Let's Talk About Asbury

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Justin Peters. I hope that this finds you and your family doing well today. I want to thank you so much for joining me for this podcast. So today we're going to be talking about the Asbury revival.

This has been much in the news since its inception on February the 8th. I was actually out of the country when it started in Israel on my recent trip there. But this thing has just spread like wildfire and everybody is talking about it.

Not only in the evangelical world, but also many Roman Catholics and even the secular news media is talking about this. A number of secular outlets have reported on what is happening at Asbury University, and not the least of which is Fox News by Tucker Carlson.

So you know if something in the evangelical world has risen to that level that Tucker Carlson is talking about it. This is a pretty big deal. Millions of people really are talking about it. People from all over the world have hopped on airplanes and flown into Kentucky to be a part of this Asbury revival.

And there's a lot of division as to exactly what this is. And so I want us to talk about it on today's program. Is this a revival? What is a revival in the first place? Once we establish that, is this what is happening at Asbury?

So let me say at the onset here that we do have caution. I have cautions and the men that I'm about to introduce to you and interview, they have cautions as well. Please understand, dear ones, that this is in no way a judgment on anyone's sincerity.

We have no doubt that many of the people involved in this are very, very sincere. That is not the issue. We're not calling into question anyone's motives, their sincerity like thereof, none of those things.

We want to get to the truth. We want to talk about what true revival is and does this meet the biblical qualifications of a revival, of a true move of the Holy Spirit and what he does, how he moves. Is that commensurate with what we are seeing at Asbury?

And so I wanted to bring in some trusted voices, some men that I know and trust and am honored to call, not only compatriots in the ministry, but friends of mine as well. So I want to introduce them to you now, and I will introduce them in alphabetical order according to their last names.

The first is Scott Anial, Dr. Scott Anial. Scott has a number of degrees. He has a PhD in worship theology from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the Executive Vice President and Editor-in-Chief at G3 Ministries, and he's authored several books there.

You see, Changed from Glory into Glory, The Liturgical Story of the Christian Faith, and Biblical Foundations of Corporate Worship. Scott has actually written a number of books, and here is a screenshot of them.

I may be missing some, I'm not sure, but anyway, you can look these up. I commend them to you. Scott is a great guy. I had the privilege of spending some time with him in Brazil last year on a trip there.

Super, super great guy, very knowledgeable. I wanted to bring him in on this. Also going to be talking to Dr. Josh Bice. Josh has earned a Master of Divinity and a Doctor of Ministry D .M .N. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He is the pastor of Praise Mill Baptist Church in Douglasville, Georgia, outside of Atlanta, and he is the founder and president of G3 Ministries. And last but not least is Matt Sykes. Matt has earned his Master of Arts in Worship, and he is in the process of finishing his Ph .D. in Worship from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He is actually writing his dissertation as we speak. Super great guy, and he serves currently as the pastor of discipleship and worship at Praise Mill Baptist Church, and just a great guy. All three of these men are super fine guys.

Josh and Scott I spent time with, well I've known them for several years, Josh longer than the other two, but spent time with them on various trips, and Matt got to get to know him a little bit when I was at G3 recently, about a month or so as of this recording, doing some recording there.

So these are three really good brothers, very knowledgeable, and so I want to bring them in. We're going to talk about Asbury. And I would also say that I have no doubt, at least me personally, I have no doubt that there very well may have been some people converted at Asbury when the gospel was actually preached, but we'll talk about how that was not the rule there at Asbury, much more the exception.

But any time the gospel, the true gospel is preached, God can use that to convert someone. I believe that there have been people converted under Benny Hinn's ministry, under his preaching at least. I have heard Benny Hinn present the gospel certainly well enough for someone to be converted, but that is not an endorsement of Benny Hinn.

He is still a false prophet and false teacher in every sense of the term, so it's not an endorsement or a commendation or a validation on any level of Benny Hinn. It's simply that the power of God is the gospel and God can use that despite the instrument through which it might be delivered.

So I want us to talk about Asbury, what is going on there, what are the precautions that we should take, what are the concerns that we have, what it is, what it isn't. I think you'll find this to be a very fair discussion, a very compassionate discussion, and very helpful as well.

Please do watch this, watch it all the way through to its conclusion. There's a lot of information here, we deal with a lot of things, and I think you'll be able to see as we go through that this is coming from the hearts of men who truly do care about Christ, care about his bride, and care about you.

Thank you so much, dear one. So without any further delay, here is our discussion about Asbury. Okay, so Scott, Matt, and Josh, brothers, thank you all so much for taking your time out of your day and joining me for this important discussion, I believe, Asbury and this so-called revival, some are calling it an outpouring, but it has been the topic of conversation in the evangelical world and even some circles in the Catholic Church as well, I understand.

So this is a hot-button issue, and there's a lot of division over it. So thank you all for joining me, and welcome to the channel. And so I thought we would begin just by talking about what is a revival?

I mean, that word is used a lot, but what do we mean when we talk about a revival or an outpouring? What does the Bible have to say about this, and where do we see revival in church history? So I'll kind of tee that off, whoever would like to pick up the ball and run with it.

Yeah, Justin, I think this is a good question, because we, like you said, we talk about revival a lot. We use that word and awakening and these kinds of words, often without defining them. And we have to also remember that we find those words in Scripture, things like awakening and prayers for God reviving us.

But in some ways, we're sort of putting those terms on things that happen in Scripture or in church history. But I think we see them, right? We see prayers, for example, in the Psalms of people crying out and saying, Lord, will you not revive us?

Will you not turn our hearts? And really what they're praying for is that God will lead us towards repentance, that God will lead us towards a pursuit of Him when perhaps there's been a period of time in which we've not been pursuing Him.

And so we find prayers for that. And then I think you clearly do see examples in Scripture of that happening. In the Old Testament, it happens with Israel. You see periods in which the nation is following after false gods, and then God turns them, and there's a season of repenting under the preaching of the Word, and then they begin to follow after God again.

So I think it's perfectly acceptable to call that a revival in which God is reviving His people and turning them back to Him. So I think we do see examples of that kind of thing in Scripture, for sure.

Okay. All right.

Yeah, I would totally agree with that. I think it's sometimes the case where some scholars or theologians want to quibble over the terminology. They'll perhaps make a distinction between a revival and an awakening, an awakening being that idea of an outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon a group of people, bringing and resulting in salvation, and we see this at Pentecost, and we see it again throughout church history, whereas some would say, well, in the Psalms, we're seeing the people of God who were the people of God being restored or brought back into a right standing with God, and that's.

A revival.

Again, I'm not going to really quibble about the distinctions, but what I would say, and I think Scott makes mention of this, is that we always see historically the people responding to the Word of God.

It's the Word of God calling the people of God back into a right standing with Him. And so what we don't see is just this movement that's driven by emotions and all sorts of other cultural things. We see it really driven by the Word of God, and I think that that's historic, and we can even see that in the Protestant Reformation as well.

Okay. All right. That's helpful. That's helpful. What about things like the Great Awakening or the Second Great Awakening, Matt? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think we see, when we look at the Great Awakening, we see, when we read history books, we see what's happening there. We know about Jonathan Edwards and his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and the preaching of that, where it's told that he preached it almost sort of just very even killed, not much inflection in his voice as he preached it.

Of course, we don't know.

We don't have any recording of that, but probably all of us have read the sermon, and we know the emphasis there is on the Word of God, a realization of our sin, our depravity, and our need for true repentance.

And there's reports of how people responded to that sermon with sort of violent emotional reactions, if you will. And I think with that, all of it, it's hard to know what's happening in a moment. When we take one day or a couple of weeks, even, and we see lots of response, especially visceral responses such as that, to know whether this is genuinely producing the fruit of repentance and salvation in people's lives.

So it's very difficult for us to measure something like that in a short period of time. We have to wait. We have to wait and see what kind of fruit those individuals are bearing from that event, whatever it might be.

So I think Edwards wrote about this when he was in response to what was happening with the Great Awakening. And, of course, it turned out that many of the people who responded in that moment continued and persevered in the faith, but many of them didn't years and even decades later.

And so I think we see a lot of good things happening when we read about the Great Awakening. It's easy for us to sort of caricature the Great Awakening, especially as we compare it to the Second Great Awakening.

But in general, when you look at what happened in the Second Great Awakening compared to the First Great Awakening, there's a lot more methods and new measures, as Finney titled them, being employed to try to get people to a crisis moment, to make a decision.

And, of course, we know that Finney...

Charles Finney, speaking of Charles Finney.

Yeah, Charles Finney. Yes, exactly. Charles Finney didn't believe in the total depravity of man. He didn't believe in original sin. So it's an understanding of what we are like in our moral state apart from Christ that is at the root, I think, of this question.

And so we saw a lot of probably false conversions from the Second Great Awakening. And so many people have said that that wasn't a true revival or it wasn't a real Great Awakening. It was sort of a manufactured thing.

And I think there's definitely some value in looking at those two periods and comparing them to each other to sort of see what is revival like, what should it look like, what should responses be, and how do we measure those in the long term?

Yeah, I think that's a really important distinction. Ian Murray's well-known book, Revival and Revivalism, I think articulates that distinction really well. There's a difference between true biblical revival, which Edwards said was a surprising work of God.

It was not scheduled. It was not planned. They didn't hold revival meetings. No, Edwards was simply preaching expositional sermons on justification, and God, in His sovereign wisdom, chose to save a lot of people at one time.

And people did respond, you know, emotionally. But Edwards looked at that and he said, the emotion itself is a sign of nothing. It's just what happens sometimes when people come under deep conviction.

As Matt pointed out, Edwards was really quick to say the true sign of revival is not going to be what happens in the moment in the service. It's going to be whether or not there's fruit and perseverance in the lives of these people long term.

And you contrast that with the revivalism of Charles Finney and those in that period, where they were trying to create something by scheduling meetings, by holding protracted meetings, by having come forward altar calls and anxious benches, and trying to engineer certain things to move people to a point of crisis in which they would then experience revival.

So there's two entirely different theological foundations for what is happening, which affected the methodology, which then affected whether or not there really was fruit. And I think what you see under Finney's ministry, there wasn't fruit to the point where the places in which those revival meetings happened, and there was a lot of fire, they end up being described later as burnt-over districts because there wasn't true regeneration taking place, and the people who experienced those sorts of things were literally burnt out and actually led to apostasy and even a hindrance for the gospel in those regions following what happened.

Yes, yes, exactly. And so much of what we see today in modern evangelicalism is that it's basically the ghost of Charles Finney walking around the hallways of our churches and our meetings, absolutely.

And with more modern-day quote-unquote revivals, really the only thing that we've had in the last, well, in our lifetimes would be like the charismatic renewal, the Pensacola outpouring, Toronto, Brownsville, and then in 2008, Lakeland, with Todd Bentley kicking elderly women in the face with his biker boot upon the instruction from God.

So when we think of revivals today, within our lifetime, they're heavily, heavily charismatic Pentecostal. Um, so how much of that element do you think that dynamic is at play in what we've been seeing in Asbury in the last couple of weeks?

Yeah, I would just, yeah, I would just say as we look at this, this latest quote-unquote revival, Justin, as you mentioned, you know, the connection to the Toronto blessing and Lakeland and all of these, you even mentioned Bentley, interestingly enough, I mean, he found his way to Asbury and was in the, in the chapel and in the balcony and spent a few days there and praised it.

Um, obviously we see a massive connection to all of these things that we're seeing flow from Finney's ministry. Scott mentioned the anxious bench and, and all of this come forward to the front, this crisis moment, and all of these pictures that are flowing out of this, this latest quote-unquote revival, uh, on this university campus seem to have those very characteristics.

We see them at the front, you know, praying. We see a lot of the same sorts of methods, right? As we think about, you know, uh, the, the, the inspection of fruit, if you will, uh, just being able to, to look and see, uh, whether or not this is a legitimate movement of God or whether or not it's, you know, something that was planned by man.

Um, when we evaluate these things, according to scripture, it just seems that this doesn't pass the test. Again, I don't want to be seen as just being overly judgmental, but to be clear, we're actually called to examine such things and such movements according to God's word.

And so we're seeing those characteristics that are very much connected to Finney's ministry rather than someone like, say, Jonathan Edwards, for instance. We talk about the ghost of, of Finney, and, and we think about, you know, how Finney's ministry really impacted the whole of evangelicalism, that of Billy Graham, uh, the Southern Baptist Convention, even in my own pastoral ministry over the last, say, decade of ministry, there have been, uh, you know, many people, an enormous number, in fact, great percentages of people that I've baptized, not for the first time, but for the second or even third time, which I think is a tragedy.

And so that, along with all the videos that I've seen flowing out of this latest, uh, quote unquote revival, this movement, uh, it has, uh, been very much connected to the, the charismatic movement. Even, uh, as late as yesterday, I saw a group of people on the campus circled up and, uh, one figure in the middle preaching and, uh, instructing everyone to hold their hands high above their head to receive the blessing of God so that they could speak in unknown tongues.

Hey, dear friends, I wanted to interrupt Josh just for a moment here to insert something, because this is a good point to insert it. Josh was just talking about how he saw video just, uh, I think from yesterday as of this recording of people, uh, at Asbury being instructed to hold hands to receive the gift of speaking in tongues.

And, and this is a good point to good opportunity to point out that holding hands is a common technique amongst word faith NAR type folks. Um, Benny Hinn, especially is a good example. Benny Hinn will tell members of his audience to hold one another's hands.

And he does that right before he slays them in the spirit. Now this is a, because when you're holding someone's hand, uh, that makes your audience much more manipulatable. Uh, you can control them more easily.

And then he yells fire on them or shouts. And, and, uh, if one person falls back because they're preconditioned to do this, but when one person falls back, well, if you're holding someone's hand and then the person next to you, they're kind of also going along with this.

Well, when your neighbor begins to go back, then you begin to go back. And pretty soon you've got dozens, if not hundreds of people being slain in the spirit, uh, all at the same time. So, uh, I don't know how much of this hyper charismatic element was there.

And Asbury, I know some of it was because it even made it into the national news. Watch this video clip that, uh, I found as I was actually on, uh, Twitter and discovered this. I think, I believe it was Terry green who posted this and I went and found the clip and downloaded it.

Um, it even made it on Fox news. Listen very carefully to the interview here that Ainsley Earhart does with this, uh, young lady who is an Asbury student there at the revival. Listen very carefully to this.

All right. Thank you so much, Ashley. Well, we are here at Asbury university as we've been saying, where the spirit of God just touched so many people in this auditorium behind us. It is alive on this campus.

We're in Kentucky. People have been worshiping here 24 seven for the last two weeks. It has been wonderful to see. We're here with Kirsten Williamson and Khalil at key. Am I saying that right? A Kiki, a Kiki.

Okay.

Beautiful name. Well, thank you all for being here. You're both students here. What year are you?

Um, actually I am not a student here, but I'm a senior in high school.

Amazing. Even better. So you live in the area and you just are coming by Southern Ohio about two and a half hours.

What?

Yep. Okay. So when, when did you start, when was your first service two weeks ago or was it?

Uh, so it started the eighth and I came on that Sunday and yeah, yesterday was my sixth time coming here.

That is great. So where are you staying in a hotel? How are you pulling this off?

We have been, I've been coming with friends. We've been traveling back and forth. And then last night was like the only night we stayed in Airbnb, but it's all worth it.

So what have you seen so much?

Um, we have seen limbs grow back. We have seen limbs grow back.

What do you mean?

So Ainsley Earhart asked this young lady who turns out high school senior, but she says, what have you seen? And she said, well, we've seen limbs grow back. What you've seen limbs grow back. And Ainsley rightly is struck by that.

She said, wait, limbs grow back. What do you mean? So I'm going to back up and play this again for you. Watch carefully. Listen to what she says in response.

What have you seen so much?

Um, we have seen limbs grow back. We have seen limbs grow back.

What do you mean?

We have seen people just go up to people, pray for them. Um, even yesterday I saw a girl take off her boot. She had a sprained ankle. A guy came back in line, prayed for her. She threw it off, started running and just weeping for what God had done for her.

And she said it didn't hurt anymore. Just incredible.

Okay. Dear ones, there's a huge difference between a limb growing back and someone running around with a sprained ankle, uh, those kinds of healings, you know, the sprained ankles kind of stuff, you know, bursitis in your shoulder.

Those are all psychosomatic healings. Those happen all the time at charismatic conferences and events and crusades and all that. I wish I had a nickel for every time I have seen a psychosomatic healing mind over body.

Those happen constantly in charismatic crusades. Benny Hinn, I mean, if I did have a nickel, I'd be a very wealthy man right now. However, if I had a nickel for every time I've seen a genuine organic healing, a healing that cannot be explained by, um, just mind over body or temporary rush of adrenaline.

Um, I'd be completely destitute and living under a bridge. Those healings do not happen at charismatic meetings, uh, Benny Hinn crusades, those kinds of things. Psychosomatic. Yes. All the time. Organic.

No. And, you know, I don't think this young lady was trying to deceive. Uh, I think she was just caught up in the emotion of the event, the emotionalism, exactly what Josh was speaking of and to whom we shall now return.

And so as a sign that, again, that the spirit of God was moving upon them. So, uh, in my estimation, I would say this does not pass the test of a legitimate revival, biblically speaking. But I would also say that there are probably, uh, genuine converts that are there on this campus that are just confused and that are caught up in all of the abuse.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's really important to talking about the, you know, the methods of, of someone like Charles Finney being employed here. I mean, I watched several clips from, or extended videos from this service.

You know, they frequently refer to the bot, the front area as the altar, right? Come down to the altar and receive prayer, receive, you know, receive, come lay everything down. Another thing that I think is really important that I heard language being used, uh, was, uh, about this, you know, this auditorium on Asbury's campus sort of being the, you know, compared to like the temple or the tabernacle and coming to meet God at this place, like his presence is here at this place.

And that's another aspect, you know, that we have to, we have to look at it's not the word of God, but it's this special anointed place that we have to go to and receive the spirit.

Right. Yeah.

Which brings up, I agree completely. And that's, yeah, yeah. No, I was just going to raise the issue of, of the centrality of music in this Asbury event, which is to me, another real clear indication of the influence of the charismatic movement in, and even Finney earlier, in contrast to true movements of, of conversion and repentance in church history and in scripture, which are always centered on the preaching of God's word.

And music is certainly going to be part of the services. Music is going to be a way to teach doctrine. It's going to be a way to respond to the Lord, you know, in, in response to the preached word. But if you look at either scriptural revival or even, you know, the Reformation or the Great Awakening under Edwards, there is the singing of hymns, but that's not really what is producing the responses.

What is producing the responses is the Holy Spirit of God working through his preached word. Whereas at Asbury, there's very little, if any, preaching, it's really song after song after song after song, the centrality of music, which again, comes directly out of the charismatic movement where music has now reached a level where they even themselves describe music as a sacrament.

That's how we experience the presence of God. We experience God's presence through the music, and so if you remove the music, then there's no longer the presence of God. And that's the kind of language and things that we're, you know, we're seeing take place at Asbury.

Music is very central.

Right, right. And I've said in talking to some friends of mine about this, if you were to go up and unplug the keyboard, it would stop. I mean, the Holy Spirit would just disappear somehow. And I've told some of you this, I've watched, now, none of us, in fairness, none of us, I don't think, have been to this in person.

I haven't been there. I haven't had the opportunity, but I've watched quite a bit of it online, and I watched a lot of the live stream online, and it was just what you're saying, Scott. It was heavily, it heavily emphasized music.

It would be one song after another, and I didn't see any preaching. I didn't see any exposition. I didn't see any preaching at all until the final night, as of this recording this past Thursday night, where there was, to be fair, some of that, but I probably watched eight to 10 hours of the live stream in the days leading up to Thursday night, and I didn't see any preaching.

I didn't hear any preaching. There were a few testimonies, but it was 90 music, and not only was it music, but it was these Bethel Hill song songs, the quintessential 7 -11, a few words repeated over and over and over and over, very shallow music, very shallow lyrics, nothing overtly heretical, but very shallow, and it was the same five or six songs repeated over and over.

There for a while, I thought I was stuck in a loop in listening to it in the live stream because it was just the same stuff over and over and over, so Scott, that goes to what you were talking about. What is the effect on the intellect?

What is the effect on the mind when you have these few songs with just a few words repeated over and over and over for so many songs could last eight, 10 minutes, what does that do to the intellect?

Yeah, well, the intellect actually gets in the way in that theology. If you have too much theological density, then you're actually prohibiting the spirit from working somehow because it really is this sort of psychosomatic, almost trance that you work yourself into.

It really resembles sort of New Age mantra where you just say the same thing over and over again, and yeah, like you said, Justin, it might not be heretical. It might actually be theologically true statements, but the effect is you're just saying the same thing over and over again.

You're not really thinking about it, and you work yourself into sort of an emotional experience that then has come to be defined because of the influence of Pentecostalism. That experience or those feelings, that's the presence of God, and waves and waves of God's presence is how it's often described, and that's what you end up seeking after.

Right, right, and none of us—I know one of the criticisms for folks in our theological camp, our sociologically-reformed circles, oh, you're just a bunch of fuddy-duddies. You're so scared of emotion and all that kind of thing, and to the contrary, I would be afraid of the man whose emotions are not impacted by the profundity of Christ and who he is and what he's accomplished for us.

If your emotions are not impacted by him, then I would be concerned for you, but what we're seeing with this is something totally different. This is emotionally driven, emotionally sourced, and as one part of this, one piece of this puzzle, I have watched—I don't know if y 'all have—but I watched the sermon, the initial sermon that kicked this thing off, and again, kind of like I said a minute ago, nothing overtly heretical, but there was no gospel there either.

The gospel was not presented, and it was from that sermon that this whole thing started, so I'm assuming that you would—.

Yeah, in fact, Justin, if you go back and look at the transcript of that sermon, tacos is mentioned three times as many times as repentance is.

Interesting, I hadn't noticed that, but yeah.

Yeah, so in other words, repentance was mentioned zero times, and tacos was mentioned three times in that sermon, but it should be noted that the sermon itself is not really where the quote-unquote spark of revival happened.

It was after the chapel service ended, and a group of students circled up to sing together, and then the president sent a message sometime later, a few hours later, that apparently that the Spirit of God was moving in the chapel, so that everyone flooded the chapel, and then it shut everything down on campus at that point.

Right, yeah, and did y 'all see this? So apparently Asbury—I want us to talk about Asbury itself some here, but Asbury has had, I believe, 12 revivals, to use that term. They've claimed 12 revivals in their history.

11 of the 12 have been in February, and the other one was in March. That's just a—it's a curiosity to me. So let's talk about that and talk about Asbury itself. So there's the college Asbury, Asbury University, and then there's Asbury Theological Seminary.

I went to their websites, and both of them, by their own admission, they both say, both the university and seminary, say we are grounded in the Wesleyan holiness tradition. They do, to be fair, have a doctrinal statement of faith that would pass a basic doctrinal smell test.

They affirm inerrancy in the originals and that kind of thing. They affirm marriage is between one man and one woman. They affirm the bodily resurrection of Christ and all these things. But what—so two questions.

What is the Wesleyan holiness tradition? So we know exactly what Asbury is and the theological ground from which they're coming. What is that? And should we expect to see a true move of the Holy Spirit start in a university as opposed to the church?

Matt can speak to the Methodist holiness movement, I think, well. Yes. So the Wesleyan holiness movement, there's, I guess, as far as I understand it, there are sort of two kind of branches in terms of Wesleyan tradition, Methodism, and the holiness movement is rooted in kind of coming out of that revivalism of the 19th century, especially kind of the things we were talking about earlier with Charles Finney.

And this emphasis on the Wesleyan idea of perfectionism or the second blessing theology, which of course then eventually leads us into Pentecostalism and the idea of being baptized in the Holy Spirit as a separate event from conversion.

And so I think it's a lot of emphasis on this idea of what they would call holiness, or maybe even holiness of life. But it seems to be rooted primarily in the experiential, this sort of these mountaintop experiences of experiencing what they perceive as the outpouring of God's spirit for them and taking them to higher and higher planes of sanctification each time that happens.

And it's not really holiness in the way we would think of it in like a life that's characterized by virtue, by living out the fruit of the spirit in every area of life, but it's this experiential kind of holiness where we were coming before the throne of God and we're pouring ourselves out.

We're getting these, everything we've been talking about, these experiences of God. And so I think that's where they find themselves. I was actually part of, when I was in college, I was actually part of a campus ministry that was part of the Wesleyan Holiness movement, tradition, whatever you might want to call it.

And I can just tell you that the things that I've seen on the videos, the live feed from this event, this revival, so-called revival at Asbury, is very similar to what I experienced on an almost weekly basis on those Wednesday night meetings on campus.

Even the same kind of language being used, even the same way of talking about God and talking about even the Bible and the way we talk about experiencing God, those kinds of things. A lot of similarities into what I would see, not just like on a one time or certain periods, but almost on a weekly basis, that was the same motivation that was driving those meetings.

And so I find it very interesting that we could see, like you brought forward, Justin, about these meetings happening every, always happening around February, March. Could there be something about, we're getting close to the end of the school year, but we're not, we still got a lot of time left.

I mean, who knows what's driving that time factor. But it's interesting that we've seen 12 of those in the history of the school, which is just a little over a hundred years old. And we've seen 12 revivals, these special moves of God spirit there.

And then to answer your other question, I don't think we would see revival taking place outside of Christ's church. I mean, it only makes sense biblically if we read the text of scripture, that if there's going to be this revival taking place, it would happen in the local church, which is where God's ordinary means of grace are taking place.

And again, I keep going back to this connection to this idea that this is a special location, sort of like a special temple that we have to go to. We have to make this pilgrimage to, which of course we have seen that with, I think over a hundred thousand people visiting the campus over the last two weeks, coming to experience and get a taste of the presence of God in this location.

So why is it this location where we're experiencing this outpouring of the spirit, if it's a true revival, shouldn't it be happening within the local churches and be more broad than this one place? Yeah.

Right. Yeah, Matt, I would agree with that. I think we look to God's church as being where God is placing his emphasis and moving upon his people and growing us through the ordinary means of grace. That is not to say that God can't use college students to do extraordinary things and to really take bold stands where necessary.

I mean, we've seen this historically. If you study the Reformation, you'll find that in many ways it was a student movement in terms of the grassroots idea of the Reformation. I mean, you find Luther there teaching theology in Wittenberg, and you see the 95 theses nailed to the castle church door, typeset, spread abroad.