Revival: What is it? 22 January 2012

In the first of a series on Revival, Brian Clee led us in considering ‘What is Revival?’.
His sources were Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Rev W. V. Higham, the sermons of the latter are available free to download from the www.WVHigham.org
We find the term in numerous verses, Hab 3:2, Ps 138:7, Ps 85:6 Firstly we observed that it is not possible to revive something that is dead. It is incorrect to think that revival is ‘many being converted’. Revival is primarily a work within the church, and the blessed effects spill out into the world around, often resulting in an increase in conversions.
Secondly, in conversion, the Holy Ghost comes to a person and brings spiritual life. We can be anxious about what might happen in a revival based on accounts we might read but, Mr Higham has pointed out that revival can be thought of in terms of a heightening of the ‘normal’ extraordinary workings of the Holy Ghost.
It is important to note, just like in the life of an individual Christian, that, even when we are not feeling especially close to the Lord, that he continues to work. We were asked to think back if we could remember times which, although not revival, were nevertheless touches of his presence. One remembered the eagerness and earnestness for informal meetings which concentrated on fellowship around the things of God. Another remembered meetings where there were struck silences and time passing without noticing, as Mr Higham has said, ‘shards of eternity thrust into time’. Weeping seems to accompany an especial measure of God’s presence, weeping because of an intensified sense of personal sin and unworthiness, mixed with joy in the Holy Ghost.
Three things: preaching, people and power. True religion is more than notion, something must be known and felt. God’s hand was upon Mr Higham: there was always a sense of the greatness of God. And the people came, from 1966 or so onwards, the church gradually filled up. Many said they didnt know why they had found themselves in the church and then wanted to know who had told the preacher they were coming and all about them – they felt exposed in the sermon. The presence of God: an awareness of purity and mercy in the gospel, yet battles within and from without the church.
What is revival then? ‘Sudden, sustained presence of God’. Yet there is a longing and a praying before the ‘sudden’… a sharpened focus on the Bible. It is another dimension, a visitation, an outpouring, and invasion of God with his people. Days of heaven upon earth. We are grateful for any work of God, but how we need revival. It has almost reached the status of myth, with a few lone ‘believers’, isolated and humoured, they are easilly brushed aside as mere ‘misty eyed ones’, in all our planning and programming. But, as Thomas Charles said in 1791,

Unless we are favoured with frequent revivals, and a strong, powerful work of the spirit of God, we shall in great degree, degenerate, and have only a name to live by; religion will soon lose its vigour, the ministry will hardly retain its lustre and glory; and iniquity will, of consequence, abound.