With all the recent talk about "The end of
America as we know it." I was greatly challenged and encouraged by this
quote from a book I was reading last night: "When Wesley would preach he
was often assaulted physically just for preaching the gospel. Mobs were raised
again and again against him and his fellow preachers. Occasionally a Methodist
meeting house would be utterly destroyed and the officers often favored the
culprits. England was as unlikely a place for a great revival as one could
imagine. The Puritan revival had been suppressed with great violence.
Independent-minded and Bible-believing preachers were everywhere abused, jailed,
run out of the country, or their property confiscated. England was hardly
civilized, utterly foreign to what we now know as England. Yet God breathed upon
John and Charles Wesley, on Whitefield and the preachers whom God raised up
with them, and a mighty revival transformed England. Besides leading to the
salvation of millions of souls the Wesleyan revival indirectly started a Sunday
school movement, caused prison reforms, stopped the slave trade, caused immense
reforms in government, and largely created what we know as traditional English
character, justice and society. The unbelief, the lewdness, the immorality and
dishonesty among the people and among church and government leaders when the
Wesleyan revival began were far more discouraging than is true in America
today. In view of the mighty revival God gave in Wesley's day, his foolish and faithless to believe that God
could not now stir America and England and anywhere else in the world where men
shake God and pay God's price for revival, as mightily as He did in Wesley's
day. The problem is not with the hardness of world conditions and wicked
hearts. The trouble is with the laborers. 'The harvest truly is great, but the
labourers are few.'" ~John R. Rice
Rice also writes that four infinite resources of God make revival always possible. 1. The infinite grace of God 2. The infinite power of the Word of God 3. The infinite, miracle-working power of the Spirit of God and 4. The power of persistent, prevailing, brokenhearted, believing prayer. He states, "When a group takes full advantage of these resources available, they cannot avoid revival." (We Can Have Revival Now! page 104)
