Realities of Revival II: The Means of Revival

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder, and with me this week again is Teddy James, who is normally on the other side of the camera, but Teddy has agreed to be with me through this short series on a topic that is often misunderstood or neglected, but it is one of great sweetness to the believer, and one that requires real carefulness and wisdom, and that is the topic of revival, or Extraordinary Seasons of Grace, and last time we left off with mentioning some good books that people could read, and I didn't give these two because these are not really books that I'm going to recommend someone reads because they are reference books, but I want to call your attention to them because they're so unusual.

These are two annotated bibliographies, and they were... Explain what an annotated bibliography is.

Yeah, so a bibliography, if you think back at when you were stuck in school and you had to write a book report, or you had to write, you know, a small paper, at the back of your paper, if you quoted anybody, you had to give the bibliography what book.

Okay, so what books you used in the producing of your paper. So these are simply lists of books that exist and where you can find them in the world's libraries.

This was all assembled pre -

And really, I think he should have been given an honorary doctorate just for this, because it's quite a feat.

He traveled the Western world, and, you know, in Britain and America in particular, and went to these libraries and the books that he had purchased over decades, and he assembled a list of books on revival, or books about Whitefield, either by Whitefield, by Whitefield supporters, or by Whitefield's critics.

And I have actually read these two books, and Mr. Roberts said that he assumed that it was me, and him, and his wife,

Maggie, that we would probably be the only ones that read them, because she proofread them for print.

But I want to just point out, this one is called An Annotated Bibliography of Revival Literature, so this deals with the revival any century that Mr.

Roberts was able to locate, and so it has nearly 6 ,000 entries.

So I'm gonna hold it up, I don't know if the camera will be able to catch it. So what you have is, for instance, here's one by Cotton Mather, early

American minister, and this is the 3 ,597th entry, but we have

Cotton Mather, The Triumphs of the Reformed Religion in America, The Life of the

Renowned John Eliot, a person justly famous in the Church of God, not only as an eminent

Christian and an excellent minister among the English, but also as a memorable evangelist among the

Indians of New England, with some account concerning the late and strange success of the gospel in those parts of the world, which for many ages have lain buried in pagan ignorance.

Written by Cotton Mather, this edition is 1691. It's 152 pages, and then

Mr. Roberts gives, through his abbreviated way, he has a way of listing libraries, he gives about nine libraries that you can find these in in the world.

It is an amazing resource. By the way, that really long paragraph I read, that was the title and the subtitle.

So if you want to know about a genuine revival or an extraordinary season of grace that occurred when an early

American minister, John Eliot, was preaching to the Indians, before David Brainerd, before other missionaries that we know better, not just that he was a

Reformed man as a missionary to the Indians in America, but he experienced some extraordinary success.

John Cotton recorded it. You can find that book, you can probably find it more easily on Google Docs, but you can find that book and you can read.

And so there are 6 ,000 of those, and the Whitfield and Print over 8 ,000. So quite amazing resources, you know, really for those that want to do some pretty significant reading.

So John, we've talked about a lot of different books, and they're fantastic books, but if you were to give a very simple and very succinct definition of what revival is, without having to, you know, pour through 8 ,000 entries, can you give us a very simple working definition of revival?

I'll give two, and these are both pretty to the point. They're certainly shorter than the titles of the books

I read. This is by Richard Owen Roberts in his little book on revival, and he says, in using the term revival, which in his first chapter he says,

I'm not saying this, and he gives a lot of nots. Not, not, not, not. So what are you saying? I am speaking of an extraordinary movement of the

Holy Spirit producing extraordinary results. So, an extraordinary movement of the

Spirit, an extraordinary work of God that produces extraordinary results.

Now, in the book, The Revival of Religion by the Scottish Ministers, they give a definition, and I think it's also helpful.

They say this, revival is an unusual manifestation of the power of the grace of God in convincing and converting careless sinners, and in quickening and increasing the faith and holiness or piety of believers.

So, an unusual display of the power of God's grace that both awakens and saves unconverted, unbelieving people, but it also shakes, it revives, it stirs the sleepy church, and makes their faith and holiness to increase.

Well John, we've seen that, we see God convert sinners, we see him wake up sleepy churches and sleepy believers on, you know, every

Sunday. So what makes revival different from those times? That is probably, that's the million -dollar question, you know, because if you get the answer to that wrong, then you are on a wrong path that it is very hard to recover from.

No matter how much you want God to be honored, no matter how much you want his kingdom to spread, no matter how much you want the lost to be converted and the church to be awakened, if you answer that question wrongly, then it's nearly impossible to see that accomplished in a healthy way.

There will be so much error. So the simple answer, and I'm grateful to say that it's clear in history and in Scripture, the simple answer is that it is not different fundamentally from the work that God does in all the other aspects of redemption.

So as New Covenant believers, we are experiencing things that Christ purchased for us, that the

Holy Spirit is applying to us, that the Old Testament was prophesying and foreshadowing and preparing us for, that the

New Testament so clearly explains not just in the teaching of Jesus, but in the epistles where in perfect ways we see this is how

I live on the provision of Christ through this New Covenant applied by the

Spirit. So when we look at what God does in the lives of people, those fundamental things, conviction of sin, you know, breaking our hearts, convincing us that what

Christ says is true, and enabling us to believe with all our being Him that we've not yet seen, we've never touched, and yet we love

Him, Peter says, with joy unspeakable. So, conversion, repentance, and faith, the new birth, the conviction that precedes that, the drawing, the convincing, you know, uniting us to Christ, filling us with hope, in giving us what we need moment by moment for enduring sanctification, and finally completing that.

All those wonderful things that we think of as the normal work of God, if you have a right view of the normal, just because we've grown up in churches that may not have seen this occur regularly does not mean that that's not normal.

I think most of us would say we grew up in churches that were probably beneath the norm, but the wonderful ordinary work of God through the gospel applied by the

Spirit and the agency of His Church, well, that's really the same thing that revival is, except for one difference, the degree.

Revival is that raised to a degree or a level that is extraordinary.

It is not the normal Christian life. If you read the accounts of Whitefield, or of Edwards, or of the

Welshman, or the Scots, you know, during those centuries, the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, you see things, you know, you see how maybe they had all -night prayer meetings, or maybe the sermon went on for hours and hours, and nobody even noticed the passage of time.

Daniel Rowland in Wales was preaching, and he was so wonderfully used, and Rowland said in one unusual sermon, this wasn't the norm, he started preaching and the sun was shining in, you know, the windows on one side of the building, and he ended the sermon and the sun was starting to shine in on the other side, so, you know, what was that, from 10 to 3, you know, and he said there was no sense of the passage of time.

We find that described over and over, it's like God invades space and time, and that's all that we are aware of, and he accomplishes the normal things.

Conviction, salvation, sanctification, but they are accomplished at a rate that is extraordinary.

I remember one minister in Wales who met, when he was a young pastor, he pastored some of the people who had lived during the 1904 -05

Welsh Revival, which was certainly not a perfect revival, and we'll talk about imperfection in revival in coming podcasts, but he met some of those that were genuinely affected by that, and they lived godly lives all the way to the end, and by the time he was in his late 20s ministering, they were, you know, very old, and they gave him eyewitness reports.

He actually pastored the sister of Evan Roberts, who is one of the more famous preachers of the 04

Revival in Wales. And what this pastor, his name's

Vernon Hyam, what Mr. Hyam said about revival, he said it's like being chauffeur -driven.

It's as if, you know, we're going about doing all the normal work of the church, we're witnessing, we're praying, we're visiting the sick, we're trying to encourage a struggling

Christian, we're warning a Christian, who is drifting into dangerous territory. All of that is still going on, but it's like suddenly, we're not driving the car, it's like God drives the car, and it's chauffeur -driven, and things are accomplished at a rate which we could not imagine.

In the Great Awakening in the United States, some ministers complained about the awakening, because they were,

I think we would say they were compromised, they had grown lazy in the ministry. Maybe they weren't truly converted.

But they complained because they said, and these are men that did not agree with the revival, they said, because of Whitefield's coming and preaching, or because of Edwards, or you know, or Frelinghuysen, and whoever it is, you know, the

Tenet brothers, I have more work to do in a week than I have had to do in my whole previous year.

So suddenly you have people beating on your door, you know, at 1 a .m. or at 5 a .m., and they say, hey, before I go to work,

Pastor, I've got to tell you, I've got to have your help, can you help me find

Christ? And the minister is thinking, why are people waking me up all hours of the night? And it goes on and on and on.

More people in a week than we had in a year, more people in that year than I had in the decades previous, and so not everybody liked the consequences of God drawing near, but it is the same work lifted to a higher level.

Let me give one other illustration. If you think about, let's use the metaphor of a beautiful garden, and I'm thinking

British garden, not American garden, right? So don't think of peppers and, you know, tomatoes and squash. Think of flower garden.

So you walk out in your backyard, and you've got this big space, and you think, you know, I want to do something with this.

I want to try my hand at planting. And so you begin to plant, and you lay it all out, and you

Google everything, and you watch all these things on television, and you just do, and it takes so much work.

And getting the land prepared, and planting, and getting it all fertilized, and that's the easy part.

The hard part comes from the rest of your life tending to it. One time I planted, the first time that I owned a house was when we came to New Albany so that I could pastor here.

My wife and I, it's our first house we owned, and I like roses, so I said to my wife,

I'm going to plant rose bushes for you. I don't know if they were for her or for me. I planted 16 rose bushes.

After a couple of years of having to go out and spray those every time that we had a good rain in Mississippi summer, which is like every three or four days, you know, we had that kind of midday rain, and you know, to get the fungus off the leaves, etc.,

to prune them. I was so sick of those roses by year two or three that I mowed quite a few rose bushes under, all right.

We can think about planting and all the hard work, but if you're a better planter than I am, you know, you can create a beautiful garden.

But that's a picture of the normal work. Ministers, people on the pew, all true believers living, studying, applying the

Scripture, speaking to the people next to them, praying, you know, looking for opportunities for the work of God to go forward by their witness.

That's a lot of hard work, and it does produce a wonderful garden under the, you know, the blessing of the

Holy Spirit. But that's not revival. Revival is more like another thing.

Revival is still, using our metaphor, it's still like plants, beautiful plants growing, but it's not us doing all the hard work and we see a good result, you know, the wonderful result that we hoped for.

Well, hold on, because when you say it's not us doing the hard work, we're still doing the work. We're still doing the normal things that we do, right?

We're still going about the normal means, yes, normal methods, but it's not us producing the extraordinary result, and so let me give an example.

Compare that landscaping illustration with what I'm about to say. In the city of Cardiff, Wales, where my wife and I and our kids lived for a few years while I was doing research, there are a number of scenic spots, and one of the scenic spots is a hill on the edge of the city called the

Wynolt, because George Whitfield talks about going over it, as well as Hal Harris, and there's...so,

you know, when you're walking on this hill, if you're a student of revival history, it's just so thrilling. I think, what if Whitfield walked the same path?

And I would go out there occasionally with my Bible early, early in the mornings, and I had to drive to the edge of the city, and I would just get out there before the

British people started walking their dogs. And the Brits aren't always as early to get up as Americans, okay?

So I had a long stretch of nobody, and I would sit on this big flat rock and read my

Bible and write in my journal, and it was wonderful. I remember going out a few times. I didn't go out every week,

I didn't even go out every month, but I remember going out a few times, and then there was a long break because of the winter, and it's just mud, and then towards spring,

I went back out, and I was astonished. This forest that the trail leads through, this forest was covered in a carpet of purple.

It was, they were bluebells, and they were everywhere on the forest floor, everywhere except the path, under every tree.

There was no part of that forest that wasn't covered in bluebells. It looked like someone came and laid some artificial, you know, prop, some

Hollywood prop down, that someone just laid down this carpet of purple flowers. And I thought about it, and it is, it's much like the difference between the normal work of the church and when

God comes and causes that normal work to be extraordinary. It would have taken thousands of workers a long time to get that many bluebells planted and up and beautiful, but for God, it was overnight, you know.

It was something that happened naturally, and of course, and it looked like, wow, in a few moments, in a few days or maybe a week of springtime, suddenly there is a forest of flowers prettier than anything we could do, and it was, you know, it's like it surprised me, and oftentimes that's what revival is.

Another way of describing it is as if a nation were born in a day.

It is an extraordinary rate of success of the gospel, an extraordinary growth among God's people, so that, you know, looking back, it's not exactly like this, but it feels like we were in darkness before, and then there was a sunrise, and the whole land is covered in light.

And that's often the illustration that some of the 18th century and early 19th century men used to describe what revival felt like.

It was like a dawn. Instead of us carrying around candles at night or flashlights, it's like God sent the dawn, and it feels as if it is occurring in a moment compared to the ordinary, slow work of a church.

There is something in my heart that now just burns and just says, okay, Lord, send revival now.

So John, talk to us about, you know, how do we seek and pray for revival?

Well, what these men pointed out in the book Revival of Religion, what we've talked about, the fact that the work of revival is the same kind of work, same categories of work that God does in salvation, except it's lifted to a much higher degree, so it's extraordinary in its impact, or it's, you know, the swiftness of its accomplishment.

That's different. But since it's the same basic kind of thing, then that means we use the same methods.

And that, of course, is where we immediately see a lot of carelessness. It's just natural to us to think that if we're going to have a revival, that we've got to have revival methods.

I grew up thinking that that was inviting a more dynamic preacher than my pastor normally is, and of course it includes inviting a dynamic singer, usually a family of singers.

I don't know where those families live, but Sniders are definitely never going to own a bus that says, The Sniders, and we arrive and start to sing.

You know, we would be paid not to sing. Our little family worship times, you know, it's just sanctifying to have to listen to all of us listen to each other sing.

We'd have this fancy family show up, they all played five or six instruments, the preacher was really dynamic, and you know, the altar calls were gripping, and you know, you would be able to report at the end of the week, 50 people saved this week, and it was a success, but that's not what we're talking about.

What do we normally do? We study the Scripture, we pray, we cry out to the

Lord for Christian and for unbeliever. We cry out that God would make us to be a very clear billboard of what

He can do so that our lives don't clash with the words that we're saying about Jesus. Wonderful comments about your

Lord, pretty puny fruit, you know, if that's the best He can do, I'm not so interested.

So we use the means that God has given us. The Word, prayer, fasting, worship, you know, even the

Lord's Supper, baptism, church discipline, fellowship with other believers, all of these things, we use them as fully as the

Bible would have us them. So for example, Mr. Roberts has often mentioned that one of the things we can do is use baptism, or the

Lord's Supper, in the right way, and instead of just treating it like it's a thing that we do every week, or every month, or every quarter, what if the preacher began to prepare the church for the celebration of the baptism of a believer, and the believer gives, you know, a significant testimony.

We don't just say to them when they get down in the baptistry, you know, are you a

Christian? Yes, sir. Did you ask Jesus into your heart? Yes, sir. Where is He right now? In my heart?

That's right, Johnny. And based on this testimony and and the authority invested in me by this church,

I baptize you, you know, in the Trinitarian name. Well, what if Johnny was allowed to, you know, to be discipled before the baptism, was allowed to have time in front of the church, and in his own way, whether he's a 15 -year -old, a 12 -year -old, or a 80 -year -old, that he is allowed to explain to the church, this is how

God saved me. And, you know, according to his ability to just be so clear with the people, and that to be approached prayerfully by the entire church, and, you know,

Johnny's friends and his family who don't go to the church and don't really get excited about Christ at all, they are there, and they see that baptism, they hear that testimony, they hear the sermon, they see the people thrilled at the baptism, you know, the

Christians, they see changes in this young person or old person that follow week after week after week.

What a wonderful tool. And that's just one thing. So what

Richard R. Roberts has said in the past, and I think it's the simplest way to answer your question, is to make an extraordinary use of the ordinary tools or means that God has given us to promote

His kingdom, because we need an extraordinary work. John, that sounds good, but I mean, can we see that in history?

Can we look back and see examples of that? Yeah, I think that it's crystal clear. We see it in Scripture.

You think of the accounts in 2nd Chronicles, when Hezekiah sees how his father, a wicked man, has led the nation into idolatry, and all that has come from that as judgment from the

Lord, to get their attention. When young Hezekiah in his 20s sees this, his response is not ordinary.

He doesn't say, you know, I feel like I need to make sure that I don't skip my 20 -minute quiet time today, and I'm gonna show up at church on Saturday, and I'm gonna talk to my friends that, you know, live next door to the palace and invite them to the youth special this week.

Like, no, it's...the need is extraordinary. We, at times, there are times in history where we feel that the ordinary work of the

Lord is just not enough, and we're asking God to show up and to do something to turn a nation, to turn a denomination, to turn a church, to turn a family, a marriage, or your own cold, dry soul, to turn it to Christ.

And so the desperate need is then matched by the extraordinary seeking, and we see that in Scripture, and we also see it in history.

One example I want to give is this book, The Revival of Religion. In the introduction, and in chapter 1, there's a lot of talk about these kind of things, and I believe it's in the introduction, where it's mentioned that in their day, in the 1840s, leading up to that revival, the churches did do something different.

And they give three things that they did. Number one, now remember, these are churches that are already preaching pretty long, theologically serious

Reform sermons. These are Church of Scotland men. And the people are already being called to repentance, the

Christians are already being told that their lives impact the people around them, so they're doing the ordinary things of the

Christian life. This is what was added. Number one, the preachers began to call attention to the doctrine of revival in their preaching from the pulpit.

So they began to deal with texts that described the need for God's nearness, how would we seek that nearness, what would we expect from that nearness, and they did it first from Scripture.

So again, those passages that describe where God describes who may draw near to Him. The Reformation and Revival under Asa in 2

Chronicles. Asa leads the nation to repent, to put their idols down in the dirt, to destroy them.

Even his mother has an idol she's hiding, and he deals with that. He calls the people, not just in Judah, but even the the tribes in Israel, which are not under his rule, he's the king of Judah to the south, hey, if you're sick of worshiping the golden cows up north, come here, we will seek the

Lord, and many of them came. He even sent messengers into non -Jewish areas, come seek the

Lord, and they did, and at the end of that account it says, the Lord let them find

Him. When they cried out to Him in a covenant with one voice, one heart.

So there are a lot of lessons there, it's not a formula, but there are lessons. If God is unchanging, this is a way to seek

Him that is appropriate. He's still sovereign, and He will bring and reward and give and respond as He chooses.

We can trust Him to do what is best, but we see some very good principles in the biblical accounts of seeking.

But that's not, okay, let me, in the accounts of biblical seeking.

But that's not all they did, they didn't just call attention to biblical passages. Second, they said the historical accounts of revival were recovered from neglect.

So the people had quit reading those biographies, they had quit reading about Seasons of Unusual Grace.

They still read Christian books, but just not books about real revival. So they were recovered from neglect, they were republished by the denomination, and they were encouraged in the church.

So the pastor said, if you haven't read Jonathan Edwards over here, his book on, you know, the nature of a narrative of surprising conversions, where he talks about young people especially being wonderfully saved in the midst of that revival, if you haven't read that, well, there is a new edition.

You can now get that here in Scotland, and we encourage you to read it. Third, prayer was called for in an extraordinary way.

Public prayer family prayer, private prayer. Robert Murray McShane reported that in his church, as the people were beginning to be stirred by the hunger for revival and the beginnings of it, he said there were 39 separate prayer meetings that occurred.

Some of them were just children meeting. And so it wasn't, every prayer meeting wasn't a gathering of the entire church.

It might have been, you know, businessmen at lunch, or moms in the evenings, or dads before they go to work, you know, or it might have been everybody, you know, in the gathered services of the church.

So those are some wonderful things we can do. We can point people to passages that help us understand the nature of seeking

God in this way. We point them to the historical accounts, we get good books into the hands of the people, and we lead out and encourage extraordinary prayer for God to come and do what must be done if He is to be honored in our day.

So let's say that we do all of that. I mean, John, here at our church,

Christ Church New Albany, we have prayer meetings, and we have had, you know, even recently we had a day of fasting in the church, and it was such an incredibly sweet time.

We read careful books, I mean, we have access to these revival books. We speak with you, and we cry out for revival.

And things do happen, but how do we judge when it is, you know, that slow methodical work, and it's just that bearing ordinary fruit, versus this is fruit of a revival?

Yeah, in the early days of the church, about three years in or so, we had a number of conversions that occurred, and they occurred so rapidly among adults who had been very religious before they came to the church, and then among some of our young people, our college -age kids, that one man in the church, who is now one of the pastors in the church, asked me, did

I think that was revival? And my answer was, I did not. I thought it was the wonderful ordinary, which we were not used to.

Now, 23 years into the church, so maybe probably 19, 18 years after that event,

I think I would say it wasn't what we would call the manifest presence of God in that extraordinary way, but I would say maybe what the

British people call, it was a gentle visitation. I do think it was an unusual level of work being accomplished.

If you think of it agriculturally, we would say it was a time in which, you know, we were doing a lot of harvesting, not a lot of plowing.

So there are various seasons, and to try to be too strict about our descriptions, well, that's revival, that's just a gentle visitation, that's the normal.

Three categories, where do you divide them? Well, that would be pretty difficult. You know, this is an organic thing, you know,

God working in us, differing levels, degrees where we notice that work, and so I wouldn't want to be too strict on that.

But I think that one way we can judge the claims of a people that say, we are having revival at our church.

I don't mean we scheduled a revival, I mean, whatever sparked it, something extraordinary is happening, and it's a revival, and you ought to come and see it, and get in on it.

And how do you respond to that? I think that our response to that, since revival is the same kind of thing, just lifted to a higher level, a higher degree by the

Lord, it's the same kind of thing as conversion and sanctification, I think that that helps us in judging.

And I don't mean judging in a sinful way of judging, I mean graciously judging, maybe assessing, you know.

So when someone comes to me in our present culture in Mississippi, where everyone gets baptized, you know, by age seven or whatever, and they say to me, my grandson,

Johnny, just got saved and baptized this weekend, and you know, Johnny is six years old.

Can God save a six -year -old? Certainly. Is it more often the case that a young child wanting to please the parent does whatever that church thinks should be done in order to be called a

Christian, and the church has affirmed that because they feel that that would be a kind thing to do?

That, by far, is what is happening by, you know, the majority, I think, of conversions like that end up not sticking.

So it's not God's convert, it's our convert. And we mean well.

It's easy to make mistakes. So how do we make those judgments? Well, when someone says that to you, if they say, my grandson got saved, you don't start, you know, pulling out

Puritan books and throwing it at them and saying, what fool would believe a six -year -old could be saved, you know?

You go to one of those silly churches and, you know, you're going to be judged by God for handling conversion and in an inappropriate, inadequate way.

I mean, we don't do that to people. Sometimes we don't know what to say. Many times someone has said that to me, and I just think, do

I say, great, or do I say, well, I'm not sure? Well, I try not to say either.

So, you know, you try to say something that's encouraging, that's good to hear, thank you for letting me know, and I promise you, by the grace of God, I will remember to pray for him and to ask the

Lord, you know, if that really is the work of God, that that would just grow and prosper in his life as he grows, to the point that it would erase every question mark anybody could ever have.

Which can be offensive. Yeah, even that can be offensive. Like, well, what do you mean? I just told you he asked Jesus, I led him through the prayer, so he's a

Christian. What are you talking about? And in that case, I think you just have to be offensive, you know, in the most kind way, your answer will offend.

So with revival, same thing. We're having a revival here, and our response, hopeful, cautious, prayerful.

You know, thank you for telling me about that. You know, revival is a wonderful thing, and I certainly believe, you know, that may be what you're saying, but also, you know, there are counterfeits, and so I will be praying with you,

I'm sure, as you're praying, that God's real work would be done, and what's being accomplished would endure and show itself to be the real thing.

And one thing that's important to keep in mind, too, is that with that, what you're not doing is saying,

I don't believe you, right? It's saying there are counterfeits to be aware of, there are minefields, you know, that we're walking in, and so optimistic, certainly, but cautiously optimistic.

Yeah, and I don't think that if a church is not like the church we go to, that we automatically put them in the category of spurious revival.

So that's obviously counterfeit, because they don't have the same confession of faith we do, they don't have the same catechism, they don't have any catechism.

We don't have a monopoly on God's grace. Right, and I remember being in a minister's conference, and it was by invitation only, and the only way

I got there was I knew someone that was invited. And so I got slipped in the back, and Mr.

Roberts was speaking there, I think Bill Ellif and Jim Ellif were kind of the instigators of it,

Henry Blackaby was there, I was just converted. And there was a Q &A time, and one man stood up, and the theme was revival, and one pastor stood up and said, and he was a

Reformed guy, as many were in the crowd, but not all. And he said, isn't it true that God only brings revival to those who have good doctrine, meaning

Reformed guys? And Mr. Roberts gave his, you know, characteristic political answer.

He would say, well, something like, if you want to believe that, you have a right to be stupid, but no one reading history could say that, and he went on to show that men on both sides of certain theological issues were used by the

Lord in revival, and time has demonstrated that both sides of that were genuine works of the

Lord. Now, there are consequences to our error, and all of us have some error.

There are consequences to our error and in our, you know, inadequacies, and so those do show up.

It's not meaning that doctrine doesn't matter because it's revival, but God does work in people that aren't just like us, and that needs to be understood.

How can you judge the fruit of revival? Well, how do we judge the fruit of other things? If a person says they've been saved, if they said,

I went to a conference, you know, on the church, and I've come back rejuvenated, if they went to a conference on marriage, and they say, man, it was just the best thing ever, what do we look for?

Well, emotions, that's not it. We can get emotional about a lot of things. Yes, and even good doctrine at the conference preached by godly, solid guys, that's not enough.

And coming back with zeal and wanting to apply it is not enough. The only fruit that demonstrates a thing is the work of God is that it produces

Christ -likeness. Maybe I should say that's the ultimate fruit.

Another way of approaching it would be, if God were distant from us, and I don't mean in his essential presence, but in that activity, if it seems like God doesn't attend church where I attend church, then you can expect, and we certainly have experienced, you can expect that things will go on at church as if we're not paying attention to what

God likes at all. It's as if he has no opinion on the matter. Does God like electric guitars and drums, or does

God like pipe organs? Well, actually, I don't think that that's an important question, but that's questions people ask. Does God like, you know, this, or does

God like this? Does God like expository preaching, or does God like topical preaching? And, you know, we have all these questions, and when

God is distant, what God thinks about things really isn't guiding church decisions.

Now, but if God as the King, so to speak, comes into the room, suddenly what the

King likes and doesn't like becomes the determining thing about what we're doing.

Think about being kids, you know, when mom and dad are off, and our babysitters babysitting us, and she's a pushover, and we know it, you know, and mom and dad, she's not going to tell on us.

What mom and dad like and don't like just doesn't even enter our brains. But when mom and dad walk in the front door, and we're right in the middle of doing something, they may have told us, do not do that when we're away, suddenly what mom and dad think about things becomes all important, and it guides everything.

When God draws near in that wonderful way, one of the evidences we've seen throughout history is that there is such a clarity about what

He thinks, and His priorities become the priorities of His people.

So godliness more than comfort, holiness more than numbers, sin is seen in light of how

God sees sin, holiness, His Son is valued more by us like He values

Him. So, I think that's a very simple way of thinking of it. If God were to walk in the room, so to speak, what would alter?

So things that we see in the Scripture that we know are true, that we agree with conceptually, suddenly they come to bear on us with such extraordinary weight.

Does that, historically, does that typically, is it sourced in the preaching, or is it sourced in God meeting individually?

I know revival being corporate, but you know what I mean by that. So, you know, is it people having these prayer meetings, and private prayer, and family prayer, or is this seen more, so the sinfulness of sin, sinfulness of sin, is that seen more through the preaching and the experience of the church corporately?

Yeah, I think there's so much variety in the history of revivals, just like the variety in the history of true conversion.

You know, certain things happen in true conversion. You quit hoping in you, and you start hoping in Christ.

You quit claiming your right to rule yourself, and you lay your rights at the feet of Jesus Christ.

But that can look different. You know, regeneration, the awakening, looks different in different people.

We don't all have the same experience as Paul did on the road to Damascus. You know, we don't all get struck down and have that moment where we said, that was that moment, that hour, that minute,

I was dead in Christ, and I was alive. But we do all have to have the elements that are involved in true regeneration and true conversion.

We were dead, and now we are alive. We were unbelieving, now we're believing. We were unrepentant, and now we are repenting.

And that happened at some point in life, and even though we can't pinpoint it because our experience may not be exactly the same as our neighbor, those elements have to be there, or it's not true conversion.

Same thing with revival. Sometimes we see that revival has resulted from a prayer meeting of children.

There was a meeting in Wales in the mid -1800s, if I'm remembering correctly, where the children were concerned because their parents were crying out for revival, and nothing was happening.

And their parents were genuinely brokenhearted, because they felt that if God did not come and do something, that that region they lived in was just going to be swept with sin.

And the children snuck out and met by themselves at night and had a prayer meeting.

I don't know of any other occasion where this occurred in any other revival history, but the

Lord seemed to answer that in an extraordinary way, and parents woke up and looked for their children, and they weren't there.

They walked to the church, and they were aware of an extraordinary sense of God.

In other words, what God thinks about sin, what God thinks about His Son, all those things. Suddenly that comes like a crushing, gracious weight on their soul, and God had drawn near.

We can read this, but that's unusual. We wouldn't say, if you want to have God draw near to your church, the way to do it is to get the kids to sneak out at night and to all meet at a local spot.

There have been revivals where these things began as a result of businessmen praying at lunchtime, you know, the prayer revival in the mid -1800s in America and New York, but then there are other times where it was clearly from the preaching.

So I would say that there's no standard pattern for how it starts, but we do notice this.

Generally, God burdens, and I think Matthew Henry is one that called attention to this,

God burdens a few for an extraordinary work for God's namesake.

You know, we need more than what's happening right now, and they begin to cry out, and God raises up that small handful, and then it begins to spread, and others cry out.

But sometimes it seems that, you know, there's just a few that cry out, and God seems to draw near, and suddenly church and the work of the gospel goes forward with a blazing speed, and it wasn't the whole church that prayed, and sometimes maybe it's the whole church that prays.

But we never see God wait until every single individual gets right, kind of a thing, you know? And that's always a fear that I've had in my mind, like, well, what if one church member is not really right?

What if they're not right right now, and we have this day of fasting and prayer? Then God won't listen, you know? I have never heard of any account in history, never seen one in Scripture, wherever, where every single person came to God with pure motives and sought

Him perfectly. So sometimes the stirring seems to arrive after the beginning of small groups praying, or individuals, or the whole church.

Sometimes it seems to come before many are praying at all, and that makes prayer to erupt.

There's just quite a lot of differences. But until we meet again next week, let me just say this.

If a person is saying, well, if there is such a thing as revival, if God does at times draw near and work in a greater way, certainly this is a day that we need it.

What can I do? Do I need to go visit a revival? Well, I don't know that that would be the best choice.

If we had a revival near us, it wouldn't necessarily be bad, but is that what God requires? It seems to me, as I think about it in my own soul, this is what

I think. What do I think I would do differently if God drew near an extraordinary way, and I just was on my face, you know, as has so often been the case in revivals?

I think of Helen Rosevear, British missionary to the Congo, I believe, in the 1950s, and she talks about that she was a very young missionary doctor, and the older missionaries who had been praying for revival for so long, something happened.

You know, there was an extraordinary season of God's grace. It prepared the Christians for the war that was coming and the terrible persecution they suffered, including her, just horrific.

She said that it was like God drew near to the service, and she went to her face on the dirt floor, and aware of her sin, aware of God's cleanness, aware of Christ's beauty, and she said she was there for down, face down in the dirt for a while, weeping, and she looked up and she saw that everybody else was down in the dirt too, she didn't notice them, but the two older missionaries who had prayed for this, their hearts were more prepared, and they were weeping for joy at the front as they tried to help people seek the

Lord and deal honestly with Him. She said that some people even dug a hole in the dirt floor so that their face will be lower than the dirt, they just, they didn't want to be confronted with God.

So I mentioned that story about Helen Rosevear to point to this.

If God drew near, would John Snyder be on his face, being more serious about little selfishnesses that I have told myself that God's okay with?

Yes, I think that would certainly be one of the things. Then why not go lock myself in my bedroom and give some extra time to reading about who

God is, reading about what God says about sin, reading about the provision of Christ, you know, through Him, all that I have.

Why not stay there and plead with God that He would break my heart over those little respectable versions of selfishness right now, here.

Would I be more in the Word of God if God drew near and revival occurred in the church?

Certainly. I think I certainly would. So why not plead with the

Lord and ask Him, not in a way that we're trying to manufacture something. God, why not give more time to Your Word now, instead of saying, well, if revival comes, we'll give more time to His Word.

Would I speak more freely of Christ to people? You know, there are just so many things that I expect would probably change in my life.

So if I want to seek the Lord for His real work in a gloriously new and greater way, why not start now where I'm at, instead of saying, well,

I need to get a book on revival, or I need to go down the street where there's a revival. Those aren't bad ideas, but they're not the best.

So next week we'll talk about what kind of things do we expect to see in the work of God in revival.