00:00:40.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:47.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:00:59.000Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at AndrewandTodd.com.
00:01:08.000Joining us now is Dr. Jerry Newcomb, serves as the executive director of the Providence Forum and as a senior producer, on-air host, and columnist for James Kennedy Ministries.
00:01:20.000And he is a historian and an expert on all things revivals and the history of America's great awakenings, a topic I am passionate about.
00:01:29.000And Dr. Newcomb, welcome to the program.
00:01:42.000Well, you could define it in different ways.
00:01:45.000And I would say, in terms of the real big picture, D. James Kennedy, you just mentioned the founder of D. James Kennedy Ministries, a noted author and so forth.
00:01:56.000He said in the big picture of things, he looked at it this way: America was born because of the first great awakening.
00:02:04.000That was in the 1730s and 40s in America, okay?
00:02:08.000And that helped propel really the whole push for independence.
00:02:13.000Then the second major great awakening was in the early 1800s.
00:02:18.000And that pricked many people's consciences about the evils of slavery and the inconsistency of having slavery with a country that's based on the idea that all men are created equal.
00:02:28.000And it really helped push ultimately the end of slavery.
00:02:33.000Obviously, it happened through the Civil War, but there was a great deal of push for that.
00:02:37.000And then he said, Dr. Kennedy, now we are in need of a great third great awakening.
00:02:56.000And I remember about 20 years ago, there was an event like that at Wheaton College.
00:03:00.000And my wife and I met at Wheaton Graduate School about 45 years ago.
00:03:06.000By God's grace, I was so grateful for that.
00:03:08.000But anyway, so there have been these little movements, but I would say I kind of tend to agree with Dr. Kennedy that in the big picture you're looking at, the first great awakening, the second great awakening, and now the need for a third great awakening.
00:03:24.000But see, part of the difference is that sometimes these spiritual movements that happen here and there, they don't necessarily reform and transform great portions of the society and the people.
00:03:39.000And that's, I think, maybe where the difference boils down to how you define a great revival or great awakening.
00:03:46.000Well, let's talk about the first great awakening that led to the American Revolution.
00:03:52.000Talk about the major characters, Mayhew, Edwards, Whitfield, and talk about how that led into the American Revolution.
00:04:01.000It created the framework and the foundation.
00:04:04.000Yes, John Adams said, our second president said that, in effect, the revolution occurred in the people's hearts a generation before the actual American War for Independence.
00:04:18.000And he's referring to, in some ways, this whole push for the Great Awakening.
00:04:25.000I would say that really historians would credit Jonathan Edwards, Reverend Jonathan Edwards, Calvinist preacher, Congregationalist minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, in a pulpit there.
00:04:40.000And under his preaching on a series of sermons about justification by faith alone in Jesus Christ, that that's really when revival began to start taking place.
00:04:56.000And the character of New England began to slowly be transformed into a place.
00:05:02.000And then George Whitfield came over from England and he preached not only in Massachusetts, but up and down the whole North Atlantic coast in all the different colonies.
00:05:14.000In fact, Dr. Paul Johnson, great British historian who wrote a book that's a wonderful book called The History of the American People.
00:05:26.000And he said that George Whitfield is likely the first American or the first American, first person, because he was British, not American, but the first person that we know of that visited all 13 of the colonies in America.
00:05:46.000So in effect, the whole thing begins with Jonathan Edwards and then spreads through George Whitfield to the rest of the colonies.
00:05:55.000And there were different preachers that were involved.
00:05:58.000You mentioned Jonathan Mayhew, who died, I believe, in 1760, but he was a minister in the Boston area.
00:06:08.000And he had some very interesting things to say about politics.
00:06:12.000And he even said in a famous sermon that when the king does so many evil things in tyranny, he does, for all intents and purposes, unking himself.
00:06:25.000Now, he was writing this in 1760, and he was, I'm sorry, he wrote it in 1750.
00:06:31.000He died in 1760, but he was actually referring to the 100th anniversary of the execution of Charles I, who was a tyrant.
00:06:41.000And King Charles I was the one with the star chamber where Christians, Puritans, Presbyterians, Quakers were being persecuted for believing in Jesus.
00:06:53.000And, you know, it was a terrible, terrible thing.
00:06:56.000In fact, there was a civil war in England, and it was brought about, frankly, through Charles I's intolerance and persecution of the Christians.
00:07:07.000And so, anyway, bottom line is that God was working in different ways.
00:07:13.000But I want to say this about Jonathan Edwards, because he really is the one under whom God really sparked the first great awakening.
00:08:30.000He gets fired by his own church, and yet they didn't have somebody to fill in the pulpit.
00:08:34.000And so week after week on a Saturday afternoon, there'd be a knock at his door and it would be one of the leaders in the church saying, you know, Reverend, I'm sorry, but we don't have anybody to fill in the pulpit.
00:08:48.000Would you please preach tomorrow morning?
00:08:52.000And he would do it a week at a time because that's what God called him to do.
00:08:57.000And I just think that speaks volumes about him.
00:09:00.000I think we have to get to a point where we have to humble ourselves before God and repent of our wicked ways.
00:09:08.000And that's one of the elements of revival that is so critical and so needed.
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00:10:44.000Doctor, can you elaborate a little bit on the content of the most popular message by Jonathan Edwards?
00:10:51.000Is that message the entirety of what he was sharing?
00:10:55.000Should he be best known for that message?
00:10:57.000Is that just the one that got the headlines?
00:10:59.000Or do you think that is actually Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, a proper summary of the message he was most well known to deliver?
00:11:09.000Well, it's certainly his best known sermon.
00:11:12.000You know, earlier I referenced Paul Johnson.
00:11:15.000Paul Johnson said, ironically, while Jonathan Edwards is best known for that particular sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, he preached more about the love and the joy of God, you know, than he did the other.
00:11:31.000But the point of the sinners in the hands of an angry God is one that people should not forget, that if you are, You know, separated from God, which we are naturally, and you have not been born again, you have not been regenerated, you are in a precarious, dangerous state spiritually.
00:11:55.000I mean, if I could use an analogy from the Passover, 1400 years before Jesus was even born, God instructed the people of Israel about the Passover.
00:12:06.000And He said, What you need to do is you take this lamb that's without blemish, you sacrifice that lamb without breaking any of its bones, and then you take the blood and you put it on the top and the two sides of your house.
00:12:20.000Then, when the angel of death sees the blood on the top and the two sides of your house, you think I'm making the sign of the cross?
00:12:28.000You bet I am because that's what they did, you know, 1,400 years before Jesus died.
00:12:34.000And through faith in the Lamb of God, whom Jesus is, you know, when John the Baptist saw him, he said, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
00:12:44.000And so, through faith in Jesus Christ, God takes away our sins and he passes over the judgment because we are covered under the blood of the Lamb.
00:12:56.000God made him who knew no sin, that is, Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God.
00:13:04.000The basic gospel message sometimes gets obscured, even in a church context, Charlie, where people may go to church week after week, and in effect, they think that essentially what they're being told is don't do this and do that.
00:13:20.000And, you know, in a real sense, the message of Christianity isn't do or don't, it's done.
00:13:30.000And so, the bottom line is that when the true gospel just gets preached, even in simple ways or in sophisticated ways, it has a profound impact.
00:13:42.000And in the case of Jonathan Edwards, he was focusing on how people were in their natural states in a very dangerous condition, even if they were church members.
00:13:52.000So, the idea of repentance was a core theme.
00:15:11.000And he said, by the way, that day of fasting and prayer should take place one month from now.
00:15:19.000And so that was at the end of April, 1863.
00:15:22.000And within two days, Stonewall Jackson was shot.
00:15:26.000And, you know, that's an amazing thing.
00:15:28.000Stonewall Jackson seemed to have his own personal relationship with Jesus, but he was born south of the Mason-Dixon line.
00:15:36.000I don't want to get into the Civil War and so forth, but the bottom line is Stonewall Jackson was one of the best generals America ever produced.
00:15:44.000And as long as he was alive, you know, the ongoing scourge of the Civil War continued.
00:15:52.000So bottom line is Lincoln was saying we need to repent.
00:15:55.000By the way, I believe Stonewall Jackson personally would have said, yeah, we need to repent.
00:15:59.000You cannot get to a place of repentance if you think that you're doing everything right.
00:16:06.000When Roe versus Wade fell as the law of the land last year, all it did was increase what pro-abortion states are doing to entice and mislead women to abort their children.
00:16:16.000States are now advertising to travel just to get an abortion.
00:16:22.000So the need to provide the truth as girls and women are contemplating what to do about their pregnancy is greater now than ever before.
00:16:29.000Ultrasounds save babies because ultrasounds give the truth at a time everyone else is saying it's not just a baby, it's just a clump of cells.
00:16:37.000When you introduce a girl to her baby by providing an ultrasound, you are giving her the truth at the most important time of her life.
00:16:44.000And more than 85% of the time, she will choose life.
00:16:47.000You don't have to make a lot of noise to make a big difference for life.
00:16:50.000Just give an ultrasound at preborn.org to be a hero for life.
00:17:17.000The Great Awakening was a spiritual movement with political consequences.
00:17:21.000It reached its zenith with George Whitfield, but this powerful series of religious revivals all began with a humble Calvinist minister named Jonathan Edwards.
00:17:31.000His life and his preaching helped bring about what's called the First Great Awakening in America that led to the salvation of up to half of the South and one-third of the North.
00:17:42.000The ideas of the Awakening, as historians say, laid the foundations for what became the Revolution.
00:17:49.000The Awakening was the sowing of seeds for what became the freedom of the revolution.
00:17:56.000So I'm a great admirer of Whitfield, and Americans should appreciate his immense contribution.
00:18:03.000Anyone who's able to get Oz Guinness in a documentary or a film deserves great credit.
00:18:07.000Dr. Newcomb, how do we watch that film and tell us more about it?
00:18:11.000And there are other great guests, too, also in this whole series: Dennis Prager and Rabbi Daniel Lappin and Janet Ellis and Eric Metaxas and my good friend, Bill Federer, and as well as Bill Peter Lovak.
00:18:42.000And I said, you know, Bill, the more you study America's true history, the more you realize how the Christian faith, the Bible, played such an incredibly pivotal role.
00:18:54.000And he said, yeah, it's like digging in a well.
00:18:57.000And the more you dig, you know, the more and more, or like a mine digging in a mine, the more you dig, the more you come out with all this, you know, gold and so forth.
00:19:59.000In government schools, though, where I grew up, I was taught the founding fathers were deists or they didn't have much fascination with religion.
00:20:14.000I mean, for example, you take the Declaration of Independence.
00:20:17.000It was 56 men that met in Philadelphia in 1776.
00:20:22.000And of those 56 men, the vast majority of them, 52 approximately, were not only professing Christians, but they were involved in Trinitarian churches.
00:20:36.000I say that as opposed to Unitarian churches, where you do begin with a bit of liberalism.
00:20:41.000Now, Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, I actually co-wrote a whole book about him with Dr. Mark Beliels.
00:20:49.000And the gist of the book, it shows two things, really, and documents it.
00:20:54.000One, that is, Jefferson was not a lifelong skeptic.
00:20:58.000Yeah, later in his life, he did entertain some serious doubts about core Christian doctrines.
00:21:03.000And there's no, you know, getting around that.
00:21:06.000But he didn't hold those views earlier.
00:21:08.000So, for example, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, when he wrote the Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777, which was adopted in 1786.
00:21:18.000But anyway, he wrote that in 1777 that same year, 1777, as a layman, he was the person who helped found a church which called an evangelical minister, the Reverend Charles Clay.
00:21:35.000And the name of that church was the Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville.
00:21:42.000And this Charles Clay, whom they called, was an evangelical.
00:21:46.000And in fact, in that book, by God's grace, we were able to put in print for the first time ever, to our knowledge, two of the sermons of Charles Clay.
00:21:55.000These are sermons that Thomas Jefferson himself supported.
00:22:00.000So point number one in the book, Jefferson was not a lifelong skeptic.
00:22:04.000Point number two is that he did not believe in the separation of God and state.
00:22:10.000So for example, when he was president, he went to church on a regular basis where?
00:22:21.000Not just religious, Christian worship services there.
00:22:24.000And I told that to a friend of mine one time who was an elderly gentleman at the time.
00:22:30.000And he said, well, what about the separation of church and state?
00:22:35.000I say, you know, well, that's not what the founders understood.
00:22:38.000You know, they certainly didn't intend to have the separation of God and state.
00:22:42.000And so it's, it's, as you were saying, it's also a, um, it's totally taken out of context.
00:22:49.000Um, one liner in the letter to the Danbury Baptist Convention where he was actually giving them assurances the government would not come after them.
00:22:59.000And it was what, readopathed by the Burger or the Warren Court, one of the two as just kind of reapplied in, I think, a very unconstitutional and sloppy manner.
00:23:08.000So, but let me ask you, because the critique that then some Christians will say is, but these founding fathers didn't believe in their faith enough to put it into the founding documents, into the Declaration of the Constitution.
00:23:58.000And John Eidesmo, great law professor, author of Christianity and the Constitution, I asked him one time, what would you say to those who say, well, in the year of our Lord, that's a mere formality.
00:24:10.000His answer was, that's like saying an attestation clause in a will is a mere formality.
00:25:40.000Yeah, but he says the Son of Man has been given the task of judging because he is the Son of Man.
00:25:46.000Jesus is the judge, and the founders knew that.
00:25:49.000And so I think that's a very significant point.
00:25:52.000And then finally, you have a reference to trusting in divine providence.
00:25:56.000We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
00:26:02.000And so, you know, God is interwoven in the Declaration of Independence.
00:26:08.000And as far as the Constitution itself and the Declaration, both of them are beneficiaries of the covenantal constitutional making process in American history.
00:26:21.000And it all began in the Mayflower Compact.
00:26:24.000It began in the cabin of the Mayflower when the pilgrims set down an agreement for self-government under God, which they all signed as witnesses, the Mayflower Compact.
00:26:36.000They talked about how they took this voyage for the glory of God in the advancement of the Christian faith.
00:26:43.000We do covenant and combine ourselves into a civil body politic.
00:26:47.000That Mayflower Compact, 1620, was the first of about 100, maybe more of these different constitutions, covenants, essentially, based on the biblical model of covenant that the pilgrims, the Puritans, the Quakers, Presbyterians, et cetera, came up with agreements for self-government under God.
00:27:07.000And so by the time the founding fathers sat down to, you know, first of all, to declare independence in 1776, and then right up the Constitution, 1787, they had had about 150 years of constitution making.
00:27:22.000And it all gets back to the biblical concept of covenant.
00:27:38.000The fundamental orders of Connecticut.
00:27:40.000That was the first fully developed constitution written on American soil.
00:27:44.000Connecticut was founded by Thomas Hooker, the Reverend Thomas Hooker.
00:27:48.000He led his followers from Boston, Massachusetts.
00:27:52.000They had a minor disagreement among their fellow Puritans.
00:27:56.000But as they created this settlement in 1638, he preached a sermon based on Deuteronomy 1.
00:28:04.000And the gist of it was that the Lord God was giving them an opportunity that through their people, they would choose for themselves their rulers.
00:28:16.000And then a year later, 1639, they developed the gist of what he said in that sermon into the fundamental orders of Connecticut, the first fully developed constitution on American soil.
00:28:29.000And it talks about the reason they made this settlement in the first place was for the purity and liberty of the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
00:28:39.000And historians tell us that the fundamental orders of Connecticut is in lineal descent to the U.S. Constitution.
00:28:48.000It is, you know, the Constitution itself is derived in part from what you find in that fundamental orders of Connecticut.
00:28:57.000That's why to this day, you see a license plate from Connecticut, a constitution state.
00:29:05.000It was interesting to listen to Marjorie Taylor Greene about the politics in different states.
00:29:10.000Unfortunately, Connecticut today, like most of the New England states, is very, very liberal.
00:29:16.000It is not in any way faithful to the original ideas that helped give it birth and the freedom that they enjoyed initially because of the gospel.
00:29:27.000Yeah, they are far from adhering to the beauty of the Constitution.
00:29:31.000I want to just re-emphasize one part of what you spoke about, which is that 150-year period where the colonists wrestled with, toiled over this idea of self-government.
00:29:46.000And then obviously the awakening revival leading to the American Revolution.
00:29:51.000We might be seeing a modern day revival break out today.
00:29:56.000What are the signs that history tells us that would say, yes, we are in the middle of an awakening or a revival?
00:30:02.000Well, I think one of them would be the great interest in getting back to our true roots.
00:30:50.000I remember when Peter Marshall, the son of the chaplain, he wrote a book or co-wrote a book in the 70s, the 1970s, The Light and the Glory.
00:31:01.000And that was one of the first steps towards reminding Americans about our true history in the modern era, because so much of this was rewritten, not just in the 60s and 70s, but even as early as the 1930s.
00:31:16.000You're probably familiar with Dr. Peter Lobeck, perhaps.
00:31:19.000He and I co-wrote a book about the faith of George Washington.
00:31:22.000It's called George Washington's Sacred Fire.
00:31:24.000It's a real big, thick book about his faith and so forth.
00:31:27.000But Dr. Lilbach was showing how even as early as the 1930s, there were some historians that were trying to, you know, miscategorize George Washington, take him out of the category of Christian and put him in the category of effectively unbeliever.
00:31:44.000And then in the 1960s, that was definitively done through a book about George Washington's religion.
00:31:51.000And in fact, our book, George Washington's Sacred Fire, really responded directly to that.
00:31:56.000And I think one of the highest compliments I got, if I could say, tell this anecdote real fast, George Washington's main church went before he died.
00:32:05.000It's where the funeral was, Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia.
00:32:09.000It's a Episcopal church, Church of England.
00:32:12.000And anyway, the docents there told my co-author, Dr. Lilback, when they saw him after the book came out and so forth, they said, We want to thank you because you gave George Washington back to our church.
00:32:27.000We used to have to tell people, you know, well, the scholars say he's an unbeliever or, you know, a deist and so forth, but didn't really believe all this stuff.
00:32:37.000George Washington had a copy of the book of common prayer that he made for his own, you know, and he read it all the time, read the Bible all the time.
00:32:46.000And so anyway, we've been robbed of our history, Charlie.