The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.
- 1 John 3:8
“Sunday, December 23, 1788
“I had very little life in preaching to a few dead souls at Pope’s. On Monday, at Hutt’s it was nearly the same both in preaching and sacrament. In the evening, at brother Cannon’s the Lord powerfully broke into my soul and the cloud disappeared. That night while sleeping, I dreamed I was praying for sanctification, and God very sensibly filled me with love, and I waked shouting glory, glory to God! My soul was all in a flame. I had never felt so much of God in my life I rode to the Widow Wollard’s and preached on, ‘For this purpose was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.’ During the last five days, we have ridden one hundred and forty miles.
“This verse from 1 John 3 gave itinerant evangelists like Asbury their sense of godly militancy. They saw themselves in a battle, not against the wild frontier they were seeking to tame but against the Devil, who was destroying the souls of those they were seeking to reach. The eighteenth-century circuit riders were big-hearted and loud-voiced, and they were not easily intimidated or silenced. They were fighting Satan and claiming the victory Christ had gained over the works of the Devil.”
- Robert J. Morgan, 100 Bible Verses That Made America
In my recent trip to visit the grandchildren, the oldest of them went with me to Nashville, to sell used books and games. One of the books that I purchased in return was 100 Bible Verses That Made America by Robert J. Morgan. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the birth of the USA, I thought I would do a condensed mini-series on some of these verses, four posts per week for a few weeks – maybe not all 100 verses.
I have written about my great-grandfather before. His father did not have enough money to sit on the front porch and have slaves do all the work. He and his family worked side by side with their slaves. My great-grandfather was within a year of the same age as one of those slaves. They treated each other as brothers. Some distant relatives of mine heard that Yankees had taken over Memphis, TN. While my great-grandfather had already gone off to war, a few members of the family rode toward Memphis to actually get a peek at a real life Yankee.
Along the way, they met a Yankee raiding party, one of those groups that had a reputation of killing people that they met. One relative turned his horse and headed home. One relative was captured, then released when he got sick. But the slave escaped into the woods.
My great-grandfather was Baptist. He grew crops on a few acres. He taught school, but on Sundays, he’d travel from church to church to preach. And he would look for his “brother” while there. The photo above is of the first reenactment of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, PA. The man in the grey suit, next to the man with the umbrella on the far right, is my great-grandfather. He had not been at Gettysburg, but he went anywhere he could to find his “brother.”
The author of the book stated that the Cane Ridge Revival was started by a Presbyterian, Barton Stone, but the revival sparked a fire in the local Methodists. Bishop Francis Asbury was the first Methodist bishop in the USA. The quote above starts with a note in his diary of how his efforts became fueled by the Holy Spirit.
Notice that he preached when he was received at a home. It did not matter what day of the week that was. In the book, it said that Asbury had traveled three hundred thousand miles by horse or carriage and he preached over sixteen thousand sermons. And he was one of many such circuit riders.
Asbury University, where the outpouring of the Holy Spirit occurred in 2023, was founded in 1890 as Kentucky Holiness College, but the name was changed a year later to honor Bishop Francis Asbury.
It is by the efforts of the circuit riders that churches were planted across the nation during those early years. It is probably not a “coincidence” that the revival was focused at Asbury University.
Soli Deo Gloria. Only to God be the Glory.
Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley 
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