Who knows anything about the English-speaking world
knows that our history was made by a
great event in Great Britain.
It's called the Evangelical Revival.
We associate it with the work of John
Wesley, George Whitfield, but in this country it's
called the Great Awakening.
You can't read an ordinary history book without
reading about the Great Awakening in America or
the Evangelical Revival of the 18th century in
Great Britain.
But why did they need such a revival?
There's a temptation to an historian to paint
the picture blacker to show up the bright
lights that followed.
But I want you to understand before the
days of John Wesley, when John Wesley was
a boy, when George Whitfield was a boy,
conditions in the English-speaking world were utterly
deplorable.
Now you can often judge people by their
sports.
A great British historian, Trevelyan, said society was
one vast casino.
Gambling was the national pastime.
Cockfighting was one of the popular diversions.
The Dean of Wales Cathedral had a picture
window put in the deanery so that the
guests could watch cockfighting from dinner table.
Now you know, of course, that over on
the other side of the Atlantic, they talk
about Britain as John Bull, and they always
have a bulldog.
Why a bulldog?
The bulldog had a retractable lower jaw.
They used to use those dogs to bait
bulls.
Now you know, animals are very sensitive in
the nose.
They have a stronger sense of smell than
we have.
In fact, some dogs can't see very far,
but they can smell your scent a long
way away.
But they can be easily hurt, and so
these dogs would fasten their teeth in the
nose of the bull.
This was bull baiting, another popular sport.
Boxing was without any gloves.
They boxed barehanded.
But you were allowed to keep your thumb
out, and if you knock a man's eyeball
out on his cheek, that was loudly applauded.
These prize fighters used to pound each other
to a bloody pulp, and this was tremendously
popular.
Drunkenness was prevalent.
Now, English people tend to be beer drinkers,
just as Germans do, but with the colonizing
of the West Indies, rum and gin became
popular, and people became outrageously intoxicated.
London at that time had a population of
600,000, but one in every ten, excuse
me, one in every six, owed his livelihood
to drink.
One house in every six in London was
devoted to the sale of liquor.
What did such hard drinking do to those
people?
Well, according to Bishop Benson of Gloucester, it
made the English people cruel and inhuman.
Not only that, the theater was rotten.
Addison, a famous writer, said one of the
unaccountable things of the utter lewdness of the
stage and theater.
Sidney and other writers called it coarse, obscene,
and scandalous.
In fact, the theater was so filthy that
most theaters had a brothel alongside.
They used the theater for titillation, and then
they used the brothel for indulgence.
The popular novel of the time was rotten.
Jeffrey said there was never such a mass
of rubbish published.
Now, isn't it very interesting?
The present wave of pornography in this country
began some years ago.
Do you remember how it began?
It began when a lady, Catherine Windsor, wrote
a book called Forever Amber.
And this Forever Amber was an historical novel
describing the life of this particular period.
And, of course, that sort of thing becomes
popular with the ungodly, and now there seems
to be no limit to what people can
publish.
Not only that, but at that time, industry
was inhuman.
Women were used in the coal mines.
A woman would wear a belt, a leather
belt, around her waist with an iron chain
fastened at the navel, and the iron chain
passed between her legs to a truck.
And she crept on hands and knees, dragging
trucks of coal.
It's interesting, when Parliament finally put a stop
to this, they put in horses instead.
And one of the objections to getting the
women out of the mines was because they'd
have to make bigger mine tunnels, because you
need more space for horses to drag trucks
and for women to drag trucks.
The ships coming from Africa to the Western
world were full of helpless slaves.
I have seen that series called Roots.
It wasn't exaggerated.
Not at all.
Blacks were packed like sardines, neck to ankle,
ankle to neck.
These people had never been off the land
before.
Africans were not seafaring people.
They were seasick.
They vomited over each other, were hosed down
with salt water.
That gave them ulcers.
And if they couldn't make it, they were
thrown overboard.
The prisons were cesspools of iniquity.
And one of the sports for Saturday afternoon
or Sunday afternoon was to watch hangings.
Berkeley, for whom Berkeley, California's name, said morality
and religion have collapsed to a degree that's
been never known in a Christian country.
So you could say there was decline everywhere.
You know, what were the churches doing?
The church had declined too.
The church was corrupt.
Butler, the famous apologist, refused to become Archbishop
of Canterbury.
He said, the church is too far gone.
You'll find that godly people, the Puritans, were
driven out.
I remember when I went to stay at
Oxford.
I stayed in the Baptist manse at a
place called Abingdon, seven miles from Oxford.
Why was that Baptist church built there?
Because Baptists weren't allowed to live within seven
miles of a city.
They were persecuted.
That's why the Puritans fled the country and
came to New England.
There was a case where a godly bishop,
the Bishop of Chester, rebuked a clergyman for
drunkenness.
And the surprised clergyman had never been told
off before.
He said, but sir, I never get drunk
on duty.
In other words, he was drunk most of
the time except at Holy Communion.
He always, he said, I have a conscience.
I never get drunk at Holy Communion.
One of the great unbelievers of the day
was Lord Bolingbroke.
He told the clergy in a meeting in
London that the greatest miracle of Christianity was
that the preaching of it was committed to
such an ungodly bunch as they were.
He said, well, what about the others?
What about the Baptists and the Congregationalists and
the others?
They'd lost their power.
And the same thing was happening in Scotland.
And the same thing was happening in Wales.
But what about those godly Puritans that ran
away from all this and settled in New
England and other parts of the American colonies?
Ah, the tide had gone out there too.
Now, you may not know that when the
New England Commonwealth was set up, you had
to be converted to be a member of
a church.
And you had to be a member of
a church to vote in the election.
You couldn't vote unless you were a church
member, and you couldn't be a church member
unless you were converted.
That meant that about a tenth of the
voting population voted.
The others paid taxes and they didn't like
it.
So they grumbled.
Americans always have hidden this idea of taxation
without representation.
So they grumbled.
And finally, the Puritans, instead of separating church
and state as Roger Williams suggested, the Puritans
worked out a compromise.
They said if any man had a father
or mother or grandparents who were church members,
he could be an associate member and vote.
And that let the world into the church.
Now, you know, for instance, supposing this church
was identified with this community in the valley.
And supposing the issue came up whether or
not we should have drinking and dancing on
church premises.
Most of the church people say certainly not.
But when the issue would come up, I'm
judging from those New England days, they'd call
a town meeting.
If it were left to the people of
the San Fernando Valley to decide whether or
not you had drinking and dancing in the
property, they wouldn't vote as you vote.
So the world came into the church.
Now remember, the church should be in the
world just as a ship should be in
the ocean.
But the ocean should not be in the
ship, and the world should not be in
the church.
You've heard perhaps of great American Puritan, Dr.
Increase Mather, and he published a sermon called,
The Glory Departed.
He said, we're the posterity of the good
old Puritans who were a strict and holy
people.
Such were our fathers who followed the Lord
into this wilderness.
He said, you that are aged can remember
what New England was like 50 years ago,
when the churches were in their first glory.
Time there was when many were converted, and
there were added to the church daily such
as should be saved.
But are not sound conversions rare this day?
Cotton Mather said, there's been a horrible decay.
Now you may say, why did the Puritans
lose their spirituality?
Well, this was a rough country.
They were settling a wilderness.
Brutalizing context with primitive Red Indians, and with
African slaves, lack of enforcement of the law,
increase of wicked vice and brutal pleasures, gambling,
cockfighting, horse racing, prize fighting, and all the
rest.
Profanity and drunkenness demoralized the American colonists.
It seemed as if the whole of the
English-speaking world was corrupt.
Now don't forget at that time, the population
of Great Britain was much greater than the
American colonies.
You know, when these colonies became independent, there
were only five million people here.
Only five million.
At the time I'm speaking about, much fewer
in number then.
But the revival began about the year 1727,
almost simultaneously in New Jersey and in Hernhutten,
Germany, among the Moravians.
I won't wear you now with the details
about the Moravians.
They were the ones who developed such a
missionary conscience.
But there was in America a Dutchman called
Theodor Frelinghuysen.
He had been soundly converted and became a
pietist.
He preached a pure religion.
When he was appointed to the Dutch Reformed
Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey, near Princeton,
he found the church full of ungodly people.
Anyone who spoke Dutch could be a member
of the church.
So he adopted what we call Eucharistic Evangelism.
You say, now I haven't heard of that
before.
Every three months, all these people got together
for Holy Communion.
It's the same among Presbyterians.
And they would have one or two preparatory
services before they partook of the bread and
wine.
They'd come in on their wagons.
Conditions were very primitive.
But he began preaching Evangelism before Communion.
He preached on whoever eats and drinks unworthily,
eats and drinks damnation to his own soul.
Now some sinners began to tremble and some
got very angry.
In fact, they appealed to the governor of
New Jersey.
They appealed to the classes of New York.
They appealed to Amsterdam to have him removed.
The old people resented this.
They said the former minister didn't keep us
away from the Lord's table.
He said, I'm not keeping you away.
I'm telling you, you've got to live right
to come to the Lord's table.
But the young people responded.
And that was the beginning of the revival
there.
Now the same revival, of course, affected England.
I must condense what I say about conditions
across the Atlantic.
You know that John Wesley, a very godly
young man, went to be a chaplain in
Georgia in the colony at Savannah.
But he fell in love with a girl
there.
He couldn't bring himself to propose.
He was a very introspective sort of fellow.
The girl waited patiently to see what he
was going to do, and then on the
rebound she married somebody else.
What did John Wesley do?
He refused to let this girl and her
husband come to communion.
He was asked why.
He said, because she's a hypocrite.
What do you mean she's a hypocrite?
Well, she loves me and she married him.
The husband had a warrant sworn out for
his arrest.
And John Wesley decided that discretion was the
better part of valor.
He got on a horse and didn't stop
galloping until he reached Philadelphia.
Then he took ship for England.
You might call that prevenient grace.
He was a great horseman after that.
When John Wesley got back to England, he
met George Whitefield.
And he said, I'm thinking of going to
America.
And John Wesley said, don't go.
It's hopeless there.
But they drew lots, and George Whitefield decided
to come.
Now in England, John Wesley, when he was
a student, belonged to a little club.
They were called the Bible Moths.
The nickname that stuck most was the Methodist.
They went to communion every day.
They visited the sick.
They fasted.
They had a method of living.
It was all works, works, works.
But they meant them.
And that's where the name Methodist came from.
It was a nickname.
But the first to be converted in that
group was George Whitefield.
He worked so hard at it, he got
ill.
And while he was in bed, he read
a book called The Life of God and
the Soul of Man by a man called
Henry Scougal.
And this book upset him.
Scougal said, religion is not a lot of
duties and exercises.
It's the life of God in your soul,
union with God.
And the result of that, George Whitefield was
converted.
After Wesley came back from America, he was
very unhappy.
He had met a Moravian missionary on the
ship.
And he said, I, he told the missionary,
I just don't have the faith.
And Peter Bowler said something to him that
was very strange.
He said, preach faith until you have it.
In other words, don't give up the ministry,
but preach it until you get it yourself.
Now, one night, John Wesley went to St.
Paul's Cathedral, that lovely cathedral in London.
And the choir sang a magnificent number.
He went to a prayer meeting on Aldersgate
Street afterwards.
And someone was reading from Luther's introduction to
the Epistle to the Romans.
And suddenly, it dawned on John Wesley that
sins were forgiven.
Now, it's strange today, when something like that
dawns in our soul, we show it in
certain ways, don't we?
They fell to their knees and sang, we
praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to
be the Lord.
Those old-fashioned words.
And from that time on, John Wesley became
a powerful preacher of the gospel.
Now, George Whitefield started preaching in Bristol, the
second largest city of England at that time.
But he had to move off to somewhere
else, so he asked John Wesley, would you
take my place?
The churches were closed to them, they were
preaching in the open air.
John Wesley said in his diary, I thought
it was a sin to preach in the
open air.
He believed, as a clergyman, you ought to
preach in a consecrated building, a parish church.
He said, I could scarce reconcile myself at
first to this strange way of preaching in
the fields, of which he set me an
example on Sunday.
I should have thought the saving of souls
almost a sin if it had not been
done in church.
But he tried it.
Twenty-four hours later, John Wesley preached in
the open air.
And in his diary, he said, I made
a bright succession of appeals to the reason,
the conscience, and the heart of my hearers.
Now, I used to think John Wesley must
have been a genius of an evangelist, that
strong men were broken down and wept.
Not at all.
He was a very stuffy high churchman.
But the point was this, the Holy Spirit
at that time was poured out upon believers
to revive the church.
And at the same time, the Holy Spirit
was poured out upon the people to awaken
the masses.
The result was these minors, who had come
out to gamble and to fight and to
misbehave in every possible way, were deeply convicted
of sin and began to repent and be
converted.
So, John Wesley formed a society.
See, the churches wouldn't open their doors to
him, but formed a little society that met,
quote, to confess their false one to another
and pray for one another that they may
be healed.
That was the first Methodist class meeting, and
out of that came the whole Methodist denomination.
Now, in 1739, by the way, John Wesley
was converted in 1738, George Whitfield began his
London ministry.
The only church in London that was willing
to have him was that great St. Mary's
Church in Islington, in North London.
But the vicar was overridden by the church
wardens.
They locked the doors against Whitfield.
The result was he preached in the churchyard.
And then he began preaching the open airs,
and he used to have 10,000, 20
,000.
Oh, I would have loved to have heard
George Whitfield preach.
In those days, there was no amplification, no
loudspeakers.
You know that when Whitfield was crossing the
Atlantic, on those little sailing ships, they would
form like a V of ducks for a
convoy, for protection against the wind, to help
each other if a storm came up.
And if it was a calm Sunday, because
it took a month or more to come
across, if it was a calm Sunday, Whitfield
would conduct divine worship for the fleet.
He had such a voice, he could lead
worship from the leading ship to the whole
ship and all the ships present.
When he preached in Philadelphia at the Custom
House Steps, crowds used to gather across the
river in New Jersey to listen to him.
Benjamin Franklin was no fool, he was a
mathematician.
He calculated by pi r squared and all
the rest of it, that the total number
listening to Whitfield's unaided voice was 25,000.
His enemy said he could reduce an audience
to tears by the way he pronounced the
word Mesopotamia.
Now, when he came, there had been glimmerings
of revival in the American colonies already.
Revival began 1727 in New Jersey under Frelinghuysen.
It spread from the Dutch Reformed to the
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians.
Now, most Americans misunderstand the word Scotch-Irish.
They think, well, that means his mother was
Scotch and his father was Irish.
No, no, the Scotch-Irish are the north
of Ireland people.
Largely Presbyterian.
Very rugged lot.
I remember reading in the history of the
Allegheny Presbytery, the prayer of a Scotch-Irish
Presbyterian elder in the Kirk Session.
He prayed, Grant, O Lord, that I may
always be right, for thou knowest, Lord, that
I am hard to turn.
I thought that was a very good Presbyterian
prayer.
Now, the revival spread from the Dutch Reformed
through a man called Gilbert Tennant to the
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who spoke English with a
Scotch-Irish accent.
They had so many candidates for the ministry,
they started a little log college just north
of Philadelphia at a place called Nishimene.
That log college Whitfield visited and described for
us.
And he said that from it were going
forth many faithful servants of Jesus.
Just a rock log college.
That college grew and grew until today it's
known as Princeton University.
Do you know that most of American universities,
the old ones, came out of that revival?
I won't go into all the details, but
most of them came out of that revival.
It spread from the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians to
the Baptists.
Before the Great Awakening, there weren't more than
500 Baptists in the colonies.
Now they've got 21 million.
You can trace them right back to that
revival.
Then it jumped north and broke out in
Northampton, Massachusetts under Jonathan Edwards in that great
revival of 1738.
And then it began to spread.
And then who should arrive but George Whitfield.
George Whitfield was on a sailing ship headed
for Philadelphia, but it landed in North Carolina.
They weren't very exact in those days.
He meant to get to Philadelphia, so he
had to go the rest of the way
by horse.
But when he started preaching, he had phenomenal
response.
Benjamin Franklin said his preaching was the most
powerful he'd ever heard.
Benjamin Franklin once was talking to George Whitfield.
Whitfield said, I'm going to start an orphanage
in Savannah.
Franklin said, you're crazy.
Not Savannah, way down there.
Philadelphia is the center of all the colonies.
Now you build it here, and I'll help
you financially.
Whitfield said, God has spoken to me, and
I'm going to start it in Savannah.
So Benjamin Franklin said, he's not going to
get any money from me.
Now he went to one of these meetings,
and he saw that George Whitfield was going
to take up a collection for his orphanage.
He said in his pocket he had a
five dollar gold piece, some silver dollars, and
some copper.
But he determined not to give anything.
He didn't approve.
But when the plate was passed, he relented
and decided to put in the copper.
George Whitfield was preaching so powerfully, he decided,
well, I'll give him the silver as well.
And finally, he put in gold, silver, and
copper, and everything.
He said that man could really preach.
Now what was the result of this awakening?
It completely turned the colonies around from being
a rough frontier society to being a godly
nation again.
And what was the effect in England?
It was the great event of that century.
It turned the English-speaking people towards God.
Now some people say, well, why do we
have to talk about these things that happened
such a long time ago?
Very simple.
The scripture tells us to tell our children
and our children's children what God has done.
Why?
That they may not forget his commandments.
They might put their trust in God.
He will answer in due course.
You'll find many, many times revival has broken
out among God's people when they heard of
what God has done and what God can
do.
Now that's only part of my message.
I want to give you the rest a
little later.