Revivals that Stay by E.M. Bounds
Revivals are among the charter rights of the church. They are the evidences of its divinity, the tokens of God’s presence, the witness of his power. The frequency and power of these extraordinary seasons of grace are the tests and preservers of the vital force in the church. The church which is not visited by these seasons is as sterile in all spiritual products as a desert, and is not and cannot meet the designs of God’s church. Such churches may have all the show and parade of life, but it is only a painted life.
The revival element belongs to the individual, as well as to the church, life. The preacher whose experience is not marked by these inflows of great grace may question with anxious scrutiny whether he is in grace. The preacher whose ministry does not over and over again find its climax of success and power in these gracious visitations of God may well doubt the genuineness of his call, or be disquieted as to its continuance.
Revivals are not simply the reclamation of a backslidden church. They do secure this end, but they do not find their highest end in this important result. They are to invigorate and mature by one mighty act the feeble saints; they also pass on to sublimer regions of faith and experience the advanced ones of God’s elect. They are the fresh baptisms—the more powerful consecration of a waiting, willing, working church to a profounder willingness, and a mightier ability for a mightier work. These revivals are the pitched battles and the decisive victories for God, when the slain of the Lord is many, and his triumph glorious.
There are counterfeit revivals well executed, well calculated to deceive the most wary. These are deceptive and superficial, with many pleasant, entertaining, delusive features, entirely lacking in the offensive features which distinguish the genuine ones. The pain of penitence, the shame of guilt, the sorrow and humiliation of sin, the fear of hell—these marks of the genuine are lacking in the counterfeit. The test of a genuine revival is found in its staying qualities. The counterfeit is but a winter spurt, as evanescent and fitful as the morning cloud or early dew—both soon gone—and the sun but the hotter for the mockery of the cloud and because of the fleeting dew. These surface revivals do more harm than good, like a surface thaw in midwinter which only increases the hardness and roughness of tomorrow’s freeze. The genuine revival goes to the bottom of things; the sword is not swaddled in cotton, nor festooned with flowers, but pierces to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow.
A genuine revival marks an era in the life of the church. It plants the germs of the great spiritual principles which grow and mature through all the changing seasons that follow. Revival seasons are favoring seasons, when the tides of salvation are at their flood, when all the waves and winds move heavenward...days of emancipation and return and rapture. The church needs revivals; it cannot live, it cannot do its work without them. Revivals which will lift it above the sands of worldliness that shallow the current and impede the sailing. Revivals which will radicate the great spiritual principles, which are worn threadbare in many a church. It is true that in the most thorough work some will fall away, but when the work is genuine and far-reaching, as it ought to be, the waste will scarcely be felt in the presence of the good that remains.
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