In Jonah 3 we saw God bring revival to an entire city. Hundreds of thousands of people in Ninevah, from the greatest to the least, mourned over their sin and threw themselves before God’s grace.
In modern times, we throw around the word “revival” a lot. A youth pastor friend told me there was a revival going on at a local high school. When I asked him what made it a revival, he said, “A lot of kids are excited about Jesus.” A Pentecostal friend told me about a revival happening at his church. When I asked him what that meant, he said, “A lot of people have started speaking in tongues.”
So what is a true revival? If it happened right now, in our neighborhood, what should we expect to see?
1. A striking awareness of God
After the King of Ninevah heard Jonah’s five-word sermon (“Yet forty days, Ninevah overthrown”), the king’s immediate response was to issue this command to his people: “Let them call out mightily to God. … Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.”
True revival begins with a new awareness of God’s sovereign glory and grace.
Duncan Campbell was a Christian leader who witnessed God bring revival to Scotland in 1949. He said the first thing he noticed was an unusual sense of God’s work. He wrote:
To be fully realized, this has to be felt. A rector of the Church of England, referring to his visit to the Isle of Lewis, said, ‘What I felt, apart from what I saw, convinced me at once that this was no ordinary movement.’
2. A deep awareness of sin
The Ninevites made a commitment to turn from their sin: “Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.”
Duncan Campbell saw the same thing in Scotland:
The main feature has been deep conviction of sin — at times leading almost to despair. I have known occasions when it was necessary to stop preaching, because of the distress manifested by the anxious, and many would find expression for the feeling in their hearts and burden of their guilty conscience, in the words of John Newton:
‘My conscience fell and owned its guilt
and plunged me in despair:
I saw my sins His blood had spilt
and helped to nail Him there.’
3. A tangible response
The Ninevites were so distraught by their sin that they took off their clothes and put on burlap bags. They fasted from food and even water. The king got up from his throne, and sat down in a pile of ash.
Duncan Campbell observed this in Scotland as well:
Physical manifestations and prostrations have been a further feature, I find it somewhat difficult to explain this aspect; indeed. I cannot. But this I will say: The person who would associate this with satanic influence is coming perilously near to committing the unpardonable sin.
Lady Huntingdon on one occasion wrote to George Whitefield respecting cases of crying out and falling down in meetings, and advised him not to remove them from the meetings as he had done. When this was done, it seemed to bring a damper on the meeting. She said, ‘You are making a great mistake. Don’t be wiser than God. Let them cry out. It will do a great deal more good than your preaching.”
True revival draws many more people to be aware of God’s sovereignty and desperate for God’s grace. It leads many more people to worship him in Spirit and truth. True revival results in many more people who will join every tribe and tongue at the throne of God (Rev. 7).
Let’s pray along with Habakkuk, “I have heard the report of you, and your work, O Lord, do I fear. In the midst of the years revive it!” (Habakkuk 3:2).