A spiritual awakening is what happens when revival spreads—when one heart catching fire turns into many, until the flame jumps from person to person across a whole region or nation. Before we get into how that works, let’s start with revival. People throw the word “revival” around so much these days that it has started to lose its meaning. You hear it on podcasts, you see it in sermon titles, and everybody seems to mean something slightly different by it. So, before we can answer what is spiritual awakening, we need to get honest about what revival actually is, because the two are not the same thing.
Here is where I land after years of studying this, preaching it, and watching God move firsthand. A revival is what happens in one heart, one room, or one town. An awakening is what you get when a whole bunch of those revivals start happening at once, in a lot of places, until the spread covers a nation or even the world. A revival is a single fire. An awakening is what happens when enough fires catch at the same time, and the whole region lights up.
A Quick Word If You Came Here Looking for Something Else
If you typed, “What is spiritual awakening” into a search bar, you may have been after something different—a New Age idea, a kundalini experience, a sense of unlocking your higher self. When the Bible talks about spiritual awakening, it is about God awakening you to know His love for you and stirring a watching world to see its need for Him.
The Heartbeat of Revival
Leonard Ravenhill said it best. “Revival is the finger of God pointing right at your sin.” That is not a comfortable image, but it is a true one. When a preacher opens the Word and something in us moves, when we stop loving sin, that is revival showing up. The Old Testament word for that is shuv, which means to turn back. The New Testament word is metanoia, which means to change your mind. Put them together and you get a picture of a person walking hard in one direction, in sin, who decides to turn around and start walking toward God instead.
That is what repentance is. Not just feeling bad about something… turning around.
John the Baptist preached repentance (Matthew 3:1-2). Jesus preached it as the very first words out of His mouth after His baptism and His temptation in the wilderness. His message began with a call to repent because the Kingdom of God was at hand (Mark 1:15). Paul preached it too, telling people to prove their repentance by deeds appropriate to repentance (Acts 26:20). Every great preacher in the New Testament built their ministry on this one word, because repentance is the birthplace of revival. Scripture is full of these turning-back moments, and if you want to steep yourself in them, I’ve gathered some of the most stirring Bible verses about revival in one place.
From Revival to Awakening
So, if revival is one heart catching fire, turning back to God, and then refusing to keep that fire to itself, what is spiritual awakening? It is what happens when that fire spreads. I think we have the count wrong on the Great Awakenings, by the way. Most people call the Wesley and Whitefield movement in the 1750s the First Great Awakening, but I believe the real first one was the Reformation, when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door and lit a spiritual fire that spread across an entire continent. That was an awakening, and it birthed the Protestant Church.
Then came the one most people number first, when George Whitefield and John Wesley preached so powerfully that 80% of the bars in the 13 colonies shut their doors when Wesley’s horse rode into town. People fell on their knees in the street.
A third one came around 1805, when it was said that those who were listening held onto the backs of pews so hard that you would have thought they were trying to keep themselves from sliding into hell. Then, of course, the Third Great Awakening came next (what I would count as number four).
People have been praying for another of this kind of awakening for a long time, and I think we may have just watched one happen in real time. When Charlie Kirk passed away, I watched footage of 10,000 teenagers pouring into the streets singing worship songs in Japan. Of all places, a nation that has had every reason to resist Christianity since the war, kids were worshiping in public. The same thing happened in the Netherlands, a country with its own long history of pushing against the church. That is what an awakening looks like: not one church having a good Sunday, but thousands of revivals breaking out at once until the whole field is burning.
Why This Distinction Actually Matters
I know some people hear all this and think, “Fine, that is interesting history, but why does it matter for me on a Tuesday afternoon?” Here is why. If revival is the spark and awakening is the spread, then the thing standing between the two is almost always training.
The First Great Awakening, the one under Wesley and Whitefield, got stopped dead in its tracks in a lot of places because new believers were getting kicked out of churches for not wearing the right clothing. There was no discipleship waiting for them. Whitefield himself said something that has stuck with me for years. He said his converts were like “grains of sand passing through his hand.” Wesley’s converts, on the other hand, ended up in church, because Wesley built discipleship. He started the Methodist movement. He trained people.
That is the real tragedy of stopping at revival. A heart gets set on fire, and then nobody hands it any fuel. It burns bright for a season and then it goes out, not because God failed, but because there was no net to catch the new believer and train them to follow Jesus.
What Spiritual Addition Gets Wrong, and What Multiplication Gets Right
There is a trap a lot of churches fall into without meaning to. Someone has a powerful encounter with God, gets plugged into leadership, and the church quietly hands them the job of reaching people. Now the evangelist evangelizes, and the rest of us get to sit back and feel like we have done our part by showing up and clapping.
That is spiritual addition: one person doing the work while everybody else watches. What we actually need is spiritual multiplication, which means every person who gets revived turns around and trains the next one. That is the only way to reach the world. You have to increase the number of messengers sharing the Gospel. And that only happens when you train every new believer to share the Good News.
Jesus put it this way: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few” (Matthew 9:37-38, ESV). An awakening is God answering Jesus’ prayer request by raising up more laborers.
So, Where Do You Start?
If you are reading this and asking yourself, “What is spiritual awakening and how do I get there from wherever I am sitting right now,” here is my honest answer. It starts in exactly one place, and it is not a strategy meeting or a new program. It starts with you calling out to Jesus in your life.
Ask Him to do in you what He has done in the lives of men and women throughout history who got close to Him and were never the same again. The closer you get to Jesus, the more your heart starts beating like His does, and the more your eyes open to the people around you. You stop seeing certain groups of people as the enemy and start seeing them as your mission field. The world is not divided into Christians versus everyone else; it is Christians reaching everyone else.
Revival is what God does in you. Awakening is what happens when enough people let that revival turn into action and pass it on to somebody else. We need the finger of God pointing at our complacency just as much as we ever needed it pointing at our sin. If you encounter Jesus, you will naturally take part in His mission.
I have prayed more times than I can count that God would let me see something like this in my own lifetime, the way Billy Graham prayed to see what God did through D.L. Moody. I believe He is already answering that prayer in pockets all over the world. Our job is not to manufacture it. Our job is to get the kindling dry, stay close to Jesus, repent quickly, train the people He puts in front of us, and then get out of the way and watch Him light the fire.
So, what is spiritual awakening? It always starts the same way it always has: one heart turning back to God, and then refusing to keep that fire to itself.
Want to know where that fire is in your own life? The Spiritual Multiplication Quiz takes just a few minutes and shows you where you stand: Seeker, Believer, Follower, or Laborer.
