Purpose in Prayer

by Edward M. Bounds

If any minister can be satisfied without conversions, he shall have no conversions.

—C. H. Spurgeon.

I do not believe that my desires for a revival were ever half so strong as they ought to be; nor do I see how a minister can help being in a “constant fever” when his Master is dishonoured and souls are destroyed in so many ways.

—Edward Payson.

An aged saint once came to the pastor at night and said: “We are about to have a revival.” He was asked why he knew so. His answer was, “I went into the stable to take care of my cattle two hours ago, and there the Lord has kept me in prayer until just now. And I feel that we are going to be revived.” It was the commencement of a revival.

—H. C. Fish.

XII

It has been said that the history of revivals is the history of religion, and no one can study their history without being impressed with their mighty influence upon the destiny of the race. To look back over the progress of the Divine Kingdom upon earth is to review revival periods which have come like refreshing showers upon dry and thirsty ground, making the desert to blossom as the rose, and bringing new eras of spiritual life and activity just when the Church had fallen under the influence of the apathy of the times, and needed to be aroused to a new sense of her duty and responsibility. “From one point of view, and that not the least important,” writes Principal Lindsay, in “The Church and the Ministry in the Early Centuries,” “the history of the Church flows on from one time of revival to another, and whether we take the awakenings in the old Catholic, the mediæval, or the modern Church, these have always been the work of men specially gifted with the power of seeing and declaring the secrets of the deepest Christian life, and the effect of their work has always been proportionate to the spiritual receptivity of the generation they have spoken to.”

As God, from the beginning, has wrought prominently through revivals, there can be no denial of the fact that revivals are a part of the Divine plan. The Kingdom of our Lord has been advanced in large measure by special seasons of gracious and rapid accomplishment of the work of conversion, and it may be inferred, therefore, that the means through which God has worked in other times will be employed in our time to produce similar results. “The quiet conversion of one sinner after another, under the ordinary ministry of the Gospel,” says one writer on the subject, “must always be regarded with feelings of satisfaction and gratitude by the ministers and disciples of Christ; but a periodical manifestation of the simultaneous conversion of thousands is also to be desired, because of its adaptation to afford a visible and impressive demonstration that God has made that same Jesus, Who was rejected and crucified, both Lord and Christ; and that, in virtue of His Divine Mediatorship, He has assumed the royal sceptre of universal supremacy, and ‘must reign till all His enemies be made His footstool.’ It is, therefore, reasonable to expect that, from time to time, He will repeat that which on the day of Pentecost formed the conclusive and crowning evidence of His Messiahship and Sovereignty; and, by so doing, startle the slumbering souls of careless worldlings, gain the attentive ear of the unconverted, and, in a remarkable way, break in upon those brilliant dreams of earthly glory, grandeur, wealth, power and happiness, which the rebellious and God-forgetting multitude so fondly cherish. Such an outpouring of the Holy Spirit forms at once a demonstrative proof of the completeness and acceptance of His once offering of Himself as a sacrifice for sin, and a prophetic ‘earnest’ of the certainty that He ‘shall appear the second time without sin unto salvation,’ to judge the world in righteousness.”

And that revivals are to be expected, proceeding, as they do, from the right use of the appropriate means, is a fact which needs not a little emphasis in these days, when the material is exalted at the expense of the spiritual, and when ethical standards are supposed to be supreme. That a revival is not a miracle was powerfully taught by Charles G. Finney. There might, he said, be a miracle among its antecedent causes, or there might not. The Apostles employed miracles simply as a means by which they arrested attention to their message, and established its Divine authority. “But the miracle was not the revival. The miracle was one thing; the revival that followed it was quite another thing. The revivals in the Apostles’ days were connected with miracles, but they were not miracles.” All revivals are dependent upon God, but in revivals, as in other things, He invites and requires the assistance of man, and the full result is obtained when there is co-operation between the Divine and the human. In other words, to employ a familiar phrase, God alone can save the world, but God cannot save the world alone. God and man unite for the task, the response of the Divine being invariably in proportion to the desire and the effort of the human.