Wake UP!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last evening I had the opportunity to sit in on a lecture concerning the First and Second Great Awakenings in the US.  The speaker was Dr. John D. Hannah, Research Professor at Dallas Theological Seminary.  Over the past year I’ve come to appreciate Church history and try to slowly learn more about the rocky path it has traversed over the past 500 years.  I’ll admit, I’ve not done much study of the 1500 years that immediately followed Christ and His apostles.

I’ll not bore you with the details of these two great awakenings (I realize that while I consider them extremely interesting, most probably won’t), but I would like to lay out a couple items of interest that I pulled from the lecture.

Breaking down the walls…

All awakenings are a work of God.  Amen.  I could end it there.  His work will be accomplished and the Church will be built.  But how does that look?  The resulting force of a true awakening is an increased focus on missions.  The First Great Awakening (1735-1745 ish) led to expanding educational institutions, American Indian missions, and a stress on philanthropic work.  The Second Great Awakening (1800-1815 ish) had similar results with the addition of some international flavor.  Through this era, the father of the modern missions movement emerged in William Carey.

Here’s some interesting figures.  Dr. John claims that during “normal” times i.e. not during an awakening, the average return for an evangelizing Christian is 1-2%.  So you would have to share the gospel with 100-200 people to get a couple converts out of that.  Now during the two awakenings listed above, that return increases to about 8%.  Now that might not seem like too many people, or we could say, “C’mon, is that really a sign of God working?”  Consider the time of the First Great Awakening.  Colonial America had approximately 3 million people of which 300,000 were converted!  Unbelievable!  Transfer that to 2009, with a current US population of 305 million people and that would mean 30.5 million converts in the next 10 years……Imagine the transformation of our country if that many people were saved between now and 2020.

But really, why do we share the gospel message?  Is it because of the statistics or some historical success rate?  No way!  It’s because the holy scriptures command us to do it!  And who can hold it in?

Let’s pray for God to open the floodgates in the US and pour out His grace and mercy on the lost.  May the ruckus be so loud that they all WAKE UP!

 

Peace,

JAE