Is It Revival?

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Collin Hansen
Everyone very excited to see you here in the middle of the afternoon, day two, kind of a midpoint in the conference. Excited about the Lord still going to do with us, and excited to hear from you tonight, Jen.

Jen Wilkin
Thanks, Colin.

Collin Hansen
Looking forward to that. So this is a topic that I’ve been looking forward to talking about for a long time. Is it revival? I’m just going to go ahead and read again the description. Around the United States, we’ve seen dramatic reports of spiritual movements, especially among young adults. Is this a biblical revival or a distraction from the normal work of Christian discipleship? Jen and I will give you biblical, theological, and historical tools to evaluate revival, with the hope that God will bless the ordinary means of grace with an extraordinary experience of its power and presence. I have a couple different touch points personally with revival, not necessarily well, I guess that would be an interesting question. I wrote originally about the young rest is reformed, which actually in some ways definitely has different marks of revival. That was a book that I wrote back in 2008 an article back in 2006 and then through that met Tim Keller at the 2013 Gospel Collagen National Conference. He gave a session on revival. I also then did a book in 2010 called The God Size Division: Revival Stories That Stretch and Stir. Wrote it with one of my seminary professors, and we look back through the history, and my basic question that we’re going to be discussing today is why is it that reformed people who have a history biblically and theologically with revival don’t talk about it, don’t seek it today, and we’re going to look at some of the critiques and, and whatnot, but that’s just a little bit of my personal background, how I came across this topic, but Jen, I know you’ve got a little bit of a history here too.

Jen Wilkin
Well, so Colin is much more educated on this than I am. I’ve done, I know, I know a little bit of church history to know the history of revivalism, and I looked into that mainly because of the way that I grew up. I grew up, many of you will know, with mother who got in pretty deep into the word faith movement, but we were also in, I would say, just pretty much typical sort of either Southern Baptist or non-denominational environments where we would have the annual week where the revivalist came in, and he led a revival. It wasn’t in a tent where we were, but that’s probably because I live in Texas, pretty hot. And, and then you know, there would be the every head bowed, every eye closed. Let’s see that. Get those hands up, you, sir. I see you. Yes, you ma’am. In the back, hands going up all over this room, right? And I can still remember all seven verses of just as I am, because we – I’m not kidding, because we just kept the hidden verses for the

Collin Hansen
real, yeah, yeah,

Jen Wilkin
it’s like the secret menu at Torches Tacos, so, so I would say that my default setting toward revival is to suspect that it’s revivalism instead of revival, and that’s something I don’t want to over correct for something that I grew up with. Do you know what I’m saying? Okay, and so then Colin, on the other hand, where would you say you land on this, like just experientially, like based on your lived experience.

Collin Hansen
Oh yeah, I think part of just you don’t always know that you’re in a revival in the middle of it, almost like that famous office quote, right? You don’t know the good old days, and you know till later when you’re in the middle of them, and that’s a little bit of if you’re if you’re spending a lot of time trying to get revival going, and to push it and promote it. It does often lead to that kind of stretch and that manipulation, I think, in some ways. And so, but the challenge that I ran into was more on the opposite side of a professor of mine was in seminary, was teaching through the well, teaching on church history, and looked at the book of James and said, Is it possible we just don’t have revival because we don’t ask for it, and I was thinking about J. I Packer’s great book, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, and I was thinking about how our prayers are often the means through which God accomplishes his works. That’s the way that we participate in those, and so that really just got me back to why don’t I? Why don’t I pray for this? Why don’t I look for this, and I have all the rationales of how it goes wrong, like you’re talking about there to stay away from it, but then at the same time I had a different, I think at some level I look at history without any faith, it’s almost like those people were just, they were dumb, you know. They just believed anything.

Jen Wilkin
Chronological snobbery. Yeah, exactly.

Collin Hansen
A little Owen Barfield, CS Lewis, chronicle chronological snobbery. I don’t know if you ever felt that way in the Bible. How do you.. I mean, you must have to overcome that as a Bible teacher alone. No, but I

Jen Wilkin
hear other people

Collin Hansen
do, I. And we’ll talk a little bit in here about descriptive versus prescript, especially in the book of Acts, as an example there of what to expect, but I think I’ll just share another example here. There’s there’s a lot of political confusion about revival as well, it’s often one of the places, and I’ve got a background working in politics, that’s one thing that soured me quite a bit on it. I don’t know if you guys saw recently. There was an event called Rededicate to 50. It was last month at National Mall in Washington. One of the passages, this was quoted by President Trump. This is one of the most common revival passages that you’ll hear. It’s Second Chronicles 714 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. I think it’s a wonderful prayer, so biblical prayer. I think we would all love that for our ourselves, our family, our nation, our churches, all that sort of stuff, so that’s a very, very common prayer, but I usually hear it in political context, not necessarily in in church context, there, and I think sometimes that can be a little confusing. Vice President Vance also then went on, he was talking about Charlie Kirk, and observed that there were encouraging reports of increased church attendance among young adults, but I think as I was looking back on these different events, wondering, is this – is this what a revival would look like? You were talking there about how we often equate it with these staged, planned events, and at that event specifically, there was a pastor who led the audience in chanting together, revival, revival, revival, and look again. I share that passion. I think that’s why we’re here to talk about that. I’m just not sure that’s exactly how these things come about. I’d be

Jen Wilkin
curious to know, like, in this room, who is where are you coming from? So, like, do you, how many of you come from a tradition or grew up in a tradition where revival was a regular feature that was talked about. Hands up. Okay, how many? Not a big,

Collin Hansen
that’s not a big percentage. No.

Jen Wilkin
Well, the reason I always ask this is because a lot of times when I’m at TGC, the Presbyterians are holding a lot of microphones, and I’m like, I’m like, guys, there are 350,000 people in the PCA, and there are 5.5 million Baptists. So, so I’m just always so really, I always do kind of want to know, like, which room am I in? As the PCA here, or the Baptist here, is it a mix, is it other people? And so, because we do have very different, I think, perceptions of what is what is important or what is broken based on where we’re coming from, so we had the people who grew up with revival slash ism as a regular feature. How many of you have only seen those kinds of things at second hand or at a distance? Okay, so more of you probably than than the people who sort of grew up in a similar tradition to mine. When you think of revival slash ism, how closely do you associate it with charismatic practice? Okay, which was

Collin Hansen
definitely what was displayed at the National Mall event. Is

Jen Wilkin
there anyone who doesn’t associate revival with charismatic practice? Okay. Okay, and we would probably have more words to say about that, if we were talking in a one on one conversation, but I, I get, get that. Okay, go ahead, Colin. Not gonna, that

Collin Hansen
was good. Well, one of the, one of the positives here, I think, about revival is that it presupposes a bad time. Every revival has a before and after picture that actually encourages me quite a bit. By the way, another book recommendation in here, you mentioned revival and revivalism, that’s also the title of a book, Banner of Truth Press by Iain Murray. Looking back on the history, so distinguish between those two dynamics. So, if you’re just thinking historically here, you’d be looking back, First Great Awakening, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, things like that, 1730s and 40s, that would be considered by him a revival, then revivalism would be the institutionalization, the things that we more associate all the way from Charles Finney to Dwight Moody to Billy Sunday to Billy Graham, all the way through, that’d be more revivalism. Distinguish really

Jen Wilkin
how you would define revival versus revivalism. Is revivalism essentially just appropriating tools that we saw render something in a revival and systematizing them, is that how you would say it?

Collin Hansen
Well, so you talked about the altar call, right there. So, and how many people churches with altar calls? I’m not necessarily always against how many people raise those hands. Yeah,

Jen Wilkin
every, yeah, every head. Yeah, okay.

Collin Hansen
All right, so good, good number in there.

Jen Wilkin
I could do it. I could pull off a good invitation. You would come forward.

Collin Hansen
It’s that’s a development from something called the Anxious Bench that was invented by Charles Finney, and he was a presbyter. Arian and was considering himself part of that revival tradition, but essentially the idea was to preach with a cert, I mean, people would come down, they would sit in the front, and he would preach directly to them, and essentially long enough until those people felt compelled to make a decision on the spot. Okay,

Jen Wilkin
that’s like late 1800s right? Give people early 1900 okay? Early 18, yeah,

Collin Hansen
early 1800s so pre-civil war era in there, but, but variations on that continue through Dwight Moody, that’s more the 1860s 1870s and on then into Billy Sunday, that’s more like the 1920s 1930s and then Billy Graham from the 1940s all the way through the 2000s Well, and I think it’s

Jen Wilkin
important to note that when we talk about, like, Billy Graham using some of the same tools that Finney used, what we’re not saying is that Billy Graham was a charlatan. I love Billy Graham. My first book was about Billy Graham. What we’re saying is there was a sensibility around methods that generated a response, and I would say you can tell me whether you would agree with this, that some people use those earnestly and some people use those manipulatively, and I would also guess that some people, it was a mix, they didn’t know where the line was, and so some of what I think we see in the in the negative expressions of revivalism are the ones that are clearly negative, would be a desire to shape a room, and you have actually a really good marker for what distinguishes between a room that was, I don’t know, that it’s possible to manipulate someone for good reasons, but a room where someone had good intentions in what they were doing, and a room where someone didn’t, and what would you say is the main marker of what shapes those rooms

Collin Hansen
well underneath, so much of this is is pride, and I think it’s a good test for yourself if you’re desiring revival. And just think about it, what does that mean? It could mean that you feel this sense of intimacy with the Lord. I hope a lot of you are feeling that at this conference, I hope tonight, Jen, when you’re teaching that that’s the experience that this room has, there of a feeling of a connection with intimacy. I would absolutely hope that you go home feeling spiritually encouraged, empowered, refreshed, motivated. A lot of times, when I come to these events, if I’m traveling home by plane, all of a sudden I’m wanting to evangelize those people next door. I’m just, you know, in the next seat over. I’m really excited. I’m just exuberant about that. And so, so you want that, and then when it, when it goes from there, you want to share that with your family, you want to share that with your church, you want to see your community, want to see your nation. That’s, that’s the desire there, but any of those things, as you’re saying, can be very easily manipulated, and you can end up having the wrong motivations, and so one of the markers on that motivation, one of the checks on that motivation is to say, I want the Lord to send revival. Let me think about it. Let me explain it just a couple different ways here. This sense of almost an experience, a preview of what we will experience eternally, an in breaking of that sense of awe and worship and joy, and like I never want to stop feeling this way and gathering with God’s people, things like that. So that’s that’s one way to look at another way to look at it is simply you’re doing all the same ordinary means of grace that you always do, you’re reading your Bible, you’re singing, you’re praying, but all of a sudden there’s just so much more power. These people that you had been praying for, now they’re coming to faith, these words that you’d been studying in scripture, now they’re leaping off the page, like, where did that come from? How did I miss this? And then some, some even in here, that most common examples of revival is people who are around the church for a long time, and they’re like, I, you know, I know that I’m supposed to be here, but everybody else seems to be experiencing something more into it. Yeah, they’re way more into it than I am. Revival is where you all sudden say, oh, now I get it, you know, there’s there’s a sense and a sensibility about about the things of the Lord there, but one of the ways that you can most naturally and safely, I think, seek revival is to say, Lord, send revival and start it with the church down the street that I don’t get along, not because you want the rival to do bad, but because what you want is the Lord to work, not the Lord to make you famous, or to make you well known, or to make everybody look at you and say, wow, you’re really special, because there’s one of the key components to revival is confession of sin, and there was a revival in Pyongyang, which is now North Korea, in 1907 one of the most spectacular revivals in all of history. I wrote about it in my God-sized vision book, and a lot of people just can’t even. Fathom, and remember one of the biggest revivals in Christian history happening in what’s today North Korea. I mean, only a little bit over a century ago, and one of the things that unleashed that revival were these Western missionaries that the Koreans looked up to. The Western missionaries were confessing sin. Wait a minute, I didn’t know the missionaries could sin. It’s all of a sudden that unlocks, it’s a pride thing, the pride falls, and then the spirit, spirit comes, and it’s just an absolutely spectacular results with that.

Jen Wilkin
What do you think about revival messages that are based predominantly in the benefits of salvation? Do you know what I’m saying? To where it’s like, do you know what, if you come down here tonight and you pray, you can have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and your anxieties are going to be gone, and you’re.. do you hear what I’m saying? It’s not the.. it’s not the kingdom of heaven is at hand, repent and believe. So, is are those messages potentially more prone to manipulation, or are they just a different way of presenting the gospel?

Collin Hansen
I think that could go either way. It’s a great question. There is a.. there are a couple different ways that we can learn about this. One is John Piper’s book, God is the Gospel. That’s how the ultimate delight, the ultimate pursuit of our life is the Lord himself, and then added unto these things are those benefits, but what we want is the Lord himself. That’s another test about eternity. Do you want just the benefits that come with eternity, or do you want the presence of the Lord himself? Well,

Jen Wilkin
and I think also, obviously, you put together some great notes here, and now I’m just doing Jen’s just tossing them out the window,

Collin Hansen
which I’m totally fine with. We’ve been friends for a long time. First thing I said to

Jen Wilkin
Colin when I walked in the room is I left my notes up in my room, so I did read them and interact with them, and then I left them, because you know what, Colin, I got stuff I want to talk. I think

Collin Hansen
they’d rather hear from you anyway,

Jen Wilkin
when so much of evangelism, so like, take it out of the revival setting, so much of evangelism in our age, and for the past 40 years or so, has been predicated on an appeal to the individual for individual benefits, and I wonder, in revival slash revivalism, that might be happening now. All, and I say this in ignorance, maybe you know the answer. Are the appeals that are given at the end of the services, some of the ones that we’re seeing, like on college campuses and things, are they given to the individual, or are people aware that what they’re being called into is something transcendent, something ancient, something bigger than them, and that it’s not them just inviting Christ into their hearts, but it’s Christ inviting them into His kingdom. Like, is that ever the message? Is that the message of true revival?

Collin Hansen
That’s a good question, but I just don’t want to put those limits on the Lord, because I don’t think we all, we don’t have to have perfect motives to come to the Lord. I think that’s a

Jen Wilkin
good, that’s good news. Yeah,

Collin Hansen
well, I’m just thinking, how, I mean, on the one hand, naturally all of us have certain felt needs that help to draw us to, okay, I’m hoping to experience some change, and I’m just thinking about my own coming to faith at age 15, and I probably had a lot to do with wanting to fit in with some kids that I thought were fun, and probably some girls involved, you know, I mean,

Jen Wilkin
I remember when parents at my church started throwing pizza parties when their kids got baptized, and I was like, “Shoot, every Wilkin kid’s gonna want to get dunked now.

Collin Hansen
Was it like with a lot of gifts, like the bar mitzvah? At least it was.

Jen Wilkin
It was like a Baptist bar mitzvah. Now that you mention it,

Collin Hansen
see, we told you you’d walk away with some practical ideas. I do

Jen Wilkin
think that some of it, though, is we tell ourselves, you know, we need to be really careful with children because they’re easily manipulated, but the reality is we’re all easily manipulated. Yeah, we

Collin Hansen
just, we just don’t tend to come with those pure motives, and so I don’t want to denigrate that, I don’t want to say that’s okay, but I do, I think we’d be aiming for an ideal that’s not quite realistic in that sense, if we’re saying you can only come here if you understand, but I do think that if we qualify biblically, let’s talk about some of the biblical examples here, because I do think that

Jen Wilkin
those were in the notes, by the way,

Collin Hansen
I do think that Jesus is called, tell me if I’m wrong, Jesus’s call was not just, hey, awesome, your life’s going to get a lot better, but in some ways it’s the

Jen Wilkin
opposite, the

Collin Hansen
opposite of that, right, so that could be another. Test of revival. The one test could be, are you willing to pray that the Lord would send it, and He would start with others. Another test could be, and I’m teaching and making it very clear that the only way to gain your life

Jen Wilkin
is to lose it, lose your

Collin Hansen
life, right. So, are there other.. just give us any other examples or precedent that you see biblically.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, well, I mean, I think what you’re getting at is you don’t want sanctification to be a bait and switch, right? Like, hey, justification, amazing sanctification really hard, but we didn’t tell you that part, and also don’t really worry about it, as long as you’re in, you’re in, and, and I.. so when we think about biblical precedent, I think one of the things that one of my favorite stories, really, in all of the Old Testament, as a Bible teacher, this will not surprise you, is the story where Israel rediscovers the book of the law after the exile. You know, they’re rebuilding the walls, and they come out, and then that the priests stand and read and think what they’re reading, we don’t know which text it was, but we can narrow it down to five books. So I’m like, what were they reading? Did they read Leviticus? Like, what? Which part was the part where the people started weeping uncontrollably? And when I look at that, and I’m just going to let my jadedness come through for you to celebrate or to condemn, but when I look at that, when I picture that scene playing out, I think to myself, no one invited the Holy Spirit to come, there was no smoke machine, no one was padding underneath the words that were being read, it was just the Bible, insofar as they had it being read aloud, and people coming under conviction. Not only that, but they didn’t have the cross till they were, you know, they’re still anticipating the work of the cross, and so I think if you took the most stripped down image of what it looks like for revival to happen, and I would also add, I don’t know how you feel about this, there weren’t you’re gonna

Collin Hansen
find out, probably there

Jen Wilkin
weren’t a bunch of gentiles who were listening who went, what do I do to be saved, and so I wonder how often we reduce revival to evangelism when you know, and I’m a discipleship girl, so you should expect me to bring this up, right? Like, and then, and then the key ingredients of a revival happening so often seem to hinge on whether someone has a gift of evangelism, and we don’t just mean typically when we say that someone who knows how to give the altar call, we mean someone who the spirit has given a particular gifting to, to this is, I don’t mean this to sound cynical, but like to close the deal, you know, to be the closer, and and so none of that is present in what we see in Ezra and Nehemiah, and that doesn’t mean that what we see in Ezra and Nehemiah is the full and final word on what revival looks like, but when I read that, I think this feels so far removed from our modern conceptions of what it is, so I don’t, I don’t know how to reconcile those things,

Collin Hansen
well, try to reconcile it through the book of Acts. So, just explain some of the basic concepts between descriptive and prescriptive, and of course, we’d be familiar with the Acts 29 concepts. And

Jen Wilkin
what are you talking about?

Collin Hansen
Yeah, but the idea that.. so just

Jen Wilkin
don’t laugh at Acts 29 jokes

Collin Hansen
too soon.

Jen Wilkin
Loosen up, man.

Collin Hansen
No, just trying to point out what. How are we supposed to approach the book of Acts? Because if you’re having a discussion about revival, it’s going to be about the book of Acts, and we see this, and it in many ways contrasts with our experience of the church today. So, are we.. what do we see as normative? What do we see as prescriptive? This is what you’re supposed to be doing. What do we see as descriptive? You also have covenantal dimensions coming into play. Of I did a study with this with Don Carson at Trinity when I was in graduate school. Of the when the spirit descends, what’s happening there is like an advance of the gospel, the Gentiles there, so it’s not necessarily endorsing this second blessing, for example, so that would be one example from scripture, that that is not a, that is not a prescriptive act in conversion, that you convert, and then later there’s a second blessing, no, this is actually a covenantal signifier there in the book of Acts, so describe more broadly that prescriptive, descriptive dynamic. Well,

Jen Wilkin
and I would even say in studying the book of Acts, you see that it does something that we also see elsewhere in the scriptures, where you have the principle of first to the Jew and then to the Gentile, that keeps happening, and so you have Pentecost that happens with a predominant. Jewish crowd, right? The spirit descends. They, they start to speak the gospel in tongues to people who would not have otherwise heard it, because they didn’t have their native tongue represented. And then a few chapters later, we’re at the house of Cornelius, which is, he’s a, he’s a Gentile, he’s a Roman, and all of a sudden the same thing happens there, and I always call it mini gentile Pentecost, but a lot of times because the same or similar thing happens twice in the book of Acts, people read it to be see this is now a thing that’s just going to happen over and over again, instead of seeing it say first to the Jew, then to the gentile moment, and so, and I also would just note that, yeah, we’re seeing, I read, you’re going to be so shocked to hear this, I read the book of Acts as descriptive, and that does not mean that nothing that happens in the book of Acts ever happens anywhere else in Christian history, but it means that I think the purpose of the book is not to establish the normative day to day practice of the church or the Holy Spirit. I think it’s showing us a moment in time, it’s a hinge book, but I would say that when you think about how often the Spirit, if we’re talking the Trinity, who’s, you know, who’s your favorite member of the Trinity in any particular portion of church activity, the Holy Spirit tends to be the poster child for revivalism, and the Spirit is referenced, like we ask the Spirit to come, we, you know, it’s all about the Spirit, but the way that the Spirit functions in the Trinity is never self-referencing, he’s always referencing the Son, and the Son is always referencing the Father, and so it’s a curious development to me when I hear in revival settings a lot of talk about the spirit and maybe less talk about the Father. Well, very little talk about the Father, I would say. And then, and then some talk about Christ when it’s time for the altar call. Is that an unfair.. did I said, well, no, that

Collin Hansen
this is one of those.

Jen Wilkin
Like, just read the notes next time. Oh,

Collin Hansen
no, no. I was trying to just work through one thing. To recommend is to follow through this and just go back and say, Who does Jesus teach that the Spirit is? Who does He tell you the Spirit is so this might be a little bit provocative, but the more I hear somebody talking about the spirit in the context of revival, the more worried I get, because the spirit’s work, as he reveals himself, is to, like you said, to point to Christ specifically, and especially in there, but also to bring about the conviction of sin.

Jen Wilkin
Yes, so not just the warm feelings.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, so the conviction of sin, and then the illumination of the word, specifically the word as it testifies to the work of Christ in there, and the person of an identity of Christ. So, when I hear somebody talking about the spirit, the comment there is usually an equation of the revival with miracles, and it’s a revival if a lot of people are healed. So healings are a good example from, thank you. Healings are a good healings are a good example from scripture, where a revival could include healings, but they are not a sure sign that a revival is happening, and they are not a necessary component of a revival. So I’m pulling this from Jonathan Edwards, his treatise on the religious affections from the first Great Awakening. There were some wild bodily manifestations, I mean, dramatic kind of things that would probably make us uncomfortable that were happening in Jonathan Edwards’ church, specifically. You remember who he was writing about those? That’s his wife, was his wife experiencing those different things in there. It’s anonymous, but that’s who he’s talking about, his

Jen Wilkin
hormones.

Collin Hansen
I did not say that.

Jen Wilkin
I said it because you couldn’t.

Collin Hansen
I didn’t even think it.

Jen Wilkin
And now we’ve reached my favorite part. Sorry, go ahead. I’ve become a distraction. Show

Collin Hansen
is wonderful. So he’s writing about all these things, and so the challenge came that you think, well, it’s not a revival unless people are lying down on the ground shaking in the middle of preaching that some people are just feeling so under the weight of sin that they literally fall down there, he’s saying, but you know what, and aren’t there examples in scripture of this? Christians aren’t the only ones who can do signs and wonders, right? I mean, we see this from the Egyptians, and we see this from, I mean, we see this in the New Testament as well, so other people can perform, whether they’re magic. Six or whatever you want to say that they are, they’re not the only people who can wow an audience by doing some things in there, and of course you even have Satan has ability to do these things as well to counterfeit these dynamics. So, what Edwards says is, if you have those things, you might have a revival, that’s great, but the way you know that you definitely have a revival is if you have people loving their enemies, as you can’t do that without the spirit, you can’t do that without the gospel, that’s when you have that true revival. So that’s one, one reason I do. Again, this is descriptive, but I still think it’s compelling. Acts 242 not all these things are going to happen in a revival, but they’re a description of a revival that is happening, which is the Old Testament, or excuse me, in the early church, New Testament, and they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, so there are some markers that you see consistent in here, people are underneath the word, they’re teaching and they’re learning the word, they’re gathering together, they’re loving one another, they’re wanting to be around each other. That’s a big part of revival. It’s sort of like churches happening, you just don’t want it to end. If you get to this conference tomorrow, and you know we’re not a church, obviously, or anything like that, but we’re a gathering of believers, you get to the conference tomorrow and you’re thinking, I wish we could have just kept doing that at some level. That’s why I

Jen Wilkin
always go over my teaching time.

Collin Hansen
That’s your excuse. No, but it is. It’s really special. You just want that to continue, and that’s a longing the Lord has put in your heart to do that forever. And that’s beautiful to think about. There, so they advise themselves to the apostles, teaching the fellowship to the breaking of bread and the prayers, and awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles, and all who believed were together and had all things in common. Again, now we’re going to start to get controversial there, but simply, you’re seeing generosity, there’s an uncommon willingness to give to others, that’s again not a sure sign of revival, but it’s a good sign of one. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. Again, once again, just not a necessary thing, but a good sign. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts. Another often just people enjoying each other, it’s not just that everybody, every moment is is teaching, but they’re also just enjoying that broader fellowship, praising God and having favor with all the people, and the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Okay, now I got a question, Jen, how do you think it’s possible that you could have a revival? Do you think that means everybody’s going to like us, because that seems to be the implication here for Evan Revival. All of a sudden, we’re going to be popular.

Jen Wilkin
Well, I think that actually is one of the reasons that I think that the book of Acts is descriptive. I think there needed to be this initial momentum, and I do think that there was a particular favor on that moment, because if there hadn’t been, the church wouldn’t have reached a critical mass to go out to the ends of the earth. I’m not saying that you might not see that at another time, but generally I would say the more normative report in scripture is that if you’re following the Lord, you are not going to be well received. Now, I think there are pockets, you know. I think that’s maybe one of the reasons we see revival in pockets, is because at different times different groups of people have a particular openness. Like, it’s so fascinating all the things that are going on, like in the UK, and I know there’s been a lot of conversation around the choir revival, and is it happening? Is it not happening? But you know, we were talking yesterday in a session about Louise Perry. I was, I was, I was recommending her book with caveats, because she wrote it when she’s called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. She was a radical third-wave feminist. She then began describing herself as like a former radical feminist who now ascribed to like Judeo-Christian principles, basically all of her research into the sexual revolution, the punchline that she concluded was that the Bible was right about sexuality. Fascinating to me, a secular person, and she’s not the only person like that, I think. Tom Holland is now attending church, the guy who wrote Dominion, and so it’s like

Collin Hansen
Freya India,

Jen Wilkin
Freya India, yeah. And so, and they’ve written some really, really important things now. She wrote the book I just said before she was a believer, and some of the language in there makes your hair stand on end, but her points stand. And so, all of that to say, when I hear her story, I think that’s the Lord, like that’s the spirit, that is the failure of the secular project, and it’s happening in a more pronounced way geographically in England, because that is more the normative history of most people who. Her age, as they grew up with no faith tradition, or with very, very little of one, and but I think what kind of what I’m starting to wonder out of this conversation is like, if you were going to do a pie chart about how what different elements there were in revival, how big of a slice would evangelism even be, because you just described a whole bunch of things that are what we might call the ordinary miraculous acts of the church, right, where they, they lack a sense of miraculousness, like a physical healing, but in reality the spiritual miracle that has happened to enable them to take place is the greatest miracle of all. It’s the, it’s the fulfillment of all the shadow miracles that Jesus does during his, his earthly ministry. But they’re, they’re simple acts of faithfulness, and one of the things is that people are getting saved.

Collin Hansen
Well, it’s a fruit of revival.

Jen Wilkin
Okay. So,

Jen Wilkin
so, but tell me about your, you’re looking at your slice of pie, we’ll make it a cherry pie, since she said it’s free.

Collin Hansen
It’s true, it’s on the top. Yeah, I just don’t.. the maybe the biggest misconception I hear is you already identified that when people think revival, they think evangelism.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah,

Collin Hansen
in fact, just technically speaking, you can’t revive somebody who wasn’t already alive, so it’s just..

Jen Wilkin
well, you also said something earlier I wanted to follow up on. You said that the reason that revival moments are so precious to us is because they’re a foretaste of the New Jerusalem.

Collin Hansen
True guys, nobody’s

Jen Wilkin
getting evangelized in the New Jerusalem like the work of evangelism ceases, but the other works of generosity and of having all things in common don’t. So that would make me want to say maybe evangelism isn’t a part of revivalism at all, but a revival at all. But I know that’s not true. No,

Collin Hansen
it’s a common, it’s a common fruit, but I just.. is it the point? Is it the point? Oh no, I just want you to

Jen Wilkin
tell me how big your slice of pie is.

Collin Hansen
I think through that,

Jen Wilkin
is it half a pie?

Collin Hansen
Well, I mean, the elements that you see.. I don’t.. now I’m just hungry. Now I’m just hungry, that’s all that happened here. Pie

Jen Wilkin
wasn’t in the notes,

Collin Hansen
so we just get me an apple pie, is all I’m asking for here. The elements that you see in some way, I don’t think you can have revival without confession of sin. I don’t think that exists anywhere,

Jen Wilkin
and some of that will be from unbelievers coming to faith.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, but, but again, one of the most common triggers is people who thought they were Christians or had fallen away, like, oh, wow, I didn’t realize how far I drifted, and I realized how much unconfessed, and I mean, I’m not asking for show hands, but if you felt that way before, the spiritual release, the spiritual release of having confessed something that you had covered up. This is what we called

Jen Wilkin
when I was growing up rededication, and I’m a backslidden believer, and I’m gonna go rededicate. So, first we let the general pagans go forward, and then around verse four to five, if you needed to rededicate, you went down,

Collin Hansen
but even there, though, that’s the problem, right? Because there’s still.. I was going to mention this earlier, college campus revivals are one of the more common things that you hear about, and the,

Jen Wilkin
and that was true also with the Jesus movement, right?

Collin Hansen
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s a fairly common thing, and we could associate a lot of different reasons for that. The Asbury Revival, recently from a few years ago, was one of the better examples, because there were people who understood the nature of revival and were very consciously shepherding that revival to do positive things and not bad things, because the bad things come pretty quick in revival. Satan’s going to get involved, he’s going to seek to thwart this. So one of the things you often hear, this happened at Yale University all the way back in the early 1800s with Jonathan Edwards’ grandson, Timothy Dwight, the students go through revival, and what’s the first thing the students ask the president to do? Stop classes. Amen. It’s a revival, we don’t have to go to class, and Timothy Dwight said, “You still got to go to class. Revival is not inconsistent with learning, it’s not inconsistent with everyday discipleship. You don’t just get to stop those things just because that happened. At Asbury, they did the same thing. The students came and said, ‘Shut it down, we weren’t going to stay here. Of course, what happens there? They’re going to just keep it going for as long as they can get out of that, that class. But then notice. Thing that happens is that the confession of sin becomes performative, and then all of a sudden people start walking to that mic and start saying some stuff where you’re thinking, oh yeah, you should have kept that one to yourself.

Jen Wilkin
Well, and I mean, I do, should not have shared that one. It’s fair to talk about, like, the power of social contagion.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, exactly,

Jen Wilkin
and that it’s like my kids wanting to have a pizza party, also get the Baptist, lest you forget, how much time do we have, by the way? Oh, shoot, we solved all your problems, and so I do think, but, but all that to say, like, even with all of the potential opportunity opportunities for manipulation or cynicism. I don’t feel cynical about this. Do you?

Collin Hansen
Oh, well, like I said, I don’t know how you can ever be cynical about revival, because every revival has the before and after, so in every single revival, it’s this was not happening. It didn’t look good, and no one expected it. If that weren’t the case, it wouldn’t be a revival. Do you

Jen Wilkin
think you know you were touching on this? Do you think that revival should disrupt our normal rhythms, or should it undergird, well, I think

Collin Hansen
the I think one reason we don’t pray for revival is because we think, well, I’m too busy for that. I don’t, I have my spiritual life pretty well contained right now. I, I have the things that I can control, so I don’t know how you exactly walk that fine line, because I guess the broader perspective is, if you have a mentality that God can’t disrupt your life, I guess you probably have bigger problems than how to handle revival. I’m

Jen Wilkin
gonna push back on that, because coming out of the charismatic background I was in, if it wasn’t a disruption, it wasn’t spiritual, and I think about, like, the way it was a

Collin Hansen
fine line. Yeah, no, no, and

Jen Wilkin
I don’t, I don’t think there’s like a black and white answer to that, but I think, like, that I’m not, I’m not an evangelist. I sometimes have to, like, tell event planners that they’ll say, ‘Will you do an invitation at the end? And I say, ‘No, and they’re like, does that, you know, does she even love Jesus? And it’s not because I, but I do think that the work of that I’m doing with teaching is evangelistic just in its nature. I mean, I look at Nehemiah, the story of Nehemiah for that, and I think whether I get it right or not, the proclaimed word is going to go forth and do its work, and I know that women get saved in Bible study, despite, you know, that no one thinks that happens, because I know those women face to face in my own church, they’re not, we’re not having an altar call, they’re not coming down in mass, but I truly think about the desire I have for Bible literacy among women to be a form of revival, it’s I want to bring back an old thing recently forgotten, because it will enliven the life of the church, and that’s just one example. I would imagine that there are people in here who lead in worship in their church who feel the same way about the work that they’re doing, or people who lead in children’s ministry who feel that way, and I would even imagine there are people who are helping with senior adults, you know, I’m thinking about aging a lot, and one of the things that I have questions about when revival seems to only hover around young adults is, is revival not for the whole church? Now, that’s not to say that it might not start among the young and spread, but one of the things I will look for on a long trajectory is, did it saturate the church or did it stay in one demographic or even in one section of the country? Dare I say that was a belt that I just drew right there,

Collin Hansen
a Bible belt. Yeah,

Jen Wilkin
but I don’t feel cynical. I do want to pray for revival, and I sometimes will pray, Lord, I don’t even know what to look for that I know you know, and what, and I want you to do what only you can do.

Collin Hansen
So let’s just get real practical here at the end, then, and think about the places where you have led and where you’ve taught, and where a lot of these women are. We might then summarize that a revival could look like women’s groups or Bible studies that may be focused on there was a lot of gossip or a lot of talking, but not a lot of praying, a lot of prayer requests, but not a lot of praying, a lot of gathering, and a lot of talking about other people, but not talking about the word, you could see then,

Jen Wilkin
but that never happens, Colin. It’s a nice.. I’m only guessing. I

Collin Hansen
don’t know. So it could look like a group like that segment suddenly turning toward seeing and beholding the wonders of God through the riches of His word together, and that provoking a deeper fellowship with one another as. Drawn toward the Lord, and then a confession of sin, as they talk with each other about, about their growing desire for the Lord, and a growing hatred of their sin as a result of that

Jen Wilkin
assurance of an assurance, assurance of grace. Yeah,

Collin Hansen
that’s what that would be a revival, and then you would hope from there that other, that would spread through other demographics in the church, but to piggyback on your push back from earlier, what it would not look like is then mom coming home and saying, I’m not going to be involved with laundry, and I’m not going to be involved with making that pray, and I’m not going to be changing diapers because I’m in a revival.

Jen Wilkin
Yes, yeah, that’s a good, that’s a good way to think of it.

Collin Hansen
And, of course, you can reverse that for the man, where the, where the husband says, I’m not going to go to work anymore, I’m, you know, I’m just going to sit at home and read my Bible, I’m just going to pray. Colin did not

Jen Wilkin
say that women don’t work, so don’t like emails, give the man a break, give them that too,

Collin Hansen
I mean, whatever, just whatever, the mother or the father, I’m not going to continue, I’m going to, I’m not going to stop my regular responsibilities, what that, whatever that looks like for you there, because I can keep doing that, so that’s, I think, reinforcing what you’re saying there, so you’re going to continue to do those ordinary things, but imagine going to work and

Jen Wilkin
with a revival, with revival, caring revival.

Collin Hansen
Just now, all of a sudden, you have an increased desire to work well as unto the Lord, desire to care for your neighbors, to show grace to the annoying people that you work with, or work for things like that, that was what would change in that sense, and an increased desire for the Lord’s day worship, and to be with His people, and to fellowship together, and to host a small group, or something like that, and desire to say, maybe I could lead that Bible study. So I think that’s what we’re praying for, just as a summary of all this stuff. If you’re looking, and I hope you do walk away with more of a desire to pursue revival. Revival looks like trust in the Lord in prayer through the ordinary means of grace, but the difference is all of a sudden the Lord blesses those ordinary means, the prayer, the Bible study, the teaching, the worship, the singing, all that stuff, but now with all of a sudden extraordinary results of feelings, and sometimes also with that fruit, and with a sense of that in breaking of heaven, that preview. And one last thing, just to mention here, don’t feel if you’ve experienced revival in the past, or you’re desiring, and you are blessed by God to have experienced revival in the future, don’t feel bad if it has stopped or it will stop, because by definition it must. Historically, that’s always the case. So, what we see historically is that it’s the very evidence the Lord will bless for time in a particular way, and then for reasons we don’t necessarily understand, it goes away, that’s okay, because we still live on this side of eternity, and that will change one day, and that’s the longing we look for. So, maybe if you’ve experienced that kind of intimacy with the Lord at some point, and you’re really longing for that again, that’s a good thing that shouldn’t point you back in guilt, so much as point you forward in anticipation from a time when that will be unbroken forever. Can I pray to close this? All right, let’s pray. Lord, we offer all of this up to you as a prayer that you would revive us personally together from this conference, God, back to our churches, to our workplaces, to our families, to our friends, and our neighbors. God, we pray, Lord, that you would bless not only the people who share the theological beliefs and the practices represented in this room, but God, we pray for that you would give us a love for our enemies, Lord, that that would be a demonstration of the way that your gospel overcomes everything, because we ourselves have been saved as enemies far from you by your grace and grace alone. At the same time, God, we pray for other churches, other churches that we’re going home to, in our neighborhoods, in our communities, in our cities. We pray, Lord, that you would bless them, you’d send revival to them, and that revival would spread to others as well, Lord, because what we long for here, and that for ourselves to be lifted up, but for your name, and your name alone, your glory to be, your name to be lifted up, and your glory to be displayed for all the peoples. We ask these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.