Deuteronomy 6:20-25; John 8:31-36; 2 Corinthians 3:2-6, 17-18; 4:3-6
2 Corinthians 3:2 You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. 3 And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. 4 Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. 5 Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, 6 who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life…. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit….4:3 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. 4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5 For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. 6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
On this day, the 234th anniversary of when Americans declared independence from the government of England and consequently from its established church, all Americans can rightly celebrate the religious liberty that has resulted. American liberty was created by the intertwining of two forces that are in some tension with one another: enlightenment philosophy and evangelical spirituality. Enlightenment thinkers advocated separation of church and state because they feared that the influence of the church’s doctrine and ethics would inhibit the freedom of individual citizens to explore scientific, philosophical, and ethical novelties. In contrast, the evangelical believers who advocated separation of church and state did so because they feared that the government’s power and perks would inhibit or pervert the renewing and purifying work of the Spirit in the life of the church. The tension between evangelical and enlightenment perspectives lingers to this day, but so do the benefits of that odd coalition. The church has done relatively well under this system. That is because New Testament Christian faith is inherently a faith of persuasion and new birth far more than it is a faith of heredity and cultural upbringing. The thriving of Christian churches depends on periodic spiritual awakenings. If we want spiritual awakening, there are steps of understanding that come first::
Step 1: We must understand the purpose of salvation. God’s gracious purpose in salvation is to transform us into children of God in God’s image, able to represent the nature and purposes of God. If that purpose is happening, we are being saved. If that is not happening, we are not being saved and must be awakened. We must pray that God’s purpose for salvation will come true for us and others.
Step 2: We must understand our need for help. Do you remember the old television Med-Alert ad: “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” That is our spiritual status. We have fallen short of the glory of God, and we are powerless to fix our shortfall on our own. We need divine help. God must graciously cover us with the righteousness of Jesus. God must awaken us to faith through his inspired word. God must equip us to represent his nature and purposes, to do his work, through the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We must pray for that help for us and others.
Step 3. We must understand that salvation is a process. The Bible speaks of salvation in three tenses: I was saved when I came to faith in what Jesus did for me; I am being saved as I am transformed by degrees into the image of God; I will be saved when I at last enter the perfect fulfillment of the eternal new heaven and new earth. No one here has outgrown the need; we must pray for ongoing spiritual growth for us and others.
Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf was born in 1700 to a German family of Lutheran Pietists. Pietists were Christians who practiced disciplines of study and prayer to vitalize their personal relationships with God and practiced sacrificial works of charity and mission to express their devotion to God and to win new believers to Christ. In Zinzendorf’s early twenties, he became convinced that the established German Lutheran church would never accept the renewing ministry of the Pietists, and he began to welcome to his estate Christian refugees with whom he sought to establish the foundation of an alternative to the established church. The majority of refugees were Moravians, but they were quite diverse in their doctrines, rules for living, and worship preferences. Add to them an assortment of disgruntled Lutherans, Calvinists, and Baptists, and constant bickering was the result. In May of 1727, Zinzendorf introduced a time of intense prayer to the community. In addition to prayer, one of the disciplines to which members agreed was that they would speak only of matters on which they agreed rather than arguing about matters on which they disagreed. By August an profound and powerful awakening broke out. The community came into a large measure of harmony, and they were soon sending missionaries to the world. Eventually, over 100 missionaries went out from the little assemblage of refugees on Zinzendorf’s estate.
We shift scenes for a moment. Jonathan Edwards was born in 1703 in Connecticut into a strong Presbyterian family. I plead with you to lay aside stereotypes you may have heard about Edwards. He had his faults, but he had far more to offer than his modern reputation allows. He had extraordinary gifts as a philosopher and natural scientist as well as a theologian and writer; one of my University of Chicago history professors considered Edwards the most brilliant American of his century, a century that included Franklin and Jefferson, the most brilliant American philosopher ever, and one of the two most influential Americans in all our history. Edwards’ maternal grandfather, Samuel Stoddard, a man of great social polish, skill, and influence, who could deliver polished sermons without notes up until the time of his death at age 86, pastored the Northampton, Massachusetts, Presbyterian Church for a remarkable 57 years. In 1726, three years before Stoddard’s death, he called his brilliant grandson to become his assistant and heir apparent. Unlike his grandfather, Edwards was an introvert lacking in social skills, who drily read his long, detailed, profound, intricate sermon manuscripts. It is amazing that it took 21 years before he was fired. Edwards arrived at a difficult time. Although Stoddard was mentally sharp until his death, he was losing the attention of the restless young adults who had not been spiritually awakened. Northampton was a town of shopkeepers and of farmers who lived in the protection of the town and went out to work their farms during the day. They had large families, and there was no land for their adult children, who could not earn enough money to support a family, and the western frontier was not yet open. The average age of marriage rose to 29. The young adults were dragged to church, but were openly disrespectful, openly talking to one another during the worship service. Puritans accepted moderate use of alcohol, but a youthful tavern culture developed that went far beyond Puritan bounds. Further, the young adults were practicing what was called company-keeping, unsupervised dating that led to an epidemic of premarital pregnancies. In 1733-34, Edwards, having struggled with this culture for some years, at last gained enough attention to effectively address the issue. He spoke to parents and to young adults. He got them speaking to each other. He got them meeting in small groups for Bible study and prayer. He preached about the transience of earthly pleasures and the permanence of Christ’s beautiful and superior promises. He preached about what it means to have a new birth as a child of God. He claimed that, in order to truly behold God’s beauty, we need a supernatural gift of spiritual sight and hearing from the Holy Spirit. With the Spirit’s help, we can truly see God, and our hearts can be truly changed. We see God’s love in Christ and experience intense love for God in return. Edwards’ call was that we should pray ardently for the Spirit’s giving us such transforming vision. In the midst of all this praying and emphasis on new birth, a young woman, one of the most infamous company keepers, confessed her sins and repented. It was like a lightning bolt through which God worked to change the world. Edwards wrote a book, “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God,” which carried the story of the little Northampton awakening across the ocean where it was read by Isaac Watts, George Whitefield, and John and Charles Wesley. At about the same time, John and Charles Wesley under the influence of Moravian missionaries from Zinzendorf’s compound, began intense prayer to be transformed from the ineffective legalists they were, and they had their personal awakening to the gracious and living power of God, and the movement that began on Zinzendorf’s estate in Germany and in a farming village in Massachusetts, became the world-changing Great Awakening. The work of Zinzendorf and Edwards came together through Whitefield and the Wesley brothers to change the English speaking world on two continents. The Great Awakening lasted at least through the 1740’s. It is hard to mark its endpoint, but it was clearly gone by the American Revolution. Following the Revolution, American spiritual and moral life was at an all-time low.
Large-scale awakenings typically last a few years and effect the culture for the lifetime of their converts, but succeeding generations do not inherit the vital relationship with God. God has children, not grandchildren. Our faith and spirituality must be our own. There is frequent need for new awakenings. Allow me to mention a few high points. The first decade of the 19th century saw the emergence of the potent Great Revival in the West with the largest single event led in 1802 by our own Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement founder Barton Stone at Cane Ridge, Kentucky. Stone had heard of a Presbyterian awakening in southern Kentucky to which he traveled. He came home and shared the news with his two northern Kentucky congregations, and they began intense prayer ultimately resulting in a camp meeting attended by somewhere in the order of 20,000 to 30,000 people many of whom came to either new or at least significantly renewed life in Christ. We are here today in part because that happened.
In 1857, Jeremy Lanphier, a New York City businessman with no training or experience in religious work, was hired by a dying church for a last gasp effort at finding an effective outreach for the church. He tried many things that were not successful. He at last had handbills printed and distributed advertising a noonday prayer meeting. Over half the advertised hour was gone when the first person off the street joined him for prayer. By the end of the hour, there were six; nothing extraordinary seemed to happen, but the men agreed to meet again the following week. The meetings grew gradually to a respectable number over the next several weeks. Then an economic crash occurred and the meeting grew phenomenally. Soon thousands were gathering for brief, heartfelt prayers on all sorts of subjects. With no pre-planning, people began to confess sin and profess Christ. The noon-day prayer movement spread across the city and across the U.S., Canada, and around the world. There is no way to count the converts, but there were an extraordinary number.
In 1904, Evan Roberts, coal miner and would-be theological student in Wales, began speaking at a series of small prayer meetings which he organized. The praying became intense. He was soon attracting gatherings numbering thousands. The four "points" of his message were:
1. Confess all known sin, receiving forgiveness through Jesus Christ
2. Remove anything in your life that you are in doubt or feel unsure about
3. Be ready to obey the Holy Spirit instantly
4. Publicly confess the Lord Jesus Christ
His movement won an estimated 100,000 converts in Wales and spread to a large part of the world. In this country, the effects of the 1904 Welsh awakening helped churches of all stripes reach their highest point of influence in American history. There has not been an awakening like it since. We are now entering the second decade of the next century. Our culture stands in desperate need of intense prayer. It is in such prayer that awakenings start. There is no reason that the next revival might not start right here if we grasp what is at stake and pour ourselves out before God in prayer.
Above all, let us pray that the God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” will shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. That is how an awakening starts, with the shining of God’s light into our hearts through Jesus Christ.
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