BLOOD SWEAT & TOIL IN REVIVAL
by Peter MastersFROM SWORD & TROWEL 2000 No 3
What will happen to us when revival comes?
Does revival bypass ordinary means of evangelism?
So the posts went with the letters from the king and his princes throughout all Israel
and Judah, and according to the commandment of the king, saying, Ye children of Israel, turn
again unto the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and he will return to the remnant of you,
that are escaped out of the hand of the kings of Assyria (2 Chronicles 30.6).
Not long ago, in the USA, one of the best-known preachers in the evangelical world put
the question to me - ‘What exactly is revival?’ Of course, he knew very well the literature of
revival, but he wanted to compare notes, as it were, and weigh the conflicting concepts. And this is
the dilemma confronting us all - what exactly is revival?
The subject is of such immense importance, and yet there are widely differing ways of
reading the same records, and deeply conflicting perceptions.
Some speak as though the people of God are largely passive in revival; as though the Lord
suspends the need for human instrumentality in order to exhibit His power and glory in ways that
transcend and bypass ordinary efforts to win souls. They sometimes imagine people having
experiences of Christ unheard of outside times of revival.
Such a view possesses strong attraction, appealing to the ‘mystic’ in every one of us. More
legitimately, it appeals to the natural desire of the Christian to have some of the glory of Heaven
even while here on earth, and to witness and feel a unique breath of God’s invincible, heart-lifting
power.
But is it right? Do we find in Scripture a two-tier method of divine operation, one for
revival, and another for less blessed days? Revival is certainly a time of mighty, soul-gathering
power, and there is nothing we can do to produce it. It is truly a sovereign work of the Spirit, and its
timing is entirely according to God’s secret plan. However, it surely does not involve suspension of
the effort and instrumentality of believers.
A clear view of revival is often obstructed by excitable anecdotal accounts from people
who, today, might fit rather well in the extreme charismatic fringe. Exaggeration and spectacular
marvels abound.
Are we against revival? Of course not! Are we trying to pour cold water on powerful
seasons of blessing? Certainly not! Revival is rooted in the biblical narrative, and is unmistakably
demonstrated in the history of the Church. But you cannot trust everything that you read, especially
extravagant narratives from unqualified sources who project a near-magical view of revival.
Although revival involves an extraordinary scale of blessing, the normal rules of Scripture
never go into suspense. God still uses instruments. We repeat the point that we cannot produce
revival, however perfect our obedience to God. It is not a matter of cause and effect. However,
when by the sovereignty of God revival comes, Gospel witness and proclamation are still the
divinely appointed instruments. As David Fountain has pointed out over many years, revival is a
matter of scale, not of kind. Certainly, revival is not a ‘spectator sport’.
Therefore, it behoves Christian workers to be instant in season, out of season, always
striving, so that they will be available to God whatever the dispensation of blessing.
Even the briefest scan of significant revivals opens up wonderful possibilities and fills us
with hope and encouragement. Let revivals define themselves, beginning in this article with the
great awakening at the time of King Hezekiah, when - ‘the posts went with the letters from the
king and his princes throughout all Israel and Judah, and according to the commandment of the
king, saying, Ye children of Israel, turn again unto the Lord God of Abraham’ (2 Chronicles
30.6).
Hezekiah’s revival was begun with a call to repent. It was a ‘proclamational’ revival, as
are all such awakenings. The Word was proclaimed, and repentance was at the heart of the
message.
The language employed was blunt and clear, for Hezekiah’s call reads - ‘And be not ye
like your fathers, and like your brethren, which trespassed against the Lord God.’ The call was also
full of mercy - ‘For the Lord your God is gracious and merciful, and will not turn away his face
from you, if ye return unto him.’
Nevertheless, this call was resisted and rejected by many, and treated with derision and
scorn. Yet in a particular area, in Judah, there was an astonishing response. (Revival is sometimes
conspicuously regional, even within a benefiting country.) There was much labour involved in the
circulation of the posts, and much unrewarded toil also. Revival always costs labour and includes
disappointment.
One could mention revival-scale blessings associated with King Josiah, or with Ezra, and
even Jonah. All involved calls to repentance, and none were free from burdens and setbacks.
That singular, tough and rugged instrument for revival John the Baptist both preached
repentance, and bore the rigours of persecution. The mighty blessings of Pentecost were also
attended by bitter persecution, but more significantly, the multiplicity of human instruments was
established from the outset in the way the tongues of fire were distributed.
Revival always uses God’s people, but with quite exceptional results, exposing them not
only to much striving in witness and proclamation, but also to a measure of rejection and
persecution. There are many good books on revival, but we should beware of those that diminish
the place of human instrumentality, or the ‘ordinary’ operation of the Holy Spirit. God’s people are
certainly ‘passive’ in the sense that they cannot produce or even enhance revival, but when God
works, He channels through them the exhausting instrumentality of many years. Our point is that
blood, sweat and toil are inescapable features of revival.
We may think of the great awakening at the time of that giant in history, John Wycliffe,
the morning star of the Reformation. Born at some time between 1324 and 1329, and dying in
1384, Wycliffe was a rising sun of Gospel light, a defensive tower of true faith, and a rock of
spiritual stability to the faithful.
Born in Yorkshire and educated at Oxford, where he was much influenced by the writings
of Augustine, he came (most probably) to personal conversion at around 21, during the Black
Death, when he saw his friends and countless others around him struck down in great numbers.
He became a college Master, a king’s chaplain, a doctor of theology, and Rector of
Lutterworth, but it was his preaching and his tracts opposing the reign of the Pope and powerfully
pressing home the true way of salvation, that stirred the multitudes. Condemned by the Pope, the
great popularity of his preaching put him for a time beyond the power of his enemies. In 1380 he
banded together and sent out his students, the so-called poor preachers or Lollards, and the Holy
Spirit breathed in mighty power. The empowered spokesmen were numerous.
The hearts of tens of thousands were opened to the message of repentance and faith in
Christ, even before the Reformation. But we must note that this great instrument saw and felt the
need, and took the necessary initiatives in sending forth preachers. Wycliffe did not make the
revival, but he and his preachers received the sovereign blessing and were then driven off their feet
by the blessing that came. They knew labour, exhaustion, contempt and persecution, for these were
unavoidable and major features of their glorious, glorious work.
Then you come to the Reformation. Could there have been a greater awakening, a greater
outpouring of revival than the Reformation? We think of Martin Luther, born in 1483, and
described as one of the most beaten boys of his time. What schoolboy can say he was caned by his
schoolmaster fifteen times in one day? Not only his teachers, but his father beat him, and even his
mother, who once disciplined him so hard that he bled. Yet here was the future apostle of grace to
the world.
He entered the monastery at 22, and became a lecturer at the University of Wittenberg
aged 25, all the time with growing yearnings for spiritual peace. He visited Rome aged 27, and
became utterly disenchanted with the hypocrisies of the Church. He was appointed a professor of
theology at 29, and at the age of 30 (in 1513) began to study Romans, Psalms
and Galatians, discovering one epochal day that golden text, Romans
1.17, ‘The just shall live by faith.’
From there he found personal faith in Christ, and just three years later in 1517, nailed the
Ninety-five Theses to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg, the most famous date of the
Reformation revival. Certainly, it was a Reformation of theology, but also a season during which
hundreds of thousands - who knows how many? - were gathered into the Kingdom of God by the
preaching of repentance and grace.
But what activism was there! What holy zeal! What tireless labour! And what
persecution also attended the work! The Reformation has been called the greatest revival of them
all, and certainly the most costly in terms of blood. Its accomplishments were beyond measure, as
gross superstition and ignorance melted before the power of the Word, and human society received
back the gift of a sound mind, and rational thought.
What does the Reformation say about revival? Certainly not that the people of God are
passive. On the contrary, it was a glorious and prolonged season of blessing upon human
instrumentality, and upon messengers who were prepared to pay the cost in fervent activity,
exhaustion, suffering and even life itself.
We repeat, revival is never a ‘spectator sport’ enjoyed by a passive Christian community.
Rather it is a phenomenon for which we need to be trained and prepared and toughened-up.
What is revival? Says the Reformation: it is a time when God converts vast numbers,
giving instrumentality to His servants in far greater degree than usual. It is a time when countless
preachers plead the Gospel more times in a week than ever before, and when God’s people are
unusually zealous to witness and gather the people in. Pre-eminently, it is a time when the hearts of
thousands are divinely melted and opened so that they will listen, and thirst and long for mercy and
salvation.
The Reformation warns us that if we do not preach for souls now, if and
when revival comes, we shall be swept into a reformed ministry of soul-winning, and into an
exhausting work-rate previously unknown to us. The Reformation created a magnificent army of
instruments, especially the noble army of martyrs.
What a wonderful revival occurred through the ministry of many seventeenth-century
Puritans! It was a strange scene, in the lull following the Reformation. There was much formal
religion, with churchgoing maintained partly by law and partly by social convention. The forces of
ritualism were fiercely active, as works-religion strove to claw back the attention of the people.
Puritan preachers were up against a massive wall of presumption, as millions imagined
themselves to be children of God on account of their church attendance, their respectability, and
especially their knowledge.
Some Puritans preached so powerfully to tear away every vestige of carnal presumption,
that those who read their sermons today risk being plunged into painful doubts about their
salvation. Nevertheless, in many places it was the need of the hour, and experiential preaching
often led to the conversion of almost entire parishes and districts.
Puritan revival was clearly a localised activity, but involving a great many localities. It
was revival characterised by an insistence upon godly living, and making men and women of the
Book of God. But one thing may be safely said of the Puritan period of revival - how those
preachers worked!
The later ‘Puritan’ John Bunyan demonstrates the dedication, pain and hardship seen
when the Spirit moves in revival power. Son of a tinker, he became a tinker himself. Joining the
army at 16, he was at the Battle of Leicester, on the Parliamentary side (which inspired the allegory
of The Holy War).
He married a believer at 19 years of age, and at his conversion had a very long struggle to
gain assurance. Arrested for preaching at 32, he spent over twelve years in Bedford jail, in a
wringing wet cell on the river, where he penned The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Released under the Act of Pardon he went on to enjoy 16 years of remarkable blessing,
preaching constantly to great gatherings in damp and draughty barns and open places, and revival
blessing touched his ministry. The ‘universal tender of salvation’ (his term) rang out from his lips.
But, once again, the revival instrument was a man of toil, in journeys oft, preaching whether sick or
well, never resting, ever evangelising, and ready to die of exhaustion for most of his years of
liberty.
His hearers also scurried to make ready for his visits, stirring the lost, and gathering the
crowds. The people of God are certainly unable to produce a season of revival-scale blessing, but
once it comes, they are anything but passive.
We may think of Jonathan Edwards in the America of the 1730s. He read Latin at six,
Hebrew and Greek at thirteen, and was converted at seventeen. In 1734 the Great Awakening broke
with sermons such as Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, being read to crowds, we
are told, by candle-light. Edwards and other great names toiled and travelled ceaselessly in times
more rigorous than our own, to bring in the harvest of the Lord.
A few years later in Britain, George Whitefield and John and Charles Wesley became the
first instruments of a new awakening. In 1739, on a foggy November morning, just a few hundred
yards from the present site of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, on the edge of the Kennington
Common, vast crowds assembled at six o’clock in the morning, to hear Whitefield.
Dr John Gill, they said, never went to hear Whitefield preach, but if true, that is not the
whole story, because Gill pressed his congregation to go out round the taverns and the coffee
houses urging the people to hear the great call to mercy.
Whitefield stood on Kennington Common surrounded sometimes by children in early
teens, who had found the Lord through his word, thinking (mistakenly) that if they thronged round
the preacher his enemies would not hurl bricks at him for fear of hitting them. The bricks were
hurled anyway, and the children were hurt, but they kept up their vigil.
When the Holy Spirit came down in mighty power the preachers and their supporters were
not spared pain and opposition, nor were they spared the rigours of intensive daily preaching
programmes.
John Cennick, dear John Cennick, was truly a suffering seraph of grace. God first touched
his heart as he was walking down Cheapside, having come to London to be an apprentice surveyor.
He was 19, and was struck by ‘such a deep dejection of spirit’ that he did not know what to do with
himself. He laboured under depression, with a sense of utter purposelessness for some time, until in
desperation he crept into the back of a ritualistic Anglican church, and heard the closing words of a
psalm which assured him that saving grace was available to him. The Scriptures suddenly came to
life for a future instrument of the revival.
Few were so touched with sympathy for the masses as Cennick, and yet few suffered so
much vilification. Of him it was said that he died a thousand deaths of excessive labours, and
indeed, he was carried early to glory from a fever following preaching soaked to the skin.
People nowadays think this foolhardy. Why burn yourself out in your thirties or in your
forties? Surely that is not the way to serve the Lord? But in times of revival you may have half a
dozen lifetimes channelled through five years’ preaching, and no doubt you would be happy to die
early with such privileged instrumentality.
Let us never overlook the blood, sweat and toil in times of awakening. Let us not heed
those who want to eliminate this from the record. Revival costs much in terms of human
instrumentality. There is no such thing as a non-activistic revival.
When revival comes, believers are put under pressure, and often through persecution. The
preachers preach many times more often than they would do normally, and many other labours
engage them.
Just think of the compassionate activity of the eighteenth-century revival. What a
merciful, tender revival that was! Up and down the land ragged schools took root, and then the
great Sunday School movement began, because the awakening had a great heart for spiritually
abandoned children and young people.
If we switch our glance back to the United States we see another revival characterised by
unusual activity and passionate service for the Lord. (These intense characteristics did not precede
or produce the revival, but the revival produced them, and so the blessing was channelled.)
It was 1857, and the earlier awakening was now a spent force. There was very little
spiritual life, and much religious formalism. Then, in the autumn of that year a city missionary from
a Dutch reformed church in Fulton Street, New York started a noonday prayer meeting in a minor
room.
Who has not heard the story of that awakening, the start of which seems to have been
signalled in that September 23rd meeting? The numbers rose steadily, but slowly, day by day. Then
came October 7th, and the stock market crash, leading to tens of thousands being thrown out of
work, and terrible need and poverty descending on the masses. Now the prayer meetings began to
multiply.
A New York City newspaper editor checked twelve lunchtime prayer meetings in one day
and thought he counted 6,100 men present. Two years later, by which time all the newspapers were
following the extraordinary work of the Spirit, there were 50,000 to be found in the New York
prayer meetings, and it is said that one-and-a-half million people were transformed by the work of
the Spirit in that awakening. But it is a story of intense spiritual activity throughout
(especially lay activity), with churches galvanised into service, preachers proclaiming
daily, vast prayer meetings, and personal witness challenging countless people by the hour.
We read of the revival reaching deeply into both armies during the civil war, and of the
tidal wave of blessing coming to Scotland, and then to Wales and finally to England. Here in this
congregation we were also deeply affected by that awakening, even though we had experienced a
powerful manifestation of revival for the six preceding years.
Spurgeon writes in the preface of The New Park Street Pulpit of 1859, ‘The
times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord have at last dawned upon our land. Everywhere
there are signs of aroused activity and increased earnestness. A spirit of prayer is visiting our
churches and its paths are dropping fatness. The first breath of the rushing, mighty wind is already
discerned, while on rising evangelists the tongues of fire have evidently descended.’
As far as his own congregation was concerned, Spurgeon was able to say, ‘For six years
the dew has never ceased to fall and the rain has never been withheld. All this time the converts are
more numerous than heretofore and the zeal of the church groweth exceedingly.’ In other words, a
lesser, localised revival had visited them in those years characterised by numerous conversions and
also by fervent labour for the Lord. The greater and more widespread outpouring was to be no
different.
Everywhere churches received new converts on a scale that frequently swelled the number
in membership by ten or more times. It is moving to look at Spurgeon’s sermon titles in that 1859
volume just referred to. Satan’s Banquet; Compel Them to Come In; the Blood of the Lamb - and numerous other evangelistic addresses appear.
Spurgeon elsewhere points out that the revival was characterised by much personal
witness, and also by ‘white-hot’ prayer meetings.
Trustworthy chroniclers of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivals unite in
identifying the chief features of a time of revival. They mention sorrow for the state of the land as
one. They also note the abandonment of worldly pursuits by Christian people. (Does this not
expose the great tragedy of ‘contemporary worship’, which pollutes our highest activity, the
worship of the glorious God, with worldly entertainment-style music?) In times of revival the
people of God separate from distinctively worldly things.
It is sadly strange that today we have such a hard time persuading godly pastors, who love
the Lord, to take up regular evangelistic preaching. Yet this is perhaps the most prominent feature
of awakening. If revival comes, men who exclusively feed the saints, putting in just a word here or
there for the unbeliever, will at last cast aside their mysterious inhibitions and be true to their
calling and their gifts.
We have heard it said that in revival God will do more in five minutes than we can do
with 40 years of activism. Such a statement makes a true and vital point, but it is open to
misunderstanding. Revival certainly brings a scale of blessing which all the human zeal in the
world cannot remotely attain. However, as this article has repeatedly said, that blessing is still
routed through human instruments, so that these are driven many times harder than in ‘ordinary’
times.
We must never be discouraged and think, ‘O, we have carried out all our visitation for so
few responses! We have preached so many Gospel sermons for so few converts! Why don’t we
give it all up, and just cry out for revival?’
It may not be the will of God to send revival, and then what? There will be no effective
witness carried out. The Lord’s people will not be making themselves available to the Holy Spirit
for the ingathering of the lost. (Furthermore, if Christ is not set before the people, they cannot be
judged for their rejection of Him. God has left us in this world to be to some a savour of death unto
death, and to others of life unto life.)
For all we know it may not be the will of God to breathe again upon this land at all before
the end shall come. Or we may have to wait a decade or two before a renewed time of large-scale
ingathering. In the meantime ‘graves are filling up fast.’
Seasons of blessing are in the hand of God. We pray for them, we long for them, but we
cannot determine them, and so we had better be in training and doing as much as we can, always
recognising that the same principles of witness apply both in and out of revival.
Let us not wait in idleness for a special outpouring of power, for that is an exceptional
work of God not intended for every age. God in His sovereignty appoints the scale and seasons of
blessing - ‘Some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.’
Let us, however, learn our principles of action from revival, noting especially - the
prayerfulness of it, the unworldliness of it, the activism of it, and the grace-preaching focus of it.
Let us never lose sight of the blood, sweat, and toil; the striving after godliness, and the
paramount place given to evangelism. Let us pray for revival, and at the same time pursue our
service for the Lord as though it might never come. For all we know, the Lord may have called us
to serve at the front line in the bleakest period of the war, all our lives. May His will be done;
blessed be the name of the Lord!
Endnote on Revival by Peter Masters:
I remember the words of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones (indeed I heard him say this on a
number of occasions in the 1960s both at the Westminster Fraternal, and privately) - ‘There is not
likely to be a revival while the self-confidence of Christians is so great.’ In those days, as now,
leaders of international evangelising organisations were saying they would win the world to Christ
in a few short years. They thought that their perceived personal gifts, brilliant methods and
unsurpassed powers of organisation would accomplish all. Dr Lloyd-Jones was so right to warn that
self-confidence quenched the Spirit.
At the time, there were some pastors who took the warning in a way which
would never have been intended. They reasoned that if we cannot place any trust in our own
efforts, then all we can do is wait for revival. They felt it would be presumptuous and
audacious to attempt to do anything.
Surely the right and balanced attitude to revival is to see the need for it,
desire it, pray for it, and in the meantime (in season or out of season) do all we can to make
the Gospel known in obedience to the great commission. To do all we can does not
necessarily entail self-confidence.
The harder we labour, the harder we should depend on the Lord, knowing that in or out of
revival seasons we can achieve nothing unless the Lord breathes upon our efforts and moves in the
hearts of people. We can be activists, and at the same time we can be humble men and women who
depend on the blessing and power of the Spirit. Humble activism is precisely what we need today.
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