Revival
By Hester Rendall
I wish I could transport all of you to the Island of Lewis. When I was there about five years after the revival in 1953 the Spirit of God on the Island and the awareness of God on the Island were still there. It wasn't worked up by man; it wasn't hyped in a church, God hovering over a community. It was God sovereignly coming in answer to the prayers of His people, hovering over the community so that even men who had been fishing out on the waters far from the shore and coming back in who didn't know anything about God's Spirit moving in the churches didn't know anything about what happened, but as they boat came closer to shore the Spirit of God brought conviction to the fishermen on the boat and they got saved on the boat before the reached land.
We trivialize the work of the Holy Spirit and we call evangelism revival. It's not! Revival is different! Something about it, that once you've been involved in that you're never the same again, and nothing ever quite satisfies.
The meetings, the prayer meetings, it was all in Gaelic of course and I didn't understand Gaelic. I had to learn a few words in sheer self-defense. The prayers would go on twenty minutes, half an hour. Nowadays if people did that sort of thing everybody would get up and go out. But God was there and the prayers though they were long seemed about two minutes. I remember Mary Morris (now Peckham) nudging me one night, the prayer didn't start 'til 10 o'clock and she said, "It's time we went home." I said, "We only got here." And she said, "It's 3 o'clock." And I knew I hadn't fallen asleep either.
There was such a sense of God. Sometimes a person was afraid to lift their head. God was there. We can talk about it all we like. We can sing about it all we like, but there is nothing like the actual awareness of God coming. We'll never be satisfied until it happens. It'll cut through all the other cotton-wool and it'll cut through all the other fraudulence in our evangelical church going today. It'll bring us to our knees, but I warrant it'll change everything.
May the Lord have mercy on us.
He never does things exactly the same way every place, but may He do something for us that will cut through all of this and give us to see God.
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