Are We In a Revival? – At the ProFamily Legislators Conference, part 2

Are We In a Revival? –  At the ProFamily Legislators Conference: Today, we hear David Barton’s presentation at the ProFamily Legislators Conference about revival. How do we recognize revival? What does it mean to be in a revival? Could we be in a revival already? You will hear the historical perspective as we discuss previous revivals and what they looked like, and what they meant for the direction of the country.

Rick Green:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture is Wallbuilders, where we take on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. Today, we’re in the middle of a three day program. David Barton, speaking at the Pro Family Legislators Conference just a few weeks ago, and so we’re going to jump right into that. I’m Rick Green, by the way, America’s Constitution coach and a former Texas legislator. Normally here with David and Tim Barton. David, of course, America’s premier historian and our founder of WallBuilders and Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and President of Wallbuilders. But today we’re going to head out to the Legislators Conference and listen to David’s presentation. Yesterday, we got the first part. We’ll jump right back in where we left off. Here’s David Barton at the Pro Family Legislators Conference.

David Barton:

Who today would tell somebody that you’re not ready to become a Christian. Somebody came and said, I want to become a Christian. Easy, Let’s do it. Here’s a prayer, you pray that. Then they said No. Now why would they have said no to him back then? Why? Why was he rejected? I want to become a Christian. They said No. Because it goes back to what Jesus said in Luke 14. He says, You have to count cost before you become my disciple. You Dwight, you don’t understand what’s going to be required of you as a Christian. And until you understand the price, you’re going to have to pay as a Christian, you need to study a little more. And so what happened was Jesus said, You can’t be my disciple if you don’t count the cost. He says, Who goes out and attacks a city without knowing the size? Enemy, who goes out and builds a tower without knowing how much it’s going to cost you. You never starting to a project without knowing what it’s going to cost you. And you just… You don’t need to get started as a Christian without knowing the costs. You’re going to have to pay for that because you might decide it’s too high a price. You might walk away. And so Jesus laid it out. Really simple to his disciples. And this is the way the church is to practice it. So and in case of Dwight, he didn’t say the Sinner’s Prayer, which is pretty much where a whole lot of evangelical churches gone, today. You’ll receive Jesus as your prayer. You can say, Follow this, Pray with me, Pray this prayer out loud. And so we’ve done the sinner’s prayer. Now I’ll point out, if you go back through American history, you take the Great Revivalist of this seventeen hundreds. You take the Great Revivalist The eighteen hundreds. You take even what happened all the way back with great leaders across the world from Paul. None of them use the sinner’s prayer. That was not part of what any of them did to get people brought to Christ. So there was no sinner’s prayer in use at all? This is not what they did. What they did was… Here’s what it costs to be a disciple. You’ll be disciple. Your Israel’s going to cost you. There was a price to pay. And so they did exactly what you just said. They were making disciples of everyone, not making converts of everyone. Now the difference is the Sinner’s prayer. Where did it come to use? Historically, the Sinner’s prayers was introduced by Billy Sunday in the nineteen twenties. And it was a way to count people at the meeting. She just didn’t know, the crowds were so massive and we don’t really know who’s been affected. Say a Sinner’s prayer, and that way whoever says that we can count them at the end and know what kind of impact. So we’re trying to measure the impact by counting heads and we’re counting not on what they know or or what price they’re willing to pay. We’re counting here. And so this is introduced in the nineteen twenties and the church today acts like this is what we’ve always done throughout history. No, it’s not. This is a really new innovation. And it’s a nineteen twenties innovation. And it’s not part of history at all. And so Jesus go back to discipleship, It’s counting the cost. Did you know that in the Book of Acts it talks about the seat of the unlearned. The unlearned was part of the conversion process to become a Christian. The book of Acts, It was estimated… Historians say that it was probably a three to four year process. You had different levels as you learned. In this level, you’d move up to the next seat. So the seat of the unlearned- these are the ones who want to know something about Christianity. They want to know what’s required, what is involved with, I become a Christian. So you go there and you have classes, you learn about it, and then you go to the next level. And it took three to four years to actually be considered a Christian, even though they had a lot of responses, three thousand, five thousand, day of Pentecost they had that. But they went to see that, then learned is what the book of Acts tells us and said that was a Jewish tradition. That you had to go through some classes. You had to to learn what this is all about. You know it’s like you want to become a mechanic. You don’t just sign up for… You have classes to go through. You can’t just say, I’ve declared myself a mechanic, I’m a mechanic. No, you have to go through a learning process. And so that’s what the church used to do was at that type of learning process. So that the concept that we have now of everything being about discipleship is what it should be. But we’ve made it more about evangelism which is good, because we know that’s one of the fivefold ministry in the New Testament as evangelists. But evangelist perked your interest and then you get into the process and you have to learn what’s coming. And so that was just the way the church worked. That’s the way church worked in America. It’s the way church worked in Scotland, in Europe and elsewhere. So that’s the second thing is, it’s about discipleship It’s not about getting people converted. It’s about getting people to thank right, to act right, to live right, to live out their faith. It’s about making disciples of all men, teaching them what Jesus is at all those different areas. So that’s the second aspect. The third is it’s very practical. Christians today should be able to put a Bible verse to every one of those. Because every one of those things are very clearly taught in the Bible. This is part of the problem we have with a lot of professing Christians. They don’t have a clue what the Bible says on practical life or even how to live it. So this is, this is something that happens with reliable… As you start making your faith very practical, you start seeing how to apply God’s principles to every aspect of life. And this is something the church doesn’t do by and large. This is something that most pastors can’t do by and large. If I asked pastors to to give me verses on free enterprise, it’s going to be probably a long conversation while I wait for them to answer the same thing with,  What does God say about progressive income tax, with the way Jesus has teachings on what we call the progressive income tax, different title back then, but it’s the same. It’s the same thing of taxing people and different rates in different brackets of what? What does the Bible say about that? So all of these things are are biblical issues, but it takes biblical knowledge. And let me take you back. The first time we get introduced to Abraham is in Genesis 12. And so in Genesis 12 introduced Abraham. God really likes Abraham and he makes a covenant with Abraham. And so what happens is Abraham has his sons Isaac and Jacob. From Jacob… Jacob marries Rachel, Leah, and they have twelve children. Those become the twelve Tribes of Israel. The one we’d know the most about is is going to be Joseph. There’s more time spent on Joseph than any of the other twelve sans. And so Joseph we know, get sold into slavery. Then he ends up in Egypt and all the brothers think he’s dead. But he ends up being number two in command in Egypt. And so being number two in command in Egypt… The brothers get into a drought. They need food. They go to Egypt and they finally get reunited with their brother and Joseph says, Hey, Is dad’s still alive? Hadn’t seen him in decades. Yeah, he’s still alive. So he goes and he gets reunited with Dad, And he said, Hey, why don’t you just come to Egypt, I’ve got a really good gig there. I’m second in command I have a great place to stay. Will take care of you. So everybody picks up and they moved to Egypt and that’s a really good deal for the family until they have a Pharaoh that forgets who they were and then they all go in slavery. So you have slavery for four hundred years. And after four hundred years of slavery, Gods says not doing this anymore. That’s enough of that. So he sends Charlton Heston to deliver them. So then Charlton Heston comes and… Moses comes and Moses delivers them. And so leads them out and does those ten great miracles. The ten great plagues that happen. God shows his power. He leads them out, and so Moses gets to a mountain. God kills Egyptians at the Red Sea, so they don’t have an enemy behind them at all. They now have free reign to go wherever they want. They can go where they want. So they have a pillar of fire. The pillar of cloud that leads them and leads them out to the mountain. And when they get out to the mountain God says okay, we’re stopping here. You, you guys, nobody’s chasing you. And you don’t have a clue where you’re going or what’s expected of you. So we didn’t have a meeting right here. So they camped there at the mountain and this is where God delivers them, 613 laws. Now the reason this is significant is because these people had been a slaver for four hundred years. The problem from being a slaver for four hundred years is you act like a slave, you think like a slave. You expect like a slave. That’s why when they got free for a while… This man… Let’s go back to Egypt. It’s not nearly as much work to be a slave. Because at least they feed us there. And so why would people want to go back to Egypt? Because you got a slave mentality and you’ve been a slave for four hundred years. Used to people taking care of you and doing everything. And God’s got to break you of that. And so we’re going to stop at the mountain. I’m going to show you a new way to live and He gives them six hundred and thirteen laws. And the six hundred and thirteen laws encompass everything that any civil government ever needs to address. They’re all there. And this is why Israel went from being a slave nation to being the greatest empire in the ancient world. Because they took that code that dealt with every business thing, every moral issue, every military issue, every immigration issue. They had three groups of emigrants, mean just that they have what we would call a natural born citizen or green card holder and  immigrant citizens. So they had three levels of citizenship and the law may… all this stuff. It is there. And so what happens is when they start to go into the promised land, they’re still not thinking right. And that’s why He says, Okay, you guys just stay in the wilderness till the old ones all die off and you new ones… You’ll get it, you’ll go in. So he’s still trying to get the thinking right. This is discipleship- Get your thinking right on this. And this is what they worked on. So God leads a man. And it’s interesting that when you look at the 613 things, we were fully aware of that in the early church. Let me show you some of the sermons that were preached back then, with all the stuff you saw at the collection the other night. We’ve got that, since thousands… All sermons, and tell me If you’ve heard the sermons in your in your experience, probably not.

Rick Green:

Okay folks, Quick break. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to WallBuilders

Rick Green:

Welcome back to WallBuilders, we’re going to jump right back in with David at the Pro Family Legislators conference.

David Barton:

This is a sermon preached in front of Governor John Hancock, Lieutenant Governor Sam Adams and the council Senate, House representatives from 1619 until about the nineteen twenties and thirties. It was typical for every state legislative session, on it’s opening day, to have a minister come in and give guidance on the issues that we’re facing. If the issue the session is going to be education- Well, here’s what the Bible says about education. Whatever the issue was, it’s what they would deal with. So if it was military, if it was taxes. If it was whatever it was, you’d have a sermon. Come in and say, Here’s what God says about that particular issue. Now we have about 260 of these sermons on the website, right? But this is how we did. We talked about government. I have not heard many sermons at all in my lifetime about government out of pulpits and God has a whole lot to say about it, as evidenced by the fact He gave 613 laws. Here’s a sermon on judges. It’s a big… That’s a big, significant sermon. Matter of fact, judges to me is the number one issue in any election, especially federal election, because in Isaiah 1:26, God says I’ll give you judges at the beginning, lawyers as at the first and then You’ll be called the nation of righteousness, a holy nation. It’s interesting. God ties the righteous of a nation to the judges you have in the nation, which is where we got Roe vs Wade. We got the redefinition of marriage as well. We get the removal of prayer and Bible from schools. That wasn’t legislatures that did that, It was judges did that. And the whole nation pays for what the judges did. So we put a whole lot of emphasis on judges. Judges being accountable. We used to elect judges. Now twenty four states have gone to Missouri plan where we appoint judges. Not a good deal. We elect judges in the Bible. So there’s all this stuff on judges in the Scriptures. And that’s literally the kind of sermons we have because we had judges. Bible talks about judges, we have sermons on judges. Same way. Here’s a summary of the relation the medical profession to the ministry, healthcare. God is part of what He gave to the Jews in the 613 laws. There an extensive health code, and there was a doctor in 1961 that ended up writing this book called None of These Diseases. It’s based on the passage in Exodus 15:26 where God told His people says, If you will do all the things that I have told you with healthcare, I’ll put on you none of the diseases that I put on Israel. If you’ll do my health care laws, you won’t have the health problems. These are the nation’s health… And so it’s extensive code of healthcare in the Bible. And so the doctor said, Well, you know, here we are 1961 and as it turns out, we’ve got dozens of studies that show God’s healthcare laws were right. Now that’s ‘61. We’ve got so many more studies today that show that. But most people have no clue that God… healthcare. But we had sermons on it back in the day. So we had sermons on healthcare. Here’s one on the character and tenancy… the property tax adapted to a permit system. Taxation by Reverend Glover. Anybody ever heard a sermon on property tax today? There’s so many taxes. The Bible deals with what are good taxes, what are bad taxes, thus covered Biblically so. Economics was an issue, recovered the existence of God demonstrated in the works of creation. Sermon preached on the last day. That sounds like an evolution/creation sermon. It is but in 1795. I thought Darwin is the guy who did evolution in 1859. What Darwin did significantly was nothing new in evolution. He took twenty five hundred years of evolutionary teaching and synthesized the book. What Darwin did was made evolution easy to understand. Every single thing Darwin posited, everything that everyone back in that day on evolution said had been in place since the time of Aristotle. There was not a new… the primordial slime, the intermediary species, the evolution, the rise from ape to man. All of that is. There are twenty five hundred years before Darwin wrote his book. What Darwin did was made it easy to understand. So there’s nothing new. So back in the day, it’s interesting to see how many fathers wrote… the Founding Fathers wrote about evolution. Matter of fact, a Daniel Webster 1801. His senior paper at Dartmouth University was Creation vs. Evolution and that’s what he focused on When John Quincy Adams wrote a book that came out at 1848 as a long, extensive area on creation vs. Evolution. This is not a new topic to them. We think it’s new to Darwin. By the way, As Glenn mentioned the other day, when you look at Darwin’s title, this is the title of the book, The Origin of Species, but the part that nobody covers today: the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. If you buy Darwin’s Origin of Species today and get it on the web, it will not have that subtitle there. That is part of the subtitle. And his position was the more evolved you are, the lighter your skin, is the less evolved you are, the darker your skin is. In the Descent of man. He actually has eight passages where he talks about… You know, we really need to send dark skinned people back to Africa till they turn white, and then bring them back to America where they’ll integrate really well. So the whole thing today, if you want to go cancel, somebody want we canceled Darwin, because that’s where racist this is. Systemize systematic scientific… We’re just following the science as is all we’re doing. We’re just… That’s where racism comes from us. Or just follow now. Racism comes from from the heart. The Jim Crow kind of racism that America got into came from follow in the science where we started codified that and making it law. Racism is an issue of the heart, it goes back to the Bible. So we had a lot of sermons and scientific controversies. This is a ceremonial, gambling, the sinfulness and pernicious nature game. In this 1751. By the way, you’ll find that most of the sermons you’re looking at here were preached during Great Awakenings. These are revival sermons and revivals we get back to being very practical. 1751 is the heart of the first Great Awakening. This is a sermon on the Liquor Law of Massachusetts. Is it good or bad? It’s 1852. This is the heart of the Second Great Awakening. We said… Here’s what the Legislature did this week. Here’s the law they passed. Here’s what the Bible says. Okay, that’s a good law. It matches up. The Legislature did it right. Here’s one on the slave trade. This is another Great Awakening era sermon. This one’s marriage scripturally considered. This is 1837. This is the Second Great Awakening. Here’s what the Legislature did on a marriage law, this week. Here’s what the Bible says, Okay, that laws acceptable. We would look at laws from the perspective of the Bible. And these are sermons on laws that were passed last week or last month or whatever. Here’s a sermon, Call for Civil Disobedience, The Fugitive Slave law. Such a wicked law that if any Christian obeys this federal law, you will be disobeying God, and cross then… And this is part of the Second Great Awakening, calling for massive civil disobedience because if you obey a law that God is against, you’re not going to get blessed by God. So you have to disobey. Bet you’re not hearing that today from most churches. These are revival sermons. So social policy. Here’s one on elections, so voting? This is an area where we talked even on Thursday, says suppress Christian voter turnout. It’s really down. We don’t have our leaders urging Christians to be involved in civil process to vote even. This is a discourse on earthquakes. 1755. This is a first Great Awakening sermon. This actually is Reverend Dr. Jonathan Mayhew, one of the guys who kept the revival going in Boston. Here’s a sermon five years later on the great fire. So if there’s something in the news, we talked about it, got a natural disaster going on. What’s the Bible say about natural disasters? How to handle what happens. Hears the Cry of Saddam Inquired Into, its a LGBTQ sermon, This doesn’t happen much at all. This is one of those… two point eight kind of percent sermons of Pastors talk about. Seventy Seven percent of Christians today self-censor on this issue because they’re afraid of being attacked if they say something because they know that whatever they believe is going to be attacked and they don’t want to be attacked. And so with no backbone, we don’t talk about this stuff, but these are sermons we had on it. Here’s the sermon on discovery of the new planet. 1847, Uranus. This is a sermon on comets. Down at the bottom it’s two sermons occasion by the late blazing star. Here’s a Sermon on Solar Eclipse. 1806. That’s the early part of the Second Great Awakening. We covered all sorts of stuff on science and astronomy because the Bible covers stuff of science and astronomy. Here’s this sermon,The Infirmities and Comfortsof Old Age. Probably not a popular topic, but everybody grows old and has to deal with it. So sermons on Aging. Here’s a sermon, 1795, The Education of Children. And so we covered education, which would be a really ripe topic today for people to talk about. Religion, patriotism, decisions of a good soldier. The 1755, this is a sermon preached by Samuel Davies, this guy who kept the revival going an extra nineteen years in Virginia Valley’s preaching about the military because we have all sorts of stuff in the Bible on militaries. Here’s a sermon on the moral view of Railroads. 1851 Moral view of Railroads?

Rick Green:

Alright folks, last break of the day. Stay with us. We’ll be right back on WallBuilders.

Rick Green:

Welcome back to WallBuilders. We can jump right back in with David Barton speaking at the Pro Family Legislators Conference.

David Barton:

Whatever was on the news, we’re going to show you what Bible talks about. Bible doesn’t talk about railroads. Yeah, but does talk about transportation. He went through. The principles of transportation is what he went through on the surface. When you say the biblical principles of transportation, Here’s where railroads fit in, right over here. And here’s the moral view of railroads. This is the second Great Awakening sermon. So this is the type stuff that was happening. The Second Great Awakening. A voice of warning to Christians on the ensuing election of President of the United States. We talked about politics, everything. This is discipleship. This is what a revival looks like. It should cover all the areas. You get real specific. You’re doing discipleship, And so that’s what the sermons were. So why did they preach a sermon? Because we view what the scripture says in Second Timothy three, sixteen and seventeen. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God is profitable for doctrine, for reproof for correction, for instruction, righteousness. Why did God give us… And I believe that’s the number one doctrine of the Bible. That’s where we get the teaching that the Word of God is inspired, inerrant and infallible. It is true all the time. It comes from that path. I think that is the most important teaching in the Bible because if the Bible’s not true, you really can’t trust it. And so you got to pick and choose what you’re going to go with. So that’s a super important teaching. Why did God give us inspired scripture? He tells us the next verse that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work, every good work. We used to believe the Bible dealt with every single aspect of life. We have made it a spiritual book. Now it used to be a book for a living. It used to be a law book. It used to be an education. It used to be a military… Bible used  to be everything you needed. Because that’s what took slaves and turned them into nations, turned them into empires. So Biblically, how about today? Where are we today? All again, when you see all these issues, they’re not covered. Two point eight percent of pastors cover these issues. And that’s doing polling with George Barna. Polling five hundred churches a day. What we find is two point eight percent of pastors… It’s hard to have revival if you don’t know what the Word of God says about some… Because the revival is coming back to God’s standards. Is coming back to what God wants done. And if we’re not talking about, it’s hard for people to come back to it. So, and by the way, don’t think I’m being discouraging here because I think we’re in revival. And I think I can prove that, and I’ll show it to you later. But only six percent of Americans… They have a biblical worldview. This is why you have so much attack when you try to do something good. Legislatively ninety four percent of the people have not a clue what you’re doing. It doesn’t comport with their secular world view. So you get attacked for it. And this is where churches could step up and give you a lot of help. But even the pastors don’t know a lot of the stuff. Because they’ve been trained as more, not as disciples, but as converts. They’re the good ones own salvation, but they’re not good on living. And so that’s where you’ve seen a real decline. Christians in America back in the year, 2000, eighty five percent of Americans profess to be Christians. In the year 2020, Twenty years later, sixty five percent of Americans profess to be Christians. We’ve seen this thing nosedive and again working with Barna calling people who no longer go to church. Why did you stop going to church? Two out of three would go just because there’s nothing relevant going on there. It’s just a waste of my morning. I don’t get anything I can live with during the week. I want something that helped me face what’s going in life. We actually did a large study with Barnna Were, that we asked the people who go to church. What do you need for the week? What do you need to hear from pastor? Food? And they gave fourteen areas where that, seventy per cent of people in church say that I really am hungry for this area. This. This is what I faced in the week. This is what I need to be trained on. And that’s where we found only two point eight percent of pastors actually address the areas that people are hungry for. And that’s why people have stopped going to church. So practical. Ceremony was was part of what went on. And you remember Jesus all the teaches he did in the Gospels. He talked about church and he talked about the Kingdom of God. How much did He talk about church? Three times. How much did he talk about the kingdom of God? Hundred and forty one times Jesus wasn’t in the building the church. He was in building the kingdom. And that’s why he was so practical on the… He sat and gave his disciples so much guidance and that’s the difference. We can’t build a church. We got to build the kingdom. We’ve got to get people thinking right, act and right doing right, behaving right. That’s where Ben Franklin said, I love going around Philadelphia now because everybody’s singing the song when they go down the street. Never heard that before. Whitfield comes to town, gets revival started. Gilbert Tennent keeps their rival going. So that’s a third thing. Practical. The other four going to move much more quickly. So those are the three big ones then the four. They said four are kind of the manifestations of that change occurs slowly. If you go and look specifically with the first Great Awakening. How long did the first Great Awakening last? forty years? It was a forty year revival. We often think if we have a revival it’s going to get fixed and it’s going to be quick. And it’s going to be really nice to have people different that I work with. Now it’s forty year process. Take the second Great Awakening. Second Great Awakening went from 1801 to 1878, seventy seven years. You could have been born in 1802 died 1877, been seventy five years old. Lived your whole life in a revival, and you had no clue that everything you experience was in revival. Revivals are slow. They take time because it takes a while for people to change their thinking and then takes a while to change their behavior.

Rick Green:

Okay folks, we’re out of time for today. That was the second part in a three part series. David Barton speaking at our Pro Family Legislators conference. Tomorrow, we’ll get the conclusion, so be sure and tune in tomorrow. Thanks so much for listening to Wallbuilders!