Featured Saved in the great Arminian way

If it is genuine revival then all is good. Remembering...

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. -2 chronicles 7:14

 

Have you studied the George Clark Rankin guy? He tells the story better than any other. The Cripple Creek Camp meeting, as told by George Clark Rankin and David Sullins....

The Life of David Sullins
The Life of George Clark Rankin

Here are some of the rules to govern the Cripple Creek Camp meeting around 1823....
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The document above contains the rules to governthe Cripple Creek camp meeting on the 12th day of September, 1823.

On the ninth rule it is stated, “No persons or persons are to occupy the stand except the preachers and the exhorters.” The Methodist in those days had a class of minister called exhorters. These so called “Exhorters” would encourage and help breathe life into the camp meeting of the day. And what importance they put on exhortation as the exhorter class had a place with the preachers and evangelists!

On the fourteenth rule it is stated that females sit on the left hand from the stand and the males on the right. This was stated also in David Sullins time as a way to keep order in the service.

Pictured below is Robert Sheffey, who was more of the exhorter than the preacher. It was said of him in The Life of George Clark Rankin and beginning on page 239...

I passed my examinations and that year I was sent to the Wytheville Station and Circuit. That was adjoining my former charge. We reached the old parsonage on the pike just out of Wytheville as Rev. B. W. S. Bishop moved out. Charley Bishop was then a little tow-headed boy. He is now the learned Regent of Southwestern University. The parsonage was an old two-and-a-half-story structure with nine rooms and it looked a little like Hawthorne's house with the seven gables. It was the lonesomest-looking old house I ever saw. There was no one there to meet us, for we had not notified anybody of the time we would arrive.

Think of taking a young bride to that sort of a mansion! But she was brave and showed no sign of disappointment. That first night we felt like two whortleberries in a Virginia tobacco wagonbed. We had room and to spare, but it was scantily furnished with specimens as antique as those in Noah's ark. But in a week or so we were invited out to spend the day with a good family, and when we went back we found the doors fastened just as we had left them, but when we entered a bedroom was elegantly furnished with everything modern and the parlor was in fine shape. The ladies had been there and done the work. How much does the preacher owe to the good women of the Church!

The circuit was a large one, comprising seventeen appointments. They were practically scattered all over the county. I preached every other day, and never less than twice and generally three times on Sunday.

I had associated with me that year a young collegemate, Rev. W. B. Stradley. He was a bright, popular fellow, and we managed to give Wytheville regular Sunday preaching. Stradley became a great preacher and died a few years ago while pastor of Trinity Church, Atlanta, Georgia. We were true yokefellows and did a great work on that charge, held fine revivals and had large ingatherings.

The famous Cripple Creek Campground was on that work. They have kept up campmeetings there for more than a hundred years. It is still the great rallying point for the Methodists of all that section. I have never heard such singing and preaching and shouting anywhere else in my life. I met the Rev. John Boring there and heard him preach. He was a well-known preacher in the conference; original, peculiar, strikingly odd, but a great revival preacher.

One morning in the beginning of the service he was to preach and he called the people to prayer. He prayed loud and long and told the Lord just what sort of a meeting we were expecting and really exhorted the people as to their conduct on the grounds. Among other things, he said we wanted no horse- trading and then related that just before kneeling he had seen a man just outside the encampment looking into the mouth of a horse and he made such a peculiar sound as he described the incident that I lifted up my head to look at him, and he was holding his mouth open with his hands just as the man had done in looking into the horse's mouth! But he was a man of power and wrought well for the Church and for humanity.

The rarest character I ever met in my life I met at that campmeeting in the person of Rev. Robert Sheffy, known as "Bob" Sheffy. He was recognized all over Southwest Virginia as the most eccentric preacher of that country. He was a local preacher; crude, illiterate, queer and the oddest specimen known among preachers. But he was saintly in his life, devout in his experience and a man of unbounded faith. He wandered hither and thither over that section attending meetings, holding revivals and living among the people. He was great in prayer, and Cripple Creek campground was not complete without "Bob" Sheffy. They wanted him there to pray and work in the altar.

He was wonderful with penitents. And he was great in following up the sermon with his exhortations and appeals. He would sometimes spend nearly the whole night in the straw with mourners; and now and then if the meeting lagged he would go out on the mountain and spend the entire night in prayer, and the next morning he would come rushing into the service with his face all aglow shouting at the top of his voice. And then the meeting always broke loose with a floodtide.

He could say the oddest things, hold the most unique interviews with God, break forth in the most unexpected spasms of praise, use the homeliest illustrations, do the funniest things and go through with the most grotesque performances of any man born of woman.

It was just "Bob" Sheffy, and nobody thought anything of what he did and said, except to let him have his own way and do exactly as he pleased. In anybody else it would not have been tolerated for a moment. In fact, he acted more like a crazy man than otherwise, but he was wonderful in a meeting. He would stir the people, crowd the mourner's bench with crying penitents and have genuine conversions by the score. I doubt if any man in all that conference has as many souls to his credit in the Lamb's Book of Life as old "Bob" Sheffy.

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Bob Jones University also did a movie on Robert Sheffey

 

George Clark Rankin and David Sullins regard the old Cripple Creek camp meeting as famous. I have been up and down Wythe County and not a soul has heard of that meeting.They let it disappear from history!

 

I also regard Fanny Crosby as having positive input towards revival.

 

Robert Sheffey is my favorite saint and lived in the 1800s during the great Methodist revival here in Giles County, Virginia. As we approached 1900 the Methodist revival seems to have grown cold. Robert once was at a conference and was annoyed by the the lack of revival spirit in the air. Asked to lead the closing prayer he prayed...

"Dear Lord, a chill wind seems to imprison our hearts; and the brothers and sisters sit about as rotting tree stumps; and even the mouths of Thy servants who have spoken seem cold with formality and aloofness. These brethren who call themselves preachers and who by divine calling should let Thy lovingkindness shine from them like the light of the sun do not know what the trouble is. I think I know what the trouble is. Thou are not with us. We have not invited Thee. They will not like Thy servant Robert Sheffey for asking you this at so late an hour, but, Lord, come quickly, like a descending dove. Forgive them, Lord, for their stiff shirt collars and brand-new suits make it hard for them to look down from the pulpit to see if anyone stands at the altar. Forgive them, Lord, they are small potatoes, and very few in the hill …"

 

In the late 1800s we find the Circuit Rider Robert Sheffey, is traveling his circuit....

Having passed by Wythe County he was invited to a home where a young teenage girl had given birth to a baby. After hearing that the baby was born out of wedlock he asked a young boy, “Would you go bring me the sheepskin on my saddle, son? The sunbeams are coming through that elm tree at the top of the hill like the very gates of heaven were open. Do not come and get me. I will be down when I am through!”

When he descended the hill all the rest had eaten their dinner and the newborn baby boy lay in his cradle, giving a low, trembling cry.

“Is the girl all right?” He directed his question toward the midwife.

“0’ course she is. The young’uns make a lot of noise, but they’re tough as pine knots.”

He asked if he could have something to eat and as they fixed his plate he talked with the new mother.

“He’s a pretty baby. Have you seen him, Mr. Sheffey? Big feet like mine and all . . . I want you to baptize him too. Brother Sheffey, I know I have sinned. Will God forgive me – and use my son and not curse him?” she began...

“As soon as I eat we will have a family service around the bed of the new mother,” he said to all.

It was clear when he began that nobody in the household was accustomed to family prayer. He could always tell. They squirmed and shuffled and played with their fingers and picked at a thousand pieces of imaginary lint upon their clothing.

“The young sister has confessed her sin to me already,” he began, “and she prays to a loving God to forgive her and use this child. Human mistakes can be turned around and proved a blessing to God, though we must always bear the scars of our failures. I have prayed and asked my dear Lord to make this little one a blessing in this house. I asked the Lord to make this mother a good mother and for this grandmother also to feel a new burst of life as she comes to love the little one. I’m going to ask for more than that, for the storehouse of our Lord is surely bountiful.”

On the way home, galloping hooves approached from behind him. He guided Gideon to the road shoulder so as to allow the speeding rider all the room he needed. Rather than passing, however, the young boy reined to a halt by Robert’s side.

“My brother, George, got bit by a rattlesnake this mornin’. We’re afraid he’s goin’ to die. Father just now seen you passin’ and said for me to overtake you and get you to pray for George.”

“Do I know you and your family? Your face is not familiar,” Robert said.

“No, you don’t know us, but father knows of you, he says if you pray for George that the Lord would let him live.”

Robert followed the boy home, where George lay on the grass in the back yard. A solemn-faced woman who refused to meet the inquiring gaze of her visitor attended the wounded man, and presently the father came from the kitchen.

“Reverend Sheffey, call upon the Lord so my boy will live,” the father said.

“Have you ever called upon the Lord’s name, my brother?”

“No, but if you’ll do it the Lord will surely hear our prayers. It is said that many things you pray for come to pass even after many years.”

“And you have a wife and children, I see. How many? Do they ever call upon the name of the Lord?”

“No, guess not.” The father hung his head.

“Son, would you fetch my sheepskin from my saddle?” Robert said to the boy who had overtaken him

He started to kneel, and all of them had bowed and closed their eyes before he got both knees on the prayer mat. Robert could tell, as with the Wythe county family he had just visited, with all the squirming and shuffling, that this family too was unaccustomed to family prayer.

“Oh Lord Jesus,” Robert prayed, “Please bring Thy healing to this young man, and Lord in the same breath we thank thee for snakes and pray that there be many of them. It is because of a snake that this family calls upon thy holy name. One of the sons has been bitten, and they call upon Thee.

“Except for the snake this family would never in their lifetimes turned to you. What a blessing this lowly, crawling thing has been! Lord, I want you to send lots of snakes. Send another one to bite the youngest boy here, and send still another to bite this woman who never had her boys kneel by her chair, that they might hear the prayers of their mother. And, Lord, above all things, send a great big rattler, a really large one, to bite the old man so that he may call upon thy name fervently and much. In Jesus name I pray…. Amen.”

He grasped the infant by the foot before he prayed. Timidly, they bowed as he spoke…

“Oh Lord, we have not loved Thee enough, for surely Thy gifts are ten thousand times more generous than we have ever asked. Lord, we ask of Thee a mighty thing today – not to our glory but Thine. Take this little infant boy and make of him Thine advocate who will stand in a hundred pulpits across this land and bring a thousand souls into Thy kingdom. And, Lord, Thy servant Sheffey would like to know Thy plan for this little one’s life. In Jesus name.”

Before Sheffey would pass away he got a letter from the young baby prayed for in the original post....

“Dear Reverend Sheffey: I finally got your address from the Holston conference, where I learned you are still listed as a local preacher. I am told that many years ago you sat at the foot of my unmarried mother’s bed in a remote hollow in Wythe County and prayed for me and my family. Tradition handed down further states that you took my little foot in your hand as you prayed and asked God to use me in spite of the circumstances of my birth. You asked, I believe, that God would make a preacher of me and stand me in many pulpits across the land until I had brought a thousand souls into the kingdom. It is my joy to inform you that I have served churches from Tennessee to Texas (where I now am, as you can see from the postmark) and that the sixth day of August marked the day I baptized my one thousandth convert. I am still a young man and I must tell you I plan to work another forty years. Dear friend, you badly underestimated God’s power!”