George Whitefield: Preaching Institute

Well, here we are, friends, as we come to the end of our preaching institutes, and it's only fitting, friends, to make the last institute in our series on Revival, one about George Whitefield, who is unparalleled in falling into that rare category of Revival man. I hope you have been blessed by these instructional studies on preaching in our international preaching institutes, consisting with the 15 messages on the man, the message, and the man of Revival. In our message today, I want to focus about the great British evangelist, George Whitefield.

Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, in the 1950s, was addressing a room full of ministers, and he said, I wonder how many of you, if I gave you a legal pad and a pencil, that you could write 15 minutes on what you know about George Whitefield, and there wasn't anyone in the room that actually could. And I could say the same thing to you now, friends. If I gave you a legal pad and a pencil, how many of you could write what you know about George Whitefield and take 15 minutes to do it? I bet very few of you could.

Whitefield's just not known today, and that's a shame. Well, hopefully this institute will rectify that problem, because it's about this great evangelist who shook two continents for God in Revival. Since many of you probably don't know much about George Whitefield, I will use our time to elucidate upon him in the hopes of whetting your appetite, so you can go study him.

Men like Whitefield need to be studied if we want to have any chance of seeing revival in our day. So I'm going to begin by introducing Whitefield to you by reading to you a description of him from the foreword to my two-volume definitive biography of Whitefield that consists of 1,200 pages. And the foreword was written by Dr. J.I. Packer, and I'm going to read you Packer's words on Whitefield.

Here they are. Here are the words of J.I. Packer on George Whitefield in his foreword to my biography on him. George Whitefield of Gloucester, England, intercontinental gospel preacher with a voice like organ music and a lifelong West Country accent was a phenomenon.

Well, let me pause there, friends, to say, what's that West Country accent Packer's referring to? Well, when Whitefield would say Christ, he wouldn't say Christ, he'd say Croist. That's that accent. And Packer goes on to say he was a very godly man from the time when, as a student in Oxford, he met the Wesleys.

His passion was to grasp and be grasped by the God they served, the God of the Bible, the God and Father of the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Following his conversion, he left Oxford and ministered in and around town, his hometown. He came to the bishop's notice and received ordination at 21, two years younger than the statutory minimum age.

Overnight, he became a popular preacher, always highlighting the new birth throughout his ministry. He lived by rule, maintaining a steady devotional life each day, reading and rereading the marvelous Puritan exposition to the Bible by Matthew Henry, usually on his knees. And I tried doing that one here, friends.

I tried reading Matthew Henry on my knees. Well, my knees gave out on me after about six months. But anyway, we go back to Packer.

The exposition to the Bible by Matthew Henry, usually on his knees and interceding at length for the advance of God's kingdom, his penitent humility before God was lifelong and deep and was the taproot of the compassionate, confident, and confidential boldness that never ceased to amaze his hearers. He was a disciplined man, abstinence in food and drink, taking no more sleep than he needed, and he could manage on less sleep than most. And may I say, friends, as a side note, Ruthield slept about three hours a night max, and that was it.

Well, let's get back to Packer, and he could manage on less sleep than most, and always meticulous in his personal affairs, single-minded and eager, well-focused and joyful, genial and practical. He lived every day full stretch for his Lord, premature aging and the onset of asthma or angina, or perhaps both did not slow him down. The odd response that he commanded whenever he preached was as much admiration for his transparent spiritual zeal as for the stupendous force of his preaching as such.

He was a very gifted man. To his natural energetic alertness and charm were added, in sanctified mode, all the powers that marked great actors. But what were these? First, the power to command and hold attention, movement, or action, as the classical theorists or rhetoric called it, is central here, and Whitfield was never still in the pulpit.

Second, a big, and in Whitfield's case, a huge voice, capable of expressing the whole range of human emotions and attitudes. Whitfield could thunder, lament, caress, and encourage with overwhelming, heart-searching, heart-breaking power. Third, total identification with what he was projecting, not in Whitfield's case a character on stage, but the holiness and mercy of God, and the transformation of life that Christ brings when through faith and repentance we learn to live in, through, to, and for him.

Fourth, the ability to make every utterance an easy flow of vivid and arresting speech. All great actors and all great preachers could do this. Fifth, powers so to impact each individual in the crowd that he or she feels personally addressed, arrested, and drawn into what is going on, in Whitfield's case, persuasion from God through his messenger.

Thus gifted as a dramatic communicator, Whitfield had an evangelistic and nurturing ministry in the pulpit of unprecedented power and fruitfulness. Dr. Johnston tells Whitfield's story in a way that celebrates him as a servant of God, and thus can be fairly described as hagiographical, but there is nothing wrong with that, even though it is a kind of writing at which today's secular historians tend to turn up their noses. The author does not hide Whitfield's failings and imprudences, but concentrates on celebrating the way God used a which makes his book hagiography of the most distinguished kind.

He praises God for Whitfield and wants his readers to do the same. Oh, we should agree with him that Whitfield is not a man to be forgotten and be grateful for his labors to keep the great evangelist's memory green. If you care about the glory of God in the salvation of souls, you will find this book in the same town in England, in Gloucester, and both attended the same grade school at St. Mary de Crypte, though of course in different centuries.

St. Mary de Crypte Church in Gloucester, by the way, is where a young George Whitfield preached his first public sermon. The result drove 15 people mad, and when the bishop who ordained him, Bishop Benson, heard about the results of Whitfield's sermon, driving 15 mad, the good bishop replied he hoped the effects of the wouldn't wear off too soon. Well, speaking of George Whitfield's sermons, friends, I've recently, through my publisher, republished 18 of his farewell sermons to his London congregations, and I feel they're a best example of Whitfield's use of extemporaneous preaching, which was his usual style.

I can think of no better way to introduce you more to George Whitfield, friends, than to introduce you to his sermons, so I will read to you my forward to Whitfield's 18 sermons, which I just brought out and re-edited, for it will give you a great insight into George Whitfield as a preacher as we finish this last institute with the introduction of his sermons, and I highly recommend you take these 18 sermons and actually read them, friends. Get to know Whitfield. Get to know what he preached.

Get to know how he preached. It'll be a blessing to you. Well, here we go, friends.

Here's my forward to that book. If you want the best sense of Whitfield as a preacher, then read these 18 sermons, which were delivered to his much-loved London congregations, comprised of many who were brought to Christ under Whitfield's preaching. As you read these 18 sermons, it is our hope and prayer you will catch some of Whitfield's fire, and that through them you will hear some rumbles of his thunder, see some flashes of his lightning, and experience the wonder of the rainbow that so easily emerges from his heart full of love towards lost sinners.

I read them often and receive considerable blessings from them. It is my prayer that you, too, will be blessed by the genius in them, which was George Whitfield, and that they will inspire you to pray more fervently for revival in our day and for God to send us a man like Whitfield for our time. Men like Whitfield must be studied and understood if we have any desire of seeing revival in our day.

Well, friends, you're in for a real treat now as I continue on with this forward. It's been said of the British evangelist George Whitfield that he was the greatest preacher who ever spoke the English language, yet few are familiar with him today. His friend and colleague John Wesley is known, but Whitfield lies in obscurity.

But in his own time, he was used of God to shake two continents in revival and spiritual awakening, and was said of his first public sermon, it drove 15 mad. It seems every time Whitfield preached, he made a stir. Reading a printed sermon of the great British evangelist leaves much of the man absent from the page.

One had to hear him preach in person to get a sense of his amazing power as a preacher. In the 18th century, when it was heard that Whitfield was coming to town, the whole region was stirred in a raw, animal-like fervor. Read Nathan Cole's eyewitness account of Whitfield preaching in Middleton, Connecticut in 1740, and that's in my definitive volume on Whitfield, friends.

The whole account is in there. Whitfield could get 4,000 to 10,000 assembled at a moment's notice to hear him, and they would stand early in the morning in the cold and rain to hear him. 20,000 heard him on Boston Common, which represented one-third of the population of Boston at the time, and 30,000 in Philadelphia, where Ben Franklin listened to Whitfield preach from the courthouse steps, and Franklin made his way through the immense crowd with pen and notebook in hand, and Franklin estimated that the evangelist could be easily heard by 30,000 people up to a distance of a mile.

So powerful was Whitfield's voice, even his last sermon the day before he died, when he was dying himself, drew a vast assembly of 4,000 hearers at short notice to a town square in Exeter, New Hampshire. A memorial stone still marks the spot today as his biographer, and having personally visited the majority of the locations where George Whitfield preached in both Great Britain and America, one soon realizes the scope of his ministry, and it was just mind-boggling. Listening to Whitfield was jarring.

You could not remain unaffected, though you remained indifferent. His words fell like heavy hammers, breaking up false foundations of self-righteousness and carnal security. They hung like unwanted specters in the night, haunting you, allowing very little sleep.

You were either so overcome or melted down by the spirit of God in conviction of sin that you could resist Christ no longer, or you left the sermon and the preacher more hardened than ever in your sins and immune to any gospel hope. His original quaint sayings drew smiles from his hearers, such as, you would have better opportunity to put a dress on the moon, or, when speaking about false faith, he would exclaim, it was like climbing to heaven on a rope of sand. The combination of his oratory, artistic stage movement, and emotional outbursts, where he cried real tears over the lost, and became so overcome that he had to pause to regather himself before proceeding with his personal heartfelt appeals that carried you along with every action the speaker made.

Whitfield was always a stage actor putting on a show, whether he grabbed a chunk of his black gown to bring it up to hide his face in shame, or he put on the black cap of the judge to pronounce judgment. You simply could not take your eyes off of him for a moment. George Whitfield was a phenomenon.

He was an unforgettable sight to behold, and one you'd never seen or heard before. He would always approach his pulpit with great solemnity, whether it was a grand, ascending pulpit of old, or his wooden, folding field pulpit that he often carried with him. But when he began to preach, he soon became combustible, for Whitfield preaching was like Mount Sinai altogether on a smoke.

Well, we introduce these 18 sermons of the great British evangelist at a time when they are needed most, a time of famine, as the prophet Amos declared. Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. Amos 8-11.

Is this not our current dilemma, friends? Is that not the current dilemma in your own country? We have few preachers a day, but we have many teachers, and of the few preachers we have, fewer still preach the full counsel of God in the anointing of the Spirit of God. We need men on fire who will take the word of God and preach it in the power of the Spirit of God. George Whitfield was such a man.

George Whitfield was like a house on fire when he preached. You simply could not take your eyes off of him. These 18 sermons are scant examples of his sermonic material.

First, they were taken in shorthand by Joseph Gurney, a member of his London congregation, and much of what the preacher said was not caught entirely or recorded accurately. We are thankful for what he did record and eventually published. Secondly, they were delivered near the end of the evangelist's life, and at the end of the day, when fatigue got the best of a physically unwell and worn-out man.

Of Whitfield's preaching at this time, we have the account of Cornelius Winter, who was the aide and personal assistant toward the end of his life. Cornelius Winter writes, Perhaps Mr. Whitfield never preached greater sermons than at six in the morning, and at that hour he did preach winter and summer, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. His style was colloquial, with little use of motion, pertinent expositions with suitable remarks, and all comprehended within the hour.

Christian experience principally made the subject of Monday through Thursday evening lectures, but though I have lost much of the letter of his sermons, the savor of them yet remains. The peculiar talents he possessed, subservient to great usefulness, can be but faintly guessed from his sermons in print. The eighteen, taken in shorthand and faithfully transcribed by Mr. Gurney, have been supposed to do discredit to his memory, and therefore they were suppressed.

But they, who have been accustomed to hear him, may collect from them much of his genuine preaching. They were far from being the best specimens that might have been produced. He preached many of them, when in fact he was almost incapable of preaching at all.

His constitution, long before they were taken, had received its material shock. Well, those are the words of Cornelius Winter, his aid friends. And what this eyewitness to Whitfield's preaching is stating, is that it is in these last published eighteen sermons that best represent George Whitfield, the preacher.

That's why I want to recommend them to you, friend, that you study them. Get to know Whitfield. Get to know how he preached in an extemporaneous style of preaching.

And one could always tell when the preacher was ready to take flight and soar, when he began with, Me thanks, I'll see a bloodstained Christ yonder, on a hill at Calvary. And Whitfield not only takes you there in your mind, emotionally, but brings you there physically, at the foot of the cross, as a guilty sinner, facing his only remedy for sin. George Whitfield was well accustomed to persecution, for preaching the gospel of Christ to lost sinners.

In Warfield's early in his ministry, when he preached in the open air, he was spelted with rotten eggs, and had pieces of dead cats thrown at him. He was lambasted on the stage, in profane plays, where they mocked his holy life, and his physical defect of the squint in his eye, which was a medical mishap, caused by a nurse in his youth. And they mocked him by calling him Dr. Squintum.

One time, while preaching the gospel in Ireland, an angry mob stoned him. One Lord Stone, hitting his forehead, almost killed him. Years later, during a trip to America, he was introduced to a minister, who'd just arrived from Ireland, to which Whitfield removed his beaver cap, and leaning forward, he pointed to a Lord's scar on his forehead, with the remark, This, sir, is the wound I received for preaching Christ in your country.

Yet God honored Whitfield's preaching, to bring revival to two continents. It is therefore, with great pleasure, we present to you, his last 18 recorded public sermons. It is our hope and prayer, that you will read them, and you will catch some of Whitfield's fire, and that through them, you will hear rumbles of his thunder, see flashes of his lighting, and experience the wonder of the rainbow, of God's unfailing love towards lost sinners.

I read them often. And received considerable blessings from them. It is my prayer, you too will be blessed by the genius in them, which was George Whitfield, and that by reading them, you too will be stirred to pray more fervently for revival in our day, to pray for God to send us a George Whitfield for our time, a man so intoxicated with Christ, and so entirely sold out to God and the world, and eternity, that all that mattered to him, were the souls of men.

Men like Whitfield must be studied and understood, if we are to have any hope of seeing revival in our day. Oh, well, that's my forward friends. And this concludes our 15th message in our International School of Preaching.

I hope these little institutes have been helpful to you, and somewhat of a blessing to you, as you serve God and your generation. I hope they make you better preachers. I hope they allow you to be better preachers.

I pray that they teach you to study men that God has used in former times, so we can learn from them. Study the sermons that men has used in former times and spiritual awakenings, so we can learn how to preach better for our day. And as a reminder, friends, if you want to go deeper in a study of George Whitfield, you have my published works of the two-volume, 1,200-page definitive biography.

And it's been recently republished as two volumes in one. It can be found on Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, and other internet sites. In the recently republished sermons of Whitfield, make sure you get the edition I brought out that says compiled by E.A. Johnston, because there's a lot of older issues out there.

And if you get one of the older ones, you'll end up without my editorial comments, which are helpful as you read it. Oh, friends, I pray that the God of George Whitfield will be your God and undergird you with His Spirit, so that you can reach your generation through Christ and the gospel in our day. Let us pray.