Call Down Lightning

What the Welsh Revival of 1904 Reveals About the End Times

Wallace Henley

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780785219118
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: World History

God Is Up to Something Big

The Bible dedicates more space to prophecy than to any other subject. These prophetic portions of Scripture have received an enormous amount of literary attention throughout the history of the church. Over the past fifty years alone countless books have been written about the biggest global trends of our day and whether they are signs of the coming end times. But one sign has been inexplicably neglected—revival. Wallace Henley believes such a spiritual awakening is not only possible today but probable—and likely a harbinger of the end times. 

Where are we on the timeline of human history?

Are we approaching the rapture of the church?

Henley presents a meticulously researched and compelling case that the Welsh Revival and the historical cycle revealed in God’s redemptive interactions with nations, make it highly likely that our contemporary world is ripe for the lightning of another revival. Henley is confident that we will be a part of that worldwide event, perhaps moving all creation nearer to its sudden glorious conclusion and rebirth.

CHAPTER 1

We Need Lightning Now!

Can it happen again?

—LEWIS DRUMMOND¹

I will never forget the lightning which came into his voice.”

These words were uttered by Alun Morgan of Caerfarchell, a man who experienced the Welsh Revival of 1904. The memory was voiced to friends in the 1930s, more than two decades after Morgan had heard Evan Roberts speak.

Yet Morgan had never forgotten the lightning that characterized Roberts in those years.²

When the revival bolt hit Evan Roberts, a church leader described the young man as “acting like a particle of radium” or a “consuming fire which took away sleep, cleared the channels of tears and sped the wheels of prayer throughout this district.”³

Evan himself would never forget the spiritual bolt that struck him. A few weeks later he told W. T. Stead, a journalist, that it was “Living Energy.” It had “invaded his soul, burst all bonds, and overwhelmed him.”⁴

The lightning struck Roberts during a September 29, 1904, service conducted by Seth Joshua at Blaenannerch. The first meeting had been at seven that morning. During that session, Evan began to sense an “irresistible influence” coming upon him as he heard Joshua pray, “Bend me!”

Evan had trundled the road from Newcastle Emlyn to Blaenannerch in a wagon with Joshua and a group of fellow students. All the way there Evan had felt confused, swinging from gloom to joy. But there was something in the “Bend me” prayer that resonated deeply within him.

After that early meeting and before the next, which would be at 9:00 a.m., Evan and his friends and Joshua breakfasted at the home of Pastor M. P. Morgan. Later, journeying to the chapel, Joshua spoke suddenly: “We are going to have a wonderful meeting here today.” Evan answered, “I am just bursting!”

During the 9:00 a.m. service, Evan sat in a pew off to the side with friends from Newquay. Evan was struggling. He remembered that a little earlier, at breakfast, Magdalen Phillips had passed him bread and butter, and he had refused it. As he had watched Joshua receive the same food, a thought sliced into Evan’s psyche: What if God offers His Spirit, and I am not ready to receive Him, and others are ready to accept Him were they offered?⁵

This angst stirred in Evan as he sat in the Blaenannerch chapel. It was so evident that two ministers took note of the anguished young man and concluded he was neurotic.

But the ground of Evan’s soul was experiencing the buildup of the charge. Within moments the revival lightning struck him.

At the start of the meeting, many were praying.

“Shall I pray now?” Evan asked the Lord.

“No,” he sensed the Holy Spirit saying.

Evan obeyed and sat in silence. In that interval the charge continued to intensify in his spirit and soul. The cloud of God’s manifest presence seemed to hover over him. Finally, as Evan waited and others around him prayed, he felt the “living energy.” He trembled as the energy built up within him.

“Shall I pray now?” Evan asked the Holy Spirit. He felt that he would explode if he didn’t speak out in prayer. Evan then entered into the “Bend me” prayer, and the lightning struck with intensity. Later he described it:

What boiled in my bosom was the verse, “For God commendeth His love.” I fell on my knees with my arms outstretched on the seat before me. The perspiration poured down my face and my tears streamed quickly until I thought the blood came out. Mrs. Davies of Mona, Newquay, came to wipe my face, and Magdalen Phillips stood on my right and Maud Davies on my left. I cried, “Bend Me, Bend Me, Bend Me . . . OH! OH! OH!” Mrs. Davies said, “O wonderful grace.” “Yes,” said I, “O wonderful grace.” It was God commending His love that bent me, and I not seeing anything to commend. After I was “bended,” a wave of peace and joy filled my bosom.⁶

In a short time the humble youth, a gangly former coal miner, would-be blacksmith, and student preparing for seminary would be regarded as the leader of the 1904 Revival and remembered that way by history. Lightning is thus an apt metaphor for spiritual revival. When the Holy Spirit’s power strikes, the flesh is seared through conviction and experiences “death,” while the face is turned toward heaven, from whence came the bolt.

“The revival would usually come suddenly, and people could name the day and the hour that this happened,” wrote Welsh historian R. Tudur Jones. They would use descriptive terms like “as the floodgates opened” or “the fire came down” or “the baptism happened.”⁷ Suddenly was a much-used word by those who would be touched by the revival.

Sometimes it takes a bolt of lightning to get our attention. In our time we have come to the point that we must have revival as dramatic, searing, and life-giving as that bolt that singed Martin Luther’s soul and sent his body diving to the ground.

All other solutions have failed us. We must have the bolt of revival or perish. We must have the bolt of revival as a precursor to our Lord’s return. And when I say we need revival, and that there is little hope in anything else, I feel both the words and the urgency.

I am not alone.

FRAYING SOCIETY

In a New York Times article, Roger Cohen put our situation into stark perspective. He imagined a future conversation about the grim situations of the present: “It was the time of unraveling . . . beheadings . . . aggression . . . breakup . . . weakness . . . hatred . . . fever . . . disorientation.” Cohen explained:

The fabric of society frayed. Democracy looked quaint or outmoded beside new authoritarianisms. Politicians, haunted by their incapacity, played on the fears of their populations, who were device-distracted or under device-driven stress. Dystopia was a vogue word, like utopia in the 20th century. The great rising nations of vast populations held the fate of the world in their hands but hardly seemed to care. . . .

Until it was too late and people could see the Great Unraveling for what it was and what it had wrought.⁸

This “great unraveling” is a result of our soul being sick because it is broken. When Adam and Eve rebelled, evil sundered the soul from the spirit. We are fragmented beings. The spirit died to God, and there was nothing transcendent to guide thoughts, emotions, choices, and thus the deeds done in the body.

This can no longer be dismissed as the outmoded thinking of religious fanatics. The madness around us is proof.

Can we not see it? How blind can we be?

Revival returns God to the human spirit through the Holy Spirit, whose fruit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22–23). What’s wrong with that? “Plenty,” say elitist establishments who have given us all the other balms and plans and theories that are supposed to heal us but only make us sicker.

Revival links the Spirit-indwelt human spirit with the soul once again, as in the days when Eden was called Paradise.

Before that, it was a tohubohu—formless and void, chaotic and barren. Then the Holy Spirit brooded over the face of the deep and Paradise emerged. Revival, as we will see, is the Holy Spirit brooding over us again, nurturing true life, connecting us to God, enabling us to experience at least a touch of the paradise that will come again at the coming again of the creative Logos without whom nothing was made that was made: the Lord Jesus Christ.

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW

The stakes are higher at this hour than at any other time in world history. In the nuclear buildups of the Cold War era, under the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, a grim possibility emerged that history had never before faced: humanity possessed enough firepower to wipe out the whole world. The Co...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: We Need Lightning Now!
• Chapter 2: The Times and Seasons of True Revival
• Chapter 3: The Revival Cycle
• Chapter 4: The Tao of Lightning
• Chapter 5: The Hovering Cloud
• Chapter 6: The Ground Below
• Chapter 7: The Church and Revival
• Chapter 8: Evan Roberts and the Living Energy
• Chapter 9: Many Rods
• Chapter 10: Dynamics of the Lightning
• Chapter 11: Handling the Lightning
• Chapter 12: Revival and Spiritual Warfare
• Chapter 13: The Weight of God’s Glory
• Chapter 14: The Reach of the Revival
• Chapter 15: Why Revival Tapers
• Chapter 16: Jubilee!
• Afterglow
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author