When a Nation Awakens to Christ

A Vision for Another Spiritual Awakening

By Bob Bakke

Troubles are buffeting our nation. There’s no need to recount them. Respected voices say that our nation, as it was conceived, is lost, and the American Church forever diminished.

In spite of these voices—and without being pollyannaish—I count myself among those who see the U.S. as ripe for revival and spiritual awakening. I’ve studied the often-grizzly stories of Church history. I personally experienced the riots, the burned-out cities, the assassinations, the threat of nuclear war, and massive political upheavals of the 1960s. Yet, in the midst of tragic times throughout history, we have had many awakenings in our land—both in the colonial period and since our nation’s founding.

God’s people are being rattled from their small, distracted, complacent, and lackadaisical faith. They are being confronted in their sin, perhaps as a separating of the wheat from the chaff (Matt. 3:11–12). At the same time, millions of nonbelievers are afraid—hungry for hope and meaning. Some are running away from events while others resort to angry, delusional, or violent ideas. We see scores of people acting out their inner fear of meaninglessness.

While God’s people need a fresh wind of the Spirit to enliven, embolden, and refine their faith (revival), an unbelieving world is realizing they need God (spiritual awakening). This sounds like a confluence ripe for God’s intervention, and I think we are seeing evidences of such.

Qualities of the Spirit’s Work

A spiritual awakening in a nonbelieving world hinges on a couple of assumptions:

1. that a revived Church will embrace the challenges of our day. God works in partnership with His people. Augustine wrote: “Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not.”

2. that the Church gets to work with the grace and the power of the Spirit for the glory of Christ.

If the Church rises to the challenge of these assumptions, then what might spiritual awakening look like in our day?

Let’s keep it simple. Act 1–2 reveals the qualities present whenever the Spirit revives His people and awakens the lost. In Jerusalem, Pentecost’s transforming power of the Spirit on His people arose out of sustained and earnest prayer. The transformation produced powerful preaching. That preaching resulted in profound repentance and faith. And that profound faith launched and sustained a radical way of life that impacted every facet of the city:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved (Acts 2:42–47).

The sweeping of the Spirit penetrated households, shops, vineyards, farms, and places of worship in Jerusalem.

One of the clearest U.S. examples of this sweeping change resulted from a move of God in Rochester, NY, between September 1830 and March 1831. Rochester was a young city, dominated by mills and shipping along the newly constructed Erie canal. The population was between 10,000–20,000, yet more than 100,000 conversions were recorded in an area within a 100-mile radius.

The spiritual awakening followed prayer and resulted in powerful preaching. It transformed churches, families, households, local government, and every industry. Historians also record the general disappearance of crime. In the words of Charles Finney, it “swept through the town, and converted the great mass of the most influential people, both men and women, the change in the order, sobriety, and morality of the city was wonderful. . . . The public affairs of the city have been, in a great measure in the hands of Christian men; and the controlling influences in the community have been on the side of Christ.”1

Every facet of the city—industry, commerce, culture, and government—was infiltrated by newly awakened believers. Paul E. Johnson provides an academic analysis of the Rochester revival—and it’s astonishing. Johnson quotes Lyman Beecher, one the era’s most prominent evangelists, saying that the Rochester awakening of 1831 “was the greatest work of God, and the greatest revival of religion that the world has ever seen.”2

The issue of slavery is another example of awakening impact. Johnson writes:

Historian Gilbert Barnes wanted to explain why, in the 1830s, critics of slavery rejected gradualist techniques, recruited thousands of new supporters, and attacked the South by demanding immediate abolition. He analyzed the rhetoric and tactics of the movement and the sources of its support and argued convincingly that antislavery immediatism was a direct outgrowth of the revival of 1830–31.3 [In fact], in the 1830s newly converted evangelicals invaded [most social] organizations and took most of them over . . . to eliminate sin from society [including the church, industry, economics, politics, marriage and homelife] and pave the way for the Second Coming.4

Nothing Can Thwart the Spirit’s Work

Does this give us hope for today? Well, of course it should!

Rochester and Jerusalem (not to mention God’s people such as Moses in Egypt, David before Goliath, Jehoshaphat in the Valley of Beracah, and Peter in Herod’s prison) should remind us that no set of obstacles or enemies can thwart the hand of God when He decides to move. Here are some other hopeful signs of a coming spiritual awakening:

  • We should be deeply impressed with the quantity and quality of prayer being mobilized across our nation. The bride of Christ is waking up to the dangers in front of her.
  • Even as scandals and compromise continue among certain Christians, a corresponding clarity and resolve are coalescing among others.
  • A unity, unlike any in previous generations, is forming. This unity is diverse, multiethnic, and multinational.
  • We hear reports of revival meetings almost everywhere on the continent—especially in some of the hardest hit cities in recent unrest, such as Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and Louisville.

What’s Missing for the Spirit’s Work

The one thing missing, however, is vision. I believe God will provide it, but we must pray for that united vision.

Charles Finney and his ilk, through their crusades, clearly united around the gospel. But they also envisioned what a city or a nation would look like if God were to come upon it. They pressed and prayed toward that vision with one mind until God brought it to pass. That vision attracted tributaries that became a river which overflowed its banks.

We are missing such clarity. Without it, we may disperse or drift away from each other before achieving God’s glorious end for our generation. I believe we are, indeed, ripe for revival and spiritual awakening. Let’s ask God to give us the vision to see what its fulfillment would look like. And let’s ask God to give leaders the wisdom to embrace it. 

1Garth M. Rosell and A. G. Dupuis “Original Memoirs of Charles Finney” (1989): https://www.gospeltruth.net/memoirsrestored/memrest21.htm.

2Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revival in Rochester (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1978), 5.

3Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Anti-Slavery Impulse: 1830-1844 (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), 6.

4Johnson, 44.

DR. BOB BAKKE is senior pastor of Hillside Church of Bloomington, MN, a member of America’s National Prayer Committee, and the producer of several national prayer broadcasts.