Another Great Awakening Needed

A good pastor friend of mine pointed out to me that the Wales Revival in 1904 is not usually considered the Fourth Great Awakening, but is considered by some to be the Third.  It is more commonly referred to as the Wales Revival.  This article has been edited to correct that.

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The Wales Revival started in 1904.

Taverns went broke.

Police departments formed gospel quartets because they had no one to arrest.

Coal mines shut down temporarily because the miners stopped swearing and the mule teams couldn’t understand commands.

Stores closed in the middle of the day so people and employees could attend revival meetings.

Dr. James C. Dennison has written an article called “God is not a hobby: The Fifth Great Awakening and the Future of America”.   He says more Muslims have become Christians in the last 15 years than in the last 15 centuries.  An Arab Sheik says 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity every day,  with 6 million a year.  Dennison points out that even if the numbers are inflated to incite Islamic reaction, it’s clear there is some kind of movement toward Christianity among Muslims.

The World Christian Encyclopedia sites 82,000 people around the world become Christians every day.

However, in Western Europe and North America combined, only 6,000 of the 82,000 are coming to Christ.

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The most affluent continent in the world, and yet only 7% of world-wide conversions to Christianity occur here.

I believe there has never been an onslaught against Christianity in America as is occurring today.   Political Correctness has become the new religion of America, and it has many faces and many supporters who are no longer able to recognize the truth so great is their deception.

If they are not deceived, then they are the deceivers.

We are bombarded daily by those who preach “tolerance”, “equality”, “acceptance”, and “inclusiveness”, yet they do not practice what they preach.

The hypocrisy is overwhelming.

The reason America and Western Europe are spiritually stagnant is because we have forgotten what it means to be persecuted—really persecuted– for our faith.  American Christianity has become a “parochial-politically-correct” religion that is full of “Bible verse clichés” and shallow theology.  Feel-good, breakfast club churches that preach and teach prosperity salvation are clogging the highway to hell with people who have bought into the lie that giving more money assures their admittance into Heaven and increased wealth on earth.  Tel-evangelists talk about “seed money” which they promise will grow into some amount of wealth for “planting” it–but only if you plant in their church.  It’s a false doctrine of giving.

America has also forgotten the true Sovereignty, Majesty, and Holiness of God.  We have forgotten the Mystery of God, and no longer believe He is at work in our lives and the world.  What we cannot explain is no longer attributed to God, but rather to  circumstance or “luck” or even the occult.

In 1789 Fisher Ames, congressman from Massachusetts, proposed the as wording of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or to prevent the free exercise thereof, or to infringe the rights of conscience.”  He warned at the Massachusetts Convention Jan 15, 1788, “Democracy without morals…is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction.”  In another work “The Dangers of American Liberty” (1805) he said “The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness, which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be, liberty.”

He was correct:  In 2003 The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in the Goodridge case, necessitated the state recognize same-sex marriage.

Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 2001) described Ames as becoming more and more intense as he watched the progress of democracy in America.   Ames said “Of all the terrors of democracy, the worst is its destruction of moral habits.”

But hear what Kirk said:

“The press supplies an endless stimulus to popular imagination and passion; the press lives upon heat and coarse drama and incessant restlessness.  It has inspired ignorance with presumption.”  Ames believed the key to political decency [is] in private morality.

Ames also said “…when the tyranny of the majority leads to chaos, society WILL submit to rule by the sword.”