Conclusion

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

Nineteen chapters can make it look as though Charles Finney taught a great many things. At bottom he taught one: that God’s Word is to be obeyed, now, by the one who hears it. Revival is a church beginning again to obey. Prevailing prayer takes God at His word and holds on. The sinner has no excuse for refusing. Repentance confesses, forsakes and makes restitution. And a church that obeys God will not stay silent while its members hold others in chains. One conviction, pressed into every corner of life.

What to keep

Much of what Finney taught the church still needs to hear, perhaps more than ever.

Keep his refusal to let doctrine become a hiding-place. He saw that a true teaching about God’s sovereignty could be twisted into an excuse for idleness, and he would not allow it. No one reading him can remain comfortable in doing nothing.

Keep his teaching on prayer. The lectures on prevailing prayer, the spirit of prayer and the prayer of faith, for all their overstatements, have sent generations of believers to their knees with definite requests and expectant faith.

Keep his dependence on the Spirit. For all his talk of means, he never believed that preaching or measures could convert a single soul without the Spirit, and he traced his revivals to hidden intercessors.

Keep his plainness. Speak to people, not about them, and ask for a response.

And keep his conviction that the gospel has public consequences. His stand against slavery was costly and right.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord. 1 CORINTHIANS 15:58

What to set aside

We have been honest throughout about where Finney went wrong, and it is worth gathering the cautions in one place.

He rejected the doctrine of original sin as the church had received it, denying that Adam’s guilt is reckoned to his descendants or that we are born with a nature that is itself sinful. He taught that people have full ability to obey God, and that the Spirit’s work is to persuade the unwilling rather than to give life to the dead. On these points he stood closer to Pelagius than to Augustine, Luther or Calvin, and Scripture does not support him.

He held a governmental view of the atonement, in which Christ’s death upheld the honour of God’s law rather than bearing the penalty of sinners in their place, and he rejected the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. That left the believer’s standing resting, in the end, on his own persistence in holiness.

His confidence that revival follows the right use of means, and his defence of measures designed to bring people to decide, helped to create a tradition in which technique could do the work of the Spirit and a decision could be mistaken for a new birth. The Burned-over District, with its revivals and its sects, is a warning.

His teaching on entire sanctification narrowed the definition of sin in order to raise the standard of attainment, and it burdened some of the most earnest believers.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

None of this is said to diminish him. Finney tested everything by his Bible and refused to accept any doctrine on the authority of great names. We owe him the same honesty.

The man and his Master

It is striking how often, at the decisive moments of his life, Finney’s experience was sounder than his system. On the way to his office in October 1821, he saw that salvation was a finished work to be accepted, not a righteousness to be worked out. In the woods he was broken by his pride and saved by a promise. In the law office he was overwhelmed by the love of God that he had done nothing to deserve. In Boston in 1843 he found rest not in his own consecration but in the perfect will of God. At those moments he knew that everything came from grace.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. EPHESIANS 2:8–9

That is the gospel, and it does not contradict his urgency. It is the ground of it. The one who knows that Christ has done everything is free to obey with all his heart, not to earn God’s favour but because he has received it.

The question he always asked

Finney ended almost every lecture with the same question: Will you do it? He had no interest in hearers who came to learn about revivals and went home unchanged. This book ends the same way. You have read about prayer, repentance, the Spirit, preaching, holiness and justice. What will you do?

Do not try to do everything. Choose the chapter that made you most uncomfortable, and act on it this week. Break up one patch of fallow ground. Pray definitely for one person. Make restitution for one wrong. Speak plainly to one friend about Christ. And do it not as a man trying to make himself a new heart, but as one who has been given one.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Return to the chapter that made you most uncomfortable. Choose one application point and act on it this week.

2. Write down one thing God has shown you through this book that you have not yet obeyed. Obey it.

3. Where Finney’s theology has unsettled you, go back to Romans 3–5 and rest again on Christ’s finished work.

4. Choose one of Finney’s own works from the Reader’s Guide that follows and begin reading it, with discernment.

5. Pray for revival — in your own heart first, then in your church and your nation.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You have spoken, and I have heard again. Do not let me be a hearer only.

Thank You for Your servant Charles Finney: for his urgency, his prayers and his courage. Forgive where he went beyond Your Word, and forgive me where I have fallen short of it.

Give me grace to obey what I know, and humility to rest on what Christ has done.

Revive Your work in the midst of the years, and begin with me. Amen.