Your introductions are so kind that I have
to tell you when I was in New
Zealand, a man came up and said to
me, you know Mr. Orme, it must be
a great benefit to your ministry that people
are so disappointed when they see you first.
I wasn't sure what I should say, so
I said, really?
Oh, he said, I'm sorry, I didn't mean
to put it that way.
I mean that after people read your books
or heard about you and then they see
you for the first time, they realize that
only God could use you.
Now I'm not here to talk about myself,
but about the wonderful works of God.
We heard a moment ago that people never
learn from history, that they're condemned to live
history again, but it's because they don't study
history, that's why.
And this is particularly true of the 1970s
and 80s, when we're in the middle of
what you call the now generation, when they
find that history is not relevant, they can't
be bothered, and so they have to learn
all over again.
Some people find history a bore.
I find people who find history a bore,
a bore.
For example, in the 1830s, the total number
of believers in Hawaii was 500.
In 1835, the missionaries, largely congregational, met for
prayer.
They sent an appeal to the United States,
their home base, asking that they would pray
the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Hawaii.
They promised they would pray for the rest
of the world.
In 1838 came the revival.
One church in Hilo, on the big island
of Hawaii, took in 7,501 after six
months probation.
They took in over 1,501 Sunday.
There was such a movement all over Hawaii,
that little children would get up early in
the morning to run out to the sugar
cane fields to pray.
It was a vast movement of prayer.
Now this was among the Polynesian Hawaiians, before
the entry of the Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and
other races.
But so sweeping was that revival, that King
Kamehameha III declared the country a Christian kingdom
and gave them a Bill of Rights.
Twenty years later, they found that more than
19,000 of the converts were still standing
in the churches.
How many people know that?
Of course, some may say, well, why is
Hawaii not completely Christian today?
Because the immigrants who came in to take
the place of the Hawaiians, who died off
because of Western diseases, measles and smallpox and
the like, they were Buddhist, largely.
But even so, by 1860, the Hawaiians had
their own missionary societies to evangelize the rest
of the Pacific, and their churches are still
thriving.
Now the big question has come up, does
the tide have to go out completely before
it comes in again?
I find that you cannot say so.
I told you about the Great Awakening, 1727
onwards, that laid the foundation of this country.
The awakening in the days of Whitefield and
Wesley and Jonathan Edwards and others of like
rank.
Anyone who studies American history knows that the
Great Awakening, as it's called, laid the foundation
of this country.
There's no question about that.
But last time I spoke, I spoke of
the revival of 1792.
I have told how the tide had gone
out completely.
The churches had their backs to the wall.
And then they started what was called the
Concert of Prayer.
They set aside one day every month to
pray for a spiritual awakening.
And when that revival came, it swept multitudes
into the kingdom of God, and did untold
good socially, such as the abolition of the
slave trade, the beginning of monetarial schools for
the poor, the foundation of the Bible societies,
and all the denominational missionary societies.
But does the tide have to go out
first before it comes in?
No, in 1830 I found, to my amazement,
it seemed almost too good to be true
that another general awakening of phenomenal power swept
the United States 1830, 1831, and continued for
a dozen years.
Now you will find, if you go to
theological seminaries, that those who hate the gospel,
who run down evangelism and revival, speak of
revivalism as if it were a frontier phenomenon.
In other words, something of extravagance happens among
the uneducated people on the frontier.
But the revivals did not begin on the
frontiers.
This great revival of 1830 began in late
spring in Charleston, Massachusetts, across the Charles River
from Boston, and it spread throughout the country.
At that time, a young evangelist called Charles
Finney was holding forth in Rochester, New York.
And they had a local revival of great
power, so much so that it affected even
the number of arrests of criminals for the
next twenty years.
It cut them down so much.
But lots of people have exaggerated that movement.
I was speaking at a prayer congress at
San Jose, when one of the speakers with
great enthusiasm said, think of Finney's revival at
Rochester in which a quarter of a million
people found Christ.
I said to him after the service, that
poses a problem for me, because the population
of Rochester was only 10,000.
How could you have a quarter of a
million converts?
Oh, he said, I'm glad you told me.
He said, I must have got my figures
mixed up a little bit.
So he went back to his notes, and
when he saw me again, he said, I
was quite wrong.
It wasn't a quarter of a million, it
was only 100,000.
I said, that still poses a problem for
me.
How could you have 100,000 converts in
a town of 10,000 in those days
when the fastest you could travel was the
speed of a horse galloping?
They couldn't fly in for a big X
-flow or something of that type.
But Finney's reputation as a national evangelist was
made in December of 1830 in the great
revival at Rochester, but the movement was already
underway throughout the rest of the country.
Now Bishop Asbury, the leader of the Methodists,
told his preachers, we must attend to camp
meetings, they make our harvest time.
Very interesting that the Methodist Episcopal Church thrived
in the 1830s and 1840s.
Now perhaps some of you remember there was
a program recently called Key 73.
In 1972, a very godly Methodist scholar wrote
an article for the Methodist and other denominational
papers saying, we as denominations must get behind
this, otherwise the Lord will bypass us and
he will raise up the Jesus people or
someone like that.
Well he had a point, but he said
in his article, we must not forget that
the last great awakening in the United States
ended in 1820.
I was amazed.
I wrote to him and said, what about
the revival of 1830, which lasted 12 years,
and in the last two years your own
denomination increased from 580,098 members to 1
,171,356.
They doubled in two years.
He didn't answer me.
So I went down to the public library
in West Los Angeles and I got his
private address and wrote to him at home,
repeating the same letter.
I didn't get an answer, so I said
to one of my Methodist colleagues at Fuller
Seminary, how do you make a scholar answer
a serious letter?
He said, publish man, publish.
But I was reluctant to do that.
I wouldn't like somebody to publish any time
I goof.
I like to be given a chance to
correct, so I prepared it as if it
were going to be published and I wrote
on the top of it, not yet published,
and then he answered with a two-page
letter.
You know what his defense was?
What does it matter whether it was the
first, second, third, fourth, or whatever revival?
Now, if President Reagan said, our country is
unprepared, the tragedy of American military strength is
that the last war we ever fought ended
in 1814, what would you think of him?
You'd say, what about the Mexican War?
What about the Civil War?
What about the Spanish-American War?
What about World War I?
What about World War II?
What about the Korean War?
What about the Vietnam War?
Apparently, so many of these scholars don't know
that God worked in such ways in 1830,
1858, 1905.
They think the last great awakening ended in
1820, that's what they've been taught.
Actually what they teach our students is that
these were movements unstructured, we would say of
the Holy Spirit, they say unstructured, unorganized movements.
And then Finney came along and organized them,
and then Moody urbanized them, and then Billy
suddenly made them big business, and now we've
got Billy Graham.
That's the way they teach.
In other words, that the Holy Spirit stopped
working except through famous evangelists, and that is
not true.
Now, this great revival spread throughout the United
States, lasted until about 1842.
Then after that came serious division, you know
that the Baptists, North and South split, the
Methodists, North and South split, the Presbyterians, North
and South split, the Episcopalians were smaller and
they held on to their unity, and the
same was true of some of the Lutherans
who were still a minority.
But the major denominations split, chiefly over the
issue of slavery, and spirituality went down again
for a while.
Now this revival of 1830 was also effective
in Great Britain.
It raised up a man called James Coffey,
that's spelled C-A-U-G-H-E
-Y, in Ireland we'd call that Coffey, with
a guttural, but most Americans can't say Coffey,
so they say Coffey.
He was born in Ireland, emigrated to the
United States, was converted in the revival, and
went back and won thousands of people all
over Great Britain, also in Ireland, in Dublin,
and elsewhere.
By the way, one of his converts was
a young fellow called William Booth, who founded
the Salvation Army.
Now there were great revivals also in South
Wales first, and then North Wales in the
1830s, and then a movement stirred Wales again
in the 1840s.
In Scotland there were great revivals.
There was a very godly man called William
Burns, who was pastor of a church at
Kilsyth in Scotland.
That's where Whitfield had tens of thousands attending
his meetings in a great movement of revival
in an earlier day.
And W.H. Burns was very much concerned
over the spiritual condition of his parish.
There was so much drunkenness, so much violence,
so much downright unhappiness and sin.
His son, William Chalmers Burns, who was going
out to be a missionary, came to Kilsyth
and preached in his father's parish church.
And so great was the power of God
in that meeting that the prayers and crying
of the congregation drowned out the voice of
the preacher.
And this was the beginning of the great
revival of 1839 that spread throughout Scotland.
At the same time in Ireland, a country
in which there's nearly always some trouble, there
was such an outpouring of God's Holy Spirit
that the bishops of the Church of Ireland,
that's Anglican Episcopalian, talked about a second reformation.
Alas, most of their converts were lost because
when the great potato famine followed about ten
years later, many of the converts, if not
most of them, emigrated to the United States,
Canada and Australia and other places.
One other interesting thing is that out of
these movements came several renewal movements.
Restoration movements.
First of all, in Ireland, there started what
was called a breaking of bread that became
finally known as the Christian Brethren.
We call them the Plymouth Brethren.
That movement developed at that time of revival
to try and restore apostolic practice.
In the United States, a similar movement began
under Alexander Campbell and others.
We call them the Disciples of Christ.
They wanted to get back to apostolic practice.
There was another movement, a charismatic movement that
started in 1830, under the preaching of a
great Scottish Presbyterian called Edward Irving.
And he decided to try and restore apostolic
practice.
But I found that that work was erect
from within.
It was charismatic, there were healings, tongues, trances,
visions, but some very determined men used the
gift of prophecy, or maybe I should say
abused the gift of prophecy, in trying to
get their own way.
You say now, what do you mean by
that?
Well, I was talking to a good friend
of mine who went to a certain big
charismatic gathering in the United States a few
years ago, and someone there decided he needed
straightening out, but decided to do it by
a word of prophecy, as if the Lord
were speaking.
And he stood up and said, Behold, my
servant Patrick has done wonderful things in my
name, and he shall have his reward.
But he has yet many things to learn
if he will but listen.
And so on.
I said to my friend, Were you impressed?
He said, Not a bit.
He said, That was the Holy Spirit speaking
to me.
He would know that my name is not
Patrick.
My nickname is Pat.
So there was somebody faking, they were faking
to try and bully him, you see.
And sometimes within a charismatic movement you find
faking of that type.
And the leaders of this movement actually used
the gift of prophecy to get rid of
Edward Irving himself, their great leader, got rid
of him.
To show you what I mean by false
prophecy, they prophesied that there would be appointed
twelve apostles and that Christ would come before
the last one died.
And so they did that.
And the last one died 1899, and the
church died shortly afterwards.
So we've got to be very careful because
whenever there's a movement there are always opportunists
trying to have their own way.
By the way, the Catholic Apostolic Church, as
it was called, was not only charismatic, but
liturgical.
They were more liturgical than Anglican or Roman
Catholic or Greek Orthodox.
You know that in the Roman Catholic Church
the priest wears vestments.
So do those who help him at the
altar.
But not the common people.
But in the Catholic Apostolic Church everyone wore
vestments.
They were all dressed like priests.
But that movement died away.
Now there was a man called George Scott
who went from Scotland to Sweden in the
1830s.
He was chaplain to the British workmen who
built the first railways in Sweden.
The British were the first with railroads.
He was not allowed to preach, it was
against the law to preach anywhere outside a
Church of Sweden congregation, a Lutheran congregation.
But he got around that.
One of the noblemen had a chapel and
so Scott began preaching there.
He learned Swedish very quickly and there started
a great movement that swept the whole of
Sweden.
They drove Scott out of Sweden but he
succeeded by a great man of God called
Carl Olof Rosinius.
Now there were also reactionary movements.
In Germany a great leader arose and said
God has spoken to us in these last
days by his servant Martin Luther.
What need are we of the other denominations?
So they became very exclusive.
We have that movement among Lutherans to this
day in this country.
In Holland there's another man who stood up
and said God has spoken to us in
these last days by his servant John Calvin.
What need are we of these other denominations?
They're outside the true faith and so they
started an exclusive Reformed denomination.
And then also in England there were some
arose in the Church of England who said
we are the true Church.
They went back beyond the Reformers to the
early councils and thus was strengthened the Tractarian
movement which was High Church or Anglo-Catholic.
And even in the United States among the
Baptists of all people there was one of
these hyper confessional movements.
One man preached this famous landmark sermon which
said we are the true Church.
Other people may get to heaven but they're
not in the true Church.
In other words they taught that the first
Baptist Church was built in the banks of
the Jordan and that anyone outside that was
not in proper lineage.
These were reactions against revival.
But what was most encouraging about the revival
of 1830 onward was in 1834 there began
a phenomenal work in the kingdom of Tonga
in the South Seas.
Our friends are going down to New Zealand.
The people there, the original people are Maoris,
they're Polynesians a bit like the original Hawaiians.
Tonga is of the same race.
And a chief in Tonga called Tapa'aho,
he's better known as George, it's much easier
to say George than Tapa'aho, was wonderfully
converted.
He decided that he had to do something
about it.
His people were all pagans.
They worshipped the demons.
So what he did was he got a
banana palm stalk, which is rather soft wood,
wouldn't kill anyone, could hurt them, and while
the priestess was under demonic power, he took
this and knocked her out.
The people were frightened.
They thought the heavens would open and fire
would fall on this man and that would
be the end of him.
But nothing happened.
The reign of the gods had ended.
They saw the Berfone.
His cousin, Finao, on another island in Tonga,
took a different tack.
He asked the people to bring all the
gods before him, all these totems and wooden
gods and the like, and he spoke to
them in Tongan.
He said, I've brought you here, he said
to the gods, to put you to the
test.
And so that you'll have every chance, I'm
going to tell you what I'm going to
do.
I'm going to burn you.
So, if you're really gods, run for it.
And they all sat there, of course.
So Finao ordered them to be burned.
It took several days because the weather was
damp, but the people were so frightened they
didn't go to work for days.
They were so frightened.
But nothing happened.
Someone tried to poison the chief, but the
missionaries helped him with emetics.
The reign of the gods had ended.
Now that was early, but in 1834, a
visitation came from above.
You see, these people had been converted from
idols to serve the true God, but they
didn't know the gospel properly.
So after 15 years of preaching and teaching,
the baptism from above came, and it made
the tongues into the missionaries of the South
Pacific.
I can tell you the same sort of
things about Fiji.
Fiji was the haunt of cannibalism.
It's rather horrifying to read the records.
For instance, King Tanua was such a cannibal
that when one of his own cousins offended
him and fell at his feet asking forgiveness,
the hard-hearted king refused.
And before the eyes of his courtiers, chopped
off the man's arm and began to eat
it in front of him.
And when he gave the signal, they fell
on him and tore him apart.
That was Fiji before the gospel, but it
was the Tongans who brought the gospel to
Fiji.
There are also wonderful revivals in Grahamstown, in
English-speaking South Africa.
You've all heard of David Livingstone.
His father-in-law was Robert Moffat, and
he saw a great in-gathering in Botswana
Land, further west.
At the same time, pioneers were entering into
the Gold Coast, that's now called Ghana and
Nigeria, and freed slaves went back to Sierra
Leone and Liberia.
Not only that, but another interesting thing happened.
And that is that the churches sent out
missionaries to the ancient churches of the East,
to Egypt and Iran, Persia and Iraq and
Turkey, and worked among the native Christians there
and saw great revivals.
Now one man that arose from this great
movement in the United States was Charles Finney.
I've already mentioned Finney to you before.
As a gospel tactician, he's second to none.
His advice is good to this day.
For instance, I remember, I've never been able
to forget, he says, when the children of
God exaggerate the work of grace in their
midst, the spirit of God is commonly grieved.
That's good advice.
Finney's full of instruction like that.
But I think he was quite mistaken when
he said, revival is nothing more than the
right use of the appropriate means.
Now you might say, what permanent results were
there out of this time of revival in
the United States?
In 1846 was founded the Evangelical Alliance.
They believed in divine inspiration, authority and sufficiency
of Holy Scripture, the unity of the Godhead,
the Trinity of Persons, in the utter depravity
of human nature, the incarnation of the Son
of God, justification of the sinner by faith
alone, the work of the Holy Spirit and
conversion and sanctification, the resurrection of the body,
the judgment of the world by Jesus Christ,
the eternal blessedness of the righteous and the
eternal punishment of the wicked.
That was the foundation.
The sheetrock, as it were, of the Evangelical
movement.
And so you'll find to this day, those
who are considered Evangelicals adhere to this.
It goes right back to 1846.
Now this awakening came to an end about
1842 in this country, maybe 1848 on the
other side of the Atlantic.
And then there came a time of great
depression.
But when I next speak to you, I'm
going to tell you of the greatest and
most wholesome awakening of all time that swept
this country from coast to coast, filled every
church with praying people and filled every downtown
hall or theater with people to pray at
noon.
That was the great revival of 1858.
Let's take these lessons to heart, because as
our friend said, those who won't learn from
history have to go through the whole thing
again.