Call Down Lightning: What the Welsh Revival of 1904 Reveals About the End Times

Praise for Call Down Lightning

A refreshment and challenge to my soul.

—DONALD MITCHELL, UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, BYNTIRION, BRIDGEND, WALES

God is ready to lift our society—all the ingredients are here: the lightning rods of God’s people crying out in prayer are sparking a transformative, sustained movement of His relentless love. I heartily recommend a thorough reading of this insightful work. The formative clouds of revival cover our land; the wind of God is brooding over us, breeding life into our nation. ‘The Lord reigns, let the earth rejoice . . . His lightnings light up the world; the earth sees and trembles’ (Psalm 97:1–4 ESV).

—TOM PHILLIPS, VICE PRESIDENT, BILLY GRAHAM EVANGELISTIC ASSOCIATION; AUTHOR OF JESUS NOW AWAKENING

"Words are inadequate to describe just how invigorating, thought-provoking, and motivating it was to read Call Down Lightning! Wallace Henley’s unique gift of communicating stirs the heart and soul to learn from the lessons of revival and to re-dig from those wells with a hunger for a modern-day outpouring of the Holy Spirit. . . . I believe this book can be a catalyst to fan the flames for revival again. . . . Wallace Henley rightfully reminds us, ‘In true revival, Jesus Christ is seen more clearly than ever.’"

—DOUG STRINGER, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, SOMEBODY CARES INTERNATIONAL; AUTHOR OF LEADERSHIP AWAKENING

© 2019 Wallace Henley

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Epub Edition January 2019 9780785219118

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ISBN 978-0-7852-1907-1 (TP)

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To the memory of

Dr. Billy Graham

Who went to heaven as this book was being finished

And to our great-grandchildren,

Victoria and Sofia Trejo, Jack Hesley,

and those yet to be born

May you see Jubilee in your lifetime

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

In the last days, God says,

I will pour out my Spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy,

your young men will see visions,

your old men will dream dreams.

Even on my servants, both men and women,

I will pour out my Spirit in those days,

and they will prophesy.

I will show wonders in the heavens above

and signs on the earth below.

—ACTS 2:17–19 NIV

Prologue

The Gathering Storm was the title Winston Churchill gave to the first volume of his history of the Second World War. In many ways that conflict, which ultimately became global, is a parable in human time of the war in the heavens (Rev. 12:7), the great battle for the advance of the kingdom of God in a world occupied by the powers of darkness (1 John 5:19).

Several years ago I coauthored God and Churchill with Jonathan Sandys, Churchill’s great-grandson. After a year of probing Churchill’s mind through his great-grandson’s memories, I gained a small sense of what Churchill might have felt in 1939–40 as the storm of Adolf Hitler’s blitz swept down on England.

Jonathan arranged for us to premiere the British version of the book at the Churchill War Rooms, the labyrinth beneath the streets of Whitehall, the London center of the British government. I had been in the War Rooms before, among tourists, but this time was special. I arrived early for the book premiere, and my wife, Irene, and I strolled through the War Rooms alone, sensing the weight and somber atmosphere of the place.

As a sixteen-year-old boy, Churchill had told a schoolmate that someday London would be under attack and that he would be in a high position and would save England and the British Empire. In 1939–40, when Britain stood alone against Hitler, Prime Minister Churchill might have forgotten the amazing prediction he had made decades earlier.

On grim nights in 1940, as bombs burst on the landscape above the War Rooms, Churchill could not envision May 8, 1945, when the Nazis would surrender, and he would stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with the royal family, celebrating the victory over the storm and commemorating the suffering.

The Lord Jesus Christ, in Matthew 24, warned His followers of the gathering storm of great tribulation, but He also talked about the proclamation of His kingdom reaching every nation and people group in the world. This would precede His return to earth at the climax of finite time.

Jesus described a massive harvest coming in the end times (Matt. 13). It will be the fruit of all the sowing of the gospel of the kingdom throughout the ages. It will be sudden, sweeping, and massive.

Through Paul, in 1 Corinthians 10, the Holy Spirit gave us a clue about when the end times begin. Everything that happened to Moses and the Hebrews during the Exodus and coming into the promised land "happened to them as an example, and they were written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come" (1 Cor. 10:11, italics added).

Therefore, the Corinthian believers two thousand years ago were already living in the end times. Since the end times mark a crossing from the age of the law and the prophets into the age of grace, some things become clear. First, we are living in the period of the birth pangs (Matt. 24:8) immediately preceding His return. Second, we exist in the end times. Third, we should therefore expect a great revival ahead and prepare for it now.

There is evidence that revival has begun in the midst of the present storm of tribulation and intensifying immorality and paganism. Christians worldwide constitute an intensely persecuted group. Yet China, which was an impenetrable galaxy in my youth, is rapidly becoming one of the largest Christian populations in the world. Multitudes in the Middle East are turning to Christ. The demographic center of world Christianity has shifted to the Global South. Some of the largest churches in the British Isles have been planted by immigrants whose ancestors had been brought to Christ through the work of nineteenth-century missionaries from Britain.

In this book I focus on the Welsh Revival of 1904 because it is a foreshadowing of what the global revival ahead might look like.

We are now in the war rooms, at the core of the battle that rages above us and all around us. We cannot yet see the complete victory, but it is embedded in the storm!

Introduction

From about half past ten at night, to about half after midnight, Fire!

—BLAISE PASCAL, 1654¹

I was struck by a bolt of lightning many years ago that transformed my life and destiny.

It happened on a Friday night in July 1974.

After almost three years in the Washington swamp as a young aide in the Nixon White House, I was at last right in the center of God’s will for my life. Six months earlier I had become pastor of a small church at the top of lovely Mobile Bay in Alabama. I had finally embraced the call God had given me at age fifteen to preach the gospel, a call I had run from for almost a decade.

There were ravenous beasts in the Washington swamp, and for most of my three years there I had walked gingerly around them lest I awaken them. But surprisingly I had come to a new understanding of God and His call on my life while working for the president who was about to be swallowed by the Leviathan of the Watergate scandals. I knew there also were vicious dragons and serpents in the church world I had entered, but I had the peace of knowing that God would sustain me through whatever came.

A major assault came that Friday night.

I was enjoying an evening at home with my family when the phone rang. The caller identified himself as a reporter with a national news syndicate. My blood chilled and I thought my heart would stop as he talked. There was a document before the House Judiciary Committee considering the impeachment of the president that seemed to suggest I might be implicated in some of the scandals related to the crisis that would ultimately make Richard Nixon the first president in American history to resign from office. I knew there was nothing there, but who would believe me?

I hung up, trembling. Harry Dent, my old boss at the White House, had told me as he left Washington there was a possibility the Watergate affair had been staged by the president’s opponents to bring him down, along with everyone around him. There might be an attempt to create the appearance of guilt whether or not one had participated in Watergate and other political dirty tricks.

I wondered if I was about to be the target of a manufactured allegation. Reason told me it was unlikely. I had been a junior aide and not worth a lot of newspaper ink. Just how junior was clearly evident on the day Henry Kissinger made one of the most important announcements of the era—possible peace with Vietnam. Where was I? Escorting Colonel Harlan Sanders of fried chicken fame on a tour of the White House!

Reason, however, is squelched in situations of bare-knuckled fear pounding at your thoughts and emotions.

At about 9:30 that night I went out into the backyard and prayed. I awoke aching with anxiety the next morning after sleeping fitfully. The story broke, and media from around the country began to call. I realized that before our church members came to hear me preach the next morning, they would likely read in the Mobile Press-Register that I might have been involved somehow in the Watergate scandals.

LIGHTNING

I was dressed and ready for a Saturday evening engagement before my wife and children were, so I stretched out on our bed and wondered what to do about my situation. Suddenly I thought of Mrs. Chandler, a retired schoolteacher in our community who believed God had called her to pray for pastors. She had stopped by my office several times and prayed with me. I immediately phoned her.

Mrs. Chandler, I said, you are not going to believe what I am about to tell you. I then detailed what had happened.

Let’s pray, she said almost before I finished.

Mrs. Chandler prayed for me that Saturday afternoon on the telephone in a way I had never heard anyone pray before. It was not religious, not ritualistic, not formulaic. She was a woman really talking to God! There was binding and loosing and calling for the Holy Spirit to touch me. Without thinking about theology or religious correctness, I began to say over and again, Yes, Lord, whatever she is praying for, yes! I agree, Lord!

Suddenly—a word that so often pops up in the context of revival—I was struck. As I try to describe what happened I can only think of what the seventeenth-century philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote in his diary the night the Holy Spirit filled him. He wrote only one word in his diary: Fire!²

My own word was lightning. You will understand why I chose to include that term in the title of this book. The Holy Spirit struck me that Saturday afternoon. Joy blasted into my being. Laughter, peace, thanksgiving rocketed through me. My evangelical friends would call it the filling of the Spirit; my pentecostal and charismatic brothers and sisters would describe it as the baptism with the Spirit. Whatever the case, I was a man revived and transformed.

I am still full of the energy and the joy of that moment when the lightning bolt of personal revival struck me.

I never heard another word about Watergate. But the revival never stopped. I am seventy-five years old as I write these words, and that event is almost a half century in the past. And yet the strength and zeal I felt have not only lingered but increased.

Yes, increased! Even though without revival I would not know Christ as my Savior, would not know Him as Lord, would not know the manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s baptism—and without revival I would not be writing these words—my passion for revival has intensified because I believe we are living in the end times and a great last-days revival is necessary before Jesus returns. That’s why revival is more important to me than ever before and why I pen this book. Throughout its pages I will use the Welsh Revival of 1904 as a classic example of a genuine move of God that exhibited every category of revival revealed in the Bible, which I believe will be characteristics of the great last-days revival. We will learn what revival is, how it happens, and why it matters today more than at any other time in world history. We need such revival now—urgently—both for the renewal of the church and as a fulfillment of prophecy prior to Jesus’ return.

If you are looking for signs of the end times, you don’t have to look far. I believe the similarities in our present day to the time leading up to the Welsh Revival and the other crises that are at hand are revealing to us that we are in the early days of the great end-times outpouring of the Spirit. Nations are living under the threat of natural and man-made disasters. Radical Islam is seeking global domination. Abortion kills four thousand babies each day in America alone. Sexual immorality is reaching epic heights of depravity. Governments are becoming more tolerant of every kind of aberrant behavior. A new wave of theological confusion is systematically emerging in many of our churches. Compromise on once sacred biblical truths and practices is the new Christianity. The list goes on and on.

As I write these words, more than four decades have passed since that season of personal revival in the early 1970s. Yet I still feel its fire. My physical energy may be waning, but if anything, my spiritual zeal is intensifying. I understand better what the apostle Paul wrote as he aged and the intensity of the lightning that struck him on the Damascus Road still burned within: Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day (2 Cor. 4:16). And I see with more clarity what the prophet Joel prophesized: In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people (Acts 2:17 NIV).

In many ways I am a child of revival—as people impacted by the Welsh Revival in the early twentieth century referred to themselves. This is why writing this book means so much to me. All these years later, it still blazes deep within. I pray that God’s lightning will energize your life as you read this book and that the church everywhere will be awakened to its true power in this crucial hour.

—WALLACE HENLEY

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.