Isaiah chapter 51, reading together the first eleven
verses of the chapter.
We read this because this evening we come
to one of the millennial milestone messages I
have been doing throughout this year, and as
Dr. Barrett intimated, we come to deal tonight
with the 18th century.
I must confess that it's one that perplexes
me greatly to deal with, not because there's
too little to deal with, but because there's
too much.
When you stop to think of the many
things that occurred during that century, when you
consider some of the personnel God raised in
the church of Christ, some of the names,
some of them very well known, some of
them not so well known, and that's to
our shame and it is our loss, but
when you think of these names and think
of the works that God did, obviously it
is very, very difficult to pick and choose,
and therefore the temptation for the preacher is
always going to be to try to include
as many as possible in the broadest possible
sweep, and that has its own peculiar pitfalls,
to say nothing about certain parts of your
anatomy that may become a little sore than
they were from prolonged contact with a but
we will do our best to deal adequately
and perhaps more suggestively than exhaustively with this
millennial milestone as we come to the 18th
century.
We're reading in Isaiah 41, the first 11
verses, hearken to me, Isaiah 51 I should
say, my apologies, Isaiah 51, the first 11
verses, hearken to me, ye that follow after
righteousness, ye that seek the Lord, look unto
the rock whence ye are hewn and to
the hole of the pit whence ye are
digged, look unto Abraham your father and unto
Sarah that bear you, for I called him
alone and blessed him and increased him, for
the Lord shall comfort Zion, he will comfort
all her waste places, and he will make
her wilderness like Eden and her desert like
the garden of the Lord, joy and gladness
shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice
of melody, hearken unto me, my people and
give ear unto me, O my nation, for
a law shall proceed from me and I
will make my judgment to rest for a
light of the people, my righteousness is near,
my salvation has gone forth and mine arms
shall judge the people, the eyes shall wait
upon me and on mine arms shall they
trust, lift up your eyes to the heavens
and look upon the earth beneath, for the
heavens shall vanish away like smoke and the
earth shall wax old like a garment and
they that dwell therein shall die in like
manner, but my salvation shall be forever and
my righteousness shall not be abolished, hearken unto
me, ye that know righteousness, the people in
whose heart is my law, fear ye not
the reproach of men, neither be ye afraid
of their revilings, for the moth shall eat
them up like a garment and the worm
shall eat them like wool, but my righteousness
shall be forever and my salvation from generation
to generation, awake, awake, put on strength, O
arm of the Lord, awake as in the
ancient days in the generations of old, art
thou not it that hath cut Rahab and
wounded the dragon, art thou not it which
hath dried up the sea, the waters of
the great deep, that hath made the depths
of the sea a way for the ransom
to pass over, therefore the redeemed of the
Lord shall return and come with singing unto
Zion and everlasting joy shall be upon their
head, they shall obtain gladness and joy and
sorrow and mourning shall flee away, amen, the
Lord will add his own blessing to the
reading of his precious word for his name's
sake, if there is one verse that I
would use to sum up the message of
this evening and all our study of the
work of God in the century that we'll
be considering tonight, it would be verse 9
of Isaiah 51, awake, awake, put on strength,
O arm of the Lord, awake as in
the ancient days in the generations of old,
perhaps the simplest way of summing up the
entire 18th century is the surest way after
all, it was the century of revolution and
revival, in the case of the United States,
the revival preceded the revolution and in the
view of many, I think correctly, cleared the
way for the revolution.
In France, by stark contrast, the revival was
conspicuous by its absence and there the revolution
dethroned both the Roman Catholic Church and the
monarchy and set the nation upon a course
of years of bloodshed, war and tyranny.
In the United Kingdom, the revival cleared the
way for a revolution of an altogether different
kind.
When you look at the living conditions of
many of the masses in Britain and in
France in the 18th century, you'll find that
they were very much the same, while there
were differences in the actual political and monarchical
system, nonetheless the down on the ground living
conditions of the people were very very similar
and you would have to say that the
conditions which led the French to such extremes
of bloodshed and the reign of terror etc.
existed in England and yet that scenario never
took place in England.
It will be my contention, and I am
certainly not the first to make it, that
the major reason for that difference was the
great spiritual awakening, the revival with which God
visited England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the
18th century.
The revivals in America and Britain were very
closely linked, they were linked in their doctrine,
that may come as a shock because there
were both Calvinists and Armenians preaching in this
revival.
In England, as Whitfield spent more and more
of his energies on the American scene, in
England the leadership of the great awakening fell
into the hands of the Wesley brothers, who
were of course evangelical Armenians.
In the United States, most of the preaching
and most of the revival work was under
the ministry of very strong Calvinists, Jonathan Edwards
being the outstanding example and Whitfield of course
another outstanding example, and I mention others as
we go along this evening.
But you would be foolish to emphasize the
difference in theological system and be blinded to
the basic unity of doctrine.
Now, the great doctrines that fired the revival,
both in America and in Britain, were the
doctrines of vital evangelical religion, that is emphasizing
the great fundamentals of the faith, the deity
of Christ, the Trinitarian nature of God, the
absolute inspiration and authority of scripture, the atoning
sacrifice and bodily resurrection of Christ, and then
the peculiar tenets of the Protestant Reformation, justification
by faith alone, the necessity of the work
of the Holy Spirit to regenerate a soul.
And while the Arminianism of the Wesleys and
the Calvinism of Edwards and Whitfield led them
to express the necessity of the work of
the Spirit in different terms, you would be
amazed at how much common ground there was
because even Wesley believed that the prevenient grace,
as he would call it, of the Holy
Spirit was necessary before a sinner could exercise
faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
There was a tremendous emphasis upon the necessity
of regeneration.
The emphasis in the preaching in the great
revivals of the 18th century was upon bringing
doctrine to the level of real experience.
That was the key to the entire movement.
They lived in a day of great spiritual
deadness.
There was a lot of heresy, but there
was also a lot of dead orthodoxy, where
people knew how to dot every I and
cross every T, and yet they were as
cold as ice.
Religion was a matter of the mind.
If there was one word that people hated
to have applied to them, it was the
word enthusiast.
That was a word in the 18th century
that had the connotation of a wild fanatic.
In fact, it had in it more than
fanaticism.
To be an enthusiast was to be worse
than the worms of the earth.
It was to be worse than the dogs
outside a camp.
To be an enthusiast was to be practically
the mouthpiece of the devil, a delusionist, and
a threat to the well-being of both
church and state.
And yet, if anybody showed any fervor in
the things of God, he was an enthusiast.
I was rather, and I have to confess
I didn't know this before, having lived all
the years I did in Britain, where horse
racing is a religion.
I didn't know if you knew that.
More people go to horse races in one
week than go to church in a year
in England, but that's by the way.
I didn't realize that it was at the
beginning of this century that Queen Anne introduced
a national lottery.
That Queen Anne introduced two, if my memory
is right, of the great horse racing events
in England.
Events that are still big time sporting events
to this day.
Now you could be as enthusiastic as you
like about somebody beating the hind quarter of
a horse to make it get a nose
in front of another horse to reach a
certain point in a field.
That was intellectually acceptable.
But to rejoice that your sins were forgiven.
To rejoice that you knew God in Jesus
Christ.
That it was well with your soul.
That was enthusiasm, delusion, a hateful and despicable
thing.
That was the mindset that was challenged in
both America and Britain by the preachers in
the great revivals.
They stormed the ice cold battlements of logic.
Not that they were illogical.
They were the most logical of men.
If you've ever read any of Wesley's sermons
you'll know just how logical.
But they stormed those ice cold battlements of
dead logic with the fire of the gospel
that sets man free.
They were united in fundamental doctrine.
They were united in method.
The method was preaching.
They took very seriously that God has ordained
preaching for the furtherance of the gospel.
It pleased God, said the apostle, by the
foolishness of preaching to see of them that
believe.
How little things change.
In the days of the apostle, preaching was
foolishness.
In the days of Whitefield and Wesley and
Edwards and others in that century, preaching was
foolishness.
In our day, preaching is still foolishness.
You've only got to visit most churches to
find out that the preaching is a tag
on at the end of the service.
I remember years ago one of the big
television companies, I can't remember, I think it
was Independent Television, one of the two big
outfits in the United Kingdom, came to our
little country church in Cabra, outside Balamony in
Northern Ireland and they wanted to take one
of the services.
I had to get the whole sermon in.
I had to have it way, way cut
down.
It was like doing a radio broadcast actually.
I was allowed to preach, but if we
wanted to get much in, I had about
13 minutes.
You know my people couldn't believe it.
They thought something was wrong.
I figured it was better for that occasion
to look on it like a radio broadcast.
What amazed me was that the producer of
the World in Action program, as it was
called, he was amazed at the length of
the sermon, not that it was so short,
it was so long, 13 minutes.
He said, how long would you normally preach?
I very modestly said, 45 minutes.
And don't you snigger.
45 minutes.
He said, my.
He said, you know in England, if a
preacher goes 8 minutes, that's a long sermon.
Of course this is the Church of England,
that's not say Brian Greene's church or Peter
Master's church, Spurgeon's Tabernacle.
This is the Church of England.
If he goes 8 minutes, that would be
a very long sermon.
So preaching is just a tag-on, but
these men believed in preaching.
They believed in it.
They did not believe in simply getting people
together by means of entertainment.
They did not believe in turning the church
into a circus or a music hall in
order to compete with the attractions of the
world.
They believed in the power of preaching, anointed
with the Holy Ghost.
That was the method.
And much more, they took the preaching to
where the people would hear it.
The churches were closed against them in England,
so they took the preaching into the open
air.
Now that was a revolutionary step.
The first one to do that was George
Whitefield.
And there he preached to thousands.
He tried to get Wesley to do the
same, and Wesley was very much opposed to
it as a good Church of England minister.
Finally he was prevailed upon.
Charles Wesley was the last of the great
trio over there to agree.
But finally he did as well.
Preaching to the people where they could get
them.
When Whitefield came to America, the crowds got
so big that there was no church building
could hold them.
So again, he went out into the meadows
and the fields and started preaching.
So there were these links.
There were links in personnel.
You had Edwards, of course, was the towering
figure among the Americans.
I don't know if you realized it, just
as a century before, England almost lost Oliver
Cromwell to America.
Just by a hair's breadth he decided to
remain.
And I tell you, England would be a
very different country today had Oliver Cromwell come
to America.
But equally, it was just by a hair's
breadth that America didn't lose Jonathan Edwards to
Scotland.
When he was thrown out of his church
in Northampton, there was great opportunity and great
pressure on him to go to Scotland where
his genius and his ministry would have been
appreciated.
But he instead remained to be a missionary
among the American Indians.
And again, who can tell what the difference
would have been had we had Edwards in
the United Kingdom instead of having an early
death here in America.
But the personnel had a lot in common.
Edwards was red and loved on the other
side of the ocean.
The Westleys came for a short time to
America.
They never really hit it off.
Charles stayed for less than six months, if
my memory is right.
John stayed for about 22 months.
And really, he summed it up very well
in his journal.
I was just reading this the other night
and he said, I went to America to
convert the Indians.
But who will convert me.
I learned when I went to convert the
Indians that I needed to be converted.
So their ministry over here was of no
lasting significance at all.
But they did a great work in Britain.
And of course, the bridge spanning the two
was George Whitefield, who even in those days
of difficult travel, made seven transatlantic visits, seven
visits to America.
In days when it took four months to
send a letter from America to Britain and
get a reply.
That's always hoping that it wasn't somebody like
me in the other end making the reply.
Otherwise, you'd still be waiting.
But anyway, he was the bridge between so
a lot in common.
Now, early in the 18th century, in fact,
in 1719, the Holy Ghost started working in
a way in which he had never done
before in the history of the American colonies.
Here to four in the American colonies, every
work of the Holy Spirit had started in
a major center of population.
Now, they were not major by comparison to
today, but they were major for the state
of affairs in those days.
That's where it started.
You read the stories of the New England
revivals, they were always in major centers of
population.
That's where they started and spread out.
But in 1719, there was a German-Dutch
reformed minister in a rural parish in New
Jersey, Theodor Freilinghausen, and he saw God do
marvelous things.
Suddenly, as it appeared out of nowhere, God
started moving.
And in that rural parish, such was the
breath of God among the people that there
was a quickening, a reviving, a spiritual awakening.
That was the first intimation that God had
great things to do and that right quickly.
Then there were the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of
whom I made mention this morning, William Tennant
and his son Gilbert.
You may read their story in a book
that's called The Log Cabin.
Dr. Paisley has a little book available called
Those Flaming Tennants.
Certainly their story is a story well worth
reading.
William Tennant was a man of great parts,
as they would say in those days.
That is a man of many skills, many
areas of learning.
He was also a soul on fire with
love for Christ.
He was an old-lying Scotch-Irish Presbyterian
Calvinist.
But his Calvinism was on fire for God
with the blazing zeal for revival.
He and his son Gilbert became great preachers.
They set up, as I mentioned, The Log
Cabin.
That was a place in which they trained,
gave people an education, but particularly trained people
for the Christian ministry.
That Log Cabin, in due course, became known
as the College of New Jersey or as
we know it today, Princeton University.
That's how it started, with these two revival
preachers.
Then came the most conspicuous movement of the
Holy Spirit to date, and that was under
the ministry of Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts.
After seven years of ministry there, Edwards saw
God begin to do a great thing.
In the year 1734, spilling over into 1735,
as he preached, he saw God deal with
people.
Remember, this was not a major city.
This was not a United Church crusade.
This was a faithful minister preaching Christ to
his people.
And in a six-month period, he talks
about 300 of those people coming to know
the Lord Jesus Christ and living the Christian
life with such fervor and power as showed
that the work of grace was real in
their hearts.
So, up to the mid-1730s, there was
this initial moving, a sort of an awakening,
and then there was a little period of
dullness and deadness, where it seemed that the
light was going out, the fire was burning
low, the zeal was beginning to abate.
But in 1740, there came the great awakening,
and it broke upon America with tremendous power.
Again, the ministry of Jonathan Edwards was very
much to the fore, but even more to
the fore at this time was the ministry
of George Whitefield.
Whitefield had visited America back in 1737.
He had gone down to Georgia to start
his orphan work.
You may still visit the building there and
see something of the remains of Whitefield's work
among the orphans.
He did so because many of the settlers
had died, and there were many orphan children
in great need, and no one seemed to
have any hope or any way, any ideas
of dealing with them.
It was his burden to set up an
orphanage there, which he duly did.
Now, he was back.
He'd come in 1739, and on Edwards' invitation,
he visited Northampton.
Before he went there, as he preached around
the Philadelphia area, God was moving.
Suddenly, people were interested.
It wasn't because there was some great advertising
campaign or some great public relations exercise, but
suddenly there was a God-given interest in
hearing the gospel.
And of course, one has to say that
in sending Whitefield, God sent the greatest instrument
He had in the world in that day.
As I said this morning, it is the
opinion of many, competent to judge in these
things.
I think, for instance, of Martin Lloyd-Jones.
It was certainly his opinion.
It was certainly C.H. Spurgeon's opinion.
That in Whitefield, God raised up the single
greatest preacher the world had ever seen since
the days of Christ's apostles.
A man who had the countenance of a
seraph, who had the voice that would not
have disgraced an angel, who had the intellect,
who had the oratory, but most of all,
who had the baptism of the power of
the Holy Ghost in a most unusual way.
Whitefield had already seen great moves in England.
He was not long saved.
He had been, as a boy, reared in
an inn.
He, early in life, was given an education
and then in due time sent to Oxford.
There he joined the Holy Club, the Bible
moths, the Bible bigots, with the Westleys, trying
to save his soul by holy living, by
visiting prisons, by reaching out to the poor
and the needy.
But in 1735, three years before Wesley was
converted, George Whitefield passed from death unto life.
He was born again and he was justified
by faith in Jesus Christ.
Almost immediately, it was obvious, a great preacher
had come.
Very early in his ministry, people of all
classes were hanging upon every word.
The nobility came to hear him.
The common people loved to hear him.
He challenged the deadness of the Church of
England and he led the foundations in those
early years before the Methodist revival.
Since 1737, he had been seeing thousands attend
his ministry.
As I said, he was the first to
go out into the open air and there
anything from three to ten to twenty or
thirty thousand people would come to hear him
preach.
He mightily moved in his preaching.
People who had never listened to a preacher
in their lives listened to Whitefield.
People who felt that the Church was not
for them and remember this was an age
when people generally believed that religion was a
farce.
When Queen Caroline was dying, there was a
bit of a scandal.
Why had she not sent for a minister
to pray with her?
Mr. Walpole, the Prime Minister of England was
there and he said to one of her
family, go to the Archbishop, bring him in.
He prays briefly as you tell him.
Let's have this farce, and farce was the
word that he used, because if people don't
think that we are as stupid as they
are, they will take it ill.
The Archbishop would play the game.
That was the age in which they lived.
Ordinary people didn't believe that there was any
reality in the Christian religion.
It was at the lowest level of society,
something that the people were not interested in.
At the highest levels of society, the intellectuals
took it to be an exploded myth.
And now came Whitefield preaching in the power
of the Holy Ghost and suddenly thousands of
people of every class are brought in to
the company, if not to a church, no
church big enough to hold them.
And most churches not wanting to be contaminated
with enthusiasm, so they wouldn't have them.
Thousands were coming to Christ.
Literally thousands of people saved in those early
years.
When John Wesley was converted in 1738, Whitefield
brought him in to the work of evangelism.
They had been friends from their days in
Oxford.
As I've said, he introduced Wesley to this
great idea of preaching in the open air.
Whitefield had begun to put his converts into
societies.
They didn't form a different church, but they
were societies for fellowship and for spiritual growth.
And when he returned to America in 1739,
he handed the leadership of those societies over
to John Wesley.
While he went to carry this ministry, first
to Philadelphia and then to New England and
then through the colonies.
Now the great awakening really began to shake
the colonies.
When he visited New England, Whitefield saw the
fire of God fall.
Some ministers in Boston were very antagonistic to
all ideas about revival.
They looked on it as a diabolical delusion.
Jonathan Edwards combated that very strongly, but nonetheless
there were tremendously well positioned ministers in the
Boston area who detested the whole idea of
revival.
And some of them were never moved by
the revival.
Others were, but some of them never changed
their opinion.
But as Whitefield came in there, again the
people of every class thronged to hear him
preach.
The interest was incredible.
The atmosphere was electric.
I have no hope in the world of
beginning to make you feel anything that those
people would have felt when Whitefield preached.
Perhaps the simplest way to make you understand
just how powerful was his persuasiveness is to
remind you of the old story of Benjamin
Franklin.
Franklin and Whitefield became very close personal friends.
And the family of Benjamin Franklin continued to
look upon Whitefield as their friend.
Though Franklin says that he, though pressed hard
by Whitefield, never made any personal decision for
Christ.
He became Whitefield's publisher and certainly held him
in high esteem.
Now when Whitefield came to Philadelphia, one of
his main objectives was to have a big
offering.
He collected money everywhere he went.
Not for himself, but for his orphanage in
Georgia.
Franklin didn't believe in Whitefield's plan to build
an orphanage.
He was not against helping the orphans.
But he figured there isn't much help down
there in Georgia.
You know these backward southerners.
There isn't much help down there in Georgia.
There isn't, there's not a lot of easy
material to be got.
You're going to have to pay to get
people in.
You're going to have to pay extra for
material.
It would be cheaper to bring the children
to Philadelphia and build the orphanage up here
than it is to spend all this extra
money and build it down there.
So he didn't agree with Whitefield's plan at
all.
And as he went to hear Whitefield preach,
he knew that there would be an appeal
for an offering.
And he determined, I will not give him
anything.
He had a few coppers in his pocket.
He had a few bits of silver and
a few gold coins.
And as he listened to Whitefield preach, he
melted a little and he said, well, I'll
give him the coppers.
And Whitefield preached on.
He said, well, it wouldn't do any harm.
Though I don't believe in it, it wouldn't
do any harm to give him the silver.
And the time for the offering came, he
emptied his pockets of gold and everything.
It would give you something of an insight.
Even at that level of the tremendous power
and pulpit persuasion that Whitefield had.
Now you lift that up to a spiritual
level.
When he started dealing with the gospel, when
he described heaven, people could see it.
When he described hell, people could see it.
When he spoke of the trumpet blast of
God on the day of judgment, people actually
jumped, thinking that they could hear that blast.
Churches were filled.
Huge open air meetings when the churches couldn't
hold the crowds.
Ministers long dead awakened.
And all across New England, there was the
sound of abundance of rain.
Not only in New England, but New York,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia were touched.
Almost over 150 churches were affected and dozens
of these religious societies were formed.
For you Baptists, you might like to understand
this.
The Baptists and Whitefield were very close.
The great thing about Whitefield's ministry is that
it transcended denominational lines.
The Anglicans, if they weren't so chock full
of their liturgy that they didn't want to
touch anything else, Evangelical Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists,
Baptists, Moravians, they all gathered around Whitefield in
a tremendous unity.
And it was from the Whitefield preaching in
the Great Awakening that the Baptist churches had
their first significant growth spurt here in America.
Now these movements of God were of lasting
value.
I know that there is the idea that
revivals are really emotional meteors and that at
the end of the day they don't have
any lasting effect.
There are some Calvinists who write learned papers
to that effect.
They like to quote people like Charles Hodge
about the ephemeral effects of revivals.
Well for any American theologian especially to talk
like that he has to be off his
head.
Because the first Great Awakening, this is the
Great Awakening in American history and in Britain
it's the same thing only it's called there
the Methodist Revival.
In both places it had a dramatic effect
upon the entire future of the country.
In Britain it affected every level of society.
It was noted by politicians and anybody who
had an eye on his head to see
that it changed the whole moral structure of
Britain.
Changed not only the manners but the heart
of Britain.
As I said all the social elements that
went into causing such a bloody uprising in
France were present in England.
I think those historians have it right who
trace the stability of England not to its
superior politicians.
For you people in America above all people
know the stupidity of 18th century English politicians.
So it was not the superiority of their
politicians it was simply the power of revival
and the only revolution that England knew was
an industrial revolution that brought its own problems.
But it certainly saved England from the blood
bath that was in France.
In America the Great Awakening led the foundation
upon which the American Revolution was based.
I have a book written by an English
historian who according to some American historians has
written the best modern history of America.
For the simple reason that he not being
an American doesn't beat his chest with all
sorts of guilt over the development and the
coming to greatness of this country.
And according to some American historians he'll give
you more real history of America without all
the side avenues of guilt than you'll get
anywhere else in a modern writer.
Now be they right or wrong in their
assessment of him I was very interested in
reading what he a secular historian had to
say about the Great Awakening.
Now it's very interesting to me because I
have one of the standard works of European
history, a large three volume European history and
I decided just to check to see what,
written by an Englishman by the way, to
see what it had to say about Methodism
and John Wesley in England during this period.
John Wesley got two mentions in passing and
he could have been Mickey Mouse for all
this historian cared so much for historical objectivity.
So I was very interested to see what
this fellow had to say about the Great
Awakening in America and I must say I
was greatly, greatly interested and surprised.
These were his words.
Paul Johnson writing in the history of the
American people.
He says the Great Awakening was the proto
-revolutionary event, the formative event in American history
preceding the political drive for independence and making
it possible.
It crossed all religious and sectarian boundaries, made
light of them indeed and turned what had
been a series of European style churches into
American ones.
It began the process which created an ecumenical,
not in the fullness of the term that
we use today, but crossing denominational lines.
It created an ecumenical and American type of
religious devotion which affected all groups and gave
a distinctive American flavor to a wide range
of denominations.
This might be summed up under the following
five heads.
Evangelical fervor, a tendency to downgrade the clergy,
little stress on liturgical correctness, even less on
parish boundaries and above all an emphasis on
individual experience.
And I don't know how much those things
resonate with you but as a stranger in
America I can see all five of those
things very, very clearly in American church life.
And then he goes on.
Hitherto each colony had seen its outward links
as running chiefly to London.
Each tended to be a little self-contained
world of its own.
The Great Awakening altered this separateness.
It taught different colonies to grasp and appreciate
what they had in common which was a
very great deal.
Now that's the view of a modern historian.
Let me give you the words of the
second president of the United States.
John Adams said, the revolution was effected before
the war commenced.
The revolution was in the mind and hearts
of the people and in a change in
their religious sentiments of their duties and obligation.
With that in mind, Paul Johnson very astutely
made this remark.
The revolution could not have taken place without
this religious background.
The essential difference between the American Revolution and
the French Revolution.
Let me just back up here a little.
There had been for a long time contact
between French and American intellectuals.
There was a free flow of ideas.
I have deliberately, I was tempted to do
a little of this tonight, but I have
deliberately stayed away from the philosophical changes that
were taking place in Europe.
The various schools of thought which have their,
if you will excuse my strong language, their
bastard offsprings with us to this day, cursing
our society.
Those ideas were flowing freely and yet he
makes this important distinction.
The essential difference between the American Revolution and
the French Revolution is that the American Revolution
in its origins was a religious event.
Whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious
event.
That fact was to shape the American Revolution
from start to finish and determine the nature
of the independent state it brought into being.
Now stand back and look at it.
In the providence of God there was revival
in Britain and there was revival in America.
In the very century that Britain and America
would fight to the death.
A war that I don't want to get
into, not for the reasons some of you
might think, but for the very opposite reasons.
A war that Britain need never have fought
and should never have fought.
A wrong headed war.
A wrong war.
A war of ultimate folly.
Again you have to stand back and see
that there is a greater hand than any
mans in this.
King George III hadn't actually had his first
documented bout with lunacy till after the American
Revolution.
I tend to think he had an awful
lot of it unrecorded before it.
But the sad fact is that Britain's greatest
statesman, the Earl of Chatham, William Pitt the
Elder, her greatest statesman, the one who more
than any English statesman saw that the colonies
in America could not be made the servants
of little England.
And who wanted to work in the great
English speaking harmony of two nations.
Pitt was let aside for months on end.
My memory is right at the critical stage,
about nine months.
Flat out with what we would call today
extreme depression, melancholia, unfit for service.
But isn't it interesting that the two nations
that came to war, that should never have
happened, each felt the power of revival to
lead it into the kind of revolution it
needed.
An American revolution that formed this independent nation
on the lines it did.
An industrial revolution that took England from the
jaws of bloodshed and lifted it ultimately to
the heights of prosperity.
The revivals of that age of revolution stand
out to us as a grand testimony to
the power of the gospel preached in the
demonstration of the Holy Ghost.
These revivals rebuke our coldness and our defeatism
and they surely should stir our hearts to
pray to God to do the same thing
again today.
We read our text awake, we're talking about
the great awakening.
Awake, awake, put on strength O arm of
the Lord.
Awake as in the ancient days in the
generations of old.
It's a very interesting fact that the state
of the church and the nations before the
great awakening was very much as it is
today.
I've referred to the humanist philosophies that were
spreading their foul and filthy lies across Europe
and indeed getting into America.
What is called the enlightenment is not all
light.
Now we've got to be careful.
There was much to admire in establishing a
scientific method of observation, explanation and experimentation.
Much to be admired in that.
But that's a very small part of what's
called the enlightenment.
The enlightenment was really the shutting out of
the light of divine revelation and making man
and his reason or his experience or his
sensation or his desire the ultimate source of
knowledge and the ultimate good of the people.
These humanist philosophies were widely accepted in both
America and Britain among the intelligentsia.
In America while the country wasn't really yet
rich, yet the possibilities were becoming very very
obvious.
And so the pursuit of wealth began to
replace the pursuit of God in many churches.
And from the old Puritan Pilgrim beginnings that
we discussed in our last time of Millennial
Milestone Studies, from those beginnings there now was
tremendous coldness and deadness.
Oh orthodoxy yes, but coldness and deadness in
American churches as they pursued wealth.
They were more this worldly than other worldly.
Then certainly in England and in America the
evidence of this is I think also very
very clear even among some of the most
famous names in American history.
Deism.
Deism without getting into the details, Deism is
the idea of rationalism that wipes out all
idea of supernaturalism from the Bible and from
Christianity.
You had Deists who were anti-Christian and
they were the people who had the notion
that God was an absentee landlord, that God
was the great clockmaker.
He had wound up the clock at the
beginning of time and now he was just
letting things work themselves out and he had
nothing to do with it.
So there was no supernatural intervention, no incarnation,
no blood atonement, no resurrection, no such thing
as praying and getting answers to prayer.
There was no vital religion, the only religion
was human morality.
Inside the Christian church there were people who
said no Christianity, in fact one famous church
man wrote a book that Christianity is the
ancient religion of nature.
Well what do you do with the supernatural
in the Bible?
You throw it out as priest craft and
superstition.
Deism had undermined revealed religion.
It called for some of the greatest apologetic
works in the history of the Christian church.
I am not going to start going through
them tonight because they are now somewhat dated.
But nonetheless these great apologetic works from Bishop
Berkeley, Bishop Butler and a host of others
including Isaac Watts, whom we were singing tonight.
For the most part they were as cold
as they were correct.
They were simply an appeal to the brain,
there was nothing of spiritual power.
In Britain especially, and America was not free
from this, but in Britain especially there was
a long period of moral filthiness.
As a result there was drunkenness, there was
poverty, there was lawlessness, wretchedness, crowded prisons.
The theatre was very active.
I believe the greatest curse in any nation
is the entertainment industry.
The American entertainment industry is hell resident in
America.
Same in Britain and there is nothing new
about this.
The theatre in Britain, John Wesley called it
that sink of all corruption.
Openly, flagrantly, immoral, vicious, promoting all sorts of
wickedness and ungodliness.
Many attempts were made to alleviate these problems
and they met with only limited success.
This was a time when many hospitals were
built in Britain, you have to thank God
for that.
Charity schools were built because isn't education the
answer to all the needs of the nation?
Parliament even passed the gin law, which was
the suppression of most liquor sales.
The Society for the Reformation of Manners thought
that they could persuade people to live better
without getting sealed.
And on failing to do it, in 40
years they brought just a few hundred cases,
less than a hundred thousand prosecutions for debauched
living.
That's in London and Westminster alone.
The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge had a
better idea and they started distributing Christian literature.
But despite it all, the nation was sinking
deeper and deeper and then God raised up
and He shook the nation.
And in America, He raised up a preacher
and He shook the nation.
And then other preachers who carried on the
flame, for example when Whitfield left Boston, he
invited Gilbert Tennant to come and keep the
fire burning and he did.
That's how these two nations were saved and
the effects were immense.
I've already mentioned the effect on America and
its long term result.
Of Britain, one historian has written this, A
religious revival burst forth which changed in a
few years the whole temper of English society.
The church was restored to life and activity.
Religion carried to the hearts of the people
a fresh spirit of moral zeal while it
purified our literature and our manners.
A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency
and wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the
slave trade and gave the first impulse to
popular education.
That's what was happening in Britain when by
every human law it should have been sinking
into bloody revolution.
And that wasn't all.
One of the chief products of the great
awakening was a young man called David Brainerd.
He didn't live very long.
I think of him as the American Robert
Murray McShane and I think of McShane as
the Scottish David Brainerd.
Many parallels in their personal godliness and their
passion for precious souls.
David Brainerd sought to win the American Indians
for Christ.
When he died, just a young man, Jonathan
Edwards, produced David Brainerd's journal, published it to
the world.
And wherever it was read it had a
tremendous effect.
Challenged the church to rise up, to evangelize
and the church met the challenge.
People in England, a poor but brilliant Baptist
pastor, read Brainerd's journal.
God lit a fire in the heart of
William Carey, who became the father of the
modern missionary movement.
And by the time the 18th century ended,
William Carey was already in India and had
baptized his first converts.
And the modern missionary movement that was soon
to encircle the world was launched.
And it was the direct offspring of the
great revival that revolutionized both Britain and America
in the 18th century.
That's the kind of revival we need today.
We live in a day of appearances.
When people plan revivals, pay for revivals, work
up revivals, there is a world of difference
between revival and revivalism.
I would strongly recommend you to read Iain
Murray's book so titled, Revival and Revivalism.
There's a world of difference between them.
Revival is God answering the prayer of our
text.
When we come to him with a prayer
to awake and let his arm be stretched
forth in power.
Have we the right to pray that prayer?
Well, read the portion I read to you
tonight, read it again.
God says, hearken to me, ye that follow
after righteousness.
Let me tell you, carnal Christians only add
to their sin when they pray for revival,
for it's hypocrisy.
But he says, if you're following after righteousness,
if you're seeking the Lord, or later, as
he puts it, verse 7, if you know
righteousness, if you're the people in whose heart
is my law, then this prayer belongs to
you.
Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of
the Lord.
This is a prayer that people who are
in earnest with God have always the right
to pray.
And God has given his promise.
We read it tonight, my righteousness shall be
forever, my salvation from generation to generation.
Revival is not something that's a historical oddity.
Revival is not something that belongs to the
past, and we now have to give up
all hope.
It is one of the curses of Scofield
dispensationalism that many, many Christians wrongly believe.
We have nothing to look forward to but
the secret rapture.
There's nothing to happen before Christ comes.
Therefore, if we're looking for the rapture, we
can't be looking for revival.
And that sort of absolute folly has robbed
churches of the burning zeal to pray that
God will send us revival.
I don't know when Christ is coming.
I frequently pray the prayer of John on
the Isle of Patmos, even so, come Lord
Jesus.
But let me tell you, until he comes,
he has a work for his church to
do in the world.
Until he comes, neither this church nor any
other church has the right to live in
spiritual coldness and deadness.
None of us has the right to be
talking about a living Christ without any experience
of living power.
We surely should be crying for a great
awakening.
Let it come.
O God, we pray thee, let the shower
of blessing fall.
We are waiting.
We are expecting.
O revive the hearts of all.