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In the Awakening Library resource titled What Is Awakening? we describe awakening as “when a movement of God’s power and love extends far and long enough to spill over into the streets of life and the structures of the social order. . . . Not just an uptick in numbers or a flash of greater zeal, but a far-reaching encounter with God resetting the trajectory of generations.”
Awakening is that beautiful, that vast and glorious and captivating. The First Great Awakening unfolded in three theaters of Scotland, England, with the Wesleys, and in colonial America, between about 1730 and 1745, led by Jonathan Edwards. It was John Wesley, in fact, who introduced the other two: having been contacted by the Scots regarding concerted prayer for awakening, he encouraged them also to correspond with Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts.1 Wesley went on to publish more abridgements of Edwards than any other single author.2
Northampton appeared “full of the presence of God . . . in almost every house”3 according to Edwards, spreading to more than twenty communities in western Massachusetts and Connecticut. And with the arrival of George Whitefield, the roving lightning rod of the First Great Awakening, revival spread through the southern, then the middle, and throughout the New England colonies. All the churches grew. Missionary work advanced. Six of the nine colonial colleges in America were born of awakenings. A distinctive American theology began to form under the magisterial reflections of Jonathan Edwards, colonial America’s greatest theologian. The soul of our culture was really formed in that Awakening.
Revival embers smoldering during the Revolutionary War were fanned back into flame in the Second Great Awakening, again developing in three phases with camp meetings bursting onto the scene at Cane Ridge near Lexington, Kentucky, and spreading all throughout Tennessee in the early 1800s. There was the more learned but still very warm-hearted revival work of Lyman Beecher and others in New England. And then came Charles Finney, who blended a certain educated credibility with bold, frontier zeal across upstate New York to extend the Awakening into thirty-five or forty years of continuous advancement.
Finney took inspiration and many of his practices from the Methodists, who accounted for 40 percent of all clergy in America at the time. “We must have exciting, powerful preaching,” Finney lectured, “or the devil will have the people, except what the Methodists can save.”4
Beecher considered Finney’s first year-long meeting in Rochester, New York, to be “the greatest work of God, and the greatest revival of religion, that the world has ever seen in so short a time.”5 Taverns closed, the theater became a livery stable, crime dropped by two-thirds, jails stood empty for years.
American churches multiplied fourfold during the Second Great Awakening. The proliferation of the American missionary movement can really be traced to it. So much reform in prisons, against child labor, and for women’s rights—the first coeducational college in America was Finney’s Oberlin—can all be followed back to the Awakening.
Historians have attributed abolitionists’ refusal to accept any kind of gradualism in the freeing of slaves to the ethos of the need for immediate action, the need for one to make a decision on the spot in all the revival meetings of the Second Great Awakening.6 The YMCA, countless colleges and universities, the American Bible Society—much good all can be tracked directly back to the Awakening.
It is that beautiful, that vast and glorious and captivating. There is this built-in self-correcting, reanimating capacity in the Christian movement due to the Spirit’s residence in the church. Christian history is in many ways the story of successive seasons of awakening. We need it and yearn for it desperately, more every day—in our culture, in our churches, in our families, in ourselves. We want to sow for awakening, to be in on a work of God in our day.
But what about this sowing? Lots of spine-tingling anecdotes can be unwound about revival’s triumphs and heroes. But in all honesty, where does awakening start? How do we sow for a great awakening?
That’s a question we can find some answers to in the Islands of Lewis and Harris, of far-northern Scotland, where we learn of the Hebridean Revival, what some historians describe as the last real awakening in the Western world. The key leader of that revival, Duncan Campbell, finally consented to come for ten days in 1949 and ultimately stayed for nearly three years. The best account of the Hebridean Revival is a book titled Sounds from Heaven,7 which includes testimonials of twenty-three eyewitnesses. In conversation with some of these, now in their eighties, they recalled what it was like when God moved among the people.
Was it Campbell’s preaching? Or was it a certain method? These proved important, but to a man or woman, eyewitnesses described something more essential: a kind of spiritual posture found among some who were the catalytic core. There was a spirit of urgency and audacity, an attitude of brokenness and desperation, a manner of prayer that could be daring and agonizing. These friends in the Hebrides called it travailing prayer, like the Holy Spirit groaning through them, they said, like a woman travailing in labor, like Paul in Galatians 4:19 travailing as if “in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” We have come to believe that the true seedbed of awakening is the plowed-up hearts of men and women willing to receive the gift of travail.
“Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy” (Ps. 126:5).
That prayer would be the precursor to the work of God—always the preparatory, anticipating act of awakening—is not a new idea. Travail, however, may be a type of praying that has been lost, not in Christian communities of Asia, or Africa, or Latin America, but somehow forgotten in the West.
But this was the praying of the Hebrews who “groaned in their slavery and cried out” (Ex. 2:23) and God heard their groaning and remembered his covenant. This was the prayer of Hannah for a child, overcome to the point of being misunderstood as intoxicated in her petitions: “I have not been drinking wine or beer; I was pouring out my soul to the Lord” (1 Sam. 1:15).
Hezekiah took his desperation to the temple and “spread it out before the Lord” (2 Kings 19:14). “We have no power to face this vast army,” Jehoshaphat cried out, “but our eyes are on you” (2 Chron. 20:12). When he heard the news of Jerusalem’s brokenness, Nehemiah “sat down and wept,” then fasted and prayed for days (Neh. 1:4).
This is the prayer of the prophets: that we “give [God] no rest” (Isa. 62:7); that we cling to God “ as a belt is bound around the waist” (Jer. 13:8–11); that we “go at once to entreat the Lord and seek the Lord Almighty” (Zech. 8:21); that the priests might “weep between the portico and the altar” (Joel 2:17).
Elijah “climbed to the top of Carmel, bent down to the ground and put his face between his knees” to pray for relief from drought (1 Kings 18:42). Scholars say it was the posture of a woman giving birth.8 Daniel 9:3 says he “turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition” for Jerusalem.
This is the praying of the Psalms. “Streams of tears flow from my eyes, for your law is not obeyed” (119:136); “day and night I cry out to you” (88:1); “Listen to my cry, for I am in desperate need” (142:6).
This was the praying of Jesus, who “offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him” (Heb. 5:7). “As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it” (Luke 19:41). He blessed those with spiritual hunger and thirst. He taught those who followed him to keep on asking and seeking and knocking. He told parables to illustrate how his disciples should keep on praying and not give up (see Luke 18:1–8). He healed ten with leprosy who “called out in a loud voice” (Luke 17:13); the only child of a father who came saying, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son” (Luke 9:38); two blind men calling for Jesus’s help who, when rebuked by the crowd, “shouted all the louder” (Matt. 20:31). And there is no deeper view into the heart of Jesus than Gethsemane, where it was the agony of prayer that drew the first blood of the atonement. This is the praying of the early church, cleaving to one another in expectancy before Pentecost, “earnestly praying to God for” Peter in prison (Acts 12:5).
This was the prayer of Paul, who implored the Romans, “by the love of the Spirit, to join me in my struggle”—literally, to agonize with me—“by praying to God for me” (15:30). He commended Epaphras to the Colossians as “always wrestling in prayer for you” (4:12). This is the praying of the Holy Spirit, who “intercedes for us through wordless groans” (Rom. 8:26).
And in the Revelation, the only recorded prayer of the Holy Spirit is the urgent cry, “Come!” which, when united with the prayer of the church, is addressed to Jesus beckoning his thrice repeated promise, “I am coming soon!” (Rev. 22:7, 12, 17, 20).
The Bible seems utterly unfamiliar with casual prayer: prayer of the mouth and not the heart.
Travail—a kind of burdened, focused pressing—seems closer to the throbbing core of prayer in Scripture.
Tertullian considered prayer a kind of “holy violence to God.”9 Origen, in the second century, believed that “to weeping and weeping alone, God will pay attention.”10 In his Confessions, Augustine, referring to his conversion, called himself a son of his mother’s tears.11 The Celtic missionaries expected that “Thy measure of prayer shall be until thy tears come.”12 Benedict wrote the same understanding of prayer into his monastic Rule.13
In Eastern Orthodoxy, John Chrysostom advocated for travailing prayer, “for with these tears souls are planted.”14 Many accounts of those making pilgrimages during the middles ages include descriptions of sobbing and falling in prayer.15
Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar in Florence, became controversial for his denunciation of moral corruption among clergy in the fifteenth century, and was known for how we would pray before the altar until it was wet with tears. Pope Alexander VI eventually excommunicated Savonarola and ordered him burned at the stake.16 Martin Luther called him the first Protestant martyr.17
Praying for the healing of his friend, Philip Melanchthon, Luther wrote, “I attacked [the Almighty] with his own weapons, quoting from Scripture all the promises I could remember, that prayers should be granted, and said that he must grant my prayer, if I was henceforth to put faith in his promises.”18
This was the praying of the Puritans, like Richard Sibbes, born thirty years after Luther’s death, who held that prayer is a kind of “wrestling [with God that] will prevail at length, and we shall have such a sight of him.”19 Which brings us to the eve of the Awakenings we described at the beginning: the first time travailing prayer became associated particularly with the sowing we are wanting and needing to do.
Wesley had been amazed at the praying he observed at Herrnhut so that in the first watchnight after his conversion, New Year’s Eve 1738, he was gathered with Whitefield, his brother, Charles, and about sixty others at Fetter Lane, and he writes in his Journal: “About three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried out . . . and many fell to the ground. As soon as we were recovered a little from that awe and amazement at the presence of his Majesty, we broke out with one voice, ‘We praise thee, O God; we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.’”20 Later on, similar to the counsel Monica received for Augustine, Wesley “called on one who was sorrowing as without hope, for her son who turned again to folly. I advised her to wrestle with God for his soul. And in two days he brought home the wandering sheep, fully convinced of the error of his ways.”21
Wrestling, like Jacob, was a favorite image for Edwards and Finney of the prayer that sows for awakening. They believed it was not irreverent to be obstinate,22 to grapple, to take up the “blessed struggle” of prayer, Edwards called it.23 Both of them understood how the Spirit would sometimes brood over a church or community, as he did over chaos in creation, conceiving new life. But it was the church’s role then to pray that new life, those new births, into reality. They referred to the church as the “mother of the converted,” the “helpmate of God.”24 And that praying could sound like a woman in childbirth.
These were intercessors who had been seized by the raw facts of our need for God. Duncan Campbell used to preach, “Let us be honest in the presence of God and get right into the grips of reality. Have I a vision of [our] desperate need? Oh, for a baptism of honesty, for a gripping sincerity that will move us.”25
The First and Second Awakenings brim with stories of petitioners for whom this honesty produced an agony in prayer, becoming daring, unrelenting, insistent in prayer. They write of sweat and heaving and fasting.26 Finney emphasized praying until we had “prayed through” to assurance that we’d been heard, that it had been done in heaven and we could wait and watch for it on earth.27
Most important to the leaders of awakenings was that none of this courage and audacity and determination in prayer could be manufactured or self-generated. It was the ministry of the Holy Spirit, operating as the “spirit of prayer.”28 Here was to them the key spiritual gift, the essential charism, of awakening: God himself, by his Spirit, providing the discernment, the faith, the energy, even the language, the breath and groan, for the seeds of awakening.
That’s how travailing prayer could surge like a spiritual geyser of overflowing holy love for God and for his world Jesus died to save. That is travailing prayer at its heart: Gethsemane love.
“Sometimes the conduct of the wicked drives Christians to prayer,” Finney wrote, “breaks them down, and makes them sorrowful and tender-hearted, so that they can weep day and night, and instead of scolding the wicked they pray earnestly for them. Then you may expect a revival. Indeed, it is begun already.”29
Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.
We all feel deep down that we should be praying more, praying better. And reading about this kind of praying is not intended to give anyone a guilt trip. Guilt is a very short-lived, shallow incentive for prayer, ultimately ineffective. But could we who long for awakening offer God an openness to becoming less casual in praying about it?
Some believe awakening is untenable today. The times are too different, our context is too resistant. And thinking about travailing prayer is not aimed at attempting to reconstruct the past. But every context of awakening has seemed entirely impossible. And “the more we can learn from the past,” Howard Snyder wrote in The Radical Wesley, “the more useful we may be as agents of [awakening] ourselves. . . . God invites us to cooperate with him in the work of renewal, and his acts in history suggest clues we would do well not to ignore.”30
Those in the past who had the same longing believed that this manner of prayer would cause us to prize the gift of awakening and to love the Giver all the more.31 The delay and persevering would purify and humble the church making us ready to receive.32 Not turning prayer into a work, not in any way earning God’s favors with more volume or drama in our prayers, but being willing to be more experimental in our prayers, less inhibited, more united in the true ecumenical spirit Wesley advocated and less worried about what others think.
“So far as I know myself,” Wesley wrote, “I have no more concern for the reputation of Methodism or my own than for the reputation of Prester John.”33 The goodness and burden of awakening is not for careerists. Awakening is sown by the company of the misunderstood, the downwardly mobile, the unthanked, the obscure, the criticized, and burdened. Awakening is messy and costly to people who love it and long for it. Reputation is the first thing to go in this kind of praying and leading. Jesus taught that our seeds have to die before anything will grow (John 12:24). And maybe it comes to mind what it is you may need to bury for awakening to spring up: distraction, pride, an attitude of expertise, self-sufficiency, affluence, avoidance, ease.
What else it would take for us to move into the direction of travailing prayer? How bad will it have to get—if we’re not there already? Are there any sowers today who would be willing to regain an awakening sensibility: that grip of empirical honesty of which Campbell spoke, a heartache that we cannot shake until we pray it out? Is there anyone who would be willing to take on a knee-bending “sympathy with God”?34 That was Finney’s phrase. He believed that the prayer meeting was more important than the preaching meeting for convincing sinners because if they came and saw the church agonizing over souls, they would have a picture of how God felt about them. Prayer was proof of the love of God in the Awakenings.
Who is willing to let God give them a share of that holy love for his world, voiced first not in pulpits or blogs or books or tweets, but in closets?
We are beginning to wonder if perhaps the Spirit is wanting to reintroduce this gift in the West, that perhaps we are growing more ready to reclaim it. Might the Spirit have withdrawn this gift from the church for a time because there were so few looking for it, wanting it, who felt the need for it? Is there anyone willing to explore this sowing vocation, the gift by which the Spirit gives our prayers integrity, their expression commensurate with, proportionate to the depth and intensity of our need?
This is the invitation to step into a posture of determining to give up less easily in prayer, to take more risks in prayer, to be bold and tenacious again. That may mean becoming healed of past disappointments in prayer.
Whatever it might summon from you, is there anyone—fellow lovers of awakening—who would be willing to sow for it? Travailing prayer is not the only thing we do. But it is the first thing, and the most important thing.
Those who are now crying are blessed, Jesus promised in Luke 6:21, because you will laugh with joy. Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. That is his promise to travailing prayer. And God is too worthy, awakening is too beautiful, and the need for it is too great, to settle for anything less.
To access the research from which this article is drawn, click the link to access David Thomas’ dissertation on travailing prayer, “They Cannot Forbear Crying Out.”
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