Till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.
Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance
Years before Chuck died, Greg asked him if he thought there could be another Jesus Revolution.
“I don’t know,” said Chuck. “Back in the ’60s, people were desperate. Unsaved people were spiritually hungry. They were searching for God. I was desperate, too: desperate to be part of what God was doing. So I guess the question for today is, ‘Are we desperate enough?’”
Many Christians today yearn for revival. Whether in big events like the National Day of Prayer, or small prayer meetings in rural chapels, inner cities, college campuses, or suburban fellowship groups, believers are pleading with God to revive His church and send spiritual awakening to our land. Seminary students and laypeople are reflecting on those unusual times when God’s Spirit did wild things in America’s history.
Chaos and desperation are far more likely to lead to revival than comfort and complacency. That’s true in the celebrated revivals and awakenings of America’s past.
The First Great Awakening started shaking the American colonies in the late 1730s, a fairly secular time period when Enlightenment thinking had made many colonists skeptical of biblical Christianity. It began in New England, where a thirty-seven-year-old preacher, Jonathan Edwards, was earnestly praying for conversions in his staid congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Sunday by Sunday, people started coming to faith in Jesus. Over time, this trickle became a torrent, most notably when Edwards was asked to fill in for a pastor in a neighboring congregation in sophisticated Enfield. His sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is regarded today as a classic “hellfire and brimstone” address. People think of this sermon as an agitated harangue in which Edwards angrily whipped his poor listeners into a frenzy.
In reality, Edwards stood solemnly at the pulpit, hunched over the tiny writing on the wrinkled pages of his thick manuscript. He read his sermon in a monotone, glancing up occasionally to contemplate the back wall of the church.
But then something strange happened. The pure power of the Word of God—Edwards’ text was in Deuteronomy—did something extraordinary. The men and women in the pews shook and wept, crying out with moans and shrieks. They knelt on the cold floors. In despair over their sins, they repented, committed themselves to God, and joined the tide of the Great Awakening.
Edwards went on to become the second president of Princeton University and is considered one of the greatest intellects of the American pre-Revolutionary period.
But the Great Awakening did not stem from Edwards, gifted though he was. Nor did it flow from the great outdoor preaching of George Whitefield, who told the gospel story all over the barns, riverbanks, and fields of America, drawing huge crowds and becoming one of the most well-known men in America at that time. The Great Awakening came about purely by the will of God and the power of His Holy Spirit.
As Edwards put it, the collapsing people who came under conviction were experiencing “an extraordinary sense of the awful majesty, greatness and holiness of God, so as sometimes to overwhelm soul and body, a sense of the piercing, all seeing eye of God so as to sometimes take away bodily strength.”1
Paradoxically, and wonderfully, the fear of God also caused these repentant souls to revel in a new, joyful love for Him. They “felt a great delight in singing praises to God and Jesus Christ, and longing that this present life may be as it were one continued song of praise to God.”2
Between twenty-five thousand and fifty thousand of these new converts flooded into New England’s churches . . . out of a total population in the region of three hundred and forty thousand people.
The awakening faded, as all revivals do. Within fifty years, interest in Christianity had been superseded by preoccupation with this world. As America expanded to the Wild West, many towns, saloons, and frontier settlements had a law unto themselves, and God wasn’t so much a part of its enforcement. Outlaws and desperados created havoc. Then a Second Great Awakening began near the turn of the nineteenth century, when revival meetings in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio spread like wildfire among different denominations.
Crowds of as many as fifteen thousand people would gather for several days for camp meetings to hear circuit riders preach. Thousands of people on the frontier heard the gospel, repented, and started living for Jesus. In the eastern part of the country, a young lawyer in his thirties, Charles Finney, grew to prominence. Finney was a former skeptic who’d been converted; he became an aggressive itinerant evangelist whose preaching drew throngs to faith in Jesus.
A third awakening is known as the Fulton Street Revival of 1857. The mid-1800s had been a period of financial expansion. Gold had been discovered out West, railroads were booming, and industry and commerce were riding high. Generally speaking, spiritual interest was low. But a tall, forty-eight-year-old former businessman named Jeremiah Lanphier hungered for people to come to Christ. He initiated a weekly prayer meeting, from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m., on the third floor of an old church building on Fulton Street in New York City.
At noon on September 23, 1857, Lanphier sat alone in the drafty room and waited for somebody—anybody—to join him. Eventually, over the grindingly slow course of the hour, five other men did. They prayed. The group felt no great outpouring of God’s Spirit. They determined to meet again the following week.
Twenty men came to the second meeting, and forty to the third. Then, on October 14, the stock market crashed. There was financial panic. Banks closed. Men lost their jobs and homes. Families were hungry. People were desperate. Soon three thousand men and women were crowding Lanphier’s prayer gatherings, now meeting every day and in locations all over New York, filling theaters on Broadway.
Within six months, ten thousand people gathered daily for prayer throughout New York City. Prayer meetings spread to Chicago, where two thousand people showed up to petition God for souls in the Metropolitan Theater. They spread to Washington, DC, to towns across the Midwest, to the West Coast, and into Canada and beyond. For two years, God used this nonsectarian, laypeople’s movement in a revival of prayer that brought tens of thousands of new believers and reinvigorated Christians into churches all over the country.
Awakenings and revivals tend to get their own boldface titles in history books and websites. The Jesus Movement gets mixed reviews.
Some historians call the Jesus Movement an awakening and revival because of its scope: thousands of young people were saved all over the United States, and thousands of Christians were refreshed and revived in local churches.
Other commentators who look for cultural consequences of revivals say that the Jesus Movement was a revival because it led to the election in 1976 of Jimmy Carter, the “born again” president, and the rise of the Moral Majority in the ’80s, contributing to an upswing of evangelicalism that has “prospered” ever since. Such analysis seems to equate political access or social popularity with spiritual influence, something that would no doubt surprise the writers of the New Testament.
Other historians dismiss the Jesus Movement as just a cultural blip on the spiritual radar, no big deal.
Perhaps the discussion of whether the Jesus Movement was a “true” awakening or revival is a debate best left to academic circles. For his part, Greg believes it was the last great American spiritual awakening, and he passionately hopes for another, if God would be so gracious, in his lifetime.
However we define the Jesus Revolution, it is clear that God’s Spirit spontaneously stirred in unusual ways among unusual people during the hippie era. We will not know until we see with the scope of eternity what darkness and evil at work in the world was constrained by those conversions, or what ripple effects those transformed lives brought to generations to come.
Take Greg, for example. This kid who came to Christ in the Jesus Movement has seen five hundred thousand people make what he calls “professions of faith” in his Harvest Crusades. Hundreds of thousands more have come to faith through his nearly fifty years of gospel preaching at his church and through radio, TV, and other venues. It would not be an overstatement to say that more than a million people have prayed with Greg to follow Jesus. It just goes to show that God can use anyone who truly decides he or she is “for Jesus,” as Greg did in 1970, to accomplish extraordinary things for His kingdom.
The Jesus Movement awakened many, many dead souls. Most of them had at least one thing in common: they were desperate. They’d sought peace, love, and community in the utopian visions of the day. They’d thought that drugs would bring spiritual enlightenment, or that sex would bring love, or that music would bring community, or that all those things would bring freedom. They had been disappointed by the counterfeits and were hungry for what was real. It was no casual thing when they discovered in Jesus the reality they’d been looking for.
These new converts were on fire. Their long hair was standing on end. They preached on the streets. They hitchhiked solely for the purpose of sharing the gospel with people who’d pick them up. They lived together very simply. They started storefront missions. They fed hungry hippies. They believed that the Bible was true, that Jesus was the Savior of the world He loved, and that He was coming again very soon. They depended on the power of the Holy Spirit. Their numbers multiplied.
Over time, what started as a spontaneous movement of the Holy Spirit among these flower children became more mainstream. The spiritual awakening among the unsaved became a revival among the saved. It wasn’t just an alteration in the trimmings of many churches and parachurch gatherings, like adopting casual dress or contemporary music, though those changes did happen. It was a deep hunger for the Bible itself, for prayer, fellowship, evangelism, and discipleship.
It was not humanly orchestrated. Revival doesn’t start with church consultants, though consultants can help churches be better stewards of their resources. Revival doesn’t start with programs, though programs are wonderful things. To put it in hippie language, Chuck Smith didn’t sit down and plan a “happening” back in 1970. (Neither did Jonathan Edwards in 1742.) The Spirit of God started something . . . and Chuck Smith and others recognized it and responded in obedience to what God was already doing.
God grants revival. He grants it to those who are humble enough to know they need it, those who have a certain desperate hunger for Him. Only out of self-despair—a helpless understanding of the reality of sin and one’s absolute inability to cure it—does anyone ever turn wholeheartedly to God. That desperation is sometimes hard to come by in America, because it is the opposite of self-sufficiency. In the US, many of us live under the illusion that our needs are already met, that maybe God is an add-on to our already comfortable existence.
Poor and persecuted Christians in other parts of the world face horrific challenges in their everyday lives, but they are rich in faith. They know that their next breath, their next meal, and their next life are all absolutely dependent on the grace of God. Their desperate reliance on Jesus gives them a strength we often lack in our own muddled affluence. They pity American Christians who don’t have the stark luxury of such clear priorities, those who have become like the first-century believers to whom Jesus said, rather radically,
I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, “I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.” But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.3
People don’t tend to seek God when they are comfortable. Pain and suffering amplify the sound of God’s voice; we can become deaf to His call in times when life is easy. Our hearts can close tight, sealed by a heavy, rusty door.
But Jesus loves us. He says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me” (Rev. 3:20).
That image is often used to woo unbelievers to open their heart-doors to Jesus, which is great, but that section of Scripture was of course written to believers . . . or at least people who professed to be believers. Their tepid faith was neither cold nor hot, and therefore had all the power and passion of congealed oatmeal.
Thankfully, Jesus says in the same passage, “Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent!”4
Distinguished Regent College professor, author, and Jesus follower J. I. Packer has written:
Much is heard today of spirituality as self-discovery and self-fulfillment in God and of a relationship with God that brings happiness, contentment, satisfaction, and inward peace. But of bearing the cross, battling wrong desires, resisting temptation, mortifying sin, and making those decisions that Jesus pictured as cutting off a limb and plucking out an eye, little or nothing gets said.
Yet this is the living out of repentance, and without realistic emphasis on this more demanding side of the Christian life, a great deal of self-deceived shallowness and a great many false professions of faith from persons ignorant of the cost of discipleship are bound to appear.
Now it is precisely the life of repentance, of cross-bearing, of holiness under pressure and joy within pain—the life, in other words, of following Jesus on his own stated terms—that God revives . . . we do well to ask ourselves whether this is something we have come to terms with as of now.5
Do Christians today truly long for revival and awakening? Are we ready for this “living out of repentance”? There is a cost. It is different for each person and each church community. But for all of us, repentance means that something has to die.