Christian revival

Um- And I, you know, we mentioned this once before.

The last one is this, uh, th- there's a religious revival going un- underway of some dimension.

And, you know, you and I, James, remember the Jesus people of the '70s.

Yep.

Christians are increasingly accustomed to hearing preachers from all kinds of traditions.

Revivalism emphasizes personal conversion over inherited church membership.

Religious liberty makes new movements easier to form, and the Enlightenment encourages people to question inherited systems and examine truth for themselves.

Republican political culture makes Americans increasingly suspicious of the old hierarchies, and the frontier rewards simplicity, flexibility, and experimentation.

Podcast where we talk about sharing the gospel, reaching people with the good news of Jesus Christ and developing an evangelistic lifestyle that extends beyond the walls of the church and Today I want to talk about one word.

Revival.

It's a word Christians use often.

We pray for revival.

And God certainly can work in extraordinary ways.

But before revival becomes something happening around us, perhaps we need to ask what God is doing within us.

Revival isn't simply increased religious activity.

It isn't a successful church event.

I'm not a Methodist, but it's one of the things that I most appreciate about the Methodist tradition.

Revivalism is deeply embedded in the Methodist ethos because this is where they came from.

I mean, the 18th century First Great Awakening, Whitfield and Wesley, I mean, Whitfield ultimately split with Wesley over the doctrine of election, but they were cut out of the same cloth with respect to revivalism and practical divinity.

Wesley, of course, was a keen proponent of Christian holiness.

How did the early modern revivalism seek to bypass the church creeds, the sacraments? Talk more about that.

Yeah.

Revivalism is, uh, especially when you get to Charles Finney and the Second Great Awakening, revivalism pits the revival against the church.

So you may have been baptized, you may have been catechized, you may have been confirmed, you may have taken the Lord's Supper, you may have prayed for years with the Lord's people and heard a million sermons, but that is all for nothing.

That's just Churchianity.

Maybe some of the historical revivals that happened in the U.S. and the Wesleyan revival in in the UK where you have a largely still Christian civilization that had lost its fervor and had lost something and then you have revivals that restore seriousness about Christianity that had been lost.

I say that those are positive examples in some ways.

I think the Revivals also have a lot of negative effects, so maybe looking at what went wrong with some of those movements would be worth looking at.

So maybe the Wesleys in Great Britain would be one historical example that would be worth investigating.

How did the Methodist movement affect the Church of England? How did it positively affect the Church of England? What were the errors on both sides, the errors of the Church of England, the errors of the Wesleys and their allies on the other? That would be one historical example.

We're going to see these pockets of tribalism in the future.

You mentioned the Christian revival.

I've talked to people who...

I've seen different opinions of this.

Some people try to really downplay that and say, that's always been a thing.

There's always been this push, this voicing.

There's a revival of Christianity, but that's always been there, so it's not really a revival if it's always been there, and you don't want to give that too much... voice because you realize it's it's fluffed up more than it actually is and then there's people who are really going all in saying no this is the time there is a major christian revivalism with our youth with gen z with i don't know if gen alpha is quite there yet what are your thoughts on that

Yeah, I've got a lot of thoughts on that, actually.

It's by Charles Spurgeon.

It's this surgical critique titled Spiritual Revival: The Want of the Church.

Based on that ancient cry found in the book of Habakkuk, where-

Exactly, Habakkuk 3.2. And our mission today is to figure out why individuals and, you know, massive institutions just burn out.

But the strand that becomes dominant, especially in Western Protestant Christianity, and eventually in American evangelicalism, is this language of guilt, payment, and punishment, which he does, according to some, without even having to look at us.

Penal substitution becomes enormously influential in Protestantism, especially in the United States, through Puritanism, Revivalism, Fundamentalism, and And for many Americans, American Christians, it really becomes synonymous with the gospel itself.

God is holy.

Humans are guilty.