The Awakenings

Today's Scripture

Ezekiel 37:4-5 — "Then he said to me, 'Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.'"

Psalm 85:6 — "Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?"

John 3:7-8 — "Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."

The Big Idea

In the early 1700s, the churches of England and America looked like Ezekiel's valley — technically religious, spiritually dead. Then, within a few years on both sides of the Atlantic, something happened that the people involved could only describe as wind: hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were awakened to God. Historians still argue about how much the revivals changed society. That they changed countless lives — and helped launch an age of orphanages, schools, and reform — is part of the historical record.

Reflection

A valley of very dry bones

Ezekiel's vision is the Bible's most haunting picture of religious deadness. A valley full of bones — not sick people, not sleeping people, bones, "very dry" (Ezekiel 37:2). And God asks the prophet the question that hangs over every cold church in every century: "Son of man, can these bones live?" Ezekiel's answer is perfect: "O Lord GOD, you know." Not yes. Not no. You know — it depends entirely on you.

That was the spiritual landscape of the English-speaking world in the early 1700s. In England, fashionable thinkers promoted a polite, distant God who never interfered; gin was cheap, the poor were drowning in it, and many pulpits offered little more than moral essays. In New England, the Puritan fire of the founders had banked down to habit; people inherited church membership the way they inherited furniture. Religion was everywhere. Life was scarce.

What happened next followed Ezekiel's script with eerie precision. God told the prophet to do something that looks absurd: preach to bones. "Prophesy over these bones... Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live" (Ezekiel 37:4-5). Not a new program. Not better music. The word of God, plus the breath of God — and "they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army" (Ezekiel 37:10). The revivalists' entire method was that verse: preach the word, beg for the breath.

Northampton: the surprising work

In December 1734, in the small frontier town of Northampton, Massachusetts, the young pastor Jonathan Edwards was preaching justification by faith — Luther's old doctrine from Day 1 — when something began to happen that he had not organized and could not explain. Conversions came in waves. Within months, the town's taverns emptied and its meetinghouse overflowed. Edwards wrote it all down with a scientist's care in a little book that became an international bestseller and put the word "revival" into the world's vocabulary:

"The town seemed to be full of the presence of God: it never was so full of love, nor of joy, and yet so full of distress, as it was then." — Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God

Full of joy and distress — joy in the awakened, distress in those still seeking. Edwards knew this experience from the inside. Years earlier, reading 1 Timothy as a teenager, he had been ambushed by God:

"As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from any thing I ever experienced before." — Jonathan Edwards, Personal Narrative

A new sense. Not new information — Edwards already knew his theology — but a new taste, the way knowing honey is sweet differs from tasting it. That is what Jesus told Nicodemus, a man with maximum religious information: John 3:7-8 — "You must be born again. The wind blows where it wishes... So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." The Awakening's central claim was simply that verse: being religious and being alive are not the same thing, and only the Spirit's wind makes the difference.

Now the honest part, which this plan owes you. Edwards — the most penetrating mind in American religious history, the man who wrote that true holiness is love — purchased and enslaved human beings, and defended slaveholding when it was challenged. There is no softening that contradiction; it should unsettle us. It is also evidence for something Edwards himself taught: even the regenerate see partially, and whole generations of Christians can be blind to enormous evil while weeping over their private sins. Hold both facts. We will watch the next generation — including people converted in these very revivals — begin to see what he refused to see.

Edwards spent his later years sorting revival's gold from its glitter, because the Awakening produced real fanaticism alongside real grace, and critics pounced. His mature verdict cut both ways: emotion is no proof of the Spirit, but a religion with no holy emotion is dead on arrival:

"True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections." — Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections

Fields for a cathedral

Meanwhile in England, the wind was hitting two ordained ministers who were, by their own account, not yet converted. John Wesley — rigorous, methodical, a missionary failure fresh back from Georgia — went "very unwillingly" to a Bible study on Aldersgate Street in London on May 24, 1738, where someone was reading Luther's preface to Romans (the same preface we quoted on Day 1). His journal entry that night became the most famous paragraph in Methodist history:

"I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." — John Wesley, Journal, May 24, 1738

His friend George Whitefield, possessor of the most famous voice of the century, soon hit a practical problem: churches began closing their pulpits to this enthusiasm. So in February 1739, Whitefield did something scandalous for an Anglican clergyman — he walked out to Kingswood, near Bristol, and preached in the open air to coal miners, a community so rough that respectable England had simply written it off. No one had bothered to bring them the gospel. Whitefield recorded what he saw from the makeshift pulpit:

"The first discovery of their being affected was to see the white gutters made by their tears which plentifully fell down their black cheeks, as they came out of their coal pits." — George Whitefield, Journals

White tear-tracks on coal-black faces. It is one of the most famous images in church history, and it should be: the men polite religion had abandoned, weeping at the news that God loved them. Crowds grew from hundreds to reported tens of thousands. Wesley, initially horrified by anything so irregular as preaching outside a building, swallowed his scruples, took to the fields — and when critics said he was invading other ministers' territory, gave the answer that defined the next century of evangelism:

"I look upon all the world as my parish." — John Wesley, Journal, June 11, 1739

For the next fifty years Wesley rode an estimated quarter-million miles on horseback, preaching some forty thousand sermons, organizing converts into small groups for confession, Scripture, and accountability. It was Acts 2 replaying at eighteenth-century scale: people "cut to the heart," asking "Brothers, what shall we do?", repenting by the thousand, then devoting themselves to fellowship and the breaking of bread (Acts 2:37-41). And it was indiscriminate in exactly the way Joel had promised: Joel 2:28 — "I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh" — miners, servants, duchesses, slaves and slaveholders, scholars and plowboys. Paul's logic in Romans 10:14 had become a transportation strategy: "How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?" If the parish won't come to the preaching, the preaching rides to the parish.

What revival left behind

Did the Awakenings change anything beyond church attendance? Here historians genuinely argue, and you should know the argument. In 1906 the French historian Élie Halévy proposed a famous thesis: that Methodism so transformed England's working and middle classes that it helped spare England the kind of bloody revolution that tore France apart in 1789. Some historians have defended versions of the claim; others sharply contest it as far too neat. Treat it as an open question, honestly labeled.

What is not in serious dispute is the trail of institutions. The revival generation and their children built at a pace that is hard to exaggerate: Robert Raikes's Sunday school movement (begun 1780) was teaching hundreds of thousands of poor children to read within a generation. Converts and heirs of the revival threw themselves into prison reform alongside John Howard and Elizabeth Fry, founded orphanages like George Müller's in Bristol (begun 1836, eventually housing thousands of children, funded by prayer), built schools and hospitals and dispensaries, and formed the societies-for-everything that became the modern charity sector. Wesley's last letter, days before his death, urged a young member of Parliament to persevere in the fight against the slave trade — but that story belongs to tomorrow.

The logic linking new birth to social reform was not complicated. 2 Corinthians 5:17 — "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." Multiply new creations by a hundred thousand and neighborhoods change, because people who have been forgiven much start noticing whom they have been ignoring. The revivals did not preach social reform; they produced reformers, the way fire produces heat.

And the gospel turn was there all along, hiding in the mechanics. Notice that nobody in this story awakened themselves — not Edwards reading 1 Timothy, not Wesley dragged unwillingly to Aldersgate, not the miners who only came to gawk. The wind blew where it wished. Revival is simply the doctrine of grace from Day 1, applied at the scale of a town: dead things made alive, as a gift. Which means the right response to our own dry-bones age is not nostalgia or technique, but Ezekiel's posture — preach the word, and beg for the breath. Wesley died in 1791, at eighty-seven, surrounded by friends. His last clear words gathered up the whole half-century:

"The best of all is, God is with us." — John Wesley, last words, March 2, 1791

Going Deeper

Revival historians notice a pattern: awakenings are almost always preceded by small groups of people praying stubbornly for them. Be one today. Set a timer for ten minutes. Spend the first five praying Psalm 85:6 for yourself — name the dry places honestly. Spend the last five praying for two specific people and one institution (your church, your school, your town) by name. Then put a weekly repeat on it. Nothing about Northampton in 1734 looked promising in 1733.