Fire and Rain: Revival in America
`O that Thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down, That the mountains might quake at Thy presence—As fire kindles the brushwood… That the nations may tremble at Thy presence!’ Isaiah 64:1,2
By John McCandlish Phillips
(This was first published in the April 1986 issue of Moody Monthly.)
Though it is much else, revival is nothing less than a breaking through to men from the heavens, nothing less than the presence of God with men in profound and inescapable immediacy. Nearly all men near the heart of a revival know that it is so, that God is there, that He is holy.
Flesh and soul are quieted before Him—no flesh dares take glory in His presence—and the Holy Spirit freely works His work of convicting men and converting them. A clean freshness falls upon the religious scene like the freshness of a dewy meadow at daybreak.
I once saw this hint of the quiet power of revival near, of all places, Times Square in New York City. Two churches, both evangelical, sat within less than four blocks of Times Square.
In both of these places a huge ball of a man with an operatic voice came to sing, and in both of these places he opened his cavern of a mouth wide and sang magnificently—but there was a great difference.
Introduced in one church, he came bouncingly, beamingly out and threw his happy flesh around for several minutes, cracking jokes, tossing jocular insults, and making the people laugh and think of him as a real character before he sang. He seemed very popular.
This same man was introduced during a missionary conference at the other church between two speakers. The whole atmosphere in that place that day was different; it was pregnant with spiritual import. When the big man was asked to sing, he came straight to the lectern, smiled pleasantly, said not a word, and sang gloriously, quickly leaving the platform afterward. It seemed evident that, in that atmosphere, the man knew that there was no room for fleshly display and readily refrained from it. If on the earlier occasion he had seemed to sing in the glory of man, on the second he clearly sang to the glory of God.
What that atmosphere did for that man that day to lift and purify his music is a tiny sample of what true revival does to banish dross and sin and fakery or show of every species and to put a holy God at the core of men’s attention. The fruit of every real revival we do not speak here of any work or energy of the flesh called religious “revival”—is “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”
The joy spoken of is the real thing. It springs from a fountain, not from a bottle of distilled theological water. It is no first cousin to hearty Rotarian, church-lobby jollity.
Before her founding, and for quite some time thereafter, this great land had very much of that, born in the fires of Christ-exalting, sin-slaying, church-and-home upbuilding, civil-and-moral forming, soul-saving, missionary-sending revivals.
Can it happen again?
When, historically, are conditions ripe for revival? Often when they are wrong, when hope seems lost, when declension and decay rule the day—when nothing but revival will do to put things right again.
Often conditions are ripe for revival when they are wrong, when hope seems lost, when declension and decay rule the day.
When Jesus called rotting Lazarus out of the grave to life again, a tremendous physical revival occurred in Lazarus’ dead, decaying, smelly body. Ask anyone who knew Lazarus, except Jesus, what the hopes were for seeing him alive again soon and they would have thought the question mad.
God once showed a prophet a vision of a valley filled with dry, bleached bones. He asked him, “Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezek. 37:3). As the prophet obeyed the Lord, he saw those bones rattle and do a jig until they came together again and were clothed with flesh, and then breath—LIFE!—came into them. Those old bones marched again as vital, living men.
“Where there is life, there is hope,” we are told. But with God, where there is death life can spring afresh. Since God sees all men dead in their sins, salvation itself is an act of regeneration as great as the raising of Lazarus.
In seasons of revival new life comes to sinners, and renewal to saints, as quick as those dry bones stood up. Suddenly, where there was little, there is an army of God saluting the Lord in the valley of death!
The spiritual situation in Israel was black. Weak King Ahab had married strong-willed Jezebel, a foreigner devoted to the worship of the false god called Baal. She imported Baal worship into Israel wholesale and gave it the force of civil law. While supporting hundreds of its priests out of the royal treasury, she hounded the prophets of the Lord to death or exile.
Under this wicked rulership, true worship was bitterly and bloodily persecuted. The influence of Baal worship overcame many of the people, though 7,000 quietly kept themselves from bowing their knees to Baal.
Straight out of hiding and into the heart of this situation strode God’s man Elijah, commanding King Ahab to “gather all Israel to me at Mount Carmel, with 450 prophets of Baal and 400 prophets of the Asherah, who eat at Jez-bel’s table” (1 Kings 18:19).
It was quite a sight: 850 false religionists arrayed against one rough-clothed man of God. It was showdown time.
Elijah turned to the people and demanded: “How long will you go limping between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him, but if Baal, follow him.”
Their only response was a vast, wordless silence. How still they stood—in spiritual paralysis, “The people did not answer him a word.” So Elijah proposed two sacrifices one by the Baal priests, one to the Lord—and he said, “The God who answers by fire, He is God.”
Elijah then carefully repaired the altar of the Lord that had been thrown down. It was a great moment. God’s man was in action. Revival was on the way!
Yet hardly anyone knew it. Not the false priests certainly, not even the people God called His own. “At the time of the offering … Elijah came near and said, ‘O Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that Thou art God in Israel, and that I am Thy servant, and that I have done all these things at Thy word.’”
His voice was urgent now: “‘Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this people may know that Thou, O Lord, art God, and that Thou hast turned their hearts back again.’
“Then fire of the Lord fell….”
That is what revival is. God acting, always through chosen men, to turn the hearts of people back to Him. There was fire from heaven in Israel. The prophets of Baal were all quickly seized and slain. Then the skies grew dark and the dry, cracked land soaked in a great torrential rain.
Drought and famine, God’s judgments on national sin, were suddenly broken.
It all happened so fast and came seemingly out of nowhere. Truth triumphed in one hour over gathered and uplifted evil and routed it. Can it happen in our day?
Hear what James says: “Be patient, therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. Behold, the farmer waits for the precious produce of the soil, being patient about it, until it gets the early and late rains” (James 5:7).
There are two linked, if somewhat differing, perspectives here. One is on earth. The other is in heaven.
On earth, the saints desire the coming of the Lord. In heaven, God the Father desires the full harvest of the earth a big crop of souls to dwell on high forever!
Note this with great care. The farmer waits. God waits patiently, desiring His precious harvest of blood-washed souls. That is His perspective—the fullness of the earthly harvest, men to dwell with Him through endless ages.
It is inexpressibly important, because eternity is at stake. So the farmer waits patiently, but he waits for something.
It is the harvest, yes, but something must occur before the harvest rain! The harvest-ripening rain must fall at the season suited to it.
It is that, precisely that, for which the heavenly Farmer waits. His perspective is perfect and we need to get it into our perspective. We need to be, as much as possible, in synchronization with what He desires and waits for patiently.
Yes, the saints are rightly eager for the coming of the Lord Jesus, but they, too, must be patient, with a patience directly related to what He so patiently waits for.
James takes the words of Joel—and the fact of nature by which there are two great times of rain in Israel, one during the planting of the seed and one before the harvest, with a stretched-out rather dry spell in between.
James says the natural rain that brings the planted crop to fruition is a figure of another rain, a rain from heaven, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that the human harvest is to receive.
This evidently will stretch out over the whole age of grace. On the day of Pentecost, Peter declared, “This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel: ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days,’ God says, ‘I will pour out of My Spirit upon all flesh’” (Acts 2:16,17).
At His coming, the Lord Jesus will immediately take up to Himself and to the Father a harvest of all the righteous people of the earth, whether living at His coming or dead.
People now numbered by the billions are tramping the earth today—every one to be for-ever with the Lord or forever in the fire.
The stakes are high. Zechariah tells us some-thing we can do, while we patiently wait for the Lord, and he tells us why we should. If we do so, from the depths, not the shallows of our being, we will be in true accord with the Farmer.
“Ask rain from the Lord at the time of the spring rain [Israel’s harvest rainfall] … and He will give them showers of rain…. For the teraphim speak iniquity, and the diviners see lying visions, and tell false dreams; they comfort in vain. Therefore the people wander like sheep” (Zech. 10:1,2).
He is certainly talking about more than a natural rain, for he is speaking of a rain that overcomes lies and rescues men from delusions.
The devil believes in revival, in his own perverse way, for he has been managing a revival of paganism in our culture for a long while.
The devil believes in revival, in his own perverse way, for he has been managing a revival of paganism in our culture for a long while. Some of the great early preachers of righteousness in America, who publicly rebuked what we would now call holiness as the rankest worldliness, would not believe what the American people have given way to by the promptings of the flesh and the urgings of anti-biblical rationalist propagandists whose tongues, if you look carefully at the import of what they are saying, drip the sweet-perfumed poisoned lies of Satan as much as the serpent did when he said, “Eat! You will not die. It will only make you wise.”
They have led the people by the nose into what God hates, into divorce, adultery, fornication, abortion, addiction, indulgence, perve-sion, occultism, gross unbelief, and disregard of God, with deadly intent. They speak nonsense, see lies, twist law into perversion. They give out assurances of chaff and straw that betray men’s souls toward the lake of fire.
Many such false things hold sway now in our land and want more. Many cursed things have eaten their way into our culture and into the very bodies of our people. The devil’s revival began as a trickle, but it has become a terrible fast-running tide designed to sweep men’s souls into hell.
In too many of the places of vast public influence, the voice of truth, which once thundered in our land, seems weak and distant, while the voice of error roars.
The Lord can send spiritual fire to cleanse and spiritual rain to nourish and raise up the harvest. He asks us to ask Him for that, not as a request, but as a passionate desire that sees the measure of the issue dividing His harvest from Satan’s massive crusade for souls. That will make us intercessors those who stand in the gap between judgment and outpoured fresh mercy for these United States.
(This was first published in the April 1986 issue of Moody Monthly.)