Episode Details

The Awakening Before the Revolution #RTTBROS #America250 #Nation250 #America #NIGHTLIGHT

“And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh.”

— Acts 2:17

THE STORY

Before there was a revolution, there was a revival.

Between 1730 and 1745, a wave of spiritual awakening swept through the American colonies with a force that no one had anticipated and no human organization had arranged. Historians call it the Great Awakening. Those who lived through it simply called it the work of God.

Jonathan Edwards watched it begin in his own congregation in 1734. Without any special promotion or effort, people began to be gripped by an awareness of their sin and their need for Christ. Edwards reported that the town seemed to be full of the presence of God. Hard men were brought to their knees. Families were reconciled. The taverns grew quiet while the meetinghouses overflowed.

Then George Whitefield arrived from England, and the fire spread to every colony. He preached in fields and town squares to crowds that sometimes numbered thirty thousand. In a nation of three million people, it is estimated that eighty percent heard Whitefield preach in person at least once. The colonies had never had anything in common before. The Great Awakening gave them a shared experience, and a shared God.

THE REFLECTION

John Adams said later that the Revolution was complete in the minds and hearts of the people before a single shot was fired. He was right, but he was describing something that had a spiritual root.

The Great Awakening did something no political movement could have done: it gave thirteen fractious, independent colonies a common identity. They were not merely British subjects with grievances. They were a people who had encountered God together. And a people who have knelt before the same Lord have something worth standing up for together.

This is why the separation of revival and reformation is always a mistake. When God moves in human hearts, human society eventually changes. The Great Awakening did not just save souls. It prepared the ground for a nation.

We have been praying for revival in America for a generation. Perhaps we should remember that the last time God sent one, it changed the world. Let us not be so heavenly minded that we miss what He intends to do with an awakened people on this earth.