Oh America — E.A. Johnston

America's Spiritual Barrenness

Friends, I preach this message with a heavy heart as I have a very solemn message for us today about the national disaster we are facing. And that national disaster is not a health pandemic, but the spiritual barrenness of a nation.

And it is my prayer that this sermon will ignite a national repentance to return to the living God of the Bible in these desperate days. In the book of Isaiah, in chapter 5, we are confronted with the song of the vineyard, which is a lament by God over a people who have forsaken God, and God is broken-hearted over them.

Isaiah's Song of the Vineyard

God planted a vineyard with Israel in a very fruitful hill, and he tended that vineyard as a labor of love. We pick up our text in verse 2. And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choices fine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein.

And he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes. Then God laments in verse 4, what could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done in it? God had digged, and planted, and pruned, and watered his vineyard with the utmost care.

And instead of a harvest of grapes, there was barrenness with wild grapes. Then God speaks judgment upon his vineyard of wild grapes, as seen in verses 5 and 6. And now, go to, I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard.

I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up, and break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down, and I will lay it waste. It shall not be pruned, nor digged, but there shall come up briars and thorns.

I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. Here in the song of the vineyard lies God's just displeasure over the sins of his people, as he laments that he looked for a fruitful harvest from his vineyard that he labored so carefully and lovingly over.

Applying Isaiah's Warning to America

But instead of grapes, it only had brought forth the wild grapes of a rebellious people bent on sin. And I apply this same principle, friends, to our country today. What more could God have done for the nation of America, planted by God, watered by God, prospered by God, but because of her multiplied sins and rejection of God, the hedge is down, and she is laid bare.

The nation is morally bankrupt, and the church spiritually barren. God has closed the doors of our churches through a national pandemic, and the nation is no worse for it. The churches were spiritually barren before the pandemic, and it's made no difference upon our cities that the doors are closed because they made little impact upon the cities while the doors were open.

When pastors are afraid to speak up and call sin black and hell hot and cry against the grievous sins of a nation, then their fear of man makes them a silent majority. What good is a silent majority if it has no voice of authority?

Like I said, the doors of our churches are closed, and it's not noticeable in our society. Because we had churches on every corner in America, and our communities grew more wicked every day from the lack of spiritual influence of the church.

Historical Calls to Fasting and Repentance

But pastors in former days were wiser and less worldly, and acknowledged God's justice pleasure in national disasters. They held days of fasting and prayer, humiliation and repentance. Listen to a sermon, friends, preached by a leading pastor in Boston in 1755 when an earthquake shook that city.

Listen to the title of his sermon, Earthquakes, the Works of God and Tokens of His Justice Pleasure being a discourse on that subject wherein is given a particular description of this awful event of providence made public at this time on occasion of the late dreadful earthquake which happened on the 18th of November, 1755.

Psalm 18 and the Earthquake as God's Judgment

The text of the sermon was Psalm 187,. Then the earth shook and trembled, the foundations also of the hills moved, and were shaken, because he was wroth. But our modern church today is afraid to speak up and make any politically incorrect statements for fear of repercussions by man.

So instead of using this opportunity of a national crisis to bring this nation to her knees, the church is silent about a national repentance and a return to the God of the Bible. Spiritual barrenness will always reveal itself in times of national crisis, while the country is gripped with the fear of plague, laying the country bare, it must be honest with herself that she was already laid bare before all this, spiritually, by an offended God who has withdrawn his presence from the churches and removed the hedge off a nation that formerly protected it because it used to be a God-fearing nation.

Heaven help us all.