D.M. Lloyd-Jones wrote about the perils of a useless, defective or “eccentric orthodoxy”. He outlined the problem of possessing correct notions, without holiness of life:
…we can be perfectly orthodox and yet our orthodoxy can be useless if we are failing in our lives, if we are disobedient to God’s holy laws, if we are guilty of sin, and continuing in known sin. If we put our desires before him, well, we have no right to expect revival, however orthodox and correct we may be in all our doctrines and in all our understanding. You will invariably find that when revival comes men and women are profoundly, and deeply, convicted of sin. They feel that even God cannot forgive them. They have been in the Church, yes, but they have been living a life of sin, and they have know it and they have done nothing about it. When revival comes they are put into hell, as it were, and they are horrified and alarmed. They may feel so terrible about it that they stand up and confess it. That may or may not happen, but they are certainly convicted. And so sin in any shape or form is ever one of the major hindrances to a visitation of the Spirit of God.
Long before Black Sabbath’s Iron Man or any Marvel comic, Mary Shelley wrote about, “Adam”—a modern genesis story. In her novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (published in 1818), a god-like scientist named Victor Frankenstein created a human-like machine with artificial intelligence that goes horribly wrong.
Since then, we’ve had two centuries to think about the fearful consequences of technology. Now when we hear about Artificial Intelligence that has gone wrong, it sounds like a story from modern tech journalism more than Victorian gothic fantasy. Yet Shelley anticipated these horrors over 200 years ago.
Horror
When Frankenstein was written (1816), Mary Shelley was travelling across Europe with a small group of friends along with her philandering husband Percy. At the time, Shelley and her small group were living the free love, bohemian dream. They rented a house beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland where they could work on writing and navigate their love triangles. One project was to write a ghost story. The setting was perfect since the weather was especially dreary. It was called the Summer Without Sun (or the Year Without Summer), and all of the Gothic novelists were inspired in their self-indulgent, dark fantasies.
Who could have known that the nineteen-year old’s godless creation myth would become the modern parable of the technological age? Frankenstein is more than a Halloween horror story. It is the horror of fallen humanity creating a fallen world after its own image.
Revival
Six weeks after the Victorian hippies left Geneva, another visitor came to town.
He wasn’t crafting stories, but he did carry another of his own.
Robert Haldane was in today’s terms a billionaire. He had been spiritually awakened after completing an architectural masterpiece at his estate (now part of the University of Sterling). He had sold it and started giving money to missionary work. And that’s why he came to Geneva.
Just after Napoleon’s surrender, Haldane was practically a tourist. He was crossing France and visiting Geneva, in part to see the post-war state of the churches.
When he got to Geneva, he might have expected the rich heritage of live orthodoxy that John Calvin had nurtured in the 16th century. Instead what he found was a climate that was enamoured with the same ideas as Mary Shelley and her circle.
When Haldane toured Geneva, his guide was a seminary student. What Haldane discovered was that this would-be pastor was completely ignorant of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Haldane suggested that the young man meet him for a bible study. As others from the seminary accompanied him, the study grew.
All that Haldane did was work methodically through the book of Romans. The power of the Word of God shocked these students who had been numbed by French philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau. Many of these seminarians had never read the bible before.
The contrast between Shelley’s home group and Haldane’s couldn’t be more clear. Shelley’s aimed to create without God. Haldane’s aimed to see new creations by God.
Frankenstein and his monster are (in)famous. Haldane’s name is mostly forgotten. But the bible study yielded more eternal significance than an old horror story. Some of the key French Protestant leaders of the 19th century were converted in what some called, “Haldane’s Revival.”
The difference of a few months in one city was the difference between the horrors of fallen imagination and the delight of forgiveness of sins in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now more than ever our world needs Geneva’s revival more than we need new Frankensteins of technology. But can we believe that Halloween fixations on horror can give way to awakening to the gospel of Jesus Christ? Even in Frankenstein’s shadow, God is able to make the dead come alive.
In any discussion of revival, there has to be an admission of revivalism too. The distinction was highlighted by Iain H. Murray’s historical study, Revival and Revivalism. These days people will speak about revival, but what they’re really talking about is a form of revivalism.
Revival and Revivalism
The key distinction between revival and revivalism is that the first is an unpredictable intensification of the normal, sufficient way that God saves and sanctifies. The second is a predictable, application of abnormal practices in order to create immediate, visible results (conversion decisions and extraordinary phenomena).
Revival intensifies the regular means of grace through the work of the local church, the preaching of the gospel, the discipleship of the saints (including their discipline), and the obedient practise of baptism and the Lord’s supper. In revival, there is a compressed density and expanded geography to the regular work of the gospel.
Revivalism always sidesteps the regular ministry of the local church. In fact, we could observe that many churches have swapped the regular ministry for perpetual revivalism. They use “new measures”, abnormal practices, and solicit vast numbers of public decisions without the need for discipleship, accountability, or any examination of the content of the deciders’ faith.
3 False Attractions
Why is revivalism so popular? I’m reminded that it continues to be popular as I watch the spread of the Bethel Church influence into non-pentecostal, mainstream evangelical churches. When I look at the features of Bethel Church and its pastor, Bill Johnson, I see many problems, but part of the issue is simply a repackaged revivalism. Here are three of the false attractions of revivalism that are recurring since the days of Charles Finney and are seen in the Bethel movement today.
1. A New Way of Doing Church
Western, consumerist culture loves something new. New computer, new phone, new show. So when people go to church they are very susceptible to new packaging and even new content. With every generation, there is the suggestion of a new way of doing church. I remember the Emergent Church movement which was at a pinnacle over a decade ago. It had books with titles like “A New Kind of Christian”. Newness sells.
Bethel has tapped into this by promoting the use of a new Passion “translation” of the bible. It is not a translation, as Andrew Wilson points out. The practice of grave soaking or grave sucking is new and really weird (see Joe Carter’s summary).
Charles Finney offered “new measures” which lead to saw-dust trails to altar calls. None of it was in the bible and in the regular ministry of the local church. But the newness attracted a lot of people. Unfortunately in the “Burned-Over Districts” the false conversions created a spiritual hardness among people as well as cults that grew like mushrooms (cf. 2 Tim 3:5).
2. Direct Access to the Unseen
Revivalism has to offer something special and unique for people to be attracted. One of the key enticements is for direct access to the unseen. In other words, true faith in the unseen is not enough. There has to be quick, repeatable phenomena that indicate the “power” of that faith.
The Bethel message is that repetitive miracles are normal Christian life. Of course, the problem with common-place miracles is that they are a contradiction in terms. This is not a matter of the theological arguments over cessationism or continuationism. Rather, it imports a low view of miracles, not a high view. By taking strange practices and imaginative interpretations of circumstance and labelling them as miracles, Bethel denigrates the possibility of God doing the truly miraculous.
Ironically, Bethel, like all revivalism, flips 2 Corinthians 5:7 around. They want people to walk by sight, not by faith, but they will say it’s faith. The problem with this kind of revivalism that walks by sight is that it sets people up for disillusionment. When the miracles aren’t miraculous, they will go looking for some other direct access to the unseen. I have been told by observers of the Christian Missionary Alliance that along with the Bethel influence growing, there is also a move toward medieval Roman Catholicism and it’s mystical tradition. Into this mixture, there can be the prospect of encouraging a new sacramentalism as the famous convert to Roman Catholicism, JH Neuman desired. Or there is a type of panentheism that has more to do with the New Age spiritualities than might appear at first.
3. Big Attendance Creates False Credibility
Looking at revivalism, whether it was Finney’s crowds, Methodist tent-meetings, or even elements of Moody and Graham’s crusade evangelism, we need to recognize that the existence of large crowds can create authority and credibility. Usually, the existence of crowds is a poor indicator of the credible and authoritative content of the preacher’s message. How faithful the message is to Scripture is the key indicator. Getting a crowd is possible for any showman.
Nevertheless, we all know that large events have authority and credibility ascribed to the leaders of the events because of the attendance. You would expect that with such big crowds, or big influence, that the message would be informing the attendees in deep and profound ways. But in revivalism settings, when people are asked about what they actually believe as a result of their attendance, the results can be disappointing.
Sadly in the wake of such big events, people will tend to remain agnostic or vague about key doctrines. They won’t understand clearly what the content of the Christian faith is. They are unable to assent to that content. And in turn, there is no basis for them to put living trust in the true gospel of Jesus Christ as specially revealed in Scripture. John Calvin’s threefold understanding of true faith (knowledge, assent, trust), is not encouraged by revivalism. True knowledge is bypassed or distorted and bare assent to the distortion is all that is required. Few would connect the obedience of faith (Romans 1:5; 16:26) to revivalism movements like Bethel’s.
Yet the crowd creates credibility. Many churches outside of Bethel’s stream are interested in emulating them. It was similar in Charles Finney’s day when his new techniques (eg. altar calls) became standard practices within churches for the next century.
The Consequence of Finneyism
I got an email this week from a pastor who shared with me his observations about Northern Ireland in the 1970’s during the Troubles. He noted that there was a great desire for God to bring revival. There was much spiritual good that came out of that pursuit. However, he also said that revivalism, namely the legacy of Charles Finney, was promoted positively. Yet true revival never came.
It makes me wonder that when the promised revival didn’t come, and the Troubles left devastation in its wake, the consequence of Finneyism would result in many, many disillusioned people. This would be an added tragedy.
We need to resist the false attractions of revivalism. If we don’t we will see a further “marring” of Evangelicalism (as Iain Murray described).
Instead, we should seek a robust view of God and his ways, learning from the Scriptures and the history of God’s dealings in the church, so that we would not be deceived by the false attractions of revivalism.
Imagine what it would be like if you came to church expecting the possibility of a revival? Consider that God could pour out his Spirit in a new and fresh way in reviving his weak and slumbering people. Who knows if God will send revival today?
Saskatchewan 1971
On October 13, 1971 a special work of God occurred in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. One of the key features of the revival was repentance. In fact, the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix reported that there was a “surge of people making up for past dishonesty”. (Nov 12, 1971 Renewed Morality Found in Wake of Revival).
There had been a concert of prayer among pastors for the year prior to the awakening, but no one could calculate or predict when God may move. Nevertheless, it was clear that those pastors had an expectation that God was able to move in an extraordinary way.
Expectation Doesn’t Mean Presumption
One of the features of revivals is that they can often slip from expectation to presumption. Trying to “bottle it” is the temptation which many experience. When people go through a special move of God, which comes to an end, they can act as if God is not moving anymore, that the Spirit is not operative, and that the ordinary means of grace is no longer sufficient.
At this point, revival can move to revivalism (cf. Iain Murray’s contrast). What started as a special work of God that was sovereign and free, becomes a man-made, scripted and predictable process of recreation.
Andrew Bonar desired to see revival again in the late 19th century, so he supported the work of DL Moody’s “revivals”. Now Moody was certainly a mass evangelist, and the crowds which came to hear him were similar to the work of “crusade evangelists” like Billy Graham in the 20th century. At the same time, there was much less of the unpredictable character of revival. If a crusade was announced as coming to a city, most people could predict that there would be religious interest on that weekend.
This is not to say that there wasn’t much fruit from the mass evangelism events. It is just to say that those predictable events are different than an unpredictable revival. We can have an expectation that God could bring revival today, without the presumption to think that we can predict it, plan it and promote it.
Expectation and Preparation
Although churches may never be prepared for revival, just as the banks of the river are unprepared for the flood, still they can prepare for how to benefit from the awakening.
Don Carson told the story of meeting a woman who had been converted in the Welsh Revival of 1904. Carson enjoyed the fellowship with the woman, but the sad part of her story is that she had no sound church to go to afterwards. After hearing about how poorly prepared the Welsh church was in benefitting from the revival, Carson made the pledge:
Should the Lord in his mercy ever pour out large-scale revival on any part of the world where I have influence, I shall devote all my energy to teaching the Word, to training a new generation of godly pastors, to channeling all of this God-given fervor toward doctrinal maturity, multiplication of Christian leaders, evangelistic zeal, maturity in Christ, genuine Christian “fellowship.”
So there is a way to participate in the gospel’s advance that is neither presumptuous, yet is prepared to see the revival empower true reformation. That’s essentially what happened at the Protestant Reformation. Reforms were made, but the special work of the Spirit in many people from Scotland to Italy, at the same time, brought unity and force to their reforming efforts.
Expectation and Faith
In the twenty-seventh Psalm, the end offers us an exhortation to expectant prayer which we can pray in faith. The ending exhortation says:
I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living! Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!
Psalm 27:13-14
As we go to church, we should ask God to give us this kind of expectancy that he can show his goodness in new and fresh ways, or in the longstanding and solid ways. His goodness can be manifested however he chooses. And we can actively wait upon the Lord. We can wait with expectancy. Who knows if God will bless in a special way today? As the prophet Joel said:
“Yet even now,” declares the LORD, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster. Who knows whether he will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind him, a grain offering and a drink offering for the LORD your God?
I think it’s rare to find people talking about it, but is true revival possible today? I’m not talking about the revival which false teachers talk about incessantly. Nor am I talking about the civic, social revival of Western civilization which many Christians are captivated by. I’m talking about the filling of the Holy Spirit among many people at one time that yields keener attentiveness to the Word preached and produces a new promiscuous outpouring of prayer to God. In a true revival, saints are progressively sanctified rapidly, and the lost are converted decidedly. Revival is simply the ordinary intensified.
Jonathan Edwards is My Homeboy?
Among conservative churches, there seems to be an absence of any kind of expectancy for revival. Although it wasn’t too long ago that guys wore, “Jonathan Edwards is My Homeboy” t-shirts, the idea of a Great Awakening seems to be relegated to the distant past.
Since there have been such abuses by those promoting revival, I think the tendency is to reduce our expectations of God. When we do, we reduce our view to what God does in the ordinary means of grace, not looking for any intensification.
Revival for Cessationists
Since I am a cessationist, I believe that the sign gifts were uniquely given to the church in the apostolic age to vindicate the gospel message in that singular foundation-laying season. But being a cessationist doesn’t mean I’m an anti-supernaturalist. God can perform miracles. He can also use individuals in miraculous ways. Yet gifts correspond to ongoing roles, and I don’t see the warrant for continued apostolic roles, so those particular sign gifts have ceased.
The expectation of God to act powerfully and intensely can’t be abandoned just because a person confesses cessationism. If God is free to act, he can sovereignly save many people at once, or sanctify many saints in a church rapidly. None of this requires the manifestation of charismatic phenomena. Instead what we would see would be:
greater attentiveness to Scripture,
hanging upon the Word preached,
prioritized attention to prayer that is Scripture saturated,
and worship that is free, yet with great fear of God.
It is interesting for me to see that many churches that are continuationist (i.e. charismatic churches) have a lot of emphasis on subjective feelings attributed to God, but a remarkably thin emphasis on the kind of godly sanctification that I’ve described. I’ve also found that in good continuationist and cessationist churches, there is the same proper expectancy. In either type of church, there is a confidence in God to both sovereignly intensify the sanctification of saints and to rapidly save the lost according to his good pleasure. In these churches, there is no abandonment of the ordinary means of grace, but there is confidence that God could speed his works rapidly among the church in striking ways.
A Window Looking at Revival?
On Sunday, at the church where I serve, there was a window into this prospect of revival. My fellow pastors and I were overseeing the Lord’s Supper and we all noticed something. The singing had increased in volume and the congregation seemed attentive to the whole liturgy. After the service, people were noticeably moved by the concrete reality of the believer’s destiny in heaven (2 Timothy 4:8). We asked ourselves, “Is it possible that God was bringing a revival?” We had witnessed our church being broken down with grief and empathy for a suffering member. And we had also seen an outpouring of prayer to God. This had been capped off with greater attentiveness to what Scripture said about the glories of heaven.
But if we only look at worship volume and subjective impressions, then they are not the criteria which will ultimately mark out true revival. Rather when sinners are distinctly converted, and saints grow in the faith from being children to adults in a day, then it will appear that God has moved in a special reviving way.
Beyond Tim Keller’s Strategy
It is interesting to me that Tim Keller is cited by many pastors as having influenced their ministry strategy. Yet Keller himself recognized that for eighteen months he experienced something of a local revival at Redeemer in 1990-1991. Revival beats strategy every time. It doesn’t mean that we don’t employ strategy, because we must. But we have to also humble ourselves to ask God to work according to his good pleasure, whether it be in an ordinary way or an extraordinary way.
Pray to God that you would grow in your expectancy of his ability to sovereignly, freely and decidedly revive the church and convert the lost. That would be a good start for all of us.
Summer is a gift of God to a people who live in a cold country. Our summers are short and so there is always a certain urgency. We have to take advantage of the warm (hot!) weather.
The same is true for the Christian life. All people need to take advantage of the gospel offer in this season before the last Day. Paul reminds the Corinthians that “now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2).
A Sense of Urgency
It is also a season for calling people to believe in the gospel. This is not just your own personal belief in Christ, but the importance of bearing witness to this news of salvation. The season for this is brief too. And that is all the more reason why we need to have a sense of urgency, even as we are basking in the sunlight of the Son.
Jesus knew this tendency to forget how brief the window is. He said to the disciples:
Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. (John 4:35)
The harvest was urgently upon them. And they needed to admit the facts. They couldn’t let themselves think that they still had lots of time before the urgency kicks in.
The Unexpectant
In 1866, Charles Spurgeon preached on this passage and he noted how unexpectant Christians had become. He said:
You know that this is the general feeling at present in the Christian church, not to expect any great things now, but to be waiting and watching for something or other which may one of these days, in the order of providence, “turn up.”
We can be quite unexpectant. That is why we are fearful in evangelism, or we are apathetic in it. We just don’t expect that we can do it, or it will do any good. We almost completely take God out of the equation. All we end up seeing is the indifference or hostility of people toward the gospel.
But could it be that the indifferent person is simply being ripened by God, so that their apathy will be arrested by the drama of God’s wrath that rests upon them? (cf. Rom 1:18). Maybe they’ll be shaken by the profound condescension and love of God in Christ Jesus? If you speak the gospel to them, they might be ready to burst in relief at finding a refuge to flee from the wrath to come.
You don’t know this for sure. But you can be expectant of God.
As William Carey said, “Expect great things; attempt great things— for God”.
Enter the Harvest
Summer is a wonderful time. Let’s also remember that it is the precursor to the harvest. Will you pray with expectancy for ways to enter into God’s harvest?
“The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.” (Luke 10.2).
Pray this way and God will make you an answer to your own prayer.
3 Ways You Can Expectantly Enter the Harvest:
Prayerfully reflect on God’s undeserved favour to you, and start praying in concentric circles for the salvation of those closest to you, and progressively further out.
Pray for the Word heard together, in your Sunday gatherings and as people apply it in small groups and one-to-one discipling. Pray that new people would be witnessed to and invited to come and hear the message of the gospel too.
Go and share the gospel with someone and invite them to your church.
Let us pray to be more expectant of what God can do.
Revival and renewals have been happening throughout history and across geography. God has given awakenings from Iraq’s Ninevite awakening in the eighth century (BC) to Korea’s Pyongyang Revival in the early twentieth century (AD). But can public sin undo a renewal like the YRR movement?
We have to start by remembering that with every awakening, like all visible professions of faith, our interpretation of events is limited. We do not see as God sees. Apparent visible success can be much more mixed than we anticipated. As well, fears of decline can be more highly exaggerated by us, while God has many who have not bowed the knee to Baal (1 Kings 19:18, Rom 11:4).
Jesus taught us that various spiritual states can show visibly potential spiritual life, but that only the lasting, fruit-bearing life reveals the “good soil” (Mt 13:1-23, Mk 4:1-20, Lk 8:4-15).
Jesus himself experienced the reversals of having people follow him visibly, but who “turned back and no longer walked with him” (John 6:66). Of course, Jesus spoke about Judas, but he included all those who followed for a season but didn’t remain.
Paul understood this visible reversal. He had many people join and then abandon his Lord’s mission so that when Paul was put on trial nobody was there to stand up for him except, as Paul noted, the Lord himself (2 Ti 4:16-17).
Accepting the Mixed Legacy
So when renewals and revivals come, there will be seasons of delight and disillusionment. Such season ought to be anticipated. They have occurred since the days of our Lord’s earthly ministry and the early days of the church under the apostles care. There is a big difference between the disillusionment from seeing an end to visible successes and being brazenly disillusioned with God.
Should We Be Agnostic About Renewals?
Another approach always pops up in answer to the question of delight versus disillusionment. The alternative approach is to be sort of agnostic about seasons of renewal and revival. People who take on this approach refuse to acknowledge an awakening because they are a bit cynical and not wishing to be disappointed. With this approach, people may hear good reports, and they act like they don’t exist, or don’t matter.
Being agnostic about renewals tends to be fearfully passive and moribund, or suspiciously shrunk down to the safest unit possible– yourself. Like Elijah, there can be a lack of self-awareness with this approach since God is doing many unseen things all the time (cf. 1 Kings 19:18). This approach tends toward dead orthodoxy (that is therefore unorthodox), ‘the frozen chosen’, and the death of missions.
Productive Not Parasitical
In Michael Allen’s book, he contrasts the two ways that reform can take place. He says that reforms can take place productively or parasitically. I found this distinction very helpful. When we consider reformation, revival, and renewal, we always want to be seeking productive change, not parasitical change. A renewal is parasitical if it is merely feeding off of the spiritual productivity of a previous renewal. If the calls for change are parasitical then they are bound to bring serious spiritual decline. An example of this is how the Second Great Awakening was largely parasitical on the miraculous events of the First Great Awakening.
If the renewal we seek is productive we can hope for better. The good of a previous renewal can be built upon, while the errors and sins of the mixed legacy can be sifted, recanted and repented of.
An example of a productive renewal is what has been called the Young, Restless and Reformed (YRR) movement or the reformed renewal. The reformed renewal has had a productive growth for over half a century. It began after WWII, rose alongside of neo-evangelicalism, and took over the conservative wing of the evangelical movement. Now at a peak, the Young, Restless and Reformed are not so young anymore. All along, there has been a largely productive renewal that has occurred. Now the mixed nature of the renewal is starting to be recognized as visible success has not guaranteed enduring faithfulness. But on the whole, the stream represented by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, JI Packer, John Piper, John MacArthur, Albert Mohler and Mark Dever has been a productive renewal.
Gratitude for Renewals and Revivals
When we recognize the mixed legacy of renewals and revivals, we can give thanks to God for what they are, not what they are not. Revivals are not heaven on earth. We shouldn’t treat them like that. Revivals have not ushered in global Christianization, so we shouldn’t act as if they will.
But we can give thanks to God for the good soil and lasting fruit of those who are truly saved in the midst of renewals. We can be filled with gratitude for what God has done, and hold fast to the gospel of Jesus Christ as the abiding source of all good kingdom work.
With that kind of gratitude, we will be expectant of the Holy Spirit to bring new awakenings and new transformations as the ingathering of God’s people continues, awaiting the consummation of our renewal unhindered before the face of God for eternity. The affliction of reversals won’t even compare. Instead, we will come to realize that “this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor 4:17).
