A Letter by George Whitefield — E.A. Johnston

George Whitefield’s Ministry and a Prayer for Revival

When I was writing my two-volume biography on the life and ministry of the great British evangelist George Whitefield, I had the high privilege of visiting the churches he preached in and standing in the pulpits he stood in and walking the ground in the open air that he preached to 20 ,000 people at a time with the sky as his canopy in Whitefield's tomb in the basement of the Old South Presbyterian Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts, I have spent solemn times of prayer that God would be pleased to raise up another Whitefield for our day.

Whitefield’s Letter and the Church’s Need for Revival

Oh, friends, how we need to see our churches become Bethels in scenes of revival again. I want to read you a letter of George Whitefield written three years before his death. He was in poor health at the time when he wrote it from his Tottingham Court Church in London at six in the morning, December 30, 1766, and I wish to read you this letter before we go to our time of prayer for revival because I believe it will shame every one of us in how little we have done for Christ with our lives.

Here is a man who has shaken two continents for God and has been called the greatest preacher in the English language. Listen to his humility behind his words as he writes to a friend. Thy upon me, thy upon me, 52 years old last Saturday and yet, oh, loving, ever loving, altogether lovely Jesus, how little, yea, how very little have I done and suffered for thee.

Indeed, and indeed, my dear and honored friends, I am ashamed of myself. I blush and am confounded. Tomorrow, God willing, and Thursday also, with many hundreds more, I intend to take the sacrament upon it that I will begin to begin to be a Christian, though I long to go to heaven to see my glorious master.

What a poor figure shall I make among the saints, confessors, and martyrs that surround his throne without some deeper signatures of his divine impress, without more scores of Christian honor. Oh, this single eye, this disinterested spirit, this freedom from worldly hopes and worldly fears, this flaming zeal, this daring to be singularly good, this holy, laudable ambition to lead the van, oh, it is what in heaven on earth, oh, for a pleirophoria of faith to be filled with the Holy Ghost.

Faith, Holiness, and Earnest Service

This is the grand point. God be praised that you have it in view. All our lukewarmness, all our timidity, all our backwardness to do good, to spend and be spent for God, is all owing to our want of more of that faith, which is in the inward, heartfelt, self-evident demonstration of things not seen.

A Call to Humility and Prayer

But whither am I going? Pardon me, good sir, I keep you from better company, praying that all, if you live to be 52, may not be such dwarfs in the divine life as I am. I hasten to subscribe myself, most honored friends, least and the least of all.

Well, let us go now, friends, to a time of humility and prayer and get on our faces before God and pray for this nation to turn itself back to the living God of the Bible. Let us pray.