| |
He grew up working in his parents’ tavern where his extraordinary speaking ability was noticed at a young age. He later enrolled at Oxford and met the young Charles Wesley. Wesley gave him the book “The Life of God in the Soul of a Man” by Henry Scougal. It so directly contradicted all he believed it alarmed him. He said,
“God showed me I must be born again or be damned! I learned a man may go to church, say his prayers, receive the sacrament and yet not be a Christian…Shall I burn this book? Shall I throw it down? Or shall I search it? I did search it; and holding the book in my hand thus addressed the God of heaven and earth. Lord, if I am not a Christian, or if I am not a real one, for Jesus Christ’s sake show me what Christianity is that I may not be damned at last!”
Then followed a fearfully increased asceticism, with Whitefield wearing patched gown and dirty shoes, and eating the worst food, “…whole days and weeks…spent lying prostrate on the ground…bidding Satan depart from me in the name of Jesus…begging for freedom those proud hellish thoughts that used to crowd in upon and distract my soul.”
For a year, the pressure almost drove him mad. Finally, God revealed Himself to Whitefield, “…Oh what joy – joy unspeakable – joy full and big with glory was my soul filled when the weight of sin came off, and an abiding sense of the pardoning love of God and a full assurance of faith broke in on my soul!” (Quoted in, Revival, Winkie Pratney, p. 79)
When Whitefield preached his first sermon in the church of St. Mary de Crypt, 300 people crowded impatiently to hear him. It was a startling introduction. Fifteen people were, said the Bishop, “driven mad.” Whitefield was twenty-one years old. Thus began the “preaching that startled England like a trumpet blast.”
When the door to ministry in the Church of England began to close, Whitefield, seeing thousands out of church, resolved in a “spirit of holy aggression” to go out into the highways and byways and compel them to come in. His first attempt was among the Kingswood colliers near Bristol in February of 1739. He spoke to about 200 colliers on Matthew 5:1-3.
“Having no righteousness of their own to renounce they were glad to hear of Jesus who came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. The first discovery of their being affected was the sight of the white gutters made by their tears, which fell down their black cheeks as they came out of the coal-pits.
The word spread and the next audience was two thousand; the third, four to five thousand, and then audiences multiplied and expanded to ten, fourteen, and twenty thousand! Soon he would be preaching to 30,000 people at one time. Whole cities would turn out to hear the young man with the golden voice and a supernatural authority from heaven. From 1739 until his death in 1770, 31 years of immense effect, his life was one uniform outreach, his vision one thing: preach Christ, and entreat men to repent and be saved.
“Sometimes when twenty thousand people were before me, I had not in my own apprehension a word to say either to God or them. But I was never totally deserted. The open heavens above me, the sight of thousands before me, some in coaches, some on horseback, and some in the trees, was almost too much for me and quite overcame me.”
 Once while preaching in Yorkshire from the text, “It is appointed unto man once to die,” a wild, terrifying shriek came from the audience. One of his ministers pressed through the crowed and cried, “Brother Whitefield, you stand among the dead and the dying, an immortal soul has been called into eternity, the destroying angel is passing over the congregation. Cry aloud and spare not!” After a moment’s silence, he began again, only to hear a second shriek and a second one die. After that, the entire mass of the people seemed overwhelmed by his appeal.
He usually rose at 4:00 am and often spent whole nights in reading and devotion. He preached morning, afternoon and night Sundays; 6:00 every morning and evening Monday to Thursday, and Saturday night: thirteen messages a week, sometimes forty to sixty hours of speaking each week. He crossed the Atlantic 13 times and preached over 18,000 sermons.
On September 29, 1770, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, I am weary in your work, but not of your work. If I have not yet finished my course, let me go and speak for you once more in the fields, seal your truth, and come home and die.”
He preached his last sermon that night, a two-hour message entitled Faith and Works, and died the next day.
|
|
