No Formula for Revival

One of the things that concerns me about the Church of Jesus Christ generally is that we keep on trying to make the Church work without God. We keep coming up with new patterns and programs which, if we repeat them, we'll get some kind of success, but which no longer is God necessarily involved in. I think it's been true in the history of the Church.

It's why revivals never last very long. 1904, which is what we're celebrating the centenary of this church, 1904. 1904 was also the period of the Welsh Revival, when in ten weeks, a hundred thousand people came to Christ.

And then beyond those ten weeks, there were still some vast consequences, but in those ten weeks in particular, there was a great outpouring. And they used to sing certain songs. And so other people thought, that's obviously the secret, let's sing the songs they sing in the Welsh Revival.

And eventually, in fact, the Welsh Revival, I think it's fair to say, dwindled into songs. They stopped preaching and just sang these certain songs, where God had certainly moved through these songs and blessed through these songs. One of the ones that have been resurrected in the last ten, fifteen years.

Here is love vast as an ocean. How does it go? It's in this book, by the way, it's a great song. Here is love vast as an ocean.

Whatever, some of you know it, don't look for it. But that came out of the Welsh Revival, one of the key songs in the Welsh Revival. I wrote the history, jointly wrote the history of the Keser Convention a couple of years ago, or back in the year 2000, to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Keser Convention, which, of course, has had a big impact through its life in the past.

And in 1905, 300 people came from Wales to transfer the Welsh Revival to the Keser Convention. And what they did when the main meetings were over was to stay back and sing some of these songs, and they would sing them late into the night. And people would stay to be part of this singing.

But they wondered why it didn't happen. Because what they'd done, you see, they'd taken what God had done, reduced it to a formula, and tried to transplant it. But now without God.

You know, you hear things happening all across the world, and what we tend to do these days is get our Christian journalists and our Christian photographers, and put them on a jet plane, fly them to the scene of the Revival, and they take their pictures and write their stories and reduce it to some formula, bring it back and say, let's have the formula here. And they produce a manual for around the country, having seminars on how to have Revival, and they wonder why it doesn't work. Because, you see, it's detected from God.

So they've made it a program. One of the things that you find about Jesus in his ministries, you could never lock him into a program. When you try to, when you think, I've got the pattern, I know the technique, I know the secret here, and you try to lock Jesus into it, he'd break out of it.