Don't let that spirit take possession of us. It is everywhere sadly, even among Bible believing churches: ‘If only we can do this, and do that, then we will be better off.’ Not, ‘if only we flood the prayer meetings and look to God.’ Instead, it is, ‘If only we can get a personality, an individual.’ There was in a Christian magazine just a few years ago a very fine article on George Whitfield. But then at the end the writer made a comment like this: ‘What hope is there for Britain? When will there come another George Whitfield?’ What a tragedy to put it like that! Yes, Whitfield was a great man and mightily used of the Lord, but it is not a George Whitfield we need. What we need is the powerful blessing of God. And the writer of this article was an earnest believer, but we so easily lose our footing, and we are looking at people. Yes, the Lord uses people and instruments but it is the Lord who must get the glory and the honour and the praise, and to whom we look.
It was a great tragedy when Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones retired from Westminster Chapel. After that, were the prayer meetings flooded? No. The people just thought you have got to get another big preacher. That will press the button; that will ensure the people remain, and that those who leave are replaced: you have got to get the right person. When the reverent Glyn Owen – another Welshman – took over for several years, he had a very difficult time, and he spread his hands and said to me once, ‘The people are slipping away and they won't come to listen to me, and we can't get the people to the prayer meetings.’ Isn’t it sad! People say, ‘Just get the right personality who can press the button’, and at length they got the right personality, in a former Nazarene minister, a man named RT Kendall. He was a great teller of stories, but really he was half Charismatic when he started, he went completely Charismatic while he was there, and bought in nothing but non-stop gimmicks, looking to the flesh all the time. So down, down, down, things went till now the Westminster Chapel, which was once a large congregation, is a pretty small Pentecostal church. Really, that's the long and the short of it. It is the Lord who we look to and trust, and that is what Samuel is saying. We should be filling our prayer meetings more and more, because the work and the blessing is dependent upon him, not on the instruments, not on the people.
Speaking of revival: George Whitfield wasn't the only preacher in the Great Awakening. When God sends a season of extraordinary awakening, he operates through a plurality of instruments. Yes, George Whitfield was very prominent in the Great Awakening, so were the Wesley brothers, so was John Cennick, so were many others. If you took one away, you could argue, it wouldn’t have made a lot of difference. There would still have been mighty awakening. Why does God do that? Suddenly he raises up, not one, but a whole group of preachers. Because God is saying, this is my work; this is my doing. But what do we end up doing? Singling out one or two and giving them all the praise and saying, ‘When will another person with those extraordinary gifts, powers, and ability come’, as though it is nothing to do with the Lord at all – that is exactly what the people did here.
Who rules the churches? Christ rules his churches. We want the blessing of God. ‘Oh no. I hear what you say: there are times of revival, and God pours out his blessing. Yes, it is all of God and wonderful things are happening, but we don't want it like that. We want things we can do. We want to be able to form enormous choirs and bands and orchestras, and, by our various methods and gimmicks, to excel. We want to talk about gifted people and extraordinary things. We don’t want to just trust God, and preach the gospel, and crowd the Prayer Meetings. We cannot trust that.’ That is the temptation for many Christians. You see all these things have happened before, and they are all for our learning.