Episode 46: George Whitefield (Part 2)

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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.

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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.

Welcome back to the Ruled Church podcast. It's been a minute, Eddie.

It's been exactly a minute.

I don't know, I think it's been shorter than that. Hey, look, we got Wes on again.

Hello there.

Welcome to the Ruled Church podcast. I am your co-host, Alan Nelson, pastor of Perryville Second Baptist Church in Central Arkansas. With me is my good friend, partner in ministry, great brother, Eddie Ragsdale.

Say hello, Eddie.

Hello, everyone, and we have with us Wes Brown from Plummerville Baptist Church. Is it First Baptist Plummerville or just Plummerville Baptist Church?

It's First Baptist.

First Baptist Plummerville.

Best Baptist.

Yeah, Best Baptist.

Superior but humble Baptist.

That's what you're gonna name your church.

First of all, I don't have a church, Eddie. The Lord Jesus is the owner and proprietor of all his churches.

That's right.

Anyway.

Let's break into it. Amen.

Amen.

George Whitefield’s Conversion and the New Birth

We're talking about George Whitefield, and to catch up, you'll have to listen to the last episode, why you should read about guys and some of the resources we recommended. But where we ended on the last episode is we got to Whitefield's conversion.

He's converted in 1735, and so we pick up there. What do we need to know about Whitefield after his conversion?

Well, I'll tell you just, I guess I need to get used to the pacing or how quick it needs to be, because we got to point one.

Yeah.

I think Whitefield is such a great study, and I've got like one, two, three, four, about five or six more that I think make him an excellent study for Christians and for pastors.

Well, lead us through them, brother.

Yeah, if we go long, then we'll just have to, at a different time, do another episode. But okay, why don't you then, Mr. Whitefield Scholar, take us through, take us through. Let's go, let's talk through your points.

What's point two then? Or did we finish point one?

I roundly reject that title. It's false.

But let's be honest, Wesley, the Whitefield Scholar, that sounds pretty cool.

That does sound pretty cool.

It's like going back to square one, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

So regeneration, the doctrine of regeneration in Whitefield's life is so sweet and comes through so clear. And his, through the Holy Spirit discovery of it, shaped the rest of his ministry. It's shaped the rest of his life and his preaching, especially.

Whitefield never got off into the weeds of becoming a professorial preacher of us, like a guy who only speaks to the lofty in thought. He's always, and in every sermon you read of his, he is so consistent in always turning and addressing the sinner and calling them to repent and calling them to believe and to be born again.

And so that can't be skipped in Whitefield's life. He literally tried everything that he could in the pursuit of saving himself or of being good enough. And he came to the very edge of death and that's where God showed him, you can't do it.

You must be born again and it stamped the rest of his life. But as you mentioned, I think he's also a great example after he's saved of personal piety. It's amazing that when graduating from Oxford is a footnote in a man's life, it's something that like you talk about in Whitfield, like, oh yeah, that's when he was at Oxford.

But the guy's an Oxford graduate, you know? And so he is a studious person, but the rest of his life, he has three books that he basically carries with him as he travels. And that's the Bible, the Greek New Testament and Matthew Henry's commentary on the Bible.

And every morning, and I think for most of his life, it was about 4 .30, he would get up, spend an hour or longer, he would spread those three books out in front of him. And he would read and spend time in the Word and soak up the Word.

And praying over each word.

He said, he made it his goal to read a Word and pray and read a Word and pray and read a Word.

Wow.

Pray. And when you get to him in the depths of his ministry, preaching over, well over seven times a week.

Yeah.

Multiple times every day of the week. What the well he had to draw from came from his personal piety.

Yeah.

But any preacher who has been preaching longer than a year and who preaches multiple times a week, you know that you run out of your own storehouse of things to preach on fairly quickly. The things you had saved up.

And all of a sudden, then you have to start growing something new. Otherwise you're just cycling through a few sermons or series that you've got worked up. And Whitfield's preaching so much, he doesn't have time to be a MacArthur, who spends 30 plus hours on a single sermon.

It's his personal walk with the Lord that fuels and gives him the ability to preach and to preach and to preach at a pace that none of us have ever approached. I've had a lot of pastors say, man, you preach three times a week.

I just, that's so much. And I'm like, I haven't even, we're not even scratching the skin.

Whitfield's raising his eyebrows. He's like, I did that in a day. Well, let me just give a word of exhortation here. Okay, so first of all, obviously Whitfield was gifted and we're never exhorted in our preaching to go be like Whitfield, go be like MacArthur.

You need to preach like God's called you. But I will say this about Whitfield and something that I find with young men. Young men usually have a big zeal to preach, whereas they don't have the opportunity.

I say, look, while you don't have opportunity to preach, what you ought to be doing is studying, study, write sermons, take opportunities in nursing homes, things like that. But take ample opportunity to feel the bucket, as it were, to feel your heart and your soul with the scriptures.

Read like, let me just give this zinger, if you will. If you think you're called to preach, you haven't read through the Bible, set yourself, set all preaching duties aside and finish the scriptures first, right?

Right, yeah, yeah.

Just fill yourself with the word of God, know what it says. And we see this exemplary, exemplary, that's a hard word to say. We see this example.

I was sharing that with a brother the other day who's begun preaching and he's, you know, does street preaching, but he's begun preaching in the church. And I told him, I said, man, you need to take those sermons and you need to get before other audiences.

And I, same thing you said, I said, nursing home, wherever you can get four or five people to sit in front of you and you could deliver that sermon, go do it, because that will make you a better preacher just preaching it more.

And I said, you don't need to write. I said, before you write 15 sermons, you need to preach each one of them three or four times, find some different audiences where you can preach them. Don't think it has to be a Sunday morning or Sunday night behind the pulpit of your local church for it to be, because God's word is gonna be, and I don't mean who cares what it does with those audiences.

I'm saying God's word is gonna be effective and it's gonna be profitable to whoever you find to share it with. So go preach it. It's good for the preacher and the hearer. And that's even what Paul says to Timothy in 1 Timothy chapter four.

He says, this is gonna be profitable for you and for your hearers.

Yeah.

And I think it's another great lesson is on how to study. Because I think the way Whitefield studied the Bible lent itself directly to his preaching. And for him, it was, from what I understand, he didn't divide up his day into like, okay, here I am reading the Bible for personal devotional use.

And here now I am studying the Bible for sermon use. And now here I'm gonna break off a few minutes in my study to read it for personal use. And here now I'm back in the study. He wanted to know what the Bible said and how that applies to his life.

And that there's the essence of preaching. We declare what the Bible says and how that applies to the lives of our hearers. And so it trains you to not treat the Bible merely like a textbook. It's always God's word and never neglect that first and foremost, we wanna know what it says because we wanna know how it applies to our lives.

And then, well, nothing's overcoming that's not common to man. And if it's applying to our life and convicting to us, then it's probably going to be convicting to someone else.

Whitefield’s Passionate Preaching and Evangelistic Zeal

Wesley, do you think that Whitfield's zealous preaching was the product of that overflow of his pietism in the word, the fact that he wasn't just sermonizing. It wasn't just gotta crank one out for Sunday's coming kind of thing, but rather just his devotion to God in the word was overflowing in his proclamation of the word when he stood before, well, let's be honest, usually for him, the congregation in the field rather than the church house.

100 and you're a magician, Eddie, because that's right into what my third point on Whitfield was, which is passionate preaching.

Yeah.

What was in vogue in the day was a rhetorical and I guess ivory tower style preaching where you went to hear a preacher in order to be awed by his ability to dissect and to use rhetorical devices to make a point.

And it was very dry. And because Whitfield's preaching was so unlike that and an overflow of his love for God, I think that made it stand out all the more. And so I absolutely think that those two things are connected.

And because you guys know that preaching peels back pretenses, consistent preaching. Any guy can work up a sermon to preach and it'd be competent. But when you're doing it week in and week out, you're going to be found out.

Your personal devotion and your own passion is going to be revealed. Because if you, like I said, you run out if you're just trying to pull from a store house. I think about like the prepping movement.

If your plan for the apocalypse is you're going to store up 10 ,000 cans of baked beans, you're going to starve. You're not going to make it. But if you're learning skills on how to produce food, on how to produce things, then you have a lot bigger chance of making it.

But you can't just think that you're going to put enough in your pantry that you're going to survive in a situation like that. You've got to work up skills to produce things. And in the same way, if you think that you're going to store up enough knowledge through some season of your life, when you're 18 to 22, that you're then going to just draw from that well the rest of your life, you've got another thing coming.

It ain't happening, yeah. So just to put some context here, we're recording this in the month of June. It's not going to come out in the month of June, but in June of 1736, Whitfield is ordained in the Anglican church, preaches his first sermon.

But as we get into his life, he doesn't preach inside very much because of his, a couple of things that we might say, and one of these things is going to get him in trouble eventually, and Edwards later down the road is going to talk to him about it a little bit, but because he understands conversion.

Okay, so let's say this about Whitfield. He is a man that understands what it means to be born again. And God brought him through that, like we've been talking. But because of his experience, he's very, very quick and willing to point out when other people are unconverted, particularly those in the ministry.

And so this sort of fiery, like passionate preaching, preaching as though people are converted or are unconverted, willing to insinuate or flat out open up that ministers in the Church of England are unconverted, winds up getting him a lot of closed doors in terms of preaching inside established churches.

So then what happens, Mr. Scholar?

He must be talking to Eddie.

Oh, sorry, Dr. Scholar. I didn't know you were so easily offended.

Oh, no way, man. He takes it outside.

Yeah.

Takes the gospel and he starts preaching to the lost.

Yeah.

And to your point, that's a good lesson from Whitfield that he had to learn himself, is you can, just because you're right doesn't mean everything that you're doing about it is right. And so unconverted preachers was a problem in his day.

Yeah.

Right in our day.

In our day.

In our day, but that fact doesn't then give us license to do whatever we want to do and treat those men however we want to treat them or say whatever we want to say about them publicly.

Yeah, and now let me, let's just be clear. Let's make some distinguishing here. There's clear apostasy and rejection of the gospel that we do call out, you know? So for example, just to make it clear, Wes is not saying y 'all need to don't say anything about Joel Osteen or something, you know, or Joyce Meyer or something.

We're actually talking about closer to home. We believe in the Southern Baptist Convention, there are unconverted pastors, but there's a difference between that and saying from the pulpit, I know so-and-so is unconverted.

And even later in the great awakening, people are gonna take Whitfield's example and push it even further. You have guys like, I think it's Richard Davenport says that he starts saying, you know, God tells him who's unconverted, right?

And so you see like one misstep from Whitfield and then like the next generation, you know, takes it even further. But anyway, we're kind of getting ahead of ourselves. So he begins preaching, where is it?

I don't have this pulled up. Where is it he starts preaching with the minors? That's M-I-N-E-R-S. Is it more people digging in the ground, you mean? Yeah, yeah. Like he's not, yeah, he doesn't go to church camp, right?

He's preaching to actual minors, a hard group of people. And it's said that as he preaches and the crowds were gathering and these were hard blue collar, you know, alcohol consuming, drunken, you know, don't tell me nothing foul mouth people.

And as he's preaching, it says they're black faces because of all the, you know, the stuff in the mines, that the tears would run down their cheeks and create, you know, little white streaks down their faces as they were converted to Christ.

And that's an amazing thing there in this time. Whitfield's really involved in revivals in England, Scotland, Wales, and the American colonies. And in these early days, what is happening under his preaching is people are not walking in an aisle, raising a hand, signing a card.

Instead, check this out, they're actually being converted. They're being brought from death to life. They're coming to a saving knowledge of Christ. By the way, I'll just mention this and turn it back to you, Wes, but Whitfield, a fiery preacher, but don't let anyone say that that was separated from doctrine.

He was a very doctrinal preacher on things like original sin, the doctrine of regeneration, imputed righteousness, you know, the necessity of personally receiving Christ by faith. Boy, he was, and by the way, in case someone doesn't know, he was a staunch Calvinist, but he understood rightly so that true biblical Calvinism is experiential and fuels Christ-exalting evangelism.

That's right. It's a great example of God's sovereignty and all that he will use to prepare a people to hear the gospel message. You know, he can use, you know, a statue to the unknown God in Athens, and he can use years and a lifetime of empty preaching and nominal Christianity to prepare people as well.

These people who, you know, these miners, these, you know, drunkards, these people, their whole lives considered themselves Christians because they're English. And all of a sudden, this man stands up and starts talking about regeneration and salvation and hope.

And for the first time, they get to hear that there's good news and good news for, you know, being a Christian or doesn't just, doesn't mean that you become a pastor, a preacher, an Anglican priest, that there's hope for the miner.

There's hope for all of these people. The gospel's commanded to go out to them as well.

This is, yeah, no, go ahead, go ahead.

No, just the God, God can use anything he wills to use.

Amen.

To draw people in.

And Whitfield was, so God uses means too. So like, don't be the type of brother that just says, well, you know, it doesn't matter. I'm just gonna stand, open the Bible, read the scripture, preach impassionately.

I won't tell people to look to Christ. I'll just kind of give this general, Jesus died for the elect or something like that. Okay, and to my knowledge, I don't know of any person in history that preached like that, that God blessed.

Now, maybe a little pocket somewhere, you know, and God's word is powerful and God will use, as you say, sovereign, but what we see is that God's sovereignty utilizes means. And so Whitfield's passionate preaching and his study and his doctrine, and he truly was an evangelist.

And of course I'm getting ahead of myself, but like the dude gets on the ship to come over to the colonies. And by the time the ship arrives, people are like, what happened on this ship, right? Cause like, he's going through catechism classes with the sailors.

Like, by the way, you know, we make jokes about sailors, you know, because of how rough and, but he's teaching them catechism question answers. He's doing a choir with them on the way over. He's preaching on the ship.

It's an amazing thing that he's an evangelist. He's not just one of those guys that preaches services and then, hey, let's go eat at Denny's, right? Like he is preaching because he wants to see people converted.

In fact, I do have a quote from Whitfield, or sorry, from J .C. Ryle. He said, Whitfield seemed to live only for two objects, the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

You know, I think something that's important for us to remember, I think it's easy for us to look back at George Whitfield or even all the way back to the scripture, Paul there in Athens, like you were talking about, Wes, and to think, well, yeah, that was the culture back then.

People preached that people, no, it wasn't.

That's right.

No, it wasn't. It was not. And I had a missionary that we're supporting that was in my office a couple of weeks ago because he was passing through and he's in Nepal. And he street preaches every week.

And he said, it's not the culture in Nepal for people to street preach. And I think sometimes we look around us and we go, well, you know, modern day, it's just not the culture anymore. It never was. We need to share the gospel with people and stop thinking, well, it just used to be what they expected.

They didn't expect it then. They don't expect it today. We're gonna have to share the gospel with people.

Yeah, you have a state church in England at the time. And so you need to be licensed and, you know, preaching is to go on in government recognized churches, you know, for the most part. And so it was very scandalous at the time for Whitfield to do that.

And Whitfield, I believe, actually we should give a mention here. I think it's Hal Harris from Wales that was doing this before Whitfield. And so Whitfield didn't just come up with it. He's influenced most likely by Hal Harris, but he is certainly a pioneer in this.

And it's almost like the question, like, can we even do this? Well, okay, we're doing it, you know? And as Christians remember this, Jesus says, you know, in Matthew 28, all authority in heaven and earth is given to me.

So I make this joke, but you know, it's like the, what's that show? Parks and Rec. The guy's like, I have a permit, you know, I can do what I want.

I can do what I want, that's right.

Yeah, well, Christian preachers, we walk around with the permit and it's not that we can do what we want. The permit is Christ is King.

That's right.

And all this is his. And so we go and we preach Christ. Well, we're actually getting dangerously close to needing to kind of wind this one down. What else? Oh, we're gonna have to have, Wes, we're gonna have to have you back again.

We have to have another episode.

I think we're gonna have to have at least one more, because I think we've got to have a whole episode discussing Whitfield and Wesley's relationship as brothers. Because to me, it's one of the most helpful instructions maybe for us and how we deal with brothers that we disagree with.

Because I know that we're, especially with Wes, some of the teachings that we would disagree strongly with Wesley that go even further than just election and still how Whitfield was able to keep a personal friendship.

I just think that we'll have to, we've got to spend some time dealing with that, more time than we have right now.

What point did we get on your outline there, Wes?

Maybe 0 .3 to three and a half.

So not even halfway through three, huh?

I wanna, yeah. I mean, so Whitfield and Wesley's relationship, but Whitfield's just general attitude toward all believers and Christians and the charity and the Catholic spirit, not Roman Catholic, but the universal spirit that he had and carried with him in a day where that was very much not the case.

And he's preaching in Presbyterian circles and Baptists and anyone who would hear him, his humility and response to the controversy with Wesley and how John didn't respond to that in a Christian way. And Whitfield's response is just an amazing example of humility where he says, "'Let the name of Whitfield perish.'".

And I also think it's important in biography to see and show how God uses us in our weakness. I think Whitfield's weakness comes out in his marriage in one way and just confusion on that and how to prioritize that.

I wouldn't encourage young men to go study Whitfield's marriage relationship and emulate that and emulate the priorities that he laid out there, but God still uses Whitfield. And I think he's an excellent example of finishing faithfully.

Man, amen. Well, let's say then on this episode we have, and we've covered a lot, but let's say we've really gotten to Whitfield's preaching. We haven't brought him over to the colonies officially yet.

We've mentioned some things, but there's lots of things to mention about his coming to the colonies, his orphanage, his relationship with Benjamin Franklin, his meeting with Jonathan Edwards, preaching there, and then just the response from, in fact, let me just read this, that way I can, I had this pulled up.

What was it like for Whitfield to preach? Well, here's a famous recollection from a farmer named Nathan Cole who wrote this in his journal. He was in the colonies when he heard Whitfield preach. He said, when I saw Mr. Whitfield come upon 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. By God's blessing, my old foundation was broken up and I saw that my righteousness would not save me. So you wanna know what it was like to hear Whitfield, that's an example.

So let's say then we've stopped with Whitfield in England and we'll get him over to the colonies more formally and officially in our next episode, whenever that may be, whenever we can work it out again.

We appreciate you listening to these episodes on Whitfield. We hope it's been beneficial and encouraging to you and you'll do some study on this great man of faith in your own time. Anything else, Wes?

I just thank you so much for allowing me on here. Y 'all are great brothers and appreciate your friendship and your ministry, y 'all are so encouraging to me. So I just wanna say thank you.

We appreciate you, doctor. Take us out.

Eddie, 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 hoemos, the masterpiece of God.

How are you gonna respond?