Turining Point Church

In 18^th century England, times were dark. To begin with, the official Church of England was dead as a doornail. Zeal of the spiritual kind was actually frowned upon, and church services provided the best opportunity to take a nap. If one got saved it was by mistake, for the gospel wasn’t preached. Meaningless form and dead ritual ruled the day.

As they say, nature abhors a vacuum. This was never truer than of England in those days. With no Bible world-view to guide them, the philosophical vacuum was filled with an embrace of deism. Deism claims that God created things at the beginning, and then stepped out of the picture entirely. He didn’t involve Himself with the affairs of men, answer prayers, or intervene whatsoever in history. Hence, God was viewed as cold, distant, and apathetic to men’s plight.

As goes the pulpit, so goes the pew. And as goes the pew, so goes the country. Since the pulpit and pew alike were dead, and the toxic philosophy of deism held sway, the country of England spiraled into a cesspool of sin and depravity. Immorality of the grossest kind took over. Crime was so bad that the only measure authorities could come up with to stop it was to mete out severe punishment for even petty offenses. Up to 160 crimes were punishable by death. Hangings were utterly commonplace and became gala affairs of celebration. One man’s execution was attended by multiple thousands of people who cheered as the offender’s body dangled.

During this dark hour the “gin craze” was born. In 1689 prohibition had been passed. Not to be outdone, Englishmen began to brew their own. Within a generation, every sixth house in London became a gin shop and the nation wallowed in an uncontrollable orgy of gin drinking. Children were born addicted to alcohol. The English people became what they had never been before— cruel and inhuman. One woman, in order to get money for gin, strangled her child to sell his clothes for her next bottle.

The old saying, “It is darkest before the dawn,” may have sprung from the knowledge of how God works. History shows that God often chooses to move mightily in the midnight hour when things couldn’t look bleaker. The Prophet Isaiah wrote, “When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD will lift up a standard against him” (Is.59:19). This is what happened in England.

It was among a people broken by gin and sin that a voice suddenly began to shake the land. A young man of 22, George Whitefield, began to preach the simple message, “You must be born again!” His voice was extraordinary. In a day with no sound amplification of any kind, he could be heard by as many as 30,000 people at a time. The Church of England, unimpressed with his fiery message, had shut the doors on the young evangelist. George decided to take to the fields.

Soon, immense crowds quickly gathered to hear the young wunderkind. Whitefield was known to preach so hard that he would go behind a tree afterward and vomit blood. The fire of God’s Spirit consumed him. The King and Queen, along with other English aristocracy, requested his presence in the court that they might hear his message for themselves. Benjamin Franklin attended his services to see if the legend of his marvelous voice were true. It was, and the two became friends for life (though Franklin remained a deist).

John and Charles Wesley, friends of Whitefield’s from their days at Oxford University, soon joined his efforts at reaching the masses with the gospel. The flame they lit became known as the Great Awakening. It’s fire devoured England and made its way across the channel to early colonial America. Cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and New York were engulfed in its irresistible wave. There is no doubt that the Awakening paved the way for the American Revolution, and greatly influenced the philosophy behind the American Constitution. As our verse above has noted of the disciples of old, these men also “turned the world upside down.”

One historian describes the Awakening this way:

“A religious revival burst forth…which changed in a few years the whole temper of English society. The Church was restored to life and activity. Religion carried to the hearts of the people a fresh spirit of moral zeal, while it purified our literature and our manners. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave trade, and gave the first impulse to popular education.”