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I know for some of you this weekend is complicated. You love this country, but you're also worried about it. You see what's happening in the headlines and in culture, the conversations around your dinner table, and you feel something that can be hard to name.
It's not quite fear or anger. It's something maybe closer to grief — like watching someone you love make choices you can't stop them from making, but you're sure of where it's leading.
I'm not going to stand up here and pretend that away. I'm not going to give you a pep talk about how everything is fine in our country, because I don't think you'd believe me, and I don't think I'd believe it myself.
But here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take you back 250 years in American history, and then several thousand years into ancient Egypt — because I think the story of a man named Joseph in the book of Genesis has a lot to say about this moment in America.
By the time we're done, I hope we'll leave here with something much more useful than a political platform or the latest hot take.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, something happened that changed the world. A group of imperfect, complicated, but courageous men signed their names to a document that declared something the world had never heard a nation declare before:
That all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
There's something telling in the language tucked into the end of the Declaration of Independence. It's easy to overlook because it's not political language — it's actually theological. It says:
With a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.
A reliance on divine providence — a dependence on God. It's no accident that this document opens with God as Creator and closes with God as Protector. These men, whatever their faults, believed that God was not a spectator to what they were doing.
They knew what they were risking. Benjamin Franklin, in the room that day, said, "We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately."
A lot has happened in the last 250 years. Washington crossed the Delaware. An army of farmers and tradesmen defeated the most powerful military empire on earth.
Abraham Lincoln stood on the steps of the Capitol in the final months of the Civil War and called the nation to humility. He said both sides "read the same Bible and pray to the same God." It was the most divided moment in our country's history, and he reached for Scripture to find a way through.
On December 31st, 1862, enslaved and free black Americans gathered in churches and homes across the country, waiting for the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect. At the stroke of midnight, the news broke. There were prayers of gratitude and songs of joy as people fell to their knees and thanked God.
Consider what followed:
Men stormed beaches to liberate people they had never met. Immigrants crossed oceans with nothing but a suitcase and a dream. A generation marched peacefully and changed the conscience of a country. Ordinary heroes ran toward burning buildings in New York.
There's plenty we could criticize and critique, but today is a day we celebrate. Today we have gratitude.
When we look back over 250 years, we tend to look through a political lens — the wars, the presidents, the amendments, the elections. But it is the spiritual history I really want us to appreciate today. It's the history of a God who has refused, repeatedly and stubbornly, to let this country go dark.
To give us a frame for what has happened to this country spiritually, I want to take you to ancient Egypt.
We've been studying the book of Genesis since the beginning of the year, and we're currently going through the life of Joseph. By Genesis 41, Joseph has had the worst decade imaginable — sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused by his boss's wife, thrown into prison, and forgotten by the one person who promised to help him get out. He has every reason to be bitter and hopeless.
But then Pharaoh has a dream. Seven fat, healthy cows come up out of the Nile. Then seven starving, ugly cows come up behind them and devour the fat ones. He wakes up sweating, has a similar second dream, and is disturbed.
Pharaoh calls every wise man in Egypt to interpret the dream, but nobody knows what it means. Then someone remembers a Hebrew in prison named Joseph who could interpret dreams. Joseph is pulled from his cell, cleaned up, and brought before the most powerful man in the world. He says it plainly:
Seven years of great abundance are coming throughout the land of Egypt, and then seven years of famine will follow them. (Genesis 41:29–30)
The famine will be so severe it will consume everything the abundance produced, spreading across the entire known world.
Then Joseph does something bold and pretty risky. Pharaoh asked for an interpretation, but Joseph doesn't stop there — he gives a strategy. He doesn't just tell Pharaoh what it means; he tells him what to do about it.
Joseph says: find a wise man, appoint him over the land, collect one-fifth of every harvest during the good years, and store it in every city so the nation will be ready when the famine comes.
Pharaoh looks around the room, looks back at Joseph, and essentially says, "Well, who's going to be better than you?" He puts his signet ring on Joseph's hand, a gold chain around his neck, and gives him authority over all of Egypt. Suddenly, Joseph is second only to Pharaoh himself.
And he gets to work. For seven years, while all of Egypt is eating well and living comfortably, Joseph is filling storehouses — every city, every region. The Bible says the grain became like sand on the seashore; they stopped counting it because there was too much to measure.
There's no dramatic moment, no big scene — just Joseph faithfully working, storing, and believing that what God said would happen really would.
What saved a generation — what saved the known world — was a man who took the revelation from God seriously enough to do something about it, even though most people at the time thought it wasn't necessary.
All the earth then came to Egypt and to Joseph to buy grain, because the famine was severe over all the earth. (Genesis 41)
People came from every direction, every nation, every background — all of them hungry.
Joseph's story is not just ancient history. It's a template of how God reveals, how God provides, and how God raises up people at just the right time. It's an example of someone being faithful when nobody else seemed concerned. Everyone else was comfortable, but Joseph had different eyes for what was happening and what would one day happen.
I believe God has been doing that kind of work on American soil for 250 years. Every time this nation has gone spiritually dark — every time there's been a spiritual famine — God has appointed someone willing to fill storehouses.
Looking back over the past 250 years, we see that about every 50 years, almost like clockwork, there's a spiritual famine followed by a spiritual awakening. God opens a storehouse, and people who are spiritually starving come from all over.
Let's start in 1734 in Northampton, Massachusetts. The American colonies were in a spiritual famine. The churches were formal and cold. A generation had grown up treating God as, at best, an intellectual exercise. Nobody was really being saved or changed.
Then a pastor named Jonathan Edwards preached a famous sermon called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The language is terrifying — spiders dangling over flames, a pit of hell opening beneath your feet, God's wrath burning like fire. Like Joseph, he spoke truth even when it was hard to hear. And it woke the church up.
When you read that sermon, you picture a man thundering from the pulpit, pounding the lectern. But that wasn't Edwards. He didn't have a commanding voice or dramatic gestures. His eyesight was so bad he had to hold his manuscript a few inches from his face. Yet he spoke truth and preached grace as though he believed it — and people came flooding to Jesus.
George Whitefield followed, crossing the Atlantic and preaching to as many as 30,000 people at a time in open fields, because no building could hold the crowds. When he assessed the American churches, he was honest: "The reason congregations are so dead is because dead men preach to them." He preached like a man on fire, and the First Great Awakening spread across colonies, denominations, and class lines.
Fifty years later, we find ourselves in a field in Kentucky, about 90 miles from where I'm preaching. In August of 1801, at a Presbyterian meeting house in Bourbon County called Cane Ridge, 20,000 people descended on the field. They came in wagons, on dirt roads — hunters, gamblers, people who had never set foot in church — because word had spread that something was happening.
Seven preachers stood throughout the field on stumps, wagons, and logs, preaching simultaneously. An eyewitness said the crowd was so loud it was like the roar of Niagara Falls. People fell to the ground under conviction and repented for hours.
That's just 90 minutes from here. Most people would drive past it without knowing it exists — an old log meeting house, some trees, a historical marker most have never stopped to read. But what happened in that field 224 years ago changed the world, in ways still rippling today.
Fifty years later, in 1857, a former businessman named Jeremiah Lanphier had a burden. He rented a room above a church on Fulton Street in lower Manhattan and made a simple flyer inviting people to a prayer meeting from noon to one — "for merchants, mechanics, clerks, strangers, and businessmen."
He sat alone in that room for 30 minutes. Finally, one person arrived. Six people eventually showed up. He didn't cancel because of poor attendance. The next week there were 20, then 40.
Then the stock market crashed, banks collapsed, and 30,000 men lost their jobs in New York City alone. Suddenly the whole city was hungry — desperate enough to pray. The meeting became daily and spread to other buildings, cities, and states. Lawyers, physicians, merchants, and clerks would tie up their horses and come in for even five minutes on their lunch break just to get on their knees.
Within 18 months, an estimated one million people came to Jesus — more than 3% of the nation's population — swept into the kingdom through the prayer of one ordinary man who waited alone in an empty room. No famous preacher, no platform, no marketing strategy — just a man who believed prayer was the work.
Fifty years later, in 1906, on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, God did what He apparently loves to do — He found the one person nobody would have chosen: William Seymour, the one-eyed son of a formerly enslaved family from rural Louisiana. This was Jim Crow America.
He wanted to learn the Bible more than anything. He found a Bible school in Houston, Texas, run by Charles Parham. Parham let him attend — but not inside the classroom. So Seymour sat in the hallway and listened through the wall, every single day.
Someone in Los Angeles heard about him and invited him to preach at a small church. He came, preached on Sunday, and wasn't invited back. But Seymour was not a man to be easily set aside. He found a house and started praying. He called a ten-day fast. Three days in, eight men were on their knees together. Neighbors came to see what was happening, and the crowds swelled until the front porch collapsed under the weight of the people.
Soon it was three prayer meetings a day, seven days a week, for three straight years. In 1906, when churches were as segregated as everything else, at Azusa Street the color line dissolved. Black, white, Latino, Asian, illiterate, poor, and wealthy came together on the same dirt floor.
A white Southern preacher named Frank Bartleman came to investigate and wrote:
The color line has been washed away by the blood line.
Secular newspapers came to mock it. Critics called it undignified and embarrassing. But the people kept coming, because they were hungry. Skeptical preachers came to expose it as fraud and ended up on the dirt floor in repentance.
Seymour — the man who learned Scripture in a hallway because he wasn't allowed in the classroom — preached every service with his face hidden behind a wooden shoebox, because he didn't want anyone looking at him. He wanted them looking at God. Revival spread from that building across the country and around the world.
Fifty years later, in 1970, a dying church of about 25 people in Costa Mesa, California, cracked open its doors to barefoot hippies that nobody else wanted. Pastor Chuck Smith admitted he had written them off — but his wife Kay said no. She had a burden and insisted her husband do something.
An elder, unhappy with all the young hippies, put a sign on the front door: "No bare feet allowed." Pastor Chuck Smith tore it down, saying he would rip up the carpet before he turned anyone away.
In 1970 alone, thousands came to be baptized in the Pacific Ocean. Historians say the Jesus Movement reached more lost people than either of the great awakenings before it — two to three million young people swept into the kingdom through a church that almost kept its doors closed.
Look at the timeline:
The Jesus Movement was the last major revival in American history. How many years ago was that? About 50 years.
And God has been moving. In the last 12 months, we've baptized over 5,000 people in our church alone. Something is happening.
What's also clear is that there is a famine in the land.
In our city tonight, there is a teenager sitting alone in a room, scrolling through their phone at 1 a.m., so lonely they can barely breathe. They don't know it yet, but what they're experiencing is famine. They are starving for Jesus.
There's a young couple who built their life on what they were told would make them happy — the house, the job, the kids — yet they lie awake at night with a quiet feeling that something is still missing. They can't name it, but it's hunger.
There's a man in his 40s who did everything right on paper, but lost it all, and nobody in the world can address the hunger he's struggling with.
There's a college student on a campus, part of the most "connected" generation in human history, who is desperately alone, experimenting with everything available, trying to fill something only Jesus — the bread of life — can fill.
And even this Fourth of July weekend, there are millions of Americans lighting fireworks and flying flags, genuinely believing that the right election, the right party, the right person will finally fix what's broken. They're not wrong to love their nation — but they are wrong to look for their answer there. What they're looking for will not be found in Washington, D.C. It will only be found in the church, because it's only found in Jesus.
The famine is here, and people are hungry. But they need a storehouse.
So here's the question I want us to land on as our nation turns 250: How does the church celebrate this birthday?
Fireworks and cookouts are awesome — enjoy time with your family. But there is a spiritual famine in the land. Let me give you four ways the church should celebrate America's 250th birthday.
Every single revival on that timeline was preceded — not merely accompanied — by extraordinary and sustained corporate prayer. Not a 30-second prayer before a meeting, but people on their knees for hours on dirty floors.
I challenge you to spend more time talking to God and praying for this country than you spend listening to political pundits talk about it.
I can only imagine the desperate prayers Joseph prayed from prison — and the prayers he prayed during those seven years ruling over Egypt. When Pharaoh asked him to interpret the dream, Joseph said, "It's not going to be me. It's going to be God." He understood where his power came from. The best thing we can do for America in its 250th year is to be a house of prayer.
Every revival in American history was fueled by reaching people the church had written off — college students, barefoot hippies, a one-eyed son of a slave, gamblers and outcasts in a Kentucky field. Again and again, the emphasis was on lost people and the next generation.
There is a generation right outside the doors of this church that we are doubling down on reaching. We recognize the spiritual hunger in these generations, and we are going to open the storehouses.
But here's what I've noticed: sometimes the people with the greatest access to the storehouse are the least burdened by the hunger outside of it. When you've eaten well for a long time, it's easy to forget what it's like to be starving.
Maybe you've walked with God for decades, raised your kids in church, and served faithfully — and I'm thankful for that. But don't forget that the greatest gift you can give this country on its 250th birthday is not a vote, a political opinion, or a post. It's opening up the storehouse so a young person can know Jesus.
That might mean seven years of sacrifice. It might mean giving up preferences and comfort with the way things have always been done. It might mean funding a ministry you'll never personally benefit from, or showing up for students who don't look like you — people who don't protect the carpet the way you think they should and show up in bare feet.
Joseph filled a storehouse for seven years so that people he had never met could eat. May that be said of us — that we prepared and worked for a generation that is not our own.
Joseph didn't walk into Pharaoh's throne room and soften the message. The wise men of Egypt said nothing, partly because they didn't want to deliver bad news. Joseph told the truth: seven years of famine are coming, it's going to be severe, and we need to act now.
The church has to be willing to say what's true even when the culture doesn't want to hear it. There is a spiritual hunger in this country. Millions feel it but haven't named it. The famine will arrive in their lives — a relationship falls apart, a diagnosis comes, something they built their life on fails, addiction takes over, war or a pandemic breaks out. Their hunger will become undeniable.
The church's job is not to pretend everything's fine. The church's job is to be honest about the hunger and then point to the only One who can satisfy it.
There is nothing glamorous about filling storehouses. Joseph spent seven years doing work nobody filmed and nobody celebrated — no dramatic scene, no big moment. Just grain, city by city, storehouse by storehouse, day after day, because he believed that what God said He would do, He would do.
The revival I believe is coming will not be built on a single electric Sunday. It will be built on the ordinary, faithful, unglamorous work of people who filled storehouses and got on their knees while everyone else was comfortable.
This is how we celebrate 250 years as a nation.
Let me take you back up the road to Cane Ridge, 90 miles from where I'm standing. The pastor who hosted that revival was a Presbyterian minister named Barton Stone. What he experienced in that field wrecked him — in the best possible way.
He walked away convinced the church had buried Jesus under layers of tradition and denominationalism, and that God wanted something simple and biblical: New Testament Christianity. No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible. He walked away from his denomination to start a movement we call the Restoration Movement. That's our movement. That's where we come from.
So when I tell you that the coals from Cane Ridge lit every major revival throughout the world, I'm not just giving you a history lesson — I'm telling you where we came from. This church has Cane Ridge in its bones. Revival is not something we observe from a distance; it's in our spiritual DNA.
America turns 250 this weekend, and most celebrations will focus on what the nation has built — the Constitution, the military, the monuments. Those things matter. But the most remarkable thing about the last 250 years is not what America has built; it's what God has been doing. Every 50 years, like clockwork, in the face of our worst failures and deepest famine, the coals continue to burn.
And those coals will not grow cold in our church. My prayer is that God would do it again — and that we would be right in the middle of it.
I want to close with one more number: 2,000.
We are seven years away from celebrating 2,000 years since the death and resurrection of Jesus and the beginning of the church. It's coming in 2033. I believe these seven years will be some of the most spiritually significant in the history of the world. We're getting closer and closer to the return of Jesus.
Joseph had seven years of plenty to prepare for what was coming, and he used every single one — not because he was especially disciplined or ambitious, but because he believed God would do what He said, and he acted on it before anyone else felt the hunger.
In 2033, 2,000 years will have passed since Jesus looked at disciples who had no building, no budget, no platform, and no strategy, and said something that should have been laughable:
I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. (Matthew 16)
He didn't say He might build His church. He didn't say He would try. He said He would. It's the only thing He promised to build. He never promised to build a nation, a government, a political party, or a platform. He promised to build a church.
For 2,000 years — through persecutions and plagues and darkness and revivals — He has kept that promise, century after century, generation after generation.
So on this 250th year, let it be said of us as a church that when the hungry come, the storehouse is open.
