Revival?

The question is complex. Is a series of meetings, where certain results are reported and certain crowds attend, a REVIVAL? Is it real or is it religious, emotional and psychological? How can we discern what is truly the work of the Holy Spirit. It is not easy! And it is sure not a present discernment. We have heard of revivals in Brownsville, Lakeland and other places only to see what was believed to be the working of God at the time turned out to be something less.

I know this! Revival, if it is real, will come from the exaltation of the truth of the Word of God. It is difficult for me to believe that people can be spiritually overwhelmed without the exposition of scripture. Not just reading a text and departing from it to say what you want to say but a solid teaching of the doctrines of the whole council of the Word of God. I can find no historical account of true revival that happened without the Scriptures clearly being taught.

The only way to say if a series of meetings and the claims of certain results was a true revival is to wait. What happens three months after the revival is over. Where are those who made professions a year after they walked the isle? What is the spiritual temperature of those who crowded in the church six months later?

Charles Finney was considered the “Great Revivalist.” He manipulated the wills of men and he dealt in the realm of emotionalism. Under Finney’s tactics thousands upon thousands were said to come to Christ. Everywhere he went, there were crowds and there was “the stirring of the Holy Spirit in revival.” But when the “revival was over” what were the true results?

When people went behind the scenes to check into what was left after Finney did his work, his fellow workers couldn't help realize the small number of converts who ever remained faithful. In a letter to Finney dated December 25, 1834, James Boyle asked these questions:"Let us look over the fields where you and others and myself have labored as revival ministers and what is now their moral state? What was their state within three months after we left them? I have visited and revisited many of these fields and groaned in spirit to see the sad frigid carnal contentious state into which the churches had fallen and fallen very soon after we first departed from among them."

In fact, many who evaluated the ministry of Finney were convinced that sinners emotionally but not spiritually awakened became hardened and skeptical. The sinner, for example, who made an objective commitment to Christ in some emotional experience but soon, found out that contrary to the revivalists' or the evangelists` promise, nothing changed, and his heart was the same. And the wave of emotional release that he experienced made no change. That discovery that didn't solve anything in his life made the sinner more hardened in his sin, more skeptical of the gospel, more skeptical of other people's Christian profession, believing that he who had been deceived was a member of groups of others who had been and were being likewise deceived.

Here is Finney’s own evaluation: “"I was often instrumental in bringing Christians under great conviction, and into a state of temporary repentance and faith…[But] falling short of urging them up to a point, where they would become so acquainted with Christ as to abide in Him, they would of course soon relapse into their former state”

B. B. Warfield, one of Finney's contemporaries made a similar assessment: "During ten years, hundreds, and perhaps thousands, were annually reported to be converted on all hands; but now it is admitted, that real converts are comparatively few. It is declared, even by [Finney] himself, that "the great body of them are a disgrace to religion"

Pragmatic results do not signal the work of God. They could very well signal the work of emotional manipulation. Time will tell. Time will tell.