If you have ever longed to see a cold church come alive — or felt that longing quietly die inside you — Charles Finney wrote this book for you. Lectures on Revivals of Religion is the most famous, and the most argued-over, book on revival in the English language. It is bracing, practical, and impossible to read passively. Finney does not want you to admire revival from a distance; he wants you to expect it, to pray it down, and to do the plain things God has connected to it. This study guide walks you through what the book is, how its argument unfolds, where to read it with discernment, and how to let it search your own heart. The full text is free to read here on Ochorus, and this guide is meant to be read with the lectures open beside it.
What the book is, and why Finney gave these lectures
These are not essays composed in a study; they are sermons, delivered in the winter of 1834–35 at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York, taken down by a reporter and printed week by week. That origin explains their tone. Finney was, before he was a preacher, a lawyer — and he preaches like a man pressing a jury for a verdict. He had already watched whole towns turned upside down in the great revivals of upstate New York, above all the Rochester awakening of 1830–31, and by 1835 he was ready to tell the church, in the plainest possible terms, how such a work comes and how it may be lost.
His conviction runs through every page: revival is not a mysterious visitation the church must wait for helplessly, but the result of God’s appointed means used rightly. He opens with the prophet’s cry, “O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years” (Habakkuk 3:2), and immediately turns the reader’s eyes from the sky to the soul. Religion, he insists, is something we are commanded to do, even as God moves us to do it:
“Religion is the work of man. It is something for man to do. It consists in obeying God with and from the heart.”
Charles Finney
Whatever a reader finally makes of that emphasis — and it has been debated for nearly two centuries — it sets the book’s whole agenda. Finney means to put responsibility back into hands that had grown used to shifting it elsewhere.
The argument and structure: what a revival is, and how it comes
The twenty-two lectures move in a deliberate order, and it helps to see the shape before you begin. The first three lay the foundation. Lecture I answers the question of the title — what a revival of religion actually is. Finney defines it, memorably, as a fresh return to obedience: “A revival is nothing else than a new beginning of obedience to God.” It is, he argues, not fundamentally a miracle but the natural fruit of causes God has ordained:
“It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means—as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means.”
Charles Finney
This is the hinge of the whole book, and his farmer’s image drives it home: the connection between the right use of means and a revival, he says, is “as philosophically sure as between the right use of means to raise grain, and a crop of wheat.” Lecture II asks when a revival is to be expected — chiefly when the church has grown cold, worldly, and quarrelsome, so that the very need becomes the summons, praying with the Psalmist, “Wilt thou not revive us again, that thy people may rejoice in thee?” (Psalm 85:6). Lecture III turns to how a revival is promoted, beginning where Finney always begins — with the church, not the world. Taking Hosea 10:12, “Break up your fallow ground,” he calls Christians to plough up their own hard, matted hearts before they expect any harvest:
“To break up the fallow ground, is to break up your hearts—to prepare your minds to bring forth fruit unto God.”
Charles Finney
From there the book divides into two great streams of means. The first is prayer — the means, as Finney puts it, that moves God. Lectures IV through VIII form a sustained treatment of intercession that many readers treasure above all the rest: “Prevailing Prayer,” “The Prayer of Faith,” “The Spirit of Prayer,” “On Being Filled with the Spirit,” and “Meetings for Prayer.” Building on James 5:16, “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much,” Finney is careful to say that prayer changes us, not God’s character: it “produces such a change in us and fulfils such conditions as renders it consistent for God to do” what He was always willing to do.
The second stream is the means used with people — the work of witness, preaching, and personal appeal. From Isaiah 43:10, “Ye are my witnesses,” Finney presses that the church, not the sinner, is charged to use the means for conversion. Lectures IX through XIV cover dealing with the lost, the wisdom needed to win souls, and how to preach the gospel plainly. Then come the controversial and diagnostic chapters: Lecture XIV on the “new measures,” Lecture XV on the hindrances that quench a revival, and a closing series of pastoral lectures — directions to sinners, instructions to young converts, and a searching word on the “Backslider in Heart.”
The new-measures controversy
No part of the book caused more heat in Finney’s day than his defense of “new measures” — protracted nightly meetings, plain extemporaneous preaching, praying for people by name, women praying in mixed assemblies, and the “anxious seat,” a bench at the front where the awakened sat where all could see. To settled New England clergy these were scandalous novelties. Finney’s answer, argued from Acts 16:20–21 — where Paul and Silas are charged with teaching “customs which are not lawful for us to receive” — is historical and disarming. Under the gospel, he maintains, God has “established no particular system of measures”; the forms we now consider sacred were themselves once innovations, “arrived at by degrees, and by a succession of new measures.” The question, then, is never whether a measure is old or new, but whether it is wise, honest, and fitted to awaken. It is a shrewd argument, and modern readers who take for granted the altar call and the evening meeting are, in a sense, living in the world Finney’s lectures helped build.
Central themes to carry through the book
Several convictions recur, and holding them in mind keeps the lectures from feeling like a mere list of techniques. First, revival begins with the church’s repentance, not the sinner’s. Finney will not let believers pray for the lost until they have broken up their own fallow ground. Second, prayer is real labor that God has genuinely bound to His work. The lectures on prevailing prayer, and Finney’s own memories of hidden intercessors who agonized in secret while he preached, insist that the visible work rests on invisible wrestling. Third, means matter, and neglect is guilt. If revival follows the right use of means as surely as a harvest follows sowing, then a barren church cannot plead the sovereignty of God as an excuse; it must ask what it has left undone. Fourth, true religion issues in obedience and reformed living — a converted heart proves itself in a changed life, and, for Finney, in a changed society. Fifth, revivals can be hindered and lost, quenched by censoriousness, controversy, pride, worldliness, and the refusal to confess sin. That last theme gives the book its uncomfortable, examining quality: it will not let you read about revival without asking whether you are standing in its way.
Who should read it — with a note of discernment
This is a book for the spiritually hungry: the pastor whose congregation has gone cold, the intercessor who wants to pray with more than vague sighs, the believer weary of their own dullness, and anyone curious how the revivals of the nineteenth century actually happened. It rewards the reader who comes ready to be searched.
It should also be read with discernment, and honesty requires saying so plainly. Finney’s stress on human means and human ability — that a revival is a “philosophical result” almost as reliable as a wheat crop, and that religion is fundamentally “something for man to do” — is exactly what his critics feared. In his own lifetime, seasoned men like Asahel Nettleton and Lyman Beecher worried that such language risked turning a sovereign gift of God into a technique men could manufacture, and later theologians pressed the charge harder still against his Systematic Theology. Readers in the Reformed tradition, in particular, will want to weigh his teaching on the will and on regeneration against Scripture’s insistence that salvation is God’s work in us: “It is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13), and that we are “born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). Finney himself never believed the power lay in the measures — again and again he traced revival to the hidden intercession of praying men — and there is more humility and dependence in the lectures than his sharpest sentences suggest. The wise course is neither to swallow the book whole nor to dismiss it, but to receive its summons to earnest prayer and obedience while testing its theology of the human will by the whole counsel of God.
How to read it today
A few practical suggestions. Read it as sermons, not as a system. These lectures were preached to move a congregation, and they land best when you let them address you directly rather than mining them for propositions. Do not skip the preface and the reporter’s advertisement — they set the historical scene and Finney’s own aims. Read the prayer lectures slowly. Lectures IV through VIII are the devotional heart of the book, and they reward being read a section a day, on your knees rather than at a desk. Keep a pen ready for conviction, not just information; the book is designed to expose the fallow ground in your own heart, and the reading fails if nothing is broken up. Set it in conversation with other voices. Reading Jonathan Edwards’s careful Treatise Concerning Religious Affections alongside Finney supplies exactly the theological ballast his enthusiasm sometimes lacks, and D. L. Moody’s warm, unsystematic The Way to God shows the same evangelistic fire in a gentler key. Finally, let the book drive you to pray rather than merely to plan. Whatever cautions you carry, its central appeal is one no Christian should resist: “Wilt thou not revive us again?”
For reflection
Take these questions slowly, with the relevant lectures open and, better still, with the Scriptures beside them.
- Finney says a revival is “a new beginning of obedience to God.” Where in your own life has obedience grown cold, and what would a fresh beginning look like this week? Read 2 Chronicles 7:14 as you answer.
- Lecture III calls Christians to “break up the fallow ground” of their own hearts before praying for others (Hosea 10:12). What hard, matted places has this reading exposed in you?
- Finney insists that prayer changes us and fulfils the conditions on which God acts, rather than changing God (James 5:16). How does that reshape the way you pray for the people around you?
- The book teaches that revivals can be hindered and quenched. Are there attitudes — censoriousness, worldliness, unconfessed sin — that you are, however unwittingly, letting stand in the way?
- Weigh Finney’s emphasis on human ability against Philippians 2:13 and John 1:13. How would you hold together the truth that we must obey and the truth that God works the obedience in us?
The lectures are free to read in full here on Ochorus. Read them prayerfully, test them faithfully, and let them do what Finney meant them to do — send you back to God with the old cry: “O Lord, revive thy work.”
