The Work of the Holy Spirit (George Whitefield) | The Whole Counsel

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm John Snyder, and I'm here with Chuck Baggett, and we want to talk again about the book,

Salvation in Full Color. And it's a series of 20 sermons on the doctrine of redemption, of salvation.

And each of the sermons was preached by a Great Awakening minister in the early colonies, so the first Great Awakening.

And the sermons are laid out in a very theological way. So in a sense, it's a unique book.

The sermons are wonderful, but if taken in the appropriate order, they really do kind of have a cumulative effect.

So you know, if you're on Sermon 11, then the 10 sermons that preceded have just added weight to what you're going to read in Chapter 11, and it's much more beneficial if taken in that way.

Today's sermon is On the Work of the Holy Spirit by George Whitefield. And so just a quick introduction to Whitefield.

We normally give an introduction to the preacher of the sermon.

Whitefield is probably one of the more popular ones. You can find a great two -volume biography. I think it's been boiled down into one volume.

If the two -volume is still available, I would definitely get the two. And that is a book by Arnold Dallimore.

Dallimore's real strength is not that he gives you a picture of Whitefield, but he also gives you a picture of everybody that Whitefield was connected with, his work in England, Scotland, Wales, and the colonies.

And so in a sense, reading the life of Whitefield is like reading about the entire Great Awakening in Europe and in America, because of his central role in all of that.

Whitefield was the great preacher of the Great Awakening, and while some other men might have been more precise in their theology,

George Whitefield was always considered at each place that he preached, really as the supreme preacher of the gospel.

And Chuck and I, we were talking about how Whitefield's sermon is much more simple than some of the other sermons, and about half of the sermon, wouldn't you say, is pleading with the sinner.

So you can just really see different gifts that God gives different men. So just quickly about Whitefield, he was born in 1714.

His father died not long after he was born, and so basically raised by a mom, and was raised with his mom working in a public house, in a pub.

So his parents owned a restaurant -slash -bar -slash -hotel.

And Whitefield really learned how normal people lived by this. As compared to John Wesley, who grew up in a pastor's home, who was very intellectual.

Whitefield was converted at Oxford. When he was there as a student, Charles Wesley befriended him, invited him to the

Holy Club. That was not the club's self -designation. That was what other people named it as, as a mocking name.

But it was a group of very earnest, young college men who wanted—most of them wanted to be ministers.

All of them had one thing in common. They were all self -righteous and lost. Not understanding

God's way of righteousness, they tried to work their way up. So they went and worked in prisons.

They gave sacrificially. You can read the biography and find out just so many amazing accounts.

It was through reading some Puritans that Whitefield began to see that he knew nothing of true religion, of the life of God in the soul of man.

This conviction ultimately led to a breakdown in his health. He had to step away from college.

And while away from college, recuperating at a friend's home, Whitefield was wonderfully converted and began to study the

Bible with Matthew Henry's commentary, and the Greek New Testament, and the

Hebrew Old Testament, and the English Bible laid out in front of him. And he just, hour after hour, filled up on that for months.

And really, we can see later in his life when he didn't have time to study like that, because he was constantly preaching.

This is the way that God gave him fuel. He traveled throughout the

UK and in the colonies, really as the centerpiece of the Great Awakening, and died preaching.

He preached to the church. He felt very poorly. He went to a house where he was going to spend the night. He went upstairs to get ready for bed.

But he turned back, walked down the stairs, and people were there wanting to talk to him.

And he had a candle in his hand, and he preached his final sermon on the stairs until the candle burned out.

And then he went back to bed and died in his sleep. Really quite an extraordinary life in the hands of God.

I think the first time that I ever heard of George Whitefield was through a little book that an older Christian man gave me by J .C.

Ryle on George Whitefield. It's a small paperback. Banner of Truth still publishes it. It's really worth its weight in gold.

The first, one half of the book, is the biography of Whitefield.

And it's just, you know, maybe a hundred pages. And the second half of the book is a selection of his sermons, also with J .C.

Ryle's explanation of what Whitefield really believed. So really worthwhile. Chuck, why don't you walk us through the main points of the sermon?

Yeah, well, as you said, a very simple sermon. Three main points. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin, the

Holy Spirit convicts of righteousness, the Holy Spirit convicts of judgment. And the first point of the

Holy Spirit convicting of sin has a few sub -points. The others do not. And as you've mentioned, a lot of it is simply pleading with the sinner.

Yeah. So, let's hit some of our, let's hit some of those high points and kind of look at how they could be applied to us today.

Before we even get to those points, Whitefield mentions the context of this passage,

John 16, 8, where Christ says to that small group of eleven men, and when he, that is the

Spirit, when he has come, he will reprove the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.

And Whitefield really spends a little time in the introduction explaining it. These were words of comfort to men who love the

Lord, but were about to lose his physical presence. And of course, to them, it would have been very difficult to imagine the

Christian life continuing without him. What would that look like? And so he explains that he will send the

Comforter, or the Spirit, and the Spirit's great work in them and through them would be in such a way that it's actually better for them to lose

Christ's physical presence and gain the Spirit, which surely would have been hard for them to believe.

Sometimes it may be hard for us to believe. And when he goes on to describe the work of the Spirit, we need to read every description there in light of the fact that this is comfort.

It is very comforting for us to know, in light of man, the depth of man's need and the stain of sin, it is comforting to know what the

Spirit will do. It is also essential. None of these things, even though they are comforting things, and sometimes we think of comforting things as maybe non -essential.

So you comfort a friend, and you think, yes, but I mean, they could have gotten on with life without my few words of comfort, but not in this case.

When Christ says these things in John chapter 13, 14, 15, 16, and finally that great prayer in 17, this goodbye -farewell address is full of things that are essential for every

Christian if we're to live for the King, here, and if we're to know how to labor in his kingdom in cooperation with the

Spirit. Well, some of the key points. He convicts of sin.

So Chuck, what does he mention under that? Because he mentions a few things there. Yeah, the first one is that he convicts of actual sin.

So you might think that doesn't sound very comforting, but he is leading us through what we have to go through to get to the comfort, right?

But he convicts of actual sin, and not just a vague notion of sin or that people are sinful generally or even that I'm not as perfect as I ought to be, but that I am sinful and my sin is against the

Holy God, and the Spirit has to bring us to come to terms with that and to own it.

Yeah, and Whitfield drives home the point that it's not the intellectual agreement with the statement that humanity has fallen and therefore all are sinners.

It is the experiential—the old word that they used was experimental, but they mean experiential—it is the experience of feeling the weight of your actual sins against God.

And as we mentioned, people in church settings are quick to say, well, yes, preacher, we're all sinners.

But if you would follow that up, when a person says that, if you were to follow that up with saying, yes,

I know, I noticed that you are a sinner in this way, you're a very proud person or you're a greedy person, it would be so offensive, you know?

So we're all sinners is a very vague blanket. It's almost like saying we all failed the test, so it doesn't matter that I made an

F in the class, because everybody made an F, so it makes it okay. But when we're talking about rebellion against God, the fact that we're part of a great group that rebelled does not make it better.

So we are actually committing crimes against God, and the

Spirit takes that from an intellectual assessment to the heart being really ground to powder because of that.

Yeah, it's also been a part of our Mid -South religious culture that people are quite ready to acknowledge that they are a sinner in vague terms, but to own it as something that needs to be rescued from, not so much.

Yeah, second thing he mentions is that the Spirit convicts of original sin, or that is that we have a sinful nature.

So we are guilty because of what Adam did, because Adam represented us, in the same way that we are righteous before God as a believer because of what

Christ did, and He represented us. So, you know, Paul's argument in Romans 5 is pretty clear.

If you don't like the fact that Adam represented you and brought you into the camp of condemned, then embrace

Christ, who brings you into the camp of non -condemnation, you know, of perfect righteousness. And that really is important for us to, again, to feel that it's what

I am that is wrong, not just what I've done a few times that's wrong.

Because if I don't know how deep the problem goes, if the Spirit never opens my eyes to that, then

I'll be one of those people that constantly spend my life trying to fix the external problems that I can see, and I admit to, and I never am driven to the cross by the awareness that I could never fix what

I am, even if I could fix what I do. Today, I think a symptom of this would be seen in making everything a sickness.

So the problem is not me, a twistedness within me or a perversion within me, but it is,

I'm sick. And the cure then is some kind of medical cure or psychological cure and not a sin that needs to be forgiven and a nature that needs to be changed.

Yeah, or another way we see this would be the kind of the fundamental belief that we're all born with, that whatever you point out that's wrong about me, it's actually because of my environment that I'm in.

It's somebody else. And so you think the problem is outside of me, and therefore,

I have to look within me to find the cure. The danger of that lie is that you can go from one scheme to the next, and there are enough schemes to employ your energy for the rest of your life, trying to, whether it's under the umbrella of Christ and using

Bible phrases or whether it's just secular, trying to look within me to find a cure for what's out there that keeps causing me to stumble.

So you know, you can waste your entire life. Yeah. And many do. A third area that he mentions is one that might be more surprising to us, and that is dead works.

So the good religious things that we try to do to cure ourselves, and rather than balancing out the scales or in any way being meritorious, they actually condemn us further.

They are more sin piled on to the sin that already exists.

Yeah, and that phrase comes from the book of Hebrews, where we're warned about the danger of dead works. So we could describe dead works, and we even had a sermon entitled

Dead Works. Dead works are works that are done, good works, good things, you know, we find them in Scripture, these are things that we should do.

We do these duties from the wrong motive. So ultimately, even though it's something you do within religion, it's not really aimed at God.

It's really like a boomerang. It's ultimately meant to come back and benefit me. So in a sense, it's like making

Christianity and your Bible study and your prayer times and your gifts and your worship and your singing of, you know, of songs in church and helping out, you know, people, all of that ultimately is meant to bribe

God so that He'll do what you want Him to do. He'll be useful. And so you become the real center of your religion.

It's the pinnacle of idolatry. Yeah, and you can see why the

Spirit has to convict you of that and convince you of that, because who would believe that praying and worship and giving is a bad thing?

But from the wrong motive, it is. Yeah. In Isaiah 1, you know,

God talks to the people about the fact that they are in such a slide, a decline spiritually, that they're like a son, that the father comes and he has to discipline the son.

But no matter how many times a father lovingly disciplines, God disciplines Israel, they never pay attention.

He says, there's no place left on your body that I could discipline, you know. Where can

I spank you? You have all these bruises and you still won't look at me. And then

He describes their religion, and He says that they can lift their hands in their worship service and in prayer and offer their sacrifices, and He will not pay attention.

So even their religion, because of the wrong heart, is a sinful thing.

You mentioned the scale. We just can't seem, apart from the work of God, to get past the idea that God deals with us with a scale.

So we think of the ancient scales and the balances. On one side is my sin. And we say, okay, well,

I recognize there's a lot there, but maybe through a lifetime of effort,

I could put more on the good side. And we always think that religious duties are on the good side, but what if the

Bible's right? And there is such a thing as a dead work, a work, a religious thing that you really are doing for you and not for love of Christ at all.

And it's imperfect, and it's flawed, and it's self -centered, and it's on the other side of the scale.

Every one of my prayers, you know, what if you stand before a judge at the end and you find that all your prayers are on the wrong side?

Like do you mean that my gifts to the church and my teaching Sunday school class and even us, you know,

I preached before I was a Christian. So those sermons, what if they were put on the other side of the scale?

What hope does any man or woman have of ever, even in their own wrong system, what hope do you have of balancing the scales?

Whitfield gives a couple of evidences that the Spirit has worked in you this way so that you've come to see that these things are dead works.

One is that when the Spirit has worked in this way, you stop justifying yourself and you start justifying

God. He is right. I am wrong. Yeah, and another is that there's no more delay.

No more of this kind of casualness, I guess we would say. If you feel these things to be true by the

Spirit, they stick. It's not that temporary kind of, you know, the preacher, what he said kind of bothered me.

And they drive a man away from the old hopes, the old system of self -righteousness, and they drive a man or a woman or a young person to the cross with no hope but Him.

You know, the kind of coming to the cross where you say to Him, if you leave me here to die,

I would deserve that, but I'm not going anywhere else but the cross. And of course, if He did leave you there to be damned, you would be the first person in the history of humanity that went to Christ and He failed you.

He also says that He convicts us of the reigning and damning sin.

And you know, when you read that little sub -point there, the heading, it's kind of strange, like well, the reigning, and so I thought, is

He going to talk about besetting sins? You know, so the Holy Spirit points out the sin that seems to reign in your soul too often, but what

He's talking about is unbelief. The sin that we tend to think of all sins is a matter of personal character flaw or weakness.

We tend to put it in that category like, I want to believe but I just can't seem to believe.

And so you present unbelief as a weakness. I tried but I just couldn't do it.

And so it's almost as if we justify it, you know, when really unbelief is the willful choice to ignore all the truth that the true

God has given you and to believe the lies that sin presents. And you just do that every day.

Yeah, Whitfield talked about people having no more faith in Christ than the demons. He gave a little test for unbelief for religious people.

Now this wouldn't work for the non -churchgoer. But in our culture, in the Mid -South, in Whitfield's culture, in the

Anglican Church where everybody, well, 94 % were baptized immediately as children into the

Anglican Church and therefore were citizens of, you know, in the UK. He said this, you can ask a person, how long have you believed in Christ?

And if their answer is, well, I never did not believe in Christ or I've always believed in Christ, Whitfield is pretty bold.

He says this is certain proof that you are an unbeliever because, you know, what you're relying on is that acceptance of a cultural religion.

He said faith is not the outward consent to the established religion. It's not being born in Turkey and therefore you say, well, yeah,

I'm a Muslim, I was born in a Muslim country. And I'm born in England? Well, yeah, I'm a Christian. I mean, I was born in England. He says, so if that's, if your faith had no beginning, then you have no faith.

Right. Faith is a gift of God. And if he doesn't give it to you, then you don't have it. And that comes in conversion.

There's something that happens. One day you were not a Christian and one day, the next day you were a moment.

Yeah. And we'll talk about this at the end, but it's not always easy to know when that started.

And that's not important. You know, the old idea of like, were you, were you saved on a Monday? You know, were you, can you remember the exact moment?

Well, the Bible doesn't talk that way, but the Bible does talk this way. I was dead. Now I'm alive.

And at some point, whether I can pinpoint or not, it's not the important thing. I went from being unbelieving to believing to unrepentant to repentant to unresponsive from unresponsive to responsive.

And that's the work of the spirit. The next thing he talks about is the convincing of righteousness.

And that he says is that the spirit convinces people, you know, in a sense, we could say who never saw

Christ live that perfect life. He supernaturally convinces us through the written word of God.

He takes that and he gives us the ability to believe and to be convinced of Christ's righteousness, the active righteousness of Christ that he obeyed every law and the passive that his death on the cross actually cleanses every believer of all aspects of guilt.

So imputed righteousness, Christ's righteousness embraced through faith is placed upon the believer's account.

And then the removal of the law's curse or its penalty through the cross.

The third main point, the spirit convicts of judgment. And Whitfield seems to apply this in a couple of ways.

One is that the enemy of our soul has been judged by God. But then also he sees that as synonymous with God's justifying us, his declaration that the

Christian has been made right with God through an imputed righteousness that's received by faith.

And that the Spirit's work in convicting you of this judgment is a work of assurance to the believer that they really are in Christ and experiential.

Yeah, and in Whitfield's day, again, the Anglican Church did not really have a category for this, rejecting the

Puritans 50 years before who had passed out a favor, and it was kind of the vogue, you know, flavor of religion was anti -Puritan.

Whitfield and those men were preaching things like Puritans preached, to the point that they were even accused of being kind of reinvigorated

Puritanism, you know, regurgitated. So they come on the scene, they preach like Puritans, and the people reject it.

One of the things that the Anglican Church really was concerned about was the idea of assurance of salvation now.

If you could be fully assured that Christ's righteousness was placed on your account, what motivation would you have to obey?

And you'll just become this wild libertine who just lives this wretched life but says, hey,

I'm okay because Jesus is my righteousness. Well, we understand that in true Christianity, Christ's imputed righteousness is only given to a person with a new heart, and the new heart wants to obey, and the free gift of righteousness makes us grateful.

So the new nature, out of gratitude, will obey. So Whitfield makes a big point, and that really was one of the major emphases of the

Great Awakening was not only holy living, but a real and immediate awareness of peace with God through the finished work of Christ alone.

Within the section on the spirit of convicting of judgment, we've mentioned earlier that a lot of what he writes is pleading with sinners, and here's a quote from page 182 as he does that.

He says, Poor Christless souls, do you know what a condition you are in? While you are lying in the wicked one, the devil, he rules in you.

He walks and dwells in you unless you dwell in Christ, and the comforters come into your hearts.

And will you contentedly lie in that wicked one, the devil? What wages will he give you?

Eternal death. Oh, that you would come to Christ. The free gift of God through him is eternal life.

He will accept you even now if you will believe in him. Yeah, and really, as we mentioned, the entire sermon, it's like short theological statement and application, followed by pleading.

And really, Whitefield was just, you know, was the chief of this. Just word picture after word picture, throwing a net around your heart, very much like a

Charles Spurgeon. In fact, Spurgeon, when he read Whitefield, his comment was this, Whitefield was alive.

He said, What we have is a poor dying rate of Christianity compared to his.

Well, three big applications that we feel could be taken home and brought down in our modern day.

One is that experiential conversion is the great dividing line between evangelical and non -evangelical views of God's work and salvation, historically speaking.

So in Whitefield's day, men that would say that they believed the

Bible, like Whitefield would say he believed the Bible, did not agree that there was an experiential side to conversion.

In other words, ceremonies or form, so baptism in the

Anglican system was believed by many to be regenerating, so that accomplished it.

And then, so basically you have forms of religion and you have doctrines to be agreed to.

Okay, Christ is the son of God and, you know, and some basic facts like that. And if a person did the form and agreed to the doctrines and did not get into some heinous lifestyle, that was considered really all there was to Christianity.

The idea that there was an experiential work of the

Spirit that moved you from death to life, that you could recognize occurring, even though it was mysterious and you may not know the exact moment, that the effects of being made alive in Christ by the

Holy Spirit, that these were recognizable eventually. People really were bothered by that statement.

And so, in Whitefield's day, for example, William and Gilbert Tennant, the

Tennant brothers in the colonies and then Whitefield and others back in the

UK, preaching that pastors needed to be regenerate was highly offensive.

And because the view of many in that day was that if a pastor had right doctrines and could teach them and he lived a good life, a moral life, that was all he needed.

He did not need to be what Whitefield called born again. He did not need the experience of being brought from death to life.

After the Great Awakening, that really put the nail in the coffin of that wrong idea that all you need is good doctrine and a moral life.

From that point on, American churches pretty much across the board would say, a man must be born again to be a minister, but I think we've noticed that in the last years there's been a move, whether you're

Arminian or Reformed, doesn't matter, there's been a move away in Western Evangelicalism, a movement away from the experiential side of conversion.

So why do you think that's occurred? Probably an overreaction to some of the silliness that's gone on in the past 50 years.

And you were talking a moment ago about that being a historical divide between Evangelicalism and non -Evangelicalism, but today there are many,

I think, who do not look for experiential conversion within Evangelicalism. Right. Well, yeah,

I mean, I remember when we went to—when my family went to the UK, we lived next to—we moved into a little flat next to a

Baptist church. So we visited, I went and talked to the minister, and I said, we're Baptist, so we just came from the

States, I'm studying here, we'd like to attend your church, you know, so what do you believe? And when he heard me talk a little bit about what

I thought a Christian was, he said, wait, if that's what you're looking for, you're looking for an Evangelical.

So I was shocked to find out you had Baptists that were non -Evangelical and Baptists that were Evangelical. In other words,

Baptists who didn't believe that the Holy Spirit really experientially brought a man from death to life, and then

Baptists who believed, no, that had to occur. So we would call it in the States kind of liberal Baptist and conservative

Baptist or, you know, something like that. But in the UK, the divide would be the term Evangelical.

Yeah, I think that in the last 50 years, for example, we have given a lot of emphasis, particularly in the

West, to the experiential aspect of conversion, to the point that the focus of our hope was the experience that we felt.

So the sinner's prayer, of course, would be the easiest expression of that. I said a sinner's prayer, and I just felt like God just removed all my sin.

Well, is that your hope? Well, that can't be your hope, you know. Yeah, and while it was experience, it was a very non -theological experience.

Right, so focusing on experiences that were not fueled by Biblical truth, that were not centered on the person and work of Christ, that's a very un -Biblical view of the experience.

So that may be experiential, but it's not Christian. So as a reaction to that kind of non -theological,

Christless, self -focused experientialism, as a reaction to that, we have come to where people that take doctrine seriously have really, in practice, begun to doubt whether experience has a part of it at all.

I think another thing that has led to a movement away from a healthy,

Biblical, experiential view of conversion is that we have filled our churches with nice people who come and want to support and work, and they're great folks, but they've never been born from above.

And so if you begin to talk about that in a very substantial way in church, suddenly you have a large portion of your congregation say to you,

I've never even heard of that kind of a thing, and since it hasn't happened in me, I don't believe it's part of Christianity.

So the reasoning is reversed. They don't start with Scripture and judge themselves. They start with their own experience or lack of it, and then judge

Scriptural doctrine based on that. Well, that can't be true because I don't have it. And they've already been told that they are a believer. Right, yeah, and the pastor's perhaps written it in the front of their

Bible. Whitfield mentions this and says, to some of you, everything that I'm saying about the work of the

Spirit and what He does as Christ has sent Him, it makes no sense to you at all, and it cannot, because you are blind and still spiritually dead.

So if you've got churches, say Reformed churches, and I find this to be the case in Reformed churches as well, the reaction against the silliness of a hyper -experiential, non -theological conversion has led us to say, if people agree with five points of Calvinism, which are not so popular, but if a person says, hey,

I see it right there in the text, so I agree, the pastor assumes they must be a believer. They must be a follower of Jesus Christ.

And so the person is brought into church membership, whether it's a Presbyterian way or it's a Baptist way, they're brought in, and no one stops and asks, but tell me, have you been born again?

It's almost assumed, which of course is very dangerous, and you know, you have people who have agreed to this particular church's favorite doctrines, and they've put their shoulder to the wheel, and they're working alongside people, and they're nice people, and they're spiritually dead.

And if we talk to them about the experiential aspects of conversion in Christianity, they don't know what you're talking about.

Another practical application is, how does this affect the way we approach church?

So Chuck, looking at Christchurch and how we've tried to apply it, and of course we haven't, you know, there are many weaknesses that we would grieve over, but how has this doctrine affected the way we approach church?

In several ways. One, trying to do just the opposite of what you just said, when people talk to us about conversion or want to be a church member, we do want to look for evidences that they have in fact been born again.

And really to ask them to look for those evidences, as we point them to Scripture, to ask the

Holy Spirit to show them through His Word that these things are true of them. That's one way we're looking for that.

Yeah, you know, many churches might say, God has to work in you for you to be a follower of Christ.

You don't just up and do it yourself. I mean, I would say most churches within general evangelicalism would say that.

But, I think the disconnect comes when we are afraid to look for the very things the

Scripture says that the Spirit will do. If we believe these statements that Christ makes in John 16, just verse 8, then do we look for evidence, some, and we're gracious in the way we look, and like you said, we actually, we asked the person with Scripture explained, we asked them to look, do you see in your soul that God has opened your eyes to the weight of your actual sin, to the stain of your own nature that what you are is wrong?

Has God shown you that even the best of your religion is sinful? Has God shown you the seriousness of unbelief?

And a person, a true believer can say, oh yes, He has. And has God opened your eyes to the

Son and granted you all the faith you need to grab hold of Him with both hands and never let go?

And the true Christian could say, yes, He has. So we look for what the

Bible says God will do since God told us He would do it, and that can be scary at times, and we have to be gracious, but it's not loving to read what

God says He will do, to say we believe He has to do that and does do that, and then when people come to church, never to look for it.

And that leads to a second thing. If God is the one who can do that and only the one who can do that, then should we not ask

Him to do that? And so we pray and ask God to change people's hearts.

Yeah. In a sense you could say that you know you are a hyper -Calvinist. If you believe that the depravity of man, and therefore the moral inability, man just will not do what's right on his own.

He will never give up his love for self -rule in preference for Christ's rule.

You believe that, and you believe God is sovereign, and somehow you've got those things the wrong way around, and the result is you don't witness and you don't pray.

You know, a prayerless Calvinist is a hyper -Calvinist. Of all people on the planet, the Calvinist ought to be the most ashamed for not having a prayer life.

You know, because we say, I believe that God alone can really do this work, and God alone does do this work, and God has given me access to His throne, and I may plead that He would do this work.

And so if the conclusion to all of that doctrine is, but I don't have a prayer life, then obviously somehow we've become fatalists, hyper -Calvinists.

Well, Whitefield's sermon, The Work of the Spirit, really helpful in understanding what

God is doing within, in the work of conviction, stripping away false hopes, leading us, filling us with the right hope with Christ, removing the false, the lies, filling with the truth in order to bring a man, a woman, a young person to the point of repentance and faith.

And for the church, very hopeful that God is able to do this, and He is doing this.

Yes, certainly. Well, we hope that you'll be able to look in the show notes, read it for yourself if you don't have a copy of the book.

Just last week, I was in Virginia, and I saw a young couple in church, and it kind of stood out to me because there was two brand new

Salvation in Full Color books. You don't see these often. And I said, you know what, that is a great book. They said, well, actually, we've been listening to the podcast, so we got the book, and they've been reading through it.

So maybe you could do the same. It really is worth the hard work, and we found it beneficial to our own souls.