Who is Ebenezer Pemberton?

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me is Chuck Baggett. We're looking again at the book, Salvation in Full Color, 20 Sermons by Great Awakening Preachers. It's been edited and compiled by Richard Owen Roberts.

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. 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.

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

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. This week, we're looking at the chapter called The Effectual Calling.

Ebenezer Pemberton and the Sermon on Effectual Calling

This is a sermon by a man named Ebenezer Pemberton. Really, he's actually Ebenezer Pemberton Jr. because his father of the same name was a pastor in New England. But our Ebenezer Pemberton was born in 1705.

He graduated from Harvard, 1721, and became the pastor of a 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.

When George Whitefield visited 1739 and forward, he was the only pastor in the area to allow Whitefield to use his pulpit. At that time, there was some suspicion over Whitefield. After all, Whitefield was an Anglican, and they were hearing astonishing events, the occurrences back in England.

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

As the church grew, and he was there for a couple of decades, they had to add a second pastor. When they did, sadly, a faction grew up in the church that preferred the newer pastor over Pemberton. Pemberton and the new pastor were godly men, and they wanted to avoid any kind of division in the church.

So actually, they both resigned. The Synod, the authority in that area over that church, asked Pemberton to consider staying on, even though he had offered to resign. He did for a month, and he felt that it was just clear that his usefulness there was ended.

Ebenezer Pemberton then went to Boston, where he pastored for a couple of decades, dying in 1777 after 51 years of ministry. During this time, he was involved with the missionary efforts among the American Indians.

The Structure of the Sermon on Divine Grace

The original title of this was The Method of Divine Grace in Conversion, published in 1741. Chuck, why don't you run us through the basic outline of the sermon?

Sure. It's pretty simple. Two major points. How does God actually make us willing? He gives several ways in which he does that, and argues that point. We'll get to that in a few moments. Then, how it is a work of his power to make us willing.

It's not just persuasion, if you will, or argument, but he makes us willing. Then he improves upon that. Some applications.

Effectual Calling and Regeneration

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

Really, biblically, they are so closely aligned. They're so interwoven, so much overlap, that I think that it would be fine if you used them synonymously. Effectual calling is really just describing that impact upon our souls of regeneration with regard to drawing us to the gospel.