The scripture says we must tell our children's
children what God has done, that we might
set our hope in God and forget not
his commandments.
And then, to conclude the meeting, I tried
to expound the word as simply as possible.
Some teaching of scripture that deals with the
awakening of the spiritual life.
Now, I told you about the great awakening
that took place in this country just after
the Civil War, after the Revolutionary War.
And last night I told you about the
great awakening that spread throughout this country just
before the Civil War, touching all denominations.
During the Lenten season, 1858, all the churches
in New York were packed out.
In Brooklyn, Roman Catholic Parish services with 5
,000 people, there seemed to be a movement
towards God all over the country.
Now, the question has been asked me many
times, does the tide have to go right
out before it comes in again?
The answer is no.
It's true that before the days of John
Wesley, conditions were deplorable.
And before that second great awakening in the
wake of the American Revolution, conditions in this
country were deplorable.
But sometimes a wave of renewed blessing comes
in on top of one that's already there.
You say, well, how do you find these
things out?
Well, I was reading the American Home Missionary
Journal for the year 1830.
Now this Home Missionary Journal represented the home
missions of the Congregational and Presbyterian churches when
they were working together in the plan of
union.
And to my amazement, in an editorial it
said, it's with gratitude to God we speak
of a great awakening all over our beloved
country.
So many points of light are coming together
that it's like the pathways of the Spirit
being lighted up with the glory of God.
It's the first I knew of it.
So I began digging into all the records
I could find, and I found, truly enough,
1830 there was a general awakening all over
the United States.
Now, a very famous Methodist church historian in
1972 wrote an article in favor of the
Key 73 program.
You may remember in 1973, ten years ago,
there was a United Evangelistic effort all over
the United States.
The line he took was, if we don't
get behind this effort as mainline denominations, God
will work outside our ranks, among the Jesus
people or somebody, therefore let's get behind it.
It was a very good article.
But the title of his article was, Will
the Third Great Awakening Miss the Churches?
So I wrote him a nice note, thanked
him for his insights, but I said, What
did you mean the Third Great Awakening?
The Third Great Awakening swept United States 1830.
Your own denomination increased in two years from
580,098 communicants to 1,137,131.
I got no answer.
I went down to the public library and
got his private address, and wrote the same
letter again to him at his private address.
I got no answer.
I went to a Methodist member of our
faculty in the School of World Mission, Pasadena,
and I said, How do you make a
scholar answer a serious question?
He said, Publish, man, publish.
But I didn't want to publish.
If I were to goof in a book
of mine, I'd rather somebody—for instance, last night
I mentioned a couple of counties around here
in Maryland that were really in Northern Virginia.
Two people came up and told me about
it.
I'd rather have that than somebody write an
article in the Washington Post about it.
But I had an idea.
I prepared an article as if I were
going to publish it.
And I sent it to him, and I
wrote on, Not yet published.
And he wrote back a three-page letter.
I was amazed.
He said, What does it matter whether it
was number one, two, or three awakening?
Now if President Reagan, or if General Vesey,
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
let's mention him, were to say the trouble
with American preparedness is that we haven't fought
a war since 1812, I'd say, What's wrong
with the man?
What about the Mexican War?
What about the Civil War?
What about the Spanish-American War?
What about the World War I?
What about World War II?
What about the Korean War?
What about the Vietnam War?
Could you imagine a military man not knowing
of those wars?
And here was a professor of church history
that had actually said the tragedy of American
life was that the last great awakening ended
1820.
I noticed he was to speak at a
church in Los Angeles, Paul's Church.
I wasn't sure where it was, looked it
up.
I went along, found it was a Roman
Catholic Church.
There were 300 nuns there.
I was the only non-nun in the
meeting.
I paid five dollars to get in.
He was witty.
He described an atheist as a man who
didn't care whether Notre Dame or Southern Methodist
won the game.
But again he said the tragedy of American
life is that the last great awakening to
move this country ended in 1820.
I went up and gave him a copy
of my book describing the awakening of 1905.
I just happened to have a copy handy.
Now the movement began in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
Not on the frontier the way some of
the scholars say.
It's a kind of pejorative attitude, what we
call a revival, as something begins among the
ignoramuses on the frontier and then is brought
to town and made respectable.
No, no, it began in the suburbs of
Boston, and Boston has always claimed to be
the intellectual capital of the United States.
It spread throughout the country in an amazing
way.
When it got to Kentucky and Tennessee, where
there had been so many extravagances during the
frontier revival, people fainting and screaming and dancing
for joy, it was a great stillness and
solemnity.
This movement was effective for twelve years, ran
from about 1830 to 1842.
It broke out across the Atlantic.
One of the great movements was the revival
in Scotland under William Chalmers Burns.
There isn't time to go into all the
details, but this was effective in many parts
of the world.
For example, in Hawaii in the 1830s, 1835,
there were only 577 professed believers.
The missionaries were congregational from New England.
They had a session of prayer and they
prayed for an awakening in Hawaii.
They wrote to their friends in the States
and said, We'll pray for you if you'll
pray for us.
The revival came in 1838, and it came
in a very strange way.
There was a very godly man, his name
was Titus Cohen, C-O-E-N, C
-O-A-N, from New England.
He was appointed to be minister of the
First Church in Hilo on the Big Island
of Hawaii.
There was in Hilo a Hawaiian called Pua
Aiki.
He had been born deformed.
His own mother buried him alive.
His uncle dug him up.
He became court jester to King Kamehameha of
Hawaii.
He was the funny man.
But when Hawaii turned towards Christianity, there was
no room for him as jester anymore.
He became the leader of a prayer movement.
He was called the leader of the praying
ones, and he prayed that a moment of
awakening would come to Hawaii.
And sure enough, that is exactly what happened.
It was in 1837 the prayer movement began,
and 1837 was when Titus Cohen began preaching.
People flocked in, it was like a camp
meeting went on for months.
At that one church in Hilo, Titus Cohen,
after six months probation to see whether or
not they were genuine, took in 1,705
candidates.
In his church in Hilo, 7,557 in
one church during the movement.
And twenty years later, 19,000 or more
of the converts of that movement were still
in standing.
Now that same sort of thing happened in
Tonga in the South Pacific, Tonga is a
Christian kingdom today, and this was the movement
that helped evangelize Fiji, which was the world's
worst for cannibalism.
The king of Fiji, King Tanoa, was such
a cutthroat that when one of his own
kinsmen who had offended him, fell at his
feet and asked for mercy, he refused forgiveness,
chopped off the man's arm and began eating
it in front of him.
Fiji was a hellhole of cannibalism.
It was the missionaries from Tonga, native people,
who went to Fiji and helped win that
kingdom for Christ also.
Now there was another, I call this a
resurgence, because the tide didn't go out before
this.
This was like a second tide coming in.
But in 1882 there was a similar movement.
Now we've all heard of Dwight Lyman Moody.
Moody was not an educated man.
He couldn't spell to save his life.
He spelled Philadelphia with an F.
He spelled orthodox, O-T-H-E-D
-E-X, orthodox.
Now you say, well, you read Moody's sermons
today, you don't find that.
That's true, they're all edited very carefully.
The Victorians took the attitude to print Moody
as he actually spoke.
It wasn't glorifying to the Lord.
So they changed it all so that you
don't know this.
But John Pollock's biography of Moody brings this
out.
He was not an educated man, but a
great man of God.
He spoke the language of the people.
However when he went to England, he was
invited to hold a preaching mission at Cambridge
University.
Now Cambridge, like Oxford at that time, was
a university for the sons of the noble,
and the sons of the rich, and the
sons of the clergy.
When they heard that an illiterate American was
coming, they were outraged.
They determined to show him his place.
And there's no one quite like an upper
-class Englishman for showing you your place.
Moody arrived, preached in Great St. Mary's, he
called upon the vicar, Anglican vicar, to lead
in prayer.
The students flocked in, a thousand of them.
They punctuated the prayer with Hear, Hear.
That's all right for Parliament, but it's very
rude in church.
They were making fun.
Sankey sang one of his solos.
They sang a parody along with him.
Moody preached on Daniel in the Den of
Lions.
I don't know whether he had chosen that
topic specially.
Maybe that's how he felt.
But as he preached, he brought the husk
on every few minutes.
The Hebrew word Daniel has three syllables.
Dan-ee-yal.
The English word, too, Dan-ee-yal.
What the American in those days only one.
Have you ever heard of Daniel Boone?
Have you ever heard of Daniel Webster?
That's how they spelled it.
D-A-N apostrophe L, and they pronounced
it as one syllable.
And every time Moody would say, then Daniel
cried to the Lord, the students clapped their
hands and clamped their feet and shouted.
And it took him five minutes sometimes to
get silence again.
But he was no coward.
When he got home that night to his
lodgings, he said to Sankey, Sankey, I have
no hankering for that crowd.
But next night, the attendance dropped to 100.
They'd had their fun.
They'd made fun of the American.
But on Wednesday morning, the maid where he
was staying brought a visiting card.
Mr. Gerald Lander of Trinity College.
That's the most aristocratic Cambridge College where Prince
Charles studied.
If Mr. Lander of Trinity College wished to
see Mr. Moody, he said, bring him in.
And the young man came in.
Moody's thought was one of the leaders of
the riot.
He said, what can I do for you,
sir?
The Englishman said, Mr. Moody, I was one
of theirs who thought that you were singularly
unequipped to speak to gentlemen.
But sir, he said, as I observed you
on the platform, I came to the conclusion
that you were the only gentleman in the
meeting.
We who prided ourselves on our English breeding
behaved like cats, sir.
I wish to apologize.
Moody held up his hand.
He said, I'll forgive you if you come
to the rest of the meetings.
They shook hands on it.
Gerald Lander sat in the front seat.
Moody wisely waited until Friday before he gave
any kind of invitation for them to respond
to.
The first man forward was Gerald Lander, who
became Bishop of Hong Kong.
Another man forward was Stanley Smith, chief oarsman
of the Cambridge rowing crew.
There were two brothers called Paul Hill Turner,
aristocrats, converted, athletes as well.
Sir Montague Beecham, nephew of Lord Radstock, was
converted.
W.W. Castles, son of a wealthy importer,
became Bishop of Sichuan in China.
Perhaps the best known of what was called
the Cambridge Seven was C.T. Studd, the
Babe Ruth of English cricket, and these men
turned the British universities upside down.
Now, Moody was so successful that in London
in the 1880s, they built a huge tabernacle
to seat 25,000 in North London.
Moody held forth for a month.
While he was holding forth for a month,
they were building a tabernacle in South London.
He moved there for the next month.
They moved the tabernacle in North London to
another suburb of London.
When he finished that month, he went to
another one.
Then they wanted to preach simultaneously.
Even Moody couldn't do that.
So he pinch hit with friends.
One night he would preach.
Next night, some worthy person, he would be
on the other tabernacle.
One night in South London, Moody called on
a Presbyterian minister to lead in prayer.
This man had never prayed before 25,000
before.
He got rather carried away.
He prayed, and he continued to pray.
You know, if a man prays for three
minutes, you pray with him.
If he prays for another three minutes, you
pray for him.
If he prays for another three minutes, you
pray against him.
This good man was praying right through the
minor prophets.
When Moody suddenly got up and said, while
our brother is finishing his prayer, let's sing
hymn number 11.
There was a young atheist in the meeting.
He said, there's an honest man.
There's no hypocrisy about that fellow.
I'm coming back tomorrow night.
He had just come out of curiosity.
When he came back, Moody wasn't there.
But the Cambridge Seven were there, and he
was converted.
He became Sir Wilfred Grenfell, the great missionary
collaborator.
You may not remember the name, but when
I was a boy, he was an honored
name.
One of the great pioneers.
Now, when Moody got back to the States,
his student friend said, now what about us
in the American universities?
Moody had kept away from universities.
He was afraid of making a fool of
himself.
Now, the leader of the Christian associations in
the state universities was a young fellow called
Luther Wishart.
His associate, by the way, in the Philadelphian
Society at Princeton University was T.W. Wilson.
That sounds familiar.
T.W. Wilson.
You say, you mean Billy Graham's associate?
No, no.
Billy has two good friends, T.W. Wilson
and Grady Wilson.
They were boys together.
I saw both of them the other last
week.
But I mean T.
Woodrow Wilson.
He became president of the College of New
Jersey, then he became governor of New Jersey,
and then he became president of the United
States.
But at that time, he was a student
evangelist.
Wishart and Wilson said, now what about American
students?
Moody was still nervous, so he said, well,
let's have a Christian conference first.
How about up near my place?
So up at Mount Hermon near Northfield, Massachusetts,
they had a student conference.
Two hundred and fifty students came.
Moody was nervous, so he invited President McCosh
of Princeton, a Scotsman.
He invited Henry Drummond of Edinburgh and others
to be speakers, and he was sort of
master of ceremonies.
But he found the students loved him, although
they knew he was not an educated man.
A young fellow came to Moody and said,
Mr. Moody, please, could I speak to the
students?
He said, I'm sorry, young fellow, we've got
a full program.
But he insisted, so he said, all right,
you can speak to them over at the
dinner tables.
This young fellow told the students, my father
was one of the students who sat under
the haystack at Williams College in Massachusetts, went
out to India to be a missionary.
He's come home retired.
He's come home to die.
But he's praying that a thousand university students
will go to the mission field.
He spoke so powerfully that one hundred of
the two hundred and fifty volunteered.
Instead of going into law, this young fellow,
his name was Robert Wilder, visited all the
universities, colleges, theological seminaries, and two thousand volunteered
the first year.
Didn't all go the first year.
But this started a movement called the student
volunteer movement for foreign missions.
In a long generation, more than 30,000
of the cream of the crop went to
the mission field.
And Kenneth Scott LaTourette attributed to them some
of the greatest advances in the mission field
ever.
That came out of that time of revival.
Revivals in other places, one of these movements
of revival began spontaneously in Japan, 1883.
And the evangelical churches increased from about 5
,000 to 25,000 in seven years.
There was also a great movement in the
Congo, a great movement in southern Africa.
Now these were movements of renewal.
I remember well, when I was studying, I
went to a Jesuit university librarian, and I
said, could you give me some books on
revivals among Roman Catholics?
He thought for a moment that he should
come with me.
He took me to a whole shelf of
books.
He said, have a look at these.
Then I noticed each one dealt with the
formation of an order.
Renewal movements in the Roman Catholic Church have
generally given birth to orders.
From the Dominicans, the Franciscans, from the work
of St. Francis, right on down to Holy
Ghost Fathers, to the Marian Old Fathers, and
so forth.
Generally, a movement of renewal brings about an
order.
But among the evangelical churches, the movements have
been grassroots, from the laity.
And until the time of John XXIII, there
was little or no sharing across the lines.
Now, things have changed, I would say blessedly
changed.
Last year, I had a week of meetings
in St. Joseph's Pontifical Seminary in India, the
largest Roman Catholic seminary in Asia.
But I was telling Father Aldo tonight earlier
that when I was a chaplain in the
Air Force, I anticipated John XXIII by quite
a number of years.
I discovered that Pope Pius had given permission.
If Catholic men were going into battle and
there was no priest to minister to them,
another Christian minister could minister.
So I used to conduct services for them
on the landing ships out in New Guinea.
So I've always had good fellowship.
Now, these movements of revival have been movements
of the renewal of Christian people.
Primarily, movements among professed Christians.
It's true that some denominations, as I've mentioned
before, use the word revival for an evangelistic
outreach.
But that's a misuse of the term.
A revival is the coming of life again
to those who possess life.
It results in an awakening and it results
in evangelism.
The best definition of evangelism that I know
was the one coined by Canon Max Warren,
a dear friend of mine who died two
years ago.
He was at Westminster Abbey.
To evangelize is so to present Jesus Christ
in the power of the Spirit that men
may come to put their trust in him
as Savior, and to serve him as Lord
in the fellowship of his Church and in
the vocations of the common life.
That's the best definition of evangelism I know.
Billy Graham's work is evangelism.
All that's built around his campaign is to
enable him better to present the gospel to
those who need to hear it.
But revival, what we're discussing, is the renewal
of life in the Church.
In New Zealand some time ago, I met
a Presbyterian minister.
I don't know why so many of my
illustrations are Presbyterian.
I'm staying in a Presbyterian home and maybe
it's the food that I'm eating makes me
think of this.
But this was a young, up-to-date
Presbyterian minister, and he said he had no
use for mass evangelism.
I found he didn't like Billy Graham.
He never had heard Billy Graham, but he
didn't like Billy Graham, just the way some
just think that's the fashion.
So I said, what do you like?
Well, he said, I'm completely sold on visitation
evangelism.
With tongue-in-cheek, I said, how does
that work?
Well, he said, you train your people, and
they go on ringing doorbells, they talk to
people in the doorstep.
If they're invited in, all the better.
We tell them how to approach the subject
tactfully.
If they run into difficulties, then we have
a panel to help them, you know, come
along, deal with a problem.
Or if they'll come to church, all the
better.
And he told me all about it.
So I said, how is it working?
And he gave a rather embarrassed laugh.
He said, I can't get them to do
it.
There's your problem.
We need a revived church to do these
things.
We can have the biggest schemes in the
world, but if people don't feel impelled by
the Spirit of God to do it, they
won't do it.
That's why ministry to the church is so
necessary.
Now, tomorrow night, I'm going to tell you
one of the most thrilling stories of revival.
I knew Evan Roberts, the Welshman whom God
so singularly used in Wales, 1904.
That was one of the most astounding movements
of all time.
You read the papers, you find the Anglo
-Catholics and the Roman Catholics spoke highly of
this movement because it so demonstrated the power
of God.
Tomorrow night, I'm going to tell you how
that movement swept the United States.
I wrote to a prominent church historian on
the East Coast.
The time I was researching this, he said,
could you give me any clues on the
great revival that swept the United States in
1905?
He said, I never heard of such a
movement.
I doubt very much that such a movement
could have occurred in the 20th century.
He said, if you find anything interesting, let
me know.
That movement swept the United States from coast
to coast.
The ministers in Atlantic City reported of a
population of 60,000.
There were only 50 adults professedly unconverted.
And as I said once before, in Portland,
Oregon, 200 major stores closed from 11 to
2 each day for prayer, to enable their
customers and staff to attend meetings of prayer.
I'll tell that story tomorrow night.
If you're interested, well, whether you're interested or
not, I'll tell it.
I'll tell it.