The Secret Place of Evan Roberts

Evan John Roberts was born on June 8, 1878 in the seacoast village of Loughor in South Wales, the son of working people who feared God and loved the chapel. As a boy he left school early for the coal mine and later apprenticed to a blacksmith. His hands were roughened by labor, yet from his youth he carried a tenderness toward the Lord that would not let him go. In his teens he began to pray daily for a visitation from heaven. He kept a small Bible with him, read during brief pauses at work, and stole hours in the night to plead that God would bend the hearts of his people. By his own testimony he prayed for over a decade for revival before anything was seen in public.

In the spring of 1904 Roberts enrolled at a preparatory school for the ministry at Newcastle Emlyn. Those months brought a deepening of the inward flame. He attended a series of meetings in September and October connected with the evangelist Seth Joshua. At the chapel in Blaenannerch he was overcome with a sense of the presence of God and prayed the brief prayer that became emblematic of his life, "Bend me, O Lord," an echo of earlier cries at those gatherings to bend us to the will of God. The words were simple and the moment quiet, yet it marked him. He returned to Loughor with a burden that his own chapel must be visited.

At Moriah Chapel in late October 1904 he requested permission to speak to the young people. The first meetings were small, stretching late into the night with prayer, Scripture, and testimony. Then the fire spread. Within days the chapel could not hold the crowds. The services were unhurried, believers confessing sins, making restitution, singing without a choir, and praying aloud as conscience and Spirit led. Roberts did not dominate the platform. He guided. He urged four simple injunctions that became the signature of the movement. Confess every known sin. Put away every doubtful thing. Obey the Holy Spirit promptly. Confess Christ publicly. The meetings were often marked by silence broken by prayer, by spontaneous song, and by tears. They were marked above all by a sense that God Himself had drawn near.

From Loughor the awakening ran like fire along the valleys. Roberts traveled by invitation to nearby chapels and then to towns across South Wales. In Gorseinon and Swansea, in the anthracite valleys of the west and the great coal valleys of the south, meetings went on through the night as men left pits and women left hearths to gather under a felt presence that humbled and healed. Newspapers carried reports of public houses standing empty, of debts repaid, of quarrels reconciled, of magistrates with little to do. The singing of the people filled the streets. The unadorned appeal remained the same. Clean hands. A yielded will. Immediate obedience to the voice of the Spirit.

Roberts did not claim novelty. He claimed necessity. He insisted that prayer must be specific, that sins must be named, and that the Spirit must be obeyed at once. He taught nothing that could not be found in the Scriptures read aloud night after night in Welsh and in English. His own secret life remained the fountain. He rose early to pray and often refused food when burdened. He withdrew between meetings to weep and to wait on God. He had no desire to be seen. He desired that the Lord alone be known. When physical and emotional exhaustion overtook him in 1906, he withdrew from public leadership, convinced that the Spirit could guide the work without his continual presence. In later years he lived quietly, investing himself in intercession and counsel, and in the years around 1912 he cooperated with the writer Jessie Penn Lewis in the controversial volume War on the Saints, a book that arose from their conviction that spiritual warfare accompanies revival. The controversy stirred and then subsided. Roberts returned to prayer, choosing the hidden path. He died on January 29, 1951, in Cardiff, after decades in which his name seldom appeared in public but his knees remained familiar with the floor.