to read just unmute yourself and read. James 5 verse 7 and 8. Be patient then, my brothers, until the Lord comes. See how patient a farmer is as he waits for his land to produce precious crops. He waits patiently for the autumn and spring rains. You must also, you must be, you also must be patient. Keep your hopes high for the day of the Lord is coming near. Thank you. So we see here there is talk of two rains. There's the early rain and there's the latter rain. So what happened was when the first rains came, so this is like in the scriptural times when this is written, when the first rains came was when the sowing of the seeds were done because the earth would become soft and the seeds could be sown in the ground. And then there would be a second rain which is called the latter rain. And after that rain was when the crops would ripen and be ready for harvest. So if we take that in a spiritual way of God is coming to take his harvest, right? Of believers, he is coming to take back all those who have received the gospel all those who have allowed him to move in their lives. He's coming back for that harvest. Then we should be expecting that latter rain of God revealing himself in power and God coming in a way that maybe we will, we can never imagine and we will not expect even that God will come and pour out a revelation of himself and he will come in his power to us before he comes to collect that harvest of believers. And so as we look forward to the coming of Christ we also wait in expectation for this latter rain of God's presence and power in our midst as believers. So as we're looking at this we're just going to look at a lot of stories from Acts to the present day church and we look at how God's power has been manifested and how that has allowed people to start carrying his glory in new ways. We'll begin with chapter one. Okay, so you can read along if you want. I'm not going to be reading from the notes too much I'll just be sharing with you. So whatever helps you listen best if you are able to read the notes and listen or if you want to just take down notes whatever will help you fully be present and do that. So when we look at God coming like I talked about we're not talking about a single event. We're talking about God coming and changing the way things happen in our midst. It's not going to be a change that lasts for a day or a week or a month or a year. It is a change that is for good. Like from now on things are going to be done differently. From now on the way we live the way we express our faith the way we manifest God's glory is going to be at this new level that we have reached in this time. So there's someone named Duncan Campbell and he was used in a revival in Scotland which happened in 1949 to 1952. So he says revival is a community saturated with God. So people who are fully consumed fully just carrying the presence of God wherever they are. So in revival that is our pursuit. Our pursuit is God himself. We are not pursuing experiences we're not pursuing healing or signs or wonders or miracles. That's not what we're pursuing. We're pursuing God himself, his presence and a new intimacy with him. And it is when we come to that intimacy with him that all of the other things flow out naturally. So all of the signs, wonders, miracles, healing whatever it is all of that flows out of that new experience of God's power. Lou Engel says revival is God's arrival. So it is with the presence of God that revival comes. So we're asking when we're praying for revival we're praying for more of God himself. So when we are pursuing revival we are hungry and thirsting after God hungry and thirsting for more knowledge of who God is for a deeper relationship with God for a deeper experience of his love, his power, his goodness, all of that when we pursue revival. And there is no limit to how much we can know God. We believe that God is infinite. So there is no point at which we can say, okay, I think I know all there is to know about God. No, we should always and we can always be at a place of hungry and thirsting for more, right? Pursuing God, like always having this desire for more of God, always knowing there is more that God wants to show us of himself. There is more that I can learn but it all depends on where is my heart, what is the posture that I am taking am I coming to God with this desire to know him more to am I doing things that will help me know him more or am I happy where I am? Am I satisfied with my life as it is with my whatever amount of time I spend in scripture reading I do this routine and that's good or am I going to say, no, I'm going to press in for more and I'm going to make sacrifices to know God more to receive more of who God is and it does involve sacrifice. It's not an easy, it's not going to come to us easy, okay? And we'll see how sacrifice is so important, so integral to all of the revivals that happened throughout history. So God always promises his presence. I mean, he's promised that he will always be with us, that he will dwell with us, that he will move in our midst but when we are calling for revival, we are saying we want it in a much, much greater measure. We don't want what we have experienced so far, we want God to come in power. As we are any of you familiar with any revival stories? God's generals, okay. Do you want to share a little bit? You can take the mic and just share a bit. Like what was different about God's presence than what we experience in our everyday lives or in our regular gatherings as a church? In God's generals, like especially, like mostly all of them are like evangelists, like where God used them. It's because of their fervency in prayer, like from the time they've spent in prayer. So, and it's later on obviously shown up when they go and preach and all, like miracles, healings takes place. And there is, people also can feel that there's a change in the atmosphere and people start falling down and they start crying and like, yeah, there is a... Okay. Okay, so we see that it is not like the usual experience of like what we see everyday around us. We don't usually, we long for more science, more wonders, more miracles, more healing, more of God's power to be revealed, but that is not necessarily what we are seeing all the time around us. We're not experiencing that every time we meet, right? And so when, like Rain said, so when these gatherings were happening, that's what they were experiencing. There was power in the preaching, there were signs, there was conviction, there was a change in the atmosphere. So it was not... So people could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit just in that place tangibly. And so that's how God's presence is different from we all carry God's presence all the time, right? As believers, we all carry God's presence, but in a revival or in a visitation, it is like that times whatever, like a hundred, right? It's much, much, much larger than what is our everyday experience. Now, when we're talking about this, we are actually looking at embodying who Christ is, right? So Christ carried the glory of God. Can someone just read Hebrews 1.3, please? And then somebody else, John 2.11. Hebrews 1.3, who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person, and I'm holding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. Okay, so here we see Jesus described as the radiance of God's glory, right? So God's glory was manifested in Jesus himself. And John 2.11. John 2.11. The name of the sign, Jesus lived in the era of Delhi and manifested his glory and his disciples lived in Jesus. Okay, so we see how Jesus was carrying the power of God. He was embodying the glory of God in his everyday life. And so when we are pursuing more of God, we are pursuing the life of Christ, like for us to be more like Christ, for us to be people who manifest the glory of God in the way we live, in the things we do. And what is the glory of God? So when we say we wanna manifest the glory of God, we wanna carry the glory of God, what is that glory? Yes? Yeah, so the glory of God is his very nature, right? Who he is and what he does. What he does comes out of who he is. And so when we carry the glory of God, when we manifest the glory of God, we are revealing who God is through our lives and we are revealing the power of God through the way we live, okay? So that's what we mean when we say we want to be like Christ we wanna manifest the glory of God. We want our lives to reveal the character of God and the power of God. So it was through Christ that the church was birthed and every believer was supposed to be a little Christ, right? Each of us supposed to be like Jesus, yeah. And the church as a whole is supposed to be a collective body reflecting who Christ is as well. So as individuals as well as the community of believers, both of, in both aspects, we are revealing who God is. We're carrying the glory of God in both aspects. And so we are to walk as Jesus walked. So can someone read one John 2.6 and then someone else one John 4.17? One John 2.6, whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did. Okay, so if we believe in Christ, we should walk as Jesus walked. One John 4.17, this is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confident on the day of judgment. In this world, we are like Jesus. Okay? So both of those passages say that we are to be like Christ. As believers, that is our final goal is to be like Christ individually and as a church, okay? As a body of believers. Psalm 85.6, can someone read that? And, some 85.6, will you not receive us again that your people may rejoice in you? Okay, so we see in Psalm 85, the prayer of the psalmist to be revived so that the people may rejoice in God. Okay? We don't know exactly when the Psalm was written but the context seems to suggest that it was written after the period of Israel's return from exile. So when they went back and they were rebuilding Jerusalem because there's a lot of things that connect back to that return, let's see actually, maybe I should open Psalm 85 or if someone can just read Psalm 85, the whole passage. Okay, I'll read it, sorry. Okay, Lord, you have been favorable to your land. You have brought back the captivity of David. You have forgiven the iniquity of your people. You have covered all their sin. You have taken away all your wrath. You have turned from the fierceness of your anger. Restore us, O God, of our salvation and cause your anger towards us to cease. Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations? Will you not revive us again that your people may rejoice in you? Show us your mercy, Lord, and grant us your salvation. And then it goes on from there. But in those first seven verses, he is talking about being brought back from captivity, being forgiven for their sins, for God's wrath to be taken away. And so it seems to suggest that language, that language seems to suggest that it was written after Israel's return from exile. But on the other hand, even if it was written at another time, that was the experience of the Israelites, right? There was so much of being facing God's wrath because they had rejected God. So much of that history in the Old Testament is that having God's wrath and then coming back to God, being restored by God. And so that prayer comes from a place of repentance, right? So when there is repentance, when there is a cry for forgiveness is where revival comes, okay? When we humble ourselves, right? When we humble ourselves, when we come to God, confessing our sin is where we allow God to bring us to a place of restoration. If we cannot recognize our need for God and if we cannot recognize that there is parts of our lives that needs to be surrendered, needs to be repented of, then we do not give God full access sometimes to come and bring the kind of change that is needed. So we see also in Ezra 9, I'll read from your notes, Ezra 9, 8 and 9. And now for a little while, grace has been shown from the Lord our God to leave us remnant to escape and to give us a peg in his holy place that our God may enlighten our eyes and give us a measure of revival in our bondage. For we were slaves, yet our God did not forsake us in our bondage, but he extended mercy to us in the sight of the kings of Persia to revive us, to repair the house of our God, to rebuild its ruins and to give us a wall in Judah and Jerusalem. So Ezra's cry again comes from after the Jews have returned to Jerusalem and there is rebuilding of the temple, there's rebuilding of the walls. And so he says, in this rebuilding, in this repair, we can see that God is reviving his people. In the same way in the church, when we see that there is restoration, there is repair of things that are broken within the church or lives that are broken, when we see a rebuilding and a raising up of spiritual truth, raising up of new experiences of God, that's when God is reviving people. So those are ways or evidences that there is revival happening. When we see restoration, when we see repair, when we see rebuilding and when we see raising up of new spiritual truth and new experiences of God. So when we talk about seasons of revival, we talk about in a specific period of time, there is a powerful revelation of God. So that doesn't mean that when that season ends, what we have experienced ends. So we call it a season of revival because there is a revelation or an experience of God that has come in power for that period of time. But what we want is from that experience that we are able to continue in that experience, continue at that level of revelation so that we are moving to higher ground. So we don't fall back to where we were before, but from there we keep pursuing God for more and more and more, more of his glory, more of more experiences of him, more knowledge of him, more intimacy with him. Okay, so that starts with, like we looked before, it starts with repentance. Okay, and from that place of repentance, from that place of humility is where we allow God to come in power and revive us. Okay, so 1 Corinthians 5, 4 says, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together along with my spirit with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ. So the Lord Jesus must be present in power in seasons of revival. So there should be manifestations of his power. So in our usual church services, sometimes there is no power or there is some power, but in a season of revival, there is a great manifestation of power. So like we see in 1 Corinthians 5, 4, it says, or for Acts 4, 33, sorry, it says, with great power, the apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace was upon them all. So this is like not the usual, not a little power, not no power, but great power and great grace was upon them. And that's what allowed them to move out and to be witnesses. So that is a sign of revival where there is great power. And that great power then comes out in signs, miracles and wonders. So we see Acts 5 describes what that great power looked like. So it says, through the hands of the apostles, many signs and wonders were done among the people and they were all in one accord. So we see signs and wonders, we see unity. They were all in one accord in Solomon's porch. Okay, so we'll continue from there. We stopped right in the middle of this passage, but we'll start from the beginning of the passage tomorrow because we are at the end of time for now. Thank you all for joining. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks.