Glenn Beck’s Call for Revival

Glenn Beck has pulled off one of the most impressive marches on Washington ever held. On Saturday, an estimated 500,000 or more people jammed into the area between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument to support the notion that America needs to recapture its founders’ vision and rekindle its spirit through religious revival.

The event—a reflection of Beck’s growing concern for reestablishing God in American life—is a brutal indictment of many of our churches. When Glenn Beck is promoting God-sent revival in America while many churches are find their highest calling in seeker friendliness, soft man-focused sermons, thin doctrinal discourse and musical happy hours singing only repetitive and often shallow praise and worship music, the church of the living God in America is in sad shape.

Instead of a clarion call to repentance and revival, much of contemporary Christianity in America is just that—contemporary, that is, crafted for the moment without anchorage to timeless truth as a rudder for sailing through troubled times. The very word smacks of fleeting impact. A formal meaning would suggest merely being “with the current time,” which conveys a temporary quality. The word “traditional” is almost a dirty term in some quarters.

Today’s “churchianity” seems adrift from doctrinal anchorage. Years ago, I heard someone say, “Jesus unites, but doctrine divides.” Good! Let it happen, and we’ll distinguish light from darkness and good from evil. Tradition and traditional can have an enervating effect as Christ warned, “Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition?” (Matthew 15:3) But there is good, even commanded tradition as the Apostle Paul declared: “Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle.” (2 Thessalonians 2:15)

Good tradition and sound doctrine are fine fellow travelers. As the word “doctrine” has fallen into disrepute, so has the authority of the Bible and the spiritual impact of the church. Paul spelled it out in 2 Timothy 3:16-17: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Evidently, we are living in the days of negative prophecy for Paul also wrote, “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.” (2 Tim. 4:3-4)

But back to Glen Beck. On his weekday Fox News broadcast and at Saturday’s massive Restoring Honor rally in Washington, Beck is calling for wholesale return to the biblical revival that birthed America. It was a result of the fiery preaching of George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, and John Wesley, and the prodding, preaching eloquence of John Witherspoon, the only preacher to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps much of today’s preaching is a result of spineless timidity, a caution about losing tax-exemption or a misguided notion that biblical preaching is necessarily straight-jacketed into a few salvation verses or that ultimate pulpit safety if best attained by stressing the spiritual “feelies,” what A.W. Tozer called “The Modern, Smooth Cross.”

Glenn Beck’s astounding Washington rally first exhilarated me and then troubled me. Indeed, when a talk show host does better at promoting biblical revival than the average preacher, it can make concerned people sick, I being one them. I hope to feel better in the future. And when I can rewrite this blog when our churches are up to Beck’s speed, I will feel much, much better.

Dave Virkler