Thanks to King Hezekiah’s decision to follow God with all his heart, the Israelites experienced a nationwide revival of faith. They returned to God with repentant hearts and brought sin offerings to the temple. They diligently removed idols from their towns and tore down the high places where Baal and Asherah had been worshiped. They became so generous in their giving that the entire tribe of priests and Levites was once again fully supported.

Spiritual Life After Revival

It’s one thing for a nation to repent and revive its spiritual life; it’s another to avoid slipping back into idolatry and sin. Pastor Steven J. Cole has this to say about true revival:

“True revival is when the living God sovereignly and powerfully breaks into human history with the good news of his salvation. It invariably begins with His people coming under deep conviction of sin and turning from that sin in genuine repentance. It always involves a recovery of biblical truth, especially the truth about how sinners are reconciled to a holy God. Therefore, it also involves a recovery of the centrality and authority of God’s Word over all of life.” Steven J. Cole, bible.org

King Hezekiah placed a high value on the Word.

“In everything he undertook in the service of God’s temple and in obedience to the law and the commands he sought his God and worked wholeheartedly. And so he prospered.” 2 Chronicles 31:21

Leaving a Legacy

Hezekiah may have been influenced by his grandfather, King Jehoshaphat. During his reign Jehoshaphat sent priests throughout Judah to teach the people the Scriptures and under his guidance the nation experienced a lot of peace and prosperity.  Now King Hezekiah directed his priests to collect and preserve the Scriptures that had been handed down to them.

There was no such thing as “a Bible” in those days. The Scriptures were comprised of the five books of Moses recorded on scrolls and kept at the temple. The writings of David (the Psalms) and Solomon (the Proverbs) were also in the temple literature collection, but had fallen into disuse. Hezekiah and his priests collected the Psalms and Proverbs and incorporated them back into public worship and teaching.

Hezekiah must have taken Proverbs 25:1 to heart as he investigated the Scriptures:

“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.”

What a great challenge for a king to search out what God had to say.

Living By the Word

The Proverbs were written to give people practical wisdom to live by. They cover a vast range of topics and when we read them it’s like trying to catch baseballs batted toward us one after another.

But as we read the Proverbs over and over we start to catch some of them. Different verses stand out because our life circumstances keep changing and Proverbs has wisdom for so many different situations.

You can read the whole book of Proverbs in thirty-one days by reading one chapter per day. Seven of the months of each year have thirty-one days, so if you read a chapter a day during those months, you will read all of Proverbs seven times a year. There’s no downside to that!

Hezekiah inherited a nation that was a mess when he became king. He went to work to fix it by bringing his people into the presence of the Lord where they repented, prayed and worshiped together. Then Hezekiah preserved the fruit of revival by getting people connected to the Word.

That’s the pattern we can follow in our own lives. Whenever we feel disconnected from the Lord, or unproductive in our spiritual growth, we can turn back to the Lord and his Word and he will revive us again.

To read Steven J. Cole’s article on revival check out this link:

https://bible.org/seriespage/lesson-2-when-god-brings-revival-luke-15-17