Revival & Missions

It gathers the lives poured out for the gospel and the seasons of awakening God has sent — fuel for a burning heart. Its keynote is Habakkuk 3:2, "O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years": the shelf holds both the prayer for revival and the record of what it costs and produces, in the diaries of missionaries and the lectures of revivalists.

Among them are Charles Finney's "Revival Lectures," "The Life and Diary of David Brainerd," Amy Carmichael's "Things as They Are," the journal of an expedition up the Niger, Amanda Berry Smith's autobiography ("A Brand Plucked from the Fire"), and collections of the lives of men and women who gave everything for the gospel.

That it is God's work to send — "revive thy work" — yet sought through prayer, humbling, and the plain preaching of the gospel. Finney's "Revival Lectures" argue that revival follows the right use of God-given means, while Brainerd's diary shows the hidden intercession behind an awakening; together they hold the mystery and the labour side by side.

"The Life and Diary of David Brainerd," published by Jonathan Edwards, is one of the most influential missionary memoirs ever written — the record of a young man who prayed to exhaustion among the Native peoples of colonial America and saw, shortly before his early death, a remarkable awakening at Crossweeksung. It has sent more people to the mission field than the biographies of a hundred famous preachers.

Costly ones, told plainly. Amy Carmichael's "Things as They Are" refused to romanticise the mission field for readers who preferred a prettier picture; Amanda Berry Smith's autobiography records a freed slave's evangelism across four continents; and the collections of those who "gave everything" gather many such lives — poured out, often unheralded, for the sake of the gospel among the unreached.

"O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known" is the prayer under the whole collection — a cry that God would do again, in the reader's own dry season, what He has done before. It sets revival not as something the church manufactures but as something it begs for, and it ties the books of awakening to the books of mission as one work.

Brainerd's diary is the classic entry, both moving and searching; Finney's "Revival Lectures" set out the case that revival can be prayed and worked toward; and Amy Carmichael's "Things as They Are" gives the honest cost of the mission field. Together they stir the heart and count the price at once.

Because a burning heart is kindled less by argument than by example, and these are the examples — men and women who staked everything on the gospel, and seasons when God came down in power. They answer the reader's own coldness not with a technique but with a summons: to pray "revive thy work," and to give what cannot be kept for what cannot be lost.