There seems to be a stirring in certain parts. Something’s happening out there. Whispers of a ‘Quiet Revival’ are getting louder. Perhaps God is on the move or perhaps it’s all wishful thinking, a figment of the imagination.

You might get easily excited about revival, or else you might be naturally sceptical about the prospect in our current climate, hardened by many false dawns. Either way, I want to speak to you.

I take it as a given that you pray for revival from time to time, that you—or at least some part of you—longs for renewal of the Church. We might pray vaguely for revival, but how often do we stop to think about what that word entails? Have we thought that it might not mean what we think it does?

Revival begins in the Church

Restoration, renewal, revivification. Revival is a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Church leading to renewed spiritual fellowship with God. It is that glorious Pentecostal fire setting the hearts of Christians collectively aflame for the Lord. Nothing is more needful to rouse us from our mass lethargy than revival. How little most of us know the power of God for ourselves, how little most of us ask to experience it! But hearts aflame are not comfortable. Fire burns and destroys…

One of the classic verses that provides God’s pattern for revival is 2 Chronicles 7:14,

if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

I’ve often seen this verse misapplied. Properly speaking, something cannot be revived unless it was once alive.  Revival begins in the Church (‘my people who are called by my name’), not in the nation at large. First, Christians themselves must be revived before the movement spreads to ‘their land’. This is how God usually brings about revival. Even when a nation state turned en masse to God (e.g., the Assyrian capital Nineveh in Jonah 3), God humbled His own preacher first (Jonah 1-2).1 Historically, since New Testament times, revival very rarely means regime change (at least not initially). In fact, it usually happens against a backdrop of state- (or even Church-) sanctioned persecution of faithful Christian believers.2 

Revival exposes the sin in our hearts

Before Christians can experience the blessings of a great spiritual renewal, we must experience the need for repentance. Revival turns the floodlights on the hearts of believers, exposing the sin inside. Revival trashes any veneer of Christian respectability we’ve built up. Revival humbles us to the dust and leaves us grovelling on the floor, ashamed before a holy God. Convicted of the idolatry in our hearts, convicted of the worship of self, slothfulness, pride, greed and of many things we didn’t even notice before. It’s not the sins themselves so much as Who we’ve sinned against (Psalm 51:4).

Revival is a tremendously painful and emotional experience. It’s not nice to be exposed as a sinner (even a saved one), cut open red-raw. But we must feel the shame of our sin before we feel the warmth of God’s forgiveness. If you think I’m overstating it, then let’s consider an example from Scripture.

King Josiah was the last great king of Judah. During his reign there was one last great revival. Hilkiah the priest discovered the book of the law (2 Kings 22:8-10; 2 Chronicles 34:14-18). The realisation that they had provoked God to anger because of their sin cut them to the heart. When the Lord finally spoke through Huldah the prophetess, He acknowledged that,

because your heart was tender and you humbled yourself before God when you heard his words against this place and its inhabitants, and you have humbled yourself before me and have torn your clothes and wept before me, I also have heard you

2 Chronicles 34:27

After this point, Josiah and the people worked to bring about a great reformation, they made a covenant before God and cleansed the land and destroyed all the idols they could find (2 Kings 23:1-20; 2 Chronicles 34:29-33). And then they celebrated the Passover like they never had before (2 Kings 23:21-27; 2 Chronicles 35:1-19). 

Time and time again, throughout the Old and New Testaments, this is God’s pattern of revival. Before Jesus came with the good news, John the Baptist prepared the way, ‘preaching a baptism of repentance’ (Luke 3:3). This is God’s method of working to save and sanctify His people. It’s not a pleasant process. Scripture talks about the refiner’s fire (e.g., Zechariah 13:9; Malachi 3:2-3). Christ will have His perfect bride; the Holy Spirit will see to it that she is made ready for heaven. Revival costs us what we hold dear and entails many tears and much sorrow.

Revival exalts God, not man

God often surprises us with the source of revivals. He uses the foolish, weak, low things to confound the wise and strong (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). When Christians (or anyone else for that matter) get too big for their own boots, you can bet your bottom dollar that, before long, God will knock them down a peg or two and show that His ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8). And often the way He does that is not through established denominations3 or famous preachers,4 but through children,5 uneducated preachers6 and fringe movements.

It’s His work, not ours. It’s His word that is preached, not ours. The Gospel is the ‘power of God to salvation’ (Romans 1:16), not the power or initiative of man. We can’t conjure up a revival or force God’s hand. We can strategise and plan all the evangelistic campaigns we like, but they are useless on their own. Revival magnifies God’s sovereignty. It is the free pleasure of His Holy Spirit. We can be doctrinally sound, orderly in our worship, but completely dead without the Spirit. ‘It is no great thing to have order in a cemetery,’ writes J.I. Packer.7 

The problem is we don’t give the Holy Spirit the credit He is due. We quench the Spirit by our sin and we quench the Spirit by our lack of honour for His work and person. How much we like to lament the days of ‘small things’! But the Holy Spirit has never yet stopped awakening lost souls at home or abroad. Our God is still in the business of saving sinners! We seek signs and wonders, yet forget that every person born again is a supernatural miracle of grace. Packer writes that honouring the Holy Spirit has been ‘the secret of every revival movement in Christendom from the start’.8

The truth is our view of God’s Spirit is too small, so our view of sin is likewise too small. Revival magnifies both.

Revival comes after concerted heart-felt prayer

Correct doctrine doesn’t bring revival, the Spirit does. Lloyd-Jones says that ‘you can have a church that is perfectly orthodox but perfectly dead.’9 The problem is we end up kidding ourselves that we’ve got it all right, we become ‘mere orthodox intellectualists’—which is what Lloyd-Jones calls the ‘besetting danger’ of the Reformed10—and forget that we are so totally and utterly dependent on Him for everything. Unless we realise this and throw ourselves down on our knees before Him, revival won’t come. Revival is Him turning His face towards us (Numbers 6:24-26).

If we want to see God smile upon us, then we have to wait in prayer. In olden times, Christians called this a ‘concert of prayer’. Like the disciples between the Ascension and Pentecost, we must join together and ‘devote [ourselves] to prayer’ (Acts 1:14). Yet we can be good at bashing the Church, less good at waiting in prayer on the God Who builds the Church. Now, we shouldn’t be blind to her failings, but we should channel that despair and frustration in prayer to God Almighty to implore that He will hear and forgive. I fear our prayers for revival—if at all—are more a tick-box exercise: ‘Yep, prayed for revival today. Your move, Lord.’

This is hardly the way to entreat the King of the universe! We have to ask for the Spirit’s help, ask Him to purify your heart so that you can pray these prayers. Clear the decks, do away with the worldly-minded busyness, prepare the ground; set aside serious time to seek God’s face. This is how revivals begin, by God stirring His people’s hearts to pray by ‘the Spirit of grace and supplication’ (Zechariah 12:10 NKJV).

Revival won’t solve all our problems…

Revival almost always entails great opposition. The devil and his minions rise up to fight back. Revivals, like wars, bring allies together, but also result in great divisions. One of the leading preachers of the eighteenth century’s Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), was voted out of his church in the midst of a big revival. In that revival, many souls were won for Christ, feelings ran high, many people had tremendous experiences of God’s presence (including Sarah Edwards, Jonathan’s wife) yet it was marred—and prematurely ended, some would argue—by excesses and disharmony and infighting within the Church.

Revival isn’t a silver bullet. It brings out of the heart the good, but the bad also surfaces. In many ways it is perhaps a foretaste of heaven. But only heaven itself will provide that blissful, uninterrupted fellowship with God: Father, Spirit and Son.

…but we should seek revival anyway!

Now this all may leave you feeling somewhat discouraged and in a sense I’m not sorry if that’s the case. My point is not to make you feel good, it’s to show you, me—all of us—that we must come to that point of brokenness wherein lies true repentance and humility before God. We must cry out day and night like Jeremiah, the weeping prophet (Jeremiah 8:18-9:1) until God turns His face upon us again, to restore us, to bring ‘times of refreshing [from] the presence of the Lord’ (Acts 3:20). Even as creation groans (Romans 8:22), we ought to groan and pray and prepare the ground for the Lord to add the blessing.

Whenever we hear of some report of revival breaking forth, we ought not to respond with immediate euphoria or instant judgement, but instead cautious optimism, praying that this will indeed prove to be a sovereign work of God’s Spirit awakening hearts through the preaching of His word.

Revival is not just a fanciful notion. God has worked many great revivals and will do again. Revival brings a tremendous energy and revitalisation to the Church. Delight in communing with God is restored. Faith is given that can withstand trials and do great things. People are marked by deep hunger for God’s word. Christians live together in love; the Church becomes like a magnet that draws others in. Above all else, they long for the glory of Christ and for His name to be exalted through all the earth.

Each revival is a sneak peek of how things will end, a precursor of what is to come; the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21), when all will bow before King Jesus (Philippians 2:9-10), every tear will be made dry (Revelation 21:4) and it will have all been worth it. If you weren’t sure about praying for revival before, then I hope you are a little surer now. If you aren’t excited about the prospect of revival, then you should be! Revival must be the universal cry of all Christian believers. And it often starts with two or three of us on our knees.

▶Footnotes
  1. And surely the proud Hebrews (of which Jonah was a representative) who heard the account were humbled as well—seeing foreign Assyrians respond to God more readily than they themselves did! ↩︎
  2. For example, the initial spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire was in spite of great persecution under emperors like Nero and Diocletian. In more recent times, the Church has grown in China despite Communism (although some of this growth is apparently more of a general identification with the West), see Bob Davey, The Power to Save: A History of the Gospel in China (Evangelical Press, 2011). ↩︎
  3. For instance, Martyn Lloyd-Jones notes that no ‘general revivals’ have occurred in the Church of England. The eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival sprung out of the Methodist movement. See Lloyd-Jones, ‘Revival: An Historical and Theological Survey’ in Puritans: Their Origins and Successors (Banner of Truth, 1987), 3. ↩︎
  4. One example is the revival that started in 1839 in St Peter’s Free Church in Dundee under the preaching of W.C. Burns, whilst its regular minister Robert Murray M’Cheyne was away. ↩︎
  5. For instance, see Harry Sprange, Children in Revival (Christian Focus, 2002). ↩︎
  6. Examples that spring to mind are Billy Bray and the ‘Bible Christians’ in Cornwall, ‘Praying’ Johnny (aka John Oxtoby) and the other Primitive Methodist preachers of the early to mid-nineteenth century. And of course the original twelve apostles themselves would also fall into this category! ↩︎
  7. J.I. Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit (IVP, 2005), 198. ↩︎
  8. Ibid., 188. Packer cites ‘Honour the Holy Spirit’ as the watchword of Evan Roberts, the preacher of the 1904 Welsh Revival. ↩︎
  9. Lloyd-Jones, ‘Revival’ in Puritans, 13-14. ↩︎
  10. Ibid., 8-9. ↩︎