Revivals - How Promoted

Thomas Payne

“Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest.”— Isaiah xxxii. 15.

“Ask ye of the Lord rain in the time of the latter rain; so the Lord shall make bright clouds, and give them showers of rain.”—Zech. x. I.

THE Apostle’s text on the day of Pentecost with reference to the prophecy of Joel was most suitable for the occasion, because it was associated with the promise then being fulfilled before their very eyes. Pentecost was the feast of first fruits of harvest, therefore symbolical of the first instalment of the gift of the Holy Spirit. It was also typical of the first ingathering of a glorious harvest of souls. Hence, as expressed by one writer, “The occurrence of that day exhibits the reality and importance of revivals of religion. In a single day it gave to the Christian Church a weight and influence more than a thousand fold greater than it had previously possessed.”

No doubt the prophecy of Joel, together with what our Lord had said, especially in the latter part of John’s Gospel, made a great impression upon the minds of the Apostles with reference to what would take place in the fulfilment of the promise. But the realisation, and the remarkable display of God’s power on that occasion among saints and sinners, and the ingathering of such a multitude of souls, must have greatly exceeded all their former anticipations. Not-withstanding, we may look forward in faith and hope for such times of refreshing which shall outshine in its glory and extent anything that has taken place in the past history of the Church. And the knowledge that we are in the last days greatly increases our responsibility with regard to prayer and expectation for a further fulfilment of this glorious promise. So much that has taken place, and that is still taking place all round us, tell us plainly that we are in the last days and nearing the end of this dispensation. According to the opinion of a number of spiritually-minded men, and men who have studied the Scriptures closely on this subject, as well as the signs of the time, we are to expect the last days to be associated with an extraordinary outpouring of the Spirit upon the Church and the world. The late Dr. Dale said: “I feel sure that there will shortly be such a display of the Saviour’s power in the Church, and through the Church upon the world outside, as has not been seen since Pentecost.” Referring to what took place on the day of Pentecost, Dr. Fraser says: “It was a typical and significant day which should be expected to repeat itself.” To the same effect another very distinguished writer says: “The completed fulfilment of this glorious prophecy is still in the future, a future that may be very near at hand.” And should not our expectation be raised in consideration of the certainty of the fulfilment of the promise, inasmuch as the inspired Apostle has been careful to add strength to this statement that we do not find in the prophecy of Joel, viz., “It shall come to pass in the last days saith God, that I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh? “. We are therefore encouraged to believe that, excellent and glorious as was the first instalment of this gift, there: must come a time when this prophecy shall have a fuller meaning, to wit, the desolate “wilderness shall be a fruitful field.” We are also reminded both of our duty and promise, “Ask ye of the Lord rain in the time of the latter rain, so the Lord shall make bright clouds, and give them showers of rain;” and we are to understand the “showers” of rain is a symbol of the administrations or comings of the Holy Spirit; as it is written, “And He shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain upon the earth” (Hos. vi. 3). And God be praised that the showers can be had for the asking today just as real as in the days of Elijah. The asking has already begun, and the bright clouds are beginning to appear and will soon spread over the heavens. Let us therefore pray that the Lord of the Harvest will brighten our hopes, increase our faith, and raise our expectations heavens high for “floods of blessing.” In calling our attention to this the Rev. W. G. Pascoe says: “In firm reliance upon the never-failing promises of God, we have been asking for rain. Faithful servants of God, like the prophet, cast themselves upon the earth, and have pleaded through long hours for rain. The sign has come. The prayer that has already lifted the clouds out of the ocean of God’s bountiful love can shake them until they drop down all their fatness, and make the wilderness a fruitful held, and a glorious harvest of souls will tell of the fertilising power of God’s abundance of rain.” With reference to the near approach of this the Rev. J. W. Hill says: “The clouds are already skirted with the silver lining of millennial glory; we live in the best dispensation and in the brightest period of the world’s history.” In describing the effects of this bountiful rain in the personal experience of true believers, the late Rev. C. H. Spurgeon remarked: “It is very usual in the life of grace for the soul to receive in after years a second very remarkable visitation of the Holy Spirit which may be compared to the latter rain. The latter rain was sent to plump out the wheat and make it full and mature, ready for the harvest ripening. My craving is that all of you, my beloved, who have been watered by the former rain, may also be refreshed by a more than ordinary latter rain, which shall make you more than ordinary Christians, bringing you beyond the blade period into the full corn in the ear.” The Rev. John Fletcher, speaking of the prophecy of Joel, says: “A capital promise this, of which our Lord gave an earnest on the day of Pentecost, when He sent a glorious shower on His little vineyard, a pledge of the mighty rivers of righteousness which will by and by cover the earth as the waters the sea. “

We are always ready to bring up to date St. Paul’s words to Timothy, viz.: “In the last days perilous times shall come”; nor are we offended should the picture be drawn much darker than is necessary. Why, then, should we be slow of heart to believe, or bring up to date, the words used by St. Peter, viz. : “It shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh?” And if through neglect or the dullness of our faith this precious promise has lost some of its brightness, then let us set to work and by our faith and prayers polish it up again, and in the power of the Spirit lift this truth beside the dark picture, and it will be sure to inspire us with fresh hope and courage, and prevent our love from waxing cold in the presence of abounding iniquity. Dr. Cynddylan Jones, referring to what is needed at the present day to make Protestant churches more powerful for good in the world, says:” Another outpouring of the Holy Ghost; we have cisterns enough; pray for the living water; machinery enough; pray for the spirit of the living creatures to enter the wheels; and then it will do more work and make less noise.”

Moreover, we believe that our expectations should be raised in the consideration of the past labours of many faithful servants of God, a great host of whom have already entered into their rest. Because of the good seed that had already been sown, our Saviour in the days of His flesh expected a speedy harvest of souls (see John iv. 25). And no doubt but what for the want of such expectation many Christians have lost heart in themselves, and courage in their duty, and hopefulness for a perishing world; and for the same cause the Church on some occasions has missed a glorious harvest. The Rev. C. H. Morrison recently remarked that “The world was never in all its past history so ripe for a spiritual harvest as at the present”; and while it is true that there are many things that might tend to distress us if we were only to dwell upon them, and which is referred to in the following chapter, it is nevertheless true that there is much to encourage us when we look upon the hopeful side of things, and consider what opportunities and privileges we have in contrast to past ages; the many open doors to preach the Gospel, and the readiness to receive the glad tidings: especially is this the case to-day in heathen lands. In consideration of this, Christmas Evans, the noted Welsh preacher in the last century, remarked: “Brethren, this is the time. The mulberry trees are shaking. God is going before His people, to prepare their way to victory. The hand of Divine Providence is opening a great and effectual door for the Gospel. The mountains are levelled, the valleys are exalted, and a highway is cast up in the wilderness for our God. The arts of printing and navigation, the increasing commerce of the world, the rapid march of literature and science, and the correspondence of eminent and leading men in every nation, are so many preparations for the moral conquest of the world. …The Scriptures have been translated into nearly all the languages of the babbling earth. Missionaries have gone into many lands—have met the Indian in his wigwam, the African in his devil’s-bush, and the devotee on his way to Mecca. We can furnish more men for the field and more money to sustain them. But these things cannot change and renovate the human heart. ‘Not by might or by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord.’ This is the regenerating agency; He alone can convince and save the world. His aid is given in answer to prayer; and the Father is more ready to give than we are to ask.” Bearing upon the same point, Dr. R. A. Torrey, in his work, “How to Pray,” says: “There seem to be increasing signs that the Church is awakening to this fact. Here and there God is laying upon individual ministers and churches a burden of prayer that they have never known before. Less dependence is put upon machinery and more dependence upon God. Ministers are crying to God day and night for power; churches and portions of churches are meeting together in the early morning hours, and the late night hours, crying to God for the latter rain. There is every indication of the coming of a widespread revival. There is every reason why, if a revival should come in any country at this time, it should be more widespread in its extent than any revival of history. There is the closest and swiftest communication by travel, by letter, and by cable, between all parts of the world.”

Once more, we think that our expectations should be raised in the consideration of the many gracious revivals that have taken place already during the past history of the Church. Also the fact that every great awakening and plentiful harvest of souls has been the result of the outpouring of the same blessed Spirit, and when sought for by earnest, believing prayer, concerning which we shall have more to say later on. We are, however, fully persuaded that one reason why the Church has not realised a larger fulfilment of the Holy Spirit of Promise is because of so much unbelief and so little real prayer and expectation; and as a rule where there is no expectation there is no realisation, because a lack of expectation always shows a lack of true faith. As rightly expressed by the Rev. W. Cousins: “Without expectation there will be no prevailing power in prayer; thus, because men have ceased to expect the outpouring of God’s spirit, the heavens have become as brass.” And we believe that it is chiefly because of this that many are dull of understanding and slow to believe, or to learn the truth about the ministry and operations of the Holy Spirit, and where this is the case, even though they possess a great knowledge of the letter, they are often most bitter and contentious in their intercourse with Spirit-filled believers, and will not allow themselves to see their need of the Pentecostal gift, or even the possibility of any further fulfilment of this wonderful promise. And as a result they remain very much on the same low level as Old Testament saints. And, indeed, where the gift of the Spirit is reduced and confined to the blessing of regeneration, or confounded with the Spirit’s work in that experience without which we are none of His, together with the idea that it is wrong to pray for the Holy Spirit, all of which was enjoyed among Old Testament saints, then it must be admitted that we are placed in a far worse position than those who lived before Pentecost.

A bright young Christian told us only very recently that he had received a call to the ministry, and with the call came the conviction of his need of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. But, prior to this, a book on the work of the Spirit had been put into his hand, in which the author had denied the right of our expecting to receive any such blessing after conversion. Said the young man, “If I thought that there was no such baptism for me to expect since my conversion, I should be tempted to give up in despair; but now that I am convinced that there is, I feel inspired with a new hope.” And, blessed be God! while looking into the face of that very promising young servant of Jesus Christ, we felt as if life was worth living if only to be able to assure him that the gift of the Holy Spirit was as freely at his disposal as is the gift of Jesus; also that this gift could be obtained for the asking.

We have already explained that the two events, birth and baptism, cannot mean the same thing. As a well-known writer has stated, “the birth and the baptism are as distinct in our spiritual experience as in our natural; a person must be born before he can be baptised, so a soul must be born of the Spirit before he can be baptised with the Spirit.” Furthermore, we have noticed that the Scriptures encourage us to pray for, and to expect, two very special blessings to take place in those last days. In the first place we are to expect an universal outpouring of the Holy Spirit; in the second, as a result of such an outpouring, we are to expect the awakening and conversion of a multitude of souls. But where Christians do not recognise the privilege to pray for the Holy Spirit, or the right to expect any such results, they not only refuse to put forth efforts to promote a revival, but often, by their unbelief, they put stumbling-blocks in the way of those that would. There are two classes of Christian that are more or less in danger of doing this. The first are those who occupy themselves chiefly with past dispensations, without appearing to recognise the Pentecostal period, and if they do, they seem to imagine that the grace bestowed on the first occasion completely exhausted the gift. Then there are others who are mostly taken up with future dispensations, or with what is expected to transpire after the closing up of the present age; and because of this thousands of Christians fail to recognise, or rightly to appreciate, the glorious dispensation of the Spirit in which we now live. There is no need that we overlook other dispensations; they all have a certain amount of claim upon our study and attention: yet better by far we had lived and died in the old dispensations than, after having had the privilege of living in the present, we should pass away without an experimental knowledge of the exceeding grace and glory belonging to our own day. The Apostle Paul admitted that Old Testament saints had a glory in their day, but not the glory that excelleth, and which is brought unto us through the revelation of Jesus Christ and by the Ministration of the Spirit. Speaking of those who were unbelieving and disobedient, the Apostle declared that “even unto this day when Moses is read the vail is upon their hearts.” And is it not possible for the veil of prejudice, traditional faith, or, rather, unbelief, to remain upon the hearts of professing Christians when reading the ministration of the Spirit? It has been remarked that it is fearful the amount of evidence that can be resisted by prejudice. But we fear that the veil that has prevented many from coming into the enjoyment of this Spiritual Ministration is, as we have mentioned elsewhere, the strange notions entertained in relation to dispensational truths. And the sad part of it is that those who are thus veiled often hinder others from coming into the light as well as themselves. This may be seen in the following testimony:—

The wife of John Fletcher wrote an account of her life from early childhood, from which the following is an extract: “I was now, I believe, about ten years old, and can recollect many comfortable moments in reading the Word of God. The promises in Isaiah were in a particular manner applied to my soul: and I hardly ever opened the Bible but there was something for me: till one day I heard a person make the remark that ‘many people take promises to themselves which do not belong to them.’ Of some, she observed, they belonged to the Church, others to the Jews, such and such to the Gentiles, etc., and then began to blame the presumption of those who applied them to their own souls! Such a thought never entered my heart before. I knew the words were primarily spoken on particular occasions: but the Lord had led me to believe that His Word was written to every soul so far as they were willing to receive it by faith. But from the above conversation I was unhinged. I knew not what to choose or what to refuse; so that, being cast into reasonings, I lost all my love for reading the Scriptures, and sank into a very cold and lifeless state.” And it is said she did not recover from this shock to her faith for years.

The veil of a predisposition in the heart not to believe, or expect to receive, any further fulfilment of the promise has been the great hindrance with others. This has always had the effect of blinding the soul to the claims of higher truths and fuller blessing. We may also gather from the Epistles that it is the special device of Satan to cause this veil of unbelief or partial blindness to remain if possible upon the minds of professing Christians, because if they see not, they ask not, and if they ask not, they receive not, and as a result, they often despise the teaching of those that can see and that do ask and expect. It was the spirit of indifference manifested among professing Christians toward the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit in this His dispensation that grieved and stirred the righteous soul of Dr. Owen; but God, who knows how to bring good out of evil and light out of darkness, made it the occasion for this great and learned man of God to write such discourse on the personality and operations of the Holy Spirit, that it gave to the Church at large a new sense of her responsibility as well as her privilege with regard to this important subject.

The Rev. John Fletcher, Dr. Horatius Bonar, and others, in later days, held that the constant limiting of, and disregard of the ministry of, the Holy Spirit is the sin of the Church in these last days, as it was the sin of the Jews in despising the personal ministry of Jesus Christ in the days of His flesh; and as one of our great preachers remarked, “We dread the drift of the present torrent of unbelieving thought; only the Spirit of God can lift up a standard against it.”

And is it not sad to think that notwithstanding the light that has been thrown upon this subject by so many faithful witnesses, still there should be so little concern manifested on the part of such a great majority of those who are the professed followers of Christ? In the consideration of this we cannot but feel that it is the duty of all who know the truth and enjoy the fullness of the Pentecostal baptism to pray earnestly that God may take away the veil and clarify the vision of such, so that they may not only discover their own need, but may also have infinitely broader views of the unspeakable fullness contained in the promise to meet that need. And then we think they will open their mouths wide, and cry out, like the prophet of old, “Drop down ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness” (Isa. xlv. 8). Our Lord intended that every longing, thirsty soul in these last days should see that He has provided for such a place of broad rivers and streams; therefore, no more straitness, but living waters all abounding like God’s eternal love, knowing neither measure nor end. The prophet Ezekiel got a sight of this, as may be understood by his vision of living waters. The further he was led out, the deeper he went in, until at last the waters had so risen that it became a river that could not be passed over. The hymn-writer must have had some knowledge of this when he tried to describe it in the following lines:—

“When first in this river I ventured my soul,
The waters of life to my ankles did roll.
A thousand was measured, and still I went in;
It was up to my loins, it was freedom from sin.
Yet I go on to prove it a river,
So wide and so broad I can swim there for ever.”

And, judging from Old Testament Scriptures, and the teaching of our blessed Saviour, we may conclude that the fulfilment of the Holy Spirit of promise to the Church was meant to be like so many mighty Niagaras, exhaustless as eternity, rather than the torrent of a single day.

With a desire to inspire us with hopefulness in our ministry, one writer remarked that mighty prayer, faithful preaching, and confidence in God, would secure a repetition of those wonderful scenes which took place in Apostolic days. There is hope, for God has not forgotten us: the Great Intercessor is in heaven pleading: the Holy Ghost is in the world. The Rev. A. Barnes’ remarks on revivals and Peter’s vindications of the proceedings at Pentecost are very important to all who are interested in this great subject: “From the scene on the day of Pentecost we may learn

(1) that revivals of religion are to be expected as a part of the history of the Christian church. He, Peter, speaks of God’s pouring out of His Spirit, etc., as what was to take place in these last days. His remarks are by no means limited to the day of Pentecost. They are as applicable to future periods as to that time. And we are to expect . . . that the Holy Spirit will be sent down to convert men.

(2) This will also vindicate revivals from all the false charges which have been brought against them. All the objections of irregularity, extravagance, wildfire, enthusiasm, disorder, etc., which have been alleged against revivals in modem times might have been brought with equal propriety against the scene on the day of Pentecost, yet the Apostle shows that that was in accordance with the predictions of the Old Testament saints, and was an undoubted work of the Holy Spirit. If that work could be vindicated, these modern revivals may be. And if they felt deep concern to vindicate it from the charge brought against it, then Christians and Christian ministers now should feel similar solicitude to defend revivals, and not be found among their revilers, their calumniators, or their foes. There will be enemies enough of the work of the Holy Spirit without the aid of professed Christians.” And he further showed that the man who is thus found with the enemies of God is guilty of opposing “the mighty work of the Holy Spirit upon the human heart.”