Episode 49: George Whitefield (Part 3)

Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son with whom

I am well pleased. He is honored and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

Jesus in a local, visible congregation. It's a battle of the beards this morning.

I've got Wes Brown. Wes, your beard is better than mine.

Get out of here. I don't want to hear that. Welcome to the Real Church Podcast.

I am your co -host, Allen Nelson, and I guess you should say co -hosting with me today is not the marvelous

Eddie Ragsdale who is out on some summer activities, but it is the one and only

Wes Brown. Good morning, Wes. Good morning. How are you? I'm doing pretty good.

We were talking before the show that we've been able to keep the podcast rolling during the summer.

Eddie and I were kind of nervous about that because we're both so busy and we've got some different things going on.

I'm going to be at a church camp in a couple of weeks, and he's been at camp, and I was in Mexico and just lots of different things going on.

I was at the convention. Anyway, but here we are, and since you're on, you're the

Whitfield expert, right? No, sir, but I do love reading about him. By the way, at Preachers of Grace, I heard we're getting a biography of Whitfield.

Oh, we are. Yeah, so there you go. So maybe we should have waited for this podcast, but we're trying to wrap up some things if we can today about Whitfield.

We've already done parts one and two, and really this is part three. We're trying to get Whitfield to the colonies and then just offer some reflections on Whitfield's life and ministry that are beneficial and helpful to churches and pastors today.

So Whitfield made 13 trips across the

Atlantic, two every time. So if you do the math there, you're like, well, wait a second.

There should be an even number. Well, that's because his last trip across the

Atlantic to the colonies, he didn't make it back to England. So spoiler alert,

Whitfield is not still alive. He actually died in 1770.

But 1738 was his first crossing to the colonies. He went to Georgia.

Some people know about that. But on the way over, he was catechizing the sailors, doing

Bible studies. He even did, I think, a choir. But when Whitfield got to Georgia is when he established the orphanage there, and he's pretty well known for that.

Then he goes back to England. He comes back to the colonies in 1739.

And this is probably one of the most significant trips because when he comes back to the colonies in 1739 and he arrives in Philadelphia, this is where he intersects with Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennant.

This is really when the whole of the colony is like a powder keg and Whitfield lights the fuse, and he is preaching to thousands of people outdoors.

People are traveling miles to hear him.

In fact, a famous account, I'll just read real quick, a farmer named Nathan Cole said this,

When I saw Mr. Whitfield come up on the scaffold, he looked almost angelical, a young, slim, slender youth before some thousands of people with a bold, undaunted countenance.

And my hearing how God was with him everywhere as he came along, it solemnized my mind and put me into a trembling fear before he began to preach.

For he looked as if he was clothed with authority from the great God and a sweet solemnity set upon his brow.

And my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound. Think about that, a heart wound.

By God's blessing, my old foundation was broken up and I saw that my righteousness would not save me.

And then here's what Whitfield writes of his trip in 1739 and 1740. He says,

An effectual door is open for preaching the everlasting gospel, and I daily receive fresh and most importunate invitation to preach in all the counties round about.

God is pleased to give a great blessing to my printed sermons. They're in the hands of thousands in these parts and are a means of enlightening and building up many in the most holy faith.

The clergy, I find, are most offended at me. The commissary of Philadelphia has thrown off the mask, denied me the pulpit, and last

Sunday preached up an historical faith in justification by works. But the people only flock the more.

The power of God is more visible than ever in our assemblies, and more and more are convinced that I preach the doctrine of Jesus Christ.

Some of the bigoted, self -righteous Quakers now also begin to spit out a little of the venom of the serpent.

They cannot bear the doctrine of original sin and of an imputed righteousness as a cause of our acceptance with God.

I've not yet met with much opposition from the dissenters, but when I come to tell many of them, ministers as well as people, that they hold the truth in unrighteousness, that they talk and preach of justifying faith but never felt it in their hearts, as I am persuaded numbers of them have not, then they no doubt will shoot out their arrows even bitter words.

Sorry, I'm a little slow this morning, but you see there Whitefield's commitment to sound doctrine.

You see his acknowledgment of opposition. You see one of the things that he winds up running in trouble with, and that is he was not afraid to say that ministers were unconverted, and then later during that trip,

I think it was like February. No, no, no, no. It's October of 1740.

Whitefield is going to meet with Jonathan Edwards, and Edwards is pretty famously known weeps at that meeting at Whitefield's preaching at his church, and Edwards, when they leave,

Edwards cautions him about calling all these ministers unconverted, and then he also cautions him about excesses in his preaching.

You're really going to see these excesses manifest in the second Great Awakening. We have a lot of strange things going on, people barking like dogs and all that, but some of that kind of is introduced during the first Great Awakening, and Whitefield is actually humble.

He's 11 years Edwards' junior. He's humble. He receives

Edwards' instruction and correction, and he actually recants, publicly apologizes of some of these things later on.

But anyway, that's just kind of a background. So now Whitefield's in the colonies. He's come several times.

This is really the high point of the Great Awakening, 1739, 1740, but I know that you've kind of got some summary thoughts that we should have from both his preaching, his interaction with others, so let me turn it over to you for a minute now that we've kind of established some dates and such.

So take us a little bit further here. Well, I think there are a few different things that are really well illustrated by how you've set that up and in those quotes that you read.

First of all, I think it's such a good example in Whitefield we have of someone who just wants to serve the

Lord and who wants to see the lost saved. The accounts of him ministering to the sailors on the boat over is so encouraging and such a great example.

To see Whitefield not obsessed about crowds, not obsessed about notoriety, he could have justified spending the trip over in his cabin studying and preparing.

He knew he was going to be preaching a lot in the coming months as he visits

America. Yeah. But he's there on the boat sharing the gospel and eventually catechizing and organizing a choir and meeting on Sundays and all that.

But, you know, there's no notoriety on the boat.

There's no great crowds watching him. Yeah. He's just still serving the

Lord. Amen. I think that's a wonderful testimony to his faithfulness in ministry.

And I also think that as he got over there, it's easy to watch the highlight reel of Whitefield.

It's almost like if you go to YouTube and watch some

Michael Jordan or Steph Curry or LeBron James highlight video, you get the impression that they never missed.

Yeah. Or that everything went perfectly for them.

Every time he shoots, it goes in. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. But to see

Whitefield, there was a lot of opposition to him. Yeah. There was a lot of people, especially, you know, as you mentioned, in Philadelphia, the

Anglican ministers that did not receive him, wouldn't let him preach, people that accused him of all sorts of evils and of him being a false teacher.

Yeah. And so he wasn't without his scars and rejections.

And yet he still faithfully served.

And I think that that's what drove him, or at least

God used to lead him to have such a Catholic spirit, not

Roman Catholic, but a willingness to fellowship and to preach and to share the gospel with people that disagreed with him.

Yeah. The ecclesiology. And I think that's a great example in Whitefield, because I see in our day a pretty great splintering.

And there's so many who, it seems, maybe in the face of all of this apostasy and the culture going the way it is, seeing, being exclusive or being the smaller your group, the more faithful you are.

Yeah. There's a tribalism that, yeah, for sure. Which, let me just mention real quick a few things.

I mean, those names I mentioned. So Whitefield is Anglican, Gilbert Tennant is

Presbyterian, and Jonathan Edwards is Congregationalist. And so that's just a quick example right there.

And those were friends of Whitefield and men that he partnered with. And so that's just one example.

And Jonathan Edwards never became Anglican. Whitefield never became

Congregationalist. None of those guys ever converted to the other's position, but loved one another and served and encouraged one another and supported one another.

I think that's a great example, because we're not unique. Yeah. These are the same temptations that we face, that they face.

And we see that in the rejections of Whitefield, you know, those people that just see he was an outsider and they didn't want that.

But we do see, I think, just the Holy Spirit moving in them and it gave them a love for one another that rose above some of their disagreements, because they were agreed in what the gospel is and who

God is and what happens in salvation.

Yeah. Well, and then, which we may be jumping ahead too much, but Whitefield even really tried, this is my opinion, and I'm biased because I'm a

Whitefield fan, but in my opinion, the relationship between Whitefield and Wesley, Whitefield was much more gracious.

Whitefield tried to maintain that relationship, even though they disagreed on a very significant issue when it comes to Wesley's idea of preventing a grace,

Whitefield's understanding of monergism. But Whitefield tried to maintain that relationship, tried to maintain that partnership.

Wesley ultimately rejected that. I think probably part of it is some envy on the part of Wesley because Whitefield had become so popular, you know.

You want to talk about that some? Yeah, and I think, you know, this is the

Rural Church podcast, right? And I think that one of the main, something that plagues a lot of pastors is loneliness.

Yeah. And I think that there may be some, that old joke where the man's on the roof in the middle of a flood, and he prays that God would rescue him, and the boat comes by, he says, no,

I'm not getting in, God's going to rescue me. And another boat comes by and says, hey, jump in.

He says, no, God's going to rescue me. And a helicopter flies over and says, hey, climb on. He says, no, God's going to rescue me.

And the flood rises up. He dies. He sees the Lord, and he says, Lord, why didn't you rescue me? And he said, I sent you two boats and a helicopter.

Yeah. There may be a lot of like, Lord, I'm so lonely. Lord, I'm so lonely, you know. And God's saying, look,

I've put people in your life and in your area that will encourage you and be a benefit to you, but not exactly in my exact denomination or tribe or whatever.

You don't even consider it. They're an other. And I think, not for us to compromise doctrinally, but I think that there may be some opportunities and providence that we reject on the account of that tribalism, which

I think in Whitefield, we see a good example of just a rejection of that. Yeah.

Yeah, and Whitefield wasn't bashful or, let me say, maybe that's the right word, but if you invited

Whitefield to preach, he'd come preach. And if people in the community, that was a big deal, like people in the community would invite him to preach, but the pastor wouldn't invite him to preach.

And so people obviously started getting upset about that. But territorialism, tribalism, these are things that really, and Whitefield wasn't perfect, neither

Wesley or I would say, not John Wesley, I'm talking about Wesley Brown, would say that he was perfect by any stretch.

Obviously, he was Anglican, and both of us are staunchly Baptist, so he was wrong about that.

I do think he was in error with some of his, but he was young.

By the way, just remember, he was born in 1714, December 1714.

So when he comes over in 1739, he hasn't turned 25 yet.

So in that time of 1739, 1740, he's 24, then freshly 25.

You take a 25 -year -old young man, and there's a bit of arrogance and brazenness sometimes, but ultimately,

I think he did repent of those things, and ultimately he's a force for good in the kingdom.

The Baptist cause actually was furthered by Whitefield in the sense that there were several people we could name,

Isaac Bacchus being one, that converted during this time period. I think Isaac Bacchus—I don't know if you know this or not—I think

Isaac Bacchus was converted actually under the preaching of Whitefield. Isaac Bacchus is a pretty important Baptist in American Baptist history, proponent of religious freedom and such, and ultimately,

God used Whitefield's preaching across a large swath of men and women coming to know

Christ. I mean, imagine a town where 10 % of the people were converted, truly converted, not the

Instagram post of all these people at the altar. I'm talking about truly born again, and their affections turned toward Christ.

This is the kind of stuff that towns in the—my microphone just messed up.

Anyway, this is the kind of stuff that towns in the American colonies were experiencing.

That's right. And I think you bringing up, Wesley, that's sort of the extreme example of his love for the saints, that sort of spirit that he had, the love that he had for those that even he disagreed with.

Yeah. Because he begged John Wesley not to preach or publish this sermon that he had working up that was against God's sovereignty and salvation.

And Whitefield went to America, and while he was gone,

John Wesley publishes it. Yeah. Coward. Yeah. I mean, it seems as though that has something to do with it.

Sort of while Whitefield was away, he felt he could do that.

And so he does, and he, in this sermon, takes

Whitefield's— at least in name, he takes on Whitefield's theology, his doctrine, though he doesn't really deal with it in actuality.

He really strawmans God's sovereignty and salvation and says that what

Whitefield preaches makes God worse than the devil. The type of argumentation that he used was unfair.

It was uncharitable. I mean, it really hurt him.

He saw John Wesley as a friend, and he acted in this immature, brash, uncharitable way.

Yeah. And he finds out about this in the colonies, which you know there was no transatlantic cable.

He didn't post it on Twitter. This thing's been circulating for months by the time

Whitefield finds out about it. Yeah. And Whitefield's response is,

I think, a beautiful example of both standing for right and good doctrine and the brotherly love that should be shared among the saints.

Because he doesn't roll over as a response to this.

He doesn't say, well, you know, it doesn't matter. He addresses some of the arguments that John Wesley made, but he does it in an extremely humble way and in a way that in every line you can hear him hoping and praying and pleading with John Wesley to see the light, but also to act in a way that is in accordance with maturity.

And he never once shuts the door on the reconciliation between the two men.

He wants that friendship. He wants that partnership. But sadly, it was not to be because of John Wesley's brashness, anger.

Yeah, which later on, you know, towards the end, they do reconcile and Wesley actually preaches

Whitefield's funeral. But yeah, it's really sad, sad chapter of the history there.

And, you know, I think that we can learn we can't compromise our convictions and we can't minimize sound doctrine.

And by the way, that's one of the great things about Whitefield's preaching. He didn't, you know, he was a very strong doctrinal preacher and he preached on things like regeneration.

Well, obviously, we know that you must be born again. He preached on things like imputation and justification.

I mean, these words today that you throw around in churches and they're like, wow, you're preaching over our heads.

Now, Whitefield preaches things even to the common people, but he preached them in such a way that they could understand.

And God really blessed that. God blessed his strong doctrinal preaching. I want to read to you what

Sarah Edwards had to say, Jonathan Edwards' wife. She said, it is wonderful to see what a spell he cast over an audience, that's

Whitefield, by proclaiming the simplest truths of the Bible. I've seen upward of a thousand people hang on his words with breathless silence, broken only by an occasional half -suppressed sob.

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.

So, Whitefield comes into town, and the shopkeepers close their shops.

They come here and preach. And the uneducated understand him and rejoice. The educated aren't bored.

They understand him. They rejoice. And God uses him in a mighty way. And I would say this is something to help consider with our preaching.

And that is we ought to preach in the same way. The children in our congregation ought to understand what we're communicating, though I understand there's some times that we preach above their heads.

But the same is true of the educated. We ought to preach in such a way that the educated don't feel that we're dumbing things down, and the uneducated don't feel like we're preaching over their heads.

And really, blessed are the preachers that are able. That's difficult. It's hard. But it takes work and study and practice.

Blessed are the preachers that are able to preach in such a way. Yeah, his sermons, you can look at them, and they're wonderful.

I love reading them. But it's not as though he's

William Shakespeare or something. Sure. And he's just got this prose that is exalted.

He preaches simply. His outline is simple, and he uses a lot of illustrations.

And you can see it's the passion in his preaching.

And it's that he believes what he's preaching, I think, that was so magnetic. The temptation in that day among the

Anglican preachers especially, and in our day, is to make sure that your sermon is competent.

I've done, and provably so, I've done this study and this

Greek word, so that if anyone hears or reads this sermon, they can't be attacked.

And it's safe from being accused of being lighter or just not spending any time in the study.

Now, Whitfield did study. Yeah. But you'll find him, when you start reading his sermons, he'll be defending the fact that tears are running down his face as he's preaching.

Yeah. Which would have been very uncouth or sort of maybe seen as childish, not very grown up in that day.

And I think part of it is that he actually cared about the reception that his preaching would receive.

Yeah. The response. It's easy to sort of fall into the trap of, listen, this is a verifiably competent sermon.

And so I have constructed this, I've studied this out, and I know that this is a competent sermon, so the response

I don't care about. Yeah. Because I can prove that my sermon is competent and is good.

And that's not what we see in Whitfield. We see a man who is burdened for the lost and for the

Christian and that cares deeply about the response and that people respond to the preaching.

I think that that's something else that we can learn from Whitfield's time, the colonies, and just his overall ministry is at the end of the day, we should be mindful of our brothers and sisters, or even to an extent we're mindful of the world around us.

But at the end of the day, the final straw, as it were, the final thing that we're concerned about is the glory of Christ and that we have to stand before the

Lord and give an account of our ministry. So at the end of the day, above all, though I'm mindful of those around us,

I have to answer to Christ. And we need to keep this at the forefront of our minds and hearts. And I don't want to unduly offend folks around me, but at the end of the day, if pleasing

Christ results in their offense, so be it. I must please Christ above all.

Yeah, and I think that there are many who forget that we're to preach and to proclaim as though God's making his case through us.

We can forget Jesus' lament over Jerusalem. We can forget Jesus' heart and that he's making his case.

He's pleading through us that we should do it in the way that would please him, not just making sure that the content is right.

We should make sure the content is right, but not just that. We can't leave it there.

There's got to be the passion and the caring that Christ has.

And so that we do ultimately, we want to please

Jesus. And if people don't respond, that doesn't mean, or there isn't a conversion at the sermon, that doesn't cause us to quit.

Yeah. It also causes us to get on our knees and pray.

Amen. And plead that God would bring that about. Amen, amen.

Well, as we kind of start to land the plane here, and there's so much more about Whitfield that we could talk about, so many biographies, podcasts.

Steve Lawson, I think, is doing a church history podcast pretty good.

But I want to make an appeal to rural church pastors, and all church, whatever size church, to teach your people about the men of the faith.

This will help in multiple ways. First of all, it'll help remind them that the kingdom of Christ is bigger than your one little church, or even your one denominational affiliation.

And you can do this in a number of ways. You could take some Wednesday nights and teach.

You could take some Sunday school and teach. One of the things I've done before is church history month in October, and took some time in October to either do some biographies as lessons, or sometimes multiple short little biographies in one.

Another thing I've been doing this summer is going through The Great Awakening during Sunday school, and just periodically.

Obviously, history is not everybody's cup of tea, and so maybe give it in small doses.

But don't neglect the history. Paul says that we should imitate him as he imitates

Christ. In Philippians, he talks about keeping our eyes on those who walk after the manner of Christ.

First application there is those in the local church, but there's certainly an application there for us to consider the lives of those who've gone on before us.

Absolutely. We're not called to be history teachers or history professors, but I think maybe some of the loneliness people feel is sort of a historical loneliness.

We're not. God's had his people, and he hasn't forsaken his church since the ascension.

So whatever you're going through, we have examples in history of God seeing people through it, and through worse.

I think that's also a good result of studying history, and the church gives us some perspective on, oh, this isn't the worst it's ever been, as news might cause us to believe.

There's nothing new under the sun, Solomon says, and we learn that a lot in church history.

Any concluding thoughts you have or encouragements about Whitfield's ministry?

I'm always encouraged at the way it ended, and reading that account.

Whitfield preached and preached and preached, and as you mentioned, there's an odd number of those trips, because he didn't make it back.

On the night, it was either on the night he died or became bound to his bed and died soon after.

He was ascending the stairs at bedtime with a candle in his hand, and people had gathered outside the house that he was staying in, and they called out to him, asking him to preach.

And so he stood at the window, the stairs there, and put the candle in the windowsill and said,

I'll preach till the candle burns out. And so he stood in the window, and he preached until that candle, the wick was all the way burned down, and then he went up the stairs and was shortly in glory.

And it's a wonderful metaphor for Whitfield's life. He didn't leave any wick left unburned.

He worked to the very end, and that's what

I want in my life. That's what I ask God to bless me with is the ability to keep working, preaching, to keep proclaiming, and to leave nothing on the field, nothing on the table, no wick left unburned.

So I'm always encouraged by the account of the end of Whitfield's life as well as so much of what happened in the middle.

Hey, man, it's 1770, September of 1770.

I don't have the right date in front of me, but I know it's September 1770. So he is not yet 56, similar to Spurgeon.

So they lived a lot of life in just a few decades.

And there may be some caution there about the overuse of our bodies in some ways, but in a sense, of course,

Whitfield wasn't. He was married, but his only son died in infancy.

So there may be some patterns of his life that we don't want to go out and completely imitate.

However, I 100 % agree with what you're saying there, Wes, about, man, our candle's burning.

Even right now, it's burning. It's burning every day. We only have so much, and it is eventually going to burn out.

So we must use the time that God has given us for the glory of Christ and let all these other things grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.

Amen. Amen. Well, it's been a joy, brother. It's been a joy just having you on.

We've got to get you on about something else, I guess, when Eddie's back. And it's been a joy talking about George Whitfield.

I hope this has been helpful to our listeners and encouraging. And, of course, we encourage you, again, check out the

Dallimore Biographies of Whitfield, Steve Lawson. Free Grace Press puts out a biography of Whitfield.

So much out there that you can listen and glean from and really worth your time.

Crossway puts out two volumes worth of sermons from Whitfield, some really great stuff out there.

And we encourage you in that and in your study and hope that it's beneficial to you. You've got anything else that you want to add?

I just appreciate you having me on. I appreciate your friendship. I appreciate the Rural Church Podcast.

I get to listen to that while I'm mowing the church lawn. So that's always an encouragement.

And I look forward to seeing you soon. Amen. I will see you soon.

And I'll see you tomorrow, Lord willing. But most of you others, I will not.

So thank you guys for listening on this week of the Rural Church Podcast.

And we'll see you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

God's doing. This is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the hoemas, the masterpiece of God.