Enlightenment and Enrichment (Part 2)

Church History — Steve Gregg

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Revivals of the 19th Century

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Enlightenment and Enrichment (Part 2)

Church HistorySteve Gregg

Steve Gregg discusses the second and third generations of the Reformed movement, which led to the emergence of denominations and movements characterized by a real move of God and the Holy Spirit, such as the Pietism movement, the Methodist movement, and the two Great Awakenings. Gregg mentions notable figures such as John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards, who were instrumental in the revival of orthodoxy in Europe during the 17th and early 18th centuries. He also highlights the importance of personal piety and moral discipline in these movements.

Transcript

Last time I gave out a handout that said Enlightenment and Enrichment, the years 1648 through 1776. This period of time had so much of importance to bring out that I had to break it into two lectures, and we will take the second half of it now. Last time I pointed out that the period that we are looking at is sometimes called the period of the Enlightenment, sometimes called the age of rationalism, because there was a great freeing of the sciences from the grip of the Church.

The Roman Catholic Church throughout the medieval period had controlled all the sciences, because if a scientist disagreed too sharply with what the popes wished to have believed, they could be excommunicated or worse, they could be burned at the stake, and therefore the sciences served nicely to support the Roman Catholic theology. But with the coming of the Reformation, people like Martin Luther and Zwingli and others had remarkable success in standing against the Roman Catholic Church on theological grounds. And although many persons who stood at that time against the Roman Catholic Church were burned at the stake, there was nonetheless more of a groundswell of Reformation than the Roman Catholic Church could stamp out, partly because of the invention of the printing press.

It was no longer possible just to burn a few heretics and silence their voices. These heretics once burned left books behind that were mass-produced throughout Europe, and these books caught Europe on fire, and of course the Roman Catholic Church, after many attempts to silence the Reformation, had to simply come to grips with the fact that they were not going to be able to silence this, and there were going to be people throughout Europe who did not agree with the Church's official position on theology. And that being so in the realm of theology, it encouraged those who were in other sciences to think for themselves as well.

And in freeing themselves up from the bondage to the Roman Catholic theology, some of these thinkers, I think, pendulum-swung too far, so that they threw out the baby with the bathwater, we might say. They threw out Roman Catholicism and its superstitions to a certain extent, but they also threw out God, eventually. And this they called the Enlightenment.

And we saw how that the age of rationalism, with people like Bacon and Hobbes and Descartes, gave way to the age of Deism. Deism was the last step of rationalism before God was thrown all the way out. Under the Calvinistic system, and even under Roman Catholicism, God was seen as involved very much in history.

Rationalism found no use for God as a postulate, as a mover in history or a causer of history. And certain philosophers began to say that just as the universe runs on the basis of natural laws, so does society and history develop on the lines of certain laws that are materialistic, secular laws. And while there was a generation or two that were not quite willing to throw God entirely out of the picture, the Deists kept God only as a postulate, as a first cause.

That God had created everything, wound up the universe like a clock and left it to run down. And therefore, God had no interaction with man in history after the creation, according to Deism. And the thinkers in this realm included men like John Locke and Voltaire and David Hume and others.

And therefore, it was a time of great secularization in Europe. Now, at the same time, however, when the Reformed movement had died down to a second and third generation, which usually, if you have paid attention to church history, you find that most denominations, most movements begin with a real move of God, a real move of the Holy Spirit. And some group of people began to follow God beyond the perimeters of the established religion, usually being persecuted but also being on fire for their beliefs for a generation or so.

But after they've become established, once they are no longer persecuted, once there's a second or third generation among them, they settle, as did the former orthodoxy, into a dead orthodoxy of their own, so that it just becomes dead religion after a while. Every major denomination that you would view today as lacking in spiritual vitality at one time began as a movement that had tremendous spiritual vitality. Its original leaders, every denomination was founded by a man of God who really saw something and really moved forward and had people who followed him and said, yes, we agree with this, and there was great enthusiasm, but eventually these died off.

Well, at the time we're talking about, from 1648 to 1776, deism had replaced much of religious thinking along Christian lines. And where the Reformed movement still held sway, or Roman Catholic movement held sway, it was pretty much settled into established dead orthodoxy. But God began to move and raise up revival movements within that situation.

The Quakers were one of the movements we talked about last time, under George Fox, who lived from 1624 to 1691. Another movement was called Quietism, under such people as Michael Molinas and Madame Guillaume and Francis Fennelon in France and in Spain. These were Christian mystical movements, Pietism and Quakerism.

In addition to the mystical movements, there was a movement called Pietism, not to be confused with Quietism. Quietism was the movement of Madame Guillaume and Fennelon. Pietism originated in Germany as a movement within the Lutheran Church, the dead Lutheran Church.

There were certain people who remained Lutheran to the day of their death, but started a revival movement within the Lutheran Church. One of these was Philip Jacob Spanier, who lived from 1635 to 1705. And one who worked with him and carried on the movement was August Hermann Franke, who lived from 1663 to 1727.

Influenced by those men also was a man named Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who became the leader of the Moravian movement when the Hussite brethren fled from persecution into Germany. They settled on Zinzendorf's estate and they came to be known as the Moravian Brethren, also called the Bohemian Brethren. And Zinzendorf was a pietist.

These movements we've already talked about last time. And the next movement we want to talk about is that which is in the notes I've given you today. It was in America and in England especially.

Revival movements going on. We mentioned the pietistic movement in Lutheranism. That largely took place in Germany.

And then Spain and France were where the Quietist movement were taking place. And England was where the Quakers arose. And of course, these groups spread beyond the boundaries of the countries where they began.

But the movements I want to talk about today are quite exciting. There was in the years 1734 to 1744, a series of events in America, in New England, that have come to be called the Great Awakening. And there were actually two Great Awakenings.

One that was initially spearheaded by Jonathan Edwards, which lasted for a few years around 1739 really to earlier than that, 33, 34, somewhere around there for a few years. And then later on, after that had died down a little bit, George Whitefield, who came over from England to America, was sort of the main dynamo of the Great Awakening around 1740 and following. But during that decade, in general, there were surges of revival under men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield.

In England, George Whitefield was also busy preaching. He preached between England and America. He made seven trips to America from England and back and traveled many other places too.

Whitefield was very influential in this great revival that was taking place both in England and in America. And then there was the movement called the Methodists, which Whitefield was a part of, but for which really John Wesley is much more remembered. And so it is truly the case that God sent revival in England and in America through men like Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitefield.

And those are the men I want to talk about tonight. First, we'll talk about America only because the leader in America was born earlier than the, and did what he did earlier than the men we're going to talk about in England and influenced them. And that man was Jonathan Edwards.

He lived from 1703 to 1758. He only lived to be 56 years old. Interestingly, he died of smallpox from receiving a vaccination.

A controversial issue even in our time, isn't it? But he actually, five months after he took the office as the president of Princeton University in New Jersey, he died in May of smallpox from an inoculation he had gotten the previous month. And that cut an illustrious and glorious preaching career short. Sadly, he died at age 56.

Jonathan Edwards was the outstanding preacher, theologian, and philosopher of colonial New England. He was born in Connecticut and he was a child prodigy. He began studying Latin, homeschooled, at age six.

By the time he was 13 years old, he was fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and entered Yale. He graduated from Yale, the head of his class with highest honors, when he was not yet 17 years old, in the year 1720. Now, these days we think it's quite an accomplishment of a homeschooled kid who graduates from high school when they're 16, but he graduated from Yale College when he was 16.

He was converted after that at age 17, and he began preaching in a small Presbyterian church the next year in New York City. His grandfather was the pastor of the Northampton Congregational Church in Massachusetts, and after a while he worked with his grandfather. But he tutored at Yale first for two years, and then in 1726 he was both ordained and also married.

After he was ordained, he ministered as associate pastor with his grandfather at the Northampton Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts, until his grandfather died. After that, Jonathan took over the pastorate of the church until 1750. After that, he was actually kicked out of the church.

We'll talk about that later on. It was while he was the pastor, after his grandfather's death and when he was the pastor of this church, that he became very influential. He wrote prodigiously.

He wrote a great number of books and things. He wrote on philosophy. Even as a youth, in his early teens, he wrote impressive philosophical works.

He wrote theological works, and he also preached a great deal. He spent between 13 and 14 hours every day in his study, which gave him lots of time to write. I don't know if it gave him much time for his family or not.

But the so-called Great Awakening, to which I've alluded, began in his church with his preaching. The Great Awakening period is considered to be from 1734 to 1744, and although it broke out in Edward's church under his preaching, it spread beyond that through the region and into Connecticut as well. There was tremendous impact upon sinners.

Actually, his grandfather, when he had pastored that church, in 60 years of preaching there, had had what he referred to as seven harvests, where there had been seven periods of blessing during his grandfather's ministry there, where there had been some bringing in of numbers of souls. But by the time his grandfather died and Jonathan Edwards took over the church, the church had lapsed into cold religiosity and apathy about the things of God. And so Jonathan Edwards began to preach sermons about justification by faith.

Now, I've heard a lot of sermons about justification by faith, but I'm sure that his sermons were not like very many we've heard, because he began to have tremendous impact. In fact, when he began to preach, people began to fall on the floor and groan and double over, holding their stomachs, groaning in agony because of the feeling of conviction of sin. When he preached his famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, where he compared the sinner who is not converted to a wretched spider hanging by a feeble web over a flame, and God is the one holding the web and ready to drop him into the flame.

And he described the sinner as being on a path or on a bridge that's falling apart and decaying under his feet, and he's about to fall into a deep chasm. As Jonathan Edwards began to talk about this, and most of you probably in school or some other time have had occasion to read this sermon, it's considered a classic, people actually began in the church to grab onto the pillars of the church and scream out for mercy. They were afraid the floor of the church was going to open up and they were going to fall into hell.

This is just the way that God moved in that particular time and place. And it's an interesting thing because Edwards was very nearsighted, and he was not an animated preacher at all. As a matter of fact, he read from a manuscript, as some preachers still do.

He wrote his entire sermon out in manuscript, and because he was nearsighted, he held it right up in front of his face like this the whole time. He didn't even have any eye contact with the audience. And as he read it, he'd look over the page and there'd be people laying on the floor, rolling around and groaning and hanging onto the pillars of the church.

It was truly a magnificent move of God. These people didn't just have an emotional experience like we sometimes hear about in modern day renewal movements. These people actually, their lives changed.

At a later time, Edwards, who tended to chronicle the things that were going on during the renewal, wrote these words, which I've given you in the notes. This is a quotation from Edwards. He said, There was scarcely a single person in the town, old or young, left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world.

Those who were wont to be vainest and loosest, and those who had been the most disposed to think and speak slightly of vital and experimental religion, were now generally subject to great awakenings. And the work of conversion was carried on in a most astonishing manner and increased more and more. This work of God, as it was carried on and the number of true saints multiplied, soon made a glorious alteration in the town, so that in the spring and summer following, that's 1735, the town seemed to be full of the presence of God.

It was never so full of love nor of joy, and yet so full of distress as it was then. There were remarkable tokens of God's presence in almost every house. And I break off the quote there, but this is very much what you read of in revivals generally.

If you study the history of revivals in America and in England and Wales and in a number of other places in the last several centuries, you'll find that when God sends a revival, it doesn't only cause a lot of emotional outbreaks in the church, but there are true conversions, true reformed lives. In many cases, Finney, for example, and Moody and others who knew such revivals, all the jails would be empty for months or years at a time. There were no criminals.

The police had nothing to do. The bars were closed. No customers were there.

I heard a story, and we're not talking about Moody tonight, but I heard a story that was related to Moody's revival, that a man came into a town in the United States sometime in the 1800s, and he was looking for a liquor store, and he couldn't find a liquor store. And he asked one of the locals, isn't there a wretched liquor store in this wretched town? And the man said, well, no, actually, 50 years ago, a man named D.L. Moody came through here, and there hasn't been a liquor store open here since. Now, today we hear people claiming there's a revival going on in America and various places, but I haven't yet seen a revival such as this.

If you're praying for revival, don't stop now. It hasn't come. When revival really comes, it's more like what Jonathan Edwards described, or Finney had the same kinds of results, and many others did, too.

When God sends revival, it's remarkable. At a much later time, at the turn of this century, Evan Roberts in the Welsh revival saw the same kind of thing. So, you know, when a church today puts out a sign in front on their marquee, and they say, you know, next month we're having five nights of revival, we're bringing in a special speaker for it, it's kind of presumptuous, really, because you don't get revival just by calling in a fancy preacher.

Revival seems to come somewhat sovereignly. Now, Finney would disagree with me on that, and Finney ought to know, right? But Finney believed that there's nothing sovereign about a revival. He believed that revival comes when someone prays for it enough.

When there's enough prayer and repentance on the part of the people of God, there will be revival. In Finney's revival lectures, he said that it is as sure as a farmer planting seed for seeds. He knows there will be crops growing.

And he says, likewise, wherever people meet the conditions for revival, there will be revival. And although Finney is not the subject of our discussion tonight, I must say I have some disagreement with Finney on this. You might say, well, how could you, you who've never preached a revival, disagree with the man who's the most successful revivalist in history on the subject of revival? Well, many people interpret their own experience, or they interpret their theology in light of their own experience.

If Kenneth Hagin, everyone he prays for gets healed, he assumes everyone can get healed that easily. I don't know that Kenneth Hagin's stories are all true, but he seems to say that every time he prays for the sick, they get well. Well, if that's true, that's wonderful, but you can't extrapolate from that that everyone can have the same results.

Because, I mean, Finney saw everywhere he preached, people were praying, people were repenting, and he preached and the whole town got converted. So, I mean, it's easy for him to say, hey, this is easy. You know, anyone can do this, right? But you've got to be careful about assuming that the special thing God is doing through you or through someone in your time is something that can be counted on every time you want it to happen or push the right buttons or whatever.

And I say that as one who can look with some perspective living a century and a half after Finney's time. There are many who've done the same things Finney has done and have not seen the same kind of revival. And there is very little that can be said by way of explanation other than that there is an element of God's sovereignty in sending revival.

Now, I'm not saying that Jonathan Edwards wasn't an unusually wonderful man and that his preaching wasn't excellent. I'm sure it was. But I don't think that the transformation of the whole society in his area can be attributed just to his eloquence as a preacher.

I believe there was a special move of God. And maybe they were praying for a decade or so before he preached. Unknown prayer warriors were there just pouring out their hearts to God, praying and calling down revival.

And it finally came to the preaching of Edwards, but we don't know. We can't establish that. All we know is that all unexpectedly, this man began to see real turning to God on the part of his people when he began to preach his sermons.

And he was very strongly Calvinistic, unlike Finney. Finney didn't believe the sovereignty of God had anything to do with revival. Edwards was totally Calvinistic and believed the sovereignty of God had everything to do with it.

Edwards couldn't point to anything he had done to bring about this revival out of the ordinary, and so he tended to see it more as sovereign. In fact, he had a very strong doctrine of sovereignty. Edwards is considered the founder of what's called New England theology, sometimes called Edwardian theology after him.

In 1754, of the many books he wrote, he wrote his most important, which was called Freedom of the Will, in which he denied that there is any freedom of the will. Like Luther, who wrote the book Bondage of the Will, although the title of Jonathan Edwards' book was the opposite of the title of Luther's book, they both said the same thing, basically, that the human will is in bondage, cannot choose God, cannot turn to God, except by a sovereign work of God. And Edwards wrote a great deal on theology and very strongly promoted Calvinism.

In fact, he had eventually the effect of turning George Whitefield into a Calvinist, and that brought some division between Whitefield and his former associate, John Wesley, who never became a Calvinist. Anyway, in 1750, there was a controversy. This is pretty much after the revival had petered out there.

He was still pastoring in the same church, and a controversy arose over the terms of admission into membership in the church. It had to do with whether sinners should be allowed to take communion in the church. And a certain policy had been practiced in that church under his grandfather, but Edwards disagreed with that policy, and apparently there were enough leaders in the church who disagreed with Edwards that he got kicked out, and he lost his pastorate over this particular controversy.

The next year, though, he became the pastor of the Congregational Church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It was a little village outskirts toward Indian territory, and he not only pastored the church, but he became a missionary to the Indians in that place. And it was at that time, while he was doing that ministry there in Stockbridge, that he wrote the book, Freedom of the Will, which I mentioned earlier.

In 1757, Jonathan Edwards was elected to be the president of Princeton College in New Jersey, but as I mentioned earlier, five weeks after taking that post, he died at the age of 56 as a result of a smallpox inoculation that he received a month earlier. Without reading much of the works of Edwards, it's hard to capture the spirit of the man, the spirituality of the man, just from this sketch of his activities. Of course, anyone who saw such revival as he described would not be able to remain unspiritual very long if he were not already a spiritual man.

But before any of this took place, in fact, about a decade before the awakening began, Jonathan Edwards had a day in which he committed himself to God in a unique manner. He wrote it later in his personal narrative, and this is what he wrote. He said, On January 12, 1723, I made a solemn dedication of myself to God.

I wrote it down. Giving up myself and all that I had to God, to be for the future in no respect my own, to act as one who had no right to be himself in any respect, and solemnly vowed to take God for my whole portion and felicity, looking on nothing else as any part of my happiness, nor acting as if it were, and his law for the constant rule of my obedience. This kind of talk would not be popular in the modern church, talking about a person acting as if he had no right to be himself.

The self-esteem movement would frown on this kind of talk. However, the self-esteem movement hasn't seen any great awakenings either, and maybe there's a connection. It's when people affirm themselves that God doesn't have an awful lot of room to glorify himself in a sovereign and mighty movement such as Edwards saw.

But Edwards was more typical of the older counselors, the more Puritan. He was a Puritan, really. I mean, he came kind of late to be a Puritan, but he was sometimes called the last of the Puritans, although since then some others have come along that have been called the last of the Puritans, including J.I. Packer, and before him, D. Martin Lloyd-Jones was called the last of the Puritans.

I don't know that we've seen the last of the Puritans, but the Puritan movement had had its day before the time of Edwards, and Edwards, for a while, was called the last of the Puritans. But as a Puritan, and as all the Puritans, but not only they, but many even Roman Catholic monks and so forth, very much disparaged self-esteem, and many times they had tremendous success with God because they did not try to elevate self or affirm themselves. They wanted God to be all in all.

I find it interesting that he says that he made this solemn dedication of himself to God and wrote it down. This actually occurred after his conversion by several years. It's as if he had sort of a second threshold of consecration that he came to, and he wrote it down.

A lot of times we have emotional experiences where, either alone or in a meeting, where we decide, I'm going to serve God forever in a way I never have done before from this day on. But then we don't. And sometimes writing it down would be a good idea.

I mean, the next morning when you're not feeling the same emotion, the readers say, I said that? I guess that's what I got to do. I really think that that's probably one of the great values of baptism. Baptism, I think, is a symbolic act.

In fact, as far as I know, it's the only ritual act that the New Testament commands us to do. Some people would add communion to that, though it's hard to find an actual command to regularly take communion in Scripture. It goes back to the early church that it's always been done.

But while Paul acknowledges that the church was occasionally taking communion, there's no actual command as to how often or even repeatedly to do it. But baptism is commanded and seems to be the only ritual observance that is firmly and deliberately commanded. And I sometimes wonder if it's for the same kind of reason, the value that Jonathan Edwards found in writing down his commitment so that after he, you know, the next day when he might not feel the same way, he could look and say, oh, yeah, I did say that, didn't I? And baptism is sort of a tangible thing.

A lot of people can't remember the next day how they felt saying a sinner's prayer, but they can certainly remember how it felt to go underwater, especially if it was cold. And I think that those kinds of tangible, memorable tokens, those Ebeneezers, as it were, you know, of commitments that we've made to God are useful. Well, so much for Jonathan Edwards and his role in the Great Awakening in America.

In both England and America around this time, there was revival going on. Much of what we call revival in America was that which happened under Edwards, though later on George Whitfield, whom we will look at in a moment, was involved in that as well. But Whitfield began his ministry in England, where he was a native, and he worked originally with John Wesley.

It is Wesley that we want to look at closely first, and then Whitfield. Both of these men were involved in establishing the Methodist revival or the Methodist societies. Today we'd call it the Methodist church or Methodist denomination, though in the lifetime of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, he never intended it to become a denomination.

He was an Anglican preacher, ordained Anglican, and he stayed in the Anglican church and encouraged all his converts to stay in the Anglican church. And so by the time he died, Methodism was just a movement within the Anglican church, just like Pietism had been within the Lutheran church in Germany. But after Wesley's death, the Methodist societies began to feel more and more the differences between their distinctives and those of the Anglican church and eventually separated and formed the denomination.

Like many denominations, the modern Methodists have two wings. There is the liberal and the conservative wing. Today the United Methodists tend to be a very liberal denomination.

And liberal, I mean theologically liberal. We haven't yet talked about the rise of liberalism in Germany and in America, which we will talk about in one of these weeks. But liberalism basically denies most of the fundamentals of Christianity, denies the inspiration of scripture, the incarnation, the virgin birth, the resurrection of Jesus, and for some reason still wears the label Christian.

And today, United Methodists tend to be more of the liberal type, whereas there is another denomination called the Free Methodists, who still are very conservative and still stand very largely with what Wesley taught and what he established, although of course it has become much more institutionalized than it was in his day. John Wesley lived from 1703 to 1791. He lived well into his late 80s and he preached almost to the day of his death, five times a day, rising at four in the morning.

He complained when he was in his 80s that he couldn't rise at four in the morning anymore and could only get up at five to preach. But he was a very disciplined man. He was born the 15th of 19 children.

His father was the Reverend Samuel Wesley, who was an Anglican minister, and his mother was Susanna Wesley, who was the daughter of a non-conformist minister. So he had both the high church and low church influence in his upbringing. And his mother, Susanna, I haven't said much about her in these notes, but she was a remarkable woman.

As I mentioned, she had 19 children. Only, I think, 10 of them survived infancy, though. So she only raised, I think, 10 children, 9 or 10.

Most, or about half of her children, sadly, died at infancy. I guess that wasn't too uncommon in those days. The infant mortality rate was much higher a few centuries ago than it is now.

But certainly John Wesley and Charles Wesley, his younger brother who came along after he did, make very excellent arguments for large families. Not so much that they verbalize such arguments, but their existence argues for large families. Because if Susanna Wesley had decided that 14 children was enough, there had not been John, nor Charles Wesley.

John Wesley was the great founder of the Methodist revival movement. Charles, his brother, was the great hymn writer. He wrote over 7,000 hymns.

And in any hymnal that you'll leaf through, you'll see the name Charles Wesley is the author of a great number of the hymns, some of the very finest hymns. The revival that came through John Wesley, the Methodist revival, in England, many historians feel that it prevented there being a revolution in England resembling the French Revolution that occurred in France just two years before Wesley died. Wesley, in other words, was contemporary with the French Revolution, and his generation had many of the same dynamics of peasant unrest and insensitivity of the aristocrats and so forth that led the French to revolt and have a very bloody, bloody revolution that was more communistic than anything.

It was really, I mean, the French Revolution was an ugly thing. But there would have been one, many historians believe, in England. All the same dynamics were there to make it happen, except that Wesley and Whitefield began to preach there early on and turned the nation to God.

And if Wesley had not been born, if Susanna Wesley had had only 14 children, and said, well, that's a full quiver, isn't it? Then there might never have been Methodism. There might have been a revolution in England like the French Revolution. There might never have been freedom in Western Europe to this day.

It's hard to say what would have happened, but it's interesting to contemplate. Susanna Wesley was a very methodical woman. She made a point of having personal devotions with each of her children every day, individually, not just group family devotions, one-on-one devotions with her children every day.

And, of course, she had servants to help with the household, and she even employed servants to a certain extent to watch over the children at times. But she made a point of having a close personal relationship with each of her children and to disciple them one-on-one. And to do that, to get anything done and to still allow time every day for each of 10 children, she had to be very organized.

She was very organized, and John picked up this knack for organization. And the reason the Methodists are so called is because John established methods of piety, which, by the way, Methodist is a term that the detractors against the movement called them. But John picked up his mother's knack for organization.

He was a brilliant organizer. Whitefield was a more brilliant preacher than Wesley, but Whitefield just wanted to get people saved and leave someone else to organize them into churches. And Wesley was the one who really organized the movement, as we shall see.

At age six, that is when John was six, there was a bad fire in the church rectory where the family lived because his father was the pastor. And when everyone was thought to be out of the house, six-year-old John appeared at the window of the second story of the place, and they realized that he was still trapped in the building, and he was rescued by one of the neighbors standing on the shoulders of another neighbor and getting him out of the second story window. And after that, his mother always referred to him as a brand plucked from the burning.

That's an expression that's found in Zechariah in the King James Version. And his mother referred to him as a brand plucked from the burning, and he had a sense forever afterward of divine providence in his life, that God had saved him for a reason, and that he had a destiny in God. He was educated at Oxford and elsewhere, mostly Oxford, and he began to read the Greek church fathers.

And as he did so, he began to pick up from them the awareness that the goal of the Christian life is not just to have a religious conviction, but to have perfection of life, which he saw as a disciplined love, that the perfection of the Christian life is love, but that love must be disciplined. If it is not disciplined, it gets kind of undisciplined, I guess. But the discipline that Wesley emphasized was very severe.

Eventually, when he set up his Methodist Society, he required that every Methodist preacher rise at four every morning and spend at least two hours, I think it was, in prayer. And there were other very staunch disciplines he imposed upon his ministers and his movement. Anyway, in his early life, this was before he was actually converted.

When we talk about him at this period of life, you almost think we're talking about a Christian. But he wasn't actually converted at this point. He was just an Anglican.

He was just a religious man. But he read some devotional works that had a tremendous impact on him during his college years. One of them was a book called Holy Living by Jeremy Taylor.

Another was William Law's book, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, one of my favorite books. I've read it several times and have handed it out to others. And then, of course, another of my favorite books, Of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas Akemphos.

These books profoundly affected Wesley and gave him a passion for holiness. At Oxford, he finished his education and was ordained to the Anglican ministry in 1728. And for a while, he served under his father, who was the parish pastor at Epworth Parish Church.

But eventually, he returned to Oxford to take a higher degree. And while there, he joined up with his brother Charles, who was at Oxford, and George Whitfield, who was a student there also, and several other students there and organized a group who wanted to get together to cultivate their devotional lives. And so John became their leader.

This group of students had already been meeting for prayer and for Bible study, but none of them apparently had any organizational skills. And when John arrived back at Oxford, he organized the group, and they developed a plan of study and a rule of life for themselves, which stressed Bible reading and prayer and frequent attendance at Holy Communion at the Anglican Church. Those who thought they were a little extreme came up with a number of names for them.

They called them the Holy Club, and they called them Bible Moths. Interesting term, Bible Moths. I don't know exactly how that's to be understood.

Moths eat things. I don't know if that means they eat the Word or that their Bibles got worn out as if they were moth-eaten from overuse, or if it meant that the Bible was like a light and they were drawn like moths to a flame. I don't know where that term came from, but Bible Moths is one of the nicknames that their detractors gave them.

And they were also called Methodists because they had established a method for working toward personal holiness and perfection. And that method involved Bible study and prayer and devotional exercises such as we would now recommend to all Christians upon conversion to pursue. But we take for granted that Christians have always known those are important things to do.

Actually, remember that in many parts of Europe and America, in many denominations, some of the dominant denominations, being a Christian just meant being baptized as an infant into the group, being confirmed at a later date and staying in the church and staying in the sacraments. And that's what made you a Christian. Personal piety was not emphasized in many cases.

And so the emphasis on personal Bible study and a prayer life and seeking after holiness and disciplining the life, that was something that was kind of new. Nowadays, whenever we lead someone to the Lord, we always tell them, read your Bible, pray, stay in fellowship. These are the same kinds of things that they were emphasizing in the Holy Club, but they were so out of step with the religious environment of their times that people made up names for them, like Holy Club, Bible Moths and Methodists.

They sought to imitate the early Christians. And toward this end, they would give to the poor and they would visit prisoners. George Whitfield at this time and possibly Charles Wesley were, I mean, I don't know, but they were probably saved at this time.

But John was not really saved at this point, as he later would testify. He didn't know he wasn't saved because he didn't know what being saved meant. He was just a man who wanted to be perfect, who wanted to be holy, wanted to follow God, had apparently a tender conscience, was a methodical, disciplined person.

But he didn't know Jesus and he didn't have any peace in his heart. And this became clear to him on the occasion of his going to Georgia in the United States. He went as a missionary at the urging of a friend in England.

He went to Savannah, Georgia to be a missionary there to the Indians and to others. And as he was on ship crossing the Atlantic toward America, there was a series of storms that almost sunk the ship, hideous storms. I've never been in a storm at sea.

I've been in a storm in an airliner in the air, and that's a pretty frightening thing. I've been in an airliner where the thing was moving up and down so suddenly and jerkily that if you weren't seat belted, your head would hit the ceiling unpredictably. And I've been in an airliner where lightning was flashing literally every two seconds for probably a period of a half hour on every side.

You wondered as the plane was bouncing around. I've been on all kinds of rough flights, but I've never been in a storm at sea. In one sense, you might think that a stormy flight might be scarier than at sea because you're not on the ground, but you're not on the ground at sea either.

At least an airplane can have an emergency landing somewhere if it really gets bad. There's a lot of places where a plane can land. There aren't a lot of places in the middle of the Atlantic where a ship can land.

And if the storm's too much for it, they just can't do anything but sink. And the ship almost sank. In fact, the crewmen on the ship were terrified, and Wesley himself was terrified.

He did not feel at all prepared to die because he didn't know the Lord. He was just on his way to be a missionary to the Indians in Georgia. While in that storm, I mentioned this at the end of our last session, I think, Wesley encountered on the ship a group of Moravian missionaries who had come from Zinzendorf, the state.

And these women and men and children were just sitting on a bench on the deck of the ship, singing hymns peaceably. Even the children didn't seem to have any anxiety. And he asked the Moravians, how is it that you weren't afraid? And one of the leaders of the Moravians said, well, our people aren't afraid to die.

We have peace with God, and we're ready to go meet the Lord. And our children aren't even afraid to die. And Wesley was really profoundly moved by that experience.

He realized that he was afraid to die, and that he did not have a relationship with the Lord like these Moravians apparently had, and he wished he did. Well, his mission in Georgia was a fiasco. Very ineffective.

You might imagine it would be. He wasn't a converted man. He was trying to convert people.

Not exactly the stuff of revival, to have an unconverted man being the main preacher. And Wesley got into scandalous trouble. Not through any real sin, just through youthful foolishness.

He fell in love with an 18-year-old girl named Sophie, who was the niece of the chief magistrate of Savannah. And I guess she hoped to marry him, but he was of two minds about it. They had some kind of a romance going on, but he never really got so far as to propose marriage, and I guess in her frustration that the relationship wasn't progressing, she eloped with his rival and married him.

Now, Wesley was so upset with her, and he was the parish church pastor, he excommunicated her for doing that. And then she and her father, or her uncle, brought a lawsuit against him to sue him for excommunicating her, and it got to be a real ugly fiasco. And finally, he fled America back to England in disgrace.

And as he was on ship going back to England from this two years' disgraceful failure as a missionary in America, he wrote in his journal, I went to America to convert the Indians, but oh, who shall convert me? So upon meeting the Moravians, and then later on having this dreadful failure in his missionary efforts in America, it underscored to him that although he was very disciplined and lived an orderly life, he really didn't know the Lord. And so when he got back to London, he met a Moravian preacher named Peter Bowler. And Peter Bowler explained to him that justification by faith is not just a doctrine.

Wesley knew the doctrine. He was a Protestant. Protestants know the doctrine of justification by faith.

But Peter Bowler somehow impressed upon him that faith is something that affects your life. It's not just a doctrine you hold to, but justification by faith has to be personally experienced. You have to experience a personal encounter with God through faith and know the forgiveness of your sins.

Well, Wesley didn't come to know that through Peter Bowler particularly, but he was persuaded against his will largely to visit a society meeting of some Christians in London on Aldersgate Street. And as he sat there listening, one of the leaders was reading from Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. And Luther wrote a lengthy preface to the Epistle to the Romans where he kind of summarizes the whole book of Romans and the doctrine of Romans.

And as Wesley heard this summary of the message of Romans being read, he wrote later on that he felt his heart strangely warmed. He said, I felt that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation. And an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

Obviously, he would look back at that as the moment of his actual conversion. Although he had never really rejected God, he had never crossed that threshold to regeneration before this time. Well, he visited the Moravians at Herrnhut in Germany at Zinzendorf's estate, thinking that perhaps he would join them and become a Moravian instead of an Anglican.

Remember, the Moravians were a movement out of the Lutheran church, but eventually they broke off from the Lutherans and started their own denomination. When Wesley visited Herrnhut, he got the profound impression that the Moravians were fairly self-righteous. Now, this was after their movement had been around for a while, and I don't know what he based that on.

But one thing is he felt like the Moravians looked too much to Zinzendorf, their leader, as sort of almost like a cult leader. Now, if you read the writings of Zinzendorf or study his life, you will not get the impression that he deserves to be called a cult leader. But many times a godly man will have a cult-like following from those who look up to him, and apparently that's what Wesley felt was true in the Moravian community there at Zinzendorf's estate, and so he didn't join them.

He parted company with them and went back to preaching in the Anglican church. During the time that he was preaching in London in the churches, he read some of the accounts of Jonathan Edwards, some of those things that we read when we were talking about Edwards a few minutes ago, about the conversions in New England that took place under Edwards' preaching. And that sparked something in Wesley.

It gave him sort of a vision to see similar outpouring of the spirit and revival in England. George Whitfield, at this time, who had been in the Holy Club in Oxford with John, began preaching in the open air, and he encouraged John to do the same. Now, John was very reluctant to do this.

In fact, his brother Charles strictly forbade him to do it, because it was very improper to preach outside the church. I mean, after all, sometime earlier, John Bunyan had spent 12 years in jail for preaching outside the church. Of course, Bunyan wasn't an ordained clergyman, however, and I guess there was no law against an ordained Anglican clergyman preaching outside the church, but it was just unheard of.

But George Whitfield did this first, and he urged John to do so, because Whitfield had begun preaching to coal miners in Bristol and saw tremendous conversions of these coal miners, and he asked Wesley to come down and preach with them. And so he came down to Bristol and began to preach to the miners, and he found his true calling at that time, and he became an open air preacher, and that was pretty much what characterized the rest of his ministry for the rest of his life. He saw tremendous conversions, remarkable, every bit as remarkable as those that he'd read about in Jonathan Edwards' accounts.

On one occasion, he preached to over 3,000 coal miners there at Bristol. Lots of them got saved. It is said they saw the tears running down their cheeks, and the coal miners had black coal dust all over their face, and their tear tracks looked like white lines through the black coal dust on their face.

And it just really turned John Wesley on. He just really got excited about seeing these people saved. And so that's what he began to do.

He began to be an itinerant open air preacher. In June of 1739, John Wesley wrote, quote, I look upon all the world as my parish. I judge it my bounden duty to declare unto all that are willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation, unquote.

He began to travel by horseback, and he traveled in a number of countries, too. But in his lifetime, he logged over 250,000 miles. That's a quarter of a million miles.

That distance, if it was a straight line, would be ten times around the globe on a horse at walking speed. He preached for many decades that way. He preached about five times a day most of his life, and he'd prepare his sermons as he was riding on horseback.

He'd just give his horse a lot of rain, and he'd have his books open on his lap on the saddle there, and he'd have his riding instrument, and he'd be writing his sermons as his horse found its way along the trail to the next town. And then he'd preach there and move along. And there are thousands of his sermons, I believe, that are still in print.

You can get a lot of Wesley's sermons. He also wrote commentaries on the Bible and many other things while he was doing all this preaching. A very busy man.

Too busy for marriage, unfortunately, and he did get married. But his marriage to Molly Vizelle was a disaster. He married her in 1751, but they spent most of their married life separate.

At first she tried to travel with him, but her nerves gave her trouble. And so she went back home, and he traveled without her for years. There was some bad blood between them.

The story of their marriage is a sad one. Actually, John had fallen in love with a different woman and wanted to marry her desperately, but his brother Charles, and this alienated them somewhat, his brother Charles was convinced that if John would marry her, it would ruin his ministry. Because Charles knew better than John.

John was not a man for marrying. He traveled all the time. He couldn't maintain a family.

And Charles knew this, and therefore he persuaded this woman that John was in love with to marry another guy, and persuaded this guy to marry her. So, unbeknownst to John, Charles arranged this thing while John was hoping to marry this woman. His brother arranged for her to marry some other guy, kind of, and worked it out, urged them, and so his true love married someone else.

That really bugged him. John was really angry at Charles for that, and shortly after that, probably on a rebound, he married Molly. She was actually a nurse who cared for him.

He'd fallen on the ice and hurt himself, and she nursed him back to health, and I guess it was during that period of time that he decided, he proposed to marry her, and she married him. But they did not have a happy marriage at all. There are stories, it's hard to know how many of them are apocryphal and how many of them are documented, about her.

It is often said that she used to drag him around the house by his hair. If you've ever seen pictures of Wesley, his hair was beyond shoulder length. And it is often said of Molly that she dragged him around the house by his hair.

She also was apparently a very loud, boisterous, abrasive woman, and caused him a great deal of public embarrassment. There's one story told about how he was preaching, and she was in the back of the church on one occasion, and he said from the pulpit, My wife has accused me of everything except drunkenness. And she stood up in the back and said, John, you know, that's a lie.

You were drunk last night. They had a wonderful marriage. Well, needless to say, they didn't have any children, and they spent many years apart and not very many weeks together.

And actually, at the time of her death, he didn't even know she died, and he did not attend her funeral. So that was sort of a blot in an otherwise illustrious career of a man who loved the Lord, but didn't seem to have room for a marriage and ministry both. He seemed to be married to his ministry, married to his preaching.

Well, as he preached in all the places that he traveled to, he saw a lot of converts. He was very successful. Thousands and thousands of people were converted through his preaching.

And in order to disciple these people, he set up in every place where he preached these little groups for discipleship. They were called societies, Methodist societies. And there were no clergymen in them.

There were no ordained clergy, but eventually John appointed leaders to oversee them and to preach. And the Methodist preachers became a phenomenon of the movement. John trained these men and gave them their marching orders.

They were sort of like a spiritual militia that were sent out by John to conquer territories for God. And there was a tremendous move of the Holy Spirit, and much of England was converted or at least renovated socially by the influence of the Methodist preachers. And it was a true revival.

By 1748, the Methodists were, like the Pietists in Germany, a church within the church of England. Wesley remained in England until his death, however, but the Methodist separated and became a separate denomination after he died. You know, John Wesley is in many respects the father of modern evangelicalism as we know it.

Though he had some views that are not dominant in modern evangelicalism today, he was not a Calvinist. He was an Arminian. I'm not sure how it came that he was an Arminian.

I don't know if it was just from reading the Bible. That's how most people become Arminians. Or if he read the works of Arminius or of some other Arminian writer.

I don't know. However, he came out of Anglicanism, where certainly there would have been stronger Calvinist leanings in Anglicanism than there were Arminian. And George Whitefield, as we mentioned earlier, his associate was a Calvinist.

There are stories told about the friction between Wesley and Whitefield over this issue. Sometimes they would preach together in the same places, and they would preach almost against each other. I heard a story.

I don't know where it comes from, but apparently they were staying in the same lodging place and preaching in the same town at one time. So they were sharing a room. And after a day of preaching, both of them got down at their bedsides to pray.

And George Whitefield got down by his bedside and said something like, Father, I thank you that all those who were elect were irresistibly drawn to you today through my preaching. And then he got up and went to bed, went to sleep. And Wesley said, Mr. Whitefield, is this where your Calvinism brings you? And Wesley prayed all night.

And in the morning, George Whitefield got up and saw Wesley still kneeling in his bed there, snoring away. He said, Mr. Wesley, is this where your Arminianism brings you? So they had their little tete-a-tete from time to time about their Calvinism and their Arminianism. Actually, historians sometimes say that they never really worked out their problems over this issue.

Whitefield, as it turned out, started a Calvinist Methodist denomination. But modern Methodists are, generally speaking, Arminian. By the way, as I recall, again, there's a lot of anecdotal stories you hear floating around about Wesley and Whitefield, if you happen to be in the circles that talk about such men.

And I can't document all these things. But I remember hearing that when Whitefield died, and he died almost 20 years before John Wesley did, someone asked Wesley, do you think you'll see George Whitefield in heaven? And Wesley said, barely. He'll be so far ahead of me that I'll barely see the back of his head, I imagine.

So they still had great respect for each other, but they couldn't quite convince each other of their theological positions, respectively. I can just picture some of the discussions they probably had, because I've had friends who are Calvinists, and they very much want to convince every Arminian to be Calvinist for some reason. I'm not sure why that's so important to them.

But I imagine that those men had many interesting discussions. Another distinctive of Wesley's theology, and a distinctive that has practically come to be associated with him by name, is his view of holiness, or of sanctification. In most denominations, sanctification, if it is mentioned at all, or stressed at all, is presented as sort of a process.

For one thing, a lot of denominations don't stress sanctification at all. By sanctification we mean the transformation of the life to be holy. The word sanctified comes from the root word for the word holy.

Justification is what we mean when we talk about being forgiven of our sins, and getting saved, the legal basis of our salvation before God. But sanctification has to do with the actual change in our character, change in our nature, so that we are no longer prone to sin as much as before, but we're actually more holy innately. Whereas a lot of groups, like Lutheranism for example, I don't think even emphasize sanctification or thought it was necessary at all.

There were groups, and are groups, that stress sanctification, that view it simply as the process of spiritual growth. Wesley, however, taught a view, and it is still taught among Wesleyans. Those Wesleyans, they would include not only Methodists, but also the Nazarene denomination and the Salvation Army.

Those three denominations are still Wesleyan in their views on sanctification. Wesley taught something which has come to be called eradicationism, or entire sanctification. He taught that there is a second work of grace, second chronologically after conversion.

That conversion happens at one point, and that at another point, a person crosses a second threshold into holiness, or into sanctification. This holiness actually involves the death, or the annihilation of the sin nature, or the eradication of the sin nature. That stubborn root of sinfulness in fallen man, which inclines man to sin, that is extracted by a work of the Holy Spirit, which is referred to as entire sanctification.

This view, apparently it worked for Wesley, but I don't know to what degree Wesley may have been interpreting theology from his own experience again. We know that he preached and lived a holy life of sorts, and a devout life of sorts, before he was ever converted. Then he did experience that time when his heart was strangely warmed, and he actually said he felt like he had been saved from the law of sin and death, which sounds like it's referring to his sinful nature.

There might be different ways to interpret his experience. Some of us might say, well, Wesley was regenerated in that second experience, and he was simply a religious unregenerate man before that. His own interpretation might have been that he was saved because he had faith, but he wasn't spiritually changed until Aldersgate experience.

Hard to know. I will say this, that some very good people have taught the Wesleyan view of sanctification. I'm fairly sure that Finney taught it, and there have been many Wesleyan preachers who taught the same thing.

I have not met very many people today, even among Methodists, who profess to have been entirely sanctified. I think this testimony of being entirely sanctified was much more frequent in the earlier Methodist days when the Methodism became more of a denomination, more of an institutionalized thing. Probably, as all denominations have fewer converts, real converts, in their second and third generations than there were in their founding generation, it's probably true that as the Methodist movement became institutionalized, fewer and fewer people really had the spiritual experience that was characteristic of Wesley and his teaching, although they were part of the institutional denomination of Methodism.

So much for Wesley and our consideration of him. We have one other man I want to talk about, and that is George Whitfield, who has already been mentioned both in connection with our discussion of Jonathan Edwards and our discussion of Wesley, because he had acquaintance with both those men. George Whitfield has been called the father of modern mass evangelism.

He was born nine years after Wesley, and he died about 20 years earlier than Wesley, almost. He was born in 1714, died 1770. And he was the son of an English innkeeper, but he was educated at Oxford, where, of course, he met Charles Wesley and later on John Wesley, and was, along with them, organizers of the so-called the Holy Club.

Whitfield was ordained as a deacon in the Anglican Church in 1736, and then just after John and Wesley returned from Georgia to England, Whitfield went to Georgia, and he did some ministry over there for a few months, and then came back to England. And he was a great preacher, but also as a deacon, he did a lot of benevolence kind of work. He spent a lot of time with prisoners, and he also established an orphanage in Savannah, Georgia.

He didn't find the churches really open to his preaching, so he's the one who began open-air preaching. Open-air preaching really traces its roots back pretty much to George Whitfield. This is an amazing thing to me to realize.

I've gotten over my amazement, but I was well into my ministry before I realized that open-air preaching was a relatively modern phenomenon in the church. I mean, you have Jesus, you know, in the Gospels, he preached in the open-air sometimes in the hillside and so forth, and so did Paul and Peter and apparently Stephen in the book of Acts. But after the church became institutionalized in the second century and so on, it was very uncommon for the church ever to take an open-air approach to preaching.

There were always people like the Franciscans and some of the monastic orders that would go out and they'd share outside the church walls because their whole sphere was outside the church walls. But in the days of the Reformation and the rise of the Reformed denominations and Anglicanism and all that, preaching outside the church just wasn't done. As I said, John Bunyan was put in jail for 12 years for preaching outside the church.

But he was a rebel, a good one. He was a rebel against the devil, but he was a good rebel. But he was not even ordained to preach, and in those days you weren't even allowed to preach at all if you weren't ordained by the church.

But Whitefield was ordained. He was ordained first as a deacon and then later as an Anglican priest. So he was allowed to preach, and he just did something really revolutionary.

He went outside and started preaching to the miners in Bristol. And it was, as I said, he who encouraged John Wesley to join him later in the same enterprise, and they both had tremendous success at it. Some years ago, well, let me put it this way.

I was raised a Baptist, and then in the Jesus movement around 1970, I moved into the non-denominational slash charismatic kind of movement. In my teenage years, in the early 70s, the Jesus movement was a genuine revival. It didn't have all the same impact that the Great Awakening did or anything like that, but it was a tremendous harvest and changed many things in the church.

Permanently, it would appear. But during that time, open-air preaching was normative, and I was just a kid, so I grew up around open-air preaching. I did some open-air preaching.

We had, and many people had bands, evangelistic bands in those days. We'd just go out in parks, and we'd preach and sing there, go on school campuses and do it. And so I kind of grew up thinking of open-air preaching.

What else would there be? I mean, you read about it. Jesus did it in the Gospels. The Apostles did it in the Book of Acts.

And I grew up in an environment where that was done. It really shocked me when I was in my 30s, and I read a book by D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, who was a Puritan, a modern Puritan. He was Calvinist, very strongly Calvinist.

In his book on preaching and preachers, he actually disparaged lay preaching and open-air preaching. He actually said he didn't think it was of God, which was really a surprising thing. By the way, I like D. Martin Lloyd-Jones' works, very edifying works.

But I'd never encountered anyone, an evangelical, who would say a thing like that. But he made a case that made some sense to me. I had never thought of it from his point of view.

And that was that if the church doesn't maintain some control over who can preach and who can't, then the most unqualified and the most misinformed, but the most zealous, youngest Christians might get out there and totally misrepresent the Gospel. They might totally be a bad testimony for the Gospel. People might go out and preach visibly and then fall away because they weren't really even established in their own Christian faith.

And by the way, I've seen that happen a lot. So I had a little sympathy for D. Martin Lloyd-Jones' position when I read it. But the thing is, but not entirely.

I still believe in open-air preaching. I don't think the church as an institution needs to control who preaches. I do think the church should definitely, if what is being preached is preached by somebody who's not a godly person or if it's a heretical preaching, they should speak out against it.

But I don't think the church should have put John Bunyan in jail for preaching outdoors. And I think that open-air preaching is sometimes the only way to reach the people. The coal miners didn't go to church.

And so Whitefield and later John Wesley would just position themselves in some open field where the coal miners would walk by on their way to the mines at four or five in the morning. And they'd just preach to them. The miners would stop and listen and get saved.

And it was a great strategy for evangelism. And so he began a career, Whitefield did, as an itinerant evangelist associated with the Methodist movement, with the Wesleys. He traveled and preached also with Howell Harris, who was a leader in the Welsh revival at the time.

And sometimes Whitefield would preach in Wales with this man. And he would preach in English, and Harris would preach in Welsh, right side by side with him. Whitefield's preaching was remarkable.

Probably of the men we've considered tonight, he was the most powerful preaching and moved people probably more than any other. He preached with fervor, yet in an unadorned, plain, and even colloquial style. He was rough cut.

He didn't use fancy high church language. He used the language of the people to communicate to them. His physical bearing apparently was quite striking, but also his vocal range, his strength of his voice was legendary.

It was said of George Whitefield that he could be heard, although there was no such thing as amplification in those days, he could be heard preaching clearly from a mile away. And so he preached to huge groups of thousands at a time. When he was preaching, he made seven trips to America where he preached, but his activities were also in England and Wales and Scotland quite a bit.

He made 17 trips to Scotland. Once when he was in America, Benjamin Franklin came to hear him preach, because Franklin was not a Christian, he was a deist. But in fact, he had some disparaging things to say about the gospel that Whitefield preached, but he did want to test the rumor.

He had heard that Whitefield could be heard from a mile away clearly, and so he walked around a perimeter a mile away from where Whitefield was preaching and listened and he verified it. Sure enough, you could hear him clearly a mile away. So this man had a tremendous, powerful voice.

It is said that he used startling imagery that could make his listeners feel the pain of sin and the terror of hell. He described the love of God with tears in his voice that could move his audience to cry out to God for mercy. There was a contemporary English actor named David Garrick who said, I would give 100 guineas if I could only say, Oh, like Mr. Whitefield.

Whitefield preached to the multitudes in England. Also, as I said, he made 14 trips to Scotland preaching there and went to Wales, preached in the Welsh Revival there, and he had great impact in those places. He made seven trips to America where he, in his association with Calvinists like Jonathan Edwards, became a Calvinist.

I guess when he was with the Westleys in England, he was not yet a Calvinist, but he became a convinced Calvinist through his contact with Calvinists like Jonathan Edwards. He even preached four times in Jonathan Edwards' church. It was actually Whitefield who sparked the second Great Awakening around 1740 after the first one under Whitefield had kind of died down, I mean under Edwards.

In 1743, Whitefield parted company with Wesley and founded a different denomination called the Calvinistic Methodist Society. I don't know very much about the Calvinistic Methodist Society today. Perhaps it still exists.

I've never met any Calvinistic Methodists, but most Methodists today follow the Wesleyan theology rather than the Calvinistic theology. But these men, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitefield, were some of the ones that God raised up to really revive a dead orthodoxy in Europe during the latter part of the 17th and the early part of the 18th century. We will then talk about some of the things that happened after the American Revolution and especially the movements in America in some of our next talks.

We also need to look at the rise of the modern missionary movement, which William Carey is generally called the founder of that. The Moravians were somewhat earlier than him in their missionary efforts, and the Jesuits even a long time before the Moravians. But the modern missionary movement is one of the distinctive things that arose after this and that characterizes the modern church even in our day.

So in our later lectures, we will cover some of those more modern issues. At this point, we will have to quit.