Who Was John Tennent? | Clip of Salvation in Full Color: Adoption

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We are looking this week at the doctrine of divine adoption, and the preacher is

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John Tennant. So Chuck, can you give us an update on who John Tennant was?

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Yeah, John Tennant was the third son of William Tennant, who founded the Log Cabin College in New Jersey.

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He was born in Ireland, came to America at 12, like his brothers he trained for the ministry under his father, and he was called to a church in New Jersey in 1730.

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It was a short pastorate, not because they got mad at him, but because he passed away. He died at the age of 26, so short for that reason.

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But even though it was a short pastorate, the people were very much affected by his preaching. In fact,

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Mr. Roberts, in his little brief biography, says that his first sermon appears to have been the means of awakening several of his hearers.

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This sermon that we're about to look at, as well as at least one other, maybe a few others, were put together after his death, and his brother

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Gilbert wrote a preface, and in it he speaks about his brother

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John, and says that he excelled in the polemical.

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He was good at argumentation, which I think we can see a little bit in that line of his sermon.

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Yeah, yeah. And so he was very good at that, but he was also in salvation, you know, marked with humility.

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And so those two things came together very well in his ministry, so that he was able to take a topic and, you know, lay it out well, and yet it was marked with grace and not just an argument.

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Before he came to Christ, he had evidently a problem with anger. John, or pardon me, his brother

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Gilbert says that it cost him many a deep sob, but when God did change him, he changed him remarkably, and this, even in this, he gained a measure of victory over that.

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Gilbert says that when he was under conviction, that the conviction was some of the greatest and most violent that he had ever seen, he says that for several days and nights

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John would cry out over his sin, oh my poor soul, oh my bloody lost soul, what shall

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I do? Have mercy upon me, oh God, for Christ's sake. And he would come to the edge of despair until finally

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God did rescue him, and he says that his conversion was a most remarkable conversion.

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When he preached, he spoke with tremendous boldness and power. Again, Gilbert says that when he preached in his public discourses, he was very awakening and terrible in denouncing and describing with the most vehement pathos and awful solemnity the terrors of an offended deity, the threats of a broken law, the miseries of a sinful state.

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So, Mr. Roberts says that there are indications that his 18 months or so at the little church in Freehold bore more fruit than many men see in a lifetime.

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Yeah, so, member of a famous family in the Great Awakening, and it seems that they all had similar traits like that, you know, really known for penetrating sermons to the point that it offended quite a few leaders in the denominations in the early colonies.

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Well, the sermon on adoption really centers around the verse in 1

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John 3 .1, Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.

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And he points out a number of things. And actually, the sermon is extremely precise. We were joking before the podcast that he never met a subpoint he didn't like, because some of the points have 10 subpoints, and the subpoints have subpoints.

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And so, it's very Puritan -esque in that way, you know, kind of drawing together into a sermon from all of the scripture and life's experiences, anything that can be included in this topic.

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So, you know, good and bad in that, but certainly a lot of truth here for us. We'll put the outline in the show notes, so you can see that it's pretty extensive.

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So, we're actually, even in our overview of this sermon, we're not going to hit every single point, but I want to run through the major points, and then

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Chuck and I will back up and just talk about a few things that we think are most important. Thank you for watching the clip.

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We hope that it was helpful for you. If you want to hear the full audio of that podcast, you can find it on any of your favorite podcast apps.