GOD HAD THE ANSWER TO CHINESE HATRED
The movement of 1908 in Manchuria sent a wave over every province of China. Permanent moral and spiritual transoframtion resulted
In his hut in Honan province, China, Jonathan Goforth was troubled. It was 1906 and he could look back over 13 years labour as a Presbyterian missionary. The local people were still trying to rebuild their lives after the Boxer uprising six years earlier, when thousands of Christians had been wiped out. Those who remained were consumed with sorrow and a thirst for revenge, and the task of evangelism seemed harder than ever.
He had laboured much with little to show for it and he ached to see God move. The question of finding the reviving power of the Holy Spirit became such an obsession with him that his wife began to fear for his sanity.
He began to seek God with earnest intensity, and God responded by opening his eyes to unrepented sins. He was deeply convicted of resentment towards his fellow missionaries and hurried to seek forgiveness and make reparation. His overriding desire was to be pure before his Lord.
But he persevered, finding that God opened up new possibilities: "Gradually the realisation began to dawn upon me that I had tapped a mine of infinite possibility."
Things soon started to change because now he was different. Congregations fell under the Spirit's conviction - and so on occasions did his helpers, who were too smitten themselves to help the awakened sinners! Entire congregations would start to pray, then melt into weeping.
After a visit to Korea, he became aware that revival did not depend on some anointed leader. Here he experienced churches which had covenanted together to pray daily for fire from heaven, and not to rest until it came!
At a meeting in Manchuria he held for missionaries, he poured out the longing of his heart for revival. The meeting ended, but nobody moved. They all sat in silent prayer for nearly ten minutes, then someone started to sob, and for the next few hours there was a public confession of sin and reconciliation between brothers.
In 1908 he was back in Manchuria, holding meetings at Mukden. The pattern was the same: an acute sense of sin and impurity, leading people to confess and be reconciled, and then the Holy Spirit falling in especial power.
One eye-witness, a doctor, had come to the meeting with opinions against "revival hysterics", but felt God's hand so strongly that he wrote: "The people knelt for prayer, silent at first, but soon the voices gathered in volume and blended into a great wave of united supplication that swelled until it was almost a roar, then died again into an undertone of weeping. The floor was wet with pools of tears. The very air seemed electric, and strange thrills coursed up and down one's body.
"Then began the public confession of sins. It was not so much the enormity of sins disclosed that shocked one, it was the sight of men forced to their feet and, in spite of their struggles, impelled to lay bare their hearts."
The revival spread throughout Manchuria and into Shansi and Honan provinces. It touched all alike. Children would literally writhe under conviction, confessing to lying or thefts. Church elders would tear up their letters of appointment, crying out that they were unclean men.
And although the meetings were such awesome times of uncovering, they attracted large crowds. The Chinese called these times of conviction the Little Judgment, where God could deal powerfully with their souls and thus save them from eternal shame at the Great Judgment.
The fruits of revival were apparent too, because after the conviction came the powerful anointing of God's love. Drug addicts were set free, demons cast out and sicknesses healed. The legacy of hatred and grief from the Boxer uprising was melted by the love of Christ. And for several years the work of the Holy Spirit continued in the region, rebuilding the Church in power.
This article has been extracted from Revival Fires, available online from the Jesus People Shop.
Source: Goforth of China, R. Goforth (Marshalls, London, 1937) By My Spirit, J. Goforth (Marshalls, London, 1929).
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