Revive Me, Revive Us, Revive This City

Stop Chasing the Feeling: Seek the Face of God | 2 Chronicles 7:14

What do you do when you experience the presence of God on Sunday, but by Monday the feeling begins to fade?

You do not chase the emotion. You seek His face.

In this powerful message from 2 Chronicles 7:14, discover the difference between wanting what God can give you and truly wanting God Himself. Through Scripture, stories of revival, and the gospel of Jesus Christ, we see that God’s presence cannot be manufactured, but His people can humble themselves, pray, repent, and boldly ask Him to move again.

The face you have been begging for has already turned toward you in Jesus.

This message is a call for personal renewal, revival in the church, and a fresh move of God throughout West Palm Beach.

Revive me. Revive us. Revive this city.

Key Takeaways

1. Do not chase a feeling, seek God Himself.
   Spiritual emotions may fade, but God has not left. The goal is not to recreate a moment. It is to seek His face.

2. God is both holy and good.
   His holiness reveals our sin, but His goodness welcomes those who stop pretending and cry out for mercy.

3. God’s presence cannot be manufactured.
   Music, emotion, atmosphere, and effort cannot force God to move. Revival is a work only God can do.

4. Jesus made the presence of God accessible to sinners.
   Christ was forsaken and driven out so that everyone who trusts in Him could be welcomed into the presence of God.

5. The face of God is revealed in Jesus Christ.
   The face we have been longing for has already turned toward us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

6. God has not simply visited His people, He lives in them.
   Through the Holy Spirit, believers are now the temple of God. His presence remains even when the feeling fades.

7. Revival begins with personal repentance and prayer.
   Before asking God to change a city, we first pray, “Revive me.”

8. The prayer expands outward.
   Revive me. Revive us. Revive West Palm Beach.

9. True revival changes more than a church service.
   It transforms homes, relationships, workplaces, addictions, communities, and entire cities.

10. We prepare the altar, but God sends the fire.
    We can humble ourselves, pray, repent, and seek His face, but only God can bring true revival.

    Closing Application

• This week, do not chase the feeling of what God did before. Seek His face.

  Start with the first circle: Revive me. Ask God to expose what needs to change in you. Confess your sin honestly. Open His Word. Pray even when you do not feel anything. Come to Him because you want Him, not only what He can give you.

  Then pray, Revive us. Ask God to awaken His church, deepen our hunger for holiness, restore broken relationships, and make us a people marked by prayer, repentance, and love for Jesus.

  Finally, pray, Revive this city. Pray by name for your family, your workplace, your neighborhood, and West Palm Beach. Ask God to save the lost, free the addicted, restore homes, awaken sleeping Christians, and spread the gospel throughout our community.

  We cannot manufacture revival. We cannot force the fire to fall. But we can humble ourselves, turn from sin, seek His face, and ask Him to do what only He can do.

  So let this become our prayer:

  Revive me. Revive us. Revive West Palm Beach. Lord, turn Your face toward us and do it again.

  Transcript: Pastor Rajiv Khatri

Before the Face of God | 2 Chronicles 7:14 |

West Palm Beach Sermon

Last Sunday, something happened in here.

You were in the room. You saw it. A lot of you came down to this altar. Some of you were crying. Some of you hadn't cried in years. Some of you didn't come down but you felt it anyway, that pull, that weight, that sense that God was close.

It was real. I'm not going to explain it away. God showed up.

And then Monday came.

The alarm went off. You got up. You went to work. You came home. Back to the same apartment, the same bills on the same counter, the same quiet. And somewhere in that week, Wednesday, Thursday, the feeling got thin. It faded a little. And if you're anything like me, a question started working on you.

Was that real? And if it was, how do I get it back?

That's a hard place to be. You tasted something. And now you want it. And you don't know how to get back to it.

So this morning I'm not going to hand you a program. I want to talk about what happened last Sunday. And I want to talk about the God who did it.

Second Chronicles, chapter 7. Old Testament. The story of God's people a long time ago.

King Solomon has just finished building the temple. The temple was the one place on earth where God's presence lived with His people. And here's what happens the day it's finished. Verse 1.

"As soon as Solomon finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the LORD filled the temple. And the priests could not enter the house of the LORD, because the glory of the LORD filled the LORD's house."

The glory of the LORD. That word glory means the weight of God. The realness of God. God’s own presence, so thick you could feel it in the room.

And it filled the temple so completely that the priests, the men whose job was to work inside that room, could not even walk in. The presence pushed them back out the door.

That was not a feeling they worked up. God did it. God turned toward His people, and His presence came down.

And last Sunday, in a much smaller room, with no fire and no cloud, we got a small glimpse of something like that. Not because we pulled it off. God turned His face toward us.

Now keep reading, because God says something to those people that He's saying to us this morning. Verse 14.

"If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land."

He was talking to the people of Israel back then, but he’s talking to us too, right here, right now. My people who are called by my name. That's the church. The people God has put His name on. People like us. He's talking to a room like this one.

And right in the middle, He tells them what to do. Three words. Seek my face.

Seek my face. Not seek my hand. Not seek the things I can give you. Seek my face. In the Bible, a person's face means the person. Their presence. Their self. So God is not saying, come get things from me. He's saying, come get me.

There's a difference between wanting what God can do for you and wanting God. This whole morning lives in that one difference.

What you felt last Sunday was not a mood. It was not the music. It was not the emotion of a full room.

It was God. Turning His face. Toward you.

[FULL STOP. Two seconds.]

And that changes what you do this week. You don't chase the feeling.

You seek His face.

But if you’re going to seek His face, whose face are you seeking. Who is this God? What is He like?

Because last Sunday, we didn't just feel something.

We got a glimpse at Somebody.

And I want us to see Him.

He is holy, and His holiness is good.

Register: storytelling, slow build into awe. One image at a time.

I want to take you to the day a man saw God. Really saw Him. It's in the book of Isaiah.

Isaiah was a preacher. A good man. A religious man. And it was a hard year. The king had just died, and the whole country felt shaky, uncertain, afraid of what was coming. Some of you know that exact feeling. The ground moves under you and you don't know what's next.

And in that year, Isaiah walks into the temple. Probably to pray. Probably like he'd done a hundred times before.

And this time, God lets him see.

He sees the Lord. Sitting on a throne, high and lifted up. And Isaiah can't take in all of God, so he notices the edges. Just the bottom of God's robe, just the hem, and it fills the entire temple. The hem alone fills the room.

And around the throne there are angels. Powerful ones. Each one has six wings. Two wings to fly, and four wings just to cover themselves, because even sinless angels cannot look straight at God.

And they're calling out to each other. Not "holy." Not "holy, holy." They say it three times. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord.”

And the room shakes. The doorframes tremble. Smoke fills the temple.

R.C. Sproul pointed something out about this. In the Bible, when something is really true, they say it twice. Jesus says, "truly, truly." They double it to press it down. But there is only one thing God is ever called three times over. Nobody is called love, love, love. Nobody is called mercy, mercy, mercy. Only this. Holy, holy, holy. All the way to the third degree. Because God’s holiness is not one part of Him. It is the brightness of everything He is.

And Isaiah, the good man, the preacher, falls apart. He cries out, "Woe is me. I'm ruined. I'm a man with dirty lips, and I've just seen the King."

He didn't decide to feel small. He saw God, and the smallness was just the truth arriving.

That word, holy. It means God is above us. Set apart. Clean in a way we have never been. Pure in a way we can't manufacture. So far above us that sinless angels hide their eyes.

That is the God who turned toward us last Sunday.

Now here's where most people get God wrong.

You hear that word, holy, holy, holy, and you picture God a certain way. Arms crossed. Distant. Impossible to please. A God you can never get clean enough for. And if that's the God you're picturing, then a full altar last Sunday isn't good news. It's frightening. Because if God is that holy, then people like us have no business being anywhere near Him.

But watch what this same holy God is actually like.

Jesus told a story about two men who went up to the temple to pray. Same temple. Same holiness.

One was a religious man. He stood up front and prayed a list of his own goodness. God, thank you that I’m not like other people. Especially not that guy over there.

And that guy over there, in the back, was a tax collector. A tax collector back then was a sellout. He worked for the people in power, robbed his own neighbors, and got rich off their backs. Everybody hated him, and he had earned it.

And he knows it. He's standing in the back. He won't even lift his eyes up off the floor. He just beats his chest, like the guilt is physically sitting on him, and he prays seven words. "God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

And Jesus says the man in the back went home right with God. Not the religious one with his list. The broken one with his seven words.

That's the goodness inside the holiness. The holy God, the one the angels can't look at, bends all the way down toward the man everybody wrote off, the moment that man stops pretending and starts acknowledging his sinfulness, acknowledging God’s holiness, and his need for a savior.

God does not turn away from the sinner. He receives the one who stops pretending and cries for mercy.

Holy and good. That is who He is. That is who turned toward us last Sunday.

Now, when you see a God like that, everything in you wants more of Him. And that's good. But it can send you looking for the wrong thing. I know this personally.

Part of how I came to Jesus was through visions. God actually showed me things. It was real, and it was wonderful. And then, one day, the visions stopped.

And I was young in the faith, and I figured I must have done something wrong. So I decided to get them back.

I would go in my room and shut the door. Eyes shut tight. Praying my little heart out. Nothing.

So I thought, maybe I need to set the mood. I dimmed the lights. Lit some candles. Put on the really anointed worship music. Sat there with my eyes squeezed shut, waiting for God to show me a vision.

Nothing.

So I prayed harder. Lit another candle.

Still nothing.

Turns out you cannot make God show up by lighting candles. Who knew.

Now that's funny. Little me and my candles.

But underneath the candles was something that wasn't funny at all.

Here’s the thing I got wrong back then. I thought the goal was the feeling. Get the feeling back. Manufacture the goosebumps.

But what I was actually missing was Him. His presence.

God is everywhere, all the time. He is never not with His people. But sometimes God makes His presence known. There are moments when He pulls back the curtain and lets you feel that He is right there in the room.

That’s what last Sunday was. God, who is always here, letting us know He was here.

And maybe this week, when the feeling faded, you wanted to get the feeling back, or maybe you got scared. Not that a feeling left. That He left.

I want to tell you what I wish someone had told me in that room full of candles.

He didn't leave. And you can't manufacture Him back.

But when God's people get hungry, really hungry, not for a feeling, for Him, He has a long history of pulling back the curtain and showing up.

Wales. 1904. A little country of coal miners and farmers. And the churches there had gone cold. Going through the motions. Same as a lot of places today.

And then God pulled back the curtain over a whole nation.

It didn't start with a famous preacher. It spread from ordinary people who got desperate for God. And within about a year, a hundred thousand people came to Christ in a country smaller than a lot of our states.

But the number isn't what gets me. It's what happened on the ground.

The bars started closing. Not because anybody passed a law. Because the men who used to drink up their whole paycheck every Friday just stopped wanting to. The taverns lost their customers and shut their doors.

Men started showing up at the doors of people they had wronged, years back, to pay off old debts and say they were sorry.

The courts started running out of cases. It got so quiet in some towns that a judge would show up to court and they'd hand him a pair of white gloves, a little ceremony that meant there were no crimes to try that day.

And here's the one I can't get over. Down in the coal mines, the miners used ponies to haul the coal carts. And those ponies had been trained by cursing. Swearing was the only language they'd ever been driven with. So when the miners got saved, and the cursing stopped, the ponies didn't know what to do. They didn't recognize the clean words. The work in the mines actually slowed down, because grown men had stopped swearing.

Nobody organized that. Nobody ran a program that emptied the bars and cleared the courts and confused the mining ponies. A whole nation got a look at how holy and how good God is, and it changed everything, all the way down to the animals in the dark under the ground.

Look what God did.

One more. And this one starts small.

1855.         London. The churches were dead and in real trouble. There was a big Baptist chapel that could seat fifteen hundred people, but on a good day not more than a hundred and fifty ever showed up.

They called a nineteen-year-old to preach. A kid who never finished high school. His name was Charles Spurgeon.

And Spurgeon got his people praying. He led them to pray for a mighty visitation of God, and he had people always praying for him while he preached. That church had a hundred and fifty or less when he got there. One year later, three thousand people were coming. Three hundred were baptized.

And it gets crazier. They had to knock the building down and build a new one. And while that was happening, they started meeting in a hall that seated ten thousand. Whenever Spurgeon showed up, ten thousand were there. At one point they went to a place that seated twenty-seven thousand. And sure enough, twenty-seven thousand people showed up.

And it wasn't just him. In 1858, a little group of six businessmen started meeting at a place called Fulton Street to pray at noon every day for a visitation of God. Just six. One year later, that number had grown to ten thousand businessmen praying for God to move.

And in 1859, revival broke out across the world. Some names you might know came out of that wave. Hudson Taylor, who took the gospel to China. Dwight Moody, a preacher who founded colleges. The people who would lead the church for the next forty years, most of them came to Christ in that one move of God.

It started with a room full of nobodies who got hungry for God.

So here's what's sitting on my chest this morning.

If God did that in Wales, and that in London, then the question isn't whether He can do it.

The question is whether He'll do it here. For you. For us. For our city.

He can do it again.
Register: the full range. Builds through the hinge, detonates at the peak, then descends into tenderness at the Table.

Every one of those stories, Wales, London, the six men at Fulton Street, they all have one thing in common. And it isn't a method. It isn't a program. It isn't the right music or the right candles.

It's a face.

In every real move of God, He turned His face toward His people. Will He turn His face toward us?

That question got answered a long time ago, on a hill outside a city.

Go back to our verse. Second Chronicles 7:14. God tells His people, "seek my face."

Seek my face. Come find me. Come get me, not just my stuff. Me.

Some of you might be thinking. What happens if I seek His face and I’m not clean enough to see it? Isaiah saw God's face and fell apart, and he was a prophet of God. The angels can't even look. So how do people like us, people with dirty lips and dirty hands, ever get to see the face of a holy God and live?.

And before I give you the answer, remember last Sunday. We were all in the same room, but we did not all handle it the same way.

Some of you wept. Some of you wanted to come down, but your feet would not move because you are not a public crier. Some of you stood there thinking, I don’t know what is happening, but something is happening. And at least one of you was quietly checking whether your mascara was going to survive the morning.

Different people. Same God. Same room.

How do sinful people get to see a holy God?

Remember the priests? Back in Solomon's temple, the glory of God came down so heavy that the priests could not walk into the room. The presence pushed them out the door. They could not stand in it. But that is no longer true for us.

Here's why.

Hundreds of years later, there was another Priest. The true one. Jesus. And He walked straight into the presence of a holy God that no one else could stand in. He was the one man with clean hands and a clean heart. The only one who deserved to stand and never get pushed out.

And on a hill, that Priest was driven out.

Not because His hands were dirty. Because ours were. He took our dirty lips and our dirty hands and our sellout hearts and He carried them up that hill, and the holy God turned His face away from His own Son.

Listen to what Jesus cried from that cross. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Why have you turned your face away from me?

He sought His Father's face, the way our verse tells us to. And for the first time in all of eternity, the face turned away.

The priests got pushed out of the room because God was too holy. Jesus got pushed out of the room because we were too dirty. He was driven out, into the dark, away from the face of God, so that you and I could be driven in.

And then Sunday morning came. The real one. The tomb was empty. Jesus had risen.

The face that turned away from Jesus on Friday turned back toward Him on Sunday. And because it turned back toward Him, it will never turn away from you.

So now, when God says "seek my face," here is where you find it.

The Bible says it like this. "The light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ."

You want to see the face of God? Look at Jesus. That's the face. All that holiness that made Isaiah fall apart, all that glory that filled the temple and pushed the priests out the door, it has a face now. And the face is not cold. The face is not far. The face has scars in it, put there for you.

And it gets better. Because that glory that used to live in a building, it doesn't live in a building anymore. When Jesus rose and went back to heaven, He sent His Spirit. And the Spirit does not fill a temple made of stone. He fills people.

You. The one who never belonged anywhere. The sellout in the back who can't lift his head. The one who lit candles trying to feel something. The tired one. The one who blew it all.

The glory that filled Solomon's temple lives in you now. You are the temple. God did not visit you last Sunday and leave. If you belong to Jesus, He moved in.

Now maybe you're sitting here this morning and you weren't part of last Sunday. Maybe this is your first time, or maybe you've been coming for years but you've never actually met Jesus.

So let me tell you how you get in. It's not by cleaning yourself up first. The tax collector didn't clean up first. He just told the truth about himself and asked for mercy. That's it. Turn from going your own way. Stop trusting yourself. Trust Jesus Christ, crucified and risen for sinners. That is the beginning.

Church, I have to tell you what this does to me.

For longer than I should have, I lit candles trying to get God to turn toward me. And the whole time, on a hill I didn't build, the face I was begging for had already turned.

Hear this, Belvedere.

The face you were begging for already turned toward you.

So we don’t chase the feeling. We seek His face.

And because God has already turned toward us in Christ and has taken residence in us by His Spirit, we can ask boldly to bring revival in our land.

And we pray it in three circles. Revive me. Revive us. Revive this city.

Revive me. Start there. It starts with us. A growing awareness of our sinfulness, a growing awareness of God’s holiness and praying with expectancy, “Lord, turn Your face toward me.” Revive me.

Then, revive us. This church. This room. Lord, do again what You did last Sunday, and more. Revive us.

And then, revive our city. Revive West Palm Beach. Lord, turn Your face toward this city.

Imagine it. Imagine what God did in Wales and in London. Now imagine it here.

On Belvedere Road. In the apartments off Military Trail. In the offices downtown.

The household where nobody has spoken about Jesus in years, praying together out loud. The teenager glued to a screen every night, awake to something real for the first time. The father who has been gone even when he was home, asking his wife and kids to forgive him. The addict who has tried everything, finally free. The business person who has everything and has never once felt clean, on his face before a holy God, finally at rest.

And it does not stop at these doors. Imagine sleepy Christians all over our city waking up. Imagine this room full, and churches all over this city coming alive. Imagine people walking out of here on fire, carrying the name of Jesus onto job sites, into schools, and down every street in West Palm Beach.

That’s what revival is. It’s not a crowd that gathers. It’s a people that catches fire and scatters.

That is not a program we can run. It is a fire only He can send.

But we can build the altar. We can lay out the wood. We can seek His face. We can get on our knees and ask Him to do it again. But it is He who brings the fire.

Revive me. Revive us. Revive this city.

God, turn Your face toward West Palm Beach, and let us see thousands upon thousands lit up to live for Your glory.

Let’s pray.