George Whitefield is the most famous preacher that you’ve never heard of. He was born in 1714 in what we would call an upper middle class family. His family owned the Bell Inn in Gloucester, which still stands today. When this picture was taken, the first floor of the inn was for sale! During Whitefield’s lifetime he preached at least 18,000 sermons and some estimate the number as high as 30,000. He only preached for thirty five years, so even if we use the conservative number of 18,000, that means he preached an average of 1.5 sermons every single day for thirty five consecutive years. Moreover, Whitefield was the lead character in the First Great Awakening, a genuine revival which spread throughout the thirteen American colonies. “About 80% of all American colonists heard him preach at least once.”[i] “Whitefield was the best known American until George Washington.”[ii] Most of us have heard of John and Charles Wesley. Charles wrote over 5,000 hymns and both brothers fathered the Methodist, Wesleyan and Nazarene churches. Many of you even know the name Jonathan Edwards. Why then, if Whitefield made such an indelible mark upon the Christian history of our nation, are we not more familiar with him? We’ll try to answer that question by the end of the message.

Whitefield was not only a contemporary of the Wesley brothers, but he was also mentored by them and the three became lifelong friends. By the time Whitefield was to enter Oxford University, his family business had taken a turn for the worse and he could not afford to attend Oxford. Whitefield’s mother told him about a way that he could attend Oxford—he would have to live as a servitor on campus. A servitor was kind of an 18^th century equivalent of a work study program. But in those days the class distinctions were more sharp and servitors were not permitted to have free association with the other students. But the Wesleys decided to throw away these class distinctions and invited Whitefield into their now famous Holy Club.

Listen to how Whitefield described the religious behavior of the Holy Club members.

“Never did persons strive more earnestly to enter in at the strait gate. They kept their bodies under, even to an extreme. They were dead to the world, and willing to be accounted as the dung and offscouring of all things, so that they might win Christ. Their hearts glowed with the love of God and they never prospered so much in the inner man as when they had all manner of evil spoken against them. I now began, like them, to live by rule, and to pick up the every fragments of my time, that not a moment of it might be lost…I left no means unused which I thought would lead me nearer to Jesus Christ.”[iii]

By this description, Whitefield appeared to be a dedicated Christian, wouldn’t you agree? But the fact is that neither the Wesleys not Whitefield were yet converted. Like Martin Luther had at one time tried to do, and like many religious men of his day, Whitefield tried to earn his own righteous standing before God. They were well aware that God was holy and that only a righteous man could stand in God’s presence, but they thought this righteousness could be earned by good deeds and extreme self-denial.

Whitefield described this period in his journal. “God only knows how many nights I have lain upon my bed groaning under the weight I felt, and bidding Satan depart from me…Whole days and weeks I have spent in lying prostrate on the ground.” [iv] One biographer further described his extremes of self-denial. “He left off eating such things as fruits and sweets, and wore a patched gown and dirty shoes. He adopted the customs of a German cult, the Quietists, talking very little and wondering if he should talk at all.”[v] For a man who spent his entire life talking and preaching to hundreds of thousands, it is very ironic that he spoke so little.

Up until that time, Whitefield’s entire life was the very opposite of what we have been studying in Philippians. There Paul makes clear that our justification in Christ produces good deeds, but Whitefield was trying to use his good deeds to produce righteousness. The Wesleys were still unconverted when they served as missionaries in the newly formed colony of Georgia. How many countless people have said, “What better way to earn God’s favor than to become a missionary? What better way to please God than to become a pastor, or a member of a church, or to give lots of money to e building program.” The strivings of these holy men in their Holy Club serves as a painful reminder of the futility of our own righteousness. We should always check ourselves with this question: Am I in any way trying to earn God’s forgiveness by my good works or am I living the forgiveness already given to me by Christ?

Finally, a few weeks after Easter at the age of twenty one, Whitefield was dramatically converted. Compare what he wrote here with what came before.

“God was pleased to remove the heavy load, to enable me to lay hold of his dear Son by a living faith, and by giving me the Spirit of adoption, to seal me, even to the day of everlasting redemption. O! with what joy—joy unspeakable—even joy that was full of and big with glory, was my soul filled when the weight of sin went off, and an abiding sense of the love of God broke in upon my disconsolate soul.  My joys were like a springtide and overflowed the banks.”[vi]

It wasn’t long after his conversion that Whitefield began to preach. He recounts, “I preached as usual about five times per week…it was wonderful to see how the people hung upon the rails of the organ loft, climbed upon the leads of the church, and made the church itself so hot with their breath that steam would fall form the pillars like drops of rain.”[vii]

This is where we first see what could be called the anointing of God upon his life. I don’t especially care for the word anointing because too many have stolen the word and caused it to mean something very different. It usually means one who merely draws large crowds or amazes people at miracle healing services. I don’t mean that kind of anointing. I do mean the kind of anointing where God sets aside a man, gives him remarkable gifts, a remarkable faith and a remarkable endurance, and then sets him loose. Whitefield clearly possessed this kind of anointing. He was an amazingly gifted preacher. He preached with a style that uncommon for his day and with a message of new birth in Christ. Over a period of just a few months, he became the talk of London and what we would call a major celebrity.

Whitefield records, “The tide of popularity began to run very high. In a short time I could no longer walk on foot, but was constrained to g in a coach from place to place, to avoid the hosannas of the multitudes. They grew quite extravagant in their applauses, and had it not been for my compassionate High Priest, popularity would have destroyed me.”[viii]

None of us are ever likely to attain the celebrity status of Whitefield, but that does not mean that pride is not also crouching at our door to destroy us. Years ago I used to think that pride was only a boasting about one’s accomplishments, but now I know that pride is any kind of self-centeredness and self-focus. Self-loathing is every bit as prideful as self-exultation. If you tirelessly list your sorrows and heartaches you are every bit drowning in pride if you were to bore others with your feats of greatness. In his early twenties, Whitefield developed a deep sense of humility to match his great giftedness. Had he not, he would have been a mere flash in the pan— yet another stylish but failed preacher heaped upon the pile of forgotten heroes. As I like to say, character always trumps giftedness, and humility is the queen of all Biblical character. Whitefield’s anointing was surpassed only by his humility. May the same thing be said of you and me.

Whitefield was more than just a gatherer of large crowds. We see the effectiveness of his preaching on his first voyage to America to serve as a missionary. One biographer summarized the voyage this way. “Although seven weeks earlier the men had been a scornful, cursing company, they now ‘stood forth like little children saying their catechism,’ many read their Bibles regularly and almost all attended services both morning and evening.”[ix]

When he returned to London a year later he discovered something that would transform his ministry and would become the chief “method” of the spread of Methodist churches for the next one hundred years—open air preaching. We have to understand how radical an idea this was in his day. Preaching had been a high and reverent act that was exclusively limited to inside of ornate churches. By Whitefield’s persistent urging, John and Charles Wesley were both “converted” to open air preaching, but notice how great the transition had been for them. “I could scarce reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields…having been all my life…so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls a sin if it had not been done in a church.” (John Wesley, 1739)[x]

Like everything else Whitefield attempted, this new endeavor was equally anointed. The first Sunday he preached in the open, two hundred people were in attendance. He did it again the following Wednesday and two thousand people showed up. Two days later on Friday four thousand souls heard him preach out of doors. But it didn’t stop there. His open air preaching continued to grow like wildfire. John Wesley recorded these amazing statistics. “Brother Whitefield expounded on Sunday morning to six or seven thousand…; at noon to much the same number…and at five to, I believe, thirty thousand from a little mount in Rose Green…” (John Wesley)[xi] Even Joel Osteen would’ve been jealous with those numbers, don’t you think?

Like all large crowds, we cannot be absolutely certain of his statistics, but it is helpful to know that magazines of his day and even his enemies reported vast multitudes of listeners. When Whitefield arrived in America, Benjamin Franklin measured the distance at which his voice could be heard, and stated, “I computed he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand.”[xii] It is obvious that Whitefield had an enormous booming voice to be heard by so many people in the open without the benefit of any type of amplification, but it is equally obvious that God gave him near miraculous strength and perseverance, because Whitefield never indicated that his voice became weary after preaching to tens of thousands night after night.

But Whitefield was no modern day megachurch pastor intent on building a large congregation of followers in one place. He was an itinerant evangelist who literally took the gospel to the common man. In his day, churches were for the middle and upper class, but poor people were largely closed off from the gospel. Whitefield first took the gospel message to poor coal miners, and had the following effect. “The first discovery of their being effected was to see the white gutters made by their tears which fell plentifully down their black cheeks…Hundreds and hundreds of them were soon brought under deep convictions, which, as the event proved happily ended in a sound and thorough conversion.”[xiii]

When he visited Jonathan Edwards two years later, Edward’s wife Sarah described his wide-reaching ministry. “He impresses the ignorant, and not less the educated and refined…our mechanics shut up their shops, and the day-laborers throw down their tools to go and hear him preach, and few return unaffected…Many, very many persons in Northampton date the beginning of new thoughts, new desires, new purposes, and a new life, from the day they heard him preach of Christ.”[xiv]

Whitefield’s success and his heart for the average, poor person, formed the number one method of the eventual Methodist church. Whitefield was a “Methodist” before the Wesleys ever were. For the next hundred years or so, when the Methodist circuit preachers would ride on horseback across America preaching the gospel and forming new converts into local churches, they were largely modeling their evangelistic efforts off of the ministry of George Whitefield. John Wesley was so committed to open air preaching to the common man, that he uttered these famous words. “Give me where to stand and I will shake the earth.” (John Wesley)[xv]

As we inch closer to finishing our own building, this is a timely reminder that we must never see our new church building as the center of our gospel ministry. It will always be tempting to use our building mostly as a place for sinners to come to us. The church is a gathering of people and we will always preach the gospel from our building. We will preach the gospel so that some can be saved and so that all can be brought to maturity. But gospel work is not a “come and hear,” but rather a “go and tell.” If we want to follow Whitefield and Wesley and the apostle Paul and Jesus, we must go and tell the gospel to the common man and woman where we live and work. But I can’t do this by myself! Only you can carry the gospel to where you live and work. I am here to equip you in this task. If you don’t feel ready to do this, then you come and tell me so. I will do all I can to prepare you and equip you to go and tell the good news, but I cannot do it by myself.

In 1739-1740, Whitefield made his second voyage to America and preached throughout America. Understand that in 1740, the total population of thirteen colonies was only 900,000. Boston and Philadelphia both had populations of about 20,000. This is one of the reasons why Whitefield had such roaring success. With so few people and with such immense popularity, in a year and a half’s time, it was possible to reach upwards of eighty percent of all adults in the colonies. His ministry in America formed the foundation of the First Great Awakening. His ministry resulted in true conversions with genuine life change. The effect that he had on salty-mouthed sailors and blackened coal miners carried over to farmers, shopkeepers, blacksmiths and carpenters.

You can imagine that when Whitefield returned to London he was overflowing with joy at the massive revival and repentant souls that he left in America. But sadly, as soon as he returned home, a bitter division arose between Whitefield and the Wesley brothers. While Whitefield was preaching every day in the colonies and leading souls to the Savior, John Wesley was spreading poison and hate toward him in London. Wesley had objected to Whitefield’s belief in the doctrine of predestination. Wesley wrote a sermon which soundly condemned both the doctrine and Whitefield himself and then saw that it was published far and wide. As soon as Whitefield arrived in London, a great many of his former friends and spiritual children would not even speak with him.

By those who oppose the doctrine of predestination, one of the chief objections is the argument that predestination causes one to become fatalistic about spreading the gospel. Objectors reason in this way, “If God does the electing of souls from the beginning of time, what motivation is there for preaching the gospel. They will be saved with or without our help.” When William Carey felt the call of God to become a missionary in India, an older gentleman said to Carey, “Young man, sit down! If God pleases to convert the heathen, e will do it without your help or mine.” This kind of thinking has existed at time, but the sad irony of this division was that Whitefield’s entire life and ministry was a fatal argument against this type of objection. Could anyone accuse Whitefield of complacency and fatalism in regard to spreading the gospel? Largely due to Whitefield’s preaching, the Great Awakening was just breaking out in America, while at the same time Wesley was accusing and condemning Whitefield in the harshest of terms. It was an unfortunate division and needless controversy.

The other doctrine which divided the former friends was the doctrine of sinless perfection which both Wesley brothers held tenaciously. The Wesleys rightly held to a practice of sanctification and holiness, but they mistakenly held to the belief in complete sanctification and perfect sinlessness. One biographer summarized their differences. “Charles was as strongly against the doctrine of election as Whitefield was for it, and as adamant in favor of sinless perfection as Whitefield was opposed to it.”[xvi]

While I don’t bother to preach against sinless perfection unless it begins to creep into our own church, this is an opportune time to remind us all of the utter insanity of this belief. We should fight against sin with all our strength. I told an out of town friend just this past week that the reason he was struggling with a certain sin was because he loved it too much. None of us have near enough hatred for our own sin. I am guessing that not one person here, including myself, is engaged in an adequate fight against our sin, but the possibility of attaining a place of total sinlessness is not only unbiblical, it is also, in my opinion, extremely dangerous.

It may be true that this doctrine is not widely held today, but it is still preached in many circles. Listen to this preacher tell his church of  thousands about his lack of sin.

“I know that some of you guys are raised that we’re always sinners, even if we give our life to God. I’m not a sinner. If you ask, you say, ‘Hey, Scheer, are you a sinner?’ No, and I’ll tell you quite simply why I’m not sinner, it’s cuz the Bible says God doesn’t hear the sinner. Well I’m telling ya, God hears me. And you know what he does? He responds to my request. Man, he takes, he sits up on that throne and takes notice when I put a demand on his will.

An interesting piece of history that you will probably not get in school is the fact that Whitefield had a thirty year friendship with Benjamin Franklin. Franklin published the sermons and journals of Whitefield for thirty years. Franklin was a profitable printer, but mostly printed newspapers and pamphlets. Franklin only printed sixteen books his entire career, four of which were Whitefield’s journals. They had a mutually prosperous business relationship—Franklin made money by publishing Whitefield’s popular sermons and Whitefield spread his gospel message far and wide. Their business relationship turned into a deep friendship.

A humorous story is recorded in Franklin’s autobiography.

“I happened…to attend one of his [Whitefield’s] sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. “I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistols in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”[xvii]

Despite a close friendship and his best efforts at sharing the gospel with his friend, Franklin was never converted. Listen to Franklin’s kind rejection in a letter to Whitefield. “Your frequently repeated Wishes and Prayers for my Eternal as well as temporal Happiness are very obliging. I can only thank you for them, and offer you mine in return.”[xviii] That’s a polite way of saying, “Thanks, George, but no thanks.” This is a reminder to each of us, that despite our best efforts, not everyone will be converted. But it obviously did not stop Whitefield from trying and it must not stop us either.

Whitefield was anointed by God, but he was far from a perfect man. His view of slavery illustrates his shortcomings. He wrote a scathing letter to three colonies condemning them for the cruelty toward slaves.

“Your dogs are caressed and fondled at your tables, but your slaves…have not an equal privilege. Some have been…cut with knives, and have had forks thrown into their flesh; not to mention what numbers have been given up to the inhuman usage of cruel taskmasters, who, by their unrelenting scourges, have ploughs upon their backs, and made long furrows, and at length brought them even to death itself. [xix]

He preached countless times to black slaves and the slaves loved both Whitefield and his message. He defended the fact that every slave had a soul, and that soul needed saving. The first negro spirituals grew out of the Great Awakening and Whitefield’s preaching among the slaves. Furthermore, After his death, a poem was published by a young black girl.

But despite being way ahead of most contemporaries of his day, Whitefield never argued for feeing slaves. He even encouraged the trustees of Georgia to introduce slavery to the struggling colony to foster economic development. He built an orphanage in Georgia and noted this fact in his journal. “Had negroes been allowed, I should have now had a sufficiency to support a great many orphans without expending above half the sum that has been laid out.”[xx]

Though he went farther than most in his day, Whitefield did not go far enough by not calling for freedom for slaves. We can learn from his mistakes today. Many Christians do not sufficiently feel the horror of abortion. We have come a long way, but we have not yet gone far enough.

Whitefield had amazing perseverance, but he also wore himself out and died at the age of fifty five. He and the Wesley brothers had healed their friendship, which was illustrated by John Wesley’s words at his funeral. “Have we read or heard of any person since the apostles, who…called so many thousands, so many myriads of sinners to repentance?” (John Wesley)[xxi]

I will leave you with his some words from the very last sermon he preached just hours before he died. “Works! Works! A man gets to heaven by works! I would as soon think of climbing to the moon on a rope of sand.”

Rich Maurer

November 9, 2008