What is Revival?
W. Vernon Higham (1926–2016) was a Welsh pastor, author, and hymn writer. Among his pastorates, he was pastor of Heath Evangelical Church in Cardiff, Wales for 40 years. In addition to a long and fruitful pastoral ministry, Vernon Higham wrote over 200 hymns and multiple books and pamphlets.
In The Turn of the Tide, a collection of Higham’s addresses on the topic of revival at the Evangelical Movement of Wales Annual Conference in 1984.
You may have an impression of revival which is not revival at all.
What does the word revival mean to you? Does it mean excitement? Does it mean everybody jumping about and making a fuss? You may have an impression of revival which is not revival at all. Or perhaps you have heard about the confessions of sin made under the power of God, and that has terrified you. You may be saying “I don’t want that at all! I don’t want to be a public spectacle.” What you have heard maybe are snippets here and there, enough to frighten you away and make you think that revival must be some kind of strange, freakish phenomenon.
revival is God’s very best given to His people.
True revival is not like that at all. Anything and everything that God does is good, and revival is most definitely something that God does. It comes from Him. It is God’s very best given to His people. Sometimes, because revival may be such a long time coming, we can be tempted to despair and say, “Ah! It will not come in my time, so I will go for God’s second best and choose meanwhile to busy myself with all kinds of activities.” These self efforts are sometimes good, often tiring, and usually need a great deal of energy and organization. Revival is different. It is God’s intervention, very often following on and taking over after man’s exasperation. Sometimes revival comes when there has been a great dearth, when it seems as if the embers, the very last sparks of religion, are dying on the hearth; it is then that He comes, breaking in from above, unsought. There are other times when men have been seeking Him with all their hearts, when they have been inspired to do so by God, and yet still when He comes, it will be by His sovereign will. There are yet other times, times perhaps when persecution is on the way; in such times, God can again come and prepare His church to meet the trial by granting her a great and powerful revival. In any of these instances, revival may come to a single church or to a particular area or to a whole nation or nations, and it lasts for as long as our sovereign God decrees.
What is revival? It is another dimension, in which tremendous things happen and God’s people are at last moved.
Revival is something above and beyond that spiritual environment and climate which we, for want of a better word, would deem normal. In aspiring to greater things, we are in no way belittling that which we already enjoy. In non-revival times we give ourselves to hear the exposition of His Word and apply it to our souls. We also desire that, by His Spirit, we can apply it to our lives. When we sing a hymn of praise and worship to God, it rises as a sweet incense if we do so in spirit and in truth. We live day to day in the power of His Spirit. These are great and wonderful things, in no way to be decried. We are able to say now that we are deeply satisfied with these gifts from God. Yet in revival there is something more; there is that great plus which in no way dishonors God’s present dealings with us when we seek it, which can neither be faked nor substituted nor bypassed once we have set our hearts upon it. Once we have appreciated and tasted its potential, nothing else will do. This is the highest plane of spiritual experience, the ultimate that God can do for His people in this world. You may have become slowly aware of its reality in your reading of church history or, more blessed still, by being present in an actual revival or perhaps by visiting a place where you can catch the aftermath of one. Many have testified that breathing the air of revival in this manner is enough to create a yearning for it which is never stilled until satisfied by the granting of it again.