Josué 4

Josué 4

Barnes says, it is surely most important that we should do so and therefore, anything that is going to help us to do it is of the greatest value, and one of the best aids that I know of in this respect is to consider the story of the great revivals of the past. That is why, in this centenary year, we are reminding ourselves of what happened in 1859, that wonderful year in the history of God’s people. But let us be clear about this. We are not interested in all this merely from the historical standpoint. Our interest must never be merely an antiquarian interest. There is no point in reading about revivals just for the sake of reading the history in the stories. No, our motive and our interest must be to read and to study and to consider what has happened in the past, in order that we may discover the great principles that underlie this matter, in order, in other words, that we may discover what it is that we should be seeking and praying for in our own day and generation. It should be a utilitarian, rather than an antiquarian interest and motive, that should govern us. In other words, I suggest that we should make use of everything that we can find which tells us about a hundred years ago, in exactly the same way as God intended the Children of Israel to use the twelve stones that he commanded them to take out of the middle of the river of Jordan and to set up at Gilgal. Now I am calling your attention to this interesting incident because it does seem to me to be speaking very directly to us at this present hour. Here God did something unusual, something strange, something marvellous and miraculous. He had delivered the Children of Israel first of all from their enemies, the Egyptians—he divided the Red Sea and they went through on dry land. And here they were, they had been in the wilderness for forty years, and there, on the other side of the river of Jordan, lay the promised land of Canaan, the place they were looking for, and longing for, the land of blessing, the land flowing with milk and honey. What a contrast to the wilderness! Yes, but the question was how could they go through the river? And the answer was that God divided the waters of Jordan, and they went through—again on dry ground. And God, you remember, gave this commandment to Joshua, and Joshua in turn gave it to the people. Take out, he said, twelve stones from the very spot where the priests stood as they held the Ark. Take out twelve stones and then set them up there in Gilgal. And why? Well, the reason is given here in our text. Now it seems to me that our remembering of the 1859 revival is comparable to these twelve stones that are there at Gilgal. Our position is this, and my whole business, as we study this subject, is, in a sense, just to create in you this very question, ‘What mean these stones?’ What is all this that you are talking about? What are these books and pamphlets? What are these meetings? What is this thing? We know nothing about it. As the Jewish Children in their day were going to ask, ‘What mean these stones?’, so I trust that the main outcome of our study will be to lead the men and women of our day to ask, ‘What is this and what is its relevance to us?’ So let us continue with our consideration of these verses. The thing that strikes us at once, of course, is that it is most extraordinary that this kind of thing should be necessary. Would you not have thought that with an event like this in their history, there would be no need to remind any generation of the Children of Israel of this? They are so remarkable, these two incidents, the crossing of the Red Sea and the River Jordan, they are such outstanding events that you would have thought that there would never be any need to remind people in some visible, external, objective way of such things. Yet God gave the commandment because he knows human nature so well, and what he knows about us is that it is simply astonishing to notice how easily we can forget. Even a memorable event like this could soon be forgotten, could be blotted right out of the minds and the consciousness of subsequent generations of the Children of Israel. So, ‘Put up the stones,’ says God, so that they will be a reminder, the people will be arrested, they will say, ‘What are these stones about? What does this mean?’, and then the answer will be given to them. Now this is one of the first things we all have to realise about ourselves, this tendency to forget. Yes, to forget even the greatest and the most wonderful things. It is true in every realm. I suppose that, in the last analysis, one of the most devastating effects of sin is the way in which it puts a paralysis upon the mind and even the upon the memory. This is not confined to religion, it is true in every realm. How soon are great men forgotten! Men who dominated the scene in their day and generation mean nothing at all to subsequent generations who, if they suddenly see a monument, say, ‘Who was he? What did he do?’ Though these men did such outstanding things in their time and their contemporaries thought that they would never be forgotten, time passes and other generations come; they are soon forgotten. ‘A generation arose that knew not Joseph.’ There is nothing more transient than reputation, in that sense. But it is not only true of great men, it is true of great events. Some of the most outstanding events of history are soon forgotten. A generation arises that forgets all about the sacrifices of its forefathers, who may have fought even unto death for some great principle or for some great liberty. Generations arise that know nothing about it and are really not interested in it at all. They take all the fruits and all the benefits, and they never trouble even to ask, ‘How is it that these things have ever come to us?’ Now, that is human nature, is it not? What is the cause of this and, particularly, what is the cause of this in the realm of religion? Why does it become possible that generations will arise that will even forget a thing like this so that God has to give his commandment about these stones? Let me briefly suggest some answers to this. Perhaps the main causes are absorption with ourselves, and with our own particular age and generation, and particularly our absorption with our own activities. We are so self-centred, so busy doing what we are doing. We seem to be unaware of the fact that people lived in this world in past ages and centuries, before we ever came here. There is a morbid self-centredness and self-concentration. People’s lives are bound entirely by their own circle, and how infrequently do they look out from inside it. Curtains of various descriptions are not new. There have always been Iron and Bamboo and other curtains. It is amazing to observe how small life can be. We live this circumscribed little existence, with our little activities, and we never look out beyond, and we are aware of nothing else. And, of course, added to that, there is a feeling, which is particularly characteristic of today, that the past cannot possibly help us, because of all our advances and all our wonderful knowledge, and our techniques and our astounding abilities. We are the masters. What has the past got to say to us? There is a great deal of that feeling, and it has been true, of course, of every generation before us, and it will be true of the generations to follow us. They will look back at us, if they do at all, and will just dismiss us. We are mere tyros in these matters. But, in the last analysis, I believe that the explanation is—I repeat—this subjectivism of ours. And this subjectivism vitiates even our reading and our studying of the Bible. We are all so morbidly concerned about ourselves and our own problems that we even to go to the Bible as a book which is going to help us with our problems. We want some help, we want this and that and we go to the Bible, as if it were some sort of dispensary to deal with the so called ‘mumps and measles of our souls’. Our very approach to the Bible is so subjective instead of being objective. How often, I wonder, do we go to the Bible saying to ourselves, ‘I am going to read the Bible because I want to see what God has done; I am going read my Bible in order that I can look at God acting and intervening in history’? But, the Bible is not just a book that answers my little questions and tells me various things that I may want to know; the Bible is the record of the activity of God, the manifestations of God, God’s mighty acts and deeds. I am going to look on. I am going to stand back and I am going to see what God, the Lord has done, ‘that all the people of the earth might know the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty’ (Josh. 4:24). The acts of God. But I am afraid we do not read the Bible like that any longer, do we? We want just a little word to help us. We want a nice little thought to start the day. We just want something before we offer up our brief and hurried prayer before we rush off. Beautiful thoughts. Do not misunderstand me. I am going to say a thing that can be grievously misunderstood. I verily believe that the main trouble of most evangelical people today is that they read their Bibles too devotionally, which means, I say, subjectively. And this mighty panorama of the acts of the living God is something that we seem to be unaware of and the result is that we need to be reminded of what God has done. It is all here for us, but we pass by, we do not notice, so we must put up some stones, some memorial, something to arrest attention. This is a principle which you find in many places in the Bible. Look at the communion service, for example. The principle is exactly the same. We are so dull and so stupid as the result of sin, that we might even forget this, the death of the Son of God for us and his agony and his shame and all that he endured on the cross. And his eternal love for us, we ould even forget that. So the Lord himself ordained and commanded that we should meet together and break bread and drink wine: ‘This do in remembrance of me.’ It is the setting up of the stones in Gilgal once more. We are such, and we suffer so much from this felt spiritual lethargy, that we need objectivememorials, we constantly need tangible reminders, something outside ourselves that will lead us to ask, ‘What does this table mean?’ ‘What mean these stones?’ God condescends to our weakness, and our lethargy and our stupidity by providing us with external memorials of his almighty acts and deeds. And so it is that I, for one, thank God for 1959. Simply because it happens to be a hundred years away from 1859. You notice that I am holding on to this point and I am doing so for this reason. This is our eighth consideration of this question of revival and if I have not hitherto succeeded in rousing you to ask—‘What means it?’—if there has not arisen in you this new interest and curiosity, it has all been in vain. It is not enough just to study all this and to be aware of something. Are we really becoming concerned as to what it all is? What does all this record mean? And I hope to show that the real and complete answer is given in these verses at the end of Joshua 4. It is all here. God, you see, has given his own explanation, and I have nothing to do but to hold it before you. First and foremost, it means that we are reminded of facts. ‘What mean these stones?’ Subsequent generations are going to ask that question. They will be going along casually, perhaps out on a walk or on a journey, and suddenly they will see these twelve stones and they will say, ‘What is the meaning of this?’ And the reply, said Joshua, will be, ‘These stones are here as a memorial to something that once happened.’ History, not theories; not ideas, but facts. What is the meaning of the bread and wine? Oh, the fact—that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Our whole position depends upon facts. I wish that I could stop here and deal only with this because we are living in an age when there is a most subtle theological teaching which would have us believe that you can dispense with the facts and hold on to the teaching. It is a lie! ‘What mean these stones?’ Facts! Crossing the Red Sea, crossing Jordan, in this miraculous manner. Facts, facts of God. And it is exactly the same with what we are celebrating this year. It is a simple actual fact of history that something amazing and wonderful happened a hundred years ago. Something literally took place in 1859 which was so much fact that it even began to be reported in the newspapers. And they very rarely report anything unless it is political. The only sermons they are interested in are sermons that introduce politics in some shape or form. They are not interested in spiritual matters, but they were actually reporting what happened in 1859. It became front page news. That was phenomenal! Facts. Acts. Something that belongs solidly to the realm of history. But, as the explanation here tells us, this is not something utterly unique which only happens once. Did you notice, ‘Then ye shall let your children know saying, Israel came over this Jordan on dry land. For the Lord your God dried up the waters of Jordan from before you until ye were passed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red sea, which he dried up from before us, until we were gone over’? I want to emphasise that point. What happened in 1859 is only one in a great series. It is but one example, but one illustration of something that has been happening periodically in the history of the Christian Church right through the running centuries. It is one example of what we call ‘revival’, a ‘revival’ of religion, and it is only one example. There have been many others. Let me just give you a few illustrations in passing. Long before even the Protestant Reformation, there was quite a religious revival in this country associated with the name of John Wycliffe and the Lollards. That was a revival, as definitely as what happened in 1859. Then, of course, the same thing happened on the continent of Europe with that great man John Huss. There in Moravia, what is now called Czechoslovakia, there was a real revival, associated with his name, and God used him as an instrument and as a channel. It was an amazing movement of the Spirit of God. They had it amongst the Waldensians in Northern Italy. It was a real revival. It happened with that great man called John Tauler,* who was actually a priest and a preacher in the Roman Catholic Church. The Spirit of God came upon him and it lead to a revival in his area. It was the same thing exactly. Then, of course, there was the Protestant Reformation. Let us never forget that this was a revival as well as a reformation. We must not think of that as being merely a theological movement. It was that, but in addition there was a revival, the Spirit of God was shed abroad and people were listening to preaching. Preaching and the reading of the Bible were of supreme importance. That is a religious awakening. And that is what we mean by revival. You find it in the seventeenth century, and you have it, in an amazing manner, two hundred years ago, in the great Evangelical awakening associated with the names of Whitefield and the Wesleys and many, many others. You find it again at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. And then there was this notable, remarkable event which took place from 1857 to 1859 in America, Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Sweden and in other parts of the world. This, then, is only one in a series of events that have been happening throughout the long history of the Christian Church. And you will find, as you read the stories of every one of them, that they share certain things in common. They have the same general characteristics. God moved at Jordan, said Joshua, exactly as he did before, at the Red Sea. Certain general characteristics are common to all these experiences, in spite of time, in spite of country, in spite of civilisation, in spite of everything else. So, then, what was it that happened a hundred years ago? What was this event that falls into this series? What is revival? We can define it, as a period of unusual blessing and activity in the life of the Christian Church. Primarily, of course, and by definition, a revival is something that happens first in the Church and amongst Christian people, amongst believers. That, I repeat, is true by definition. It is revival; something is revived and when you say that, you mean that there is something present that has got life. But the life was beginning to wane, to droop, and had become almost moribund, and some people said, ‘That is dead, that is finished,’ because they could not see much sign of life and activity. Revival means awakening, stimulating the life, bringing it to the surface again. It happens primarily in the Church of God, and amongst believing people and it is only secondly something that affects those that are outside also. Now this is a most important point, because this definition helps us to differentiate, once and for all, between a revival and an evangelistic campaign. To confuse these two things leads to much harm. There is nothing which is quite so foolish as people announcing that they are going to hold a revival. They mean an evangelistic campaign. Alas, this confusion was really introduced by Finney and it has persisted ever since. But it is a gross misunderstanding, it is a confusion of purpose. Let me show you the difference. An evangelistic campaign is the Church deciding to do something with respect to those who are outside. A revival is not the Church deciding to do something and doing it. It is something that is done to the Church, something that happens to the Church. The two things are essentially different. You can have a great evangelistic campaign, but it may leave your church exactly where it was, if indeed it is not worse. I add that because I am being told constantly that the churches are suffering from what is called a ‘post evangelistic campaign exhaustion’, that as the result of campaigns, the prayer meetings and the regular meetings of the church are not so well attended. And the same is true of various other organisations, which promote such activities. Evangelistic campaigns, then, have reference mainly to those who are outside, but the whole essence of a revival is that it is something that happens to the Church, to the people inside. And they are affected and moved and tremendous things happen. So then, what is it that happens? What is this? What mean these stones? What happened a hundred years ago in these various countries? The best way of answering that question is to say that it is in a sense a repetition of the day of Pentecost. It is something happening to the Church, that inevitably and almost instinctively makes one look back and think again of what happened on the day of Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2. Let me give you some of the general characteristics. The essence of a revival is that the Holy Spirit comes down upon a number of people together, upon a whole church, upon a number of churches, districts, or perhaps a whole country. That is what is meant by revival. It is, if you like, a visitation of the Holy Spirit, or another term that has often been used is this—an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And the terms are interesting because you see what the people are conscious of is that it is as if something has suddenly come down upon them. The Spirit of God has descended into their midst, God has come down and is amongst them. A baptism, an outpouring, a visitation. And the effect of that is that they immediately become aware of his presence and of his power in a manner that they have never known before. I am talking about Christian people, about church members gathered together as they have done so many times before. Suddenly they are aware of his presence, they are aware of the majesty and the awe of God. The Holy Spirit literally seems to be presiding over the meeting and taking charge of it, and manifesting his power and guiding them, and leading them, and directing them. That is the essence of revival. And what does that mean? Well, there are general characteristics which you will find in every revival that you can ever read about. The immediate effect is that the people present begin to have an awareness of spiritual things and clear views of them such as they have never had before. Now again I am talking about believers, members of the Christian Church when they suddenly become conscious of this presence and of this power, and the first effect, is that spiritual things become realities. They have heard all these things before, they may have heard them a thousand times and indeed many thousand times, but what they testify is this: ‘You know, the whole thing suddenly became clear to me. I was suddenly illuminated, things that I was so familiar with stood out in letters of gold, as it were. I understood. I saw it all in a way that I had never done in the whole of my life.’ That is what they say. The Holy Spirit enlightens the mind and the understanding. They begin not only to see these things clearly but to feel their power. What are these things of which they become so aware? First and foremost, the glory and the holiness of God. Have you ever noticed, as you read your Bibles, the effect on these people as they suddenly realised the presence of God? Like Job, they put their hands on their mouths or like Isaiah they say, ‘Woe is unto me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips.’ What is the matter then? Oh, they have just had a realisation of the holiness and of the majesty and the glory of God. That always happens in a revival. It does not always happen in evangelistic campaigns, does it? There can be a lot of laughing and lightness, and obvious organisation in evangelistic campaigns. Never in a revival, but rather awe, this reverence, this holy fear, the consciousness of God in his majesty, his glory, his holiness, his utter purity. And that, as we have seen, leads inevitably to a deep and a terrible sense of sin, and an awful feeling of guilt. It leads men and women to feel that they are vile and unclean and utterly unworthy and, above all, it leads them to realise their utter helplessness face to face with such a God. Or, like the publican depicted by our Lord in the parable, they are so conscious of all this that they cannot show their faces. They are far back near the door somewhere, beating their breasts and saying, ‘God have mercy, on me, a sinner.’ The holiness of God, their own utter sinfulness and wretchedness, their own unworthiness; they realise they have never done anything good at all. Before, they thought they had done a great deal, now they see that it is nothing—useless. Like Paul they begin to talk about it as dung and filthy rags. In their utter helplessness and hopelessness they prostrate themselves and cast themselves upon the love and mercy and compassion of God. It always happens in the Bible. Read the accounts for yourselves. Whichever one you may read, you will always find it. This is the convicting work of the Spirit who takes charge of the situation. And people may be held in that state and position for sometime. Sometimes they have been in that state not only for hours but for days and weeks, and months, and they become almost desperate. Then they are given a clear view of the love of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ and especially of his death upon the cross. At last they see it. Oh, they had always believed it theoretically and they had stayed to a communion service, but they had never felt anything, it had never truly become real for them. They had believed it, yes, they were honestly trusting to it, but they had never felt its power, they had never known what it was to be melted by it, to be broken by it. They had never known what it was to weep with a sense of unworthiness and then of love and joy as they realised that ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ Suddenly it all becomes real to them and they are given to know that the Son of God has loved them and has given himself for them. It becomes an individual and a personal matter: ‘He died for me, even my sins are forgiven’, and peace comes into their hearts; joy enters into them and they are lost in love and in a sense of praise of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. And this now becomes for them the one thing that absorbs them. If they meet anyone they talk about it at once, everybody is talking about it, it is the main topic of conversation, it is the thing that absorbs all their interest. They desire to be together now and to talk about these things and so they get together, and they hold meetings. They meet every night and they begin to talk about these things. They begin to praise God, and to sing hymns to his glory. And then they begin to pray, and there they are, hour after hour, night after night, longing to finish work so they they might get together with other people who have experienced this movement of the Spirit of God. And that, of course, in turn leads them to have a great concern about others who are outside and who do not know these things. I am giving you a synopsis of what you read in the books. They begin to get a concern for the members of their own family, husband, wife, father, mother, children, brother, sister, who do not know that they are outside. They tell them about it, they feel they must. There is a constraint that is driving them. They talk about it to people, to friends and to everybody, and they begin to pray for them. Prayer is always a great feature of every revival, great prayer meetings, intercession hour after hour. They pray for these people by name and they plead, and they will not let God go, as it were. They are intent on this with a strange urgency. And then, after a while, hearing of all this and seeing the change in those whom they have known for so long, these others who are outside begin to join the meetings and to say, ‘What is this?’ So they come in, and they go through the same experience. And so it happens and thousands upon thousands are converted. Indeed, the whole neighbourhood seems to be full of the Holy Spirit. He seems to be everywhere. People are not only converted in meetings, some are converted as they are walking to the meetings, before they have even got there. Some are converted at their work, in a coal-mine, on top of a mountain. Some are awakened in the middle of the night. They went to bed feeling as usual, but they are awakened with an awe-ful sense of sin and they have to get up and pray and plead with God to have mercy. Nobody has spoken to them at that moment—it is the Spirit of God that is acting. He is dominating the whole area. He is filling the lives of all the people. That is what happens in revival and thus you get this curious, strange mixture, as it were, of great conviction of sin and great joy, a great sense of the terror of the Lord, and great thanksgiving and praise. Always in a revival there is what somebody once called a divine disorder. Some are groaning and agonising under conviction, others praising God for the great salvation. And all this leads to crowded and prolonged meetings. Time seems to be forgotten. People seem to have entered into eternity. A meeting may start at six thirty in the evening, and it may not end until daybreak the next morning with nobody aware of the passing of the hours. They did not have to provide coffee once or twice halfway through. When the Holy Ghost organises things, time, the body and the needs of the flesh are all forgotten. A revival, then, really means days of heaven upon earth. Let me give you one of the greatest definitions ever written of what is true of a town when there is such a revival or a visitation of the Spirit of God. It was written by the great and saintly Jonathan Edwards about the little town of Northampton in Massachusetts in 1735. This work soon made a glorious alteration in the town. So that in the Spring and Summer following it seemed, that is to say the town, seemed to be full of the presence of God. It never was so full of love nor so full of joy and yet so full of distress as it was then. There were remarkable tokens of God’s presence in almost every house. It was a time of joy in families on account of salvation being brought to them. Parents rejoicing over their children as newborn, husbands over their wives and wives over their husbands. The doings of God were then seen in His sanctuary. God’s day was a delight and His tabernacles were amiable. Our public assemblies were then beautiful. The congregation was alive in God’s service. Everyone earnestly intent on the public worship. Every hearer eager to drink in the words of the minister as they came from his mouth. The assembly in general were from time to time in tears while the Word was preached. Some weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, others with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbours. Jonathan Edwards: Works, London 1840, Vol I, p. 348. There, then, I have given you a rough outline of what happens in revival. ‘What mean these stones?’ Well, that is exactly what happened a hundred years ago in all those different countries. It was the work of God—these visitations of the Spirit of God. Do you know about these things? Are you interested? Are you concerned? Are you moved? Do you not begin to see that if only this happened today, it would solve our problems? This is God visiting his people. Days of heaven on earth, the presidency of the Holy Spirit in the Church, life abundant given to God’s people without measure. I trust that we have already seen and felt something that creates within us not only the desire to say, ‘What is that fervour? Oh that we might know it. Oh, that it might happen to us’, but also that we might feel it to such an extent that we begin to plead with God to have pity and to have mercy and to visit us in that way with his great salvation. Characteristics of Revival Related Mp3 Audio And he spake unto the children of Israel, saying, When your children shall ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean these stones? Then ye shall let your children know, saying, Israel came over this Jordan on dry land. For the Lord your God dried up the waters of Jordan from before you, until ye were passed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red sea, which he dried up from before us, until we were gone over: That all the people of the earth might know the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty: that ye might fear the Lord your God for ever. (Josh. 4:21–24). We have seen some of the general characteristics of revival—a sense of the majesty of God, of personal sinfulness, of the wonder of salvation through Jesus Christ and a desire that others might know it. And we have seen, too, that in a time of revival people are aware of the presidency of the Holy Spirit over everything and the life of the whole community. Now we must proceed to emphasise certain special points about revival which seem to me to be of very great significance. Firstly, it is characteristic of revival that people of all classes are affected by it, people of all ages, people of all temperaments, people of all intellectual types. That is a point that is well worthy of elaboration, though we shall not do so here, but I emphasise it for this reason. Here is one of the final answers to those who would dismiss evangelical conversion in terms of psychology. It is not confined to special types, to the so-called ‘religious type’. One of the most striking things in the story of revivals is the fact that you get a cross section of every conceivable type and group in society, irrespective of class, age, temperament and everything else: a most astonishing feature, but one which is found with strange regularity in all the stories. And then another characteristic is that a revival is something that comes, lasts for a while, and then passes. This is most interesting because it emphasises that revival is a definite action of God. It comes suddenly or gradually, works to some great climax and then it ends perhaps suddenly, perhaps gradually. There is something discreet about it. Sometimes you can give the very date of its beginning and the date at which it ended, and that, as I say, is significant because it establishes once more that revival is the work of God and that it is not something which belongs to the realms of mere psychological experience. With the latter, as long as you have the stimulus and the factors, you continue to get results, but in revival that is not the case. That leads us to the next point, which is that the results of revival are abiding. There are exceptions. There are some who fall back. But the great feature of revival is that the men and the women who are converted by this power that has entered into the life of the Church, continue. It is not that they come forward as the result of an appeal and you imagine that great things are happening, until you find afterwards that only ten per cent of them hold, which is the figure that is expected, I am told, by most evangelists. That is not the case in revival. In a revival it is an exceptional thing for people not to grow. They abide and they continue. You will find that the literature bears this out. I have been reminding myself of it again. I have been reading a description given by a number of ministers a hundred years ago, and every one of them volunteers this self same point, namely, that the people were standing and were holding. It was not something that only lasted an evening. Of course they did not test their meetings, they did not call people to come forward. There again is an interesting point of difference between an evangelistic campaign and a revival. In an evangelistic campaign you have to plead with people to come forward, in a revival you do not—they come without your asking. That was put very well by a man who was in the revival that happened in the Congo in recent years. He wrote a little book about his experiences in which he brings it out very eloquently. I quote: There I had been preaching for twenty years in that area and pleading with people to decide for Christ at the end of the meetings, trying to persuade them to come forward and I was not succeeding. But then this came, this happened and now there was no need to ask them to come forward. The difficulty was in a sense to deal with the numbers who came. They would even come forward while he was still preaching, he could not stop them. That is something that you get in a revival. And the results are abiding. There are certain concrete facts that can be given. Let me give you some figures. I have hesitated to do so because figures have, by now, become rather unrealistic in this age which attaches such significance to them. People do not wait to see whether they are true, they are so anxious to proclaim them immediately. Nevertheless, the figures are interesting. I am not emphasising that a given number came forward at the end of a meeting, I am going to give you figures of people who joined the Christian Church, and who continued to be active and zealous members. It is said that from 1730 to 1745 in the United States, when the great awakening took place under Jonathan Edwards and the Tennants and others, that some 50,000 people joined the Christian churches. From 1857 to 1859 in the great revival that swept the United States, it is computed that half a million people joined the Christian Church. Notice my emphasis—joined the Christian Church. They were not admitted immediately. They were tested and examined; they were instructed as catechumens and they were trained. I am not talking about decisions. We have become so accustomed to that, but they did not do that sort of thing in those days. Let us get that right out of our minds. I am referring to people who, having given such clear evidence of their conversion and their regeneration, were admitted into the full membership of the Christian Church. Half a million a hundred years ago in the United States. 100,000 in Ulster alone joined the churches during that time and 50,000 in Wales. And when you remember the population figures you see the significance of these striking facts. It must also be emphasised that a great zeal for God and for holiness invariably becomes manifest in the members of the church and in these converts. The meetings are crowded. The people are anxious to work. Every enterprise and connection with the church is given a mighty stimulus. You can read, for instance, Edwin Orr’s book on the ‘Second Evangelical Awakening’ which will give you striking facts in that respect. It will show you the number of things that came out of that revival of a hundred years ago. It was not some passing emotion, but something so deep and so profound that people were consumed with a zeal for God and for his name and for his cause. And furthermore, not only did the existing churches become too small, they had to build large numbers of new ones. You see, when there is a revival, it starts as I have shown, in the Church, and the Church is built up, whereas so often when you have evangelistic campaigns, the churches are left exactly where they were. The numbers of men called to the ministry also increased enormously. This is something, too, that always happens in a period of revival. And then, speaking still more generally, in a time of revival you will find that the moral tone and the moral level, not only of the Church but of the world outside the Church, is visibly affected and raised. You can read statistics provided by the public authorities with respect to prosecutions in police courts and other courts for drunkenness and various other things and the figures are simply staggering. And it can also be seen how practices, evil practices that had characterised the life of a district or a town, suddenly disappear. There is a famous instance of this. There was a great preacher in North Wales about 150 years ago by the name of John Elias. He preached one sermon at a famous fair, a fair that was well known for its debauchery and vice and its sin and wrongdoing. That man by preaching one sermon put an end to that fair once and for ever. He killed it and it was never revived. That is the kind of thing that you find occurring in a time of revival. But you can have great evangelistic campaigns and you might think from the reports you read that the whole country had become religious. Then you are given the figures for vice and crime and you see that they are not affected at all. That is never true in a revival. Even people who are not converted are influenced and affected. A sobriety enters into the life of the whole community and the general effects of revival will last for quite a number of years after the revival is over. Now, up until this point we have been looking at the phenomenon of revival in general. But I do want to refer briefly to particular variations, which take place in different revivals, in different places and at different times. While they all share certain general characteristics, you do find these most interesting and, to me, fascinating variations. There are differences, for instance, in the way in which a revival starts; as I have said, it may be sudden or it may be gradual. A revival may come quite unexpectedly, or it may be the case that a number of people have been burdened and have been concerned and have been praying, perhaps over months or even years. Sometimes it is just a handful of people who have been concerned and burdened, and God answers. Have you read these stories? I do plead with you to do so. Read the facts and you will see some of these points illustrated. Again revival may come in different types of meetings. Sometimes a revival breaks out in a prayer meeting, not some great crowded meeting, but perhaps a little prayer meeting with just a few people. In Northern Ireland it was really three men who met together regularly to pray, just three men. Sometimes it has only been two. It does not matter. In New York a hundred years ago it was one man who prayed alone for some time in that famous midday prayer meeting. So it may come in a prayer meeting or it may happen in a preaching service. It may even happen when an evangelist is holding a series of regular meetings. He may have planned an evangelistic campaign, but suddenly it becomes a revival, something quite different. There is no limit to the ways in which it may start. Jonathan Edwards tells us that he has no doubt at all but that the sudden tragic death of a person in that town of Northampton, in which he ministered, was probably the thing that really proved to be the factor that God used. A calamity, some strange happening, something that alarms people or astonishes them, something that makes them realise the fleeting character of life in this world, these are the things that God has often used. So it may happen with a very small number or it may happen in a great crowd. God is not confined to numbers or to anything else. The Bible is full of examples of that. God’s greatest acts have been done with small numbers, with ‘remnants’. But it can equally happen with a great crowd. And that is why people who try to lay down rules and regulations—thinking that because it happened once in this way, it is going to happen again in the same way—are showing a complete misunderstanding of the laws of the spiritual realm. There are endless variations in the way in which it begins. And then consider the variations in the type of man that God uses in revival. This is another most fascinating theme. Sometimes God has used very great men, men like Jonathan Edwards, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, possibly the greatest philosopher that the United States has ever produced. Everybody is agreed about his importance, even men who are not primarily interested in religion. That is why they are still reprinting his works. And he was the man whom God used above all others two hundred years ago in the New England states. Whitefield, too, by any assessment, was a great man, and a great orator. John Wesley by any showing was an outstanding man, a genius of an organiser, and a most able intellectual. Now all these men of the eighteenth century were undoubtedly men of remarkable ability, and they were the men God used to bring this great revival among the masses of the common people. But here is the interesting thing. God does not always use men like that. He does sometimes, and that seems to be the general rule, because Luther, again, was naturally great, so was Calvin, and so were John Knox, and others. But, you see, he does not always use men of that calibre. When you come to a hundred years ago you find something very different. You find God now using simple, ignorant, unknown, most ordinary men. You find that in the United States and you find it in Ulster. How many of you have ever heard of the name of James McQuilkin? Well he was the man who was used in Northern Ireland a hundred years ago. James McQuilkin was a most ordinary man, but God laid hold of him and began to use him. It was exactly the same in Wales and the name of the man most used there was David Morgan. He was actually a minister of the gospel, but a very ordinary, unknown minister, a man of no gifts whatsoever. But God took hold of that man and used him and made him like a lion for nearly two years. Is this not something worthy of our careful contemplation? Should we not reflect upon it? God takes hold of the weak things of the world and confounds the things that are mighty. It is a part of the principle. It may be a great man, it may be a very little man. It does not matter. Then think of the area in which a revival takes place and the spread of the revival. It may be very local and it may remain so. But it may involve the whole district. It may involve the whole country, or, as we saw a one hundred and two hundred years ago, several countries at the same time. All these facts are full of significance, especially when you think of the attacks of the psychologists who think they can explain away religious phenomena in terms of psychology. I am hoping to deal with that later. But let us turn now to a vexed question, the question of the so-called ‘phenomena’ that are sometimes in evidence during a revival. Again, there is great variation here. Sometimes a revival may be powerful and yet more or less quiet. There may be a very deep and a very profound emotion. Large numbers are converted, but quietly. But is is not always like that. Indeed, it comes nearer to being the rule in revival that certain phenomena begin to manifest themselves—phenomena such as these: men and women are not only convicted of sin, but they are convicted by an agony with respect to sin. It is not merely that they see that they are sinners and that they must believe in the Saviour, it comes to them with such overwhelming force that they become even physically ill. They are in a literal agony of soul. You remember the story of John Bunyan do you not? He tells in Grace Abounding how he had such an agony of conviction for nearly eighteen months that on one occasion he even felt envious of geese that were grazing in the field. He wished that he had not been born a man at all. This agony, this terrible conviction—you may get that in revival. People are in an agony of soul and groaning. They may cry and sob and agonise audibly. But it does not always even stop at that. Sometimes people are so convicted and feel the power of the Spirit to such an extent that they faint and fall to the ground. Sometimes there are even convulsions, physical convulsions. And sometimes people seem to fall into a state of unconsciousness, into a kind of trance, and may remain like that for hours. Now all I am anxious to do at this point is to remind you of the facts. They are variable. They may be present, they may not be, but generally in revival you do get something along these lines. We must deal with this point later, because it becomes the focal point of the criticism that is generally levelled against the whole notion of revival. So then, ‘What mean these stones?’ What are they telling us? Well, I have been answering that question. It is the kind of thing that happened in 1859. It is the kind of thing that always happens in revival. There are general features, and there are variable features. It is clear, therefore, that what we have to consider is this outstanding event which takes place from time to time in the history of the Christian Church. But let me take it a step further. If those are the facts, what is the real character or nature of the facts? We must go back to our text. Here are people one day walking past Gilgal and they see these stones set up and they say, ‘What mean these stones?’ and this is the answer that they are to be given: ‘The Lord your God dried up the waters of Jordan from before you, until ye were passed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red sea, which he dried up from before us, until we were gone over.’ The children of Israel are to tell the enquirers that these are set up ‘that all the people of the earth might know the hand of the Lord, that is mighty’. These stones remind us of facts, miraculous facts. And if that were true of those stones it is equally true of every revival that has ever taken place. A revival is a miracle. It is a miraculous, exceptional phenomenon. It is the hand of the Lord, and it is mighty. A revival, in other words, is something that can only be explained as the direct action and intervention of God. It was God alone who could divide the Red Sea. It was God alone who could divide the waters of the river of Jordan. These were miracles. Hence the reminder of God’s unique action of the mighty acts of God. And revivals belong to that category. Let me examine this. These events belong to the order of things that men cannot produce. Men can produce evangelistic campaigns, but they cannot and never have produced a revival. Oh, they have tried to do so many times, and they are still trying. Alas, Finney has led the whole Church astray at this point by teaching that if you only do certain things you can have a revival whenever you want it. The answer is an eternal No! And that is not my opinion. This is a question of fact. Have we not all known and watched and seen men who have been trying to produce revivals. They have introduced all Finney’s methods, they have read his book, they know it by heart and they have tried to do what he teaches, they have tried to make people confess their sins, they have tried to make them conform, they have done everything that Finney said should be done, expecting revival as a result. They have done it all and they have brought great pressure to bear, but there has been no revival. A revival, by definition, is the mighty act of God and it is a sovereign act of God. It is as independent as that. Man can do nothing. God, and God alone, does it. ‘Set up these stones.’ Why? Well, it is to say that it is the hand of the Lord and it is mighty; it is the sovereign act of God, apart from men. And all the details I have just been giving you, fit into this and illustrate it. But not only can men not produce a revival, they cannot even explain it, and that again is most important. I would lay this down as a part of the definition. If you can explain what is happening in a church, apart from this sovereign act of God, it is not revival. If you can possibly explain it otherwise, it is not revival. You see that is true of miracles. If you can explain a miracle it is no longer a miracle. That is why it is rather pathetic to see people becoming excited when a man publishes a book with a title The Bible is True. The writer is going to prove to us that the miracles of the Old Testament have happened. And what does he proceed to say? Well, he says that this sort of thing happens quite naturally and quite often. There is one illustration which I will mention in order to show my point. You remember when Moses struck the rock and water came gushing out? ‘Ah,’ says this man, ‘we are now in a very happy position, we can really believe this.’ On what grounds? During the last war, he continues, a number of soldiers in charge of a sergeant were doing a bit of work in a given place and the men were not doing the work to the satisfaction of the sergeant. So he said, ‘Let me have that pick,’ and he just took hold of it and accidently just happened to remove a bit of shale from the side of the hedge and water began to trickle out. We can believe, therefore, that when Moses struck the rock the water gushed out. And so we can believe in miracles. Is it not rather pathetic? If you can explain a thing it is not a miracle. A miracle is the direct, sovereign, immediate, supernatural, action of God and it cannot be explained. And that is the essential truth about a revival. You can not explain it. There are no methods in a revival. If methods are used, you can understand the result, can you not? If you do certain things, you will get certain results. The advertisers know all about that. If you use your methods correctly, you will get your results all right. People are very gullible, you can make them do almost anything you like. And we are living in a age of propaganda, an age which is suggestible. But no methods at all are used in revival. None. Read for yourself. No great crowds, no band, no choir, nothing whatsoever. No preliminary advertising. None of these things at all. And yet the thing happens. You cannot explain it in terms of the methods used, because there are none. And then, look again at the men who were used. How often has it been the case in revival that you have had the same kind of thing that is described in Acts 4? This was the problem for the religious authorities in Jerusalem. Here was a man who was known to everybody, who used to sit every day at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple asking alms of the people—a man of forty years of age who had never walked at all. But suddenly this man was seen walking and leaping and running into the Temple and praising God, so that everybody knew it. And who had done this? Men called Peter and John. Who were they? This was the problem—ignorant and unlearned men! And yet, the authorities said in effect, ‘We cannot deny that a notable miracle has happened and everybody knows it. But here is the enigma. Ignorant and unlearned men are responsible for this-fishermen. Is it possible? Can they have done it? They have no learning, they have no training, they have nothing, and yet it has happened. What can we do?’ Men, you see, cannot understand it, they cannot explain it. The results are not commensurate with the powers implied. The answer is that it is God who is using these men. Now, I have reminded you that it was like that in 1858 and 1859, and, too, in 1904 and 1905, the last major revival in the British Isles. The man that God used then was a man whose name was Evan Roberts and he was a very ordinary man. But he was the man that God used and you cannot explain that revival in terms of the man. That explanation is totally inadequate. And then take another argument. Look at the change in the man. Look at these apostles of whom we have been reading. Look at them before Pentecost, weak, helpless. Look at them after Pentecost, filled with a blazing power. See the courage with which Peter, who denied his Lord, is now fearlessly facing the hostile crowd and the authorities that have power to put him to death. Look at John Wesley, before May 24th, 1738, a complete failure in the ministry. But look at him afterwards. The same man with the same abilities, the same powers, the same everything, how do you explain the change? You cannot explain it in terms of Wesley. What is it? Oh, it is the Spirit of God that has come upon them. It is a miracle. And so it was a hundred years ago in Northern Ireland and in Wales. I have mentioned a man called David Morgan, a very ordinary Minister, just carrying on, as it were. Nobody had heard of him. He did nothing at all that was worthy of note. Suddenly this power came upon him and for two years, as I have said, he preached like a lion. Then the power was withdrawn and he reverted to David Morgan again. The same man, you see. You cannot explain it in terms of men. There is only one explanation—‘the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty’. It can take the things that are not, and confound the things that are, and ridicule them. Consider the places where revival happens. Sometimes it starts in a big city, but sometimes it starts in a village or hamlet. I emphasise this point because it is to me the most glorious of all. You see, when man does something, he likes to do it in big cities, does he not? He does it in a big way and he feels that this is essential to success. But as we consider the revivals of 1857–59 may I use the expression ‘the divine humour’? Where did they break out then? It was not in the capital city of Belfast in Northern Ireland, it was in a village you have never heard of called Connor. That is how God does things. When he sent his Son into this world he was not born in Jerusalem but in Bethlehem, the very least of the cities of Judah. Thus God, that we might give the honour and the glory to himself, makes it impossible that we can explain it in terms of men. It is in the Bethlehems, the Connors, the little villages that people have never heard of, that the mighty thing often happens. And it was exactly the same thing two hundred years ago. It was in that little town of Northampton in New England that the revival broke out. It was in a little hamlet called Trevecca in Wales that Howell Harris was suddenly laid hold of, and in another similar small village that Daniel Rowland was apprehended by God—places you have never heard of, that is how God does it. And this is the wonderful thing—the next revival may break out in a little hamlet that you and I have never heard of. We people in these big cities of ours may be passed by and God may bring us to nought and do this mighty thing in some unknown little place with a small group of people. That can happen in revival. It can happen anywhere. Thank God! That is what makes life so romantic and so hopeful at the same time. There is no limit. And why is this? To show again that it is the sovereign work of God. You cannot explain it. Neither, in the third place, can men control it. There is a sudden beginning. There is a sudden ending. You get variations during the revival and men seem to be utterly helpless. While it is perfectly true to say that we can quench the Spirit and be a hindrance, it is never true to say that if we observe all the rules and the conditions that we can produce revival. No. God keeps it in his own hands, beginning, course and end. In everything, we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit and his power. But, lastly, think of its overwhelming character. ‘What mean these stones?’ These stones are there to tell us of ‘the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty’. A revival is something which, when it happens, leads people to say, as the townspeople said in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, ‘What is this? What is it?’ It is something that comes like a tornado. It is almost like an overflowing tide, it is like a flood. Astounding things happen, and of such a magnitude that men are left amazed, astonished. Let me give you but one illustration which is one of the most lyrical and one of the most wonderful. There was a preacher in Scotland three hundred years ago of the name of John Livingstone of Kilsyth. There was a marvelous day in the life of John Livingstone. He tells us himself in his autobiography that he was a very ordinary preacher. And yet, writing at the end of his life, he looks back and he says, ‘You know, there was a day, I shall never forget it, in June 1630.…’ He was at a communion service at a place called Shotts. Have you ever read of the revival at the Kirk of Shotts? Read it, my friends, this is what happened. They had had their services; they had gone on over the weekend. John Livingstone and a number of others had been spending Sunday night after the services in prayer, and in conferences, as they called them, talking to one another about these things, and Monday morning came and John Livingstone had been asked to preach. He was out in the fields meditating, and suddenly he felt that he could not preach, that the thing was beyond him and that he was inadequate. And he felt like running away. But suddenly the voice of God seemed to speak to him, not in audible language, but in his spirit, telling him not to do that and that God did not work in that way, and it made him feel that he must go back. He preached, he tells us, on Ezekiel 36. And he said, ‘I had preached for about an hour and a half. Then,’ he said, ‘I began to apply my message,’ and as he was beginning to apply it, suddenly the Spirit of God came upon him and he went on for another hour in this application. And as he did so, people were literally falling to the ground, and in that one service five hundred people were converted. Oh, modern people, I have to say this—unfortunately he did not test the meeting. I am not saying that five hundred came forward at the end, they did not do that sort of thing. Five hundred were convicted, some falling to the ground, having to be carried out. Others went out groaning in agony and were in this agony for days. But as the result of that one sermon, five hundred people were added to the churches—truly, permanently, soundly converted. That is the kind of thing that happens in a revival. And poor John Livingstone says that that kind of thing only happened to him on one other occasion. In a long life just these two days, but what days! Not John Livingstone, but ‘the hand of the Lord’, working in and through John Livingstone. A story, too, is told of a man preaching in a little town called Llanidloes, in Wales, who preached one sermon, and during the next six months a thousand people were added to the churches in the district round about that little town. What is this? This is ‘the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty’. At Pentecost you had miracles, speaking with tongues and many other things. They are variable, they do not always happen. But mighty things happen. Miraculous things happen, things that are beyond the explanation and the wit of men. And indeed, if you consult the men whom God has used on such occasions, they will all tell you the same thing. They suddenly, like John Livingstone, became conscious of a power coming upon them. Not themselves. Taken up, taken out of themselves. Given liberty. Given authority. Given fearlessness. Speaking as men of God with the boldness of the original apostles. They knew when the power came, they knew when the power went. You will read it in the journals of Whitefield and of Wesley and all the rest. This is the hand of the Lord. This is the demonstration of the Spirit and of power. It was because he knew so much about this that the Apostle Paul says ‘For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds; casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ’ (2 Cor. 10:4–5). That is it. Or, finally, look at it as it is described in Acts 2. Here are the apostles meeting together for prayer in the upper room. They had been doing it for ten days. Suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing, mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. That is it. Not always the sound, but always the consciousness of the mighty wind of God. The Spirit of God descends upon preacher, prayers, praying people, those meeting in conference. The sound of a rushing mighty wind. The hand of the Lord, that it is mighty! Do we know anything about that my friends? Do you believe this? Do we believe the facts? Do we believe the explanation? Do we who claim to believe in God and in the Lord Jesus Christ still believe in miracles? In the possibility of miracles? Do we believe in God coming in and doing things that we not only cannot do, but cannot even understand, nor control, nor explain. Yea, I ask you, do you long to know such things? To see such things happening again today? Are you praying for such a visitation? For believe me, when God hears our prayers and does this thing again, it will be such a phenomenon that not only will the Church be astounded and amazed, but even those who are outside will be compelled to listen and to pay attention, in a way that they are not doing at the present time, and in a way that men left to themselves can never persuade them to do. That is the meaning of the stones. That is why I am calling your attention to revival. This is what God can do. This is what God has done. Let us together decide to beseech him, to plead with him to do this again. Not that we may have the experience or the excitement, but that his mighty hand may be known and his great name may be glorified and magnified among the people. The Purpose of Revival Related Mp3 Audio And he spake unto the children of Israel, saying, When your children shall ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean these stones? Then ye shall let your children know, saying, Israel came over this Jordan on dry land. For the Lord your God dried up the waters of Jordan from before you, until ye were passed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red sea, which he dried up from before us, until we were gone over: That all the people of the earth might know the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty: that ye might fear the Lord your God for ever (Josh. 4:21–24). We have, you remember, been looking at the story in the Book of Joshua because it is a perfect illustration of why it is important for us to have monuments and reminders of the great things which God has done. We have seen that the principles on which God acts never vary. We are called upon to consider historical facts, significant and miraculous facts, and now we must move on to another aspect of this great subject of revival. What is the object and the purpose of it all? Here is this miraculous thing that happened. But why, why did it happen? Or, if I may put my question in a different way, and ask with reverence, why does God do this from time to time? For we have been reminding ourselves that what happened one hundred years ago is but one in a series of similar events. From time to time in the long history of the Church there have been these visitations, these outpourings of God’s Spirit. Nothing is clearer in the history of the Church than that. Indeed, that does seem to be the history of the Church. There was a great outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost. That visitation persisted for some time, but then it began to wane and finally vanished. The Church got into a powerless condition, so much so that some people thought the end had come. Then suddenly God poured out his Spirit again and the Church was raised up to the heights once more. For a time that persisted, but then it, too, gradually passed. So the history of the Church is a sort of graph of ups and downs. That has been happening throughout the running centuries. Now, the question we are concerned with at this point is—why does God do this from time to time? And the answer is given us very perfectly in these verses that we are looking at now. The first reason given in verse 24 is this—‘that [in order that] all people of the earth might know the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty’. This then is the first reason that is given. God does this thing from time to time, God sends revival, blessing, upon the Church, in order that he may do something with respect to those who are outside him. He is doing something that is going to arrest the attention of all the people of the earth. Here, we must always realise, is the chief reason for ever considering this matter at all. This is my main reason for calling attention to this whole subject of revival and for urging everybody to pray for revival, to look for it and to long for it. This is the reason—the glory of God. You see, Israel alone represented God and his glory. All the other nations of the world were pagan, they had their various gods and they did not believe in nor worship the God of Israel. But God had chosen Israel. He had made a nation for himself in order that through them, and by means of them, he might manifest his own glory and that they might bear this testimony to all the nations of the world. That was the real function of the Children of Israel, and the other nations were watching them and were ready always to scoff at them and to ridicule them. Whenever the nation of Israel was defeated, or seemed to be helpless, or was in any trouble, the other nations would always say, ‘Where is their God, the God of whom they have spoken so much and of whom they have boasted so much, where is he? Where is his power?’ And so, the first reason for this miraculous act is—that all these peoples and nations ‘may know the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty’. God is vindicating himself, he is asserting his own glory and his own power. He is doing this in order that those on the outside, who scoff and speak in derision, may see something that will pull them up and arrest them and astound them. Now, we must never lose sight of this. It is the main reason for being concerned about revival. We should not seek revival in order that we may have experiences. I have described experiences that do take place in revival, but we do not seek revival primarily for their sake. There are people who do. There are people who always rush to meetings where any kind of experience is promised and they go the rounds from one meeting to another, people who are just itching and thirsting to have experiences, always thinking of themselves. But that is not the way in which it is put here, for the primary thing is the glory of God, the power, and the name of God, and the honour of God. So let us be perfectly clear about that. There are people who are ready to jump at anything that will solve their problem or the problem of the Church. Some years ago the main sections of the Christian Church were not interested at all in evangelism. They despised it and dismissed it with derision. But today every section of the Church is talking a great deal about evangelism. And the reason is that they are seeing the churches becoming empty, so they will take up anything that may help them to solve the problem of church attendance or even church finance. And they would undoubtedly do likewise with respect to revival, but that is a terrible thing to do. No, our overriding, controlling reason for having any interest at all in these matters should be the glory of God. Does it grieve you, my friends, that the name of God is being taken in vain and desecrated? Does it grieve you that we are living in a godless age—an age when men have sufficient arrogance to speak in public and in private with sarcasm of the record of God’s mighty deeds and actions? But, we are living in such an age and the main reason we should be praying about revival is that we are anxious to see God’s name vindicated and his glory manifested. We should be anxious to see something happening that will arrest the nations, all the peoples, and cause them to stop and to think again. So here is the first thing. You will find it constantly in the Scriptures. It is in many ways one of the leading themes, if not the leading theme, in the book of the Psalms. Read the Psalms and see those men praying for a visitation of God’s Spirit. Every time it is in order that the heathen who are scoffing may be silenced. The Psalmist cries out to God that he should do something that will silence them. This is the end to which they are always looking, that God will do something and speak in such a way, that will call everybody to ‘Be still and know that I am God’ (Ps. 46:10). That is the great theme of Psalm 46. The nations and their princes are all being addressed; these people who are arguing against God and querying whether there is such a God. ‘And listen’ says the Psalmist, ‘here is the God who makes wars to cease; this is the God who arises and vindicates himself.’ Then, having displayed his case, he says, ‘Be still,’ give up, give in, admit, ‘that I am God.’ Now, that is the thing of which we are reminded here. God himself told Joshua to tell the people his primary reason for setting up this memorial—that he might thus manifest his glory and silence the people who are outside. And that is what revival has invariably achieved. It has caused those who are outside the Church and those who are inimical to Christianity to pay attention. For it is indeed a phenomenon. It is, as we have agreed, something miraculous. It is something that astounds them and causes them, of necessity, to stop, and to look, and to consider. Of course, their reason for stopping and considering may not be a good one, it may be sheer curiosity, but whatever it is, it does not matter, for it does make them stop and think. We have a classic example of this, of course, in Acts 2. It is the account of what happened on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out and we read that the people of Jerusalem and all the strangers who were gathered there, were arrested, and they said, ‘What is this?’. A phenomenon. Something was happening, and they were forced to pay attention and Peter had to get up and give his explanation, you remember. That is always what a revival does, and I maintain that there is nothing short of a revival that will have that effect. We have tried nearly everything else, but it does not succeed. The masses of the people even if they show a temporary interest, show no more than that. No, men can never do anything that will have this effect. This is always the action of God. If I may put it bluntly and clearly, what is needed is not a stunt but the action of God that will stun people. That is the difference. Man can produce stunts. And he is very clever at doing that. He can think of something fresh and new, and he will advertise it, but the people know the whole time that it is man’s doing. ‘It’s a stunt,’ they say. Now, stunts will never lead to this desired position. But when God arises and God acts, then something is happening that will force men’s attention. They cannot understand it. Here psychologists are left without any explanation. They can explain stunts without difficulty but they cannot explain this. That is the difference between man organising something, and God manifesting the right hand of his power and showing that it is mighty. Now surely this is the crying need of the hour. We are aware of the position of the vast majority of the people of this country; church attendance constitutes but five per cent of the population. And though we may preach, and fast, and sweat, and pray, and do all we can, all our efforts seem to lead to nothing. What is needed is some mighty demonstration of the power of God, some enactment of the Almighty, that will compel people to pay attention, and to look, and to listen. And the history of all the revivals of the past indicates so clearly that that is invariably the effect of revival, without any exception at all. That is why I am calling attention to revival. That is why I am urging you to pray for this. When God acts, he can do more in a minute than man with his organising can do in fifty years. Let us realise this tremendous possibility, therefore, and plead to God to make known his power and to manifest his glory in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation of people—people that even blaspheme his holy name and deny his very existence. For God’s sake, for the glory of his name, let us intercede and pray for a visitation of God’s Spirit. There, then, is the first great reason ‘that all the people of the earth might know the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty’. The second reason is ‘that ye might fear the Lord your God for ever.’ That is what I have been emphasising, that revival is of great value to the Church, as well as all it does for the world. That you might know, that you might fear the Lord your God for ever. So, what does it do for the Church? Let me enumerate some of the things that are taught here quite plainly. The first thing it does is to give the Church an unusual consciousness of the presence of the power of God. ‘That ye [the Children of Israel] might fear the Lord for ever.’ Now, in the tenth verse of the previous chapter, it is put much more explicitly and powerfully—‘And Joshua said, Hereby ye shall know that the living God is among you.’ That is it. This is going to happen, said Joshua to the people, in order that you may know that the living God is among you. When you read this story of the Children of Israel, you will see very clearly that they needed to be reminded of that. Though they were God’s people, though he had done so many things for them and to them, though he had brought them out of Egypt, though he had brought them through the Red Sea, though he had led them in the wilderness where their feet did not swell and where they never lacked food because he fed them with manna, the bread from heaven, yet they were constantly fearful and grumbling, looking at the other nations and peoples and their gods, hesitant and doubtful. They behaved in a manner which makes us feel that they were a people who did not realise their relationship to God. And God did this thing at the river of Jordan in order that they might know that the living God was among them. Now, this is the supreme need of the Church today. In one way, the main trouble with the Christian Church as she is at this moment, the main trouble with every one of us in our daily life and living, is that we fail to realise that the living God is among us. What is the Church? It is this institution, this body in which God dwells. He has promised that. ‘I will be in you. I will dwell in you. I will walk among you.’ That is what he says. That is what he said to these Children of Israel (see, for example, Exod. 29:45–46). That is what is transferred in exactly the same way to the Christian Church. The Christian Church is not a human organisation and institution. She is as the Apostle Paul puts it at the end of Ephesians 2, a great building in which God dwells, an habitation of God. This is an argument that is worked out in many places in the New Testament epistles. But the Church does not seem to realise that today. People will persist in regarding the Christian Church as just an institution, one institution among others, just a human organisation. But that is not the Church, the Church is this body in which God himself dwells. And what he does in revival is to remind us of that. When God acts in revival everybody present feels and knows that God is there. Of course, we believe this. We believe this by faith. Yes, but we should know it. We should have a realisation of it. We should be conscious of his nearness. And that is what revival does for us. ‘I am going to do this thing,’ says God, ‘then all of you will realise that I am among you, I am acting in your midst. I, the living God, have come down amongst you. I am in you. You are my people and I dwell in you and I walk in you.’ That is what the Church needs to realise today. But, of course, it is the very thing she does not realise. It is the thing we are always forgetting. But though I put that first, we must remember that God, at the same time, reminds us that the whole power that should be manifest in the Church is his power, that everything which the Church does should be a manifestation of the power of God. What is the gospel? Well, you remember the answer of the Apostle Paul, ‘It is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth’. (Rom. 1:16). How easy it is to forget that. How easy to preach it as a system, to preach it as a collection of ideas, or just to preach it as a truth. Ah, but you can do that without power. There are people, says the Apostle Paul, who ‘have a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof’ (2 Tim. 3:5). Christianity is primarily a life. It is a power. It is a manifestation of energy. And as we realise that the living God is among us, we shall realise more and more this tremendous power. That in turn will lead us to realise that the one thing that matters is that we should be rightly related to God, and always reliant on his power. The Apostle’s great claim, you remember, in writing to the Corinthians is this—that when he came to them he did not preach to them with wisdom of men, it was not with ‘enticing words of man’s wisdom’ (1 Cor. 2:1–4). He could have done that. He was a very able man and one who was learned and very well read. But though he was going to a seat of learning—there was a university in Corinth—and he knew the mentality of the Greeks, he did not approach them along that line at all. He tells them later that he became a fool for Christ’s sake and many of them despised him because of that. But, says the Apostle, I did not come in that way. In what way, then? Oh, he says, ‘in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God’ (1 Cor. 2:5). We all need to be reminded of this. Let me make a confession for all preachers. The outstanding temptation—the besetting sin—of every preacher, myself included, is that after you have prepared your sermons you feel that all is well. You have your two sermons ready for Sunday. Well, that is all right. You have your notes, and you can speak, and you can deliver your message. But that is not preaching! That can be utterly useless. Oh, it may be entertaining, there may be a certain amount of intellectual stimulus and profit in it, but that is not preaching. Preaching is in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. And a man has to realise, after he has prepared his sermons, that however perfectly he may have done so, that it is all waste and useless unless the power of the Spirit comes upon it and upon him. He must pray for that. Yes, but not only he. Those who listen must also pray for that. How many people pray before they go to a service that the Spirit of God might come upon the preacher and use him and his message? The hearers, as well as the preacher must pray for that, otherwise they are looking to him and to his message. No, all together must look to God and realise their utter dependence upon the power that he alone can give. And whenever there is a revival and God’s power is manifested, you need not urge people to pray, they do. They want to see more and more of it. Revival, then, encourages us to pray, and that is why it is good for us to read these accounts and look back on what God has done, that we may realise that the living God is among us. And we must pray to him to manifest this power. Negatively, it means that it delivers us from any and every form of self-reliance, which is the curse of the Church. There is no difficulty at all in explaining the state of the Christian Church today, it is so perfectly simple. I will tell you why the Church is as she is today, it is self-reliance in the following forms. First, reliance upon scholarship and learning. It came in about the middle of the last century. ‘Ah,’ people began to say, ‘we are now becoming more educated and we have advanced. Of course we do not want the sort of thing they had in past centuries under Whitefield and Wesley and so on. We now want learned sermons.’ And so they began to have them. And great attention was paid to form and to style and to diction. Sermons were published and it was obvious as the man was writing them that he had his eye on publication rather than on the service in which he was going to preach his sermon. Everything became learned and scholarly and philosophical and great sermons were delivered. And it is one of the main causes and explanations of the state of the Church today. Reliance upon human learning and knowledge and wisdom. Then, secondly, of course, the reliance upon organising. In the last hundred years the Church has multiplied her organisations and institutions in a way that she has never done before in all her long history. There have never been so many sub-sections of the Christian Church as during the present century. Every thing is being organised; age groups, everything else. And there are head offices which send you the literature telling you how to do whatever your interest may be, how to handle children, how to handle young people, advice on this and that. All perfectly organised and yet look at the state of the Church. They are relying on the organisation. Others rely on their own activities. As long as they are busy they think tremendous things are happening. And, of course, if you organise and if you are active, it will be reported in the papers—they must have something to report. And people say, ‘Tremendous things are happening. Look at it.’ But what is happening? Look at the Church, that is the answer. No, my dear friends, we need to learn once more the difference between bustle and busyness and ‘the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty’. But when God acts and when people realise that the living God is amongst them, they are humbled, they are abased. Men do not count any longer. And the reports are not about what men have done but about what God has done and what happens to men as the result of God’s action. A revival always humbles men, abases them, casts them to the floor, makes them feel they can do nothing, fills them with a sense of reverence and of godly fear. Oh, how absent that is amongst us. How men are standing forward. But when revival comes, men push back, they are humbled to the ground and the glory is given to God, because it is God’s power that is in evidence. Then my next point, of course, follows by a logical necessity. When all this happens the fear of men is taken away from us in every form. In Joshua 3:10 we read: ‘And Joshua said, Hereby ye shall know that the living God is among you, and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites.’ The Children of Israel were about to enter the promised land and they had been hearing about all these tribes. The spies had been sent forward and they came back and said, ‘You know, there are giants in that land and when we looked at them we felt that we were as grasshoppers.’ And they were trembling, they were afraid of these great powers that they had got to meet when they entered the promised land. Here is the answer: when you know that the living God is amongst you, what are the Hittites, who are the Girgashites and the Jebusites, what are the whole lot of them put together? They become as nothing. The fear of men is taken away immediately when we realise that the living God is among us. And if ever the Church needed this it is now. The Church is so afraid. She is afraid of organised sin, and her argument is, ‘We must be doing something because look at the world. It is attracting the young people, it gives them a happy pleasant Saturday night, entertains them, teaches them how to sing and do this and that. Well now, we must do the same thing. Bring in your pop group, or whatever it is, into your Sunday night service. That is what they like, you see.’ The world is doing it and the young people say, ‘I like it’ and because the Church is so afraid that they are going to lose their young people they feel they must do the same. Oh, what a tragedy, what a departure from God’s way. The Church has been afraid of the young people for a long time and that is why she has multiplied these institutions to try to attract them. And she is afraid, too, of the lure of the modern world. People say, ‘What can we do? We are up against the television nowadays. There was not television two hundred years ago. They had no radio, they had no cinema. There is our problem. We must do something,’ they say. They are afraid of these organisations and powers. And, too, they are terrified of learning and of knowledge. ‘Look,’ they say, ‘at what these experts are saying in the various radio and television programmes and our people hear these things. Is it intellectually respectable to be a Christian? Can you really talk about miracles still? And about dividing the Red Sea and Jordan? Surely people will not believe all that!’ So we trim and modify our gospel, because we are afraid of learning and of knowledge and of science. That is what the Church has been doing for a hundred years and that is why she is as she is today. Then people say that Communism is spreading, and if it seems to succeed through using various methods, then we should use them too. They say that we must also make our literature more effective. All right, go on doing these things, but if you rely upon them you are already defeated. There is no need to be afraid of any of these powers, they have always been there. There is nothing new about all this. The Christian Church has always had to fight the world and the flesh and the devil. She had to fight the Roman Empire at the beginning. She had to fight the malignity of the Jews. She has always had these enemies who are out to exterminate her. And the Church has often quaked and feared, but never when there has been revival, because then they know that the living God is among them ‘and he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites’. He names them one by one, you see, as I have been trying to do. What have we to fear from of all these things when the living God comes amongst us? Oh, for a touch of his power. Oh, that the Church might realise that this is the answer and then our fear of all our enemies and opponents would vanish like the morning mist. ‘Fear Him, ye saints, and you will then have nothing else to fear.’ That is how the writer of the hymn puts it and how right he is. Revival does that for us. And so, to sum it up, it makes us look, and keeps us looking, to him, and dependent upon him. Our supreme need, and our only need, is to know God, the living God, and the power of his might. We need nothing else. It is just that, the power of the living God, to know that the living God is among us and that nothing else matters. So we wait upon him. We look to him. We cry out to him, as Moses did when he was standing before the Red Sea, not knowing what to do, and while the people were grumbling and complaining. God answered Moses and said, ‘Wherefore criest thou unto me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward’ (Exod. 14:15). And on they went. Stand then in His great might, With all His strength endued; And take, to arm you for the fight, The panoply of God. Charles Wesley That is what we need, my friends. And that is why I am urging you to pray for revival. We must look to him. God does this in order to give us encouragement. To show us that he is among us. And the reminder of what happened one hundred years ago should lead us to turn back to him. I say, forget everything else. Forget everything else. We need to realise the presence of the living God amongst us. Let everything else be silent. This is no time for minor differences. We all need to know the touch of the power of the living God. And let us continue and wait until we know it. And then, of course, God does this in order to deliver us from our enemies; enemies without, enemies within. Yes God did all these things to bring his people out of Egypt, out of the wilderness, into the blessed land of Canaan. He does it, I say, in order to lead us to the land of blessing—Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey. What does this mean in the Church? It means that there has never been a revival but that it has led to praise and to thanksgiving, to enjoyment of the riches of God’s grace. The great characteristic of revival is ultimately praise, adoration, worship, full enjoyment, full, unmixed and evermore. But, in conclusion, let me just direct your attention to one other thing. We have considered this great fact of what happens in revival. We have considered the nature of the fact, the miraculous, the almighty power of God. We have asked the question, ‘Why does God do this?’ I want to ask a last question, ‘When does God do this?’ You want to know that, I hope. If you are longing and yearning, I am sure that you are asking the question, ‘Oh, when is God going to do this? We have been praying, many of us for years. Nothing seems to happen. When does God send revival?’ Well, the answer is here in this story of Joshua and it is confirmed by the history of the Church. There seem to me to be two main factors here. The first is this. God always seems to do this after a period of great trial and great discouragement. The text, we have seen, reminds us of two occasions: The crossing of the Red Sea and the crossing of the river of Jordan. When does he do this marvellous thing? Oh, he does it then, after you have been in Egypt for a while, in the bondage, in the captivity, in the cruelty of Egypt, with the taskmasters and the lashes of their whips, trying to make bricks without sufficient straw. Bondage, aridity, cruelty, persecution and trial. He does it after Egypt. He does it also after a period in the wilderness. Here are the Children of Israel right before Jordan. Yes, but they had just been forty years in the wilderness, without a home, in the howling, barren wilderness with its storms and its trials, its testings, and its provings-all that had happened to them there. Read the story. And what a sad story it is. Yes, they had had a wilderness experience. And on top of that they had had another calamity, which, to many of them must have seemed to be the end of all things: Moses, their great leader, had died. He had gone up on to a mountain and he had never come back again. The man who had come to them originally with a message from God and had addressed them in their utter serfdom when they were brokenhearted. The man who had led them through so much. He had gone. And a man called Joshua was left to lead them. Who was he and what was he? The position, you see, seemed to be utterly discouraging. Forty years in the wilderness and without a leader. Ah, thank God for this. It is after such experiences that God sends revival. After Egypt, after the wilderness experience. God knows the Christian Church has been in this wilderness many a long year. If you read the history of the Church before about 1830 or 1840, you will find that in many countries there used to be regular revivals of religion almost every ten years or so. It has not been like that. There has only been one major revival since 1859. Oh, we have passed through a barren period, with that devastating higher criticism and the evil that it has done, in pulpits, in pews, everywhere. People have lost their belief in this living God and in the atonement and in reconciliation and have turned to wisdom, philosophy and learning. We have passed through one of the most barren periods in the long history of the Church. We have been like the prodigal son in that far country, spending our time in the fields with the swine and living on nothing but husks. Yes, we have been in bondage, we have been in fear, we have suffered persecution and derision and it is still going on. We are still in the wilderness. Do not believe anything that suggests that we are out of it, we are not. The Church is in the wilderness. But thank God it is always after such a period that God acts and does his mighty deeds and shows forth his glory. The second factor in this story is also most important. It is not only after Egypt, or after the wilderness that God acts. The real moment, the moment of crisis, is when you are right up against the Red Sea, when you are actually on the border of Jordan. It is then he does it. You see, we can be forty years in the wilderness, but the mere fact of being in the wilderness does not produce it. No, it is not only in the wilderness, but when we have actually arrived at this critical position. If I may use modern terminology, God always seems to do this, when we are right up against it and so much against it that we are hopeless and helpless. You remember the picture at the Red Sea? The Children of Israel had been commanded to go on. Where were they to go? Well, they were taken to a point at which on the one side was Pi-hahiroth and on the other side Baal-zephon, two mountains, one on each side of them. Behind them were Pharaoh and his hosts and the chariots, the army of Egypt. And there were the defenceless Children of Israel with nothing to defend them at all—mountain here, mountain there, the enemy behind, and in front the Red Sea. It was a situation of complete and entire hopelessness and despair, with the people grumbling and complaining, asking Moses what it all meant, and Moses had nothing to do but to fall before God. And then the answer came and the Red Sea was divided. It was exactly the same here at Jordan. We are even given this interesting detail that the river of Jordan was badly flooded for long months at that time of the year. They could not possibly cross it. There they were, facing a flood. How could they get through? It was then that God arose and manifested the right hand of his power and gave a display of his glory. I just put this to you in the form of a challenge. Read the histories and accounts of every revival that has ever taken place and you will invariably find this, that the one man or the group, the little group of people, who have been used in this way by God to send revival, have always known a state of utter desperation and final despair. Every single one of them. Read the journals of Whitefield and Wesley. Read the life history of all these men. They have always come to this place where they have realised their utter and absolute impotence. Their final paralysis. There is the Red Sea. Here is the enemy. There are the mountains. They are shut in, they are shut down, they are crushed to their knees. it is always the prerequisite. It is always the moment at which God acts. And that is what, I confess, troubles me and discourages me today. The Christian Church is still so healthy, so confident in herself, so sure that she only needs to organise yet another effort, some further activity. She has not come up to the Red Sea. She has never been to Pi-hahiroth and Baal-zephon. She does not know that experience and until she does I cannot see that we have much reason for anticipating a revival of religion and an outpouring of the Spirit of God. It may be, you see, that things infinitely worse than what we have already known will yet have to happen to us. You would have thought that two world wars would have done it, but they have not. You would have thought that the present position would have been enough, but it is not. God have mercy upon us. Until, I say, we arrive there at Pihahiroth, Baal-zephon, Migdal, with the enemy, the Red Sea, the utter hopelessness, Jordan in flood, the utter impossibility, and the final despair. May God bring us to that realisation. May he so reveal his own glory and holiness to us. May he reveal unto us our utter impotence and hopelessness. May we see these things in such a way that we shall cease from men and look only unto the living God. And then there is no question but that he will hear us and he will manifest his glory and his power.