The Next Great Awakening

Joseph's Story as a Template

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 during a time when nobody else seemed that concerned. Everybody else was pretty comfortable. But Joseph had different eyes for what was happening—and for what one day would happen.

I believe God has been doing that same 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 of some kind, God has appointed someone willing to fill storehouses.

I'm going to tell you about some of those moments in American history. I want to introduce you to some of those people.

A Pattern Every 50 Years

Looking back over the past 250 years of America, we see that about every 50 years—almost like clockwork—there's a spiritual famine followed by a spiritual awakening. God opens up a storehouse, and people who are spiritually starving come from all over.

1734 — The First Great Awakening

Let's start in 1734 in Northampton, Massachusetts. The American colonies were in spiritual famine. The churches were formal and cold. A generation had grown up treating God as an intellectual exercise at best. Nobody was really being saved. Nobody was really changing. It was tradition.

But then a pastor named Jonathan Edwards preached a famous sermon called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The language in that sermon is pretty terrifying. He pictures spiders dangling over flames, a pit of hell opening beneath your feet, and 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 a pulpit, pounding the lectern. But that wasn't Jonathan 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 to read it. But he spoke truth, and he preached about grace like 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 with his conclusion:

"The reason congregations are so dead is because dead men preach to them."

And he preached like a man on fire. The First Great Awakening spread across colonies, across denominations, across class lines.

1801 — Cane Ridge, Kentucky

Fifty years later, we find ourselves in a field in Kentucky, about 90 miles from where I'm preaching this. In August of 1801, at a Presbyterian meeting house in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in a place called Cane Ridge, 20,000 people descended on the field.

They came in wagons and on dirt roads—hunters, gamblers, people who had never set foot in church. They came from every direction because something was happening and word had spread.

Seven preachers would stand throughout the field—on stumps, wagons, and logs—preaching simultaneously to the crowds. An eyewitness said the crowd was so loud it was like the roar of Niagara Falls. People would fall to the ground under conviction and repent for hours.

That's just 90 minutes from here. Most people would drive past that spot now without even knowing it exists. It doesn't look like much—an old log meeting house, some trees, a historical marker most people have never stopped to read. But what happened in that field 224 years ago changed the world, in ways that are still rippling today.

1857 — The Fulton Street Prayer Revival

Fifty years later, in 1857, a former businessman named Jeremiah Lanphier had a burden. So he rented a room above a church on Fulton Street in lower Manhattan. He made a simple flyer and passed it out around the neighborhood. It said: "Prayer meeting, 12:00 to 1:00, for merchants, mechanics, clerks, strangers, and businessmen."

He sat alone in that room for 30 minutes. Finally, a single person arrived. Six people would eventually show up. He didn't cancel it because of poor attendance. He came back the next week—there were 20. The week after, 40.

And then the stock market crashed. Banks collapsed. 30,000 men lost their jobs in New York City alone. Suddenly the whole city was hungry—desperate enough to pray.

That meeting started to happen daily. It spread to other buildings, other cities, other states. Lawyers, physicians, merchants, and clerks would tie their horses up outside 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 had come to Jesus—more than 3% of the nation's population, swept into the kingdom by 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 that prayer was the work.

1906 — Azusa Street, Los Angeles

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.

He was 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 else, so he found a Bible school in Houston, Texas, run by a man named Charles Parham. Parham let him attend, but not inside the classroom. So Seymour had to sit in the hallway outside and listen through the wall—every single day.

Someone in Los Angeles heard about this man and invited him to come preach at their small church. He came and preached on a Sunday, but he wasn't invited back the next Sunday.

But William Seymour was not a man who could be easily set aside. He found a house and started praying. He called a 10-day fast. Three days in, eight men were on their knees together. The neighbors came to see what was happening, and the crowds began to swell. The front porch eventually 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—hard lines drawn between black and white—there at Azusa Street the color line dissolved. Black worshippers, white worshippers, Latino, Asian, illiterate, poor, wealthy, people who had nowhere else to go—all of them came together on the same dirt floor.

A white Southern preacher named Frank Bartleman came to investigate, and here's what he wrote:

"The color line has been washed away by the blood line."

Secular newspapers came to mock it. Critics said it was undignified, embarrassing, not real Christianity. But the people kept coming. They were hungry. Skeptical preachers came to expose it as fraud—and then they would end up on the dirt floor in repentance.

William Seymour, the man who had learned scripture sitting in a hallway because he wasn't allowed in the classroom, preached every service with his face hidden behind a wooden shoebox. He didn't want anybody looking at him. He wanted them looking at God. And revival spread from that building across the country and around the world.

1970 — The Jesus Movement

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 that he had written them off. But it was his wife, Kay, who said no. She had a burden, and she insisted her husband do something about it. There was an elder who wasn't happy about all these young hippies coming to church, so he put a sign on the front door: "No bare feet allowed." But Chuck Smith tore that sign down and said he would rip up the carpet before he turned away anyone.

In 1970 alone, thousands of people 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 were swept into the kingdom through a church that almost kept its doors closed.

Is the Next Awakening Overdue?

So I just need you to look at this:

• 1734 — the First Great Awakening
• 50 years later — Cane Ridge
• 50 years later — Fulton Street
• 50 years later — Azusa Street
• 50 years later — the Jesus Movement

The Jesus Movement was the last major revival in American history. Anyone want to guess how many years ago that was? It's right about 50 years.

And God has been moving. In fact, in the last 12 months as a church, we've baptized over 5,000 people in our church alone. It's just clear that something is happening.