Times of Refreshing

My heart is always blessed and stirred whenever I read the accounts of past Spiritual Awakenings and revivings of God's work on the earth.
Many times throughout human history God has been pleased to "make bare His arm" and to send forth in extraordinary measure His grace and power.
I was reminded again of this "special" and "mysterious" work of God as I read the observation of J.Fordyce in regards to the character of the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century.

Fordyce writes,

"These preachers did not care much to argue much about the existence of God, the probabilities connected with a future life, or the reasonableness of Christianity.
To them Christ was a real Being, and His Gospel a real salvation; to them this salvation was not a future prospect, but a present and conscious possession; to them the Bible did not merely contain things of high value - it was the word of the living God, the full and final word on all matters connected with man's highest life here and hereafter.
Believing all this with intensity of faith, they spoke out of full hearts, and their word was with power; their gospel became the 'power of God unto salvation' to many thousands.
Hence the new life and quickening experienced far and wide; hence the crowds that gathered round these new preachers, wherever they stood up to speak.
Men who could see nothing in the logic of Berkeley or the ethics of Butler, for whom Paley's twelve men had no message, saw before them, felt within them, new manifestations of Divine power.
God not only lived somewhere and somehow: He was actually present among them.
The triumphs of Christianity and the living power of Christ were not merely found in the records of early history, in the thousands of Pentecost, or the heroes and martyrs of a later age; they were to be seen and felt in every city, town, and village of old England.
Thus without any reasoning, with but little argument, the Deistic position was completely undermined, and the walls of the proud Jericho of eighteenth-century unbelief fell flat before the blasts of the new evangel."

May the Lord of the Harvest stir our hearts afresh to the present reality of our Savior and our salvation!

"......and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." (Mat.28:20b)