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Revival - please pray for revival in Thailand! Revival (Part 1) Duncan Campbell described revival as ‘a community saturated with God.’ “Revival is a church word; it has to do with God’s people. You cannot revive the world; the world is dead in trespasses and sins; you cannot revive a corpse. But you can revitalize where there is life.” ‒ Douglas Brown 1922 Evan Roberts made the same claim in Wales in 1904: “My mission is first to the churches. When the churches are aroused to their duty, men of the world will be swept into the Kingdom. A whole church on its knees is irresistible.” “A true revival begins always with those who are believers in New Testament Christianity and as Edwin Orr wisely reminds us, ‘more particularly those who had enjoyed the New Testament experience of conversion and regeneration.’ Revival is therefore an evangelical experience; it is an ‘evangelical awakening.’ In searching for a biblical definition and description of revival it is commonplace to use the account in Acts chapter 2. However, we must not forget that in some ways the story of the Holy Spirit coming to the early Christians at Pentecost is unique. This is not to say that it has nothing to teach on the subject; on the contrary, there has never been a community so saturated with God as those 120 Christians in the upper room. But the uniqueness of that story is that they did not start where the church finds itself today. Pentecost was not a reviving of what was dying, nor a cleansing of what had become polluted by the world. The disciples were not commanded to wait in Jerusalem until they received repentance or forgiveness or revival. There was only one thing the Christians had to wait for, and that was power to carry out their Lord’s command to go and witness to the world (Acts 1:  . Revival is not primarily to give the church power, though it certainly does this, but to give it life. There is a world of difference. In one sense the church had no history before Pentecost. In Acts 2 the church was not restored to where it ought to have been and from where it had fallen, but it was the starting-point of the new covenant church. So the story of Acts will certainly describe the effects of a community ‘saturated with God,’ but it cannot tell us all we need to know on the subject.” ‒ Brian H. Edwards“A true Holy Spirit revival is a remarkable increase in the spiritual life of a large number of God’s people, accompanied by an awesome awareness of the presence of God, intensity of prayer and praise, a deep conviction of sin with a passionate longing for holiness and unusual effectiveness in evangelism, leading to the salvation of many unbelievers. Revival is remarkable, large, effective and, above all, it is something that God brings about. It is quite impossible for man to create revival. Though men may prepare and pray for it, revival is the work of the sovereign God, not primarily for the benefit of the people, but for HIS OWN HONOUR AND GLORY. Commenting upon Acts 2:1, ‘when the day of Pentecost came,’ Arthur Wallis claims: ‘Every genuine revival is clearly stamped with the hallmark of divine sovereignty, and in no way is this more clearly seen than in the time factor. The moment for that first outpouring of the Spirit was not determined by the believers in the upper room but by God, who had foreshadowed it centuries before in those wonderful types in the Old Testament.’” - Brian H. Edwards from the book “Revival a people saturated with God” 
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