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In the latest episode of the Great Southland Revival podcast series, author Ian Malins tells of a profound visitation from God that he experienced in the Solomon Islands.

“God doesn’t just send revival anyhow,” Ian Malins, author of What Will it Take to Bring Revival, told me in our recent conversation. “He’s waiting for us to break up the stoney ground.”

A farmer has to plough up the hard, dry ground so that when the rain comes, it will soak deep and not just run off the surface, Ian explains. “It’s the same with us. We’ve just got to open our hearts and plough up the fallow ground so that when God chooses to send the rain it will be a deep rain, and it’s going to bring an abundant harvest in our nation.”

On our most recent episode of the Great Southland Revival podcast series, former pastor, missionary and now Christian author and equipper Ian Malins shared many brilliant insights about revival and our role in it.

Ploughing Up the Fallow Ground

Ian believes that revival is not fundamentally about “everyone having a wonderful, happy time with God”. Rather, “it always starts with brokenness, conviction of sin and repentance,” he tells me. “God’s got to clean out the rubbish from our lives before we can enter into this joyful close walk with Him again.”

While revival is a corporate move of God, Ian believes that it can’t be stereotyped. If we are in a revivalist-type meeting and everyone is expected to act the same way as each other, Ian urges us to ask the question, “Is that a man-made manipulation thing or is it truly God at work?” God is in the business of dealing with us as individuals, Ian clarifies. “He knows our hearts, and even in revival that’s how He deals with us.”

Ian’s heart for revival in Australia is very apparent. “Many believe and are trusting that somehow in God’s purpose [in] this dry continent—this geographically dry and probably spiritually dry continent—God’s going to do something extraordinary.” We have only seen little indications of what that is through the revivals of the past and the prophetic words of men like Pedro Ferdinand De Quiros, he suggests. “God has not forgotten us,” Ian says reassuringly. “He’s still got a great purpose for this land.”

Revival in the Solomon Islands

Revival became a passion for Ian through some unusual circumstances. It began while he was teaching the Bible to missionary students in Papua New Guinea. He explains:

We had some students coming from the Solomon Islands where revival had been since 1970, which had brought new lease of life to the church—the South Seas Evangelical Church (SSEC). We had students from all different areas of Melanesia and the South Pacific, but the students from the Solomon Islands would tell these stories of what God was doing and what God had done there. I was there as a teacher but I felt they had something to teach me. Here I was hearing about a level of Christian life and experience—both individually and in the churches of the Solomons—that was outside my experience. So I longed to go there.

During those 14 years I never had the opportunity to actually visit the Solomon Islands. It wasn’t until I was an associate pastor on the Gold Coast, back in Australia, that the Baptist leaders were sending a team of pastors who’d like to go to the Solomon Islands. So I joined eight pastors and went across on a mission trip for three weeks into the Solomon Islands.

What I saw and experienced there changed my life. I came back a different person. Even after 30 years as a Christian, a missionary and then a pastor, three weeks changed my life. It helped me see things in a fresh perspective, and stripped away a lot of the baggage, and helped me see the core of what it means to be a follower of Jesus and what He can do.

Like a Mighty Dumper Wave

Ian describes one particular night in vivid detail:

I went then with these pastors to an Easter weekend ministry with a Solomon Islands speaker preaching over that weekend, and again a thousand people in this little village out in the islands gathered together. And over that three days, the Spirit of God just came upon those people and all of us.

At first, on the Friday after ministry, there was kind of a spirit of repentance swept across the congregation at the end, and people were weeping and crying and putting things right with one another. Wow, I’d never seen that happen in an Australian church like that.

But then two days later on the final Sunday of this weekend ministry with Michael Malio, this Solomon Islander speaker, he was a very calm, quiet speaker and just unfolded God’s call to holiness of life. There was no hyped-up kind of emotional stirring. But at the end of one of the messages on Sunday he just invited us to open our hearts to God and just to seek for Him in a fresh way and to pray.

Now the Solomon Islanders pray out loud so the whole congregation now erupted into praying corporately, and it’s like a wave of sound washing across with everybody praying. But as we were praying, there was another sound coming from the back of the auditorium, like it was hard to know what it was. It sounded like the roar of a waterfall. It started to move forward toward where we were sitting as Australians in the front row. As that sound started to move forward over the congregation, the intensity of that praying kind of went up, as people were feeling this whatever it was. And gradually it came right down to the very front row and it was like a big dumper wave about to break, and it just hovered there for a while and then it just fell over us Aussies in the front row, and I just felt this incredible overflow of something just flooding through my body, and I just began to weep, something inside of me broke. I was weeping uncontrollably for twenty minutes. But not just me—the whole congregation now was out of human control and people were on their faces, on the ground, some were standing up and praising God, some were filled with deep conviction, others were having revelations of who God was.

For me, I wasn’t having anything like that, but God was releasing something inside, something I probably bottled up hurts and struggles in ministry over many years, he was just setting me free. My emotions were just out of control.

To hear more of Ian’s incredible account and his reflections on what it will take to see revival in the church today, watch the latest episode of the Great Southland Revival podcast here.