Today on Living on the Edge, Chip welcomes guest pastor John Dickerson. Revival outlasts us when we train up today's young people to be tomorrow's Christ-centered leaders. We are preparing them to go serve Christ in every corner of the culture, in every art and industry, in every vocation of our nation. Hello, I'm Dave Drui, and this is Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. We're continuing our series, Hearts on Fire: How God Sparks Revival, with Chip's friend and guest teacher, John Dickerson.
If you have kids, grandkids, nieces, or nephews, you've probably looked at the headlines and wondered what kind of world they're growing up in. Today, John says there's real reason for hope. And you may be surprised how much of it depends on ordinary believers like you and me who choose to invest in young people right now. Here's our guest teacher, John Dickerson, with a message titled "The Next Generation and Revival." Well, when I look at my kids as a dad, I want the best for them in the future, and I don't know about you, if you've got kids or grandkids or maybe nieces or nephews. You look at the divisions happening in our nation, and just some of the different trajectories, if you will.
Wow! If that group keeps going that way, if that group keeps going that way, and I'm not finding a lot of hope. Outside of what we have in Jesus, there are there are people who mean well. I think on both sides, but even though they mean well, when they don't have Jesus, they're not able to live that kingdom ethic of loving your neighbor as yourself. And so, the more they mean well, the more they just yell at each other, and the more they seem to hate each other.
And I love it that our church is really a refuge from all of that. That as the nation fractures and frays, that there is truly this. Light were to be the light of the world as we live out Jesus' way of life. And the question I want to wrestle with in our time today is: How do you prepare your kids to live in this increasingly divided, increasingly violent culture? If we wish to see revival sustain over decades, then we have to go all in to raise the next generation for Christ.
I wonder right now. Allow the Holy Spirit to breathe in your imagination. You can say, "Wow!" If someday we had a leader of the nation, or a leader of a college, university president, or a leader of an industry, and they exhibited Christ's balance of grace and truth like this, what would you desire to see as a follower of Jesus? Pray for that. I want to give you today three ways to ignite.
The next generation toward lasting revival. First way is that we train, direct, and instruct our young people toward Christ and toward Scripture.
Now we're doing this with love, of course, because that's the way Christ did it, and we're doing this with grace. But we are also doing this very directly. We're being directive. This is what the Bible says. Here is God's will.
This is God's plan. Because we're not being good instructors in life if we don't give clarity and direction. Here's God's way of life. Look at these young revival leaders from Scripture. Josiah, who we just learned about, was trained by Zephaniah.
Esther, a young revival leader who saved her whole nation from genocide, from murder, was trained up by her uncle Mordecai. John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Jesus, was trained up by two very elderly parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, and the list goes on. Every young revival leader was trained by someone in the faithful remnant.
Now, because God has chosen for you and me to live in the United States of America, I believe we have a responsibility to be aware of His work in our land. There have been four nationwide Great Awakenings where the church got so revived that it became the cultural thing. And and not everyone was a Christian, and not everyone was Christ-like. But millions—the percentage would just grow and grow. And so then, how people would vote and who they would want to lead them would shift toward biblical values.
Never becoming perfect. It's not the kingdom of God yet, but moving toward that. And every time that has happened, it's been birthed out of peril, division, and struggle. First Great Awakening led to the Revolutionary War. Actually, Second Great Awakening really dealt head on with the sin of slavery, which was still being allowed in this nation.
And the abolitionists formed. It was a group of Christians who said, "We will give our lives to abolish slavery." Took them a long time, but eventually it moved the whole population to where the majority of people were anti-slavery, and then you had the Civil War as a decisive moment. In the lead up to the Civil War, you had abolitionist leaders like Frederick Douglass, one of my favorite abolitionist leaders. Like all the abolitionist leaders that I've studied, he was a Christian and someone who read the Bible regularly. Frederick Douglass has a quote that I want to show you here about the book that shaped the nation against slavery.
The book was written by a young woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, who was friends with her, wrote her letters. This is one of those letters. He says, "I desire to express, dear Madame Harriet Beecher Stowe, my deep sense of the value and of the service which you have already rendered my afflicted and persecuted people by the publication of your inimitable book on the subject of slavery. That contribution to our bleeding cause alone involves in us a debt of gratitude which cannot be measured." It's a long letter that goes on because Harriet Beecher Stowe was asking him, as a former slave. How do I best represent your people as I call the nation toward freedom?
Now, Harriet Beecher Stowe did not pull that off perfectly, but her motives were sincere, and the result of her work is undeniable. The best-selling book of the 1800s is the Bible. The second best-selling book is Harriet Beecher Stowe's book, which was specifically written to Northern Christians who thought, "Yeah, I'm against slavery, but it's not my problem." And it was specifically written to shake them awake spiritually and morally, and say, "Slavery is your problem, and if you're a follower of Jesus, you have to do something about it." Now, according to historians and according to book sales, that book is what moved the national conscience against slavery. Here's a picture of Harriet Beecher Stowe at age forty. But what I love is the beginning of the story.
Both Frederick Douglass and her became the abolitionist leaders they did because of older Christians who had invested into them as young people. In the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe, it was her dad who was a pastor. Her dad, Lyman Beecher, was a leader in the Second Great Awakening, and so Harriet Beecher Stowe grew up. Often, she'd be playing on the floor of her dad's study as he would be writing sermons against slavery, all based on scripture to bring about the kingdom of God here. And he'd be reading scripture and practicing them aloud.
And it was the investment of her dad. Dozens of Sunday school teachers, Christian school teachers, godly siblings, godly aunts and uncles, that shaped her to write a book that was. She wasn't just trying to write a bestseller or a good story. She was intentionally trying to move people's belief to be against slavery and to do whatever it took to end it.
So influential was that book that many historians say she's right up there with Abraham Lincoln as far as the cultural. Engines that brought about the emancipation. Let us pray bold prayers of faith for the young people in our movement. Let us pray bold prayers of faith that they would be culture shapers like Frederick Douglass and like Harriet Beecher Stowe, young people who are anointed by God to turn the cultural conscience to Christ and His truth. I want to encourage you as a church to become a movement that we view every toddler, we view every teenager as a nation-changing revival leader in God's hands, and we're not just raising kids to go to college and live the American dream and then retire and die.
We are raising spiritual warriors of grace and truth who will be bold in the face of opposition, who will be loving in the face of hatred, and who will be filled with the Holy Spirit. Amen.
So as you talk with your kids, as you talk with your grandkids, young people, even as you talk with your younger siblings and your friends about future careers and studies, inspire each other toward kingdom service. Inspire, say, "Wow, look at that gift God has given you." Let's dream about how God could use that to point people to Jesus. As we see God working in the next generation, encourage them. Cheer them on, equip them. We get to pave the way, and now we get to prepare them to go out into the world.
Not just to survive, not to try to fit in with the crowd, not to just make it, but to be a light in the darkness, to be a beacon of hope. You're listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram and his friend guest teacher John Dickerson. We'll return to today's message in just a moment, but first, life doesn't always let you sit by the radio at the same time every day. That's why there's the Chip Ingram app. Today's program plus video teachings and so much more, all in one place, whenever and wherever you're ready.
Just search for the Chip Ingram app in your app store.
Well, now here's John continuing today's message.
Well, the Civil War did overthrow slavery, but it was not without great conflict. If you study world history, you're not going to find many nations that have had a bloody fight to the death Civil War, and then a hundred years later have any kind of unity. Most of those nations never recover. They never have stable government. They never have stable economies.
You can't even really own private property for long because the two sides hate each other so much. How did our nation think about this? That's 1865. It hasn't been 150 years, maybe a little over. How how is it that now we can have a bowl game?
With Alabama Crimson Tide, and you could have a Big Ten Northern team, and one hundred thousand people can pack a stadium, and everyone just cheers for their team, and no one's trying to kill each other. Like, what? What brought the nation back together after that kind of death and murder? The answer. Was the next great awakening the third great awakening?
The third great awakening started at the beginning of the Civil War and it lasted to the early 1900s. And just like the great awakenings before it, it wasn't perfect, but it was marked by spirit-led believers who led millions of Americans to the foot of the cross. And as people would make Jesus their Lord and their Savior, and surrender to His way of life, they would lay down their prejudices. They would forgive their enemies, and it brought people together who never would have sat at the same table otherwise. Third Great Awakening launched all kinds of social initiatives that you would know today, but you might not know were started by pastors in a Great Awakening.
Things like the YMCA, the Goodwill, the Salvation Army, and the list goes on.
Well, D.L. Moody would speak to these huge crowds of thousands of people, and he would call them to God. When your heart breaks for the hatred and division that you see in our nation. And and I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but there's a good chance that for a lot of your life, every week there's going to be another news article or another thing you see on social media, and it just grieves you deeply. What can you do with that?
Use that as motivation to compel you to work spiritually for the next great awakening. Use that as motivation to compel you to tell your neighbors the hope of Jesus. Because there's this human fray down here where the two sides hate each other and they just yell at each other and they get further and further apart. The only way to heal it is to get up above it into the spiritual realm and say, "There is a God. There is a Jesus.
He loves you. He died on the cross for you. Even if you don't agree with me, I'm going to love you unconditionally, and I'm going to show you what a Jesus-like culture can be like." That's what starts to bring it back together. God wants to raise up an army of grace-filled, Scripture-saturated, Christ-loving young people who will launch out into American culture to infiltrate it—not with something subversive, but to infiltrate it with something cohesive. To infiltrate it with Christ's values, with His peace, with His good news.
And you know what's so great? It's not just that God wants to do that; He is doing that. In the church that we get to be part of, revival outlasts us. When we train up today's young people to be tomorrow's Christ-centered leaders, we are preparing them to go serve Christ in every corner of the culture, in every art and industry, in every vocation of our nation. We are training up future lawmakers.
We are training up future Supreme Court justices. We are training up future culture shapers who will not use their influence to subject and and and rule over, but to serve and to usher in the kingdom of God and the good news of Jesus. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, it's time to get off the sidelines. It's time to get on the front lines. It's time to stop spending your day watching a news channel that just makes you more and more mad, one way or the other.
It's time to actually get involved, doing something to raise up the next generation for Christ, because it's the only lasting solution for our culture. Three ways to ignite the next generation. Second is we model kingdom first living. Step one, you're teaching them God's word. By the way, way to go by bringing them here, by having your young person consistently involved here in your house.
Learn to teach them. But if you teach them and you don't model it, they're going to pick up what you do rather than what you say.
Now that I have teenagers, I know this for sure. My kids don't do what I say; they do what I do. It's bizarre to watch, and you will see your inconsistencies. If you're teaching them God's word, but really in your heart, money is your top idol. That's what your kids will pick up.
If you're teaching them God's word and you're big on the truth side of it, but you're hateful towards everyone who disagrees with you, they're going to see that. If you're full of grace and you're so full of grace for everyone that you never stand on the truth, they're going to see that.
So, model. Here's what it actually looks like to seek first the kingdom of God. If you want to be part of nation-changing revival, it starts in your heart, and then you model it out for the next generation. It just looks like serving God as much as you can with what He has entrusted to you. And when you do that, you know that you answer to God, and you just stay faithful, serving God.
I want to tell you about an unknown, overlooked person in the history of the American church who ended up shaping the nation, but you never would have known it. This guy's name was Mordecai Ham. Talk about a funny name, Mordecai Ham. Traveling evangelist with this little speaker set up, he'd go around to towns and cities and villages. And this was around the time of the Great Depression.
People would gather around, and he would preach the good news of Jesus and call people to repent.
Well, one time Mordecai Ham was leading a week of evangelistic meetings in a small village town in North Carolina. He was extremely oppressed. There were all these newspaper articles against him. There was a lot of controversy, and one night he was in a time of prayer with God, and he wrote out a prayer in a prayer journal, and it was a revival prayer, as we've been learning. He prayed, God, would you open the eyes of the people in this town?
God, would you set them free, break the chains of sin. He prayed overtly against demonic forces. He said, "God, where there is demonic forces bringing opposition to me trying to share the gospel, I pray against those demonic forces." And then, praying along, led by the Holy Spirit, he wrote out an impossible prayer in a town of two thousand. He said, "God, as I obey you, as I stay faithful in the face of opposition, will you bring ten thousand people to salvation?" As a result of these meetings, well, there's only two thousand people in the town. If the whole town shows up, you can't get ten thousand.
Well, a lot of the town did show up, and among them was a a young man who was being raised in a Christian home. He was reading the Bible every day. He was going to church, but he had never heard about a personal relationship with God through Jesus. This young man named Billy prayed and said. Jesus become the savior of my life.
In response to Mordecai Ham's bold prayer for ten thousand souls and his faithful obedience in obscurity and opposition, God drew young Billy to salvation. Billy then surrendered his life and actually modeled his career after this evangelist. And by the time Billy Graham passed away at age ninety nine. He had preached the gospel in person to more than two hundred fifteen million people, hundreds of millions more who heard his voice by radio, who read his books, who saw him on television. He proclaimed Jesus to more people than anyone in human history.
And where did it all begin? With an overlooked, unseen person in the mountains of North Carolina saying, "God, I'm going to pray revival prayers, kingdom prayers, and I'm just going to faithfully serve you in my generation." And then, what did God do? He raised up someone in the next generation. This will happen as we faithfully run God's play. We can trust Him for the results.
This happens in the spiritual family. Mordecai Ham became a spiritual dad to Billy Graham. This can also happen in your literal family, and that's true for perhaps the most famous Great Awakening leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., often you know shortened to MLK these days. Your school might have skipped this, but MLK was a Christian, not just a Christian. He read his Bible on the regular, and he was a pastor.
He was a full time pastor. That's what Reverend means. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Why is he a junior?
Well, because there was a Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., his dad. MLK grew up going to church at his dad's church, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. And his dad was a Baptist pastor. If you know anything about Baptists in the nineteen fifties, it means that if you are a pastor's kid, you are there for Sunday school, you are there for children's church, you are there for full adult church, you are there for Sunday night church, and you are there for Wednesday night church. That's just two days of the week, okay?
He grew up surrounded by Scripture, dozens of Sunday school teachers, and aunts and uncles, and his godly parents. You're listening to Living on the Edge with guest teacher John Dickerson, and a message titled "The Next Generation and Revival." To learn more about what John just shared, including a small group video study and more, go to therevivalproject.org/livingontheedge. Such an important reminder today that the most important inheritance we leave isn't in a bank account, it's a faith real enough for the next generation to see. That's why Chippingham's year-long devotional, Growing Deeper in Christ, is so valuable. It offers three hundred sixty-five daily readings to help you build that kind of faith, moving truth from your head to your heart to impact how you actually live.
And with a new leather-bound edition now. Available and special pricing on both editions. It would make a wonderful Christmas gift for a grandchild or a young believer you've been praying for. Get your copies of Growing Deeper in Christ available only at LivingOnTheEdge dot org slash offers. A mom named Heather wrote to tell us about her thirteen-year-old son who had been studying the Book of James with Chip.
She said, "So good for him to have the example of a God-fearing man like Chip to influence young men to study their Bibles." Well, your giving is part of that story too. When you support Living on the Edge, you help put clear biblical teaching within reach of moms like Heather and kids like her son.
So wherever you're listening from today, we invite you to join with us and help build revival for the next generation by giving generously to support this ministry. You can easily give online at LivingOnTheEdge.org, or call us at triple eight three three three six zero zero three. To send your gift by mail, here's our address: Living on the Edge, P.O. Box three thousand seven, Suwanee, Georgia three zero zero two four.
Well, now here is Chip Ingram. Thanks so much, Dave. You know, John's message today. I thought about my own grandkids. I'd like you to think about those of you that have grandkids or children, and you ask yourself the question: You know, what do you need to leave them?
I mean, what is the real inheritance? And you know, many of you listening have a financial planner. Maybe a lot of you don't, or hope you at least have a will, and you've thought pretty carefully about what do I want to leave my My kids and my grandkids, and I will tell you the research is in: is that people spend an enormous amount of time and energy figuring out what to pass on of their possessions and their money, and spend very little time thinking through what are the values, what's the worldview, and how do you pass on your faith? Revival historically has almost always been birthed by the next generation. I mean, think about this.
Jesus, all knowing and all powerful, could have chosen any group of people, and sometimes we forget. By and large, every one of those disciples was a late teenager or early twenties max. There's something that's happening that's still idealistic in that age group that they still believe the world can change. They're not cynical. They had this dream.
They had this vision. Here's my question: What are you planting into the next generation? If you have kids, your kids. If you have grandkids, your grandkids. If you don't have either, or if you do, who are some young people that you are purposely hanging out with that you want to impart your faith?
Could you pause right now, and just in your mind's eye, could you say, "Oh Lord, I feel so lonely at times. I wonder what You want to do with my life." God, would you lead me to some young people? Maybe I need to volunteer at church, but would you lead me to some younger people that I could befriend, and I could share some of the potholes and the barriers and the things that I wish I hadn't done, or the wisdom that I've learned that I could pass on to them, and just be a great listener, pray for them, and care for them. I want you to know that would change the course of their life, and are you ready? Probably change yours too.
Well, that's all for today's program. Join us again next time, right here on Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Today's program is produced and sponsored by Living on the Edge.
