AskDrBrown

America has been indelibly marked by its revivals. The significant outpourings of the Spirit which occurred here over the last three hundred years have deeply altered our history. Every major, positive, national change in our society can be traced back to the influence of revival, and our steady moral decline in the 20th century is a direct result of the absence of any large scale revival.

American believers today are almost totally unaware of the powerful movings of God which swept through this land in the 18th and 19th centuries. Let me put you in remembrance:

1741 -- Enfield, New England. It was here that one of the most remarkable revivals took place. God had begun to stir the New England area out of its worldliness, apathy, and unbelief in the mid 1730’s. But the town of Enfield remained untouched. Jonathan Edwards, the brilliant philosopher, theologian and, shortly before his death, president of Princeton University, was scheduled to preach there one Sunday (we would hardly call it preaching today! He read his text monotone and without gestures, and because his eyesight was so poor, he held the pages pressed up to his face!). The congregation was a casual, godless bunch. But the neighboring town had been in deep travail the previous night for God to extend his mercy on that group.

On that Sunday, July 8th of 1741, as Edwards read his famous message, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” something extraordinary began to occur. The fear of God fell. The congregants began to see themselves as hopelessly lost, dangling by a thread over the jumping fires of hell (it was a vivid sermon!). Soon there was so much screaming, crying out, and fainting that Edwards had to order them to be quiet so that his message could be heard. People began unconsciously to cling to their pews and grasp hold of the pillars of the church so as not to slip into hell. These were the days of the First Great Awakening in our land!

From 1730-1745, 50,000 souls were added to the kingdom (there were only 2,000,000 people in the American colonies at that time!). Before the revival, young people caroused and partied all night. In the height of this time of awakening, which had been greatly aided by the ministry of George Whitefield from England and had reached to the American Indians through the prevailing prayer of David Brainerd, even Benjamin Franklin could say that “it seemed as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk through the town in the evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street.”

1801 -- Cane Ridge, on the Western Frontier. An astounding 20,000 people from the sparsely populated frontier regions had gathered together for a special six-day outdoor camp meeting. The crowds were addressed by many different preachers from varying denominations, using fallen logs and the like for their pulpits. Here are some eye-witness reports:

“I stepped up on a log where I could have a better view of the surging sea of humanity. The scene that then presented itself to my mind was indescribable. At once I saw at least five hundred swept down in a moment as if a battery of a thousand guns had been opened upon them and then immediately followed shrieks and shouts that rent the very heavens.”

“On Sabbath [Sunday] night I saw above one hundred candles burning at once -- and I saw, I suppose, one hundred persons of all ages from eight to sixty years at once on the ground crying for mercy. . . The sensible, the weak, learned and unlearned, the rich and the poor are the subjects of it.”

The Wild West was being tamed, and the wilderness being revived. The whole region underwent a deep moral transformation. The Spirit of God had come.

1857 -- New York City. It was here that the great Prayer Revival took root. The churches at that time were becoming worldly and internalized, and immorality, violent crime, spiritualism, corruption, and atheism were on the rise (J. Edwin Orr). Does this have a familiar sound?

Jeremiah Lanphier, a retired businessman become missionary, acting in obedience to the Spirit’s prompting, began to promote a weekly “Lunch Hour Prayer Meeting” for revival. Only six attended the first meeting, and twenty the second. But within several months, tens of thousands were praying seven days a week, around the clock! The revival spread from city to city, jumped across the ocean to England, Ireland, and Wales, and shaped the history of our nation.

From 1857-1858 in America alone, over 1,000,000 non-church members were born again, in addition to about 1,000,000 formerly unsaved church members. At the height of the revival there were over 50,000 new births a week. As a result of this revival hitting Chicago, the 40 year ministry of D. L. Moody was born. And within a decade, slavery was legally abolished.

“The Revival of 1857 restored integrity to government and business in America once again. There was renewed obedience to the social commandments. An intense sympathy was created for the poor and needy. A compassionate society was rebirthed. The reins of America were returned to the godly. Yet another time, Revival became the solution to the problems, the remedy for the evils, the cure of all ills” (Mary Stuart Relfe).

Then in 1906 in California, the fire fell at Azusa Street. From there, the flames of the 20th century Pentecostal renewal began to spread across the globe.

Our country has been in sin before. There have been times of immorality and drunkenness on the streets, skepticism and atheism on college campuses, and coldness and worldliness in the churches. The gospel has been totally mocked and dismissed as outdated many times in the past. Revival turned things around then. Revival will do it again.