I'd like to mention a few books.
Some of you may know, and if you
do, you'll have enjoyed them as I have
done.
Little books that Dr. Belcher discovered, which are
the letters of A.
W.
Pink from the years 1918-1921.
Two thin paperbacks, which are absolutely fascinating.
And if you haven't seen those books of
Pink's letters from that early period, which have
never been published before, and you're a lover
of Pink, you'll find them, I'm sure, well
worth obtaining.
Now books on revival and the Holy Spirit,
may I say that I do think the
best doctrinal theological work that I know is
the book by George Smeaton, The Doctrine of
the Holy Spirit.
Smeaton was a man who saw revivals, he
was also a professor of theology, he was
very suited to write on the subject, The
Doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
Then there's the book by the southern Presbyterian,
Vaughan, The Gifts of the Holy Spirit.
The title is a little misleading, it's not
simply on gifts, it's on the whole work
of the Spirit of God, that's an outstanding
book by Vaughan.
Winslow, small paperback, Person and Work of the
Holy Spirit, very readable, spiritual, devotional, Octavius Winslow.
And then books on the history of revival,
let me just mention two.
Tracy, Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening, wonderful book,
American of the last century.
If you want a starting point, that would
be a very good one to buy.
Or J.C. Ryle, Eighteenth Century Leaders, sometimes
called Christian Leaders of the Eighteenth Century.
John Charles Ryle, Whitfield, Wesley, these others.
Now some books we can borrow, some we
can get from church libraries and so on,
but every pastor should have a two-volume
of Jonathan Edwards' work, quite sure we should.
A goldmine of information, history, sermons, narratives of
revival, and the two particular, or the three
particular works on revival in Edwards' writings are
his Narratives of Surprising Conversions, his Distinguishing Marks
of a Work of the Spirit of God,
and then his largest work, Thoughts on the
Revival in New England in 1740.
These and much else are in those two
thick banner volumes of works of Jonathan Edwards.
And then could I just mention A Hunger
for God by John Piper, not in the
book room, I don't think yet, just published
last week.
It's a book with the subtitle Desiring God
Through Fasting and Prayer.
And I don't know what your experience has
been, but I'm afraid a lot of books
that deal with fasting are cranky books and
one should be hesitant about recommending them.
This is not in that category at all.
I think this is a very helpful, serious,
valuable book, A Hunger for God by John
Piper.
You can get it from Desiring God Ministries
or Mottonoma, publish it, you won't have any
problems.
The subject
that I want to take up with you
this evening is the subject of hindering revival.
Hindering revival.
We have said that revival is the sovereign
work of God, that revival seasons come according
to the counsel of God who works all
things after his own will.
And if that is true, how can we
speak of hindering revival?
How can omnipotence and sovereignty be hindered?
I think it helps us to think of
that question if we put it in a
broader context.
We have to remember that it's not simply
revival that is sovereign, but every blessing we
possess, every success in the kingdom of God,
nothing comes to us in the Christian life
without God's purpose.
Our meeting this week, all that we have
done today, the breath that we draw, everything
is in the hands of God.
So the question is a broader question, isn't
it?
How can we be responsible for anything if
everything is in God's hands and under his
control?
And the scripture does not offer us an
explanation.
It simply tells us that God is sovereign
and that we are responsible.
Scripture never makes the sovereignty of God an
excuse for inaction on our part, not at
all.
We have responsibility for the salvation of men
and women.
Proverbs 24 says, If thou dost forbear to
deliver them that are destined unto death, let
not he that thundereth the heart consider it.
We have looked at the text this week
in Timothy.
We have to give ourselves wholly to these
things to save ourselves and those who hear
us.
We are responsible, ministers of the gospel, for
the salvation of the souls of men and
women.
How can the spirit of God, who is
omnipotent, who is independent, how can we speak
of hindering him?
We do not know, but we do know
that the Holy Spirit can be grieved, the
Holy Spirit can be quenched.
We know also, don't we, parallel to this,
that faith is a sovereign gift of God,
not of ourselves.
But we also read in the scriptures that
Jesus did not many mighty works there because
of their unbelief.
So it would be very wrong of us
to suppose that we have no responsibility with
regard to the subject of revival.
Now, this opens a large field.
If we are right in believing what I
have sought to put before you this week,
that revivals are the heightening of normal Christianity,
if that is true, then everything that hinders
normal Christian living is potentially a hindrance to
revival, because the two are not two different
things, as we were saying.
So, unbelief, pride, impurity, moral laxity, prayerlessness, contention
between brethren, error, unfaithfulness to scripture is a
very wide field indeed of matters which hinder
the work and the life of the church
and which potentially therefore hinder revival.
But instead of trying to cover anything like
a field of that kind, I want to
concentrate this evening on one particular danger, one
particular issue, which I believe is a great
danger to revival, which hinders revival, and oftentimes
when revival comes, becomes an obstacle and a
danger in revival itself.
Now again, we have a problem of terminology.
What words do we use?
The word that used to be used to
describe what I'm talking about has long gone
out of use in the sense in which
it was originated.
Transliteration from the Greek in the 17th century
was the word enthusiasm, which meant to be
possessed or indwelt by a god and therefore
to have some very special nearness to God.
And enthusiasm was a derogatory term religiously used
to describe those who were unbalanced emotionally and
who made great claims about their familiarity with
God.
Now, that use of the word enthusiasm, although
it'll no doubt come up a few times
this evening, it's long since passed out of
use, so I don't believe we can use
it.
And I think the best word to describe
what I'm talking about is the word fanaticism.
That has some weaknesses too, because that's a
broad word and it's an ugly word.
And what we're going to talk about has
to do with Christians and evangelicals.
So we're talking about evangelical fanaticism.
That's our subject.
And it's a distressing subject.
You know, if we weren't in the right
spirit we could easily pass on stories of
fanatics which would be very amusing.
But the fact is it's a very sad
story, quite different from our subject last night,
but I believe very important and relevant to
us in the Church.
Let me quickly try to give you a
description.
Fanaticism among Christians is the opposite of cold
intellectualism.
It's the opposite of that.
Fanaticism usually pays little attention to books.
Its great interest is in experience.
Fanaticism may be orthodox in belief, but it
is more interested in emotion and results than
it is with teaching.
While fanaticism may say that it believes what
the Bible teaches about the Holy Spirit, it
is often more interested in what the Holy
Spirit is said to be revealing to the
person, or revealing to the person, in a
way that people that only have the Bible
wouldn't understand.
Fanaticism is a kind of ultra-supernatural Christianity.
It supposes it has some kind of blessedness
which does not belong to the ordinary Christian.
But fanaticism cannot distinguish between fire and wildfire.
It does not see the danger of confusing
imagination with truth.
Fanaticism is zealous, eager to make potteries, often
proclaiming that a revival has begun, or at
any rate it will very soon begin.
That is something of the character of evangelical
fanaticism.
Now I want first to speak about the
danger of fanaticism.
And my first proof that I want to
give you that it's dangerous, is the fact
that it's constantly liable to reappear in evangelical
churches.
Not something that very rarely in history has
made an appearance, but there's a pattern in
history.
The Reformation began, work was going forward, and
then in the midst of it, fanaticism arose.
In the next century, the Puritan era, there
was a point in history when it seemed
that trans-Protestant biblical churches would be established,
that a new day was dawning, and suddenly
in the midst of that, fanaticism appeared, controversy,
division.
Same thing in the 18th century.
John Wesley had often to warn his society
in the evangelical revival of the danger of
fanaticism.
But it arose all the same.
A man called James Kershaw prophesied very solemnly
that all the Methodists in Britain were to
go over the Atlantic in the belly of
a whale.
John Wesley said he was a stark man.
But there were other fanatics who weren't mad.
There was a man called George Bell, and
Wesley said that at one point no man
was more profitable to him than George Bell.
But George Bell declared with certainty that on
February 28, 1763, the world was going to
end.
Fanaticism.
The same thing happened in Calvinistic New England
at the same date.
Reaction against coldness, people like the Reverend James
Davenport became fanatic.
It was said of Davenport, he not only
gave an unrestrained liberty to noise and outcry,
both in distress and joy in time of
divine service, but he promoted both with all
his might.
And the result was that false deals took
hold and had a devastating influence.
Jonathan Edwards, talking about it, says, The cry
was, Oh, there's no danger of being misled
if we are but lively in religion and
full of God's spirit and live by faith.
If we do but follow God, there is
no danger of being led wrong, they said.
This was the language of many, says Edwards,
till they ran on deep into the wilderness
and were taught by the briars and thorns
of the wilderness.
So, the First Great Awakening, as you know,
came to be quenched largely through outbreaks of
fanaticism.
Fifty years later, Second Great Awakening, beginning in
1798, again it appeared.
Sometimes it takes a slightly different form.
For example, in the Second Great Awakening, one
of the new teachings that appeared was that
a special mark of the favour of the
Holy Spirit was to be able to pray
the prayer of faith, by which it was
meant that God has to be true to
his word, and if we pray in faith,
God is certain to give us what we
ask for.
The scripture says that if we ask anything
according to his will, he hears us.
But it doesn't tell us that we have
any infallible knowledge of God's will.
But this was a teaching that said, if
we ask in faith for a hundred conversions,
we'll have a hundred conversions.
If we ask in faith for somebody to
be healed, somebody will be healed, because God
has to be true to his word.
And Dr. Gardner, Spring of New York, who
was one of the leaders in the Second
Great Awakening, called this a fanatical view that
would sanction every species of wild enthusiasm.
And then he went on, I have known
some people in our city who acted under
the influence of this delusion.
There are men and women still alive among
us in New York, who remember the circumstances
of the death of Mrs. Pearson, around whose
lifeless body her husband assembled a company of
believers with the assurance that if they prayed
in faith, she would be restored to life.
Their feelings were greatly excited, their impressions of
their success peculiar and strong.
They prayed in faith, but they were disappointed.
There was none to answer, neither was there
any that regarded her.
She slept the sleep of death.
They were constrained to follow her to the
grave.
And Spring says, the prayer that God's will
may be done, and not our own, is
always answered.
Now that's but an illustration, and the point
that I'm making is simply this.
Over and over again in history, fanaticism reappears.
There was a large book written on the
subject in the year 1950, and in the
preface the author, actually a Roman Catholic, gave
the statement that he thought the days of
fanaticism were all cursed.
How wrong he was.
It's a recurring danger, and that's what makes
it a danger.
It's alive in our own day, it may
get even stronger, and we have to know
what it is.
The second reason it's dangerous is that it
appears, or it's least expected.
That is to say, very often among earnest
Christians.
There is, of course, a fanaticism which is
not evangelical, which we easily recognize.
But there's a fanaticism which arises within the
Church, and it can operate in our own
hearts without our even suspecting it.
For in all of us there's a mixture
of grace and fallen humanity.
And it's a very dangerous error to think
that only non-Christians are susceptible to fanaticism.
On the contrary, sometimes it has been eminent
Christians, and certainly earnest Christians, who have fallen
and done great damage in this way.
So spirituality and false zeal can go together.
Someone has said that the best friends of
revival have sometimes proved their worst enemies.
That's right.
So fanaticism arises for we may least expect
it.
Sometimes you see, we're tempted to think that
fanaticism is just an excess of what is
good.
Zeal is good.
Coldness is something as Christians we should all
abhor.
So when we have lived in cold, dead
times, if zeal reappears, we think it must
necessarily be an ally.
But it may not be.
There's a carnal zeal.
And if we are so convinced of the
danger of coldness that we're going to welcome
any kind of zeal, then we are not
seeing a real danger.
And then once the revival begins, Christians are
very prone not to see any danger.
When there is evident power in the preaching
of the word, when God has raised up
leaders who speak with authority, in times of
awakening, there's a danger of Christians thinking everything
is under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
We don't need to be particularly watchful.
And that is entirely wrong.
Sprog, W.B. Sprog says, You may be
assured that the cause of revival is far
more likely to suffer by an attempt on
the part of its friends to pass off
everything for gold than by giving to that
which is really dropped its proper name.
In other words, he's saying, don't act as
though there's nothing ever wrong because of the
revival.
Good men, he says, are only sanctified in
part and may fall into excess.
Nothing is more certain than that to tolerate
evil in good men because they are good
men is directly contrary both to the spirit
and matter of the gospel.
Let me give you an illustration.
We mentioned the other day Whitfield's visit to
Northampton, I think we did.
He was there in October of 1740 and
his first meeting with Jonathan and Sarah Edward
and the joyful time they had together.
But as they travelled down river when Whitfield
was leaving, Edward did counsel Whitfield that there
was an area where he thought Whitfield was
in danger of going wrong.
And that was in a revival, feelings run
high, and Whitfield was falling into the danger
of thinking that because we feel something strongly,
we have a strong impression that it must
therefore be of the spirit of God.
If we feel it strong enough, impressions they
were called.
And Edward pointed out that it's a very
dangerous thing to think that we can make
our impressions a guide to what the Holy
Spirit would have us do.
Well, friends though they were, Whitfield didn't really
hear him.
But three years later, Whitfield did, and he
did for this reason.
In 1743 he was blessed with his son,
John.
He was called John because Whitfield was reading
at the time of his birth in Luke
chapter 1, the fourteenth verse, and it was
impressed very powerfully on him.
His name shall be called John, and he
shall be great, and many will rejoice at
his birth.
And Whitfield truly believed that God had used
the verse and imprinted it upon his heart
because his son, by God's blessing, was to
be an evangelist and to be used in
the kingdom of Christ.
He died four months later, and Whitfield had
to rethink.
And this is what he said.
Many good souls, both among the clergy and
the laity, for a while mistook fancy for
faith and imagination for revelation.
Now, if Whitfield went wrong at this point,
my friends, well who are we?
So my point is that this danger often
arises for its least suspected, and we all
have to guard ourselves very carefully.
A third reason why it's dangerous is because
it gives occasion for the enemies of revival
to dismiss the whole work of the Holy
Spirit.
I've said that there's a pattern of this
recurring in history, and it's true it arises
because of human weakness.
But that's not the whole truth.
The pattern is of such a kind that
it's impossible not to believe that Satan has
a direct interest in discrediting experimental Christianity.
And he does it by overdriving Christians.
Baxter used to say that overdoing is undoing,
by which he meant that if Christians can
be driven to great excitement and unthinking emotion,
they are going sooner or later to discredit
the Gospel.
That's what the Puritans meant when they said
that there's nothing more dangerous for the chariot
of the Gospel than when Satan is the
driver.
He comes as an angel of light, he
is for zeal, he's for enthusiasm, he's for
revelation, he's for impression.
And before long the whole work of God
is discredited.
An enemy has done this.
It's not just human fallibility and mistake.
The devil quite clearly has an interest in
discrediting real emotion, discrediting true revival by the
way in which he injects, if he can,
that which is simply carnal.
So if things can be explained in psychological
terms, if people attribute to the Holy Spirit
things which are obviously foolish, the world around,
society, looks on and the authority of the
Christian faith is undermined.
I mentioned that book by the Roman Catholic
who wrote in 1950.
And although he doesn't present his argument very
openly, the argument quite clearly is that Protestant
evangelical religion is so prone to fanaticism that
there's really no safe haven except to be
in the Church of Rome.
Well, one can understand the line of that
argument, but what he didn't understand was how's
that picture been created.
Where does fanaticism come from?
Does it come from the Bible, does it
come from Protestant belief, or is something being
injected into our midst which is foreign and
alien and ultimately demonic?
So these are reasons why this subject is
indeed important.
Fanaticism is a very dangerous thing.
I want to move on to the recognition
of fanaticism.
It's subtle, it's deceptive, it may be in
our own hearts.
How do we recognize it?
The first thing probably to say is that
fanaticism commonly gains its strength among young, immature,
enthusiastic Christians.
Older Christians are liable for many sins.
But this is not the sin to which
they are most tempted.
It is fervent young converts who are most
likely to be tempted by this sin.
Richard Baxter, talking about the upheaval in the
churches in the 1640s, he attributes a good
deal of the difficulties to those who stirred
up, now this is Baxter, the younger and
more inexperienced sort of religious people to speak
too vehemently and intemperately, for he says, for
the young and raw sort of Christians are
usually prone to this kind of sin, to
be self-conceited, petulant, willful, censorious and injugious
in their management of their differences in religion
and in all their attempts at reformation.
Now that pattern has happened again and again.
The young, the untrained, William Williams of Wales,
in the 18th century, in a time of
revival, he says, complaining, raw youth, whom no
one would entrust to shepherd his sheep, is
today riding high in boldness, much superior to
old ministers who have borne the burden and
the heat of the day.
Samuel Miller of Princeton, in the Second Great
Awakening, he says, it's a remarkable fact that
in all ages, young and of course inexperienced
ministers have commonly taken a lead and discovered
the most headstrong obstinacy in commencing and pursuing
measures of an innovating character, planning to have
a gift unknown to others of promoting genuine
revival themselves.
So when Paul says he must not be,
that is, a leader in the church, he
must not be a recent convert, or he
may be puffed up with conceit and fall
into the condemnation of the devil, the Apostle
is saying something immensely important.
There's no youth cult in the Bible.
And it seems to me that one of
the saddest things that's happening in the evangelical
world at the moment is often the idea
that unless we let the young people do
what they wish, unless we hurry them forward
to positions of leadership, we'll lose them from
the church.
It's a great delusion and it does great
harm.
So that's the first characteristic.
Often it begins amongst the young.
And then secondly, the second characteristic, it generally
concentrates interest on phenomena and on experiences, on
feelings and on excitement.
These are the main focus of interest.
Now I don't mean that fanaticism does that
deliberately.
Those who do this would say that they
are seeing the Holy Spirit at work, and
they no doubt believe that.
That's what makes it so subtle.
But the question is, is their spirit Bible
-centered?
Is it God-centered?
Or has subjective feeling taken control?
Now, at this point, we need to be
very careful.
And Jonathan Edwards is very careful here.
Outward phenomena may be of the Spirit of
God or it may not.
And it may look identical.
If people are laughing, if people are crying,
if people have fallen.
What is the cause of that?
Well, what's the context?
Have they been hearing the truth?
Has the Word of God gripped them?
Have their minds been arrested?
Has Biblical teaching clearly been set out?
If there's physical phenomena which is not in
the context of clear Biblical teaching, we may
well suspect that it's purely natural.
For example, once when Whitefield was preaching, a
vast crowd of people.
And here on the edge of the crowd,
much too far away to hear what Whitefield
was actually saying, was a woman standing, weeping.
Why was she weeping?
Because she could see a lot of other
people weeping.
That was the reason.
And you know, there are things that are
infectious, as serious as infection.
If people start weeping, others can very easily
weep.
That good woman had no reason to weep.
She hadn't heard the truth.
She hadn't heard teaching.
It was purely natural.
So what John of Edwards said is this.
If there are bodily effects, we're not to
be impressed by that.
But if these things are taking place, he
says, under the preaching of the important truths
of God's Word, urged and enforced by proper
arguments and motives, then we can take it
more seriously.
But in the end, nothing outward and physical
is of great importance.
It's the spiritual fruit that counts.
And you can't judge fruit by physical phenomena.
John Wesley was not against emotion, far from
it, but he says, I dislike something that
has the appearance of enthusiasm.
Now he's using it in that old sense.
Overvaluing feelings and inward impressions, mistaking the mere
work of imagination for the voice of the
Spirit, expecting the end without the means, and
undervaluing reason, knowledge and wisdom in general.
So a third mark of fanaticism is that
it generally reveals itself by a spirit of
pride.
This is what happened, isn't it, in the
church at Corinth.
All the debate about gifts.
The church had forgotten the fundamental truth that
no flesh is to glory in his presence.
But fanaticism generally, almost invariably, leads to a
spirit of self-importance.
Edwards says how in the Great Awakening, people
of this spirit were so ready to speak
about themselves and about their own experiences.
Gardner's Spring contrasts converts who are true, biblical,
with the fanatical.
And this is how he describes the fanatical.
The fanatical has a spirit who seeks observation
and wishes to be seen, and obtrudes itself
on the notice of others, talks of its
own experiences and attainments, that is bold and
assuming, that wishes to be put forward, and
unblushingly exclaims, but Jesus, come and see my
zeal for the Lord.
How different is that?
How different the spirit of the modest, retiring,
young convert who esteems others better than himself,
who looks on Christ whom he has pierced
and mourns, and who goes to the communion
of saints, conscious that he is not worthy
of the crumbs that fall from the Master's
table.
Self-confidence and pride.
And so fanatics are people who are always
well-instructed to teach others, but they are
unteachable themselves.
They don't have respect for the wisdom of
the Church accumulated through centuries of creeds and
confessions and books.
They don't think much of that at all.
They may call that book learning or dead
orthodoxy.
They say we're taught by the Holy Spirit
and we don't need these things.
And so it's almost always a mark of
fanaticism that it attacks the Christian ministry in
some way or another.
Fanatics are generally unwilling to recognize any leaders
beyond themselves.
John Wesley says in this society where Bell
was one of the leaders, Wesley went amongst
them and tried to help them.
He says, Pride and great uncharitableness appeared in
many who once had much grace.
I very tenderly reproved them.
They would not bear it.
One of them, Mrs. Coventry, cried out, We
will not be browbeaten any longer.
And a few days later she came and
before a hundred people she brought hers and
her husband's tickets, membership to the Society, and
she said, Sir, we will have no more
to do with you.
Mr. Maxwell is our teacher.
And soon after, several more left the Society
saying, Blind John is not capable of teaching
us.
Well, that's fanaticism.
People who have special knowledge and inspiration and
they don't need the guidance of ministers.
Let's move on to the consequences of fanaticism.
It produces controversy and division amongst Christians.
Now every true revival causes controversy.
People that are self-satisfied and nominal Christians
don't welcome revivals.
So, every revival produces controversy.
But the sad thing about fanaticism is that
it produces controversy among real Christians.
And that has happened again and again.
It happened in the days of Abraham Nettleson
and he said in the 1820s, As we
have it now, the great contest is among
professors of religion.
A civil war in Zion.
A domestic broil in the household of faith.
I haven't time to go into that, but
this is what happens.
Christians are diverted from the great work by
these things.
Then, consequences of fanaticism.
Secondly, it gives opportunity for large numbers of
unconverted people to enter the church.
You see, unregenerate people can get excited.
Oh yes.
Unconverted people like to have high emotions.
You remember how King Herod would like to
see a miracle.
We read in Luke's Gospel, chapter 23, He
had long hoped to see a miracle.
Plenty of people like Herod still alive.
And if you can offer miracles and excitement
and sensation, and then under the influence of
excitement, tell people what they've got to do,
and people do it, and then they are
treated as Christians, then you've got multitudes of
people entering evangelical circles without really knowing Christ.
So, fanaticism always introduces large numbers of unconverted
people into the church.
Now, I want to just give you an
illustration of fanaticism before I begin to conclude.
And this is from the Welsh Revival of
1904.
There's a recent life published of Evan Roberts,
who was one of the leaders in that
revival.
Some of you may have seen it.
It was a great revival.
Many, many people were converted.
But in the revival, there was also fanaticism.
And prayer.
Send the Spirit now for Jesus' sake.
I had put in three more words, he
explained, but the Spirit rejected them.
The first form of the prayer was, O
Lord, send the Holy Spirit now for Jesus'
sake.
Amen.
But I was forced to leave out, he
said, Lord and Holy and Amen, because the
Spirit will have no idle words.
So, he believed that the Spirit's leading was
everything.
And there was very little preaching.
There was a lot of song and prayer
and testimony.
But it was said, quotation, Preaching has failed
as a saving agency for a long time.
God is now going to save sinners for
a while without the pulpit.
So, characteristic began of very little preaching.
And at first, Evan Roberts' behavior drew no
criticism.
No one, it was said, quoting a newspaper,
No one is sure where the revivalist will
appear because he will only go where the
Spirit prompts him.
And Evan Roberts didn't try to control the
meetings.
But then, when 1905 came, he changed.
And he believed that the Holy Spirit was
now guiding him to control the meetings.
And he did control them.
To this extent, somebody might be praying and
he'd stop them in the middle of his
prayer.
Or they might be singing, and Roberts would
stop them in the middle of the singing
and saying that it wasn't the Holy Spirit's
will but there should be any more.
And sometimes he'd simply stop a service in
the middle.
Other times, he believed that God had given
him clairvoyant powers, somebody here is a hypocrite,
I know them, I see them, he says.
Or somebody here is hindering the meeting, they
must leave, they must go.
Somebody here is ready to be converted, he
said, ready to surrender.
And people said, people were excited and awestruck
and asked, how is it possible that each
time he makes a prediction, someone is ready
and waiting to yield?
Well, these meetings became more and more sensational.
And it's a very sad story, because in
1906, the poor man just broke down completely.
He'd been made a sort of national idol,
he'd been turned into a prophet, and he
had a breakdown in 1906.
He lived another 45 years, he never entered
the ministry.
He really was wrecked by, in a sense,
his ignorance of the pattern of fanaticism.
He was being carried along by influences that
had been seen many times in church history
and he knew them not.
And to my mind, it's a very sad
story.
Now, I want to then come quickly to
closing lessons.
The first lesson is, what's the remedy for
fanaticism?
Surely, friends, it has to be knowledge, teaching,
the Word of God, makes all the difference
in the world.
When a revival comes, whether people are grounded
and taught.
You know, Dr. Tozer said, writing what, in
the 1950s, he said a revival of the
present Christianity, which we have in the United
States, would be a calamity, from which we
wouldn't recover in a hundred years.
See what he meant?
When God sends a spirit, it's very important
that people are grounded in Scripture, otherwise all
kinds of things can happen.
So then, it's not difficult for us to
believe that God mercifully, and we are seeing
a day in which truth is being disseminated.
People are being brought back to the Scriptures.
That's what we need.
Now, if God should allow us, young or
old, to see a revival, let me just
give a few words which some of you
may remember.
The first is, obviously, we have to be
very watchful and very humble and prayerful and
careful.
We have to realize that there's supernatural subtlety
at work.
Revivals are not times when we can give
up watchfulness.
Secondly, we have to do everything possible to
avoid mere excitement.
Very important.
For example, when a revival comes, people want
more and more teaching.
They happily stay up to midnight or later
for the preaching of the Word.
It mustn't be allowed.
It's a great mistake.
We haven't got to give way to the
feelings of the people.
One has to do everything possible to see
that excitement is kept in check.
One of the problems with Evan Roberts was
that he scarcely slept for three weeks.
Well, if that happens, it's a certainty that
before long you're going to get all kinds
of aberrations.
We shouldn't allow the abnormal to take control.
And ministers and leaders need to resist all
wildfire.
And you know that's very difficult to do.
It wasn't done in the 1904 revival in
Wales because the ministers were afraid of the
people.
The people said it was quenching the spirit,
so the ministers kept quiet and fanaticism spread.
It's a great mistake.
You know, Whitefield was in New England once
and he'd been preaching and he'd gone back
to the parsonage and someone came running to
the parsonage and said, you've got to come
back to the church.
Wonderful, great things are happening in the church
and there's a lot of noise.
So Whitefield and the minister went back to
the church and sure enough, some people were
jumping and others were dancing.
Tremendous noise.
You know what Whitefield did?
He stamped his foot with great force and
he shouted out.
He said, you're like little chickens running around
with the eggshells still on your eyes.
Go home, he said.
Go home.
You know, that's not easy to do.
A lot of ministers wouldn't have done it.
But he did the right thing.
If you give way to feeling and excitement,
it will take control.
And so most ministers have taken the view
that if somebody is physically overcome in a
service, maybe they cry aloud or perhaps they
fall.
The best thing to do is to gently
remove them from the service.
Don't make them an exhibit because you'll then
have many more people showing the same symptoms
very quickly.
If people can't be restrained in emotion, let
them be quietly taken from the service.
These are very important practical things.
And then another practical lesson is, and I
don't honestly know how this can be dealt
with, but the 1904 revival, as I've been
saying, Evan Roberts was very seriously damaged by
the media.
One of the first revivals where the newspapers
were very interested.
Some of them were very sympathetic.
They praised him to the skies, made him
a personality.
I don't know how we'll be able to
keep the media at a distance.
But it's quite certain that if we throw
open the doors and let media into public
worship in a time of revival, it's going
to create tremendous difficulties.
It'll need very great wisdom indeed.
Well, I hope that this subject has not
been without profit.
It's a sad subject, isn't it?
But I think we need to study it.
It's a very relevant one.
It's a great danger and hindrance to the
true work of the Holy Spirit.
Shall we pray?
Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we give thanks
to Thee that Thou art reigning over all
things.
Lord, help us to see that we can
indeed do nothing without Thy light and grace
and presence.
Deliver us from all confidence in ourselves.
Humble us under Thy mighty hand.
Help us to know Christ as our only
Lord and Saviour day by day.
We pray for the churches to which we
belong.
Lord, we pray that Thou wouldst come and
indeed work with grace and power.
Help us to know Thee more.
Help us to grow in grace.
Be with us as we continue in this
evening hour.
We thank Thee for the privileges and the
blessings of our fellowship together.
Pardon all that Thou dost see and miss
in us.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.