Pressing into the Kingdom of God by Jonathan Edwards. There are probably some here in this congregation that are now concerned about their salvation, but they will never obtain it. It is not to be supposed that all that are now moved and awakened will ever be savingly converted. Doubtless there are many now seeking. They will not be able to enter when it has been so in times past. when there has been times of great outpourings of God's Spirit, but that many who for a while have inquired with others what they should do to be saved have failed, and afterwards grown hard and secure. All of you that are now awakened have a mind to obtain salvation, and probably hope to get a title to heaven in the time of this present moving of God's Spirit. But yet, though it be awful to be spoken and awful to be thought, we have no reason to think any other, then that some of you will burn in hell to all eternity. You are a- Welcome to the Budzone podcast. I'm Bud, your host. The Bud's Own Podcast is for, from, and by saints. Our buds in the faith. To edify one another in the faith and to encourage one another to love and good works. We discuss the world. We discuss the church. We discuss the faith. We discuss truth. And we do it with the mind of Christ. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to this week's episode of the Bud's Own Podcast. I appreciate you joining me. Here's how I'd like to start today. I'm going to read a prayer. You can hear it as if it is a prayer being offered, but this comes from the book that I recommend frequently, The Valley of Vision. It is a collection of Puritan prayers. The one I want to read today is from page 68, if you're looking at your leather copy of that volume. It is called The Cry of a Convicted Sinner, and here's what that prayer reads. Thou righteous and holy sovereign, in whose hand is my life and whose are all my ways, Keep me from fluttering about religion. Fix me firm in it, for I am irresolute, my decisions are smoke and vapor, and I do not glorify Thee or behave according to Thy will. Cut me not off before my thoughts grow to responses and the budding of my soul into full flower, for Thou art forbearing and good, patient and kind. Save me from myself. from the artifices and deceits of sin, from the treachery of my perverse nature, from denying thy charge against my offenses, from a life of continual rebellion against thee, from wrong principles, views, and ends. For I know that all my thoughts, affections, desires, and pursuits are alienated from thee. I have acted as if I hated thee, although thou art love itself. have contrived to tempt thee to the uttermost, to wear out thy patience, have lived evilly in word and action. Had I been a prince, I would long ago have crushed such a rebel. Had I been a father, I would long since have rejected my child. O thou Father of my spirit, thou King of my life, cast me not into destruction, drive me not from thy presence, but wound my heart that it may be healed, break it that thine own hand may make it whole. Amen." Again, that's a prayer from the Valley of Vision. It's called the cry of a sinner, and really what that reflects is the topic that we're going to discuss today, which is revival. In Ian Murray's book that I think was penned in 1994 called Revival and Revivalism, He has a chapter which kind of captures what genuine revival, I think, is. He calls it, When Theology Took Fire. So today, on this episode of The Bud Zone, I am honored to be joined again by the narrated Puritan himself, Tom Sullivan. Tom, greetings to you, brother. about, and I'm really looking forward to this particular podcast because I believe that this subject, especially that of the Second Great Awakening, has been blind because it is not properly informed. And those are the things we hope to clear up this morning. But I do want to say a quick footnote. The prayer that you read, in the Valley of Vision, you won't find the authors of the prayers, but that particular one, if If somebody is familiar with the book by Philip Doddridge, The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Souls, there are prayers at the end of each chapter, and that particular prayer is at the end of chapter 2 or 3 or whatever, and it's not a bridge. That's the whole prayer there. Some of the prayers in the Valley of Vision were a bridge. So those are very edifying, and in fact, something I've also narrated is the prayers and the rise and progress of religion. So this is Doddridge? Okay, that's wonderful to know. That's one of the things I've always kind of regretted about as much as I love Valley of Vision and they're so rich theologically and they drive you to humility and a reverent posture before God if you use them as a prayer. But you don't know who originally penned them, who originally prayed them, so that's great to know. Thank you. I've just written it in my book. Well, also, because I wanted to know, and I'm very familiar with Doddridge's book that was used in the conversion of William Wilberforce, and I happened to find the words in there as I was reading them, but I can't trace many of the prayers back to their original sources in that book, but they're very edifying. love to listen to Max McLean narrate them you know even us narrators have our heroes that set up such an example and Max McLean when he does a valley of vision it is so edifying yeah yeah okay well let me remind people about you you have been on the bud zone before That is well worth listening. I had a lot of people listen to that. Very encouraging. But you are on Sermon Audio. You can be found as the Narrated Puritan. And I want to give you a thanks because you've been providing me recently snippets of some of the narration that you do, and I'm using those as kind of my introduction on each episode of The Bud Zone. Thank you for that. I pray that folks will go follow you there and that they will uncover from your ministry all this rich tradition and rich theology that is very edifying and has largely been lost in much of the evangelical church today. So God bless you for bringing those things back to the forefront as best you can. Well, as far as I know, you and some other people must be bringing some traffic to my sermon audio site. The best month I ever had was in August of last year, but I was narrating the Bible. But this last month, we had our second best month, which was about 21,500 listens or downloads. I don't know how they rate that from. about 90 countries. So we're reaching a lot of people. I just, you know, you kind of want people to write to you if they've heard something that they have questions about that or was more particularly edifying. You want to know how the narrations themselves are affecting your listeners. I did have one lady who had listened to something that I had narrated by Virgin recently and she was going through a tough time. She didn't say what her trial was but said it was just a thing to a sister down there in the Valley of Baca, the Valley of Weeping. And so those are the type of things that gratify us, knowing that we're helping a brother or sister in Christ. Absolutely. Now, we're going to tackle the topic, well, you are going to tackle the topic of revivals, revivalism, because you've been a longtime student of this topic of revivals. How did you get interested in this? Why was this a topic of disciplined study for you? Well, obviously, a lot of it's related to my fascination and instruction by Jonathan Edwards because you can't study his life to any extent to know that he was considered the main philosopher in the Great Awakening to assist people in revivals of religion. His thoughts on the present revival of religion is very, very helpful. In fact, I had been narrating some of that this week, and some of his counsel is so profound, I was saying to a fellow pastor, you could take this section of thoughts on the present revival of religion and label it a manual for the caged, staged, neophyte Christian, because there's just so much wisdom in his, you know, you would call people like that the doctor of Christian experience. And so, in 1984, when I started going to Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, and they had this phenomenal bookstore, the first book of Edwards that I purchased, they put three titles together in a paperback, and those three titles still are in paperback form, and that's Distinguishing Traits of a Work of the Spirit of God, Faithful Narrative of Many Surprising Conversions, and Thoughts on the Present Revival of Religion. And it was a narrative of many surprising conversions in the analysis of a giant in Christian experience, talking about the various awakenings and how they differ during a revival. And I was so fascinated by that. So, very early on, it may have been in the Trinity Pulpit tape catalog, I discovered that there were five cassettes from Ian Murray. I learned the history of those messages at Grace Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. They had a family conference in 1973. They would have them, if I remember correctly, at Harvey Cedars. And they asked Ian Murray, would you give us five messages on the history of revival? And he mentions this in the book, Revival and Revivalism, that that's the first time he really, as a student of revival, started studying these things out chronologically so that he would be informed to be able to give those messages at a family conference. And in the same year, 1973, he gave those same messages in Pensacola, Florida. And I listened to those over and over and over, so I began to take note of the historical sources in America's revival history and try to find some of the original sources, such as William Henry's foot sketches of Virginia and sketches of North Carolina and Benjamin Trumbull's history of Connecticut, which is one of only two sources that even records what actually happened in the audience, what was going on on July 8th, 1741, when Jonathan Edwards preached sinners in the hands of an angry God. Because through time, these things get embellished. They get away from the historical facts of what, in fact, really happened. And we can talk about that a little bit later when I get into The Great Awakening. But between that and Murray, I began to be really interested in it. And so, the first book that The Banner of Truth had that was really a larger collection on histories of revivals was British pastor John Gillies wrote the first biography of George Whitefield, and it's called Historical Collections and Accounts of Revivals, and he started with the apostolic age and traced out various movements all the way through the end of when that book was written in 1754. And then Horatius Bonar wrote an introduction in 1845 to that book, and they reintroduced it with some more information. And so, I was very, very new as a narrator, and I narrated 18 hours from John Gilley's book. And as I shared in my testimony before, I never kept those original cassettes, and yet they found their way on Sermon Audio because they were being lent from the Chapel Library then in Venice. Florida. A brother up in Canada for Stillwater Revival Books asked for all of those cassettes, digitized them, and put them on Sermon Audio. So even though that this narration is from 1986, it still exists. I don't listen to a lot of my old narrations. I've learned a lot since then, and of course, recording equipment has improved so much. But I listened to part of one recently, and they're still very, very interesting to listen to if a person has a fascination in this subject. But for the most part, when it comes to any serious study of this subject, it's usually Arnold Delamore's two-volume biography of George Whitefield. And Revival and Revivalism, I've done an interview on the history of revivals before, and in that case, listeners could call in and they asked me my estimate of that book, and I said, I'm simply overwhelmed by it because since 1994, 394, we have so many more sources that I can look up on the internet at my two go-to places, books.google.com and archive.org. And when I was teaching on the Kentucky Revival, for example, there were secondary sources that Murray quotes that he had never seen the original where I was able to dig up the original documents. But for the time, I'm just astounded at the amount of historical material that Ian Murray put into that book. So, that's really the foundation of how I got interested in the thing. Why don't you do this, give us from the outset a sound definition, what is a revival? I have one before me, and then I'll give you my own, but this author says, what is a revival? It is a revival of scriptural knowledge, a vital piety, a practical obedience. The term revival of religion has sometimes been objected to on the grounds that a revival of anything supposes its previous existence. whereas in the renovation of centers there is a principle implanted which is entirely new. But though the fact implied in this objection is admitted, the objection itself has no force because the term is intended to be implied in a general sense, denote the improved religious state of a congregation or of a community. I would define it this way because I recently was interacting on a phone with a pastor in our own denomination who has some of an animosity of revival, and I said, what are the things you most zealously pray for as a pastor when you're praying for God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven? You're praying for his spiritual presence in your assembly, the conversion of sinners, the quickening of those who are already converted, that they would come out of a sleepy state as those who are the foolish virgins in Matthew 25, that they become awakened, that they become ready and prepared and rejoicing that the Lord is coming again. and that it would affect not only your local church, but a community. And if you grant that those are your prayer requests, why can't you also grant that in answer to that, God is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that you have asked or sought? And his manifest presence can come down on a local assembly well beyond what you were aware that he would. And that he has, and it has been documented by very trustworthy sources. Some of the men that promoted the Great Awakening were as serious of Presbyterian passers as you will find. Jonathan Dickinson, for example, revival came to his congregation in New Jersey. And he was the first president of the College of New Jersey, followed by Aaron Burr Sr., Jonathan Edwards, and Samuel Davies. So these are very good men, very reliable sources. And if you take a look at what happened in the Great Awakening, when Joseph Tracy wrote his history of the Great Awakening in the year about 1840 to attest the truth of what had happened in the local congregations, there were 50 pastors that signed a document verifying that they personally were aware of many, many conversions and awakenings within their own congregation. And I said to the pastor, who was antagonistic to revival, I said, well, what do you say when a pastor says, more people came to me in one month concerned about their soul than in the previous 30 years here that I've been a pastor? Is that normal or is that a real evidence of the manifest presence of God coming upon a local assembly? And there's so many like that. So really, revival is the things that a pastor is normally praying for, and God answers him far above what he has prayed for. And in the case of the Great Awakening, it wasn't just to a locality, local church, but to a communities, and then it spread over all of New England. And these are the things that the opponents of revival have to debunk. So that's a basic definition of the term. Just looking at the church at large today, in certain segments of evangelicalism, how do you assess their understanding of revival? Is it just something that, you know, our church plans a revival every year, and we put the banner out, and maybe we do a tent, and we schedule these things? Is that the predominant view of what a revival is in evangelicalism at large right now, you think? Well, yeah, for sure, because the tide changed when Charles Finney in the latter part of the Second Great Awakening, if it was really an awakening under his ministry, started bringing in new measures because what the change was, the old Pastors and theologians prior to him, especially Asa Hell Nettleton, who had to counter what Finney was doing, knew that revival was a sovereign work of God, that the effects of it had to be produced by the Holy Spirit working upon his own word. But with Finney, what happened is the passions were more stirred than the spiritual intellect. And they would stop addressing the mind, and they would start addressing the bodily agitation, thinking that that kind of a thing was in fact revival. And that's a whole separate study in itself. But Finney never introduced the anxious binge. it was going on before then, maybe back into the Kentucky Revival. But evangelism changed so much. It became so synergistic. It became so man-centered. And so the idea that we can work up a revival or we could have revival meetings if we plan them is a result of the lack of real belief in the sovereignty of God, that there are means to the ends which we can employ, and they must be scriptural means. But the God ultimately must bring revival. And to segue into, I was talking about Jonathan Edwards' sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, because this will define the difference. If you asked anybody, have you read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God? many of them have, and they find it so profound. And if you ask what brought the revival to Enfield, Connecticut, and they said, well, it was the words of sinners in the hands of an angry God. To show you the sovereignty of God in this, the misunderstanding of that is There are only two sources, as I said, to the validity and what happened in Enfield, Connecticut. Jonathan Edwards was an itinerant preacher. He was probably being brought in by Eleazar Wheelock, another pastor and revival preacher. But what's missing from the context, because there's only two sources and one was related by Eleazar Wheelock to Benjamin Trumbull and found its way in the history of Connecticut, And the other was in a diary that had been being kept for 10 years by an actual cousin of Jonathan Edwards. And that diary, though it's not really readable, it's been put into a readable English, is stored in a place called Storrs Library, that's two R's, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. So I was able to go in. online. Some people may not realize I didn't go in person when I tell the story. But online, I just went through the 10 years until I found July 8th, 1741. It's on documents on the internet, but I wanted to see them for myself. And both of these men said, and this is what's so interesting about that sermon that people don't really keep in mind, is Jonathan Edwards never finished that sermon. We don't know how far he got into it. It got so loud through the groaning and the crying out and the agony and the terror of the unconverted in the assembly, that Jonathan Edwards held his arms in the air, demanding silence so that he could be heard, and both of the historical sources said that he gave up. He couldn't get the sermon finished. Well, what's missing in that story is told in the history of Connecticut that the night before the pastor came to Enfield, Connecticut, the people in Enfield were very, very discouraged. These are the pastors and people involved in the churches, the leaders. because Revival was visiting the communities all around Enfield, Connecticut, and they knew that it wasn't happening in Enfield. And there's this amazing sentence in the account of Eleazar Wheelock, and that is, the night before the people lie prostrate on the ground, almost all night imploring God that he would not pass him by in Enfield, Connecticut, whether they even knew that Jonathan Edwards was going to preach the next day, because it wasn't certain he may have been asked to at the last moment. And Jonathan Edwards had a number of sermons that he carried with him, and the reason was Jonathan Edwards was in Northampton, he wasn't in Boston. And by visiting a church like that, he would come in contact with people who made a trip to Boston that could take his sermon and publish it. So the sermon had already been preached in his own congregation without, as a matter of fact, any visible fruit, but because he had it with him, he did preach it there. But what is so important to understand, and the difference between real revival and revivalism, is that God, in his mercy, listening to the imploring messages of the prayers brought before him for an entire night before answered those prayers, and God brought revival to Enfield, Connecticut, not Jonathan Edwards. And so, it's so interesting, the revival epics that I call sincere, they didn't have a lot of leaves, and all of them had, you know, some chaff. I mean, it's natural man is always going to have those things which tincture pure religion, even in a revival, especially when the passions are stirred up at a great height. But these are good men that recorded these things, and it just seems, brother, that earnest prayer and supplication for God is for him to revive his church. And because in our own circles, you may know many Reformed Baptists call themselves amillennialists, and some of them use the term optimistic amillennialists to show, well, we don't differ in what we hope for the future, for a real restoration of a number of people to God. And I said, well, all right, well, you can define eschatology and you can defend your position, but if you believe in a real optimistic amillennialism, as you say, certainly you're gonna cry down to God to manifest his presence and bring the people in from the fields of sin. And it's so interesting to me, and in June I'll have been a Reformed Baptist for 38 years in four different churches, that this subject is just not taught. So because it's not taught, people are ill-informed, and because they're ill-informed, they may think that most of the revivals had the anomalies of some of the revivals under Charles Finney. But, which brings me kind of more into a historical sketch, after the Great Awakening, there was a falling off because of the Revolutionary War. In order for us, New Englanders, Americans, to be able to go to battle with Britain, we needed help, and we found our help in France. The problem is, is France brought in their soldiers, and with them, they brought in the French infidelity. The writings of Thomas Paine and Voltaire and so on. So during the time of revival and for some time afterwards, the country was in a very decayed state. And about the year 1792, and there's just no exact date because historians say there wasn't ever a time where there wasn't some local revival going on in a congregation here and there. But in 1792, the stories, the reports started to build up. And some of your best evangelical writers and pastors in those days said, well, we really should document this. So, in July of 1800, they started a magazine called the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine. And when I learned this, I said, well, I got to get hold of that magazine, which would have been impossible 20 years ago when I started these studies. However, with print-on-demand, all of the original editions are now in my library, and the 1804-1805 annual, they would take 12 issues and combine them into an annual. 1804-1805 is in my library, I have a first edition, and I open up a book like that, and I'm always interested, who is the original owner? Did he put his name in the margin? And he did. So, I'm holding this book in my hand, it's almost 220 years old, and I looked up the name online at a place called Find a Grave memorial, and these people would put information about persons, gravestones, a little biography, and so on, and I actually found the name of the person to hold that book. So I was teaching on revival in Newburgh, Indiana, and I had this book. It had just come in the mail perfectly in time for me to teach on the Second Great Awakening. And I said, brethren, it really affects me to be holding in my hand a book from a library from a pastor who was born in the year 1740 and lived to about 1820 because it is a means to stir me up to persevere because I'm holding in my hand a book from a pastor's library who finished a course already. And I cherish it because I'm walking the same way, and I love the same things. And those things which he held dear, the things that move me, it must be because I'm holding the Connecticut Evangelical magazine in my hand, and they're talking about the revival stories that were going here and there, and some of the pastors that were greatly used in the turn of the century, which would have been Edward Dorr Griffin, and Amos also forgot, Timothy Dwight, and others. Now, it's interesting, when I told you Anne Murray did this revival series in 1973, And Banner of Truth had not published many of the things that would come afterwards. And when he did this revival series, he had the works, old antique works, of Edward Dorr Griffin, who later became the president of Williams College. Many of these people that were used in these churches also became college presidents. It was a different time. But he said that he wanted to see Edward Dorr Griffin's works back into print. It was a longing that he had. And in time, it happened. And I noted as I was preparing for the series I was teaching on revival in Newburgh, Indiana, which by the way, those are under the Louisville Reformed Baptist Church site, there were actual videos taken. And in preparing for this teaching, okay, so what happened is Edward Dorn Griffin's works were put back into print. But they went back out of print again. William Sprague's Lectures on Revival came into print, and it went back out of print again. Archibald Alexander's work called The Log College, which is the story of the college that was formed by William Tennant, the father of two men also greatly used in The Great Awakening, a print. There was no actual demand for these works of the people that God used in revival. And I've watched the type of things that Banner of Truth have published, and there has been an emphasis of Ian Murray to get this material out there. But the frustrating thing that I found, because I'm following in the steps of really my spiritual hero when it comes to church history in Murray, I'm experiencing what he has already seen, and that is that this subject which should so interest people is not only seldom taught, it's misconstrued, it's misunderstood. And if I mentioned the second Great Awakening, I had somebody that was so sarcastic to me, oh, you mean the revival where all of these heresies came out of. And I said, Lord, I don't know how you could use me. I know a lot of it is my narrations, but I did one of the most excellent prefaces to a Lectures on Revival that was part of the Richard Owen Roberts series of six books on revival by a man named William Hethridge, who You wrote a History of the Westminster Assembly. Unlike any other thing that I upload, I may have 100 downloads a day. I had 27 yesterday, and that's one of the most interesting things I've ever narrated, that it has been a burden of mine that this history has not been studied. But I'm not just interested in it for history's sake. because it was the other things that they had to learn during the revival, and I'll mention two. The difference between true and false conversion and the difference between true revival wrought by the Spirit of God upon the minds and heart of sinners and the artificial revival that can ensue as a result of what they continually call sympathy. And I'll illustrate that by telling you a story. I attended a tech school in Missoula, Montana before I came to Grand Rapids in computer operations and so on. It was very ancient in 1986. But we were brought into a room to look at some equipment, and there were a number of us from a class in the lady that was standing right next to me passed out and hit the floor. An ambulance was called and they came in. And my point in telling you this, Bud, is inside I was very affected by what I'd seen. I was fighting back tears. I felt bad. But I was being moved by sympathy. We sympathize with people. Well, that sympathy also has its place in our worship. It draws us together and makes us a unit, a congregation singing in unity. However, the physical manifestations of it in and of themselves are natural. and God gave them to us, and animals experience it as well. Just take a look at an animal that is mourning over the death of maybe a baby elephant. So, God gave us to this, but these things attend a revival, but they are not the revival of the spiritual man itself. And so, if you study these things, it's very, very helpful to realize that there is really a lot of natural feeling, a lot of natural passion within our worship services. And Finney, instead of guarding against that, as he should have, and said, well, that is not itself the Spirit working upon the mind, the will, and the affections. It's merely natural. He would actually work upon those passions, get people worked up, and then call that a revival, which was an abomination to the generation before them because they knew the true quickening had to be by the Spirit of God upon the mind alone. So, in my studying these works, specifically those which came before 1840 and Jonathan Edwards' understanding of a treatise on the religious affections and so on, is to distinguish that which is merely natural and that which is in fact spiritual. But we never think. It doesn't enter into our minds. We don't ask questions like this. How much of the natural element, the feelings, is mistaken for true worship in a church? And so when you have something like, say, the Passion Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, and now 60,000 people come to this, and then you have John Piper, who has this natural oratorical gift and a pathos Much of that does, in fact, work on the mind if the truth is being communicated. But people don't ask themselves how much of the natural feeling may be being worked up in these young people who already have used means to that end of natural feeling by their upbeat, almost rock-and-roll worship service. So, so much of these passions are worked up and people think it's a revival, where the all-searching eye of God looks at it, knows what is of Him and what is natural feeling, and maybe very little spiritual good has actually, in fact, been done because it wasn't the Spirit, through the Word, that was gaining the desired effect. And so, by studying revival, I've also been so much brought to an appreciation of Christian experience itself. And I'll stop there so that you can ask the next question and I can catch my breath. Well, there is so much I am observing from what you've said. Backing up to Enfield, I think it's important for folks to know, and as well backing up to your counsel with this pastor friend that was talking with you, but the truth that you've brought out about what happened in Enfield the day before the preaching of that sermon, That cannot go without notice for us today. You know, one of the problems is that if we neglect our history, we're juvenile, we're immature. History has a way of maturing us because we learned from it. The important thing with that is that these people are prostrated in prayer before God that he would not pass them by with the blessings of his awakening and his revival. So prayer, very instrumental. The Lord hears the prayers of his saints. The Lord responds to that. But the other thing is that in the context, whether they knew if Edwards was going to be preaching the next day or not, the fact is he is standing before them bringing the Word of God. That is the mechanism through which the Spirit works. So you've got that content of theologic truth from the Word of God, and we're talking largely law and gospel. I mean, you're a convicted sinner. How do you know? Well, we've got a law that we measure ourselves against, and we're all guilty, and we have a gospel. you don't really see that. Your counsel to this pastor is you want to see these things, are you praying for them? That's absolutely critical. Yes. I want to make a point about the revival that happened in Enfield, Connecticut, because somebody was saying, well, am I misunderstanding you? God brought revival and people were affected apart from the enlightening word of the message of Jonathan Edwards. I'm only telling you part of the story because revival first has a breaking down element of conviction and leaving a man stripped before the presence of God, and I mentioned this to you before, that there is no genuine revival that I've ever studied where the manifest presence of God came in upon an assembly and you're outside of Christ where the sinner is standing before the presence of God and they're not in terror or afraid, and that's a missing element. However, a lot of people were agitated crying out, many on the floor weeping, but there were pastors within that assembly. Eliezer Wheelock, who was also greatly used as a preacher in the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards himself, the brother I told you about, Solomon Williams, who wrote the ten-year diary of his life. was also a relative of Jonathan Edwards and a pastor, they were all there to counsel the people who were under this duress. So that's when they open up the promises of the gospel, the good news, and enlighten people who are under all of this duress and fear and so on up to where their hope is. Now, what's interesting about that is these people probably knew all this However, during a revival, you receive these things as for your life. I have something here from a book that was also part of the Richard Owen Roberts series. Let me read a couple of these things so you have some idea of what it is like when the manifest presence of God comes. upon an assembly in the year was 1816. The author was Joshua Bradley, who himself was a Baptist. And it was Ackworth, New Jersey, and he said, a solemn and strict attention was paid to the word preached. And a good work progressed gradually until September of 1816, in which time about 60 were added to the church. Now, this is what happens when the Holy Spirit in his manifest presence comes upon an assembly and you have a number of unconverted people. Every seat in the house of God was filled, not with drowsy, inattentive hearers, but with awakened immortals, looking on the lips of the speaker with almost restless attention as if their everlasting all depended on the proper improvement of a single sermon. So during a revival, the pastor is preaching, and it comes with such solemnity because more so than ever, it is attended with the Spirit of God. And so people hang on every word preached because there's such a solemnity. the room. So, let me read one more account and then I'll tell you the story behind this. There's a book called William Reed's Authentic Records of Revival in the United Kingdom in 1859. The following day, they had been praying for revival because they heard about what was going on in 1858 in New York City and I'll explain that in a minute. June 12th was the Sabbath, a day which will never be forgotten by many in this parish. Oh, with what power and majesty Jehovah walked amongst us. Zechariah 12.10 was wonderfully fulfilled to us. That's where it says, I'll pour upon you a spirit of grace and supplication. When the usual time for public worship came, the church was so crowded that we were obliged to retire to the churchyard and conduct the services in the open air. The crowd became immense. the minister and congregation of Scriggin having joined us in a more solemn assembly never met on earth. During the services, the tears and suppressed sobs of many showed that it was no ordinary occasion, that it was the day of God's power, that the spirit of power was dealing to personally with men's souls. When the benediction was pronounced, a few retired, but the great majority lingered still, in fact, as if they were held by a vice or bound with a chain. And in a moment, as if struck with a thunderbolt, about a hundred persons were prostrated on their knees, sending forth a wail from hearts bruised, broken, and overwhelmed with horror, such as never will be forgotten, and which, perhaps for solemnity and awe, will never be surpassed until the judgment day. Oh, what must the wellings of the lost in hell be when the discovery is made that when lamps are gone out, that the day of mercy is past, and the door of hope shut forever! For hours these stricken, smitten, and bleeding souls remained on their bended knees, Unconscious of everything but their own guilt and danger, in need of a Savior, please fervor which surpasses all description. The evening of Wednesday, June 15, was appointed for a prayer meeting, and long before the hour for commencing the service the church was crowded. The awful sadness in every countenance bespoke the deep earnestness within. Even the most ungodly were overawed and wore a solemn sadness on their faces. had a pestilence swept over the neighborhood, leaving one dead in every house. Several, he said, they could not have been more in fear. He says a greater awe would not have been produced. At the close of the services, several efforts were made to dismiss the congregation, but without a veil. And it was not until, now think about this, nine o'clock at night, prayer meetings over, try to dismiss the congregation and send them home. It was not until four o'clock in the morning that the people could be persuaded. to go home. Multitudes were again on that night steeped in awful sorrow and stung with the most poignant remorse for sin. Such an utterable horror overwhelmed one young man that the blood streamed from his mouth and his nose. Another man who all of his life was a profligate had such a vivid view of the horrors of hell and the pains of hell took such hold of him that he cried out like a demoniac that a hundred devils were dragging him to the bottomless pit. But this is history of what the Lord hath done. And today, what we were talking about earlier, nobody believes that this is reproducible because we can't produce it. But the church at large, having so jettisoned the law, From which that conviction comes, the spirit uses, you know, you're looking at the holy law of God and realizing how wicked and hopeless you are. You don't get that conviction when you're preaching, Jesus loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. You just need to invite him into your heart. You're playing to the manipulative effects of emotionalism and To the extent that you're going to deal with sin, it's going to be sin that you sort of feel this, it's not a godly remorse, it's my conscience feels bad. Neither is that the fruit of a genuine work of God. It's what you've just described, and the Holy Spirit is galvanizing your attention on the Word of God being preached, and it's been prepared ahead of time by the faithful saints who are praying for the movement of God's Spirit. Well, and I'll tell you the history behind it to really emphasize the power of prayer, but one thing you have to understand—Edward says this, and I teach this when I teach on Revival—we don't know anywhere in the Scripture that God has limited Himself to how much of the terrors of hell a person may feel in this life. who may be on his deathbed or may be awaken in a revival, no more than we know how much of a foretaste of heaven Stephen felt in the book of Acts chapter 7 and others on their deathbed who are going into glory. God hasn't limited himself. Only that if it came too much upon a person, physically we wouldn't be able to stand it. That's why we have to have bodies that could withstand the one or the other or a soul in hell. But in this life, the body would not be able to stand long under that. It would expire. But the mention of prayer is this revival came. I don't know if you ever heard of the prayer revival, the layman's prayer revival of 1858 in Southern America. And that's where Jeremiah Calvin Landphere was commissioned by a Dutch church in Southern Manhattan. He actually grew up in the church of J.W. Alexander, one of the sons of Archibald Alexander. And I used to, but I used to live in New York City in 1984 and 1985, and I'd take a walk from all the way down from Central Park to South Ferry, where I'd get on a boat to go to the Coast Guard base. So if I saw a church building that looked old, I would go into it. So I actually went into this church and the church of the son of Archibald Alexander, who actually wrote a book on expository preaching, and I got in a conversation with a pastor, and it was really very quickly obvious within a few moments that this was a complete liberal. And I said, I don't know, if you don't believe the Bible is true, how do you wage war with the devil? And he says, well, we don't believe that there's a devil. And that's an indication about how much we need revival. But Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier came up with an idea. He had passed out tracts. He'd used other means of grace, but the business district of New York City was causing the Dutch church to fold. And I've walked up to many of these churches. Trinity Church, which has been rebuilt a couple of times in downtown Manhattan, goes back to 1697. But he decided to have a prayer meeting during the business hour, and he put out a sign, if you can come for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or the whole hour, you're welcome to come. And if you know the story, that first day, and for the listeners who don't know the story, it's written in the book, The Power of Prayer by Samuel Prime, but the first day, for the first half hour, nobody came. And then a few minutes later, the first person came up the stairs, a second and a third, and finally five people with Jeremiah Lanphier. And they thought, well, that's an encouraging start, so they had it again next week, and more came. And to make the story short, it had to be multiplied to three different places. The prayer meeting that was at the Dutch church became a daily thing. It spread through Manhattan. And even there are reports of it that it was in Philadelphia, Detroit. I even know stories of it that it had spread to Kalamazoo, Michigan. And all of this because of a single prayer meeting, and then everybody started to pray. And the story that I just read you, which is on page 22, I've read it so many times to build up my case that this is God that did this. Otherwise, if the devil did this, the kingdom would be divided. God did this. Page 22 of Thoughts on Revival of Religion, presently going on in the United Kingdom, 1859. Authentic Records of Revival of Religion. in the United Kingdom, 1859, that they had started their prayer meetings and it spread to eight different places within the church because they were getting reports of how the Lord was blessing the prayer meetings in Manhattan. And a pastor would read these reports and the people would be stirred up to pray, well, why couldn't God do that here? So that was the year 1859, and it was so widespread. And brother, I've studied the Great Awakening. I've studied the Second Great Awakening. I know nothing for its event and fruit like the revival of 1858 in Manhattan and 1859 in Europe. And yet, brother, this history has been forgotten. It's just amazing to me. So you got three different authors. William Reed, he wrote that one. William Gibson wrote a book called The Year of Grace, How the Revival Came to Ulster, and Thomas Phillips, 1859, written in 1860, How the Revival Came to Well. And I've been narrating this stuff recently. Well, I had noticed that the Manner of Truth had published a book called The 1859 Revival Sermons of the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit by Charles Spurgeon. Well, why were they called revival sermons? Because the 1859 revival came to Spurgeon's congregation, and this was the result of that, and people coming into this church. And this is such an amazing widespread result, and I have read hours from different accounts how it even was felt in Germany and other places. And yet, brother, this history is almost totally unknown in our day. Is this something that's being addressed at all to your knowledge at the seminary level? Are guys being taught the history? No, no. Brother, that's my burden. And you know, it's going to be interesting in the future because I have been put together in this way that this stuff really excites me. I have attended the classes at our own seminary in the church, and I interact with people all the time, but I don't know of any history that has been taught, certainly not at a seminary level. And when we teach church history, we teach Baptist church history. When I taught American church history, I started with the Mayflower, and I went through the congregational history of the leaders of the church in Massachusetts in their persecution of the Baptists. The Presbyterian church history, the formation of the beginning of the seminaries in this country like Andover Theological Seminary in 1808 was started because men were being prepared for the ministry at places like Harvard and Yale, and they were going spiritually bankrupt. I have in my library a book from 1822, which would be 200 years old this year, written by the professor of theology in Andover Theological Seminary, written to Henry Ware, who taught theology at Harvard, called Letters to a Unitarian. So our seminaries were started because of the burden that men had to protect the theological education of future pastors. And I shared this with a polemic I wrote to Sam Waldron recently. and he agrees with me that what I discovered—and I wrote to Ian Murray about this one time—is that between the first generation and the second generation of Princeton Theological Seminary, the three men who were most involved in the seminary in its first years were Archibald Alexander—it was 1812 when Princeton was started—taught all of the classes. The second year, they added Samuel Miller to the professorship who taught ecclesiology, church history, and so on, and Ashbel Green, who was one of the presidents of the College of New Jersey, who also was overseeing this result. And I shared with Pastor Waldron, the difference was, because it started to change with Hodge, and that's a whole other subject that I could get into. Hodge wrote this work called The Great Revival in his Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, which a lot of it is somewhat antagonistic to what went on in The Great Awakening. But I said to Pastor Waldron, the difference was our original seminary professors were also pastors. And when the pastorate and the theological chair got separated, we became scholastics, we became academics, and the experimental pastoral theology started to wane. And within our own movement at this time, and it's a great lamentation of mine, that we have a group of our best theologians who are so taken up right now with classicism, the writings of Thomas' acquaintance, who many of them are antagonistic to the subject of revival like this pastor I was telling you about. And they go to every conference that James De La Zelle or somebody can give them on the divine simplicity and so on. And they have no real interest for the history that I want to get out there, and so I butt heads with them. And I know it's a burden of Paul Washer, too, because he was here for our recent conference, that we don't become so academic that it doesn't affect us experimentally. Yeah, and I think that's, you know, one of the indictments against the church at large right now, not necessarily in the Reformed orbit, but more broadly, is that you don't have pastors who are theologians. And so if you've got seminaries where the theologians have no practical pastoral capacity, either from experience or that they're an academic and a pastor, that they're doing both jobs. You get a disconnect there necessarily, I think, because you don't understand the impact that understanding not only biblical history, but also what has the Spirit done since the closing of the canon. Well, the other thing that happened is that the men that started Princeton Theological Seminary started it in the midst of great revivals that were going on in this country, and I haven't even mentioned the Kentucky Revival. And just a real quick mention about that, the Logg College started a second Logg College, and Samuel Blair was one of the professors, and he personally taught Samuel Davies. And you may have heard the story that David Martin Lloyd-Jones says that Samuel Davies is the greatest preacher that America ever produced. Well, I've read Davy's own words that the greatest preacher he heard in his lifetime was Samuel Blair, his professor. And part of the Great Awakening stories involves Samuel Blair's congregation. So the pastors also lived in the surroundings of revival. and they were very pro-revival, Samuel Davies was and so on. The other thing is that's really important to keep in mind, why in our day are a number of Presbyterians antithetical to revival, and not just in the Protestant Reformed churches up in Grand Rapids? It's because of what is called a covenant nurturing model of rearing your children within a family that to suppose that children are brought up in that nurturing covenant. So what you began to see was they did not appreciate hearing of these children conversion experiences. And that's interesting to me because I came across an article by R. Scott Clark from Westminster West from the Heidel blog in about 2013, where he was examining and commenting on the conversion of Phoebe Bartlett a four-year-old that was converted during the Great Awakening, and Jonathan Edwards was her pastor. And she had an alarming awakening, and her mom couldn't soothe her. And these things were related to Jonathan Edwards. He wasn't initially involved in this, but he reported So, the way she was converted was that she had been catechized, and three of the questions that she had memorized came back to her memory and the gospel truths that were contained therein. What are the means of her conversion? Well, R. Scott Clark said, well, if I'd have been her pastor, which was Jonathan Edwards, I wouldn't have pointed her to this conversion experience. I would point her back to the Abrahamic promises that she enjoys as a covenant child. And I thought, I don't know anything that would be more calculated to delude children than instead of hoping for their own experience and really knowing conviction of sin and the remedy and laying hold of our Lord Jesus Christ. And they are aware of that. And not all children are. I grant that children may not know the time of their conversion. But that's the emphasis. That's why Herman Henkel, a professor of the Protestant Reform Seminary in Grand Rapids, wrote an article—you can look this up—'Ought the Church to Pray for revival. And the sum of it is no, and for one thing, being jettisoned in our day is books like Pilgrim's Progress and the burden of on the back of a Christian and the way he came to the wicked gate because they say that's preparationism and so they get mislabeled that way, but also because they say we don't accept this view of covenant of grace. Our view is and they don't even preach the free offer to gospel or common grace in the Protestant Reformed churches, is that God's normal way of bringing converts into our church is through the covenant nurturing model of discipleship. And the assumption is there, and I'm putting together a number of sources, especially Mark Horne, H-O-R-N-E, wrote an article called, Is God the God of the Mature, Professing Christian Only, that he says, I'm not going to press my children for conversion experience or to go to Christ or whatever. I'm going to raise them up with the assumption that because they were brought into a covenant family, they are Christians. And I think the devil is used in this to delude young children to give them a false hope that they won't, and the parents won't pray. them for a personal conversion, and that's why you have this antagonism toward revival. That's why you had, for example, in our day, a book written by Frank Lambert called Inventing the Great Awakening, which was answered in a work in 2011, but these people want to downplay it. And you know what's interesting, Bud? I think this is really important for your listeners to hear, that the people that praise those works are the historians like Daryl Hart, Mark Noll, Henry Stout, and his work on George Whitefield, who are antagonistic towards people like Ian Murray because of this evangelical emphasis upon the conversions that happened in the Great Awakening. When I did a study, I was doing the history of the American church, and I got to Charles Hodge. I was using Andrew Huffaker's biography, and it was interesting to me that Hodge's lament about the Second Great Awakening is that he had noticed that the number of recorded children's baptisms had decreased during this time of awakening. And my response to that is, well, as a Baptist, I think that's a sign of revival. But it was his lamentation because it was taking the church away from this governing, nurturing model of rearing children that we will not put our emphasis upon upon children's conversions. It's something that we're going to assume. And there was a difference between the first Great Awakening, if you read Archibald Alexander, excuse me, the first generation of Princeton, if you read Archibald Alexander thoughts on religious experience where he talks about conversion in children, it changed by the time that Hodge came on the scene. And Alexander really believed that children early manifest their innate depravity against God, and they need to be converted. And that conversion emphasis for children start to be lost as the covenant model that they hold to in paedo-baptism gained the ascendancy. Interesting. Well, I'll tell you, I don't know where to go from this. Practically I want to put a page There'll be a web page that accompanies this episode because I was going to ask you the question, you know Give us a list of like five books that folks need to read but I don't think you can give me just five What you would recommend, if somebody wants to start a basic study on this history, what do they need to go to? And I want to link those books that you would recommend. Well, first of all, yeah, you have to have the book written about 1840 by Joseph Treacy, a Congregationalist, which incidentally was written after Charles Hodge wrote his constitutional history. So he says he doesn't grant all of his conclusions, but The Great Awakening That term really became popularized by Joseph Tracey because he wanted a name for all of these revivals that were happening through the ministry of Whitefield, Lieutenant Blairs, Jonathan Edwards, and so on. So he's really the one that labeled it the Great Awakening. But for the history of that, there's just nothing equal to it. Also, Bennett Tyler's life of Asa Hell Nettleton for the Second Great Awakening is a must. And there is a more up-to-date extended version of the Life in Nettleton that was written in 2012. But if you read Tyler's you have all you need. What's so nice about these books is now they're in the public domain. You can get them for like a dollar for the Kindle, or you can download the PDF, as I do, to my Kindle to narrate right from there. But also, for the prayer revival of 1859, I had mentioned Samuel Prime, and that's a good source. It might not be as interesting to people, say, to read The Year of Grace by William Gibson, though it is a phenomenal story of what happened in Europe. And then people ask me, when do you think the last really revival that we can document is? And the only thing I can be confident of is probably the 1907 Korean revival that took place in both North and South Korea. There really was an awakening there. And then right before that, the second Wells' Awakening of 1905, but even by then, by 1905, some of the leaders in that just seemed to be a little bit too charismatic for me to be comfortable with them. So, in my revival reading, I usually stick from 1859 and prior to that, but I could give you a bibliography for people that would maybe be interested in the subject who hear this interview. Okay and then you know you can you can link me to some of the recent narrations that you've done that you talked about that would be drawn from the content of some of these resources and and others. Well, for sure, my sermon audio narrations is the largest audiobook collection of revivals that there is anywhere. Because I mentioned the name Richard Owen Roberts and the next Ian Murray, and by the way, they're both 91 years old. I get a kick out of that because they were both such revival historians that Richard Owen Roberts was really a student of revivals. He wrote a bibliography of every book that he knew on revivals that's out there. But he put together a series of six volumes, and none of them are related. They all just talk about different revivals that have happened. For example, the revivals of 1815 to 1818 by Joshua Bradley, William Reed's Authentic Records of Revival, in the United Kingdom in 1859, the revival under William McCulloch, and so on. And so much of those I have narrated, and they've been on Sermon Audio. And if you don't find them under my site, look under the Stillwater Revival book site. He had published a number of the narrations that I've done. And I recently started to do again a number of the sections of John Gilley's historical collections and accounts of revival. as well. And this is an important historical fact. The people that try to debunk the Great Awakening have to try to take apart a magazine that was started in 1743 by a Boston pastor named Thomas Prince and was called Christian History. And 1743, 1744, he was collecting all of the reports that he was hearing from around him that would be submitted to him from the Great Awakening, including Jonathan Edwards' narrative And people have to show that Thomas Prince really did not come up with what would amount to a great awakening, that if you had a revival here or a revival there, that doesn't prove your point. And I ask myself, but why are you people antagonistic to that? If God created the world to have fellowship with his elect, why should it bother them that at certain times he would more manifest himself and bring in a number of people at one time and reinvigorate the church to do her work. Why wouldn't he do that? Jesus said the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Certainly, Jesus is going to have his Holy Spirit that testifies of him, you know, God the Holy Spirit, testifying of Christ. to come in a more manifest presence at certain epochs, and how could we not be praying for that to happen now? We don't want just a local revival in a church of 100 people in Owensboro, Kentucky. We want Kentucky and Tennessee and Missouri and Michigan and all that affected again like it was in the Great Awakening. Our brother, we have had it. If God does not mercifully interpose, we've had it. We're beyond anything that we could do from our end. God must take up our cause or we are undone. Why would people be antagonistic to that and then call themselves Christians? I haven't had a clue. Well, you know, as you, as you understand, uh, what the lord's done in scripture you see you know his example with israel and and you see all these years of disobedience and his chastisement and uh... he always returns he restores because he is faithful uh... but he drives us to our knees and we're not there yet in the church at large we're we're not there uh... we think that we've got the capacity for a shipment You know, the desperation is not there, but I'm telling you, you know, we're still, and people rebuke me for saying this, but we're still too much praying about somebody that has to have a foot surgery or something else rather than crying, God, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Or as Paul Washer says, we pray more to keep people out of heaven, or to pray people into heaven. We're neglecting that. We pray more to keep them here, you know, restore them. They're 99 years old, but we want them restored or whatever. We want also for his kingdom to be expanded and his name to be glorified in the earth and his son to be lifted up. And that's why we got to get more desperate in America. And it's not, brother, it's not going to happen until God turns the screws tighter upon us. But I think about just what God has done since you and I have had our last conversation. We were talking about we really don't believe that this judgment is going to touch us. We think that it can't. The things that have happened even since you and I have talked with what's going on in Russia and how it's affecting our pocketbooks and it's about to get worse, These things may be ramped up, but we cry God and wrath, remember mercy or we're undone. Well, I can only say this in observation. Your studies of revival have been profoundly impactful to you. You're revived. And thank God that you're out there speaking to bring this focus to people and to the church. What hath the Lord wrought? We need to know that. And we fail to know it to our own peril. Well, I would say to your listeners, in closing, If this subject has interested you, please go to Sermon Audio to my site, The Narrated Puritan, and listen to the preface to this Lectures on Revival by Scottish Ministers, 1840. And the man's name is William Hetherington. And listen to what he says, the magnificence of their knowledge of experimental theology and their desire for revival and answering the antagonistics to it. My frustration is, and I tell people, your average adult cannot read a work written for teenagers from the 1830s. But do whatever you can, if he uses a word like concomitant and so on, learn what these words mean so that you can understand what these men said. For example, William Chalmers Burns is in there and so on. These are the things you have to listen to. Well, brother, thank you for your time. We're going to be back together again. I know we're going to have another topic that's going to come up. I'm honored by this. I just count you as a dear friend and thank the Lord for the way that he's using you. Oh, God bless you. Thank you, Tom. Well, God bless you and best to you, my brother. And that concludes this episode of The Bud Zone. The Bud Zone podcast is a member of the Christian Podcast Community, where you can find scores of biblically sound podcasts for your edification and encouragement. Go to christianpodcastcommunity.org to discover more. You are now leaving the Bud Zone. Thank you for listening. God bless you. And just a reminder, no doctrines have been harmed during the recording of this show.