Though not all repentance leads to revival, you can’t have revival without repentance.
Not long ago, an intercessor wrote the following note to IFA:
I have read the Six Battle-Ready Positions for Victory in Spiritual Warfare [IFA prayer guide] and find one very important strategy missing for all prayer warriors. First and foremost, repent daily, ask the Lord to show you your own heart, get right, so your prayers are not hindered. This vital piece is missing and so important.
Because revivals are marked by repentance, one way to highlight the need for repentance is to consult with those who have experienced revival. We are doing that, and the result is a three-part series, the first part of which follows here.
The seeds of the Asbury Outpouring of nearly one year ago were planted during the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Asbury Revival. On Feb. 3, 2020, at 10 a.m. — the very same day, month, and time the revival broke out 50 years earlier — Asbury University dedicated its chapel service to celebrating that 185-hour revival.
Before the chapel service began that day, Charity Johnson, who had been a freshman at Asbury at that time, struck up a conversation with Jeannine Brabon. Johnson didn’t know that Brabon was to be a featured speaker that day. The two had a meal together after chapel, and Brabon encouraged Johnson to pray for revival, as the older woman had done when she was a freshman at Asbury, in 1967. Brabon left campus convinced that revival would come to Asbury again, because Johnson and others were praying for it.
Johnson, who studied the concept of repentance in a youth ministry class at Asbury, said:
“Repentance is not only about asking for forgiveness, but turning away from what you’re doing. Have a change of mind, a change of heart. It’s actually not wanting to do the thing that you were doing. You see the thing that was wrong with it.”
Here’s an interview with Johnson:
Brabon recalls that Psalm 66:18 had spoken to her when she was younger: If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear. She advocates fasting as a spiritual discipline that enhances prayer and repentance. “That whole concept was very key to me in interceding and believing God for revival, not to allow sin in any way to thwart God’s holy purposes from coming to fruition,” she said.
On Oct. 3, 1969, four months before the revival, Brabon secured permission to gather students to pray overnight in the Hughes Auditorium. “We began by confession of sin,” she said. “All across the whole auditorium, people began confessing.” They prayed 2 Chronicles 7:14: ” … if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
By 3 a.m. there were still some 80 students present. “I’d never been in anything like it,” Brabon said. “The Shekhinah glory literally had descended.”
On Feb. 3, 1970, Asbury Dean Custer Reynolds was scheduled to bring the message, but instead he opened the mic for testimonies, many of which were expressions of repentance. The service ended up lasting for one week and 17 hours, and as it progressed, Brabon witnessed more and more expressions of repentance. She said:
“I knew — because I’d been praying — who were in the lost set on campus, and I watched them on Friday night at midnight go right into the altar and just stay there for two hours and just weep, seeking God. That’s where you’d see the genuine repentance.
You cannot be in the holy presence of God and not have sin exposed in your life, and you can’t stand in the presence of God and not confess it. There’s no justification for any action or victimization or manipulation. ‘This is where I’m at. This is what’s happened to me.’ No. It’s, ‘I’m before God, and I did this.’ It’s really being true and transparent before God. Not letting sin in any way hinder.”
Brabon points out that one week before the 2023 Asbury Outpouring began, national leaders, including Rep. Kevin McCarthy, then speaker of the House of Representatives, gathered at the Museum of the Bible, in Washington, D.C., for the National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance. She said almost no one was introduced (as also came to be the case during the Asbury Outpouring), and she believes that the event paved the way for Asbury’s 374-hour chapel service.
Judge Tim Philpot, a former student of Asbury University
Another speaker at the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Asbury Revival was Judge Tim Philpot, who called it a revival of repentance. He tells people that he was on the “Top 10 Most Wanted List” — meaning that many on campus were praying that he’d get right with the Lord. His father, energized by a previous revival at Asbury when he was a student, was an evangelist. “I was just a fake,” Philpot said. “My parents thought I was somebody I was not, and my other friends knew who I really was.”
Though he ranks his rebellious streak as pretty tame when compared with what’s going on in the world today, he nonetheless insists: “By Asbury standards, I was considered quite the rebel.”
Philpot was nearly killed in a car wreck three weeks before the Asbury Revival. He recalls: “For three to five seconds, as my car was hurtling through the air — I had heard about heaven and hell my whole life, and I was pretty sure I was going to hell.”
A freshman in 1970, Philpot remembers skipping chapel service on Feb. 3 and going straight to an 11 a.m. class. When he got there, he found the classroom totally empty. “I had this fleeting thought that the Lord had come back, and I was the only one left on Asbury’s campus,” he said.
He finally made it over to the Hughes Auditorium. “I was as lost as can be, but I didn’t want to leave,” he said. Three nights later, at 1 in the morning, he went up to the altar. “I was weeping and wailing,” he said. “I knew I had experienced God. I saw Him. I felt Him. It was dramatic. It was traumatic. It was real.”
The 1970 revival fueled his passion for evangelism, and today he says of the 2023 Outpouring: “It proved to old guys like me that our experience in 1970 was for real.” He has felt inspired to write the names of people he’s praying for onto golf balls he finds — 60 so far. He summarizes his approach to evangelism this way: “It all starts with praying for somebody, and then sitting back and waiting for the phone call.”
Of the 1970 Asbury Revival, Philpot says: “The fact that we’re still talking about it 53 years later is proof to the kids of today that what they’ve experienced in 2023 can be real 53 years from now. This is something that will sustain them throughout their lifetime.”
Here’s an interview with Philpot:
Philpot chose not to attend the 2023 Outpouring because, as he put it: “I felt like I was experiencing some revival right here in my little chair.” In the same way people didn’t want to leave Hughes Auditorium in 1970 and 2023, says Philpot, “I didn’t want to leave my chair.” He points out that the Outpouring didn’t happen only in the Hughes Auditorium. “It was happening in lots of other places too,” he said, “including places where it’s just me and God.”
Inspired by what happened in 1970, Johnson was praying for healing, deliverance, and freedom from pain and sin. She watched her prayers being answered, starting on Feb. 8, 2023. There were a lot of non-Christian students who decided to follow Christ during the Outpouring, she says, because:
“They felt a tug in their heart that something was telling them to stay or something was telling them to go back to chapel, even though everything else within them that was flesh wanted them to leave that day, but they turned around either by just the Holy Spirit or someone being prompted by the Holy Spirit to lead them back into chapel.”
After the Outpouring, Johnson says, groups from around the world called for Asbury students to talk about how the Lord had worked in their lives during the Outpouring, even as students had been called 53 years earlier. Also, faculty and students organized discipleship groups to ensure students could continue walking in the choices they had made during the passion of revival.
In talking about how important prayer is to revival, Brabon quotes E.M. Bounds: “You can do more than pray after you’ve prayed, but you can’t do more than pray until you’ve prayed.”
This series will continue to cover the importance of repentance in the 1904–1905 Welsh Revival and the 2023 Asbury Outpouring. Watch www.HeadlinePrayer.org for the next installments, and search for #ImportanceOfRepentanceInRevival to pull up all the articles and interviews.
In the comments section below, post your praises for the repentance that has already come before, and also your prayers for the repentance we must look for now — fervent prayers for the revival and awakening our world so very desperately needs!
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Article written by Rich Swingle has taught and performed in 39 nations across six continents, mostly in his own one-man plays, five of which were performed Off-Broadway. He has performed in more than 45 film projects. Rich and his bride, Joyce Swingle, another contributing writer for IFA, now have 41 “screen children.” They have collaborated with Rev. Timothy J. Mercaldo to create a “singing play” titled Songs of Revival: Hungry After God Himself. The Swingles live in New York City. Visit www.RichDrama.com for more information.
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