Coming Down from the Mountain
A response to Rabbi David Ostrich on revival, presence, and the test of faith
· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
The Question Behind the Question
The real test of an encounter with God is not what happens in the room, but what happens on the drive home. Rabbi David Ostrich made that point recently in a short column about the Brownsville Revival, and I want to take it a few steps further.
The Brownsville Revival began at the Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida, on Father’s Day in 1995. It ran for about five years, several nights a week, and drew visitors from around the world. During those years, a reporter called local clergy, including the rabbi, and asked the questions everyone was asking. Is it real? Are the healings real? Is God actually there, or is this a well-run show?
The rabbi said he was surprised by the question. Of course God was there, he answered. God is present everywhere. He said the better question was what the worshippers did afterward. Did they drive politely, pay their taxes and child support, and treat others as they would want to be treated? He closed with a line from Episcopal Bishop Charles Duvall: a man does not truly believe in Jesus unless he behaves like Jesus.
I agree with him. I also think the matter has more layers than a newspaper column can cover, and those layers are worth working through.
Everywhere, Yet Not Always Noticed
God is present everywhere, but we are not everywhere aware of Him. That distinction explains why a revival can feel like God has arrived when in fact He never left.
The rabbi quotes Deuteronomy and Psalm 145, and both hit the mark. David says the same thing in Psalm 139: there is no height, no depth, no darkness where God is not. Paul told the philosophers in Athens that God is not far from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:27–28). Omnipresence is not a minority opinion in Scripture. It is the foundation on which everything else stands.
Yet Scripture also records moments when people suddenly woke up to what had been true all along. Jacob, running from his brother, lay down in the open with a stone for a pillow. He dreamed of a ladder reaching heaven, and when he woke he said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not” (Genesis 28:16). God had not moved to Bethel that night. Jacob’s eyes had opened.
That is what I think happens at a genuine revival. People gather, quiet their distractions, confess what they have been hiding, sing until their guard comes down, and pray with expectation. Their attention turns, and they notice the One who was already there. The experience is real, and it can be overwhelming. But the change is in the people, not in God’s location.
This matters for the rabbi’s question. If revival is mainly a change in us, then we answer whether it was real the way we answer any change in a person: by watching what that person does next.
Every Mountain Has a Valley Below It
In Scripture, God’s people meet Him on the mountain, then return to the valley to serve. The rabbi points to Moses, and the pattern holds through the whole Bible.
Moses spent forty days with God on Sinai. He came down with the tablets in his hands and his face shining, and walked straight into a camp where a golden calf and a camp-out were out of control (Exodus 32). The glory on his face did not exempt him from the mess below. It equipped him for it. He spent the rest of his life leading a complaining people through the wilderness, and the Law he carried down was mostly about ordinary things: honest weights, fair wages, care for the widow, and returning a neighbor’s stray ox.
The Gospels repeat the pattern almost exactly. Jesus took Peter, James, and John up a high mountain, and they saw Him transfigured, His clothes shining whiter than any bleach could make them, with Moses and Elijah talking with Him. Peter wanted to build three shelters and stay. Instead, Jesus led them down the next morning, and at the foot of the mountain they found a crowd, an argument, and a desperate father whose son was being thrown into fire and water by a spirit the disciples had failed to cast out (Mark 9:2–29).
I do not think that placement is accidental. The mountain shows us who Jesus is. The valley shows us what He is for. A Christian who wants to live on the mountain has misunderstood both.
Gifts Are Not Proof; Fruit Is
Jesus Himself said that spiritual power is not the test of a true disciple; a changed life is. The rabbi asks whether tongues and being “slain in the Spirit” were only a night’s entertainment. The New Testament had already raised that question, and answered it more sharply than he did.
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned that many would say to Him on the last day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and do many mighty works in Your name?” And He would answer, “I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matthew 7:21–23). Prophecy, deliverance, and miracles are on that list. They are not enough. Just before, He gave the test that is enough: “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).
Paul says the same thing to the church that had more spiritual gifts than any other, and more trouble. The Corinthians spoke in tongues, prophesied, and boasted of their knowledge, while they sued one another, tolerated open immorality, and humiliated the poor at the Lord’s Supper. So Paul wrote the chapter we read at weddings, though he wrote it as a rebuke: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal (1 Corinthians 13:1).
The fruit Paul names elsewhere is not spectacular: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Galatians 5:22–23). None of it shows up well on a service video. All of it shows up in traffic, at the dinner table, in the office, and in how a man handles money. The rabbi’s list of tests (courteous driving, child support paid, taxes filed on time) is simply that fruit, described in plain clothes. James would add that faith without works is dead (James 2:17), and John that whoever says he loves God but hates his brother is a liar (1 John 4:20).
Root and Fruit
Behavior is evidence of faith, but not its source. On this point I want to add one thing to the rabbi’s argument, not to correct it but to finish it.
If we stop at “behave in godly ways,” we risk two errors. The first is moralism: the idea that religion is mainly good conduct, so that a decent agnostic and a devout believer are doing the same thing. The second is despair: a man who tries hard to behave like Jesus and keeps failing may conclude that faith is a fraud, or that he is.
Jesus did not say, “Produce fruit, and you will be a good tree.” He said a good tree produces good fruit (Matthew 7:17), and that a branch bears fruit by abiding in the vine; apart from Him we can do nothing (John 15:4–5). The order matters. The encounter with God is meant to change the root: to forgive what we could not undo, to heal what we could not mend, and to give us a new heart, as Ezekiel promised (Ezekiel 36:26). The behavior grows out of that change over time, the way fruit grows: slowly, seasonally, and sometimes after a hard pruning.
So I would put Bishop Duvall’s principle this way. If an experience of God never shows up in a man’s conduct, something did not take root, however intense the evening was. And if a man’s conduct is slowly changing in the direction of love, something real is happening in him, even if he never had a dramatic night at all. Revival is valuable when it plants something. It is wasted when it only stirs the soil.
This also explains why Christians cannot simply copy the behavior of Jesus by willpower. We are not asked to imitate a dead teacher’s example. We are asked to let a living Lord reshape us from within, and then to cooperate with Him daily in the valley. That is harder than either moralism or emotionalism, and it is the only thing that lasts.
What Revival Fruit Has Looked Like
The revivals history remembers with respect are the ones that changed how people lived in public. The meetings themselves faded; the conduct remained.
The Methodist awakening under John and Charles Wesley in eighteenth-century England was full of emotion: weeping, shouting, people falling down under conviction. But it is remembered for what came after. Wesley’s converts organized into small groups that met weekly to ask one another how they were actually living. Many miners and laborers stopped drinking away their wages. The movement fed prison reform, schooling for the poor, and the campaign against slavery. One of the last letters Wesley wrote, in 1791, urged the young William Wilberforce to keep fighting the slave trade.
The Welsh revival of 1904–05 left similar stories. Accounts from that time describe taverns losing business, debts being repaid, and stolen goods returned. One often-repeated story says the pit ponies in the coal mines were confused for a while because the miners had stopped cursing at them, and the animals had only ever been driven with oaths. Whether every detail is exact, the stories people chose to tell were about changed behavior, not about the services.
Brownsville produced fruit of this kind too. People who attended tell of broken marriages restored, addictions ended, and young men and women who went into ministry and missions. It also had its share of excess, conflict, and a painful aftermath, as most human movements do. That mixture is not a reason to dismiss it. It is a reason to judge it the way Jesus told us to: one life at a time, by the fruit, over years rather than nights.
The Drive Home
The question for us is not whether God was in Pensacola, but whether He is in our conduct this week. Most of us will never attend a five-year revival. All of us have had moments on the mountain: a sermon that cut through, a prayer that was answered, a quiet morning when God felt near.
The test of those moments is the same one the rabbi proposed. When I leave church this morning, will I let someone merge in front of me without resentment? Will I keep a promise that costs me something? Will I tell the truth on a form when a lie would save money? Will I be patient with the person in my house who tries my patience most? Will I ask, and mean it, what Jesus would do, and then do it?
I am grateful to Rabbi Ostrich for asking the question so plainly. Jesus summarized the whole Law with two commands from the Torah: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind (Deuteronomy 6:5), and love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). A Jewish teacher reminding Christians of that is not a stranger correcting us. He is pointing us back to the text our Lord quoted.
God is in this place, as Jacob learned. The proof that we know it will be found on the road home.