Was George Whitefield a Christian? - A Puerto Rican Answers

This is my last Heddy Topper, so I'm going to enjoy it. I wanted to do a quick video here about this. Today was an interesting day. We got two articles that I think are related. Not that they were coordinated or anything like that.

That's not what I mean, but they're about the same topic, essentially. And it's talking about sort of the legacy of people from the past, Christians who have professed faith and their antics and their beliefs and their sins and things like that.

And it's really two things. It's an article here about George Whitefield. Is George Whitefield a Christian? And then there was an article about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his depravity. And so what I find so interesting about this is that this social justice movement has got us so twisted up and confused as a church that we've got people, credible people, that talk about Dr. Martin Luther King as a great reformer.

They have conferences about this man. They preach sermons about this man. You know what I mean? It's really crazy. And he was a literal heretic. Like he was not a Christian. He denied essentials of the faith.

And as most heretics are, they're engaged in all kinds of depravity. There's depraved sexuality and just there's allegations of him making fun of a girl getting raped and stuff like that. I don't know if any of this is true.

And it doesn't really even matter. The man was a heretic. And so no amount of good things that he could do, let's just say it's all not true, no amount of good things he could do could make up for the fact that he denied Christ.

He was a literal heretic. Okay, so on the one hand, we've got that. On the other hand, we've got George Whitefield. And people question his salvation. They question whether or not he was a Christian, a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And what's so interesting about this is the reason they question it is because they cite his participation in the slave trade. And that's the unforgivable sin these days. That's the ultimate. That's way worse than anything else.

That's the sin that if you participated in it, well, how could you possibly even be a believer? That kind of thing. And I don't get involved in these conversations too much because they're really kind of stupid when you think about it.

Because here's the thing, I try to keep it really simple. I know I've been influenced by a lot of personas non grata, but look, the reality is, is he a professed believer? Yes, he is a professed believer.

Does he have a credible baptism? Yes, he does have a credible baptism. Are there promises associated with that baptism? Yes, there are. Was he ever excommunicated from the church? No, he was not. I keep it really simple.

Is George Whitefield a Christian? Yes, he definitely was a Christian, okay? And so we can look back and say, well, he's got these sins in his past, but sins don't cancel out God's covenant promises, right?

And so we can speak about him and treat him as if he was a brother in Christ because he is a brother in Christ. But that's the starting point, at least. That's my starting point. So if you're baptized into the covenant, you haven't been excommunicated, you're professing Christ, you're a believer, as far as I'm concerned.

When you're not a believer is when you've been baptized and then you deny Christ. You deny that he's God in flesh. You deny these things. These are basics of the faith. The Bible gives us that very short list of things that you can deny and be treated as an unbeliever, right?

Slavery isn't one of those, by the way. If you think slavery is a good thing, if you think the slave trade in America was a good thing, that's actually not one of those things that we can say, okay, now you're no longer a believer because you've denied the faith.

That's actually not one of those things. But anyway, so I'm reading this article here on the For the Church blog, and it's a good article. I like much of what it says, but this is where it really worries me because this social justice movement, I've often said that my channel is really for two groups.

My channel is for, well, it's the church at large, of course, but I really worry about minority believers who buy into this stuff because it's really soul damaging. It's soul crushing, this movement. So much of it, it encourages strife.

It encourages grievance hustling. It encourages unforgiveness and all kinds of really basic Christian things that we need to be cultivating in ourselves. It encourages people to not deny those things.

And in fact, it fosters these things. And that's why I really worry about minorities because it's hard enough to be a minority, right? I mean, let's just, it's hard enough to be a minority. We don't need people encouraging us in sin, right?

And so here's the real worry about this, that the author of this article lands in the right place. He says, yes, he hopes that George Whitefield was a believer. Now I'm willing to go one more. He was a believer.

He was in the church. I treat him as a brother because there's no reason not to, at least biblical reason anyway. He has got a credible baptism. He does not deny Christ. He preaches Christ. In fact, we have so much more evidence of George Whitefield's understanding of the gospel and being a regenerate believer and understanding that his only hope in death is the grace that comes from Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, the Lord that he desired, that he worshiped.

He was not a perfect man, but he knew his, so he only had one hope. And it wasn't that he repented of all his sins individually. Nope, that wasn't his hope. That's not what the grounds of his justification were.

No, no, no, no, no. He knew that his hope, his only hope was Jesus Christ. And the covenant promises that Jesus Christ gave to him that he had taken hold of through the ordinary means of grace, just like all of us do.

That's our only hope. And so we have more evidence of George Whitefield believing that than we do of lots of other people believing that. And yet somehow we're talking about this. See, this is a real problem.

Look, look, this is what this is about. Look, this article, like I said, it was good, but I really worry about this for people who think the opposite, who think that George Whitefield wasn't saved. I really worry about them because look at this reasoning here.

He says, he says, I'm not the judge. I have no power to condemn. And I have no way of knowing what may have occurred in Whitefield's final moments, what anguish the spirit might have produced in his heart as he contemplated finishing the race.

Okay, so now listen to the rest of this. This is the end of the article. In the end, I hope and trust that Whitefield was saved, not because I have benefited from his work, though I have, but because I am sure I will die with unrepented, with sin, unrepented of myself.

And as the worst sinner I know, my only hope is found not on the grand scale, weighing my good against my bad, but on the grand cross of Christ where even the vilest of sinners may find atonement. This is the whole thing, guys.

This is why I do what I do. This is why I do my channel. This is important because if you're thinking that if Whitefield died unrepentant of his sin of believing in slavery and holding slaves and all of that thing, all of that, and because he didn't repent of that, then that means he could not have been a Christian.

If you think that you need to repent of each individual sin in order to not be a bad tree with bad fruit, then you've got a really, really tough road ahead of you because that's not the grounds of our justification.

That's not the grounds of our justification. I love how the Westminster Confession puts it. It's talking about repentance unto life. This is chapter 15, and it makes a very important clarification that we need to understand.

It says this. It says, men ought not to content themselves with a general repentance, but it is every man's duty to repent, to endeavor to repent of his particular sins particularly. So what this is saying is it is every man's duty to repent of all the sins that they are aware of.

If they're aware of their sin, they need to repent of it, right? But here's the thing though. You cannot look to that and say, okay, well, if I die, and this is what this author is saying here, that some of the people on the other side of this, they say, well, maybe he repented in his final minutes.

Well, what if he didn't? What if he didn't? Is our hope our repentance? See, that's the thing. Because let's just say he didn't repent of this unforgivable sin. Isn't Christ's forgiveness, I mean, doesn't it cover that?

Look, George Whitefield, we have more evidence of George Whitefield's repentant heart than we do of most people, right? Most people, he's written so many things. We know so much about him. He's a historical figure.

We have more evidence of his repentant heart than we do of almost anybody. But if it requires, if salvation requires repentance of every sin that you have individually in order for it to be true repentance, then we are really in a bad place because nobody is going to be saved if that's the standard.

See, we know better than this. Why are we acting like that's a legitimate interpretation of the gospel, that you need to repent of every sin? So the only way George Whitefield could be saved is if he had some kind of a deathbed repentance of his sin of slavery.

Why are we acting like that's a legitimate understanding? It's not. It's not, this is important. See, the Westminster Confession is great because it says other things. It's like, it's almost like they thought of everything.

They thought of every pitfall you could fall into because even though it says, look, we can't just be satisfied with this general repentance. We gotta repent of particular sins, particularly. It also says repentance is not to be rested in as any satisfaction for sin or any cause of the pardon thereof, which is the act of God's free grace in Christ.

So you see what I'm saying? This is dangerous ground that we're walking on because if we're going to judge Whitefield by this ridiculous standard of him having to have repented of every single sin that he's ever committed before he dies, I mean, we're more like Roman Catholics here.

Why don't I introduce purgatory into this? That's not how it works. That's not the gospel of grace. Look, I don't understand how anybody who really understands the depths of their own depravity could put this kind of a standard on George Whitefield.

I don't understand it. I don't understand it. But I do know that there is something fundamentally wrong with this social justice movement that puts that standard on this guy, but at the same time will elevate Dr. Martin Luther King for the good works that he did and have conferences and consider him a Christian brother and all of these things when he is a literal heretic.

See, there's something that's gone wrong here. Something has gone topsy turvy here and we really need to pay attention to it because lives are at stake here because look, if you get this wrong and all of a sudden think that repentance is somehow the grounds of justification and you better be repented up because if you don't actually literally repent of literally every single sin that you've ever done in your entire life, even the ones you don't know about, then when you go to hell, when you die, I mean, well, I guess it's hell for you.

That's not the gospel. That's not the gospel that I know. That's not the gospel of free grace where God's covenant promises are applied to his covenant people. Look, George Whitefield's pastor needs to have looked at his life and called him out on sin and excommunicated discipline wherever he thought was appropriate for him to do.

But look, right now, if we're gonna judge, look, God says that we're gonna be judged according to the judgment that we use. And so we need to take that into consideration here. If we're gonna hold George Whitefield to this impossible standard, how can we possibly have hope in the future?

You say, I hope in Christ. Yeah, but so did George Whitefield and his status as a Christian, because he was a Christian, he was a baptized believer in the church. His status as a Christian comes with covenant promises as well.

He held onto those promises to the day he died, as far as we know. Don't hold them to a standard that nobody could possibly meet. It just, it really concerns me because a lot of minority Christians buy into this idea that, well, maybe he wasn't a Christian because he endorsed slavery.

Well, by that standard, are you a Christian? Anyway, I hope this is helpful. God bless. Look, I hope that you don't hear the video that you just watched as sort of a minimizing of sin. I really hope you don't hear it that way.

If anything, it is an acknowledgement of how sinful sin is and how powerful the God that forgives that sin also is. Because here's the thing, I know the depths of my own depravity. I know it. I know that I know more about my own sins than I know of almost anybody else's sins.

And I also know how deceitful it can be, how deceitful and how hidden it can be. And some of it will come to light and I'll potentially try to justify it a little bit before I repent of it. But I endeavor, and this is a repentant heart, I endeavor to repent of every sin that I know about.

But I mean, I think we would, I don't know that you could really understand how depraved your nature is if you think that you will be aware of every sin that you've committed at any given point in time.

I think that if you really think about this and understand how deceitful sin is and how insidious it is, there will be sins that you've committed that you will never know that you've committed them until you find out.

You know what I mean? This is the reality. And so this is why I got a little bit emotional in this video because I really do care about minorities in the church. I care about the whole church, obviously, but I don't want anyone, and we're talking about minorities here because that's who really is questioning this George Whitfield stuff.

I don't want you to be on this treadmill where you just never really know if you're saved because have you repented completely? Have you repented of everything? Even the things you don't know about? Like this is not, this is like the old story of somebody who commits a sin and on the way to confession, he gets killed.

And so he didn't completely confess of that. He wasn't atoned for that. Like we cannot judge historical figures by a standard that would never work on anybody. I mean, that's what the Bible literally says that judge not because the standard you judge will be used on you.

And so minority Christian, if you're watching this, was the sins that were committed in slavery, were they serious sins? Yes, they were serious sins. I've got ancestors that were slaves too. You know what I mean?

There were serious sins and we don't wanna diminish that. But is the gospel of grace powerful enough to cover even those sins? Yes, we need to look at how the Bible talks about sins and sinners. And the reality is that slavery is addressed very often in the scripture and it addresses it in a certain way and it is not the unforgivable sin.

It just simply isn't. And so is George Whitfield a Christian? Well, you better hope he was because he called upon the name of the Lord. He knew that Jesus Christ was his only hope in life and death, his only comfort in life and death.

That's from the Heidelberg. And I hope you know that too. Because if you think that somehow that repentance is sort of going to atone for these sins or that's how the grounds of your justification. So you better repent up.

Otherwise, what if you trip and fall and die and you haven't repented completely? If you think that your salvation hangs in that balance, that's literally believing that salvation is in your hands and you better make sure to do good enough, to repent enough.

And that's not the gospel. So I encourage you to really consider the theology that Whitfield held onto. Throw out the bad stuff about him thinking that this was okay, that these sins were okay, whatever.

Throw out that stuff. But the theology of a powerful God who can save sinners, real actual sinners with dirty hands and things like that, that's a theology that is worth holding onto. That is a theology that is important.

That is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Free grace, guys, free grace. It's radical, it is more powerful than you could ever imagine. It is possible to know that Jesus Christ has promises for you and that you're in that covenant.

It's possible to know that. You don't have to worry, oh man, I don't know if I'm repented up. Yes, you should work on your sanctification. You should be considering, hey, maybe there's some blind spots that I have, some sins that I need to repent of.

Yes, you should be doing all of those things, but that's not the grounds of your justification. Seriously, guys, this is important stuff. I hope this video was helpful. God bless.