Welcome to Revival Radio TV.
I'm Gene Bailey.
Today we're going to learn more about George Whitfield,
the father of our first great American awakening.
Let's check it out how it all began.
Genesis 2618 tells us Isaac dug again the wells of Abraham.
In every generation there have been revivals,
massive moves of the Spirit
that changed the course of history.
In every revival there were believers like you
who chose to answer the call,
to become the one in their generation.
Discover your call to be the one in your generation.
We're about to take you face to face with history.
So let's get into today's program.
With me again is Doug Bonner. Doug, glad you're here.
Pleasure to be here, Gene.
Let's talk about someone
that a lot of believers here in America may have heard about,
heard his name thrown around a lot, and that's George Whitfield.
And so talk to me about who he is in his story.
Well, he was an Englishman. He was born in the early 1700s.
But he had an amazing adventure.
He was an evangelist,
and he felt prophetically called to the colonies
that would become the United States of America.
He preached 18,000 sermons,
gave 12,000 talks over a 30-year period.
He crossed the Atlantic Ocean 13 times.
He spent three years almost just on boats
to preach in the Americas.
He spent nine years atilously being an evangelist.
It is said of him that his life was a continual uninterrupted sermon.
He was almost the religious rock star of the day.
He was known by over 80% of the inhabitants of the colonies.
18,000 sermons.
Yeah, an amazing, huge amount.
He just preached almost every day.
And isn't that what we're supposed to do is live our life as a living sermon?
Absolutely.
What an example George Whitfield gave us.
I want you to watch this brief video
and learn more about who George Whitfield really is.
All right, let's dig into this, Doug.
Tell me about the father of the first great awakening.
Well, you could say that if Jesus was born in a barn,
then George Whitfield was born in a bar.
His parents were business owners,
and he came into this world in December of 1714.
That's 300 years ago.
His main passion that he had was the theater.
He loved to act and to tell stories in front of people.
He had an amazing voice that carried long distances
and he was passionate to become really an entertainer.
But his family, they took him to church,
as the majority of people in those days did,
and there was a Godward side to him.
As a young boy, he said to his sister,
he said that God intends something for me which we know not are.
As a teenager, he told his mom once, he was going on an errand,
and he said this, he said he received a spiritual impression
that he would become a minister or a preacher one day.
Well, his mom just laughed at that
because there were two sides to George at that time.
There was the spiritual side, and it wasn't good.
It was annoying, his mom said,
because he was just holier than now,
and he criticized for doing things he felt were ungodly.
But then there was the George side,
and then he would just turn around and do exactly those things.
But as he grew up, he wanted to go to Oxford and receive an education,
but his father had died when he was very young,
and they had no finances.
But his mom, she made a way for him to enter into Oxford
under a scholarship where he was basically,
it was called a servitor.
He was a butler to the older students.
Little did he know the transformation that would happen
in his life when he went to Oxford.
So, born in a bar.
Yeah, in a bar. Can you believe that?
Born in a bar, called of God,
and gets somehow, gets from that lowly beginnings
to a place of being in Oxford.
Now, Oxford still has, what a statement.
Now, even today, when you say you went to Oxford,
it's a tremendous thing to be able to say.
But he also knew, he was also connected with the Wesley Brothers somehow.
Tell me about that.
And there's a specific story I want you to share
about the woman in the drowning incident.
It's a great story.
He said, I went to Oxford without a single friend.
And the first year out at Oxford, it didn't help
because all the wealthy students that he was serving
were encouraging him, as he said, to join in their excess of riot.
So, he was trying to be holy and good and pleasing to God.
Have a good time.
Yeah, no. But it was the Wesley Brothers that, I mean,
they saved him in the sense that they put him
into their holy club.
And now the holy club, he felt at home there
because everyone was trying to be holy.
And so it was like pray and read your Bible and do good things.
But it was one of those things where he had an encounter
that he wasn't sure that you even could have.
And it was to go and visit those who were in prison and poor.
So here's the young 18-year-old George Wittfield.
He's walking down the streets of Oxford.
And he comes across a woman who he's met because her husband is in jail.
But she's soaked to the skin and she's distraught.
And she comes up to him and says,
Mr. Wittfield, I'm so sorry,
but I didn't have food for my children this morning.
My husband is in prison.
I felt that my life was worthless.
So I've just tried to drown myself.
And so she said that she threw herself in the River Charwell,
which still runs through Oxford.
And a man had rescued her.
And she was pulled out and she knew that she'd done a wrong thing.
And she instantly said, I'm going to find Mr. Wittfield.
And so she did.
She bumped into him.
That was a God incident.
And she said, can you come and visit my husband and I?
So the first thing he did, he gave her money and food for the babies.
So the next day, he's visiting this man and something happens.
He just opens up the Bible and he reads John 3.16.
God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, whoever should believe in him,
should not perish, but have everlasting life.
An amazing thing happens.
This woman, all of a sudden, she gets happy.
And she says, I believe.
I believe.
I don't have to perish.
I can have everlasting life.
And George is thinking, well, I've preached this before.
I've said this before.
Why is she so excited?
She actually believed it.
Exactly.
But then the husband, I mean, he did the same thing.
I can imagine him thinking, well, I believe too.
But he was amazed because something happened from just the believing of one verse of the Bible.
He didn't know that that could happen, but he was about to have that experience.
And that experience, it rocked his world.
He recalled a ray of divine light which instantly darted upon my soul.
And from that moment, but not until then, I did know that I must be a new creature.
He said he was filled with joy for hours and for days on end.
And he was shocked by the effect that it had on him.
But not everybody was happy as he was.
Now, Whitfield, when you look at art of that time and drawings, they never show Whitfield in a church.
That's true.
He's always outside.
Yes.
He was always preaching in the fields.
And what happened with that?
Would he become a traveling minister?
Is that what he was doing?
Yes.
Now, of course, he began, he was preaching in the churches, but the doctrine of the Church of England from the Book of Common Prayer
was that you were born again at the time that you were baptized as an infant.
And then he has this experience.
He sees that the Bible, even though the Book of Common Prayer has got some awesome things in it, it diverges from the Scriptures.
Right.
And so he started to preach that you had to be born again as an adult.
He got a whole lot of persecution because there were people who said, no, that's not the case.
So the doors to the churches and the pulpits, they closed.
And so he had, he was preaching in one church and he had a thousand people outside.
And he realized, wait a minute, I can be more effective outside than inside of the churches.
Well, and I think what you just said there is tremendous truth that we all need to take.
This just goes right into what we talk about being the one you can be more effective outside the church than you can be inside,
because that's what you're supposed to do.
You're supposed to take this gospel to the world and take it to.
So he was a living example of what needed to happen.
He was preaching out and taking the gospel to the world.
He truly was the one being the one, wasn't he?
Yes.
And there's a great story about that.
He was in the Bristol area, which is on the west coast of England.
I grew up around that area and it's a coal mining area.
So he's just walking there and the shift is obviously ending for a whole bunch of coal miners who were coming out.
Now, of course, they are black.
They're covered in the coal dust.
All you can see is the white of their eyes.
So he calls over to them and he said, a blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
And they stop and then he says it again.
And they're shocked because why is a minister talking outside of the church?
Because preaching is only supposed to be done inside.
What he preaches to about 200 of these guys, an amazing thing, takes place.
He's preaching on the darkness of the pit of hell and being separated from God and how Jesus was a friend of publicans and sinners.
I mean, these coal miners were called crude and coarse and cussing men.
But all of a sudden he saw that tears would pour down their faces and leave white streams.
He said it was white gutters on their faces.
And he realized that God was touching these unchurched men.
Well, he preached for a number of days.
In a few days there were 2,000, then five, then 10, and he preached to a crowd of 20,000 people, unheard of in those days.
In the years leading up to the American Revolution, one man sowed the seeds of revolution simply by changing men's hearts.
This Englishman sparked the embers of revival in England.
Then he brought it to America where the flames swept like a wildfire.
His dramatic storyteller sermons drew thousands of followers throughout the colonies from New England to Georgia.
Vast seas of crowds who gathered outdoors became converts after hearing him explain about the new birth we can have in Christ.
The pulpits of the churches were closed to him in both England and often in America.
Yet he reached into many of these churches and from the pastor to the parishioner, entire churches were saved and transformed.
George Whitfield was responsible for changing the way Americans thought about God, the church, their liberty and equality.
And by doing so, transformed the nation and the world.
So he comes to America and so what happens when he gets here?
Well, he starts to preach. An amazing thing happens is that he goes to the highways and in byways.
On one of his trips he preached to half a million individuals.
He was tireless and he would have large crowds.
Now it wasn't just the preaching but he met a man called Benjamin Franklin.
Of course, he was the co-signer of the Declaration of Independence.
But Benjamin Franklin, he was a printer. He was a businessman and he'd heard about this up-and-coming evangelist in England.
So they got together and he printed all his sermons and even when Whitfield was not preaching, his sermons were.
They would actually read them in churches and have revivals.
So when you went to Whitfield Revival, what was that like?
And specifically, once you tell the story of Nathan Cole, tell me about that.
It was electric. It was exciting. There was anticipation.
And it's a great story. I mean, businesses shut down, courts shut down, farms shut down and everyone, they went to the revival.
Nathan Cole, he was a young man and a rider, almost like a town crier, would go out and say,
Whitfield's preaching, Whitfield's preaching, he's preaching at 10 a.m. in the courthouse.
And so Nathan dropped what he was doing in the field.
It was eight o'clock in the morning. He'd likely been up since four.
And he ran inside. He gets his wife and they get on a horse and they rush and they drive for a whole hour.
Twelve miles into the town. But it's so interesting because the horse got tired.
He had to rest and walk a bit. But he said, I saw a cloud over the town.
But as he got closer, it wasn't a cloud at all of mist. It was a cloud of dust.
There was a traffic jam and hundreds and hundreds of horses and carriages of people rushing in to hear the e-bans.
He said he had to wait for a gap almost in the traffic to get in.
So he gets in there and the anticipation is so high.
And he said it was like the voice of an angel who spoke to him.
And as with many thousands of people, he was touched by that.
He said, I look back on the farms and they were empty.
The power of the Word of God, he knew how to relay that.
But you talked about him spending time on his knees and the word and the sermons would jump out at him.
That's something that we live in such an immediate society.
And I know we've said this for my whole life.
We almost cursed microwaves when they came out because they were too quick.
And there's nothing like getting on your knees and seeing what God has to say to you, hearing with him.
So as he's preaching, what kind of messages would he actually preach?
He preached on everything.
Now, of course, he preached the message, I think over 3,000 times.
And that was, you must be born again.
He said, let us not use labels and let us say we're just Christians.
And I think that he really unified unintentionally, I think, all these different groups and states.
Under one, it was a nation under God rather than individual states under their denomination.
Even in Pennsylvania, it was founded by William Penn and he was a Quaker.
So it's like the flavor was where Christian first and it birthed an identity, I think, of the whole nation that was to come.
So what was the difference between Wesley living to 88 and Whitfield only going to 56?
It was not spiritual.
It wasn't a God thing that he was called home early.
Whitfield, he got what he said.
He said, I would rather wear out than rust out.
He did not take care of himself.
He kept a very punishing schedule.
I mean, he would sometimes, he would preach all day.
He would ride all night and then preach again.
Here's just a nine day excerpt of his life.
It said he visited the sick, the imprisoned, he entertained with guests.
He was in Pennsylvania.
He dined with William Penn's air.
He prayed with many individuals.
He was a man, he loved, you know, to go.
The worst moments of his life was those three years that he spent on the ships.
He said, I faced the devil on those times because he hated when he was not moving around.
So yes, he died young.
I think if he had looked after himself, he would have had many more years.
But he packed a lot of years, a lot of life in those years.
Benjamin Franklin was pretty skeptical, wasn't he?
Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I was too.
Like, are you kidding me? I mean, 30,000 people, how about 300?
I mean, no microphone and no amplification and all the noise outside.
So it's a great story.
Franklin is in Pennsylvania.
He's listening to Whitfield.
And so he's skeptical, but he's the scientist, of course, you know.
So he walked away as far as he could from where Whitfield was preaching.
And he did a calculation. He kind of drew an arc and thought, well, there's the preacher.
I'm here. And if I drew an arc, you know, like an auditorium,
if I give everyone like two foot by two foot, it wasn't 20,000 whom could hear.
He calculated that 30,000 could hear that man preach.
I mean, that changed me. I thought, wow, that's true. That's not just preaching, you know.
That's facts.
Yeah, that's facts. That's right. That's right. This is great.
Franklin, he was, and most of us don't know, didn't know that.
I'm sure maybe you didn't ever heard that Benjamin Franklin had such an interest in Whitfield
and what he was doing.
So was Franklin a Christian or what did he believe?
Well, he was, Franklin, he called himself a daest.
And a daest was a man who believed that God's there,
but he doesn't involve himself in the affairs of man.
So praying is useless.
So he called him that, but he wasn't really because he believed in prayer.
And at the time of the revolution, he encouraged the people to pray and invoke God,
invite God into the affairs.
So we don't know if he became a Christian.
I remember when Franklin was becoming famous as a scientist,
of course, he flew his kite into a thunderstorm.
Always remember that.
And Whitfield, he wrote to him and said,
I would now humbly recommend to your diligent, unprejudiced pursuit
and study of the mystery of the new burr.
So he's saying, study the new burr.
And we don't know that, you know, that he became a Christian,
but he greatly appreciated the fruit of the new burr.
I mean, the change, this wonderful experience here.
This was in 1739.
And this is Franklin, he said this,
it was wonderful to see the change that was made in the behavior of our inhabitants
from being thoughtless or indifferent about religion.
It seemed as if the whole world was growing religious
so that one could not walk through town in an evening
without hearing Psalms sung in different families.
So, man, he loved to see the fruit of revival.
Yeah, he was seeing the fruits of the revival.
Absolutely, and he believed in it.
You know, there are several revivals where something happened with a child,
did something huge.
Yeah, because we think it's just the big evangelist,
you know, the great awakening, but there was many thousands of small.
And there's a mother, she was born again,
and she was trying to share the excitement of that with all her friends,
and she may have not been good at it.
And she was frustrated because no one wanted to hear her.
But her daughter, her 10-year-old daughter, she got saved and just was full of joy
and said, Mom, I want to tell the whole world this.
Pray, let me run to some of the neighbors and tell them that they'd be happy.
I love my savior too.
And so, and the mother said, I don't know, I've tried that, and it didn't work.
But this 10-year-old, she went to a shoemaker, and she was quite blunt.
She said, you need to be saved, otherwise you're going to be lost and without God.
And amazingly, the tears just started to pour down this man's faith.
So, it's not a great evangelist now, it's a 10-year-old girl, and he was saved.
And 50 people were born again just a result of that.
So, it was more than the great man of God, it was just people
just sharing what happened in their lives.
What about some of his messages with, how did the other pastors receive him
when he was preaching, especially when he was talking about the new birth?
Yes, he was the talk of the town and in the taverns too.
And he was very dramatic.
And so, they didn't like his style, and they didn't like what he said.
Again, they struggled over this whole thing of the new birth.
I mean, to us, it's obvious, you start and you get born again.
But these guys had years of religious life.
And so, he was shut out of the churches, even in the colonies often.
So, was it just the pastors that gave him a hard time?
Oh man, no.
I mean, there were individuals who were just trying to cause problems.
There's a great story here.
There's a gentleman, he was called John Merant.
He was a freed African-American.
He was a French horn player.
So, he'd walked past a meeting house where Whitfield was.
And there's a lot of noise going on.
And he said, what's going on in there?
And his friends said, oh, they're just hallowing in there.
You know, they're just crazy guys.
So, this guy said, I'm going to stir up a bit of trouble here.
I'm going to go in and blow my French horn.
So, he pushes his way in.
He pulls the French horn off his shoulder, just as when the elderly Whitfield looks at him
and says, Amos 412, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.
This guy is knocked to the ground.
It's like the power of the word impacted him.
And he said, when he got up, he said it was like the words of Whitfield
were like swords that pierced him, but in a good way.
And he was transformed.
There's another great example of a man in a bar
and they were all mimicking the preacher.
Right.
You know, because he would jump around.
He'd cry often.
And so, they thought that was hilarious.
It was free entertainment.
Sure.
So, this man gets up and says, I can do this better than you all.
So, he gets up.
He's handed the Bible.
And it's a verse of Scripture that says, repent and believe.
So, he just says, repent and he can't speak.
Wow.
This is pretty powerful stuff, isn't it?
One person can make a difference.
George Whitfield stepped up to be the one.
And we are a nation today because of people just like him.
We saw the 1857 prayer revival, how many individual people stepped up.
And revival went through 15 nations.
George Whitfield united our separate colonies into one single nation.
He was an accidental revolutionary, helping us fight the injustices
of things like the Stamp Act while he was in England.
He would also go on to minister in Scotland on 11 separate trips.
When the city of Glasgow had only 17,000 people there,
he had over 30,000 people in his meetings.
When Whitfield saw war would be inevitable between America and England,
he stepped up and helped us fortify in practical ways.
When men died in the Boston Massacre, the first skirmish of our Revolutionary War,
Whitfield rode across all the colonies to get to and comfort every family of the dead.
He didn't live long enough to see our nation fully birthed,
but our troops never forgot him.
They would go to his gravesite and take a fragment of his clothing with them in the battle.
Like William Seymour of the Azusa Street revival,
George Whitfield had one working eye.
People said he had one eye looking to bless them and one eye that saw God.
Thank you for sharing in this update on George Whitfield,
and we'll see you next time, right here on Revival Radio TV.
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