Packer on Whitefield

As we study the lives of Revival men as we're in these seasons of praying for Revival to come to our land, friends, I think it's important to listen to the words of great men and their comments on other great men. And I want to read us today the words of J.I. Packer, his thoughts on George Whitefield. Morton Lloyd-Jones wrote the foreword to Arnold Dalimore's wonderful two-volume definitive work on George Whitefield.

And I was privileged to have J.I. Packer write the foreword to my two-volume definitive work on George Whitefield for this generation. And I want to read us James Packer's observations on George Whitefield at this time, because it's pertinent to our study of men of God and how these men of God were used for God's great glory. Here now are the words of J.I. Packer from the foreword from this biography.

George Whitefield of Gloucester, England, intercontinental gospel preacher with a voice like organ music and a lifelong West Country accent was a phenomenon. I'll pause there, that West Country accent when George Whitefield said Christ, he didn't pronounce it Christ, he pronounced it Croist. Anyway, now back to Packer's words.

He was an unusual human being whom God equipped and used in a quite unique way. 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 his hometown. He came to the bishop's notice and received ordination at twenty-one, 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 re-reading the marvelous Puritan exposition of 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 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. A 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. What were these? First, the power to command and hold attention.

Movement, or action as the classical theorists of rhetoric called it, is central here, and Whitefield was never still in the pulpit. Second, big in Whitefield's case, a huge voice, capable of expressing the whole range of human emotions and attitudes, Whitefield could thunder, lament, caress, and encourage with overwhelming, heart-searching, heart-breaking power. Third, total identification with what he was projecting, not in Whitefield'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 can do this.

Fifth, power so to impact each individual in the crowd that he or she feels personally addressed, arrested, and drawn into what is going on in Whitefield's case, persuasion from God through his messenger. Thus gifted as a dramatic communicator, Whitefield had an evangelistic and nurturing ministry in the pulpit of unprecedented power and fruitfulness, and that's what I want to pray for us to have today, friends. Unprecedented power in the pulpit.

Our pulpits today are negated as power. The Holy Spirit's absent in most of our congregations. When was the last time we felt the power of God in a meeting? Oh, how desperately we need for God to send us His Spirit and move among us in His manifest presence, friends, in revival once again.

Let us pray for our churches at this time that God will heal, heal the divisions, heal all the, heal all the self-satisfied hearts that sit each Sunday and sit there as a rock listening to the same method and man methodology. Let us pray that the great doctrines of Scripture once again be thundered forth with the power and might of a George Whitefield. Let us pray.