Despite his strong faith in Christ and love of the Scriptures, Edwards was by no means a perfect man. Among his flaws was the fact that he could occasionally have an explosive temper. He also, unfortunately, like many men of his day, was a slave owner. In time, however, “he came to oppose the slave trade as an impediment to spreading the gospel in Africa, thereby providing a basis for the abolitionism espoused by his son Jonathan Jr. and disciples such as Samuel Hopkins.”[347]
God used Edwards despite his flaws, and fortunately the remarkable positive legacy of Jonathan Edwards did not end with his death. In many ways his impact had only begun to be felt throughout the young and growing country. Edwards and his beloved wife, Sarah, had eleven children together, eight daughters and three sons. Ten of their children lived to adulthood, and the Edwardses invested heavily in them all, making certain they were well educated (including the girls), teaching them the Scriptures, praying with them, playing with them, and preparing them to make a difference for Christ in the world. They succeeded beyond their parents’ wildest dreams.
In 1900, a reporter by the name of A. E. Winship conducted a study of what had become of the 1,400 descendants of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards. “He found they included thirteen college presidents, sixty-five professors, one hundred lawyers and a dean of a law school, thirty judges, sixty-six physicians and a dean of a medical school, and eighty holders of public office, including three U.S. senators, mayors of three large cities, governors of three states, a vice president of the United States, and a controller of the United States treasury. They had written over 135 books and edited 18 journals and periodicals. Many had entered the ministry. Over one hundred were missionaries and others were on missions boards.”[348]
The Rise of George Whitefield (1714–1770)
Another incredibly influential figure in the First Great Awakening was George Whitefield[349], a passionate preacher of the gospel and missionary to the American colonies.
Born in 1714 in Gloucester, England, Whitefield was one of seven children. When he was only two years old, his father died, leaving his mother a grieving, struggling widow who would not remarry for another eight years. But George grew into a brilliant young man, and he was determined to make something of himself. He studied hard and eventually attended and graduated from Oxford University. It was there that he met two young men whom God would use to change his life, John Wesley (1703–1791) and Charles Wesley (1707–1788), who eventually became world-famous gospel preachers, teachers, and songwriters, went on to found the Methodist church, and were key figures in revivals going on in England and in the American colonies.
At Oxford, however, the young Whitefield was only beginning his spiritual journeys. Though he had been raised in the church, he was only now taking his quest for God more seriously. It was Charles Wesley who invited Whitefield to get involved in a men’s Bible study and prayer group that Wesley led with his older brother John. The group was derided by fellow students as the “Holy Club,” but the Wesleys liked the name and embraced it; Whitefield embraced it as well. Early on, the group consisted of just eight or nine men. At its peak, about two dozen men participated. But few realized then the spiritual revolution that was going to emerge from their midst.
The group resolved to resist what they saw as their fellow students’ lives of luxury and waste of time and money. The members of the Holy Club fasted two days a week. They took Communion together. They devoted themselves to caring for the poor. They ministered to prisoners. And all the while they kept rigorous schedules and sought to keep each other accountable to maintaining strict, disciplined, and austere lives. The young men were well meaning, to be sure, but there was a problem: they were trying to earn God’s favor through their good works rather than accepting the free gift of God’s forgiveness and peace through faith in Jesus Christ alone.
Whitefield would become the first to discover his mistake—that while newly religious, he didn’t actually have a personal relationship with Christ—and radically change course.
One day, Whitefield asked Charles Wesley for a list of books to read and began to devour them one by one. His favorite was written in 1677 by a Scottish theologian named Henry Scougal, titled The Life of God in the Soul of Man. The work had a profound, life-changing impact on Whitefield. “God showed me that I must be born again, or be damned!” he would later write. “I learned that a man may go to church, say prayers, receive the sacrament, and yet not be a Christian.” Whitefield was startled, even offended. “Shall I burn this book? Shall I throw it down? Or shall I search it?” he wondered. “I did search it, and holding the book in my hand I thus addressed the God of heaven and earth: ‘Lord, if I am not a Christian, or if not a real one, for Jesus Christ’s sake show me what Christianity is, that I may not be damned at last!’ God soon showed me, for in reading a few lines further, that ‘true Christianity is a union of the soul with God, and Christ formed within us,’ a ray of divine light was instantaneously darted into my soul, and from that moment, and not till then, did I know I must become a new creature.”[350]
Such radical new thoughts troubled Whitefield at first. He embarked on a course of deep soul-searching as he completely rethought his understanding of Christianity, his involvement in the Holy Club (which he would leave for a time), and his place in the world. Whitefield bought a Greek copy of the New Testament and began studying it, reading it whenever and wherever he could. As he did, God began to open the young scholar’s eyes, ears, and heart to the truths in his Word of what it means to be born again. He learned how a man can—and must—be saved and be adopted into God’s family not through being religious but through receiving the free gift of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ. And then one day in 1735, it was as though the clouds over the young man parted. The gospel suddenly made sense, and Whitefield—at the age of twenty—got down on his knees and said “Yes!” to Christ. “God was pleased to remove the heavy load, to enable me to lay hold of his dear Son by a living faith, and by giving me the Spirit of adoption, to seal me, even to the day of everlasting redemption,” Whitefield later wrote. “O . . . what joy—joy unspeakable—even joy that was full of and big with glory!”[351]
Whitefield began to wake at five each morning for prayer and Bible study in both Greek and English, praying over every word and line. “I began to read the Holy Scriptures upon my knees,” he recalled. “This proved meat indeed and drink indeed to my soul. I daily received fresh life, light, and power from above. . . . Oh, what sweet communion had I daily.”[352]
Whitefield immediately started sharing his faith in Christ with others and was excited when “God made [him] instrumental to awaken several young people.”[353] By the following year, he had completed his schooling, become an ordained Anglican minister, and preached his first sermon. He found it exhilarating. He had found his life’s calling, and he continued preaching as opportunities presented themselves. He also served for a while as a missionary in what eventually became the American state of Georgia, where in addition to preaching, he helped start an orphanage.
But it was after Whitefield’s return to England that the Lord’s favor truly came upon him. The young Christian was soon preaching the life-changing gospel message with more conviction and power than anyone in the U.K. had ever seen before. Churches were packed wherever he spoke, and people were getting saved. The problem was that many of the Anglican clergymen Whitefield encountered were not born again themselves and were cold to his series of messages, which he called “The New Birth,” based on John 3. Before long, Whitefield found himself banned from one pulpit after another and under severe criticism from the religious establishment.
Yet it was at precisely this time that God gave Whitefield a radical idea: What if he preached the gospel to the lost in the open air—in fields, factory yards, and town squares? Whitefield had heard of a layman named Howell Harris who was preaching in homes and at outdoor events in Wales. He’d even corresponded with Harris and had been encouraged by Harris’s passion for Christ and by the
results he was seeing. So on a cold February day, Whitefield simply couldn’t wait any longer. He headed to a coal-mining district near the city of Bristol, called several hundred miners and their families together, and began preaching the gospel to them. Today, this might not seem so remarkable. Today, we know the stories of evangelists such as D. L. Moody and Billy Graham preaching outside of church walls. In the 1700s, however, this was considered by the Anglican hierarchy as outright religious fanaticism. But Whitefield didn’t care. He kept preaching, and he saw people praying to receive Christ and developing a hunger for God’s Word.
“Blessed be God!” he later wrote. “I have broken the ice. I believe I was never more acceptable to my Master than when I was standing to teach those hearers in the open fields. Some may censure me, but if I thus pleased men I should not be the servant of Christ.”[354]
Interest in Whitefield and his message began to grow. Soon he was preaching thirty outdoor meetings a week around Bristol, then in towns and cities throughout England. Three months after that first experiment, he was preaching daily to crowds in London ranging from ten thousand to fifteen thousand. Not long after that, he preached to a gathering of some eighty thousand people.
Word about Whitefield was already spreading across the Atlantic. Pastors throughout New England, then the Mid-Atlantic colonies, and then the South wanted Whitefield to come and preach in their pulpits. They had read Jonathan Edwards’s pamphlet on revival. Now they were hearing about an evangelist who seemed to have the hand of God upon him. What if God could use Whitefield to bring revival to their communities?
Sensing God’s call to revisit the colonies, Whitefield set sail and reached America on October 30, 1739. He immediately went to Philadelphia and preached in churches that were packed to overflowing. He also spoke in New York, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. He was frequently forced to add extra meetings and then outdoor gatherings to accommodate all the people interested in hearing the Word of God taught with more passion and strength than they had ever heard it before.
In November, Whitefield wrote to Jonathan Edwards, asking the well-known reverend if Whitefield could visit the site of the famous revival in Northampton.[355] Edwards seized the opportunity to meet this kindred spirit. He immediately wrote back to welcome Whitefield, offering him the opportunity not just to visit but to preach in his town and also in Boston and the surrounding areas. Edwards also learned that the governor of Massachusetts wanted to hear Whitefield as well.
The impact was stunning. Whitefield spoke to students and faculty at Harvard and saw many pray to receive Christ. He spent four days in Northampton, preaching, teaching, and comparing notes with Edwards about what they were seeing God do to bring revival to the colonies. And the crowds just kept growing.
“When he preached in New England during the fall of 1740, Whitefield addressed crowds of up to 8,000 people nearly every day for over a month,” noted one historian, describing that evangelistic tour as “one of the most remarkable episodes in the whole history of American Christianity.”[356] In his final message before departing the colonies, Whitefield preached the gospel to a crowd of at least twenty thousand on Boston Common.
The Impact of George Whitefield
We need to be careful about how we evaluate numbers, of course. A man’s ministry should be measured primarily by his faithfulness to God’s calling on his life, not by how many people show up to listen or by how many respond to an invitation to receive Christ. Indeed, a pastor, missionary, or layperson can be a wonderful and truly faithful minister of the Word of God and the gospel and never see big crowds or much fruit. As Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, liked to say, we should share Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leave the results to God.[357]
Jesus drove this point home best of all. In the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, he told us that God wants us to wisely and effectively invest the spiritual gifts, natural talents, and financial resources he has given us, and he wants us to get a good “return,” as it were, on our investments. But in the end, God will not grade us on our external results; he will grade us on our internal faithfulness. To those who are successful in their spiritual investments, he will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!” (Matthew 25:21, NIV).
That said, if God chooses to bear much fruit through a man and his team, we need not deny it. We should rejoice in it, as long as we are giving praise to Christ and not to the man or his ministry. We are all just servants, after all. The glory belongs to Jesus.
In that context, then, the more I learn about the things God did through George Whitefield, the more I rejoice. The man wasn’t perfect, of course. But he was used mightily.
“For decades [in the early 1700s] preachers had lamented the absence of grace and the apparent indifference of their congregations,” wrote one historian of the Great Awakening. “In sermon after sermon ministers unsuccessfully urged sleepy sinners to awake to their danger. An individual now and again detected signs of the Spirit operating in him, and in the 1720s and 1730s a number of congregations reported seasons of spiritual refreshment. But not until the 1740s did men in large numbers lay claim to the divine power which their theology offered them. Then they suddenly awoke to God’s glory and experienced a moral transformation as promised. In the Awakening the clergy’s pleas of half a century came to fulfillment.”[358]
The powerful preaching of George Whitefield was one of the catalysts of this movement sweeping across the colonies. College presidents invited Whitefield to address their student bodies. Local government leaders wanted to meet and discuss faith with him. The governor of Massachusetts came to see Whitefield preach in Boston. Even the esteemed Benjamin Franklin, not known to be a man interested in the Bible or the things of Christ, could not resist striking up a friendship with Whitefield and engaging him in many conversations, starting with Whitefield’s first visit to Philadelphia.
Franklin actually soon became an admirer of both the crowds Whitefield was drawing and the cultural impact he was having. For Franklin could see that people were not just hearing Whitefield preach; they were responding to his message with weeping, with genuine repentance, and with changed lives and conduct. “In 1739 there arrived among us the Rev. Mr. Whitefield [and] the multitude of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons was enormous,” Franklin would later write, noting that he had attended one particular open-air sermon that he personally calculated was heard “by more than thirty thousand.”[359]
Franklin observed, “It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious” after hearing Whitefield’s sermons, “so that one could not walk thro’ the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families in every street.”[360]
Franklin would go on to publish Whitefield’s sermons and even financially invest in Whitefield’s ministry, though there is no evidence that this founding father ever personally prayed to receive Christ as Savior.
Others, too, were struck by the impact of Whitefield’s preaching.
Said one observer of the Great Awakening in Boston in November of 1741, “The apostolical times seem to have returned upon us; such a display has there been of the power and grace of the divine Spirit in the assemblies of his people, and such testimonies has he given to the word of the Gospel.”[361]
Declared a pastor in Connecticut who was amazed by what God was doing through men like Whitefield, Edwards, and the Wesleys, “I believe the people [in my congregation] advanced more in their acquaintance with the Scriptures, and a true doctrinal understanding of the operations of the Holy Spirit in conviction, regeneration, and sanctification, in six months’ time than they had done in the whole of my ministry before, which was nine years.”[362]
Over the course of his t
hirty-three-year ministry, Whitefield preached an estimated fifteen thousand sermons.[363] The pace and intensity of his ministry eventually exhausted him, and he actually died during a preaching tour. When Whitefield passed from this life and went to heaven on September 30, 1770, his dear friend John Wesley preached his eulogy. He said, “Have we read or heard of any person, who called so many thousands, so many myriads of sinners to repentance?”[364]
George Whitefield was without question one of the preeminent leaders of the Great Awakening in America in the eighteenth century, and he was used powerfully by God throughout England as well. As one religious historian has usefully noted, Whitefield “initiated almost all of [the eighteenth century’s] enterprises—the open-air preaching, the use of lay preachers, the publishing of a magazine, the organizing of an association, and the holding of a conference. And by his thirteen crossings of the ocean, he provided the international scope of the movement. Among his accomplishments there must be recognized the host of men and women he led to Jesus Christ and the large part he played in this great work of revival on both sides of the Atlantic.”[365]
Confirmed another historian of the eighteenth century, “The very magnitude of the revivals, which won for the Awakening the appellation ‘Great,’ is one indication of their importance. From Whitefield’s 1740 tour until 1743, the period when the revival was at its peak, thousands were converted. People from all ranks of society, of all ages, and from every section underwent the new birth. In New England virtually every congregation was touched. It was not uncommon for 10 or 20 percent of a town . . . to join the church in a single year.”[366]