Then suddenly He appears

“But it is, you see, a part of His method to allow things to go to the very limit in favour of the enemy and the adversary. And then when everybody says, ‘It’s all up, it is finished’, God arises and His enemies are scattered, and the church experiences a new period of revival. That is how revivals have always come, and the reason is quite obvious. If they came in any other way, some of us would be claiming that we had produced it, that something we were doing had led to the revival. God always sees to it that nobody can ever claim it. He does it in His own way and He allows things, He shuts us up in unbelief until the whole thing seems hopeless, then suddenly He appears.” D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones