This is part seven of Revive Us Again, a ten-part series on revival and renewal in Scripture and church history.

Sow for yourselves righteousness; Reap in mercy; Break up your fallow ground, For it is time to seek Jehovah, Till He comes and rains righteousness on you.

Hosea 10:12 NKJV

In the winter of 1834 and 1835 a former lawyer stood up in a New York chapel and gave a series of lectures on how revivals happen. They went to press in 1835 as Lectures on Revivals of Religion, and the first one made a claim that still starts arguments. Charles Finney wrote that a revival “is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle, in any sense.” It is, he went on, “a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means.”

Almost a hundred years earlier Jonathan Edwards had published his account of the awakening in Northampton. He titled it A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. Edwards chose that word on purpose. He did not see the awakening coming, and he never claimed to know how to make it come again.

Both men loved the Lord. Both preached to see sinners saved. And they gave opposite answers to the question this series asked in its first post, the one on the sign out front of the church. Can a church put revival on the calendar?

Fire in the Kentucky Woods

The road between those two men runs through a clearing in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in August 1801.

Barton Stone’s Presbyterian congregation at Cane Ridge held its communion that month. It was the old Scottish kind, with days of preaching before the Lord’s Table. The roads filled with wagons, riders, and families on foot. Nobody kept a count, and estimates of the crowd run from about ten thousand to twenty-five thousand. The meetinghouse held a fraction of them, so preachers climbed onto stumps and wagons and preached across the grounds at the same time.

Many people fell. Stone wrote that a man or woman would, “with a piercing scream, fall like a log” and lie there as if dead. Others jerked so hard their faces blurred. Some danced or laughed, and a few made a sound the critics mocked as barking.

In the last post we held up Jonathan Edwards’ marks of a true work of the Spirit. Run Cane Ridge through them. Edwards said bodily effects prove nothing either way. A man flat on the ground has not proven he met God, and he has not proven he didn’t. So the falling settles nothing. Fruit settles it. Many who came to Christ in those woods stayed with Him, and the Baptist and Methodist churches of Kentucky grew for years after. Edwards also asked whether a work leads people into truth. Two of the ministers who stood with Stone in those years later joined the Shakers, who taught that Christ had already come again in a woman named Ann Lee. Real conversions and grave error came off the same field.

Stone never pretended the meeting was clean. He admitted there was “much fanaticism” in it and still would not let that condemn the work. That is about as fair a verdict as anyone has given.

The Lawyer With a Method

Finney came along a generation later. He was a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer in Adams, New York, when he was converted in 1821, and he left the law to preach. By the end of that decade he was one of the best-known preachers in America.

He brought methods people called the new measures. Meetings ran every night for weeks. Sinners under conviction were called forward to the anxious bench, a front pew set apart for prayer. Finney prayed for people by name from the pulpit. In Rochester, a boomtown on the new Erie Canal, he preached from the fall of 1830 into the spring of 1831, and the whole city felt it.

It would be easy to make Finney the villain of this post. He doesn’t deserve the part. In the same lecture where he called revival the right use of means, he wrote, “But means will not produce a revival, we all know, without the blessing of God.” His third lecture took Hosea 10:12 as its text and told people to “take up your individual sins one by one, and look at them,” with pen and paper in hand. He called slavery a great national sin and refused the Lord’s Supper to slaveholders. Plenty of men with tidier theology never did as much.

But a method that works like plowing invites a hard question. If revival follows the right means the way a crop follows the plow, what is left for God to do? Finney’s imitators did not always stop to ask it. Towns learned to expect a revival every season. Preachers learned which techniques brought people down the aisle. By 1845 Finney himself was worried. He wrote that “for the last ten years, revivals of religion have been gradually becoming more and more superficial.”

Revival and Revivalism

The historian Iain Murray drew a line between two words to describe what happened next. Revival is what God sends. Revivalism is the belief that the right methods will produce it, and the machinery built on that belief.

The two can look alike from the parking lot. Both draw crowds. Both see people come forward. The difference shows up years later, in whether the converts are still walking with Christ and whether the church still prays when nobody has booked a speaker.

The fall revival week on the church sign has roots in those protracted meetings. That doesn’t make it wrong. Good preaching happens in those weeks, and God has saved people in them. But a week on the calendar can’t promise a visitation, and nobody should print one as if it could.

Six Men on Fulton Street

Now set a different scene beside Finney’s lecture hall.

On September 23, 1857, a layman named Jeremiah Lanphier climbed to an upstairs room at the North Dutch Church on Fulton Street in lower Manhattan. He had put out a handbill inviting businessmen and working men to a noon prayer meeting. It asked for very little. “Stop 5, 10 or 20 minutes, or the whole time, as your time admits.”

For half an hour nobody came, and he prayed alone. Then a step sounded on the stairs. By the end of the hour six men were praying in that room. Some accounts count Lanphier among the six, and others count six who came to join him.

There was no famous preacher and no anxious bench. The rules were plain. Pray, keep it short, and nobody holds the floor more than five minutes. Three weeks later the New York banks closed their doors, and frightened men started climbing those stairs. By the spring of 1858 thousands were stopping at noon to pray across the city, and the meetings spread from town to town.

Fulton Street had its own ash, and it would be dishonest to skip it. The noon meetings kept out “controverted points,” and in 1858 everybody knew which point mattered most. The prayer meeting with no method kept silent about slavery, while the man with the method had barred slaveholders from his communion table. Neither side of this argument walks away with clean hands.

Still, look at what happened in that upstairs room. Nobody there tried to produce anything. They asked God, and they kept asking.

The Farmer and the Rain

Hosea settles the argument between Finney and Edwards, and he does it in one verse.

He preached to the northern kingdom of Israel in its last generation, and he talked like a farmer. “Break up your fallow ground.” The Hebrew is niru lakhem nir, break up for yourselves the unbroken ground. Fallow ground grew a crop once and was let go. It packs hard and the weeds take it. Somebody has to put a plow to it before seed will do any good.

“For it is time to seek Jehovah.” The verb is darash, to seek with purpose, to keep asking until you find. Sow, reap, break up, seek. Those are Israel’s jobs.

Then the subject of the verse changes. “Till He comes and rains righteousness on you.” The last two verbs belong to God. He comes, and He sends the rain. The word for rain, yarah, can also mean to teach, and some translators read the line that way. Either way it falls from heaven.

A farmer can break the ground and sow the seed. No farmer in Kentucky or New York ever made it rain.

Paul said the same thing about the church at Corinth. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6, NKJV).

So who was right? Edwards was right about where revival comes from. It is God’s gift, and it surprises the people who receive it. Finney was right that God gives His people work to do while they wait, and that the work starts in their own hearts. The trouble began when the plowing was treated as if it caused the rain. The answer to the sign out front is the one Hosea gave. Break up the ground, seek the Lord, and leave the rain to Him.

Kindling

Lanphier’s rules still work. Find two or three other believers and pick an hour that suits working people, a lunch break or a weeknight. Pray for twenty minutes. Keep each prayer short and pray more than you talk. When somebody starts a speech, remind the room that this is a prayer meeting. Then come back the next week whether anything seems to happen or not.

And take Finney’s counsel on Hosea, because it is sound. Sit down with a pen and paper. Ask God to show you the hard ground in your own life, and write down what He shows you, one sin at a time. Confess each one by name. That is plowing. The rain belongs to Him, and Paul tells the plowman not to quit.

And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.

Galatians 6:9 NKJV

Word Study

Term	Original	Strong’s	Meaning	Key text
nir	נִיר	H5214, H5215	to break up untilled ground (the verb), and the fallow ground itself (the noun)	Hos 10:12; Jer 4:3
darash	דָּרַשׁ	H1875	to seek, inquire, search out with purpose	Hos 10:12; 2 Chr 15:12
yarah	יָרָה	H3384	to throw or shoot, to send down rain, and in another stem to point out or teach	Hos 10:12; 6:3; Exod 4:12

Discussion Questions

1. Finney called revival “the right use of the constituted means,” and Edwards called Northampton a “surprising work of God.” Which way do you lean, and what Scripture shapes your answer?
2. Edwards said bodily effects prove nothing either way. How should a church weigh dramatic experiences like the ones at Cane Ridge?
3. Read Hosea 10:12. Which verbs belong to us and which belong to God? What happens when a church forgets the difference?
4. The Fulton Street meetings kept out “controverted points.” What subject might your church leave out of its prayers to keep the peace?
5. What would it take to start a short weekly prayer meeting in your church, and what keeps us from doing it?

Going Deeper

• Iain H. Murray, Revival and Revivalism (Banner of Truth, 1994). The book that drew the line this post leans on. Murray traces how American churches moved from praying for revival to planning it.
• Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1835). Read Finney in his own words before you decide what you think of him. The third lecture, on breaking up the fallow ground, is still searching. It is free online.
• Paul K. Conkin, Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). A short, careful history of the meeting, its Scottish roots, and what came after.
• Kathryn Teresa Long, The Revival of 1857–58 (Oxford University Press, 1998). The best modern history of the prayer meeting revival, honest about what it did not change.
• Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1996). A fair biography that takes Finney’s theology seriously.

This post is drawn from The Fire Shall Never Go Out, my book in progress on two thousand years of revival and renewal.