WWUTT 290 Reviving New England?

When it comes to understanding revival, it's more than just the sermons that are preached or the responsibility of the pastor.

There is a role the entire church plays in the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ when we understand the text.

Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text as an online ministry committed to teaching sound doctrine and exposing the faulty, visit our website at www .utt

.com. Now here's our host, Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you, Becky. Welcome, everybody. It is

Friday, and typically on Friday we do our Q &A, taking questions from the listeners and responding to them on the

Friday edition of the broadcast. Today I'm the one that's going to be asking the questions, and answering them will be

Nate Pickowitz, who is the pastor of Harvest Bible Church in Gilmanton, New Hampshire.

Did I say that right? Is that Gilmanton? That's correct. Yeah. Now you have it on the book that it's Gilmanton Iron Works?

Yes. What does that mean? Yes. What is Gilmanton Iron Works? Okay. So Gilmanton Iron Works is actually the name of the town in which

I live, but without getting into the old issues of it, there's actually two specific names, two different zip codes and everything,

Gilmanton and Gilmanton Iron Works. I live in the Iron Works, but that's just a lot to write on a piece of paper.

Right. So you just go by Gilmanton. Is it separated by a river or something, or what's kind of the natural division between the two?

I don't know. It's probably separated by somebody's house who died 200 years ago. I have no idea.

I really don't know. It's an old, old town, and everything's very old.

We've got families that have been living here for 100 something years. I mean, it's just, I have no idea why it is the way it is.

No clue. Well, the reason why I have Nate on the show here, and by the way, Nate, you're my first guest on When We Understand the

Text. Oh, fantastic. Yes. I've never actually had a guest. 280, 290 episodes now, and you're my first guest here.

Thank you for having me on. I feel very honored. That's cool. We'll make you a plaque, run it through the photocopier, send it your way.

Nate acquired his master's from Trinity Theological Seminary and is the author of a new book entitled

Reviving New England, The Key to Revitalizing Post -Christian America. You can find it on Amazon .com

or through EntreatingFavor .com. Nate is also a co -host with Landon Chapman on FireAway.

So I've asked Nate to be on the program today to talk about the new book, Reviving New England.

Now, Nate, one of the first hesitations that I imagine would keep a person from picking up the book is that it's called

Reviving New England, and they live in Texas or Idaho or California or somewhere. So what makes this book relevant to a person who lives somewhere else other than the northeastern portion of the

United States? Yeah, that's a very good question. It's a question that I was asked persistently when

I was pitching the book. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, the thing about New England is that there's a certain allure to New England.

It's not like I'm writing a book called Reviving Arkansas. You know, there's something very specific, very old, very historic, very

Americana about New England because that's our heritage. It's the crux.

It's the backbone of where the country actually began. So everything's, you know,

Christianity started here. The country was founded here. So it's really, even though it's specifically for New England and addressing the problems that are in New England, it's really kind of meant to be sort of like a nod, a wink to the fact that this is really the heart of the history of our country.

So the principles themselves that I work through in the book are applicable in any context, whether you live in, like I said,

Arkansas, whether you live in California, whether you live in Tokyo, it doesn't matter. God has a very specific prescription for what he desires of his church.

And and so those the principles are timeless and location less. But I live here.

This is where I minister. This is where it would all begin. So hence, reviving New England. Yeah, I actually felt like right while I was reading it, that you could take the

New England history portion of the book and replace it with Southeast United States history or Pacific Coast history.

And the rest of the book would really apply to that area. Would you say that would be a fair assessment? Yeah, that was certainly the goal.

I mean, I didn't want people to, you know, I mean, certainly it's it's geographically specific, again, because there is a problem up here.

But I think that, you know, what's going on in New England is indicative of so much it's happening elsewhere in the country.

And, you know, there's something, you know, there's something very sort of old world about New England that I think draws people in.

I mean, to this point, we're only a week and a half in. But I've had more people from outside New England purchase the book than those people inside the

New England. So people around the country are getting getting the idea they're they're catching on to the idea that this is something that's that's treasurable, you know, that there's something about New England that people actually have a heart for.

So, yeah, I think, you know, the principles, you know, I didn't want people to read the book and feel like, oh, this is something that's only

X, Y, Z. I mean, the Bible is timeless. The Bible spans, you know, culture and generations and so on and so forth.

So I didn't want them to feel like this is something that was totally different than what scripture would tell them in their own context.

So, yeah, it was written for that purpose, for sure. So you made the comment about how more people from outside New England are buying the book than in New England.

And there's actually a statistic that you mentioned in the book where you're talking about as little as one and a half percent of the population in some of the areas are actually born again believers.

And one of the things that you tie into these statistics, you call New England an unreached people group.

But when we listen to like David Platt or statistics that come out of the International Missions Board, they define an unreached people group as being a people where the church can't be found anywhere or you can't find the gospel being proclaimed anywhere.

So why is it that you would define New England as an unreached people group, given that the church has such a rich history in that part of the

US? Yeah, that's a good question. I actually didn't come up with that idea on my own. I was

I had heard that kind of here, there and everywhere. Oh, unreached people group because of the percentage of believers.

And I was actually talking with a professor from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and we were talking about New England.

And and he says, well, how bad is it up there? And I said, well, in some areas it's less than two percent. And he looked at me and he said, two percent.

He was like, that's like an unreached people group. And I was like, it kind of is, you know. So it was actually it's actually a

Southern Baptist professor who gave me the idea, which is interesting enough. And certainly, you know,

I mean, we can talk about terminology and certainly, you know, it's not like we're living in a different culture that has no idea of the church at all.

But in some towns in New England, some whole regions in New England, there is no gospel witness.

You know, people sort of when you talk about Christianity, it's their parents religion. It's something from a long time ago.

But it's not like where people pretend like they're Christians and then they maybe really aren't. They'll flat out tell you, oh, that's not for me.

I'm not a Christian. Like they don't even know anything. So, you know, there are some parts of of this area that there is zero gospel in the town that I live in.

I remember I was preaching at an event and an event and someone came up to me afterwards and said, I haven't heard that in 30 years.

I haven't heard it since I was a kid. Yeah. So it's not to say that there is no church at all here, but certainly

I was using the term to kind of, you know, remind people that, boy, you know, this really is it is as dire as we say it is.

Right. We should be treating this as if it were that kind of a mission.

And there's other groups, gospel coalition that's over here and they're starting to use phrases like Unreachable Group. And so it's really just to paint the picture that things are difficult.

There is a very low gospel penetration in this area. So it's it is challenging.

So through in treating favor dot com, you've been writing a series of blogs in which you say like why

Second Kings is the best book of the Bible or why Amos is the best book of the Bible. So every book that you write on, you argue for why it's the best.

So in the in the introduction of of the book Reviving New England, you say the key to revitalizing

America is first to revive New England. Are you merely being hyperbolic there, like in the best book of the

Bible series, or do you truly believe that reviving New England means revival for the rest of America? Well, I'll answer your question with a question.

Do you believe that my best book series is hyperbolic? You don't really think that Amos is the best book in the

Bible. What's wrong with you? Well, there's a hint of truth in that. I mean, certainly, you know, again, as a writer, you're trying to capture the attention of the reader.

You're trying to make your point and not gloss over the need over here. That's part of why

I'm writing the book is to make sure that the need is present. But, you know, truthfully, when I really examined it, because there's such a vacuum, because there is such a lack of consistent, pervasive gospel witness, in some cases it feels like we're starting from scratch.

Whereas you go to other regions of the country where there might be a large breadth of deism or sort of kind of Bible belt

Christianity. And I've heard similar arguments that, well, there's just it's just as bad down here as it is up there.

But there is no semblance of Christianity in some areas. So I really think that if we were able to sort of start fresh and get what, you know, certainly we can talk about some of the markers, but get the

Bible preached in the pulpits again, get repentance happening on a wide scale, really do the things that we know that God is calling us to do.

This really could be a test ground for what's coming. It was it was the it was the spark for, you know, nationwide revival and awakening in the past.

Yeah. There's no reason to think that it can't be used again because we don't have such a pervasive witness here.

So I think it could be a test ground. And if something were to happen up here, I think it very well could spread to the rest of the country.

I really do believe that you mention awakening and you talk about in the book, the early portion of the book, a lot of the history of New England.

I really like that section because I like reading about the history of the spread of the gospel, particularly in the

United States. And you mentioned such giants like Jonathan Edwards and itinerant preacher George Whitefield and also the first and second great awakenings.

Now, through when we understand the text, I'm often feeling questions about Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh -day

Adventists and Mormonism, all of which kind of came out of the second great awakening and also inventions like altar calls or sinner's prayers.

So I tend to have a pretty jaded view of the second great awakening in particular. So how would you change my mind?

What can you say was so great about the second great awakening that we can learn from today when it comes to preaching about revival?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I was very skeptical myself when I was doing the research for the book, I found myself looking forward to the the books on the first great awakening and my heart was kind of warmed by that.

Yeah. And then I got to the second great awakening. I'm like, oh, I don't want to read about this garbage. Sure. Yeah.

You know, and you get this you get the passages about Finney and all this other stuff and you're like, oh, come on, man. But, you know, in truth, the second great awakening actually did a lot for us.

Yeah, we did get a lot of our cults from that. And when you have a culture, the thing about it is, is that the second great awakening was actually larger in terms of scope and breadth than the first great awakening.

It lasted longer, lasted 30 years. And the the reaches of it were farther.

This went this one went worldwide. And the reason it went worldwide is because not only did you have the popularity of a lot of these preachers, but you also had whole movements and whole organizations that were beginning the track societies,

American Bible Society, the worldwide missions movement was really started in the second great awakening.

You had, you know, Adonai and Judson and you had Luther Rice and you had seminaries being founded.

You had training schools being founded. So much of what we know now, Princeton in its, you know, more or less present form, not the liberal pressure, but Princeton, as we know it, old

Princeton was coming out of the second great awakening. So so so much of what we have

American wise for Christianity was birthed primarily out of the second great awakening.

But New England also has the title of claiming the four worst heresies in American history as well. So we have that little notch on our belt.

But so much that was good did come out of the second great awakening. It just, you know, we tend to get caught up on revivalism and we've sort of forgotten what revival is really all about.

Yeah. So I'm talking today with Nate Piglets and he's the author of the book Reviving New England.

Chapter two is called Giving God His Pulpits Back. And you really outline the problems not only in New England pulpits and what has happened there, but I think really describes problems in most of the pulpits in America today.

I mean, it's the exact same things that I'm facing in some of the pulpits in my own community. Pastors have either digressed into moralistic sermons or New Age sermons or feel good sermons.

And it's related to the feel good sermon that you make the following statement. If the preacher fails to warn his listeners of their peril and God's righteous requirement in favor of trying to make them feel good, he has abdicated his responsibility in ministry.

So what do you say to the preacher who says something like, well, everybody already knows their sinners and I'm just trying to say something to help lift their spirits a little bit?

No, they don't. They don't know that they're they don't know the depth of their depravity. If you preach it all the time and you're a hellfire and brimstone preacher and Steve Lawson calls that, by the way, a

Bible preacher. But if you're constantly preaching, you know, judgment and wrath and you're preaching for repentance and you're calling the congregation to conviction, then yes, there is a certain point when you do have to sort of say,

OK, there is love, there is grace, there is, you know, mercy. But by and large that I mean, you know, this that is not what we're seeing.

Forget New England. That's not what we're seeing anywhere. Yeah, there are so few preachers that are actually preaching the whole counsel of God, which includes all the wrath and judgment and call for repentance.

The first word out of Jesus's mouth was repent. So sure, we don't do that. You know, so a pastor who says, well,

I already they already know all that stuff. I'm just telling them something to make them feel better because they already feel bad enough about it themselves.

I would question I would really question that judgment call and say, I don't know as if people do. And I think it's

I think it's a way out. I think it's a way of escape because they just don't want to make people feel bad.

But if you're making people feel bad for the right reasons, if you're saying, well, yeah, you have sinned against a holy God and you are worthy of death, that makes them feel pretty bad.

Well, there is the opportunity for the gospel. The gospel is the good news. So you can't really even ever get to the good news if you don't first tell them that they have spiritual cancer and they're about to die.

So we have, like I said in the book, we've abdicated our responsibility. We have we have bypassed

God's righteous standard in place of making people make people feel better.

It doesn't work. It's not right. You have to tell people I was reading. Sorry, I know

I'm kind of digressing here, but I was reading in Lamentations this morning, you know, good devotional book.

It's the best book in the Bible. I was reading in Lamentations and after after Jerusalem falls captive and into destruction by the

Babylonians, you know, Jeremiah is lamenting the condition. And he actually specifically in chapter two cites it's because of your prophets, because they told you everything was fine.

Oh, yeah. Peace, peace. And there was no peace. Right. They told you everything was great. You don't have to worry about sin. You have to worry about repentance.

Everything's going fine. And then when destruction came, he says, you know what? Blame your prophets. This is your prophets problem that you're suffering so bad.

So we're in the same boat, I think, where, you know, preachers have got to be faithful. Yes, to love, to mercy, to grace, but also to to the justice of God, to the fact that we have sinned against a holy

God. We have to tell them the truth. It's the most loving thing we could do is be honest with our people.

You talk about there the responsibility of preachers and you spend a good portion of chapter two making an argument for expositional preaching.

And you actually provide this is something that you don't often see. You'll hear the argument for expositional preaching, but you don't see examples from the

Bible of expositional preaching. And you actually give the biblical examples of where exegesis is done in the scriptures, in the book of Ezra and in Acts in particular.

And I would say even the apostle Paul does this to his own writings in the way that he'll present a concept and then expound on it.

So he's even doing exposition as he's writing. So when we have like the

Andy Stanley's of today saying that that kind of preaching is cheating and that's the easy way to do preaching and they'll even go as far as calling expositional preaching an unbiblical form of teaching.

So how can we respond to those kinds of criticisms today? Well, I mean, except that it's not, you know, you look at the scriptures and we see over and over again examples, you know, when he when when

Paul declares that he taught the church, the whole counsel of God. Well, how do you suppose he did that?

Right. You know, I mean, he was working in such a short period of time. He had to go just, you know, boom, boom, boom.

He would preach sermons that were three, four, sometimes, you know, five hours long into the wee hours of the morning until somebody died in the scriptures until somebody fell asleep and died.

And then he had a good moral in that story. By the way, there is a moral in that story.

Don't preach too long, because if you do, people do die. So it's a warning that preachers preach too long.

There you go. But, you know, I mean, I mean, there's countless examples in Acts, you know, when the when the

Ethiopian eunuch is being a disciple on the back of a carriage, you know, you know, Philip asked him, you know, do you understand what you're reading?

Well, how can I understand if someone unless someone explains it to me? That's great. Jesus in Luke 24, when he encounters the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he exposits for them.

He explains to them all the scriptures pertaining to himself. He goes through and just gives them an overview of the entire

Old Testament from what we can tell and explains them. Even in John chapter one, Jesus, there's a verse that says he talking about Jesus has has made him made it known to us, made himself known.

Well, the word is basically exposes Jesus, exposes himself, exposes God for us in himself.

So Jesus is a preacher. And they didn't they didn't drum up, you know, clever, pragmatic lessons for the people.

They told them the word of God. And in the same spirit of the prophets, they expounded the word of God.

I mean, I'm terrified to give anybody in our church anything from my own mind.

I mean, in my view, and I'm probably going to get flack for this, but I think it's the most arrogant thing in the world to say that, you know, what's best for the church.

And to do so, you're sidestepping the word of God and giving them practical, pragmatical approaches to how to live their life and so on and so forth.

That is arrogance. I don't have a clue what these people need. Yeah, God does. And his word is living and active and does the job for it.

So, you know, we're called to be faithful. We're not called to reinvent the wheel. I mean, I really believe that.

So that's a great conviction and one of mine as well. And in fact, I mean, the burden that is upon a preacher to preach to a people for the salvation of their souls.

And I have no idea what to say. But I but the relief of that burden is that what to say has already been given.

It's the word of God. And so just giving the word of God to the people, which has the power to say, for I am not ashamed of the gospel, it is the power to save the power of God for salvation in Jesus Christ.

So great conviction. And if you're listening and you miss that, go back and listen to it again, because that was a really great point that Nate made there.

When we hear a title, we hear a title of a book like Reviving New England or revitalizing or re evangelizing.

I think there's a tendency to think, well, this is preacher talk. And that's mostly what you and I have been talking about here.

The the responsibility for right preaching from the pulpit, for expositional preaching.

This is the kind of thing my pastor needs to know. But I'm not a preacher. So why is this important for me to know about how to revive something?

Just tell me what time to show up and I'll be there. So how do you place it upon the lay person to be responsible for right teaching?

Like what is the responsibility upon your average Christian congregant for revival?

Well, they have to know what their part is, too. I mean, at some point in the book, I actually address the the church goer.

I trust the church member. I mean, in the end, I mean, certainly pastors and elders are called to lead the church, but it's the body of Christ that does the work of ministry.

So, you know, I have people that are traveling to my church of a long distance because they're having a hard time finding a church close to where they are.

Well, not everybody has discernment enough to know what kind of church to go to. What kind of church to serve and what kind of church to look for.

And the thing about it is and and there's a I have to tread lightly here, but there's a certain sense in which the reason that things have gotten so bad in New England is because the people in the churches have allowed it to get this bad.

Sure. Yeah, they have desire to have their ears tickled. They have they have never put it on their pastor to say, we want you to teach us the word of God in days of old.

That's what they were looking for. The Puritans, they wanted Bible preachers when they came over.

The pastor who was supposed to come over on the Mayflower, the pastor that was from the congregation in Scrooby, England, did not come over.

He stayed back. And the guy that they had come over was not the best Bible teacher. And they didn't make him their pastor.

They didn't make him. Yeah, I said that right. They waited until another pastor could come over. They wanted a

Bible teacher. So the requirement, you know, we are called to be faithful as pastors and elders and teachers.

But the church is also responsible for making sure that you surround yourself with faithful, competent, godly men and then submit to them.

But when you just desire to have your ears tickled and then you fire every single faithful pastor you have,

I cannot tell you how many faithful pastors have been fired from pulpits in New England. It didn't start with Jonathan Edwards, but certainly

Edwards. Even today, pastors are getting kicked out of their churches and they're getting fired faithful guys.

So the church has a responsibility to identify faithful, godly men, identify sound doctrine, sound teaching, and cling to the word of God and find people who are going to bring you solid biblical teaching.

So it isn't just the pastors. The churches have got to rise up, recognize, commit, you know, confess their sin.

If they have sin in this way, confess it and find yourself an expositor and look long and hard until you find one and get them in there and have them teach you what the

Bible says. So the weight does fall to the churches as well. I really believe that.

Yeah. And I think I think that you play, you're getting me all fired up, you're pushing my buttons here. You place that in the book very well, too.

Talking about like if we are responding to the gospel, here's what it should look like among the people of God.

So it's not just a responsibility that's placed upon the preachers, but also the body of Christ and how we are supposed to respond to the gospel.

And you brought up sin again. And and I think that one of the things that I really appreciated about the book is that you don't leave anything to assumption.

You describe what exegetical preaching is, what right preaching is supposed to accomplish. And you even describe what sin is and what our response to our sin is supposed to be in light of the gospel.

So how is an understanding of sin important when it comes to wanting to see revival take place?

God is not going to bless anything we do if we have sin bound up inside of us that's been unconfessed like that.

I mean, that is that's astounding to me to think that we can live with indwelling sin that's that's ensnared us and then turn around and say,

God bless what we're doing. I mean, we need to be on our faces pleading with God for forgiveness, asking for forgiveness, which he will grant first John one nine.

He will grant it. But but pleading with him and asking him and begging him in a godly way, of course, but asking

God to to work. And I mean, I give the example of Joshua, chapter seven, where there was sin in the camp.

Akin had sinned. Yeah. And that one sin impacted the entire nation of Israel to the point where they were losing battles and wars and couldn't figure out scratching their head.

Why isn't God blessing us? Well, because someone had sinned in the camp. And I just I shudder to think how many people are are walking around, myself included.

I mean, I have sin I have to face as well. But but how many people in the church up here and everywhere are burdened down with sin?

They have never confessed to God. And then in the same breath, they're going to say, Lord, bless us. Yeah, it is just the height of error.

And I think there you mentioned the lengths which I go to to explain certain things.

I really don't want to assume anything because I wrote this in part for for folks up here, maybe that are

Godward, that have a desire for God to move and God to work. And even the term revival is a very old term up here.

Someone suggested I should call it reforming New England. Well, I would get the reform camp to buy the book. But I want to get the people who are who who are longing for the old days of revival.

Definitely. And who are probably stuck in the same problem saying, oh, well, we can live however we want, but we want we know they're thinking big tent revival.

They're thinking old old world. Sure. Well, then I'm going to explain to them sin, repentance, gospel.

I mean, they need to hear these things. So it was it was very deliberate, but never assumed that we just understand sin or OK with it, because maybe folks aren't maybe they don't understand what it is.

Right. And the need for repentance, you know. I really think you picked the right word for the title, because typically when we think of revival as the noun, so revival is a thing that happens.

But you titled it reviving, which puts that into action. So I think it kind of overcomes a little bit of the stigma that might be associated with revival.

I mean, we're such a consumer driven culture. We're looking for those keywords and catchphrases and reviving just sounds a little bit different than revival.

So I think the right word is chosen there and may be able to overcome some of those tendencies that people have that people have to think about, you know, the old way of doing things or old school revival and might see that word and go, oh,

Nate Pickowitz is telling us to go back to the 17 or 1800s here. And in fact, there's a there's a word that you use in the book at the start of chapter five.

You touched on a great word, which is actually growing in popularity in my denomination, the Southern Baptist Church, traditionalism.

And we kind of we long for the good old days of how things used to be, and Ephesians 710 says that these kinds of thoughts do not come from wisdom to long for the good old days.

So how is traditionalism a step in the wrong direction when it comes to talking about revival?

Well, I think what happens is that, you know, we long after the things that our ancestors did, but we don't long after the heart.

We don't long after their faith. It's like in Revelation chapter two when he says, you know, you're basically I'm summarizing here.

You're doing the right things, but you've lost your first love. Yes. The love that that you're that the church planters in the 17 and 1800s, the love that they have for God, the love they had for the word of God, for sound doctrine, for repentance, the love they had for the things of God did not translate.

The traditions translated, the culture translated. I was telling you before the show, the building that we worship in was built in 1820.

You look at it and you're transported back 200 years. That's also the tradition of having an old building is there.

But I'll tell you, the preaching that was being done in the 1820s is not here.

Right. The love that people had for the Lord in the first and second great awakening in a lot of areas is not here.

And so it's just it's not just a matter of going back to the things that we used to have or things we used to do. But do we really go back to the faithfulness and to the real love and faith in God that our ancestors used to have here?

And right now, that's what we're not doing that. And we need to we need to return to the Lord in our hearts and traditions.

That's fine. It's good to have an old building. That's fun. But in the end, it's wood. It doesn't mean anything if there's no heart behind it.

Yeah. Well, we talked a little bit ago about not leaving anything to assumption. So as we as we kind of wrap up the interview here, let's talk specifically about revival.

So what does that word mean and who ultimately is the agent that makes revival happen?

Is it going to be the preacher? Is it going to be the congregation? Where does revival come from? Yeah. So revival itself is is originally was a puritanical word.

We believe Cotton Mather kind of brought it into the sort of usage in the last couple hundred years.

But the Puritans understood that revival was a surprising work of God.

So they would look at it as when God would would basically move and people were getting saved in a rate that was not normal, you know, normal expectation.

When God would move, people would be repenting, turning to Christ whenever something would happen and they would be they would be amazed when revival would come.

They would be amazed and they would say this must be revival because God is moving. So they were they were building their understanding of revival on God when he would move.

Fast forward to the second Great Awakening. Now you have revivalism, which is very, very different.

Revivalism is manmade tactics. It's trying to produce something that should be happening through the work of God.

Gotcha. So, you know, you're you're doing anxious bench kind of stuff. You're you're trying to pressure people into making decisions.

Yeah. Alter calls all the stuff that Finney didn't invent, but he pioneered the use of it.

Sure. I mean, even down to, you know, even recently I saw a video of some preacher somewhere in America longing for the days of old.

He had a whole jar full of sawdust that had been saved from the early revivals, the

Kentucky revivals, and he took it out in 2016 and was pouring it on the ground and people were getting excited.

That's revivalism. That's yeah, manmade antics to try to produce something that God is doing supernaturally.

So if we really want revival, we have we have to look to God. God may work through our faithfulness, but it's his prerogative whether he wants to bring it.

God reserves every right to remove the lampstand from New England. He reserves every right to remove the lampstand from from the

American church, if he so chooses. So we're pleading with him. He's got to be the one to work.

We're waiting for a surprising work of God. But while we wait for him, we have to be doing the things we have to be bearing fruits that are worthy of repentance, doing the things that are pleasing to God.

Otherwise, he's not going to bless our manmade efforts. It's not going to happen. My guest today has been

Nate Pickowitz from I'm going to mess this name up again.

Gilmonton, Gilmonton, Ironworks, New Hampshire. Oh, my goodness.

That's quite a name. I've never seen a town name like that before. He's author of the book Reviving New England, The Key to Revitalizing Post -Christian

America, available on Amazon dot com or through the website that he has with Landon Chapman in treating favor dot com.

Nate, I thank you so much for being on with me today. And as we were getting started here today, too, Nate told me that he's been working on his in a world voice.

So can you give us a sampling of your of your movie trailer voice here? In a world where no one understands the text, one man will tell them what verses mean in 90 second videos.

Hey, there you go. That'll go on the trailer for for what videos? Awesome.

Thank you, Gabe. I really appreciate your your ministry, everything that you're doing. I just I feel like we have a kindred spirit here.

And I just I appreciate everything that that that the what ministry does. And I think it's funny also that Landon calls it the whoa, what like he actually was at the top of the double, double, which

I think is just flat silly. So no, but it's we're really appreciative of your faithfulness and what you guys are doing over there.

So thank you. Thank you so much, Nate. I sure appreciate that. And and we always have Michael W. Smith in common.

I think that's how we came into each other's company. Yes. So and I'll finally get to meet

Nate at the Shepherds conference coming up here. Right. That's right. At the first quarter of twenty seventeen, five hundred years of Reformation.

It's a good time to be at Graceland. That's true. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And and still reforming. That's that's still going on as well and reviving as well.

So I love the book. It was a very easy read, less than one hundred and twenty pages that he gets all of this information into reviving

New England, the key to revitalizing post -Christian America. I highly recommend that you pick it up. Thanks, Nate, for being on the show with me today.

And God bless you in your ministry and what you're doing there in New England as well. Thank you, Gabe. This is when we understand the text with Pastor Gabe Hughes.

There are lots of great Bible teaching programs on the Web, and we thank you for selecting ours. But this is no replacement for regular fellowship with the church family.

Find a good gospel teaching Christ centered church to worship with this weekend. And join us again Monday for more