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About the Book
"Apostolic Preaching of the Cross" by Leon Morris explores the central theme of the cross in the teachings of the apostles in the New Testament. The book delves into the significance and impact of the cross on the early Christian community, highlighting its role in redemption and salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Morris provides a comprehensive analysis of the apostolic preaching of the cross and its implications for Christian theology and practice.
Evan Roberts
Evan Roberts’ childhood
Evan Roberts was born and raised in a Welsh Calvinist Methodist family in Loughor, on the Glamorgan and Carmarthenshire border. As a boy he was unusually serious and very diligent in his Christian life. He memorised verses of the Bible and was a daily attender of Moriah Chapel, a church about a mile from his home.
Even at 13 years of age he began to develop a heart for a visitation from God. He later wrote “I said to myself: I will have the Spirit. And through all weathers and in spite of all difficulties I went to the meetings… for ten or eleven years I have prayed for revival. I could sit up all night to read or talk about revivals. It was the Spirit who moved me to think about revival.”
Bible College and an encounter with the Spirit
After working in the coal mines and then as a smithy, he entered a preparatory college at Newcastle Emlyn, as a candidate for the ministry. It was 1903 and he was 25 years old.
It was at this time that he sought the Lord for more of His Spirit. He believed that he would be baptised in the Holy Spirit and sometimes his bed shook as his prayers were answered. The Lord began to wake him at 1.00 am for divine fellowship, when he would pray for four hours, returning to bed at 5.00 am for another four hours sleep.
He visited a meeting where Seth Joshua was preaching and heard the evangelist pray “Lord, bend us”. The Holy Spirit said to Evan, “That’s what you need”. At the following meeting Evan experienced a powerful filling with the Holy Spirit. “I felt a living power pervading my bosom. It took my breath away and my legs trembled exceedingly. This living power became stronger and stronger as each one prayed, until I felt it would tear me apart.
My whole bosom was a turmoil and if I had not prayed it would have burst…. I fell on my knees with my arms over the seat in front of me. My face was bathed in perspiration, and the tears flowed in streams. I cried out “Bend me, bend me!!” It was God’s commending love which bent me… what a wave of peace flooded my bosom…. I was filled with compassion for those who must bend at the judgement, and I wept.
Following that, the salvation of the human soul was solemnly impressed on me. I felt ablaze with the desire to go through the length and breadth of Wales to tell of the Saviour”.
Two visions
Needless to say, his studies began to take second place! He began praying for a hundred thousand souls and had two visions which encouraged him to believe it would happen. He saw a lighted candle and behind it the rising sun. He felt the interpretation was that the present blessings were only as a lighted candle compared with the blazing glory of the sun. Later all Wales would be flooded with revival glory.
The other vision occurred when Evan saw his close friend Sydney Evans staring at the moon. Evan asked what he was looking at and, to his great surprise, he saw it too! It was an arm that seemed to be outstretched from the moon down to Wales. He was in no doubt that revival was on its way. If you are in the market for clothes, https://www.fakewatch.is/product-category/richard-mille/rm-005/ our platform is your best choice! The largest shopping mall!
The first meetings
He then felt led to return to his home town and conduct meetings with the young people of Loughor. With permission from the minister, he began the meetings, encouraging prayer for the outpouring of the Spirit on Moriah. The meetings slowly increased in numbers and powerful waves of intercession swept over those gathered.
During those meetings the Holy Spirit gave Evan four requirements that were later to be used throughout the coming revival:
1. Confession of all known sin
2. Repentance and restitution
3. Obedience and surrender to the Holy Spirit
4. Public confession of Christ
The Spirit began to be outpoured. There was weeping, shouting, crying out, joy and brokeness. Some would shout out, “No more, Lord Jesus, or I’ll die”. This was the beginning of the Welsh Revival.
Following the Spirit
The meetings then moved to wherever Evan felt led to go. Those travelling with him were predominately female and the young girls would often begin meetings with intense intercession, urging surrender to God and by giving testimony. Evan would often be seen on his knees pleading for God’s mercy, with tears.
The crowds would come and be moved upon by wave after wave of the Spirit’s presence. Spontaneous prayer, confession, testimony and song erupted in all the meetings. Evan, or his helpers , would approach those in spiritual distress and urge them to surrender to Christ. No musical instruments were played and, often, there would be no preaching. Yet the crowds continued to come and thousands professed conversion.
The meetings often went on until the early hours of the morning. Evan and his team would go home, sleep for 2–3 hours and be back at the pit-head by 5 am, urging the miners coming off night duty to come to chapel meetings.
Visitation across Wales
The revival spread like wildfire all over Wales. Other leaders also experienced the presence of God. Hundreds of overseas visitors flocked to Wales to witness the revival and many took revival fire back to their own land. But the intense presence began to take its toll on Evan. He became nervous and would sometimes be abrupt or rude to people in public meetings. He openly rebuked leaders and congregations alike.
Exhaustion and breakdown
Though he was clearly exercising spiritual gifts and was sensitive to the Holy Spirit , he became unsure of the “voices” he was hearing. The he broke down and withdrew from public meetings. Accusation and criticism followed and further physical and emotional breakdown ensued.
Understandably, converts were confused. Was this God? Was Evan Roberts God’s man or was he satanically motivated? He fell into a deep depression and in the spring of 1906 he was invited to convalesce at Jessie Penn-Lewis’ home at Woodlands in Leicester.
It is claimed that Mrs Penn Lewis used Evan’s name to propagate her own ministry and message. She supposedly convinced him he was deceived by evil spirits and, over the next few years co-authorised with Evan “War on the Saints”, which was published in 1913. This book clearly delineates the confusion she had drawn Evan into.
It left its readers totally wary of any spiritual phenomena of any kind or degree. Rather than giving clear guidelines regarding discerning satanic powers, it brought into question anything that may be considered, or that might be described, as Holy Spirit activity. Within a year of its publication, Evan Roberts denounced it, telling friends that it had been a failed weapon which had confused and divided the Lord’s people.
Evan Roberts the intercessor
Evan stayed at the Penn-Lewis’ home for eight years, giving himself to intercession and private group counselling. Around 1920 Evan moved to Brighton and lived alone until he returned to his beloved Wales, when his father fell ill in 1926. He began to visit Wales again and eventually moved there in 1928 when his father died.
Nothing much is known of the years that followed. Evan finally died at the age of 72 and was buried behind Moriah Chapel on Jan 29th 1951.
May his life be both an example and a warning to all those who participate in revival to maintain humility; keep submissive to the Spirit; be accountable to godly men and women; remain true to their calling; use the gifts God has given, but be wise in the stewardship of their body.
Bibliography An Instrument of Revival, Brynmor Pierce-Jones 1995, published by Bridge Publishing (ISBN 0-88270-667-5).
Tony Cauchi
the dating games - an online war against true love
A war is being waged against true love. As we celebrate another Valentine’s Day, I wonder if you will be another civilian casualty. If the current trends continue, what will the pursuit of marriage be like in twenty years? One new study reports, “Apps are the new norm in dating. . . . By 2040, 70% of people are expected to meet through dating apps.” Why does that cause any concern? Well, because despite all the new and innovative ways to find love, “People are lonelier than ever. . . . One study found that over half of dating app users reported feeling lonely after swiping.” They have called it “the gamification of courtship.” The fierce irony is that the “game” wounds and devastates so many. Dating websites and apps have ridden in on digital horseback, bearing a dozen roses and declaring their fidelity, but their first love is in your pocket — and they’re jealous lovers. They play the sympathetic matchmaker up front, but they’re more like the Gamemaker in Hunger Games  — pulling whatever levers necessary, at whatever cost to you, to get what they really want. Online dating may have wed its thousands, but it’s wounded its tens of thousands. If you’re wandering out into the crossfire in your own search for marriage, are you awake to the pitfalls? Who Will Deliver Us? For all its many weaknesses and perils, old-fashioned courtship did prevent the pursuit of marriage from becoming a playground for digital likes, swipes, and winks. Real-world structure and boundaries meant, for the most part, that pursuing a woman required intentionality, clear communication, patience, and risk. It felt more like buying your first home than renting a movie on iTunes. Wi-Fi, one of the greatest achievements in communications technology, should have made romance so much easier — more people, less driving, more access. Instead, it seems to have blurred the lines we needed, leaving us even more lonely and less likely to find wedded bliss. The websites and apps have manifestly facilitated random sex and superficial flirtation, but they seem to have done far less to help us find love. Far from solving our problems, they have often multiplied and complicated them, leaving many feeling like we’re driving blindfolded — until the inevitable crash into greater heartache and deeper loneliness. Who will deliver us from the gamification of our hearts — from this dating scene of death? “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25). Because of him, in the midst of all of the confusion and heartache, we have an anchor and a refuge. We’re no longer condemned by the sins we’ve committed in relationships in the past — by the ways we have wittingly or unwittingly followed the course of this world (Ephesians 2:2) — and we’re not captive to the broken and prevailing dating trends of our day. Five Reasons to Quit Playing While the world plays games with sex, romance, and “commitment,” Christ frees us to quit playing and start dating differently — with selflessness and humility, with clarity and intentionality, with patience and sobriety, even if we choose to meet someone online. If you have been wounded by the romantic carelessness of others, or you’re tired of suffering from all the ambiguity, or you simply want to avoid the dangers of dating today, here are five big reasons to beware online. 1. Humility, not vanity, prepares us to love a spouse. The overwhelmingly popular swipe feature, which allows you to impulsively like or reject people based on their appearance, can poison anyone with pride. The flick of a thumb, so seemingly harmless, threatens to cheapen the image of God. What does God feel when we flippantly swipe a real man or woman, someone he himself wove together, into the trash bin of our phones? When there were no apps between us, the dynamic was more palpable. You had to reject people to their face (or at least with your voice over the phone), where you were confronted with them as a person, not just as pixels. We don’t have to like or date every man or woman who likes us; we do need to treat them as eternally valuable made ones. Online dating has made it so much easier to treat them as virtually nothing. The yay-or-nay culture in online dating not only diminishes the value of a person; it also fortifies our walls of pride. The apps and profiles pretend to give us the power to decide what is better or worse, ugly or beautiful in a human being. Instead of leading us to marital bliss, that kind of vanity ruins us for marriage, for the kind of the crucified love that requires Christlike humility at every single turn. Fill your phone and life with habits that expose vanity and cultivate humility. If you want to love a woman (or man) well, you will need to be relentlessly vulnerable about your own faults and tenaciously patient and compassionate toward hers (or his). 2. Money, not wisdom, fuels online dating. If you seriously want to be informed, you won’t have to read long to realize that money, not love, drives these companies. They don’t go to sleep at night dreaming about how to get you married. They go to sleep, wake up in the morning, and work extremely hard to make money — from you or anyone else. It’s not personal, but it is incredibly professional. People have undoubtedly always made money from people who want to marry, but never at this scale and never this pervasively. By some reports, $2.5 billion every year (and growing). After food, shelter, and water, there is no demand higher than love, and Silicon Valley has quickly learned how to turn the demand into millions and millions of dollars. Even if you don’t pay, they’re selling your “free” clicks and likes and connections for advertising. This does not mean that dating websites or apps are inherently bad, or that godly people may not find their godly spouse through them, but it does mean dating online is inherently dangerous. The apostle Paul warns, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy 6:10). If your priorities and desires are shaped by Christ, then I’m sure dating websites and apps can be one good way to meet your future spouse — like a pirate ship in the hands of a just captain. I fear, however, that too many Christians have instead reluctantly climbed aboard with Jack Sparrow, expecting to find a stowaway among the crew to marry, while blindly riding into whatever trouble the ship takes them. 3. Perfection is an illusion, not an expectation. The apps allow you to create the illusion of perfection — and to buy that same illusion from others. No one creates a profile looking for opportunities to highlight their weaknesses and expose their flaws. The whole system is built to make us look (and feel) too good about ourselves — to indulge in (and entice others with) an illusion of ourselves. Paul says, “By the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned” (Romans 12:3). Can we really think honestly and soberly about ourselves while we’re busy making ourselves look as good as possible? Many of us need to be reminded that God’s perfect person for us isn’t all that perfect. Every person who marries is a sinner, so the search for a spouse isn’t a pursuit of perfection, but a mutually flawed pursuit of Jesus. We are not only looking for an almost-perfect husband or wife; we are looking for a man or woman secure enough in Christ to boast in their weaknesses (2 Corinthians 12:9). Regardless of the believer you marry (and how well their profile scored), you will likely find out soon that you do not feel as “compatible” as you once did, but hopefully you will marvel more at God’s love for you in Jesus and the amazing privilege it is to live out that love together, especially in light of the ways you consistently disappoint and fail each other. 4. Romance has the power to ruin lives and souls. Gamification . I wrote this article because of that word — because the word was so grossly (and personally) familiar, and because it was so deeply offensive. I have seen the destruction careless dating can cause because I have been the naïve, reckless, and selfish destroyer. I flirted without any serious intention of pursuing. I let girls wonder if I was leading them on. I played hide-and-seek with the blood-bought hearts of my sisters in Christ. I treated physical intimacy like a hobby. Game  may describe how some of us have treated love, but what we leave behind often looks and feels more like a house leveled by a tornado. We all want to pretend dating is fun and harmless until we’re the ones harmed while someone else has their fun. But even before we get hurt, we know how much is at stake. We know the springs of life flow from the heart (Proverbs 4:23). We know she was formed by God in her mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13), and given a soul that will last forever. We know the passions of the flesh wage war against us (1 Peter 2:11). We know that we are lured and enticed by our desires into sin, which leads to death (James 1:14). Romance has as much power as anything to ruin lives and betray souls. When you’re tempted to treat it more like Candy Crush, remember the eternities that are affected by romantic intimacy. 5. Jesus demands (and offers) more. You cannot avoid this war altogether. Even if you left all the websites and traded in your smartphone, pursuing love will mean being vulnerable to potential heartbreak. The world of online dating simply makes it easier to get hurt. I want you to be wide awake to Satan’s schemes against you. I want you to be prepared for the fiery arrows that will fall on your path to marriage. I also want you to know how people are wounded so that you can love them well in dating, even if you never marry them. Jesus will demand more of you. Dating how he wants us to will not be convenient, easy, or cheap. It will require extraordinary patience, self-control, and sacrifice — far more than most expect from us online, and far more than we can muster without his moment-by-moment help. The love he demands won’t have the thrill of flirtation, or the mystique of ambiguity, or the adrenaline rush of sexual immorality, but for the first time, it will feel real. Because it will be real. Because it will be filled with him.
