Evan Roberts and the Fire That Started with Confession

In the autumn of 1904, a twenty-six-year-old Welsh coal miner named Evan Roberts stood before seventeen people in a small chapel in Loughor, Wales, and delivered a staggeringly simple message: confess your sins, put away every doubtful habit, obey the Holy Spirit promptly, and confess Christ publicly. No elaborate theology. No impressive credentials. Just an unadorned call to repentance from a man who had spent months on his knees in prayer.

The religious establishment scoffed. Wales was already a churchgoing nation. Chapels dotted every valley. Surely these people did not need some uneducated miner telling them to repent. They had their hymns, their traditions, their pews worn smooth by generations of faithful attendance.

But Roberts, like John the Baptist before him, understood that heritage alone produces no fruit. Within weeks, the revival that began with those seventeen people swept through Wales like a brushfire. Over 100,000 people came to genuine faith. Taverns emptied. Courts had no cases to try. Coal miners stopped swearing so completely that their pit ponies, trained to respond to profanity, no longer understood commands and had to be retrained.

John the Baptist stood in the Jordan wilderness and warned the Pharisees not to rest on the words "We have Abraham as our father." Evan Roberts echoed that ancient cry in the coal valleys of Wales — that God desires not the comfort of religious ancestry, but the living fruit of a repentant heart.