In this series of meetings, it's our desire
not only to present the Word of God,
but to tell you what God has done
in our own times for his people in
answer to prayer.
Now, of course, you cannot read the history
of the American settlement without considering the Puritans.
After the Puritan movement in Britain, after the
return of Charles II, there was a moral
decline.
London had a population of 600,000, and
100,000 owed their livelihood to strong drink.
One house in every six was a tavern.
A Frenchman visiting England said bluntly, the English
have no religion.
The reaction against Puritanism had been so strong
that the people went wild in their enjoyment
of sin.
Blood sports were all the rage.
They had boxing barehanded.
A man could keep his thumb out, and
if he gouged out the eye of his
opponent on his cheek, that was loudly applauded.
Crowds would go to see criminals hanged at
Tyburn Hill.
Drunkenness was epidemic, profanity of the very worst
kind.
The theater was so filthy, it was generally
operated alongside a brothel.
The novel was a mass of trash.
It's rather interesting, when the first dirty novel
came out in our own time, do you
remember a book called Forever Amber by Kathleen
Windsor?
Why, that was very mild compared to the
trash they have today.
It was based, however, upon that very period
in England when sex was treated as a
joke.
A godly Bishop of the Church of England,
the Bishop of Chester, said to one of
his clergymen, I have to rebuke you, sir,
for being drunk so often.
The man stammered an apology.
He said, I'm never drunk at communion.
He always was sober when he conducted a
communion service.
Like people, like king, the king had seventeen
illegitimate children.
It was one of the sneers that some
men owed their title to the fact that
the king wished to honor their father for
some deed he had performed for the good
of the nation.
In other cases, they owed their title to
the fact that he had already dishonored their
mothers, and he gave titles to his illegitimate
children.
That was the condition in Britain at that
time.
In Scotland, it was much the same.
What about the so-called free churches, the
two centers?
They had lost their power and were slipping
into a kind of Unitarianism.
The Presbyterian Church of England lost its Calvinistic
zeal and went into Unitarianism.
Across the Atlantic were the godly Puritans who
had settled New England.
But one of their great leaders preached a
sermon on Ichabod, the glory has departed from
New England.
Religion was dying in the American society.
It was at this time that God intervened
and poured out his spirit in a worldwide
awakening.
I intend to tell you briefly about that
movement.
Some people think that John Wesley and George
Whitefield started a movement which finally touched all
of the English-speaking world.
But actually, the movement began long before the
conversion of John Wesley.
The movement began about 1727, and strangely enough,
in two places far apart.
One was in Germany at a place called
Hernhut.
Count Nicholas Zinzendorf was a godly, pietist Lutheran.
At that time there were refugees fleeing persecution
in Central Europe, and he made room for
them in his estates in Saxony.
Some were Lutheran, some were Bohemian, some were
Sassanian, some were Calvinist, some were Zwinglian, and
they were bickering among themselves.
In fact, Nicholas Zinzendorf spent most of his
time trying to keep the peace between these
bickering Christians.
But he challenged them, and they decided they
would bury the hatchet, and they would start
a time of prayer.
And in due course, the Spirit of God
moved upon those people at Hernhut and sent
what we call the Moravian Revival.
It was on the 12th of May, 1727,
that the group of settlers promised they would
try and live in peace.
And there came what was called in those
days an effusion of the Holy Spirit.
We would say an outpouring of the Holy
Spirit.
Now notice, that word is scarcely ever used
today.
It's true that tonight someone prayed that there
might be an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
But even today, most people are concerned for
individual blessing, not for an outpouring on the
whole body of Christ.
In late July, these brethren decided to establish
a watch, a prayer watch, at this hill
near Hernhut.
And they read the first epistle of John,
if we confess our sins, he's faithful and
just to forgive us our sins and to
cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
At the main congregation at Bethelsdorp, on August
the 10th, the pastor who was leading the
service was overcome with a sense of the
presence of God.
And he and the people continued in prayer
and singing, in supplication and weeping, till after
midnight.
Another Pentecost had begun, and the results were
that the gospel began to travel to the
far ends of the world.
Now what is interesting is this, at the
same time, 1727, in the colony of New
Jersey, at a place called New Brunswick, that's
where Rutgers University is situated, there came a
visitation of God's Holy Spirit through a Dutchman.
His name was Theodor Freilinghausen.
He was minister to these Dutch settlers in
New Jersey.
You know, of course, in the Reformed denominations,
communion is a quarterly arrangement, and in those
days people traveled long distances so as to
be able to take part in communion, and
they would have two or three days of
preparation for the event.
Theodor Freilinghausen took advantage of the opportunity to
engage in what he called Eucharistic evangelism.
You say, what is that?
He preached before communion, and he preached such
texts as, whoever eats and drinks unworthily, eats
and drinks damnation to his own soul.
Some of the older people were indignant.
They said, our previous dominion didn't treat us
like that.
But the young people were greatly convicted.
The result was a revival began, a moving
of God's Holy Spirit, which spread all over
the American colonies.
But let's consider, first of all, what happened
on the other side of the Atlantic.
That movement that began in prayer, 1727, continued
and gained strength.
Now at Oxford, there was a group of
young Anglicans, high churchmen, who met for prayer
and devotion.
They were sometimes called the Bible Moths, other
times they were nicknamed the Methodists, the Holy
Club.
The reason they were called Methodists was they
went to communion every day.
They were so methodical about their religion—it was
a religion of works—that they were nicknamed Methodists,
a nickname that stuck to them long time
afterwards.
One of their leaders was John Wesley, and
he read to these members of the Holy
Club Jonathan Edwards' Narrative of the Surprising Work
of Grace at Northampton, Massachusetts.
That was 1734.
It was some time later that he read
the account.
This stirred their hearts to pray for a
visitation of God's Spirit.
The first to be converted was George Whitfield.
It shows that the Lord has a sense
of humor.
He reached into a tavern at Gloucester and
picked a young man, George Whitfield, who went
to Oxford and worked his way through school.
Now, Oxford was a university meant for the
sons of the wealthy and the noble and
sons of the clergy.
But George Whitfield was a son of a
tavernkeeper, and he went there and worked as
a servant to the other students.
He worked so hard that he was such
a methodical Christian that he had a nervous
breakdown.
He broke down in health, and while he
was in bed, he read a book by
Henry Scougall called The Life of God in
the Soul of Man, in which Scougall said
religion doesn't consist in doing things.
It is union with God.
This made him indignant because he had spent
most of his current time doing things.
But it led to his conversion, and ultimately
to the conversion of John Wesley.
George Whitfield made his way to the American
colonies.
In those days, navigation was not a very
exact science.
His ship was headed for Philadelphia, but landed
somewhere in North Carolina.
The wind blew it out of its course,
and he made his way up to Philadelphia
by horseback.
In the meantime, John Wesley applied for a
chaplaincy in the colony of Georgia.
He was always very unfortunate about womenfolk.
He fell in love with an English girl
in Savannah, but he was so pedantic he
couldn't bring himself to propose.
He was so unsure of what the Lord's
will might be.
Perhaps he felt romantic stirrings and thought they
were too carnal, but the girl waited for
him, and then when he didn't seem to
be willing to propose to her, she married
somebody else.
What did John Wesley do?
He excommunicated her.
He wouldn't allow her to come to communion.
Her husband demanded an explanation.
John Wesley said, I have refused communion to
her because she is a hypocrite.
What do you mean my wife is a
hypocrite?
Well, he said, obviously she loves me, but
she married you.
The result was the husband went to the
governor Oglethorpe and swore out a warrant for
John Wesley's arrest.
John Wesley got on horseback, didn't stop riding
until he got to Philadelphia and caught the
first ship back.
That was prevenient grace, of course.
It made him one of the world's great
horsemen, and that was used in his journey.
He was still a horseman until he was
83 years of age.
But he was always rather unfortunate about the
opposite sex.
After that he kept away from them, but
then, as we might say in the vernacular,
one snuck up on him and nursed him
while he was sick, and he married her,
and what a time she gave him.
On board the ship he met Moravian missionaries.
At that time the Moravians had missionaries in
Greenland, in the Carolinas, in South Africa, and
in India.
Why did they get that running jump?
Because from the revival at Hern Hood, 1727,
they maintained nonstop a prayer meeting for a
hundred years.
It put them in the advance of all
other Protestant Christians.
Wesley came back.
He wrote in his diary, I went out
to convert the Indians, but who shall convert
me?
Twenty years afterwards he wrote in the margin,
this was too severe a judgment.
After all, when Wesley went to Georgia, he
was a Christian, he was a Protestant, he
was an Anglican.
In a certain way he was evangelical.
But he lacked one thing.
He did not have the assurance of salvation.
On the 24th of May in 1738, that's,
remember, eleven years after the outpouring of the
Holy Spirit in New Jersey and in Germany,
he attended Evensong in St. Paul's Cathedral, and
the choir sang, Out of the deep have
I called unto thee, O Lord.
He was deeply moved.
He went to a Moravian prayer meeting on
Aldersgate Street, and there he heard someone read
Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans.
While he was describing the change which God
works in the heart through faith in Christ,
I felt my heart strangely warmed.
I felt that I did trust in Christ,
Christ alone, for my 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.
In other words, he experienced what he believed
in his head.
That was the secret of the first Great
Awakening.
Whitefield and Wesley and Selina Curtis of Huntington
and the other leaders preached that you may
know that you're a child of God.
It was not merely a theological proposition.
Wesley, in his journal, he kept a remarkable
journal.
He began to pray with all his might,
and then he testified openly to all there
what he now first felt in his heart.
It was the first time in his career
that he knew he was a child of
God.
Now, on the 14th of February, 1739, George
Whitefield went down to his boyhood home, Bristol,
the second largest town in Britain.
A malicious report preceded him, so the churches
closed their doors against him.
Whitefield turned to the open air and began
to preach in Kingswood.
It was a rendezvous for the worst people
of Bristol.
The coal workers there, the colliers, as they
called them, were ignorant, violent, brutal, blasphemous, drunken,
and criminal.
They met there to get drunk, to gamble,
and to fight.
But he began to preach to a couple
of hundred, and before long he had 20
,000 people.
John Wesley was asked to substitute for him.
Wesley was such a high churchman at the
time, he said in his diary he thought
it was a sin to preach in the
open air.
But Whitefield said, try it, you'll like it.
So he tried it, and on the 31st
of March he arrived in Bristol, and he
said, I should have thought the saving of
souls almost a sin if it had not
been done in church.
But 24 hours later, that would be on
the 1st of April, All Fools' Day, he
preached in the open air, as he said,
making a bright succession of appeals to the
reason, the conscience, and the heart.
He was a very methodical man.
And then he said, I propose to preach
here next Sunday.
And now the work had begun.
He formed his converts into societies within the
Church of England.
This was the beginning of the great Methodist
movement.
Now in the meantime, Whitefield went up to
London to preach.
25th of April he began in London.
Only one church was willing to receive him,
St. Mary's Islington, because the vicar there had
been a member of the Holy Club, had
been converted through them.
But the vicar was overridden by church wardens.
They said he shall not use the church.
So he took to the churchyard, and that
began his great open-air meetings in London.
He used to go to Kennington Common and
Clapham Common.
The crowds that attended were 25,000.
People came in their carriages.
Enterprising businessmen set up booths and sold food
to people who walked long distances to get
there, because in those days there were no
trains to carry them.
There was a great deal of opposition.
But now Whitefield and Wesley were preaching to
multitudes up and down Britain.
Now as I said once before, I used
to think that John Wesley, like George Whitefield,
was such a genius of an evangelist that
strong men, for the first time hearing him,
broke down and wept before God.
But I find that the secret was not
so much that, as the fact that when
the Holy Spirit was outpoured upon these godly
men, the same Holy Spirit fell in convicting
power upon the multitudes of unchurched people in
Britain.
It wasn't long before there was opposition.
Clergy of the Church of England would stir
up mobs to stone them.
Wesley always kept his composure.
He'd take out his handkerchief and wipe away
the blood from his face, and just continue
preaching.
He was superb in his courage and unruffled
in his composure.
But this continued for quite a while.
Now how can we sum it up?
A high church historian, Canon Overton, said, it
would be no exaggeration to say that morally
and spiritually, the dominant religious power, both inside
and outside the Church of England at the
close of the 18th century, was the one
that had been evoked by the evangelical revival.
What effect did it have upon the nonconformists,
what we would call free churches, not the
state church?
Let me just give you an idea.
In 1740, the number of permanent places of
worship registered by dissenters, Baptists, Congregationists, and others
had dwindled to twenty-seven.
Twenty-seven in the whole country.
The number of temporary chapels was 506.
After sixty years, in other words, at the
end of the 18th century, the number of
permanent chapels had increased from twenty-seven to
nine hundred and twenty-six, and the temporary
ones increased from five hundred and six to
three thousand four hundred and ninety-one.
By the way, Whitefield had a great reception
in Scotland.
Now John Wesley was honored in Scotland.
Several Scottish cities gave him what they called
the freedom of the city, honoring him as
a great man.
But they didn't take him so warmly as
they did to George Whitefield, because George Whitefield
was a brother Calvinist.
In 1742, Whitefield arrived in Scotland.
It is very interesting that he was invited
to Scotland by a seceding group of Presbyterians,
the seceding church, led by the Erskine brothers.
When he arrived, they wanted to ordain him.
But Whitefield said, my good brethren, I am
ordained.
I am ordained by the Church of England.
They said, but that's not true Presbyterian ordination.
Well, they said, that's too bad.
Well, they didn't know what to do.
Then they decided, all right, we will license
him.
So they gave him a license.
They wanted to do everything in order.
In the meantime, a man called William McCullough
in the big dead church of Scotland had
heard of Whitefield's remarkable ministry in the American
colonies, and invited him to come to Cambuslang,
outside Glasgow, to preach there at a communion
service.
What he saw far outdid what he had
ever seen in America.
He preached at two, at six, and at
nine p.m., to crowds of twenty and
thirty thousand.
And then the ministers had to work for
hours dealing with seekers after God.
On Saturday, July the fourth, July the ninth,
Whitefield preached to twenty thousand on the preaching
braise on the hills, a little amphitheater of
hills.
And then on the fifteenth of August, McCullough
and twelve assisting Presbyterian ministers held a second
communion with thirty thousand attending.
So now they're having revival in Scotland as
well as in England.
They also had great revival in Wales, but
there isn't time to tell you of all
this.
You're much more interested in what happened on
this side of the Atlantic.
I wish I could have heard George Whitefield
preach.
You know, that man had such a voice
that when those little sailing ships would sail
across the Atlantic, they formed a V on
Sundays, like ducks going across the pond if
it was a nice Sunday.
It took, of course, many, many weeks to
sail the Atlantic on those days.
And George Whitefield would conduct divine worship for
the fleet from the first ship.
The captain would line up the passengers and
the crews on each ship, and he would
preach to the whole fleet.
His enemy said he could reduce an audience
to tears by the way he pronounced the
word Mesopotamia.
That was an exaggeration, of course.
Now, I told you the first sign of
revival was in New Jersey in a Dutch
Reformed congregation.
It's rather interesting that not only did the
great revival of the 18th century begin in
a Dutch Reformed congregation, but the great revival
of 1858 began in a Dutch Reformed congregation
in Manhattan.
Now this is rather significant because the Dutch
Reformed are a very sober people, not easily
carried away.
You could describe them as Presbyterians with a
little extra starch.
There was an Irishman just north of Philadelphia
at a place called Neshemany, had built a
log college.
His name was Tennant, William Tennant.
He was from the north of Ireland.
He had four sons in the ministry, and
one of them, Gilbert Tennant, went up to
New Brunswick to become pastor of the Presbyterian
congregation there.
They were English-speaking, or rather Scotch-Irish.
They spoke English the way the Scotch-Irish
spoke English.
And the revival spread from the Dutch to
the Scotch-Irish, and then made a sweeping
move throughout Presbyterianism in Pennsylvania.
It communicated itself to the Baptists.
At that time, the Baptists had only 500
members in the colonies.
Today, they claim something like 20 million.
So apparently this revival did them some good.
I remember once I was speaking at Forest
Home when a minister, a Presbyterian minister, came
to me and said, you know Orr, it's
all right to talk about revival to Nazarenes
and Baptists and Pentecostals, but we in the
Presbyterian church believe in an educated ministry and
an orderly service.
I said, where did you learn this?
He said, I'm a Princeton man.
I said, that's very interesting, because you know,
this long college that was started by the
Presbyterian revivalists in this great revival grew until
it became the College of New Jersey, and
today it's known as Princeton University.
Now the revival jumped from the South up
to the North, broke out in Northampton, Massachusetts
under Jonathan Edwards, and there were phenomenal things
there.
Now most people remember Jonathan Edwards by one
sermon.
I remember once I took a course, the
time I was doing my doctorate in education
at UCLA.
The professor was Jewish, and one evening he
thought the class needed some entertainment, so he
read some extracts from Jonathan Edwards' sermon on
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,
and they laughed at some of the wise
cracks he made about this.
I raised my hand afterwards.
I said, do you know, sir, how many
of Jonathan Edwards' sermons are still extant?
He said, no, Dr. Roth.
I said, about 506, and that's the only
one of its kind.
But of course, the world likes to make
fun of Jonathan Edwards because of his sermon,
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
It doesn't suit the easygoing temper of today.
The revival spread from Northampton, Massachusetts to other
parts, but then in 1740 Whitfield came across
the Atlantic for another visit, and that was
the crisis, the climax of the Great Awakening,
as it's called.
In Britain it's called the Evangelical Revival, but
I think we ought to mark it by
saying the Evangelical Revival of the 18th century,
or the Great Awakening of the 18th century,
because some people have never heard of any
other.
That's all they know about it.
Now, as far as this work is concerned,
Whitfield began preaching the vast crowds.
Do you know that when he was preaching
at the Custom House Steps in Philadelphia, people
would gather across the Delaware in Camden, New
Jersey, to listen to him?
Of course, that would be a calm Sabbath
evening, it would not do during a storm,
but of course there were no factory noises
and no automobiles and so forth.
He was a remarkable preacher.
Not only that, but he had a great
burden for education.
I've read some of the stories about Whitfield's
visit to Philadelphia.
One of his great admirers was not a
professing Christian, Benjamin Franklin.
He was a deist, but he admired George
Whitfield.
You'll find at the statue of George Whitfield
outside the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin's tribute
to his integrity.
One evening, Benjamin Franklin went to hear Whitfield.
He had argued with Whitfield.
Whitfield wanted to start an orphanage in Savannah.
Franklin said, look, Philadelphia is the center of
the colonies, it's the biggest town.
What do you want to start an orphanage
way down there for?
Start it here and bring the orphans from
Savannah or from Boston.
Build your orphanage here.
But Whitfield said, the Lord has spoken to
me, and he wouldn't argue.
So Franklin said to himself, he's getting nothing
from me.
Now, in the course of the address, Franklin
said he perceived that Whitfield was going to
take up an offering for his project, and
he had determined to give him nothing.
In his pocket, he had a gold five
dollar piece, and several silver dollars, and a
certain amount of copper.
But he said as he proceeded, his heart
softened a little bit, and he decided to
put the copper in the offering.
And as he proceeded, he changed his mind
again and decided to give the silver as
well.
And finally, when Whitfield finished with a plea
for the orphans, he put gold, silver, and
copper and everything in the plate.
I heard a variation of that story.
I haven't been able to document it, but
there was a Scotsman standing alongside Benjamin Franklin,
and he showed him his pockets.
He pulled the lining of his pockets out
and said, I've come here with empty pockets
because that man can get money out of
a stone.
And he ended up borrowing a dollar from
Benjamin Franklin to put in the offering.
Now, what was it like?
He went to New York.
Gilbert Tennant said, I never saw such attentive
audiences in all my life.
All that Whitfield said was demonstrative of light
and power.
The people's eyes were fixed on him, and
their ears hung upon his words.
Then he came back to Philadelphia through New
Jersey, preaching to vast concourses.
Then he went up to Boston.
Now, I remember in 1950, Billy Graham called
me from the Bellevue Hotel in Boston.
He had preached in Boston Common to 15
,000 people.
But at that time, Boston had a population
of over two million.
But in Whitfield's day, when Boston had a
population of less than 20,000, he preached
as big crowds as Billy Graham ever had—vast
crowds.
One of the Boston ministers, Benjamin Coleman, wrote
to Isaac Watts, the hymn writer in England,
and said, a year later, our meetings flourish,
Sabbaths are joyous, our churches increase, our ministers
have new life and spirit in their work.
These showers of blessing continued for 18 months
after Whitfield's visit.
In Boston, 30 new congregations came together.
Out of a population of 300,000 in
New England, 30,000 were converted.
The Congregationalists formed 150 new congregations in 20
years following the Revival.
And the moral improvement of New England was
so great that it was the most glorious
and extensive revival of religion and reformation of
manners that the country had ever known.
There were some debit items.
One of Whitfield's admirers was a man called
James Davenport.
During the Revival, there was some emotion, so
he tried to promote emotion, tried to work
up things, and worked up a lot of
excesses, brought the movement into discredit.
But I think everyone who has studied the
history of this country would agree that one
of the formative influences, one of the greatest
of all in the formation of the Republic,
was the great awakening that climaxed in 1740.
How long did it last?
Well, perhaps you could say that from 1727
it lasted 50 years.
That takes you to 1776.
Isn't that a significant year?
You say, why would that affect it?
Sad to relate, there was a lot of
dissension.
The Anglicans, Episcopalians, and the Methodists supported the
mother country.
The Baptists, the Congregationalists, the Lutherans, and the
Presbyterians supported the Revolution largely.
The Quakers and the Mennonites were very neutral.
They used to burn each other's churches down,
which rather hurt the ecumenical goodwill.
And so the Revival had declined by the
time of the war.
Conditions got to be the worst in the
history of the American settlement, but that's another
story, and I'll tell you that on another
occasion.
Now, why do I tell you these things?
It's because it seems to be a pattern
of God's working.
When conditions get to be deplorable, and God's
people cry out to him for intervention, he
answers their prayers by outpouring his Holy Spirit
and sending another renewal of Christian life that
sweeps back the tide of unbelief and immorality.
Surely we need that today.