Not sure why I’ve taken such a long break from missionary biographies and stories. Several in the past have changed my life and thinking, and so much so that these types should be general, monthly reading for me.

Mountain Rain, for example, about China/Burma missionary James O. Frasier taught me a great deal about prayer, as did Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret. Don Richardson’s Peace Child and Lords of the Earth showed me just how wildly different world cultures can be. Through Gates of Splendor taught about the potential cost and glory of mission work. Revolution in World Missions clued me into the changes needed in “how we do missions” today. The Insanity of God—goodness. All of the above!

I share these few examples to illustrate the deep spiritual impact that missionary biographies and stories have had on my life. This book, By My Spirit by Jonathan Goforth has continued that tradition for me.

The time is the late 1920s. Jonathan Goforth paces the room, recalling the most memorable period of Christian growth he ever witnessed in Manchuria, the revivals of the 1900s. To capture the memories as clearly as they come, he speaks, while his son transcribes, resulting in this fast-paced recollection of how God’s Spirit transformed the Chinese Church through conviction and confession into a vibrant, loving community on fire for the Savior.

Goforth takes his readers from one revival meeting to the next, in one village church after another, where God’s Spirit was moving. He includes enough detail to put us there in the room, yet he doesn’t bore us with the unnecessaries:

He arrives in a place. He prays and preaches. Stubbornness and hindering sins are palpable. But then the Spirit penetrates a heart, and that soul under deep conviction makes a public confession of some secret sin. Soon the whole place is weeping and praying, confessing and cowering. Lives are mended. Fellowship is renewed. The Spirit has brought revival!

I don’t know about you and your church background, but whenever I heard the word “Revival” growing up, it meant one thing: “Evangelistic Meetings.” Some popular evangelist had been hired for the week, so you could pester your unsaved neighbors or friends into coming out on a Tuesday and hearing about the wickedness of booze. That’s what “revival” meant to me for years and years.

But then I read this book, and it’s like a light went on. Evangelism and altar calls for the unsaved aren’t REVIVAL—that’s VIVAL.

The Independent Fundamental Baptist Churches of my youth have it backwards. Revival doesn’t come when we start seeing people getting saved. It’s when the lying, cheating, angry, selfish, arrogant, indulgent, careless, addicted, bitter, gossiping, fat and lazy Christians among us acknowledge their sin, confess their sins one to another, repent, and forgive. When this happens, revival happens. And when revival happens, “vival” will be all that much easier to see.

Goforth’s descriptions of revival in this book are mesmerizing and convicting. Why don’t we see such revivals today? Well, he answers that question in the closing lines of the book:

If revival is being withheld from us, it is because some idol remains still enthroned; because we still insist in placing our reliance in human schemes; because we still refuse to face the unchangeable truth that ‘it is not by might, but BY MY SPIRIT.’ (138)

Backing up a few pages, he describes how we can be sure that revival does come to our own church and region:

God’s revival may be had when we will and where we will…Any body of Christian people, provided they wholeheartedly and unreservedly carried out God’s will, could have revival…What is revival but simply the Spirit of God fully controlling in the surrendered life? … The history of revival shows plainly that all movements of the Spirit have started in prayer….There is no secret…Revival always comes in answer to prayer. (131-3)

Prayer and confession—that’s all it takes. This book has changed my thinking entirely about how revival looks, and it makes me now pray all the more than we could see this in our region even today. The question is, could I be the one to start it? Could I be the one who, under conviction of the Holy Spirit, feels humble enough to confess my sins before a gathering of my brothers and sisters in Christ? Could I?

Could you?

By My Spirit is a powerful recounting of a true Revival in China at the turn of the 20th century. We’re more than a century past that event now….perhaps it’s our turn to experience the same.

©2021 E.T.

Read More Great Missionary Stories:

• Raymond Lull by Samuel Zwemer (1902)
• The Romance of Missionary Heroism by John C. Lambert (1907)
• By My Spirit by Jonathan Goforth (1929)
• Adoniram Judson by Faith Coxe Bailey (1955)
• Green Leaf in Drought-time by Isobel Kuhn (1957)
• Through Gates of Splendor by Elizabeth Elliot (1957)
• By Searching by Isobel Kuhn (1959)
• Among the Savage Redskins of the Amazon by Harold Wildish (1961)
• Arrows of His Bow by Sanna Morrison Barlow (1966)
• Peace Child by Don Richardson (1974)
• Lords of the Earth by Don Richardson (1977)
• From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya by Ruth Tucker (1983)
• John and Betty Stam by Kathleen White (1989)
• Let My People Go by A.W. Tozer (1990)
• Torches of Joy by John Dekker (1992)
• An Ordinary Man—A Great God by Joy Mielke (2011)
• Mountain Rain by Eileen Crossman and M.E. Tewskesbury (2013)
• Beneath the Ancient Dust by Melissa Meyers (2018)
• Daring Dependence by M.R. Conrad (2022)