Well if you don't know how to tweet, I am
a member of that society. But I fear that if I went to the booth and
learned how to tweet, for the first time in my life I might actually win a prize and undoubtedly
the prize would be a copy of Ferguson's The Whole Christ along with the DVD set. That would be something of a challenge, as
it is difficult to live within yourself without also watching yourself. Well, it is a wonderful privilege for us to
be together and I have been thinking a great deal about our conference, about its theme. Those of us who speak regularly at the Ligonier
conferences often wonder, but don't dare to ask, "How did you come up with this theme?" But whatever we may think about themes, we
thank God that R.C. and others with him in thinking a long time ago now about this conference
settled on this theme of "Awakening." It has been the function of Ligonier's whole
existence to seek an awakening of a longing to know God in His holiness. It seems to me that there is something that
not only very poignant, but also very timely about the fact that the theme of our conference
this year is "Awakening." As I've been thinking and reading about this
theme, the impression that has been left upon me is how much we are one-eyed men and women
living in a world of half-blind people, not realizing that it's possible to see God with
both eyes. And you cannot read about seasons when God
has come among His people without having some sense that you may never really have worshipped
Him at all. And so our great aim, I'm sure this is true
of the whole ministry team and of those who will be sharing in the conference, is that
this will not merely be a weekend of instruction but a weekend in which God will come upon
us in a new and fresh way and sovereignly, graciously stir up in us a desire for better
days, for holier worship, and for a knowledge of God to that we have never really experienced
before. And so, my task in opening up the conference
is to introduce this theme of the revival of God's people, the nature of an awakening. I want you to turn with me to the Acts of
the Apostles and have your Bible open there in the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles,
and we will look from time to time at various points in the work of God in the early days
of the Christian church. But I want to begin by reflecting on the condition
of the contemporary church, and I mean our own contemporary churches. We suffer from an enormous impoverishment
of worship. The most obvious signal is what happens after
the benediction is pronounced and people get on with the next part of their business and
it's an indication that we know so little about what we have just been doing, and we
know so little of that overwhelming sense of the presence of the God whom we have been
praising that we would want to linger in His presence and continue to worship Him and that
anything else would be a distraction from our greatest delights. In some ways, that's a knock-on effect of
the impoverishment and powerlessness of our preaching. You well know that orthodox theology does
not guarantee powerful preaching. When we hear powerful preaching, we realize
that what we have been listening to is talking. We may have been, as someone once said to
me about a decade-long ministry, "We were well instructed, but we were very poorly nourished,"
and there is an impoverishment not only of our worship but related to that, a weakness
in our preaching. Another indication of our need is that we
build massive ecclesiastical structures like medieval cathedrals in their size, and the
least attended meeting within them is almost always the meeting for prayer. It's the meeting for prayer and the prayerfulness
of God's people that says everything about our desire for the presence and blessing of
God. And then there is the powerlessness of our
witness. The statisticians tell us how few people who
come into the membership of evangelical churches, are coming into that membership because they
have been recently converted to faith in Jesus Christ. The same, incidentally, is true of Reformed
churches. There are Reformed churches into which very
few people have come in the previous decade because they have been converted to Jesus
Christ. There is some sense, surely, in which if we
had eyes to see it, we would really feel that "Ichabod" has been written all over our ecclesiological
life in these days and that the glory has departed, except that we have not had so much
of a sense of what the glory of God really is that we notice it has even departed. And so we, not they, but we, we here most
of all, stand and sit in need of what you remember Peter calls in the Acts of the Apostles,
"a time of refreshing from the presence of the Lord." I don't think I need to underscore for you
that a revival or an awakening is not something that we can accomplish. Like many other strangers to these parts,
I still vividly remember a Saturday afternoon at a conference in a church in a state that
will remain nameless to protect the guilty, and I wandered outside of the church and looked
across the road and there was another church that was advertising a revival the following
week on the Tuesday and Thursday. I couldn't help wondering what God was going
to do on the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of that week, and then of course it dawned
on me that these were not stupid Christian people. These were people holding a season of spiritual
awakening, of spiritual refreshment and renewal. But we all here surely recognize that a revival,
an awakening is not something that we plan. It is a reality that God gives. It is not worked up from earth, it is not
even worked up first of all from earth by prayer. It is sent down by God from heaven as a season
of refreshing from the presence of the Lord. What marks it really is not so much that God
does things that He doesn't ordinarily do. It isn't that regeneration and conversion
are somehow superseded by revival and awakening. It is not so much that God does extraordinary
things in that sense but that He does ordinary things in an extraordinary way. And in doing so, He both awakens the church
from its lethargy and revives the spiritually dead from their judgment and their condemnation. These seasons, we find them already in the
pages of the Old Testament. We'll see them here in the early chapters
of the Acts of the Apostles. We can read about them throughout the history
of the ages. These seasons always have the same characteristics. There is an intensification of spiritual experience,
especially an intensification of a sense of guilt before a holy God and joy in the forgiveness
of sins by that holy God. There is a movement from pleasure in the things
of grace to profound joy in the things of grace, and along with that intensification
and partly as a fruit of it, there is also an acceleration of God's work. I was reading the other day about a minister
who was involved in the awakening that took place in the eighteenth century in Scotland,
and he happened to write to a friend, "There were only twelve people brought to faith in
Jesus Christ last Sunday, but I believe many others were awakened." This was in a town of nine hundred people. I suspect of all the ministers who are here,
there are very few who would be able to point to any Sunday in their lives when twelve people
have been converted under their ministry and many others awakened. So, the ordinary is intensified and because
of that intensification, there seems to be an amazing acceleration of what God does. And part of that acceleration is that from
mouth to mouth in the past, and doubtless from tweet to tweet in the present, multitudes
of people would be caught up so that there would not only be an acceleration of God's
work but that there would be a multiplication of the word of the gospel spreading. This is what takes place in an awakening. Some of you will know that the man I like
to call one of the great British theologians, Jonathan Edwards, remember his dates, believed
that this was how God punctuated the whole of history. He writes in his History of Redemption, "From
the fall of man to our day, the work of redemption in its effect has mainly been carried on by
remarkable communications of the Spirit of God. Though there be a more constant influence
of God's Spirit always in some degree attending His ordinances, yet the way in which the greatest
things have been done towards carrying on this work always have been remarkable effusions
of special seasons of mercy." When you read through the Old Testament Scriptures
and the history of redemption from the fourth chapter of Genesis when men in their desperate
need began to call upon the name of the Lord, right through the early days of the Christian
Church, you can see there are seasons when God brings restoration and significant advance
through these periods of awakening. Both of these realities are true. Often, without the awakening the church would
die. With the awakening, the church, as it were,
is projected into the future and stabilized for the future. And the promise of our Lord Jesus that He
would build His church and the gates of Hades would not be able to prevail is once again
established in the story of our history. It seems to me that the greatest illustration
of that in the pages of Scripture is what happened in the wake of the day of Pentecost. We might, therefore, say that the day of Pentecost
inaugurated the first awakening of the New Covenant period. Now, we need to be careful what we say. Pentecost was an unrepeatable event, as unrepeatable
as the day of Jesus' crucifixion and the day of Jesus' ascension. So Pentecost itself is unrepeatable and unrepeated,
but it's clear in the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles that there were elements
in the day of Pentecost that were not only repeatable, but actually were repeated in
that early season of the Christian church's life. The Day of Pentecost did not happen again,
but many of the Spirit-given realities that marked the Day of Pentecost came again and
again like waves beating on the shore. These very realities of which we've just been
speaking, an intensification of spiritual experience, an acceleration of the gospel,
a multiplication of those who were converted, was characteristic of that whole opening section
of the Acts of the Apostles through the experience of Philip in Samaria. I think we're intended by Luke to notice it,
because he very carefully punctuates these opening chapters with, as it were, pausing
the video that we are watching to say, "Now, here is the key to what God was doing. Here are the basic marks of God's awakening
power." I will use an illustration that Abraham Kuyper
uses. There is a new waterworks created for the
city, and the mayor comes along and he opens the waterworks. That day is never repeated, the day when the
waterworks were opened, but there will be seasons when a new community here and a new
community there comes to experience, as it were, for the very first time the reality
that was inaugurated on that day when the waterworks were opened. The same is true in the history of the Christian
church. There is not a repetition of Pentecost, but
there do seem to be seasons when it seems as though God has opened the doors of a dam
in heaven and pours out His Spirit upon His people and brings a fresh enlivening to the
church and awakens multitudes of dead sinners. I say, it seems to me that Luke punctuates
the early chapters of Acts by pointing this out to us. It is of course true of the day of Pentecost. In his summary statement in Acts 2:42-47,
he completes that summary by saying this, "The Lord added to their number day by day
those who were being saved." So there is the Pentecostal effusion of the
Spirit when three thousand are converted and baptized, many of whom, perhaps most of whom
are scattered after the day of Pentecost. But then day by day the Lord is adding to
the number of those who are being saved, and so when you turn the page to Acts chapter
4, verse 4, you have to reduce the three thousand now because they've left, many of them. But now, many of those who heard the word
believed, and the number of the men came to five thousand. Presumably this number needs some kind of
multiplication because the gospel comes not only to men, the number of men, this is families. Some of you come from church traditions where
the membership is reckoned in families, not in individuals. Then as you read on in chapter 4 and verse
33, "With great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the
Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all." What a thing to be able to say about the church. What a need there is for those who are outsiders
to Jesus Christ to be able to look at our churches, and even if they do not have the
vocabulary or the categories to say this, to recognize as people did in those early
days, great grace is upon them all. Then as you read on into chapter 5 there is
this staggering statement in verses 13 and 14, "None of the rest dared to join them,
but the people held them in high esteem. And more than ever believers were added to
the Lord." That's a paradox that we can scarcely take
in, that here is a church that people feel they couldn't possibly belong to this church. There is something about its holiness and
integrity that makes me feel like I couldn't belong there, and yet with all my heart that
is what I want. More and more people, we are told, were pressing
into the church because they were brought to faith in the Savior, Jesus Christ. Then in chapter 6 and verse 1, "Now in these
days the disciples were increasing in numbers," and then the clue in 6:7, you see how he is
punctuating his narrative by saying, "This is what was happening. Here's my summary," and here is his summary
in verse 7. Notice his language, it's so significant. He says, "the Word of God continued to increase." I sure wonder if anyone in your congregation
would say that's happening in your congregation. Not that the preacher's sermons are getting
better or that everything is in apple-pie order, but what we see happening here is that
great grace is upon us, and the Word of God is getting bigger and bigger, and the word
of man is getting smaller and smaller. That's what they're saying. So the word of God marvelously increased and
then eventually, if this is true, "The word of God continued to increase and the number
of the disciples now multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests
became obedient to the faith." This of course is what happens in an awakening. The gospel breaks through into the lives of
those who have had an almost constitutional stubborn resistance to it, because of what
it would cost them. So, eventually Luke will tell us in chapter
9 and verse 21 of the marvelous ways of God, when Saul of Tarsus is converted and people
are amazed, because people are being converted through him who formerly persecuted the church. What's the characteristic of this? Well it begins, doesn't it, in Acts chapter
1 with this first principle that behind these seasons of refreshment, these awakenings,
there is a new burden for prayer given to the people of God, or at least to some of
them. And you see this again and again as historians
seek to trace this. Sometimes they can trace it back to a moment. Sometimes they can trace it back to a single
prayer. You know what it is to be in a gathering for
prayer when everyone is half-asleep, and then suddenly the gathering comes to life because
of the prayer of an individual. I knew a man who in God's grace seemed to
have a gift of awakening prayer meetings, because he would lay the situation before
God, and then he would change gears with these words, "We are coming to Thee about this." And you sensed you had moved into a new gear,
and this is what was happening among these disciples. We are told how they devoted themselves to
prayer. In Acts 1:13 and 14, perhaps even more significantly
in the later season we are told how the Apostles devoted themselves to prayer and the ministry
of the Word. The minister who does that has my admiration,
because my guess is that most of us devote ourselves to the ministry of the Word with
some prayer. But you see this is what lies behind it and
when you read, as many of you will have done, about the awakenings, for example in the eighteenth
century, you know that behind these awakenings there have been seasons, not when people have
said, "Let us pray for an awakening," but when God seems to have impressed upon their
souls a sense of the desperate barrenness of their need and the desert condition of
the church, and they have come to God, not so much to pray for an awakening but to pray
for His presence, and for His power, and for the Word of God to increase. So you see, for example, in my own country
with which I'm most familiar, you see in a little village like Cambuslang in the eighteenth
century, one congregation where they began to form little societies for prayer to plead
with God to come, and they are conscious that this is not a virtue they have worked up,
but this is a burden that has been placed upon their souls so that they can do no other. Those of you who know anything about the Great
Awakening, there was in a single day at the Kirk o' Shotts in the central belt of Scotland
know that the instrument in that awakening was a young man who had not yet actually gone
through the final stages of becoming a minister of a church, and his older brethren summoned
him to preach on the Monday at the end of a communion season and he found himself flat
on his face in prayer, and the sluice gates opened, and mature ministers were convinced
that at least five hundred people had been converted through this young man's sermon,
and they lasted into the future. They followed them through. How did it begin? It began with the recognition that we are
utterly helpless. So much of our prayer begins with the recognition
that we want to help, but true prayer, true intercessory prayer, is ultimately the recognition
there is nothing we can do to help. We are utterly helpless, and we are calling
upon God, and you see, therefore, if there is going to be any kind of awakening, we need
to go down. We need to go down into our utter abject helplessness
in the church. Part of the tragedy of our situation in our
entire evangelical, yes, to our Reformed subculture, is that we plan how we will do it and so rarely
come to the point of recognizing there is utterly nothing in our power to accomplish
lasting spiritual good. The man who was the instrument in the Great
Awakening in the nineteenth century in Scotland was also a young man and one of his older
colleagues said that in the weeks before the awakening, the only way he could describe
this man was that he seemed to be living in prayer. When someone was showing him an area where
he was going to preach, they later on found him in his little bedroom prostrated before
God, crying out to him in his utter helplessness, and so this is the case. This is why Jesus says to the Apostles and
to the others, the hundred and twenty who gathered, "You are to wait in Jerusalem,"
and they understand that means that there is nothing that they can do. They come to God with a sense of helplessness,
and they devote themselves to prayer. When you visit a church, incidentally, what
is the thing you look for when you look for what is going to happen in the church, and
it's there in the worship bulletin? For years and years, I have always looked
for the same thing. How does this church tell me as a visitor
that it prays? And I have to tell you in my experience, churches
rarely indicate in their worship bulletins and in what's going to happen in the week
that this is a church that's conscious of its abject helplessness, because it meets
for prayer. Of course, we may be too modest to mention
it, but I doubt it. There are evangelical churches of thousands
of members where if the congregation is called for prayer, when there is little providential
reason that thousands of them would be absent, thousands of them are absent. Why is that? Because we did all this without prayer, so
why would we need prayer now? So, a burden of prayer comes from the Holy
Spirit. I remember as a young man, I was twenty-one. I was helping in a church in the Highlands
of Scotland where that had been an awakening earlier on in the century. Because all the people had lived there forever,
they still knew one another by the names they had given each other when they were in elementary
school. There was a man that I can't remember his
name, but everybody knew him as Dodo, and there was an obvious reason actually why he
was still known as Dodo. He was so old, and he lived in this little
croft, you know, with a couple of rooms. I remember him one day taking me out round
to the backyard, and he said to me. "I remember," he said, "as a fourteen-year-old
boy on the Sabbath afternoon coming out here, and that green grass had turned black because
the men," he called them the men, "were prostrate on the ground and they were shoulder to shoulder." Of course, in those days in Scotland all you
could afford was black, "and they were bowed down before God." I'll never forget him saying to me, because
it touched something in me that made me say, "O Lord, to see such a day." He said they were praying that the Lord would
come in the evening and then he said, I wish now I'd said to him, I was too shy to say
to him, "Tell me more." He said, "And He came." So, awakenings are always related to the burden
that God gives in prayer. Secondly, awakenings are always related to
the exaltation of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Try this sometime, you know a kind of trivial,
a fun thing to do with Christians, a word association test and throw into the word association
test, the word "Pentecost." I'm pretty sure that you will get a high percentage
of people saying, "Holy Spirit." We need to understand that Pentecost is the
day when the Holy Spirit comes, but Pentecost is not a day about the Holy Spirit. In fact, once Peter has given us the text
of his sermon, he only makes two references to the Holy Spirit in the rest of the sermon,
why? Because he understands this is an amazing
thing, given how dim he was theologically beforehand, he understands what Jesus meant
when He said, "When the Spirit comes, He will glorify Me." And so, one of the things that takes place
in an awakening is that there is a kind of direction of preaching, and that direction
of preaching is towards the blessed God and to the One in whom He has provided salvation. That's a very telling thing also for us today,
because often the real interest of people in the preaching is what is here for me. It is a remarkable fact that in the last hundred
years, maybe some recent exceptions, and R.C.'s books were glowing exceptions, there were
very few books to tell Christian people about Jesus Christ. And publishers know what they're doing, they
know what people want. One of the things that happens when the Holy
Ghost comes in awakening is that preaching is re-centered on Jesus Christ, and conversations
are re-centered on Jesus Christ, and you see this happening both on the day of Pentecost
and punctuating these early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles right through Peter's
understanding of what happens in the household of Cornelius. Jesus Christ is exalted in all His majesty
and all His glory, and the fullness and sufficiency of Jesus Christ is so set before people that
they realize that He is all sufficient for all of the needs of all of the people all
of the time, and He is able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him. So the same Edwards, when he describes what
happens when Christ is exalted, he says some are struck with the glory and wonderfulness
of the dying love of Christ, some with the sufficiency and preciousness of His blood,
others with the value and glory of His obedience and righteousness, and some the excellency
and loveliness of Christ chiefly engages their thoughts, and some His divinity, and others
the excellency of the way of salvation and the suitableness of it to their necessities. Now how can that possibly happen? Only when Jesus Christ is set before us in
the fullness of the biblical testimony so that we see how great He really is and how
all-sufficient He is. So, when there is this coming of the Spirit,
the people of God inwardly are crying out in such a way that by God's grace it draws
out of their preachers, "Tell us about Christ, tell us about Christ," because as Jesus says
it's when the Spirit glorifies Him that men and women are convicted of sin and righteousness
and judgment. I've never forgotten an older man I knew,
who had an aged aunt who had a friend who lived between the manse in which Robert Murray
M'Cheyne lived and his house. I couldn't take in that you would actually
almost touch Murray M'Cheyne in a couple of generations, and I remember that he came to
me once when I was a young man after I'd preached and he said these words, "The Holy Spirit
loves to bear testimony to the exaltation of the Lord Jesus Christ." I don't think that's happening among us. May I also say this, systematic Bible exposition
doesn't guarantee it's going to happen either. All that means is next week's passage is going
to be the one after last week's passage. And do you know the congregation is at least
half of the sermon, in that when there is a longing, preachers feel that and give more? You only need to read some of the sermons
that are preached in days of awakening because they not particularly impressive to understand. This was the bare-bones the people, as it
were, dragged out of the preacher more and more of the Lord Jesus Christ, and was Paul's
ministry, wasn't it? "I'm determined to know nothing among you
except Jesus Christ and Him crucified." I'll bet there's a pretty substantial percentage
of ministers have chosen that text as the opening text of their ministry. God would be more pleased if they'd all been
able to choose it as the closing text of the ministry, preaching Christ. "We don't preach ourselves," he says to the
Corinthians, "we preach Christ. We preach Him crucified." "Jesus Christ," says Paul, "was placarded
before you." "Him we proclaim." And then, there is a third dimension. There's a burden of prayer given to the people
of God, there's an exaltation of Christ in the preaching of the Word and thirdly, there
is a boldness of application of the truth that in some sense seems to be possible or
appropriate only in a season when the Holy Spirit, as it were, oils the channels between
the Word and the needy hearts of people to make it possible to engage in this close application. One of the things that characterizes this
preaching, you see it in Simon Peter in an amazing way. Here he is, he's within a few weeks of having
been so cowardly, he's denied his Savior and he's now standing before people on the day
of Pentecost and saying to them, "You crucified Him." Now I can exegete that, but what I need to
see is the man is taking his life in his hands. How is it that he has this new boldness? The answer actually is not simply "the resurrection
of Jesus." The answer is that the resurrection of Jesus
was the preface to the ascension of Jesus, and the ascension of Jesus was the preface
to this visible manifestation of the fact that He was now crowned Lord of all. And because Peter knew He was crowned Lord
of all, he was able to bring the application of what Christ had done down into the consciences. You see, that's the difference between instruction
in preaching and application in preaching. Application in preaching gets to the conscience,
and it's not a matter of the decibels of your voice or what kind of personality you have,
it is that through the Holy Spirit preaching becomes dialogical. You know there's been a whole movement in
all these homiletical theorists to say, you know, "We need more dialogue in preaching,"
and when I read that I say, "Well, you have no idea do you really, what preaching is,
because preaching in the power of the Holy Spirit is the single most intense dialogue
people have in their ordinary life, because Christ is speaking to you." That's why real pastoral counseling at its
best is done in preaching, because that's where the intense dialogue takes place where
the Spirit through the Word and its ministry gets down into the deep places of which we
ourselves may have been unconscious. There is this application, you read Edwards'
sermons, and you think that without the presence of the Holy Spirit people would be switching
off, because it seems sometimes he's standing there asking questions in the second person
singular for as long as ten minutes, and he's engaging through the power of the Spirit in
the ministry of the Word in this dialogue, this discriminating preaching of the Word
that brings, on the day of Pentecost, this intense conviction of sin, so intense that
people seem to need what the older writers used to call an "out gate" for its intensity
and they cry out, "So what should we do?" This is actually the explanation of some of
these phenomena that take place all over the world when God comes in this way. Some of you will have read that wonderful
book, The Korean Pentecost, about the beginnings of the great days in the Korean church and
the particular service where, two, I mean two three-piece suited American Presbyterian
ministers were there, and the Holy Spirit came, and they were emotionally appalled at
what came out. And if you'd asked them before they said,
"We would have done everything we could to say, 'Now, what we need here is decency and
order,' but you know there are times when calling out for the forgiveness of sins takes
precedence over decency and order." That certainly happens in days of awakening. I'd love to read to you from my little book
here the accounts of some of those in the eighteenth century in the little village of
Cambuslang who came under this kind of conviction, very ordinary people longing for salvation,
longing for the burden of their guilt to be removed, longing for their sense of bondage
to be broken, and experiencing something of that intensity. Saying things like, "It was all I could do
to hold myself in in the service because I longed to cry out 'O God, have mercy upon
my soul! Lord Jesus, remember me. Father, forgive me,'" as the consciousness
of their sin and the guilt was brought before them. I'm glad I had this experience once, but sometimes
I grieve that I've only had it once, of being interrupted in the middle of preaching. One thing for that to happen if you're preaching
in the open air, another thing to happen in your own congregation when somebody sitting
in the gallery on a Sunday night starts talking back to you. Then discovering, I will never forget this
when I shook hands at the door with this man. I was absolutely certain he had no idea he
had done it. There was nothing in the disposition of the
transaction, I mean I was ready for anything. There was nothing in the conversation that
indicated that he was conscious that what had been taking place in his soul had had
this "out gate" because he could no longer contain it. It was such an illustration to me of what
is always going on under the preaching of the Word. But here there are these occasions when there
is such deep conviction of sin. That's why I am probably like you, I don't
think this is just a Celtic disposition, but I'm probably like you that whenever I'm in
a prayer gathering and somebody prays, "Lord, send a revival and begin with us," I kind
of shudder inside because it brings such conviction of sin. So there's a burden for prayer. There's an exaltation of Christ. There's a boldness in preaching. And then, of course, everything gets sorted
out. Everything becomes tidy. No, then there is always painful opposition
to the gospel. That's the story of early Acts, isn't it? And it always seems to come in the same style
as in the early Acts. First of all, there is intimidation. "We've got to stop this." And then when intimidation fails, there is
position seeking within the church. Intimidation usually from outside the church
but sometimes from inside the church and then position seeking, in the case of Ananias and
Sapphira. And then if that fails to destroy the church. That's why the church discipline in their
case was so serious and so divine, because it would've been so destructive of what God
was doing. If intimidation and position seeking fail,
then there is the third demonic strategy of division in the church, the case of the Hebrew
and the Greek speaking widows in the church. The days of the eighteenth century awakening
in my own country, I'm somewhat ashamed to say, part of the opposition was from two of
the men who were the significant founders of the denomination in which my ordination
is held. For those of you who are nosy, it's the Associate
Reformed Presbyterian Church. Because they didn't want Whitefield messing
around with evangelical people they regarded as unclean because they hadn't joined them
in the secession. So, there's always going to be opposition. Some of it desperate opposition, some of it
involving fellow believers because where there is awakening, that awakening always takes
place, as Jesus promised, on enemy occupied territory. But then, finally, there is always a glorious
transformation. A burden for prayer, an exaltation of Christ,
a boldness in preaching, a painful opposition to the gospel, and a glorious transformation
of believers. I knew somebody, still know them, who experienced
such an awakening. I asked them, "What was it like for you?"
and the thing that struck me was that the pattern was still the same. They said, "I was just overwhelmed with a
sense of conviction of my own sin. I had a desire to turn from my specific sins,
but from all sin to Jesus Christ. I was overwhelmed with a sense of the joy
of forgiveness and the love of Jesus. I wanted to devour the Word of God. I longed to be with Him in prayer. I saw the needs and the difficulties of others
more clearly, and I felt that I would be willing to forsake everything for the Lord Jesus Christ." The interesting thing about that was that
I saw that experience spread like wildfire in the mystery of God's ways. I remember years ago in the seminary I taught
in, a couple of men came along and they promised to us that we were on the verge of the greatest
awakening the world had ever seen, and it would take place in the United States of America. Almost everything about that statement I thought
was wrong, and I remember leaving with a student and I turned to him and I said, "Do you know
why does it always need to be the greatest awakening the world is ever seen? I'd give my eyeteeth for any awakening." So, may God give us something of a burden
for it in these days. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your Word. We pray that in these days You will both exalt
our Lord Jesus Christ, humble our hearts, cause us to pray, fill us with joy, sweeten
our fellowship, and strengthen our witness. For Jesus' sake, Amen.
