Dear Friends in Christ,

The following is a brief account of the Welsh revival in 1904.  I believe that once you read this account you’ll understand better what we’re talking about concerning revival, and it’s our prayer that it will fire your heart to pray for another outpouring of God’s Spirit.  Even now there are signs everywhere that God is preparing His Church for what I believe will be the greatest awakening in the history of the Church.  Oh, I pray Our Father will bless this to your hearts.

HOW THEY PRAYED IN THE WELSH REVIVAL
by Edwin & Lillian Harvey

When proud man bends, the mountains flow down.  This happened in a most decided manner with that young Welsh miner, Evan Roberts, just previous to the outpouring of God upon the villages, towns, and cities of Wales during the 1904 revival.  We can always trace the work of God to a praying figure, and there were praying people whose intercessions shaped the instrument used so mightily at that time.

Seth Joshua had prayed for four years for God to raise up an instrument either from the plow or the mines who would be used in the hands of the Almighty to bring the once religious principality of Wales back to its God.  The spiritual condition was very low, and attendance at the house of God was poor.  It was time for Him to work.  Then there were praying groups, scattered here and there, whose sighs and cries were heard in Heaven.  The instrument prayed for was being prepared by God for some years previous although unknown to those who were so deeply concerned.

When only a lad in his early teens, Evan had attended a prayer meeting.  One night the words of William Davies, the deacon, remained as a nail fixed in a sure place in the mind of the youth.  “Remember,” the deacon said, “to be faithful.  What if the Spirit descended and you were absent?  Remember Thomas!  What a loss he had!”  But Evan shares the story of what happened:

“I said to myself:  ‘I will have the Spirit;’ and through every kind of weather and in spite of all difficulties, I went to the meeting.  Many times, on seeing other boys with the boats on the tide, I was tempted to turn back and join them.  But, no, I said to myself:  ‘Remember your resolve,’ and on I went.  I went faithfully to the meetings for prayer throughout the ten or eleven years I prayed for a Revival.  It was the Spirit that moved me thus to think.” 

I well remember how my husband and I stood on that little winding road which led out to Loughor, a mining village, a few miles from Swansea.  A local friend had taken us to see the blacksmith shop where Evan Roberts had worked for a time, and it seemed we partook of the spirit which still seemed to us to pervade that spot.  Born in 1878 in the mountainous mining district of Wales, Evan also spent some of his working time down underneath those hills mining the coal, while the Lord was shaping His instrument to mine the souls of men.

Later a call to preach produced a struggle in the heart of the candidate.  Finally he yielded, saying, “For me a grave or a pulpit.”  The preparatory school for ministers to which he went was presided over by a godly man who encouraged the students to seek for deeper experience of grace.  Even at this period the young ministerial student was spending nights in prayer for revival.

Already the sound of a coming movement was in the air.  Here and there were tokens of a future blessing.  At a Keswick Convention held at Llandrindod in Wales in 1903, Evan Roberts heard the late F.B. Meyer speak.  He too had likewise been praying for a revival for many years.  The obedience of a young woman who rose at this gathering and said, “I love Jesus Christ with all my heart,” unleashed a small rivulet of grace which was but the forerunner to the floods which were to inundate Wales a year later.

When God sees a person bent upon being all for Himself, He will move Heaven and earth to bring that person into contact with the right individuals.  Seth Joshua, an evangelist with the Forward movement of the Presbyterian Church, went to a place in Cardiganshire to hold special meetings.  Some of the young students from the school were there, Evan among them.  One of the hymns sung was “Bend Me Lower.”  The presence of God was again felt in a marked way.  Evan Roberts was under the burden of prayer, and in this service he had a vision of God’s condescending love to sinners.

The Spirit was saying to the young man, “You need to be bent.”  Speaking of this momentous time in his spiritual history, he records:  “I felt some living energy of force coming into my bosom.  It held my breath.  My legs trembled terribly.  This living energy increased as gone after the other prayed until it nearly burst me…. My bosom was boiling and if I had not prayed I would have burst.

“What boiled in me was that verse:  ‘God commendeth His love.’  I fell on my knees with my arms stretched out over the seat before me.  The perspiration poured down my face, and my tears streamed so quickly I thought the blood came out…. I cried, ‘Bend me, bend me!’  I thought blood was gushing forth.”

Certain friends there approached him to wipe his face while he continued to call out:  “O Lord, bend me!  Bend me!”  The Lord answered that prayer and Roberts continues:

“After I was bent a wave of peace came over me and the audience sang, ‘I hear Thy welcome voice.’  And as they sang I thought about the bending at the Judgment Day and I was filled with compassion for those that would have to bend on that day, and I wept.  Henceforth the salvation of souls became the burden of my heart.  From that time I was on fire with a desire to go through all Wales, and if it were possible, I was willing to pay God for the privilege of going.”

Back at school, the young man felt a loneliness and isolation as he was eyed rather suspiciously by those who could not understand his recently acquired burden for others, and the overwhelming love of God which had been shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost.  He felt led to leave the school and return to his own village of Loughor to hold some services.  Here he mentioned four requisites for revival.

1. Past sin had to be confessed.
2. Anything of a doubtful nature had to be put away.
3. Do whatever the Spirit of God prompts you to do.  For, said he, it is better to offend men than to grieve the Spirit of God.
4. A personal confession of Christ as Savior.

Speaking of these services, he explained his procedure there.  “At the beginning of the revival, the usual meetings held in Loughor were for one hour.  I went there on the Monday night, began at 8:15, and went on for two hours.  Every night, we went on with the meetings until I felt, and they all felt, that the work for that meeting was accomplished, every night working with the Holy Ghost, until the work for that particular meeting was done.

“In the fourth meeting the one thing emphasized was that they should confess Christ as their Savior.  There was a lack of that – ten only confessed, and felt there was a stiffness to confess.  I prayed on that one point.  I determined to wait until dawn before leaving the place, and prayed and prayed and prayed.  After a time we had ten, not converts but church members, to make a confession in public.  It was a declaration of their faith, not an acceptance of Christ.  After some ten minutes there came the eleventh, and in less than half an hour there were twenty; and I felt that something had been done.  They used the power they had.  They had confessed Christ, and they all felt as if they had some great joy, and that opened them to receive.  Each one must use what he has before he will get more.  Perhaps in this case they did not like the public confessing, and others may not like it; but they must do it, like or not like, and then if they will obey, God will work upon their volition.

“In the seventh meeting, in the seventh hour, I was impressed to pray – not only to ‘hope’, but to pray and believe that the Holy Ghost would come down and come THAT VERY MOMENT.  THE FAITH WAS GIVEN… There would be about one hundred present, and I was in the big pew, and there I sat and I prayed a definite prayer, then each one prayed it, half through the congregation, there was a movement and somebody was crying under the gallery – one here, one there.  Afterwards it transpired that there was more than one in the same pew upon whom God worked.

“The difficulty is to get meetings in which the work is accomplished.  Workers go so far, then stop….There is a beginning, and ending, and you must know when there is an end to God’s purpose for that meeting, and work with God until it is done.  There is too much trifling with God.  There is a lack of co-operation with Him.  They will ‘pray’, but He will never come by prayer alone.  The value of prayer lies in its answer.”

Rapidly the fire of revival spread to other parts of Wales.  Dr. F. B. Meyer and G. Campbell Morgan wished to see for themselves what was going on, so they visited the area in the early days of the movement.  Outside the railway station at Cardiff they accosted a policemen, asking him where the revival was.  Putting his hand on his heart and with face aglow he replied, “Gentlemen, it is here.”  So they had a favorable impression for their first contact.

F.B. Meyer’s impressions of the man God was so mightily using in the salvation of souls have been left recorded.  “F.B. Meyer saw one evening a young minister came into a crowded service.  During the meeting he stood up and prayed for two of his unsaved friends who were scoffing in the gallery.  One of them immediately arose and said, ‘I am not scoffing.  I am simply saying I am not a infidel but an agnostic.  If God wants to save my soul I will give Him an opportunity.  Let God do it.’

“This boast seemed to strike Evan Roberts so that he fell on his knees in a perfect agony of soul.  It seemed as though his very heart would break beneath the weight of this man’s sin.

“A friend of Dr. Meyer’s who stood near him said, ‘This is too dreadful!  I cannot bear to hear this man groan so!  I will start a tune to drown it!’

“Dr. Meyer said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t do that.  I want this thing to sink into my heart.  I’ve preached to great masses of people without turning a hair;  I want the throb of this man’s anguish to touch my own soul.’

“Evan Roberts sobbed on and on and Meyer said, My God, let me learn that sob, that my soul may break while I preach the Gospel to men.’

“After about ten minutes Roberts arose and addressed the men in the gallery:  ‘Will you yield?’  They said, ‘Why should we?’  Then he said to the people:  ‘Let us pray,’  The air became heavy with signs, tears, and these two men upon their hearts, as if their hearts must break beneath the strain.

“Meyer declares that he never felt anything like it.  He sprang to his feet; felt as though he were choking.  He said to his friend:  ‘We are in a very fight between Heaven and hell.  Don’t you see Heaven pulling this way and hell that?  It seems as though one heard the beasts in the arena.’

“Soon one of the men yielded.  The other went his way like the impenitent thief.  If it took that to reach men in the great Welsh Revival, will it not take the same today?

“O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night:  give thyself no rest….Arise, cry out in the night:  in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord’ (Lam. 2:18,19).”

Here are some of the impressions which Campbell Morgan shared with his congregation in Westminster:  “In connection with the awakening there was no preaching, no order, no hymn books, no choirs, no organ, no collection, and finally, no advertising.  Now, think of that for a moment again will you?  Think of all our work.  I am not saying these things are wrong.  I simply want you to see what God is doing.

“There were the organs, but silent; the minister, but among the people, rejoicing and prophesying with the rest, only there was no preaching.  Yet the Welsh Revival is the revival of preaching to Wales.  Everybody is preaching.  No order, yet it moves from day to day, week to week, county to county, with matchless precision, with the order of an attacking force.  No song books, but ah, me I nearly wept tonight over the singing of our last hymn.  When the Welsh sing they abandon themselves to their singing.  We sing as though we thought it would not be respectable to be heard by the one next to us.  No choir,  did I say?  It was all choir!

“And hymns!  I stood and listened in wonder and amazement as the congregation sang hymn after hymn, without hymn books.  Oh, don’t you see it?  The Sunday School is having its harvest now.  The family altar is having its harvest now.  The teaching of hymns and the Bible among those Welsh hills and valleys in having its harvest now.

“There was not advertising.  The whole thing advertised itself.  You tell me the press advertised it.  I tell you they did not begin advertising it until the thing caught fire and spread.  And let me say to you, one of the most remarkable things is the attitude of the Welsh press.  I came across instance after instance of men converted by reading the story of the revival in The Western Mail and the South Wales Daily News.

“In the name of God let us all cease trying to find it!  At least let us cease trying to trace it to any one man or convention.  You cannot trace it.  And yet I will trace it tonight.  Whence has it come?  All over Wales – I am giving you roughly the result of the questioning of fifty or more persons at random in the week -a praying remnant has been agonizing before God about the state of this beloved land, and it is through prayer the answer of fire has come.

“You tell me that the revival originated with Evan Roberts.  I tell you that Roberts is a product of the revival.  You tell me that it began in an Endeavor meeting where a young girl bore testimony.  I tell you that was the result of a revival breaking out everywhere….It is a Divine visitation in which God — let me say this reverently –in which God is saying to us:  ‘See what I can do without the things you are depending on;  see what I can do in answer to a praying people;  see what I can do through the simplest, who are ready to fall in line, and depend wholly and absolutely upon Me.’  Within five weeks twenty thousand have joined the churches.

“What effect is this work producing upon men?  First of all, it is turning Christians everywhere into evangelists.  There is nothing more remarkable about it than that, I think.  People you never expected to see doing this kind of thing are becoming personal workers….

“The revival is characterized by the most remarkable confession of sin, confessions that must be costly.  I heard some of them, men rising who have been members of the church, and officers of the church, confessing hidden sin in their heart, impurity, committed and condoned, and seeking prayer for its putting away.  The whole Welsh Revival is marvelously characterized by a confession of Jesus Christ, testimony to His power, to His goodness, to His beneficence, and testimony merging for evermore into outbursts of singing.

“Oh, brothers, sisters, Pray, Pray, Pray alone!  Pray in secret!  Pray together!  and pray out of a sense of the world’s sin and sorrow.”

W.T. Stead wrote for London’s Daily Chronicle:  “There was absolutely nothing wild, violent, hysterical, unless it be hysterical for the laboring breast to heave with sobbing that cannot be repressed, and the throat to choke with emotion as a sense of the awful horror and shame of a wasted life suddenly bursts upon the soul.  On all sides there was the solemn gladness of men and women upon whose eyes has dawned the splendor of a new day.

“Employers tell me that the quality of the work the miners are putting in has improved.  Waste is less;  men go to their daily toil with a new spirit of gladness in their labor.  In the long dim galleries of the mine, where once the hauliers swore at their ponies in Welshified English  terms of blasphemy, there is now but to be heard the haunting melody of the revival music.  The pit ponies, like the American mules, having been driven by oaths and curses since they first bore the yoke, are being retrained to do their work without the incentive of profanity.

“There is less drinking, less idleness, less gambling.  Men record with almost incredulous amazement how one football player after another has forsworn cards and drink and the gladiatorial games, and is living a sober and godly life, putting his energy into the revival….

“Two thirds of the congregation were men and at least half were young men, stalwart young miners, who gave the meetings all the fervor and swing and enthusiasm of youth….The last person to control the meeting in any way is Mr. Evan Roberts.

“People pray and sing, give testimony, exhort, as the Spirit moves them.  As a study of the psychology of crowds, I have seen nothing like it.  You feel that 1,000 or 1,500 persons before you have become merged into one myriad-headed but single-souled personality.”

D.W. Lambert, in an article on the revival in Wales, said of the results:  “While the revival was emotional (it was working on Celtic soil), it was also ethical.  The Spirit of God did His own work of conviction as the standard of restitution was set up.  A young man would return his prize medal or diploma because he had gained it unfairly.  Long-standing debts were paid, and stolen goods returned.  Prize fighters, drunkards, gamblers, and publicans, were savingly transformed. Magistrates had no cases to try and public houses were deserted.  Prayer meetings were held underground, and it is said that even the pit ponies felt the revival in the changed language and manner of their masters.

“Above all, this was a revival of prayer.  It began in prayer and prayer was the keynote all through.  In many meetings there was no preaching or speaking, just a great volume of prayer and praise going up to God.”

The revival suddenly ceased in 1905 when many thought it could not be contained without spreading world-wide.  Always when there is a work of God, Satan is unusually busy imitating the Spirit’s work.  My husband and I held meetings in the very area where the revival had its greatest impact.  The little chapel in which we ministered had been one of the first in which mighty grace had wrought miracles.  We met those who had been subjects of the revival, and there was something marked about them.  The prints of the hob nailed boots had left their impression on the old forms, and as we listened to hear their heavenly singing we had to admit that if it was so wonderful when no revival was in session, what must it have been when God was moving upon thousands, touching the heart strings and loosing lips long sealed.

We listened to stories first-hand, related by men well on in years who had witnessed God’s movements in the revival.  We begged for some of these personal reminiscences to be written down for future generations to read, but the chief historian who could have done it was removed shortly afterwards by death.

What had caused the sudden withdrawal of the instrument – Evan Roberts?…  The biographer of Mrs. Jessie Penn Lewis gives this short explanation:  “Through the strain and suffering brought upon him during eight months of daily and continuous meetings in crowded, ill-ventilated chapels, one of the chief figures of the awakening in Wales completely broke down, and thus it came about that by the invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Penn-Lewis, Mr. Evan Roberts went down to the country home near Leicester, where they were now living, for a time of rest and recuperation.  His recovery, however, was slow and intermittent, lasting many months, and during the long period of convalescence, he began to open his mind to the hostess on many experiences of supernatural forces witnessed during the Revival.  Since her own mighty enduement of power for service, Mrs. Penn-Lewis had learned the path of the Cross, and seen the dangers attendant upon souls who, having experienced such a breaking-through into the supernatural realm, do not know identification with Christ in His death as the place of safety from the wiles and assaults of the devil.”

During his stay in this gracious home, he, together with his hostess, authored a book, War on the Saints, enlightening many Christians as to the subtle attacks of Satan upon the work of God and upon individual souls.  He often strikes his heaviest blows at the saintliest of men and women.  Satan is more active when God is active through His Holy Spirit.  At the beginning of the original, unabridged edition of the above book there is this word:  “As the key is to the lock, so is this book to the Christian.”  Upon reading it one is aware that the authors were acquainted with Satanic wiles and wished to admonish others.  Out of the greatest movement of God can come many subtle attacks of the evil one bent on discrediting the work of God.  This book is doubtless a prize coming from one who, first-hand, fought out most fierce conflicts with the prince of the power of the air.

Copied by permission from Harvey Christian Publishers, Inc.

Copied from How They Prayed, Volume Three — Missionaries and Revival, by Edwin and Lillian Harvey Copyright 1987

We would encourage you to get your own copy.  Contact Harvey Christian Publishers, Inc.  3107 Hwy.  321,  Hampton, TN  37658.  Tel/Fax (423) 768-2297.  E-mail:  books@harveycp.com.  https://www.harveycp.com. If for some reason you can’t afford the book, but still want it, then write to us and we’ll see that you get one.  I’d like everyone on our list to read this book.  Write to me personally at my home address.

Concerning the Ministry: A number of people heard about a conference on Holiness and Revival at the Vineyard in California and donated the funds to send me along with a good friend Gordon Douglas out for the week. The speakers will be Leonard Ravenhill, his son David, John Wimber, and Paul Cain.  We thank God for this blessed opportunity.

We also thank you for the support of this work and hope that our letters are a blessing to you.  We view this as a most vital ministry.  If you are praying for us would you just drop us a note telling us so.  God bless you.

Your Brother in Christ,

Jim