At The Movies: A Great Awakening - Archie Callahan

August 30, 2026

Clip 1: One Person Can Make A Difference

Clip 2: Feel The Need...Meet The Need

Clip 3: The Call To Awakening

Clip 4: You Must Be Born Again

Wake Up, Sleeper: A Call to Spiritual Awakening

Drawing from Ephesians 5:14-16, this sermon issues an urgent call for both believers and unbelievers to awaken from spiritual slumber. Using the film "A Great Awakening" as a lens, Pastor Archie contrasts the lives of George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin to illustrate the difference between genuine salvation and moralism. Whitefield represents the spiritually awakened believer who boldly proclaims the necessity of the new birth, while Franklin represents the moralist who respects faith but resists personal surrender to Christ. The sermon challenges the church to reject complacency, dead religion, and the false gospel of self-improvement, and to embrace the true gospel of grace. It concludes with a call for believers to become agents of awakening in their communities, workplaces, and the world.

Key Points:

- It is possible to be physically alive, morally upright, and outwardly successful while remaining spiritually asleep

- Spiritual sleep is characterized by complacency, apathy, lukewarmness, and being dulled by the hypnotic pull of media, comfort, and distraction

- Moralism, the belief that good behavior and virtue merit salvation, is a counterfeit of the gospel and a substitute for being born again

- The gospel declares that salvation produces good works, not the other way around; we are accepted by grace, and therefore we obey