It is critical that we as a nation seriously consider, understand, accept, and then discuss with our fellow Americans just how precarious our situation really is. We must not put our heads in the sand. Rather, we need to honestly confront the grave challenges before us. We must not allow ourselves to become paralyzed by fear or consumed by the thought that our fate is sealed and there are no steps we can take to turn this ship of state around and get it back on the right course.
The central question we now face is this: Will God in his mercy unleash a dramatic period of sweeping spiritual revival and moral renewal and reform that will fundamentally transform our nation and help us get back on the right track before it’s too late?
While it is by no means guaranteed, I believe such a dramatic revival is possible. The prophet Habakkuk once prayed, “O LORD, revive Your work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make it known; in wrath remember mercy” (Habakkuk 3:2). If the Hebrew prophet chose to pray for revival, we should too.
The good news is that twice before in American history we have experienced periods of broad, deep national revival. In fact, these movements were so game-changing that both secular and Christian historians were compelled to call them the “Great Awakening” and the “Second Great Awakening.” Unfortunately, few Americans know the history of the two spiritual revivals that swept this land in the early- to mid-1700s (pre–Revolutionary War) and in the early- to mid-1800s (pre–Civil War). I certainly don’t recall learning much of this history growing up. My parents didn’t talk about it, as they hadn’t been taught about it, and I don’t recall learning any of this at church or in the public schools I attended.
I first began developing an interest in America’s Great Awakenings while I was working as an advisor to Steve Forbes. As I set out to write this book, however, I decided to undertake a closer look at how God moved so powerfully to save our country in the past. I was absolutely fascinated and deeply encouraged by what I read. And as a result, I contend that it would be very valuable for all of us to review a bit of that history and then ask whether another such awakening could happen again.
The First Great Awakening (1700–1760s)
Let’s begin with some context. Many of the pilgrims who came to this continent in the 1600s and 1700s were strong followers of Jesus Christ, eager to experience religious freedom from the state-run churches of Great Britain and the European continent and to build vibrant faith communities in the New World. But by no means were all those who came faithful believers. Some were businessmen, soldiers, government officials, bureaucrats, and tradesmen who came with little or no religious heritage or faith. These came to work, not to advance the Kingdom of God. Some who arrived here were convicts sent essentially to provide slave labor until others from Africa and the Caribbean were cruelly captured and enslaved and brought to the New World. In time, therefore, the British colonies became a hodgepodge of different religious beliefs.
Unfortunately, while there were some boldly evangelistic ministers and laypeople in the colonies, most believers who were here did little to preach the gospel or make disciples capable of spiritual reproduction—that is, making other disciples who could and would make still more disciples. In other words, the Christians who came to the colonies tended to remain in their churches and in their pews and made little spiritual impact on those around them.
To be sure, they faced enormous challenges. They were battling the exhaustion of building a new society from scratch. They faced disease and the death of many of their family members, friends, and loved ones. They often struggled against harsh weather conditions. They also faced political oppression from the British and skirmishes with the Native Americans (whom they called Indians). However, rather than see these as opportunities to boldly share the life-changing message of the gospel with the rest of the colonists, most believers instead retreated into the safety of their families and tight-knit communities.
Yet this inward and almost-isolationist approach by the believers had unintended consequences. By the late 1600s, various ministers throughout the colonies had begun to despair of the moral and spiritual condition of the people and the rising apathy toward the things of God. So they began preaching of the need for a purification of the church and a revival of interest in hearing and obeying the Word of God. They also began praying more diligently for God to do something that the pastors couldn’t do on their own: turn increasingly sluggish and secular hearts and minds toward Christ.
To these ministers’ horror, however, events in the colonies took a terrible turn for the worse, not the better. There came a sudden, furious, and devastating war with the Indians, which became known as King Philip’s War—referring to Metacomet, the leader of the Native American forces, who was known to the British colonists as King Philip. Not many Americans today know much about it. Indeed, few have ever even heard of it. Yet it was this brutal conflict that helped shake the foundations of colonial American life to its core and set into motion a chain of events that would lead to an astounding outpouring of God’s amazing grace.
Historian Jill Lepore, in her award-winning book The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origin of American Identity, described the conflict:
In 1675, Algonquian Indians all over southern New England rose up against the Puritan colonists with whom they had lived peacefully for several decades. The result was the bloodiest war in American history, a terrifying conflict in which the Puritans found themselves fighting with a cruelty they had thought only the natives were capable of. . . . In proportion to population, their short, vicious war inflicted greater casualties than any other war in American history. . . . By August 1676, when the severed head of the Wampanoag leader, King Philip, was displayed in Plymouth, thousands of Indian and English men, women, and children were dead. More than half of the new towns in New England had been wiped out, and the settlers’ sense of themselves as civilized people of God had been deeply shaken.[336]
“The mood in New England following King Philip’s War (1675-76) was bleak and raw,” noted historian Thomas S. Kidd in his intriguing book The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. Kidd wrote of two pastors from the Northeast who thought it increasingly obvious that “we are a people in extream [sic] danger of perishing, in our own sins and under Gods Judgements [sic].” Moreover, the pastors feared that “‘all ordinary means’ of promoting moral reformation had failed,” causing them to ask themselves whether “our degeneracy and apostasy may not prove . . . perpetual.”[337]
Desperate for the Lord’s grace and mercy, a growing number of Protestant ministers began devoting themselves to prayer and fasting for a revival in the colonies. A growing number of laypeople began to pray for widespread revival as well. They asked God to have mercy on them and their neighbors and countrymen, and they patiently waited for the Lord to show his powerful hand. Yet what then began to unfold starting around 1700, building through the 1740s and lasting well into the 1760s, was more than even the most faithful prayer warriors had hoped for, dreamed of, or imagined. For suddenly there emerged two new dynamics.
• First, there entered into the drama preachers who proclaimed the gospel and taught the Scriptures with great care, passion, and conviction—and with a supernatural power few had seen or heard from their ministers before.
• The leaders of the Great Awakening—preachers like the American-born Jonathan Edwards and British-born missionaries such as George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Charles Wesley—tended to be well-educated men who had attended universities such as Yale and Oxford and were trained theologians. Yet they didn’t allow their higher learning to create an intellectualism or an elitism about the Bible that would make it difficult for laypeople to understand them. They carefully studied the Scriptures. They were empowered by the Holy Spirit. They had demonstrable spiritual gifts of teaching, preaching, and evangelism. And they believed that the Word of God—not they personally—had the power to save souls, change lives, and alter nations.
• Second, there emerged in this drama millions of people who wanted to hear the gospel preached with great passion and conviction. These people realized that their hearts were full of sin and that they needed to repent and get right with God. A revival cannot take place if there is no one to preach the Word with God’s power. But nor can it take place if no one will listen to God’s Word and be transformed by it.
By the grace of God, there emerged in America at that time a historic convergence of preachers and hearers, and no one in the New World had ever seen such dramatic results.
The Rise of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758)
Few men were more instrumental in the First Great Awakening than Jonathan Edwards. Edwards was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703, into a family of well-educated and well-respected pastors and theologians. Edwards’s father was a pastor, and his mother’s father was the Reverend Solomon Stoddard, a famous pastor who shepherded the nation’s largest and most influential church, in Northampton, Massachusetts, about eighty miles from Boston, and who saw God bring a series of small revivals to his congregation that foreshadowed the revivals to come.[338] Eventually, Edwards married Sarah Pierpont, the daughter of James Pierpont, a pastor and theologian who was the founder of Yale University.
Edwards himself was a brilliant young man. He graduated from high school at the age of thirteen and was immediately accepted to Yale. Four years later, in 1720, he graduated as the valedictorian of his class. After continuing his theological studies at Yale, he became an assistant pastor and understudy to his grandfather Stoddard. But it is unlikely that Edwards understood exactly what the Lord was going to teach him next.
“On Sunday evening, October 29 [1727], a terrible earthquake shook the homes of New Englanders, awakening many both physically and spiritually,” one historian noted. “This was followed by a long series of aftershocks, which kept the threat fresh in the minds of penitents. Immediately churches filled with seekers anxious to secure their salvation, lest they be caught unprepared for their own death.”[339] Remarked one layperson who survived the earthquake, “God has by the late amazing Earth-quake layd open my neglect before me that I see no way to escape. But by fleeing to Christ for refuge. God in that hour Set all my Sins before me. When I was Shaking over the pit looking every moment when the earth would open her mouth and Swallow me up and then must I have been miserable for ever & for ever.”[340] In towns throughout Massachusetts, churches continued to fill as people repented and gave their hearts to Christ.
The Lord used Reverend Stoddard to minister to people powerfully during this time, and his grandson was at his side to assist him. And three years before Stoddard went home to be with the Lord in 1729, the twenty-six-year-old Jonathan Edwards became senior pastor of Stoddard’s church.
Though relatively young and inexperienced, Edwards could see God was shaking his town and his community, both literally and spiritually. He could see the hunger people had to find forgiveness and redemption and to grow closer to Christ. Most importantly, he firmly believed the Scriptures spoke clearly of God’s ability and desire to save many souls and reverse a nation’s drifting from the Lord. He believed God’s words from 2 Chronicles 7:14, when the Lord declared, “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and heal their land” (NIV). Edwards understood the similarities between what was going on around him and the spiritual revivals that occurred in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, when the entire nation of Israel listened to the Word of God and repented of their sins. So Edwards began to pray that God would use him to effect great change, and he began to preach with the faith that the Lord would hear and answer his prayer.
The Impact of Jonathan Edwards
Beginning in 1734, Edwards saw God move even more powerfully in his congregation and community. During a short period of time, several people died in a way that rattled observers to the core. One young man whom Edwards described as being “in the bloom of his youth” was unexpectedly stricken with pleurisy (an inflammation in the chest cavity), experienced intense pain, was delirious for two days, and then was gone.[341] Then a young married woman unexpectedly developed a terrible illness and passed away. “This was followed with the death of an elderly person, which was attended with many unusual circumstances,” Edwards recalled. The tragic deaths reminded people of their own mortality and focused them on the prospect of spending eternity either in heaven or in hell. Five or six people suddenly came to the church and converted, Edwards observed. Then a well-known immoral woman came to the church and was saved, and something dramatic began to happen.
Concerning this conversion, Edwards would later write:
The news of it seemed to be almost like a flash of lightning, upon the hearts of young people, all over the town, and upon many others. Those persons amongst us, who used to be farthest from seriousness, and that I most feared would make an ill improvement of it, seemed to be awakened with it. Many went to talk with her, concerning what she had met with; and what appeared in her seemed to be to the satisfaction of all that did so.
Presently upon this, a great and earnest concern about the great things of religion and the eternal world, became universal in all parts of the town, and among persons of all degrees, and all ages. . . . Other discourse than of the things of religion would scarcely be tolerated in any company. The minds of people were wonderfully taken off from the world, it was treated amongst us as a thing of very little consequence.[342]
A revival in Northampton was under way.
Edwards described the events taking place in his community as nothing short of miraculous. He wrote:
The work of conversion was carried on in a most astonishing manner, and increased more and more; souls did as it were come by flocks to Jesus Christ. . . . The number of true saints multiplied, soon made a glorious alteration in the town: so that in the spring and summer following, anno 1735, the town seemed to be full of the presence of God: it never was so full of love, nor of joy, and yet so full of distress, as it was then. . . . It was a time of joy in families on account of salvation being brought to them; parents rejoicing over their children as new born, and husbands over their wives, and wives over their husbands. The doings of God were then seen in His sanctuary, God’s day was a delight, and His tabernacles were amiable. Our public assemblies were then beautiful: the congregation was alive in God’s service, every one earnestly intent on the public worship, every hearer eager to drink in the words of the minister as they came from his mouth; the assembly in general were, from time to time, in tears while the word was preached; some weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, others with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbors.[343]
Edwards called what he was witnessing “a shower of divine blessing.”[344] Indeed, to me these accounts of the early days of the revival read like the exciting and supernatural events of Acts 2, when God poured out his Holy Spirit and created the church in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost.
In 1738, Edwards published a powerful tract titled A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. He described what God had just done, why he believed God had done it, and how Edwards and his congregation had responded to this outpouring of the Holy Spirit. He wrote about how people had begun fasting and praying for the lost and how young people had begun to share the gospel with their friends and neighbors and with complete strangers.
In a world without radio, television, or the Internet, the well-written tract caught people’s imagination and spread like wildfire. Copies were quickly snapped up, devoured, and shared with others, even as more were being printed. As other ministers and laypeople throughout Massachusetts and the other colonies heard of the revival and read Edwards’s pamphlet, many began to beseech the Lord to do in their churches and communities what he had done in Northampton.
And the Lord answered their prayers. The revival soon spread through thirty-two
communities near Boston, then throughout New England and the rest of the colonies. Edwards’s tract was published in London and spread widely through Great Britain, Scotland, and Wales, where pastors and laypeople were enthralled and began praying and preaching for revivals in their nations as well.
In the years that followed, Edwards went on to plant other church congregations, serve as a missionary to Native Americans, and preach the gospel in congregations throughout New England (including his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in 1741).[345]
But arguably his most lasting impact was through his published works. He produced a series of highly influential publications to help others develop sound biblical theology and further the revival. These included The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (published in 1741), Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival (published in 1742), and A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (published in 1746). Each of these was used by God to shape Christian thinking in Edwards’s day. In 1758, Edwards accepted the position of president at the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton University). The school was founded in 1746 by four pastors specifically for the purpose of “educating Ministers of the Gospel” as well as to be “useful in other learned professions—ornaments of the State as well as the Church.”[346] Edwards was increasingly determined to train future pastors, theologians, and Christ-centered laypeople. He felt that by strengthening and revitalizing the college, he could advance the Kingdom of Christ even further. Sadly, he died of complications from a smallpox vaccination only a few months after accepting the post.
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