A Nation in Need of Repentance and a Third Great Awakening
Recent events on all sorts of fronts remind us virtually every day how sorely our nation needs the gift of repentance and a Third Great Awakening.
Satan must be having a field day with what is going on in modern America. It seems like every week that goes by there’s some new tragedy unfolding in this country.
I think part of that reason is because we have forgotten God. We have no fear of the reality of hell that awaits those who knowingly reject Christ. Jesus died for sinners, going to hell for us on the cross, so we don’t have to go. But because there’s no fear of God in the land, there’s no fear of the consequences after death.
We kick God out of all of our institutions, then we turn around and get mad at Him for not intervening when some madman goes on a killing rampage. This reminds me of the verse in Proverbs that says, “A man’s own folly ruins his life. Yet his heart rages against the Lord.”
I’ll never forget what an Alabama black pastor said to me one time when I interviewed him about Judge Roy Moore, the Ten Commandments judge. He said, “All across American people should stand with Judge Moore about the Ten Commandments. Why? Because when they took prayer out of school, you didn’t hear about kids killing each other, about them bringing dope to school, shooting the teachers, you didn’t hear about that. You see what I’m saying? That’s what’s wrong. We need more God-fearing.”
We are in great need of national revival. America was born in part through the revival that swept through the colonies. We call it now the First Great Awakening.
Founding father John Adams said, “The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the mind and hearts of the people and change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.”
In his book, “A History of the American People,” the great historian Paul Johnson adds, “The Great Awakening was thus the proto-revolutionary event, the formative movement in American history, preceding the political drive for independence, and making it possible” (p. 116).
The Second Great Awakening in the early part of the 19th century helped end the horrible scourge of slavery.
During the dark days of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed April 30, 1863 as a national day of fasting and prayer. In his proclamation, he noted, “We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God.”
He went on to say, “Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!”
And his conclusion was, “It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, who spent about a decade in a Soviet gulag and who wrote massive award-winning books on the failed Soviet Union, said this at Harvard in 1978: “More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
He went on to say, “Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Today, America is in great need to stop forgetting God. We are in need of a great national revival—a Third Great Awakening. I believe we should all pray to that end, before it’s too late. It’s America’s only real hope in the long run.
