November 28 Daily Devotional

The graph of grace

The long history of the Church can be put in the form of a graph. It starts there at Pentecost in what may be described as a mighty revival. After a lapse of time, you remember, the power appeared to have passed, and the Church went down into a trough. The devil and the world were attacking, and everything seemed to be lost. The Church had no authority and no power. Men became desperate. Suddenly God pours out His Spirit again. There is a mighty revival, and the Church is lifted up to the very crest of the wave once more. That is how the history of the Church has progressed. It has not been a steady level. We might wish it to be like that, but it has never been so. It has always been this up and down, and the ups are the revivals, the ‘pouring forth’ of the Spirit.... Under such mighty outpourings men have testified that they have learned more of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ in an hour in a meeting during a revival than they had learned in a lifetime of Bible study and reading theology. At the same time men and women who had hitherto belonged to the world and who had never heard the gospel before seemed to be put into the same position immediately.

There is something very wonderful about this ... ‘He that dwelleth in the heavens shall laugh’ [Psalm 2:4] and I believe that God sometimes laughs at the Church. He sees us ready to put out our hands to steady the ark. We think that we alone can do it. We are greatly concerned. We hold our conferences and bring out our proposals. But they come to nothing. Then, when we are quite exhausted, after all our great campaigns, conferences and our brilliant organization ... God unexpectedly—in the last place where you would ever have expected Him to do so and through the last person you would ever have thought of—suddenly sheds forth the Spirit. Then the Church rises to a new period of glory, of power and of influence. Men and women are again converted in masses, and the power of the truth is again upon them.

Authority, pp. 90–2