Running to the Roar: A Deep Dive into Historical Revivals and Their Relevance Today

Rick Green:
Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. It's WallBuilders Live and we're talking about today's hottest topics on policy, faith and the culture, always from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective and, obviously, with all that's going on in Washington DC and, frankly, what's going on with our in our own lives, in our local communities. We need truth. We need that biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. So, thank you for joining us, thank you for being a part of WallBuilders Live. Visit our website today, www.WallBuildersLive.com, partially because there's just a lot of great information there and that's where you can make a donation to help us out, to help us do what we do and spread that truth even more, but also because we're going to be catching the tail end of a presentation David Barton did a few days ago, and if you missed the first part, our first few parts of that, they are available on our website right now at www.WallBuildersLive.com. We'll catch the end of that presentation today. It's called Running to the Roar. So, folks, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back from the break, we will be picking up right where we left off yesterday with David Barton's presentation Running to the Roar. Stay with us folks. We'll be right back on WallBuilders Live.

Tim Barton: 1:22
Hey guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have at WallBuilders called the American Story. For so many years, people have asked us to do a history book to help tell more of the story that's just not known or not told today and, we would say, very providentially, in the midst of all of the new attacks coming out against America, whether it be from things like the 1619 project it's say America is evil and everything in America was built off slavery, which is certainly not true or things like even the Black Lives Matter movement, the organization itself, not the statement Black Lives Matter, but the organization that says we're against everything that America was built on, and this is part of the Marxist ideology. There's so many things attacking America. Well, is America worth defending? What is a true story of America? We actually have written and told that story, starting with Christopher Columbus, going roughly through Abraham Lincoln. We tell the story of America not as a story of a perfect nation or a perfect people, but the story of how God used these imperfect people and did great things through this nation. It's a story you want to check out For more on WallBuilders go to Wildbuilderscom, the American story.

David Barton: 2:35
If we were to teach discipleship, we would be teaching serious things about how to live out our life, and because we're into discipleship, the outcome of that is very practical. And that's the third point that has always gone with the revivals. We own a number of original sermons. In fact, on our website at wwwwellbuilderscom, there's about 260 older sermons that are up on the website. You can read the old sermons and as you read the sermons out of the Great Awakening in Central America, you find out that they are very, very practical. It was about how to apply your faith in a daily setting, whether it be with business, or whether it be with benevolence, or whether it be with relationships with others, or whether it be with criminal justice or whatever it is with. They were very practical sermons because Jesus gave teachings that were very practical. So all of these issues that are here are issues that we hear about on a regular basis through news media or through what we read in papers or online or something else, and while we know these are contemporary issues, the significant point about all of these is there are Bible verses that deal with every one of these. A lot of people who profess to be Christians don't know what the Bible says about these issues, but they should. This is part of what discipleship is is, hey, let's see how to think about these things. Once you have a relationship with Christ, you need to think biblically and the Bible talks about all of these and, by the way, just resources, like on immigration. Bible has a lot to say about immigration. It's been a big debate in America for decades. We actually did a book called this Precurious Moment. It has a whole section on immigration American view of it, the biblical view of it, what we've done historically. A lot of good resources if you want to see how to think biblically about immigration. The same with so many of these other areas, so many of the economic things capital gains tax or the estate tax or progressive income tax. The Founders Bible is. This is a book that was done where we took what the founding fathers of America said about policy issues when they quoted the Bible to help build those policy issues. And all we've done is just take the founding fathers writings with the Bible versus they used as they crafted policies. And as you read the Founders Bible, you get to read the Bible, but along with it the commentary is provided in a very practical way by those who helped shape the culture and who came out of the great awakening and who understood that the Bible does apply to these issues. So when you look at what Jesus did and all of his teachings, it's interesting that he only mentioned the word church three times in all of his teachings, but he did mention the word kingdom 141 times. Why is that? Jesus was not into building the church, he was into building the kingdom and thinking right and acting right and doing right. It was into discipleship and so that's what he talks about throughout the gospels and that's really what we need to be thinking about. So that's the third thing with the revival. It is very practical. The fourth thing of the revival is change occurs slowly. Let me take you back to the American revivals. If you go back and look at the first great awakening, it lasted from 1730 to 1770. It's a 40 year revival. Yeah, we tend to think that a revival is a point in time, that if God comes in and we have a revival next Monday morning, everything's going to be good in America. That's not the way revivals work. They span decades. Generally it is slow change. It is all sorts of struggle along the way, all sorts of having to be aggressive and go confront thinking or go confront the culture and say, hey, that's wrong. This is what the Bible says about this. So it's a slow process. The second great awakening it runs from 1801 to 1878. Now some historians break that into the second and third great awakenings. Nonetheless, you had about 70 years there of revival. That's not the way we think about revivals. We think that's a quick transformation, a quick change. That's just not the way it's been. Even if you look at the turn of the century revivals DL Moody and Iber Sanky and those guys you find that that goes from about 1880 to 1910, about 30 years. Then Billy Sunday comes along and we go years more. So there's so many decades that surround revivals. We don't usually think that way. Revivals quite literally span decades and most people actually didn't know they were in a revival. If you go back to the first great awakening, as Whitfield was preaching, you asked the average listener is this a revival? No, this is just a church service out in the past year, because this guy's put up a pulpit and he's talking to us, they didn't think of it in terms of revival because it was just something that was happening locally to them. They weren't watching everything else in the nation. This is only a local thing going on, so they didn't think in terms of revival. And it's usually historians after the fact who look back and said, hey, that was probably revival Because it happened in so many communities across the nation. Let's call that the first great awakening or the second great awakening or whatever it is. It's usually historians after the fact that look back, or sometimes at the very end of revival, after it's been going for decades and the latter part of Whitfield's life, 40 years into it, they started writing about revivals that were going, but that was looking back for 40 years. So when you look at a revival historically, a revival is something that is a process. It's not an event. It's not something that suddenly happens and now everything's different. It becomes different over a period of time and there is a lot of hard work involved in it. So that's the fourth thing is you have to understand change occurs slowly when you're in a revival. The fifth thing to point to is you have to become transgenerational. In other words, you have to think outside your own generation. A revival, because it spans decades, often involves more than one generation. So good examples in the Bible in Judges 13. In Judges 13, you find that the Israelites. They want to follow God, but they're under the oppression of the Philistines. Their culture is hostile to what they want to do. They live in a place that's really hard to live out their faith, and so they pray to God and it's like God. We need a revival, we need a different culture. We need our culture changed. We're under the oppression of the enemy and so they pray and it's read the scripture. You get the sense that this is years and years, maybe even decades, they've been praying this, calling out to God for help, for a revival. And the Lord does hear and he does answer their prayer. So what happens is you look in verse 5, an angel comes to earth. He looks up a guy named Minoah. It says Minoah, God's heard the prayers of this people. He's going to deliver these people from the Philistines. And here's how it's going to work your wife is going to become pregnant and when that kid grows up he's going to be the national deliverer. Wait a minute. I thought you were answering our prayers. I got to wait 20 more years for this kid to grow up. You mean this kid's going to be the national deliverer? We got to wait for him to grow up. Oftentimes that's the way revival works, is you have to wait for the next generation. There's a lot of indications right now that we literally may be in a revival and again, because it spans decades, people rarely recognize it. But there's a lot of statistical indicators that are very interesting. For example, if you look at where we are culturally with the issue of abortion. Biblically, that's a pretty easy issue to just address and say, hey, the Bible is on the side of life before birth, whether you go through Psalms 139, or whether you go through Jeremiah 1, or all the other passages, lots of passages out there. Even back in the Laws of Moses, you protected children before they were born. So you look at that issue. And finally, in America, we've arrived at the point in America where that over 50% of Americans believe that the pro-life position is correct, and that's really good. It's taken us years and years to get there. So what does that mean in the future? Well, here's where it gets interesting. When you look at the next generation of young people, 72% believe that abortion is morally wrong. Now, this is interesting. How did the next generation get 20 points more pro-life than the ones who are teaching them 20 points more pro-life than their teachers and 20 points more pro-life than pastors or parents or whoever. The culture itself is about 51, but the next generation is 72. So guess what happens when those kids get into political offices? On the issue of abortion, we're going to see a big change. Only 19% of those kids support abortion with man. There's just not the support for that anymore now. This is what the next generation millennials and gins, they the younger generations but we also know that there's so many areas in polling where that they are not thinking right yet. On other issues on the issue of marriage, for example, on the issue of children, on the issue of moral rights and wrongs and absolutes, absolute truth there's so many other areas where they're not strong. And that's what a revival does is help train the next generation how to think about those issues. But already on the life issue, look what God sent us. He sent us a generation that, lord willing, when they get an office they can turn this thing around, because they just don't have the tolerance for abortion that we see with so much of the older generations. So that's part of what happens with the revival. If you look at the Great Awakening and go back to the Great Awakening talks about Reverend Dr Samuel Cooper up in the Boston area. As you study his life, you'll find that throughout that Great Awakening that happened up there in the 1750s, 1760s, 1770s, that he had a young man that spent time with him and he spent time with that young man and it turns out that young man grew up to be someone very notable in our history. It was a guy named John Quincy Adams became president of the United States, but it goes back to an older generation taking the time to pour into a younger generation. Help them think right, help them know right, help them think biblically about many issues. You have the same thing when you look at the Reverend Gilbert tenant. Reverend Gilbert tenant outside of Philadelphia and the valleys there across middle Pennsylvania. He did the same thing and there was a young man that he took time to mentor. He spent time pouring into him and talking with him and spending time with him and that young man grew up to be someone very significant. His name was Benjamin Rush. He's a signer of the Declaration. As a matter of fact, John Adams said he's a third most notable founding father in America. You have George Washington, ben Franklin and Benjamin Rush. He starts the Sunday School Movement, he starts the First Abolition Society, he starts the First Bible Society. He served in three presidential administrations. He helped birth the nation. Just a remarkable guy. Somebody spent time getting him to that point where he grew up to be the man that he was. And if you look, even someone like Reverend Samuel Davies, who spent time down in the rural area of Virginia. There was a young man that he took time with and he mentored that young man. Samuel Davies is considered by historians to be the greatest pulpit orator in American history, the greatest preacher ever in the pulpit, and he's pouring into this young man as a guy named Patrick Henry. Patrick Henry becomes the most famous orator in the American Revolution. Patrick Henry credits Samuel Davies with having taught him those skills and how to do that, how to think biblically and how to communicate effectively. So, as you look back at the Great Awakening, what they were doing was they were training the next generation of leaders and they put time into it. They mentored that next generation. So we need to look now at younger generations, or even sometimes people older than you, if you're thinking right, and they're not. Every one of us ought to say, hey, I'm going to find one person and spend some time pouring into them. I'm going to mentor, I'm going to help shape the way they think, because who knows where they're going to be 20 years from now. I mean, these ministers had no idea what these young guys were going to grow up to be and what they would do for the nation and the country and even the world in some cases. So we all need to find someone that we can pour ourselves into and invest in that way that transgenerational, from one generation to the next. We have to think in those terms. And so John Quincy Adams we'll talk about him for just a little bit is the Reverend Dr Samuel Cooper, who spent time with him. Now, as he grows up from a young man, he gets involved in so many things. I mean, you look at the Massachusetts Minute Men, the famous Minute Men in the first battles of the revolution. When John Quincy Adams was eight years old, he was out drilling with the Massachusetts Minute Men. Then, when he is 10 years old, he is serving as secretary to the ambassador to France, and the ambassador to France happened to be his father, John Adams, but he's serving as secretary to the ambassador doing official correspondence, et cetera, when he is 14 years old, congress sends him overseas to the court of Catherine the Great in Russia as the diplomatic translator. He spoke, I think, at that time, six different languages. So at 14 years old, congress has sent him on a diplomatic mission. And when he's 16 years old, congress sends him to Paris to help set up all the negotiations to end the American War for Independence. He's 16 years old, so he goes on to have a long career in politics. As a matter of fact, George Washington he was a diplomat under George Washington. When he was 21 years old, George Washington said he's the greatest diplomat we have in the entire foreign core. When his father, John Adams, became president, he continued to serve in the diplomatic corps. And then, when Thomas Jefferson became the third president, at that point in time John Quincy Adams becomes a US senator under Thomas Jefferson. And then, when the fourth president comes in, james Madison, he goes back to being a diplomat. For James Madison he actually negotiated the end of the war of 1812. In that period of time he was appointed a confirmed US Supreme Court, but he termed it down because he's ending the war with the British. And then, for the fifth president, james Monroe, he's the secretary of state and then John Quincy Adams becomes the sixth president of the United States. Now he served president for four years. After being president he goes into the House of Representatives and as a member of the he's, by the way, the only president ever gone from being president to being a member of the House. But in the House of Representatives he hates slavery. He's an anti-slavery guy. He's a big time anti-slavery guy and, it's interesting, his nickname was the Hellhound of Abolition. He just got his teeth in that issue. He wants to end slavery, abolish it, and he just wouldn't let go of it. And so he spent the next 17 years in the House fighting slavery as one of his big signature issues. And across that period of time. Of course you have lots of people being elected in Congress, a lot of more younger people, and there was a particular young man who came into Congress and really watched John Quincy Adams and watched him lead the anti-slavery debate, watched him propose. He had a proposal that would have ended slavery by 1843, a constitutional amendment. Just couldn't get everybody to get on board and pass it. I mean, he did so many remarkable things and this young man listened to him and learned from him and paid attention to him and would often pick up bills that John Quincy Adams introduced. He'd help carry those bills and so over time John Quincy Adams eventually died there in Congress, the halls of Congress had a stroke. Two days later he died in the chamber. The speaker of the House and this young man saw all this and was inspired. He was actually appointed by Congress to be on the Committee of Arrangements for the funeral of old man Adams, who'd spent 70 years of his life serving America in public office. So he's so inspired by what he's learned from John Quincy Adams that he's working in an estate against slavery and he's speaking against slavery and he's doing public debates against slavery and he's very committed to it. And it's interesting that this young man that John Quincy Adams clearly had a large effect on is a guy named Abraham Lincoln.

Rick Green: 17:15
Alright friends started to interrupt David's presentation, but we've got to take a quick break. Stay with us. You're listening to WallBuilders Live.

Tim Barton: 17:32
Hey, this is Tim Barton with Walbuilders, and, as you've had the opportunity to listen to WallBuilders Live, you've probably heard the wealth of information about our nation, about our spiritual heritage, about the religious liberties, about all the things that makes America exceptional. And you might be thinking, as incredible as this information is, I wish there was a way that I could get one of the WallBuilders guys to come to my area and share with my group whether it be a church, whether it be a Christian school or public school or some political event or activity. If you're interested in having a Walbuilder speaker come to your area, you can get on our website. You can go to wwwwalbuilderscom and there's a tab for scheduling and if you'll click on that tab, you'll notice there's a list of information, from speakers' bios to events that are already going on, and there's a section where you can request an event to bring this information about who we are, where we came from, our religious liberties and freedoms. Go to the Walbuilder's website and bring a speaker to your area. This is Tim Barton from WallBuilders, with another moment from American History. The Second Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees to every individual the right to keep and bear arms, has been targeted for years now by those who are determined to dismantle the individual right to self-protection. Opponents argue that only the militia, the military and law enforcement are to have and use firearms. But those who wrote the Second Amendment strenuously disagreed, including Founding Father Richard Henry Lee, a signer of the Declaration, a president of the Continental Congress and one of those who actually framed the Second Amendment. He declared to preserve liberty. It is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. For more information about Richard Henry Lee and the history of the Second Amendment, go to WallBuilders.com.

David Barton: 19:40
And so here's old man Adams, helping mentor the next generation and get them to think right. And he didn't know what this young man was going to become, but that's the young man who ended up ending slavery. And he was, if you will, the millennial or Gen Z of that day. For old man Adams, that was the next generation. And so he goes on and he becomes president of the United States and he issues the Emancipation Proclamation and ends up being the guy to oversee the death of slavery. All of this gets done Now. John Quincy Adams wanted to see that. He didn't get to see it, but he did get to help train the guy who brought an end to slavery. And this is the way revivals work. You have to reach the next generation and get them trained, because they're going to become the leaders. If you can get the next generation and thinking right, then you can see massive changes in the nation. So that's becoming transgenerational. And I'm thinking, and again, every one of us needs to find someone that we can pour ourselves into and help them think right and see the perspective. And we've got some experience we can pass on. I don't care if you're 18 years old. Find a 15 year old and help them think right about certain issues. So, whoever you are, you really want to find a relationship with someone and, by the way, you may be a 15 year old that's thinking better than 35 year old. Great, help them think the right way. So this transgenerational cross generations is very important. And the sixth and final point is that a revival requires a lot of hard work. Let me take you back to George Woodfield. Now we talked about Woodfield and without his preaching there would be no United States of America the fact that 80% of Americans heard him preach. He's a guy that talked about our need for having a military. He opposed the Stamp Act. He was involved in economic issues. He's a guy that was involved even in helping us think out what we needed to do for independence and how all the 13 holidays could come together and think as one. He did so much, but it was a lot of hard work and in those 18,000 sermons he preached all across the United States community. He had a lot of opposition and it's sad, but a lot of times the opposition actually came from the church. Community have records of where the pastors would say to parishioners hey, you need to go out and you need to help Woodfield with potatoes or stones or cabbage, you need to crawl up in a tree over him and pee on him and defecate on him. Are you kidding Pastors saying that it was so much of the church that opposed him? If you look at the writings against George Woodfield from back in the day, it was pastors saying this guy is crazy, we need to get away from him, we need to stop him. So often the church opposes revival in what happens Now. Generally the church will get on at the last part of the revival and say it was our ideal all along. But in the early stages they really fought Woodfield, just like they fought Charles Finney, just like they fought DL Moody, like they fought everybody else. It's interesting the church often fights revival and people that are stepping in to do what God wants. They don't agree with it right up front but they say you know that he's right, we need to do that, and so there's a lot of opposition that goes with it. Now, his 18,000 sermons, his 34 years of preaching he did it all on horseback. This is not like being in media where you can put out social media and everybody listens to it. He went from Maine to Georgia and back seven different times on horseback. Now think about what that means for weather, think about what that means for travel conditions. That is tough on your body. That is tough any way you go at it. And, by the way, he carried a portable pulpit with him and he would sit that up and get up and speak in it and then go to the next town to sit up and speak. So he's going town to town doing this for 34 years. So 80% of all Americans heard him speak. It was not easy for him to cover all those different communities and what you find is his preaching literally killed him In the last two years of his life. After preaching he would go off to the side and just cough up his guts and spit up blood and just was so hurting. And then, after he coughed up and spit up, he would get back on his horse, ride to the next town and preach and then, after he was done, he had to go off to the side and just cough. It killed him and he didn't know he was in a revival. This was hard work for him. We now call it the Great Awakening and we say without him we wouldn't have America. That's not what he knew back then and so, from the perspective of revival, his preaching killed him. He's buried in a church in Massachusetts where he was in 1770 and died there and buried in the local church. But he was an inspiration for Americans in later generations and a lot of those that he tried and touched on in his generation became leaders in the next generation. So when you look at revivals, it's characterized by a lot of hard work, not a lot of inspiration. You do it because it's the right thing to do, not because I enjoy what I'm doing. It is so much fun to be out in a hellstorm on a horse when the weather turns bad. That wasn't what motivated him. He did it because it was the right thing. That's what God had him doing. So that's the sixth thing about a revival is it requires a lot of hard work. So when you think about a revival, the question we have to ask ourselves is do we really want one? And if we really want one, then you need to be prepared to be individually involved and locally involved. Can't wait for things to get healthy from the top down. You need to work right in your own area. Second thing is you have to be willing to disciple others. You have to not just get them to know the Lord, you have to get them to think right, which means also being very practical. You have to show them how the Bible applies to everything that goes on in life, which means you need to know that yourself. You need to find out how the Bible applies to economics or to criminal justice, or to marriage and life, or to investments or to whatever it is. The Bible applies to all those areas. Then understand that a revival is a process. It's not an event. It's not something that happens right here and suddenly everything's healthy. It's going to take a period of time and for that reason it has to be transgenerational. We have to deliberately think outside of our own generation and do what we can to help other generations think the right way. And the final thing is a lot of hard work. There's nothing easy about it, but if you want the outcome, you have to invest into it to get that outcome. So that's what's required in a revival, and this is all about being offensive minded. We started by talking about run to the roar. If you want a revival in America, you're going to have to be offensive minded and do these things aggressively. You have to run to the roar and if we can do that in the culture, we can start being the salt and light that will push back the darkness, push back the rottenness is trying to kill the society. We can start training the people that will make a difference in this generation and the next, but it's all about us being offensive minded and running to the roar.

Rick Green: 26:03
We are out of time for today. You've been listening to David Barton his presentation Running to the Roar. We need that one right now, today, folks, and just a need for truth out there, and I want to encourage you to get more of that at our website WallBuildersLive.com. I want to also ask you to come alongside us, make a contribution at that website, because that allows us, as a listener supported program, to reach more people and speak more truth to the culture. So please consider that today at the website WallBuildersLive.com. Thank you for listening to WallBuilders Live.