You've had your way to the intersection of faith and politics.

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And we also encourage you to let your local station know if you'd like to hear us locally and we're not on a station there close to you. If you're not familiar with which station we're on close to you, then go check it out at wallbuilders live.com. Here we go to Building on the American Heritage Series with David Barton. David Revival is something that pastors talk about. We as Christians all say we want it. What exactly is it? How do you know

when you're in one? And what should we be praying for? Well, I'll tell you, that is a big focus in America right now is revival. I've never seen the type of prayer I'm seeing now. We have the National Day of Prayer. We've had that for decades. Days of Prayer go back hundreds of years. but in the past several National Days of Prayer,

there have been over

50,000 prayer groups on each National Day of Prayer. Not 50,000 people. You're talking about 50,000

different groups. In civic arenas. I mean, they're meeting at courthouses, they're meeting

at police stations, at fire stations, they're meeting at school, 50,000 groups praying, and at big

emphasis has been praying for revival. Yeah. We're praying for revival. What's it look like? Yeah. And the best answer to that is, well, let's go back and look at some previous ones and see what's common to them. The first thing that's common to all revivals, and you have several biblical revivals. You have several American historical revivals. You have the first great awakening, the second and third great awakening kind of run into each

other.

You have the turn of the century revivals. You know these revivals in American history. What's characteristic is that always lasts for in decades. So it's not that. Now, I thought revival was something that happened quickly. You had a move of the spirit. That's right. The nation was in revival and that's it. People think if God answers our prayers revival, he's going to swoop in and fix every problem in the nation.

Well, I remember when to weekend revivals. is this not what you're talking about that's the thing yeah yeah not not a historical sense that's not

a revival the first great awakening went from 1730 to 1770 that's 40 years the second great

awakening and bob's up against a third great awakening but that goes from 1801 to 1878.

That's 77 years.

Wow.

You could have been born in 1802.

You could have lived a full 75 year, happy life, died in 1877, and never knew you were in a revival because your whole life was spent.

Your whole life was part of that revival.

Yeah, so let's go back to the first great awakening, because historians agree, without that, there is no United States of America. It took that revival to lay the political landscape, to lay the spiritual landscape that allowed America to become an independent nation, create a form of government, create a bill of rights, etc. So help me get this in the timeline then. So the first Great Awakening is before the Revolution.

1730 to 1770 is the Great Awakening. First Great Awakening. 1776 is the Declaration of Independence. 1787, Constitution is written. 1789 the Bill of Rights is written. And that's where we start. This revival you're talking about. This is where all the seeds were planted. This is where all for 40 years, all this thinking was changed, and then it manifested itself politically in the next several years after that. Because all this stuff that's been talked about over here, it's like, wow, now we've got a chance to do this in policy. We've never been able to do this before. We've always been under the British monarch. We can do it ourselves. Whole different approach. So if there was such a good result, meaning our nation being born and all the great things that happened with our document, how did we get the revival itself then? That's what people won now. We want to have a revival like that. Well, you go back to someone like George Woodfield. There's a lot of preachers in the first great awakening. Gilbert Tennant, Gilbert and Willem Tenet were big preachers, Jonathan in Edwards, that famous sermon on sinners in the hand of angry God. You got Samuel Davies. You got Samuel Cooper. You got Jonathan Mayhew. You got all these famous preachers, but probably the best known as George Whitfield. Yeah. And by the way, here's some of Whitfield's original writings from the First Great Awakening. And here's some sermons from Matthew, who was also part of the First Great

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