Who is Ebenezer Pemberton?

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me is Chuck Baggett. We're looking again at the book,

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Salvation in Full Color, 20 Sermons by Great Awakening Preachers. It's been edited and compiled by Richard Owen Roberts.

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If you remember, it's been a while since we've been together, but this is a book that has 20 sermons on the theme of salvation.

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They're laid out in a very specific order. The purpose is so that each truth builds on the previous truth or leads to the next truth.

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If these truths are taken in their biblical and appropriate order, then the impact that these sermons have is cumulative.

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In other words, it's not just that we're reading a sermon about repentance or faith or the death of Christ on the cross.

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In reading these in the biblical order, they carry much more weight and bring much more benefit to our souls than if we took them in an isolated way.

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This week, we're looking at the chapter called The Effectual Calling. This is a sermon by a man named

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Ebenezer Pemberton. Really, he's actually Ebenezer Pemberton, Jr. because his father of the same name was a pastor in New England.

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But our Ebenezer Pemberton was born in 1705. He graduated from Harvard, 1721, and became the pastor of a

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Congregationalist church in New York City. It was a small congregation, and yet he continued to grow in godliness and in wisdom as a pastor.

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When George Whitefield visited, 1739 and forward, he was the only pastor in the area to allow

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Whitefield to use his pulpit. At that time, there was some suspicion over Whitefield. After all,

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Whitefield was an Anglican, and they were hearing astonishing events, the occurrences back in England.

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So he trusted Whitefield, and I'm glad he did because Whitefield visited many times and always came to his church when he was in the area.

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The church, the enormous crowds that visited to hear Whitefield, many of them stayed and became shepherded people under Pemberton.

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Now, as the church grew, and he was there for a couple of decades, they had to add a second pastor.

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And when they did, sadly, a faction grew up in the church that preferred the newer pastor over Pemberton.

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Pemberton and the new pastor were godly men, and they wanted to avoid any kind of division in the church.

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So actually, they both resigned. And the synod, the authority in that area over that church, asked

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Pemberton to consider staying on, even though he had offered to resign. And he did for a month, and he felt that it was just clear that his usefulness there was ended.

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Ebenezer Pemberton then went to Boston, where he pastored for a couple of decades, dying in 1777 after 51 years of ministry.

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During this time, he was involved with the missionary efforts among the

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American Indians. The original title of this was, The Method of Divine Grace in Conversion, published in 1741.

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Chuck, why don't you run us through the basic outline of the sermon? Sure, it's pretty simple.

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Two major points. How does God actually make us willing? And he gives several ways in which he does that, and argues that point.

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We'll get to that in a few moments. And then, how it is a work of his power to make us willing.

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It's not just persuasion, if you will, or argument, but he makes us willing.

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And then he improves upon that. Some applications. We probably should say right off at the beginning that effectual calling is a theological category in what we call soteriology, the study of salvation.

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Sometimes in the older writers, effectual calling and regeneration are treated synonymously.

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And really, biblically, they are so closely aligned. You know, they're so interwoven, so much overlap, that I think that it would be fine if you use them synonymously.

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Effectual calling is really just describing that impact upon our souls of regeneration with regard to drawing us to the gospel.