Revival Revisited

Oswald J. Smith visited Russia during a time of revival in the early 20th century.  He wrote a book about the subject entitled The Revival We Need.  In this book he says,

"My friends, I have travelled throughout Europe, the Near East and the Far East, Canada and the United States.  I have gone from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, again and again.  I have attended the best evangelistic meetings, and listened to the greatest Evangelists and Bible Teachers on the continent.  But I have never, anywhere, seen duplicated what I have just described, except under the ministry of those who are working in Russian lands.  And why?  What is the explanation?  Has God forsaken America?  Is He through with Canada?  Has England had her chance?  Why are there no revivals anywhere in these countries today?  Simply because the supreme pre-requisite for revival is lacking, that which I saw in continental Europe, I am yet to see here, namely, hunger. 

My friends, there is no real, true, deep, spiritual hunger in this country; no heart-searching after God.  Things fill our vision.  We have so many comforts and even luxuries that we do not feel our need of God.  If we were to be stripped of everything we possess it might prove to be our salvation.  People here do not want to attend meetings.  Oftentimes it takes hundreds of dollars worth of advertising to even interest them.  The theatres and moving picture shows are thronged; the dance halls, beaches and parks, crowded, but our churches, for the most part, are empty. People would never dream of walking even ten miles to attend a service; nor would they stand for three hours in the open air to hear the Gospel.  Hence my diagnosis that there is no hunger.  The nicer the day, the greater the temptation for an auto ride.  God must take second or third place. 

The Russian people have but little of this world's goods: hence their spiritual hunger for the riches of God.  Let those of us who have a hunger - and, thank God, there are a few here and there - let us take up a lamentation for the people of Great Britain and America, and call upon God to create that hunger, be it by catastrophe, war, depression, or what not, that hunger, without which there can be no genuine revival."

 

What would cause a great catastrophe in the 21st century?  Low interest rates cause the stock exchange to become overvalued.  Economists are very worried.  The western economy is heading into unchartered waters.  Interest rates have never been this low for this long.  There could be a major Wall Street crash greater than 1929.  Low interest rates cause banks to lend too freely.  The banks could run out of money.  Would the governments bail them out the next time?  If a recession happened now there would be nothing we could do.  We can't lower interest rates, we can't borrow more money.  We may find ourselves unable to put up interest rates because finance plans for buying cars and mortgages, after 20 years of interest rates being so close to zero, might become so dependent on low interest rates.

 

Automation of industry causes loss of jobs.  Until now, technologically advanced companies have been more productive.  Workers in an automated car factory build more cars, pay more taxes, buy more things and put more money into the economy.  In the 21st century many automated industries are relocating their offices to tax havens and avoiding huge amounts of tax. If such companies were to run all our taxis and sell all our shopping, the government would lose enormous amounts of tax revenue.  The few people these companies employed would be spending their billions in another country, not in the country where they are providing goods and services.  If the government run out of money and the banks run out of money at the same time, the word recession no longer applies.  This is an economic crisis from which there is no hope of recovery.  When I was a child, I saw the end of socialism.  Will I live to see the end of capitalism as a system of economics?  Will the ensuing collapse and chaos lead to a mass turning of people to God?

 

The church has a life cycle.  A work of God is born.  It grows.  It declines.  It dies.  If you keep it going for too long, it becomes a fossil.  When a new church is created, it is very likely to grow quite rapidly for a time.  Sometimes the work was only intended to have a limited lifespan.  Leeds, Newcastle, Preston and Stoke are all places that flourished for a short time and died.  The apostles did not plant huge churches wherever they went. Athens is not the same as Corinth.  In Corinth the Lord told the apostle Paul to stay there because he had many people in the city (Acts 17, 18.)  In Athens God had only a few people in the city.  They are mentioned by name.  There is no church of Athens in the Bible and there is no epistle to the Athenians.  Also, if Paul had stayed in Corinth for 25 years he might have found things falling apart by then.  God did not instruct Paul to stay in Corinth for longer than a few years, and eventually the church in Corinth did have serious problems, as the letters from Paul to the church show.  If you sense a lack of power and a lack of anointing in the work, the best thing to do is to move on somewhere else, where you're more likely to win the battle.

 

The church is a body.  It is made up of people and it can be hurt and wounded.  If some members of the church have just died, and some important leaders have recently resigned, as is the situation in Sheffield in 2017, it is acceptable that for a few years very little would happen amongst these people.  They are physically trying to reorganise themselves and keep the church running.  They are also, emotionally, in a state of shock.  If they spend hardly any time in evangelism and concentrate mostly on the administration of the church, that is acceptable.  The body is hurt and wounded.  It needs to rest.  It needs time to recover.

 

There are times when the church comes under God's discipline.  In Leeds I was given a word from Zecheriah 13. 

“Awake, sword, against my shepherd,
    against the man who is close to me!”
    declares the Lord Almighty.
“Strike the shepherd,
    and the sheep will be scattered,
    and I will turn my hand against the little ones.
8 
In the whole land,” declares the Lord,
    “two-thirds will be struck down and perish;
    yet one-third will be left in it.
9 
This third I will put into the fire;
    I will refine them like silver
    and test them like gold.
They will call on my name
    and I will answer them;
I will say, ‘They are my people,’
    and they will say, ‘The Lord is our God.’”

In the last 10 years since this word was given, many leaders (shepherds) have left the church.  Entire branches of the church, in several parts of the country, have closed.  Up until 2007 the Jesus Army had been growing rapidly across the country.  Success can make us proud and arrogant.  "God brings growth," people used to say.  "If your church is not growing, there must be something wrong with you."  When my church began to grow, I looked at the amazing number of people we had brought into our new minibus and thought what good leaders we were.  How effective our evangelist was.  Here he is again, coming to the meeting on the Saturday night with the new people he has met that afternoon.  We began to require the same performance from everybody else.  Where are the new people you have brought to your Wednesday night cell group this year?  Sometimes the only thing that will bring church leaders back down to Earth again is to completely lose some major spiritual battles.  We are being subject to the refining fire.  In the early days of metal working it was difficult to prevent metal from becoming useless and brittle.  Metallic ore melted in a fire will absorb carbon from the fuel in the fire.  The crucible is a metal pan between the metallic ore and the fire that prevents contamination of the metal with carbon.  It creates a strong, pure metal.  As the ore itself is not completely pure, it is also possible to purify the metal even more by burning off the impurities and heating the metal in the crucible for a long time.  This is what God is doing to his church.  The church is not in decline.  It is being purified.  Oswald J. Smith talks about the need for repentance.

 

"Now, how may we secure such an Outpouring of the Spirit? You answer, by prayer. True, but there is something before prayer. We will have to deal first of all with the question of sin; for unless our lives are right in the sight of God, unless sin has been put away, we may pray until doomsday, and the Revival will never come. "Your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you so that He will not hear." (Isa. 59: 2)

 

Then we will be able to pray effectively.

 

"Ah! my brethren, are you praying? Do you plead with God for this city? Are you beseeching Him night and day for an Outpouring of His Spirit? For now is the hour to pray. We are told of a time in the work of Finney when the Revival had died out. He then made a covenant with the young people to pray at sunrise, noon and sunset in their closets for one week. The Spirit was poured out, and before the week ended the meetings were thronged.  And of course it must be believing prayer, prayer that expects. If God stirs up hearts to pray for a Revival it is a sure sign that He wants to send one and He is always true to His Word. "There shall be showers of blessing." His promises never fail. Have we faith? Do we expect an Awakening?"

 

Another word I was given in Leeds was that there would be a famine in the land (Amos 8.)  This is not a famine of food or water but a famine of hearing the word of the Lord.  J Darren Duncan says on his website;

The time had come when they wanted to hear the Word proclaimed, but there was no place where it was being done. The prophets were either silent or dead; the house of the Lord was no longer visited by the sweet Spirit of God; the services of the Lord were as cold as the tomb. God sent it, but it was not God’s fault. It was the people’s fault. The Prophets had been sent to them, but they had been rejected and even killed. The Word had been proclaimed, but they had turned a deaf ear to it. The Spirit had striven with them, but they had hardened their hearts against Him.  How much longer will it be before this happens to us? We have outlawed the Bible, legalized abortion, let criminals go free, heckled, scoffed and discriminated against God. When God withdraws then people will want Him, but He will not be found.  "Then they will call to me but I will not answer; they will look for me but will not find me, since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the Lord."  Proverbs 1:28-29.

J Darren Duncan refers to the services of the Lord being as cold as a tomb.  If he was living in Europe or Britain, he might wonder if a time would come when the services of the Lord would simply not be there.  Looking at photographs that one local church has on its wall, the congregation are nearly all octogenarians.  There is one young couple with children and the rest are over 75.  In 20 years time, this church just won't be there.  Of course, this is not the case everywhere.  There are young families in other churches.  There are signs of growth in other churches.  But the traditional churches full of old people are very large denominations and it is often the small independent churches that are full of young families and experiencing some growth.  We are seeing an increasing secularisation of society.  I looked for the religious section in a small library in Leeds.  I was shocked to find it was not there.  Amos 8 says,

 

"The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord,
    “when I will send a famine through the land—
not a famine of food or a thirst for water,
    but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.
12 
People will stagger from sea to sea
    and wander from north to east,
searching for the word of the Lord,
    but they will not find it."

 

One of our women did a lot of work with Chinese students.  She said that there was usually somebody in the family, maybe a grandmother, who had known Jesus in this way.  In my family there was no one who knew Jesus at all.  What do you do if you are desperately seeking God and none of your friends or family know him?  You go to the church at the end of the street.  It is boarded up and long since closed.  You go to the local library but they inform you that they don't have a religious section.  You turn on the radio.  There is one Christian radio station on DAB but the signal is too weak for your radio.  The signal is broadcast on only a few transmitters and is too weak for some radios to be able to tune into it.  You can look on the internet.  It may be your only hope.

 

This is a frightening vision, with people staggering from sea to sea and wandering from north to east searching for the word of the Lord, wanting it, unable to find it.  When most of the churches in Britain and Europe have closed, when society has subtly and slowly eliminated the Christian message from libraries, schools and television, when the economy is collapsing and people are desperately searching for something to fill their need, some of those people will find you.  Some of those people will find the small number of churches that remain.  Then there will be considerable growth.

 

http://gospeltruth.net/OJSmith/revival_we_need.htm
http://www.jdarrenduncanministries.com/outlines/A_Famine_In_The_Land.htm