The year 2020 has been a year of shaking, waking and breaking. What America and the Church needs most right now is a Revival of Repentance. When revival comes, it will sweep our nation once again just like it did in the midst of the social unrest of 1970 in Kentucky.
He Did It Before He’ll Do It Again
On February 3rd, 1970, it seemed like just another ordinary day at Asbury College. Protests were happening and people were burning down buildings and rioting in the streets, but the students of Asbury were compelled to go to their knees.
No one was expecting Jesus to walk through the door of the chapel and rain down peace. Well, almost no one. On February second one of those faithful students testified hearing from God. He said, “While we were in our dorm during a prayer meeting that tomorrow it was going to happen, and it did, [God] just opened it up and let it fly. It was the greatest outpouring of God’s love and Holy Spirit and I can’t express it, I’m just amazed, I’m glorifying His name, I’m praising His name.”
Everyone else expected it to be a regular 50-minute chapel service. What happened instead was a spontaneous move of the Holy Spirit. Toward the end of the chapel students started coming to the altar in droves after a philosophy professor gave an invitation. It all started with a student giving their testimony. One person said she wasn’t leaving the chapel until she found peace in her heart. A teacher came forward and confessed he had backslidden and he repented and asked his students to forgive him. What happened was a repentance revival that left people with a peace they said they’d “never felt before.”
Steve Seamonds, a senior at the time said “The power of God was so real that it felt as though [he] was in a suspended state of reality, that time itself began to collapse and students could sit in Hughes Auditorium for hours and hours and it seemed like it was only minutes.” People experienced God in ways they never had expected. Linda Hager, a Junior at the time said, “As it unfolded what I began to learn was I could not dictate to God how He would come. I can’t control God, I can only stand in awe of what He chooses to do.” People were confessing things that could have gotten them kicked out of seminary. They were bringing their petitions to God and confessing to each other the things that they were challenged with in their lives.” People were humbled by the Holy Spirit and were awestruck with the Spirit of love and peace as they confessed their sins.
The Revival began to spread and by Friday, Azusa Pacific College was said to have “gone wild.” News stations picked up the story and people everywhere were hearing about it. The students went out and evangelized that Jesus showed up; they couldn’t help but share how real He was. Revival went from campuses to neighborhoods to homes. Letters began to go out to other campuses sharing the witness of what was happening. Students began to go and minister to the soldiers in bootcamp a few days before heading to Vietnam. Within three days, it spread like wildfire to more than 40 campuses all across the country. A mighty wind of God’s Spirit was moving and it was undeniable.
With every move of God there are skeptics, so there were some who were invited to go and experience it for themselves. They too began to experience a “divine magnetism” that caused them to turn to the Lord and fall to their knees.
On a Sunday five days later, Pastor David Seamands of William Methodist Church said, “It’s Sunday morning, we must have a sermon,” but he realized that the Holy Spirit didn’t want any sermons. God did what God wanted to do and the revival spread like wildfire. What came out of it was true repentance, intercession, a call to holiness, an indwelling of the Holy Spirit, a new found peace and an experience of the presence of God unlike anything they’d ever experienced before. The thing that characterized this move of God’s Spirit from the beginning was described as “the freedom to seek God.”
That revival spread all across the country to more than 40 colleges and universities in one week because of the power of the witness. The media spread their witness, the students spread their witness, the teachers spread their witness. One witness lead to the next and to the next and so on. This spontaneous move of God lasted one week, but God only knows how far reaching the impact really was.
Continue to Part 5 of What’s Stirring? — A New Reformation