Not a Miracle

Wilt thou not revive us again: that thy people may rejoice in thee? PSALM 85:6

Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion begin with a definition that startled his first hearers and still divides his readers. A revival of religion, he said, is not a miracle, falling like a hailstorm on one town and passing by the next. It is, in his words, “a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means.” To understand Finney at all, we have to understand what he meant by that, what he did not mean, and why it has provoked so much argument.

A new beginning of obedience

Start with what he said a revival is. It is, he wrote, “the renewal of the first love of Christians, resulting in the awakening and conversion of sinners to God.” It presupposes that the church has declined. It begins with Christians, not with the unconverted. Backslidden believers are brought under conviction of their own sin, driven to repentance, renewed in faith, and filled again with love for God and for the souls around them. Only then, as a rule, do sinners begin to be awakened and converted.

Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works. REVELATION 2:5

His shortest definition is his best: “A revival is nothing else than a new beginning of obedience to God.” There is nothing mysterious in that. A church that has been disobeying God starts to obey Him again. It confesses its sins, prays in earnest, seeks the lost, and lays aside its quarrels and its worldliness. That, for Finney, is revival, and every believer can see at once what it requires of him.

Almost every Christian can receive this gladly. Scripture never tells a declining church to sit still until God acts. It tells it to remember, to repent and to return.

Rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness. JOEL 2:13

The farmer and his field

Finney’s favourite picture was the farmer. Suppose, he said, someone went among farmers and preached that God is sovereign and will give a crop only when He pleases, so that to plough and sow as if expecting a harvest is to interfere with His sovereignty. If the farmers believed it, they would starve the world. Just so, he argued, the church had persuaded itself that revival is so purely a matter of divine sovereignty that there is no connection between means and results, and had sat waiting while generations perished.

He did not deny that God gives the increase. “Means will not produce a revival, we all know, without the blessing of God,” he wrote. But neither will grain grow without that blessing, and nobody concludes that farmers should stop sowing. God has connected means and ends in grace as in nature, and He expects His people to use them.

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. GALATIANS 6:7

There is a great deal of truth here. Scripture commands the means and never presents God’s sovereignty as a reason for idleness. Paul, who taught election more plainly than anyone, became all things to all men that he might by all means save some.

Three agents and one instrument

Finney was careful to say who is at work in a revival. There are, he said, ordinarily three agents in the conversion of a sinner and one instrument. The agents are God, the person who brings the truth, and the sinner himself. The instrument is the truth. God acts by His providence, arranging events so that the truth reaches the sinner, and by His Spirit, who sets the truth home with such power that the sinner yields. The Christian acts by speaking, praying and living in a way that makes the truth plain. The sinner acts by obeying it.

For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven … so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void. ISAIAH 55:10–11

He illustrated the power of a Christian’s very presence with a story he told in the first lecture, and again in his Memoirs. A man of solemn spirit walked through a factory. A young woman at a loom whispered a joke to her friend and laughed. He simply looked at her with grief. Her thread broke; she could not mend it; she sat down overcome. Conviction ran through the building, the owner stopped the works for prayer, and within days nearly everyone there was converted. The lecture does not name him, but the Memoirs make clear that the man was Finney himself, at a cotton mill near Utica.

Where the definition goes wrong

So far, so good. But Finney’s definition carried more weight than it could bear, and it needs honest qualification.

First, the word philosophical. Finney meant that revival follows natural laws of the mind as reliably as a crop follows sowing. He went so far as to say that there is nothing in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature, and that when people become religious they only use the powers they had before in a different way. That is consistent with his view of human ability, which we will weigh in later chapters, but it sits uneasily with Scripture’s account of the new birth as something only God can do.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. JOHN 3:8

Jesus did not say that the Spirit’s work is lawless. He said it is not ours to command. The farmer can plough and sow and must; but he cannot make it rain, and a wise farmer knows the difference. Finney knew it too, in his better moments, and insisted that means are useless without the Spirit. But his language often suggested that if the church did its part, revival would follow as surely as a chemical reaction. Many who took up his lectures believed exactly that.

Second, the confidence. Finney seems to have thought that where revival did not come, the church had failed to use the means. Sometimes that was true. But Scripture also knows of faithful servants who laboured long with little visible fruit, and of seasons when God withheld His blessing for reasons of His own. Isaiah was sent to a people who would not hear. Jeremiah preached for forty years and saw the city fall. Their faithfulness was not measured by results.

So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. 1 CORINTHIANS 3:7

Third, the excitement. Finney taught that a sluggish church must be roused by powerful excitements, though he said, rightly, “Not that excited feeling is religion, for it is not.” The revivals that followed him show how hard it is to raise excitement without mistaking it for grace.

What to keep

Keep his definition of revival as a new beginning of obedience, because it is true and it strips away every excuse. Keep his refusal to let sovereignty become a pillow. Keep his insistence that revival begins with the church, not with the world. And hold all of it inside the humility of the psalmist who asked God to revive His people, knowing that only God could.

Turn us again, O God, and cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved. PSALM 80:3

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write down one specific way in which you have stopped obeying God. Revival for you begins there.

2. Ask whether you have ever excused spiritual idleness by appealing to God’s timing or sovereignty.

3. Think of the man in the factory. What does your face and manner say to the people around you about eternal things?

4. Pray for your own church by name, asking God to renew its first love — and ask what part He wants you to play.

5. Resolve to use the ordinary means God has given — His Word, prayer, fellowship, witness — without supposing that they work by themselves.

A PRAYER

O Lord, revive Your work, and begin with me. I have left my first love and called it maturity.

Give me a new beginning of obedience. Show me where I have stopped doing what You said, and give me grace to start again today.

Keep me from idleness dressed up as trust, and from striving dressed up as faith. Let me sow and water, and look to You for the increase.

Turn us again, O God, and cause Your face to shine, and we shall be saved. Amen.