My Travels with Whitefield — E.A. Johnston

Once asked if he would give permission for his sermons to be published, he said, yes, if you will publish the thunder and lightning as well. Well, I'm not sure that's possible, but we're going to hear how he preached.

Good to have you, Ernest, come and present your material. We'll have a word of prayer and commit you to the Lord and ourselves as listeners. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for gifts given to members of the body of Christ.

We thank you for the gift of writing and for publishing books. And Lord, you have given this to our brother, Ernest, in a generous way. And we pray that you will bless him this morning from his studies as he shares with us some insights into the preaching of George Whitefield.

Lord, we don't pine and say, oh, I wish I were living in the time of Whitefield, because the God of Whitefield is the God of today. And we pray only for a double portion of the spirit of God that was upon Whitefield so eminently as he preached in Britain and in the colonies in North America.

So bless our brother today, anoint him, and may our hearts be tuned in to what he is saying. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Thank you, Dr. Ted. Well, the last time I spoke on revival at the Institute here was a Monday evening school of preaching.

And during that time, I had a broken rib. And then I get an invitation to come again and speak on... I've heard of missing ribs. Yeah? And now I have a broken wrist, which makes me a little hesitant of accepting a further invitation.

Maybe the Ulfords have it out for me. I don't know. No, really, the one who has it out for me and who's against revival is the devil. And the last thing Satan wants to see is a revived church. And you want to get Satan raging against you, you should lay hold of God in prayer on a regular basis, crying out for revival.

And they'll get his attention. I was blessed this morning at 5 .30 in the morning. I got a phone call from many you will know him. George O'Day down in Ghana, Africa. And he told me to tell you that his church in Africa this week has been in prayer and fasting every day for this conference here this week.

And he strategically timed his phone call knowing I would be leaving, knowing the time of day to catch me at 5 .30 this morning to share that with us. And when you have brothers and sisters in Africa laying hold of God with that seriousness, God's going to do great things, and He has done great things here.

George Whitefield as a Surrendered Servant of God

I've been blessed immeasurably this week by the messages, by the prayers. And we're not through yet. Well, George Whitefield was an unusual man. He was a surrendered man. He was a mightily used servant of God.

The hardest thing about preparing this message today wasn't so much on what I was going to say about Whitefield, but what I was going to leave out. My book is over 1 ,200 pages. I literally could have written another 1 ,000 pages and not covered his enormous life.

So it was the leaving out that was the hardest part to share with you today. I want to kind of go over a little bit of where I was this last week. But before I begin, I'd like to just introduce you to George Whitefield with his own words.

Whitefield's Journals and the Power of Open-Air Preaching

There may be some in our group this morning that are not familiar with the life and ministry of Whitefield. And I'd just like to read a page or two from his journals. This was written in 1739 when he was 24 years old.

And this is Sunday, May the 6th, 1739. Preached this morning in the moor fields to about 20 ,000 people who were very quiet and attentive and much affected. Went to public worship morning and evening and at six preached at Cannington.

That's Cannington Common. It's a large, grassy area. Such a sight I never saw before. I believe there were no less than 50 ,000 people and near four score coaches besides great numbers of horses. There was an awful silence amongst them.

God gave me great enlargement of heart. I continued my discourse for an hour and a half. And when I returned home, I was filled with such love, peace, and joy that I cannot express it. I believe this was partly owing to some oppositions I met with yesterday.

It is hard for men to kick against the pricks. The more they oppose, the more shall Jesus Christ be exalted. And then, Tuesday, May the 8th, preached in the evening as usual on Cannington Common. Some considerable time before I set out from town, it rained very hard.

So that once I thought of not going. But several pious friends joined in hearty prayer that God would be pleased to withhold the rain, which was done immediately. To my great surprise, when I came to the Common, I saw above 20 ,000 people.

All the while, except for a few moments, the sun shone out upon us. And I trust the sun of righteousness arose on some with healing in his wings. The people were melted down very much at the preaching of the word and put up hearty prayers for my temporal and eternal welfare.

Why did God use George Whitfield? We're going to look at that today. I think giving you just a little brief rundown of where I was last week would be helpful. I started off in London with a fellow Whitfield scholar, Dr. Digby James.

And he and I went to Tottenham Court Chapel, which was Whitfield's main chapel in London. That and the Moorfields Chapel. His wife, Elizabeth, is buried beneath the pulpit there. Looking at the church, which is a new church.

The old church was bombed during the last bombing of World War II. Destroyed it, assuming that her remains were blown to smithereens as well. But it was there at Tottenham Court that Whitfield preached his famous farewell sermon, The Good Shepherd, before he went to America for the last time.

Whitefield's London Ministry and Public Opposition

And then we went from there to Moorfields. It was just hard to imagine the tens of thousands of people coming up from London in their coaches and on foot, with torches in their hand before daylight, assembling to hear him.

To hear this odd man with a squint in his eye when he was a little boy. A nurse was treating him with the measles, and through an error, he ended up with a squint in his eye. It looked like his left eye was continually looking at his nose.

In fact, later in his career, the London stage put on some very profane and perverse plays about Whitfield that were absolutely disgusting. And they called him Dr. Squintum, making fun of him. The dear man was lampooned and lambasted more than any other man in his generation or many in the history of the church.

From Moorfields, we went to Kennington Common, where I just read that. And then we went to Mayfair, where Whitfield, he says he preached 80 ,000. I think his figures were a little exaggerated. It was probably more like 50 ,000.

But try to picture, without any amplification, without any microphone, what a tremendous voice he had to be heard by 10, 20, 30 ,000, 40 ,000 people. It's quite remarkable. Well, from London, we traveled down to Bristol.

And in Bristol, we went to Dummer in Basingstoke. Whitfield took Robert Kinchin's charge there when he was an ordained priest with the Church of England and ministered to people in that little country village.

It's exactly the same today as it was then. We then went to St. Cyr in Stonehouse. We went to Kingswood, where Whitfield, on Hannah Mount, preached to the Colliers. He got up on a little mount, and he said, These poor rag muffins, they're known as barbarians, they won't come to the churches.

I'll be like Jesus, and I'll go out to them in the fields. And he stood on this mount, and I stood there. And that's where they lived, down in these little hovels. And he started to preach, and 200 of them started to come up and listen to him.

And eventually there were 2 ,000. The next day there were 20 ,000 of these Colliers. And he said they were so affected by the word that their tears were making white gutters in their black, coal-stained faces.

That the people were so melted down knowing that there was a Jesus that loved them so greatly. And there he was, this odd man in a cassock and gown with a squint in his eye, an ordained priest in the Church of England, now a Methodist, just preaching out in the fields in the open air.

Whitefield's Connections with Wesley and His Early Formation

Well, from Bristol, in Bristol we went to Wesley's New Room, which was a church that John Wesley built there. When he took over for Whitefield, when Whitefield went to America, he asked Wesley to come and preach in the open air, which Wesley was at first reluctant, but he did go and had great success there.

Then we went to Rodborough Chapel, which is a little chapel. You go down a hill and there's a graveyard here, and here's the chapel. And inside is the cane, the walking stick that Whitefield had that I got to hold, and his broad-bottomed chair is there that he would sit in and then preach from later on.

It's all remarkably preserved from Rodborough, which is near Painswick. We went up to Gloucester, which is the place of his birth, the Bell Inn. His father was a wine merchant who died when he was two years old.

His mother remarried. It wasn't a good marriage, and they started to have financial trouble, and Whitefield had to stay out of school to help at the inn. He would pour beer and mop up where his little blue apron, and he was pretty much a servant there, which helped him because when he went to Oxford, he went as a servitor.

And what that was was a servant to the John Wesleys and the Charles Wesleys, the more privileged students. He polished their shoes and emptied their buckets, and that's how he got his schooling at Oxford, as a servitor.

So God prepared his servant even then. From Inn Gloucester, we went to St. Mary the Crypt, the church where Whitefield was baptized, preached his first sermon, which the good Bishop Benson, which ordained Whitefield, said that Whitefield's sermon drove 15 people mad.

And the good bishop said he hoped that the effects of the sermon wouldn't wear off anytime soon. And I stood at the baptismal fount where Whitefield baptized a Quaker. The Quaker was 62 years old. Whitefield baptized him because the man wanted to be born into the kingdom of God through a living faith, and they prayed around him and held hands, and then Whitefield preached the sermon from that baptismal fount right there.

And that was quite exciting. From there, we traveled on up into Glasgow, Scotland, where, through research, we found the High Kirk churchyard where Whitefield preached in the open air those many, many times where the people were just astounded and melted down under the preaching of the word.

20 ,000 out there in Glasgow under the sky. He preached from a graveyard there. And then we went to Cambuslang. One thing I wanted to just kind of read briefly, a little bit from Arthur Fawcett's magnificent book on the Cambuslang revival, just to give you a flavor, just a little paragraph.

The Cambuslang Revival and Conviction of Sin

This doesn't give it any justice, but I wanted to just read a little bit. On Tuesday, 6 July 1742, he came to Cambuslang at midday and preached at 2, 6, and 9 o 'clock at night. Such a commotion surely never was heard of, especially at 11 at night.

It far outdid all that I ever saw in America. That's Whitefield speaking. For about an hour and a half, there were scenes of uncontrollable distress like a field of battle. Many were being carried into the mass like wounded soldiers.

Mr. McCulloch, that was the pastor there, preached after I had ended until past one in the morning, and then one could scarce persuade them to depart. All night in the fields might be heard the voice of prayer and praise.

Well, we went there to those preaching braes in Cambuslang. It's a natural amphitheater. It broke my heart when we got up to the church because Willem McCulloch's grave is graffitied over with satanic symbols.

In fact, it was so bad, I asked that my picture be taken above the graffiti. It just wounded my heart so greatly. But the preaching braes, you can see where they set up the communion tents, where they served 10 ,000 people communion that day.

It was said that Whitefield's face was lit up like an angel as he served communion, and God came down in his glory in his manifest presence during the communion time. The people were just uncontrollable, and they're weeping, crying out under conviction of sin.

The Decline of Whitefield's Historical Places

That was Cambuslang. From there, we went over to Dunfermline to Ralph Erskine's church, where Whitefield preached three times before he had the breach with the Scottish Presbytery. They wanted him to just preach for them, and he was more Catholic in spirit.

He wanted to preach for everybody, and Ralph Erskine's church is a cafe now. It's just horrible. He's right outside, his crypt's right outside, graffiti's all around it, beer cans and cigarettes. There's a little merry-go-round right in the front of the church.

It's absolutely, you have to see it to even believe it. I'm still trying to digest it all, what the glory that was and how the gold has damned. But once we were in Edinburgh, we were asking Ian Murray to try and help us find the Orphan House Hospital Park where Whitefield preached and revival came down in Edinburgh, and Ian Murray didn't know where it was, and neither did Dallimore.

So we did some research, and we found out that John Harriet's Hospital was indeed the Orphan House Hospital there, and that building's still there. So we went there, and we got permission to come in. We got the little visitor tags and did our research, and we did validate that that indeed was the place.

And I walked around the grounds outside. It's right below the castle, and you could easily compute that 10 ,000 to 20 ,000 people could stand out there outside right now on the greens. Back then, there was more grass.

So that's where Whitefield preached in Edinburgh with such great power from the Holy Spirit. Well, before we proceed, I thought it would be good if I read you a little bit.