UNBLOCKING THE WELL OF THE LIVING WORD

Each daily devotional below begins with an excerpt from a transcript of a Duncan Campbell telling the story of how the 1949 Hebridean revival began(1)

Duncan Campbell said:-

“Now how did it happen… this, to me, is an interesting story and I want to tell it in full… One evening an old woman 84 years of age, and blind, had a vision. Now don’t ask me to explain this vision, because I cannot but strange things begin to happen when God begins to move and this dear old lady in the vision saw the church of our fathers crowded with young people and she saw a strange minister in the pulpit. She was so impressed by this revelation, because a revelation it was… she sent for the minister and told her story. The parish minister was a God-fearing man, a man who longed to see God working. Oh, he had tried ever so many things to get the youth of the parish interested, but not one single teenager attended the church… that was the situation… Well what did this dear old lady say to him? I’ll tell you what she said: “I’m sure, Mr McKay that you’re longing to see God working. What about calling your office bearers together and suggest to them that you spend two nights a week waiting upon God? You have tried mission, you have tried special evangelists.. I tell you Mr McKay, “Have you tried God?” Oh, I tell you this was a wonderful woman… so he meekly obeyed and he said, “Yes I will call the session together. I will suggest that we will meet on Tuesday night and Friday night and spend the whole night in prayer.”

George Whitfield was the outstanding preacher of the First Great Awakening in the eighteenth century and he recorded in his journal how he was ‘filled with the Holy Ghost. Oh, that all who deny the promise of the Father, might thus receive it themselves!’ He describes how on one occasion: ‘He began to pray a brief prayer… but to his own astonishment could not stop. Petitions, praises, raptures poured forth from his lips: ‘A wonderful power was in that room’. Whitfield’s prayer was drowned by the cries, which, he was sure, could be heard a great way off… Cries and groans and quaking had sometimes accompanied the preaching. ‘Thousands cried out so that they almost drowned my voice.’ Whitfield did not doubt this time that the Spirit of God was present… men and women dropped as dead, then revived, then fainted again as Whitfield preached on, swept up into the contemplation of Christ’s all-constraining, free and everlasting love’ until…Whitfield himself fell into a swoon. For a few moments the Tennent brothers believed he was dead. He revived, mounted his horse with their help, and together the three men travelled no less than twenty miles home through the woods, by moonlight, singing as they rode.’(2)

Charles Finney was the main instrument in the Second Great Awakening in America which his biographer claimed ‘literally altered the course of history.’(3) Charles Finney described his experience of the Holy Spirit, which occurred in 1821: He said ‘The Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going though and through me…it seemed to come in waves of liquid love, for I could not express it in any other way.(4) It seemed like the very breath of God. I can remember distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like immense wings’.

‘No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart. I wept aloud with joy and love. I literally bellowed out the unspeakable overflow of my heart. These waves came over me and over me, and over me, one after the other, until I remember crying out, “I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me,” I said, “Lord I cannot bear any more”, yet I had no fear of death. Later in the evening a member of my choir – for I was the leader of the choir, came into my office to see me. He was a member of the church. He found me in this state of loud weeping, and said to me, “Mr. Finney, what’s wrong with you?” I could not answer for some time. He then said, “Are you in pain?” I gathered myself up as best I could, and I replied, “No, but so happy that I cannot live.”’(5)

John 10:10 says ‘I have come that they may have life and have it to the full’. We long for fullness. You filled George Whitfield and Charles Finney with your Holy Spirit and gave Peggy Smith a vision of a church filled with young people. Fill me up Lord with your Holy Spirit. Open my eyes to see what you want to do.

PS Today I happened to be watching Loren Cunningham (founder of YWAM) share his personal experience of meeting Duncan Campbell, who told him that before the awakening in 1949 everyone was reading the bible three times a day.  So even before individuals having an encounter with the Lord, there needs to be a broad exposure in the community to the bible

References

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXIZOSWvXaE

(2) John Pollock, Whitfield: the evangelist

(3) Lewis Drummond, Charles Grandison Finney and the birth of modern evangelism, 1-3

(4) Drummond, Charles Grandison Finney and the birth of modern evangelism, 1-3

(5) Drummond, Charles Grandison Finney and the birth of modern evangelism, 1-3