What Is Revival? What Happens When God Turns His Face

In the coal mines of Wales, the pit ponies stopped recognizing their orders.

The miners had trained those ponies with cursing. Swearing was the only language the animals had ever been driven with. Then, in 1904, revival swept through Wales, the miners got saved, and the cursing stopped. The ponies didn’t know what to do with clean words. The work in the mines actually slowed down because grown men had stopped swearing.

Nobody ran a program that did that. So what did?

Wales, 1904. A little country of coal miners and farmers, and the churches had gone cold. Going through the motions, same as a lot of places today. And then God moved. It didn’t start with a famous preacher. It spread from ordinary people who got desperate for God. Within about a year, roughly a hundred thousand people had come to Christ.

But the numbers aren’t what get me. It’s what happened on the ground. The bars started closing. Not because anybody passed a law, but because the men who used to drink up their paychecks stopped wanting to. Men showed up at the doors of people they’d wronged years back, to pay old debts and say they were sorry. The courts ran so short of cases that in some towns a judge would be handed a pair of white gloves, a little ceremony meaning there were no crimes to try that day.

A whole nation got a look at how holy and how good God is, and it changed everything, all the way down to the animals in the dark under the ground.

Fifty years earlier in London, the churches were in real trouble. One large chapel could seat well over a thousand people; on a good day, maybe a hundred and fifty showed up. They called a nineteen-year-old who never finished high school to preach. His name was Charles Spurgeon. Spurgeon got his people praying. Praying for a mighty visitation of God, and praying for him while he preached. Within a year the building overflowed, hundreds were baptized, and before long the crowds had outgrown one hall after another, filling venues built for many thousands.

Around the same time, a handful of businessmen began meeting at noon on Fulton Street in New York to pray for God to move. Just six men at first. Within a year, thousands were gathering daily to pray, and in 1859, revival broke out across the world. Hudson Taylor took the gospel to China. D.L. Moody came out of that wave. Much of the church’s leadership for the next forty years traces back to that one move of God.

It started with a room full of nobodies who got hungry for God.

So what is revival? Here’s what those stories have in common, and it isn’t a method, a program, the right music, or the right atmosphere. It’s a face. In every real move of God, He turned His face toward His people. That’s the language God Himself uses: “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14, ESV).

Revival is not a crowd that gathers. It’s a people that catches fire and scatters.

And notice what it is not: it is not something we manufacture. We can build the altar. We can lay out the wood. We can get on our knees and seek His face. But it is God who sends the fire.

If God did that in Wales and in London, the question isn’t whether He can do it. The question is whether He’ll do it here, and whether His face is even turned toward people like us. That question was answered a long time ago, on a hill outside a city. At the cross, Jesus took our sin and was driven out, away from the face of God, so that we could be driven in. The face that turned away from Him on Friday turned back on Sunday morning when the tomb opened. Because of Jesus, God’s face is turned toward His people. Revival doesn’t start with working God up. It starts with what Christ has already finished.

So we pray in three circles. Revive me. Start there. Lord, turn Your face toward me. Revive us. This church, this room. Revive this city. Lord, turn Your face toward West Palm Beach.

Imagine what happened in Wales happening here. On Belvedere Road. In the apartments off Military Trail. In the offices downtown. The household where nobody has spoken about Jesus in years, praying together out loud. The addict who has tried everything, finally free. Sleepy Christians all over the city waking up, and people carrying the name of Jesus onto job sites, into schools, down every street.

That’s not a program we can run. It’s a fire only He can send. But we can seek His face and ask Him to do it again.

This comes from a message I preached this past Sunday at Belvedere Church. If you’re looking for a church in West Palm Beach that’s praying for God to move in this city, come pray with us. Sundays at 11:00 AM, 301 Cherry Road. Come as you are.