Implosion (28 page)

But there were also occasions when he misread the hearts and motives and sincerity of genuine believers, for he was not yet one himself. For a period of time, Finney attended a weekly prayer meeting that he concluded had no purpose and no impact. “On one occasion when I was in one of the prayer meetings, I was asked if I did not desire that they should pray for me,” he wrote. “I told them no, because I did not see that God answered their prayers. I said, ‘I suppose I need to be prayed for, for I am conscious that I am a sinner, but I do not see that it will do any good for you to pray for me, for you are continually asking, but you do not receive. You have been praying for a revival ever since I have been in Adams, and yet you do not have it. You have been praying for the Holy Spirit to descend upon you, and yet complaining of your leanness.”
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Little did Finney know that God
was
about to answer the prayers of those nameless but faithful saints—and the prayers of many others like them around the Northeast. Indeed, a sweeping revival was coming there, too, and the Lord was going to use Finney as one of the key agents of change.

It began on October 10, 1821, when Finney himself was miraculously saved. After many months of searching the Scriptures and imploring God for insight, one night Finney's eyes were opened. “Right there the revelation of my pride was distinctly shown to me as the great difficulty that stood in the way,” Finney wrote. He wept on his knees, deeply struck by “an overwhelming sense of my wickedness.” Yet at that moment, a passage of Scripture he had been reading (Jeremiah 29:12-13) “seemed to drop into my mind with a flood of light,” and he sensed the Lord saying directly to him, “Then shall you go and pray unto me, and I will hearken to you. Then shall you seek me and find me when you shall search for me with all your heart.”
[407]

What happened next stunned Finney. “I instantly seized hold of this with my heart. I had intellectually believed the Bible before, but never had the truth been in my mind that faith was a voluntary trust instead of an intellectual state. . . . I seized hold of [God's promises] with the grasp of a drowning man. . . . I remembered saying with great emphasis, ‘If I am ever converted, I will preach the Gospel.'”
[408]

Finney was not only saved to his great joy and relief, but he was true to his word, and the Lord used him to great effect. Immediately, acquaintances could see a change in his countenance and asked him what had changed. He told them of his salvation, and others began trusting Christ from that first day. The more people with whom Finney shared the gospel and his own experience, the more people were struck deeply by their own need for salvation, and they, too, prayed to receive Christ.

Soon Finney was leading so many people to the Lord that he decided he could no longer do the work of a lawyer but had to preach the gospel with all of his time. He realized that he had decided to become a lawyer before coming to Christ. He had never made the decision with God's wisdom or direction. Therefore, he concluded after prayer, the career wasn't from the Lord. He became convinced that he had the spiritual gift of an evangelist as described by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 4:11 and thus had to obey Paul's admonition in 2 Timothy 4:5 to “do the work of an evangelist, [and] fulfill your ministry.”

The Impact of Charles Finney

Word spread rapidly that something extraordinary was happening. The power and favor of Christ was upon Finney's life, and people could see it and sense it and were moved by it. Though he had no formal training in theology, he understood the basics of the gospel, and when he shared these truths, people said yes to Jesus. “The work spread among all classes and extended itself not only through the village but also out of the village in every direction,” Finney recalled. “My heart was so full that for more than a week I did not feel at all inclined to sleep or eat.”
[409]

Finney's parents were soon converted after he shared the message of Christ with them. Ministers began to ask him to preach, and he accepted many of those invitations. Floods of people were converted through his proclamation of the gospel.

Pastors who thought they had already been saved realized they had never truly been born again and were dramatically converted. Soon they, too, began preaching the gospel with new sincerity and conviction. People who had attended church for years but had never really believed now trusted Christ and began sharing the gospel with family, friends, and neighbors. Time after time, skeptics and cynics came to Finney's meetings to mock the young preacher, but time after time they shortly fell to their knees, weeping and begging Christ for mercy.

Finney realized that he desperately needed to know as much of the Bible as he possibly could. He later wrote, “I read my Bible on my knees a great deal during those days . . . beseeching the Lord to teach me his own mind.”
[410]

Finney also wrote, “I used to spend a great deal of time in prayer, sometimes literally praying ‘without ceasing.' I also found it very profitable, and felt very much inclined to hold frequent days of private fasting. On those days I would seek to be entirely alone with God—and would generally wander off into the woods, or get into the meeting house [church] or somewhere away entirely by myself. . . . Whenever I fasted and let the Spirit take his course with me, and gave myself up to let him lead and instruct me, I always found it in the highest degree useful. I found I could not live without enjoying the presence of God.”
[411]

God heard Finney's prayers and used him even more mightily in the years ahead. Sometimes Finney would show up at a completely packed church to preach (he often spoke for up to two hours at a time) only to find that the moment he stood up to speak, people began crying and publicly confessing their sins and rededicating their lives to Jesus Christ before Finney said a word. People were not only receiving Christ as their Savior and Lord but were intensely moved by their own sinfulness and their desperate need for God's mercy and forgiveness.

Revivals swept through central and upstate New York in places like Syracuse, Rome, and Utica, and “a great revival in Rochester over the winter of 1830–31 catapulted him to national renown.”
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Rochester was one of the larger cities in western New York, with a population of approximately ten thousand at the time. Finney not only preached three times on Sundays but held revival meetings at least three other times each week. In fact, in Rochester, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to save the unsaved and draw the already saved into a closer walk with Christ was so astounding that Finney's meetings drew hundreds of thousands of people from all over the region. Dr. Lyman Beecher, who contemporaneously chronicled the impact of the Finney revivals, observed that the ministry in Rochester “was the greatest work of God, and the greatest revival that the world has ever seen in so short a time. One hundred thousand . . . were reported as having connected themselves with churches as the results of that great revival. This is unparalleled in the history of the church.”
[413]

“The moral aspect of things [in Rochester] was greatly changed by this revival,” Finney observed. “It was a young city, full of thrift and enterprise, but also full of sin. The inhabitants were intelligent and enterprising in the highest degree, but as the revival swept through the town and converted the great mass of the most influential people, both men and women, the change in the order, sobriety, and morality of the city was wonderful.”
[414]

Christianity Today
has noted that “the zenith of Finney's evangelistic career was reached at Rochester, New York, where he preached 98 sermons between September 10, 1830, and March 6, 1831. Shopkeepers closed their businesses, posting notices urging people to attend Finney's meetings. . . . Crime dropped by two-thirds over the same period.”
[415]

Better yet, one historian noted, “the revival spread far beyond Rochester as revivalists and pastors who visited the city carried its enthusiasm and message back to the surrounding towns” and “a wave of revivals broke out from New England to Ohio as the new divinity suddenly caught hold and new measures proved an effective method for advancing them.”
[416]
Finney preached the gospel all over the Northeast, including in New York City for a year. To train and equip pastors, evangelists, and laypeople, he also published books of his sermons and later his autobiography.

The Legacy of Charles Finney

Revival “is the renewal of the first love of Christians, resulting in the awakening and conversion of sinners to God,” Finney wrote in his much-read and -discussed 1835 book,
Lectures on Revival
. “A revival of [true Christianity] is the arousing, quickening, and reclaiming of the more or less backslidden church and the more or less general awakening of all classes, and insuring attention to the claims of God. It presupposes that the church is sunk down in a backslidden state.”
[417]

In order to train a future generation of pastors and lay leaders and affect the moral and spiritual climate of the entire nation, Finney accepted the position of president of Oberlin College in Ohio in 1851. Like Francis Asbury, Finney took a long-term view. He didn't simply want to win souls; he wanted to win, build, and send pastors and fellow soul-winners throughout the United States. Also like Asbury, Finney cared deeply about the poor and needy in society, and he encouraged his students to do so as well. What's more, he believed women should receive better education, and Oberlin was the first college in the U.S. to admit women into its classes.
[418]

At Oberlin, Finney also became known for advocating the abolition of slavery. He and his students helped lay the groundwork for the North's moral opposition to slavery that would change the future of the nation just nine years later. Tragically, the people of the South resisted such desperately needed moral changes as the abolition of slavery and the restoration of freedom and justice to African Americans. Southern states began to secede from the Union upon the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, eventually resulting in a war that brought tremendous devastation on the country. Neither Finney nor the other revivalists can be directly blamed for the Civil War. Their desire, shared by millions of other Americans in the North and the South, was to see a peaceful process of national reform and renewal.

Finney was not perfect, of course, and he was by no means everyone's cup of tea. His critics have accused him, for example, of being too emotional and theatrical in his preaching in the early years of his ministry, and this is a fair criticism. That said, he seems to have matured over time and was somewhat less emotional in his later preaching and teaching, to the point where some later criticized him for not being passionate enough in his preaching.

As noted previously, Finney was not a trained theologian. But this should by no means be a disqualifier. Many men and women who have been used powerfully by the Lord have not had formal theological training. Yet some believed Finney was not careful enough with his theology and his teaching of the Scriptures. Others saw Finney as an outright heretic. Both charges he vehemently denied.

While there are a number of theological areas in which one could take issue with Finney, let me note one here, as it is particularly relevant to whether we will see a Third Great Awakening. While Finney spoke often about the power of the Holy Spirit and wrote extensively about the role of the Holy Spirit in changing lives, he firmly believed that employing certain methods of ministry could bring about a revival no matter what. Whereas the Wesleys and Asbury taught that ministers should use certain methods based on biblical principles with the hope that the Lord would unleash revivals, Finney taught with conviction that if believers followed certain principles and took certain steps, God would, in turn, pour out his Holy Spirit, and a revival would ensue. “[Revival] is not a miracle,” he argued vigorously, “or dependent on a miracle. . . . It consists entirely in the
right exercise
of the power of nature. It is just that, and nothing else. . . . It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means—as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means. There may be a miracle among its antecedent causes, or there may not. The apostles employed miracles, simply as a means by which they arrested attention to their message, and established its divine authority. But the miracle was not the revival.”
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I don't believe this teaching is scripturally sound. Revivals and awakenings cannot be created by man. Only God can bring them about. There are certainly things that the Scriptures tell all believers to do to serve the Lord and seek to win a community and bless a nation. We'll discuss these in the next chapter. Nowhere in Scripture, however, do we see that human actions guarantee a revival, much less a Great Awakening. Our test is our faithfulness to the Word, not the results that we see. Pastors and missionaries who faithfully preach the gospel in a community or a country for years but see little fruit will be rewarded in heaven for their faithful obedience to the Lord and his Word, not for their visible results. As the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth. Now he who plants and he who waters are one; but each will receive his own reward according to his own labor” (1 Corinthians 3:6-8). We do our part, God does his, and only he decides whether to cause much growth or a little, to unleash a revival or an awakening or not.

That said, I don't think Finney should be condemned or dismissed for believing that his methods would always cause revivals. He took certain actions, and they did bear much fruit. Many people did come under the conviction of sin. Many people did repent and give their hearts, souls, and minds to Christ. Nearly everything Finney did seemed to result in revival. So perhaps he can be forgiven for believing that other believers in other times and places would see the same results if they took the same actions.