...that I've entitled An Introduction to Charles G.
Finney.
When we talk about Brother Charles Finney and
the legacy of revival that he left, there
are very few that are like him that
have come along really since the days of
the apostles.
And I think as we look to his
life, there are a lot of things we
can glean from him.
We can glean from him some of his
methods, but more than that, I believe his
heart and desire to see revival and to
see lives changed and to see souls brought
into the kingdom of God was great.
And if we could glean that one thing,
somehow by God's Spirit he could touch us
and give us a similar desire to burn
in our hearts the way that at one
time it burned in his, I believe we've
accomplished much.
We're going to begin our study tonight starting
out with From Birth Through Childhood.
From Birth Through Childhood.
In the times of declension that have seized
upon our nations throughout the centuries, God has
always had a voice to raise up and
call the people back to fear and to
love their God.
When the fires of passion for God die
out and the candlestick of their anointing is
near to be removed, God will start a
fire.
Not just any fire, but one fire burning
with the holy zeal that cries out, May
I burn up for thee.
See, Charles Gramson Finney was one such person.
The fires of the great awakening lighted by
the likes of Jonathan Edwards, John Whitfield, and
John Wesley were dying down to a smoldering
ember.
And the years of bygone revivals were losing
their foothold and becoming a memory.
And as these men would eventually go on
to meet their Lord, God had his next
yielded servant waiting in the wings.
Praise the Lord.
You know, I'm thankful that God always has
somebody waiting in the wings.
He always has a root that he can
raise up out of dry ground.
Roughly a year had passed since the death
of John Wesley.
And on August 29th, that would be 1792,
Charles G.
Finney was born in Warren, Connecticut, as a
descendant of the New England Puritans.
When he was about two years old, his
father moved the family to Oneida County, New
York.
See, neither of his parents were religious, and
among his neighbors there were very few religious
people.
He seldom heard a sermon unless it was
an occasional one from a traveling minister who
was ill-equipped to teach the hearts of
such a cold people.
You see, there were very few Christian resources
that he could even glean from.
Brother Finney told in his biography the terrible
ways in which sermons used to be delivered
by those traveling preachers when he was a
child.
See, the people would often go home.
They would laugh at what he had said.
But I doubt, and I believe that many
of us would agree, that's ever read anything,
any of his sermons that Brother Finney ever
did, that anyone ever left laughing from any
of his meetings.
You see, when the people had so lost
their faith in the ministers of that day
that they could laugh them to scorn, I
believe it's time for revival, the years of
learning.
Just when a meeting house was built in
Brother Finney's neighborhood, and a pastor had been
brought in, his father moved the family again,
this time, to the wilderness skirting the southern
shore of Lake Ontario, here he lived for
several years with no more exposure to Christianity
than he had in Alameda County.
When he was about 20 years old, he
traveled to New Jersey, near New York City,
where he worked as a teacher.
Charles Finney was primarily self-taught.
He returned to New York, or New England
rather, twice to attend high school.
Brother Finney had a tutor.
He was from Yale University.
He wanted to attend Yale himself, but the
tutor had advised him that it would be
a waste of time, that he could have
completed four years worth of work or curriculum
in just two years if he didn't go
to the university.
As a result of that, he ceased to
pursue his education any further.
Charles Finney would later study Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew, but in his own words he said,
I was never a classical scholar.
The tutor wanted him to go and help
run an academy in the southern states.
He was about to accept the offer when
he was informed of his parents that he
had not seen for years.
They both immediately came after him.
They convinced him that they would go with
him back to Jefferson County, New York.
Thus he became a student in the law
office of Squire W.
in Adams, Jefferson County.
That would be Squire Wright.
This was in 1818.
Charles Finney would have been 26 years old.
You know, I think about how many young
Christians there are that already have a heart
and a desire for God, and they're much
younger than 26.
I hear of ministers that are in their
teens and others that are in their 20s,
and I think, you know, Brother Charles Finney,
at this young of an age, was still
searching for God.
What could we do with young people who
already had a heart for God and was
already pressing ahead?
I believe God is raising up some in
the likeness of Charles Finney in our day.
The searching years, the searching years.
At this time, Brother Finney began to study
at the law office of Squire Wright of
Adams, near his old home in western New
York.
At Adams, while studying law, he attended the
Presbyterian Church.
In his own words, he said that he
knew about as much about Christianity as the
heathen at that time.
The pastor, George W.
Gale, was an able and a highly educated
man.
His preaching gained the attention of Finney, although
to his keen and logical mind, it seemed
like a mass of absurdities and contradictions.
It was while studying law and attending church
at Adams that Finney became interested in Bible
study.
I've read accounts where he would say that
because it was actually in the...
there were Bible references in the law books
and things, that it caused him to be
more and more interested in the Bible.
He found many references in scripture.
He had many conversations with Pastor George Gale,
but they would rarely agree on any point
of doctrine.
In his autobiography, Brother Finney writes, Pastor Gale
was thoroughly Calvinistic.
Whenever he came out with a doctrine, which
he seldom did, he would preach what has
been called hyper-Calvinism.
He was, of course, regarded as highly orthodox,
but I didn't get much out of his
preaching.
As I sometimes told him, he seemed to
begin in the middle and to assume many
things that I thought needed to be proved.
He seemed to take it for granted that
the hearers were theologians and to assume they
understood all the great fundamental doctrines of the
gospel.
I must say that I was more perplexed,
Brother Finney said, than helped by his preaching.
When you read some of the methods of
Brother Finney, and I hope to talk about
this in our next study, but he had
a belief that you needed to thoroughly convince
the audience of what was being preached or
taught.
See, he didn't believe in using a language
that was over the heads of the people.
He didn't believe it was important to come
across to the people as though he had
some great eloquent method of speaking.
He wanted to get directly to the point,
convey the message, and if he could do
that, he'd seen it as success.
And I believe we can learn a lot
from that today.
So often we want to sound eloquent.
So often we want to be able to
sound articulate.
But Brother Finney was not interested in that
at all.
The thing that interested him was, was he
able to make a compelling case for the
teachings that he was making to the people.
Of course, we know that he had a
lot of studies in law and was even
admitted into the bars, I understand, and wanted
to be a lawyer early on, but God
had other plans.
But he never left that methodology, even in
his preaching.
He always preached to the people as though
he was trying to convince a jury of
someone's guilt or innocence.
I think that's interesting to note.
There was something that Charles Finney noticed about
the people at his church, and it was
this, their prayers were never answered.
Until this time, he had never lived where
he could attend a prayer meeting.
He'd go to the prayer meetings, he would
listen to the prayers, and when the prayers
came not to be answered, he was troubled,
and it made a bad impression on him
in his search for Christianity at the time.
Painfully honest at times, he has once asked
of the people if they would like for
them to pray for him.
But he said, no.
He said, no.
He said, you have prayed enough since I
have attended these meetings to have prayed the
devil out of Adams if there were any
virtue in your prayers.
But here you are, praying on and complaining
still.
I thought that that was interesting.
I thought that was interesting how that had
such an effect on his life when he
looked and seen that the prayers of the
people were not answered.
And I think it again builds a great
case that we need to walk with God
and serve Him that our prayers would be
answered.
And in so doing, people could be compelled
to recognize the truth of the gospel, even
in that.
But Brother Finney says clearly that it was
almost a stumbling block for him that their
prayers were not answered.
But in spite of all these things, in
spite of all these things, he became more
and more concerned about his own soul.
He felt that if there was a life
beyond the grave, he needed to be prepared
for it and he was not.
He continued on in his autobiography and he
says, but as I read my Bible and
attended the prayer meetings, heard Mr. Dale preach
and spoke of him and others, I became
very restless.
I became convinced that I was in no
state to go to heaven if I had
died.
It seemed to me that there must be
something in religion that was of infinite importance.
And I decided that if the soul was
immortal, I needed a great change inside me
to make it into heaven.
But still my mind was not made up
as to whether Christianity was even true or
not.
However, the question was too important to leave
alone.
I was particularly struck with the fact that
the prayers I had listened to from week
to week were not being answered that I
could see.
And when I read my Bible, I learned
that Christ had said about prayer and answers
to prayer.
He said, ask and you shall receive.
Seek and you will find.
Knock and it will be opened to you.
I also read what Christ said, that God
is more willing to give this Holy Spirit
to them that ask him than earthly parents
are to give good gifts to their children.
I heard them pray continually for the outpouring
of the Holy Spirit and then confess that
they did not receive what they had asked
for.
I think about that a lot of times.
I think about that.
And you know, Brother Finney is absolutely right.
We need to get ourselves in a place
to where when we pray, God will answer
our prayer and God will hear it.
We need to believe in faith.
We need to pray out of a pure
heart so God will hear our prayer.
We should not regard iniquity in our heart
that the Lord would not hear us.
And obviously there was something desperately wrong with
these people's prayers.
The day of salvation.
Praise the Lord.
On a Sunday evening in autumn of 1821,
Charles Finney made up his mind that he
would settle the question of his soul's salvation.
He began to focus entirely upon it.
He consistently attended local prayer meetings and continued
going to church while in Adams.
Finney was always concerned that people would know
that he was searching for salvation.
You see, he was embarrassed by his own
admission.
He was embarrassed for anyone to even think
that he was seeking the Lord or maybe
he wasn't saved.
Finney was already concerned that people would know
he was searching.
When he prayed, at times he would whisper
his prayers lest anyone would even hear him.
In his own words, he confessed that he
had been ashamed to even be seen or
reading his Bible before his true conversion.
Finally, after some number of days, conviction overtook
him and he snuck off to the woods
to seek the Lord, looking over his shoulder
all the time as he went for fear
that somebody might be following him.
The night before, he feared slipping into hell.
If at once, he could likely die.
He found a place to pray outside the
town in the middle of some fallen trees.
You think about this scene for a minute.
Here's Brother Finney going out, looking for a
place to pray so nobody could see him.
There were some trees that had fallen down
in such a way that if he would
get down in the very center of it
and just duck down, it would be almost
impossible for anyone to see him.
Charles Finney himself describes the scene.
He says, I ducked in there.
I knelt down to pray.
As I had turned to go up into
the woods, I remember saying to myself, I
will give my heart to God or I
will never come down from here.
I repeated this on my way up.
I will give my heart to God before
I ever come down again.
But when I attempted to pray, I found
that my heart would not pray.
I'd assumed that if I could not find
a place where I could speak aloud without
being overheard, I could pray freely.
But when I came to try, I was
dumb.
That is, I had nothing to say to
God.
I could only say a few words and
those without heart.
In attempting to pray, I would hear the
rustling of the leaves and I would stop
and I'd look up to see if someone
was coming.
I did this several times.
Finally, I found myself on the verge of
despair.
I said to myself, I cannot pray.
My heart is dead to God and will
not pray.
I was kicking myself for having promised to
give my heart to God before I left
the woods.
When I came to try, I found I
could not give my heart to God.
My inward soul hung back, he says, and
there was no going out of my heart
to God.
I began to feel that it was too
late, that God must have given up on
me and I was past hope.
I think about that.
You think about that for a minute.
I remember when I came to the Lord.
Back, I was a prodigal son, back in
1991.
I remember watching a passion play on Easter
Sunday and looking up and as they raised
the cross up with this man who was
playing Jesus, he cried out, My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?
And there was something different about me and
I can so relate to what Brother Tenney
is saying here.
I didn't have to have someone to coerce
me and say, Will you come and accept
Christ?
I had a different idea.
I thought, you know, as much sin as
I've committed, I wonder if the Lord will
accept me, accept me back, to take me
back.
See, it's a different mindset when you begin
to feel the weight of your sin.
It's a whole lot different story than so
often we have to do and today trying
to beg or even almost plead, you see
a lot of times happening for people to
come.
Tenney said, I began to feel it was
too late, that God must have given up
and I was past hope.
Charles Tenney had a revelation of his pride
when he noticed himself always looking to see
who might be watching him.
Finally, at the top of the voice, he
yelled out, I would not leave this place
if all the men on earth and all
the devils in hell had surrounded me.
He continued, What, I said, such a degraded
sinner as me, on my knees confessing my
sins to a holy God and I'm ashamed
to have any human being find me on
my knees before him.
The sin appeared awful.
It appeared infinite.
It broke me down before the Lord.
Now I think about that.
I heard somebody say with the same fanfare
that you go out into sin, you need
to come back into the kingdom of God
repenting.
And I believe that's true.
I think it was Spurgeon who made the
statement that our repentance should be haughty and
not timid.
In other words, we shouldn't be ashamed that
we're repenting.
We should have the same zeal to repent
as we had when we were in sin.
And I believe that's true.
And I believe that's what Brother Finney is
relaying here.
Then the scriptures came to his mind.
You will seek me and find me when
you search for me with all of your
heart.
He instantly took hold of this passage and
trusted Christ.
He had intellectually believed the Bible before, but
now he was genuinely saved.
He continues, I was suddenly conscious of trusting
at that moment in God's trustworthiness.
Somehow I knew that that was a passage
of scripture, though I did not think that
I had ever read it.
See, the Spirit of God had brought it
to his mind.
I knew that it was God's word.
I knew it was God's voice, as it
were, that spoke to me.
I cried to him, Lord, I take you
at your word.
You know that I am searching for you
with all of my heart, and that I
have come here to pray to you, and
you have promised to hear me.
Praise the Lord.
You know, I think about that.
And I think about when I came to
the Lord.
I think about that.
You know, I believe what one person said
is so often true.
It was a minister.
It might even have been Ray Comfort who
said, We give the proud the law to
break them down, but in that brokenness we've
got to give people grace.
And that's the message that we need to
realize.
Whenever we see people broken under their sins,
we need to offer them grace.
Give the law to the proud and give
grace to the humble.
I will preach the gospel.
Charles Finney had prayed with such earnestness that
he did not realize he was already headed
out of the woods.
The thought that he was actually transformed did
not even occur to him.
He simply said to himself, If I am
ever converted, I will preach the gospel.
He would soon reach the road that led
to the village and began thinking about what
had just happened.
He noticed that the mind and his heart
that had just been tormented with feelings of
conviction were quiet and peaceful.
He said to himself, What is this?
What is this?
He said, I must have grieved the Holy
Spirit entirely away.
I've lost all of my conviction.
I don't have one bit of concern about
my soul.
The Spirit must have left me.
He continued, It seemed as though I had
never been so unconcerned about my salvation in
my life.
Then I remembered what I had said to
God while I was on my knees that
I would take him at his word.
In fact, I remembered a whole lot of
things that I had said and concluded that
it was no wonder that the Spirit had
left me.
For such a sinner to take hold of
God's word in that way must surely be
presumption if not blasphemy.
I concluded that in my excitement I had
grieved the Holy Spirit and perhaps committed the
unpardonable sin.
You think about a person who had so
reached the Lord, they had so touched God,
had so been transformed, the conviction totally left
them.
G.
Frederick Wright, in his biography of Charles Finney,
sums up the last hours, few hours rather,
of his conversion.
He writes, On returning to town he found
that the whole forenoon had passed away but
he had no appetite for dinner and instead
of going back to his boarding house he
went to his office where in the quiet
of the noontide hour he took down his
bass violin and he began to play and
he sang some hymns with which in his
impenitence he had so often led the worship
of the congregation.
Every note, this time though, brought tears to
his eyes.
And after making several ineffectual attempts to suppress
his feelings he put aside his music and
he devoted himself during the afternoon to readjusting
the books and furniture of the office having
little conversation with any of the people who
came in.
As we read the final accounts of Finney's
conversion we are left to ask ourselves if
we can recall the hour in which we
first believed.
Finney spoke of the glorious baptism in the
Holy Spirit.
Frederick continues, It was an experience that he
was not looking for and of which he
did not remember ever to have heard of.
It seemed to him as if there was
a positive force like electricity entering and penetrating
his old system.
He wept aloud with joy and love and
to use his own words literally bellowed out
of unutterable gushings of his heart.
So overwhelming were these waves of feeling that
he cried out, Lord, I cannot bear it
anymore.
I shall die if these continue.
The joy that Finney felt did not leave
but it was still fresh in the morning.
You know, that's how we know somebody's really
been converted.
We know they're converted.
And so characterized the life.
So characterized the life of this man who
would become one of the great preachers of
all times in America.
Charles Finney is considered the father of modern
revivalism with over 500,000 conversions resulting from
his ministry.
Historians claim that in many ways Finney laid
the well-paid robe for mass evangelists who
would come after him, Dwight Moody, Billy Sundy,
Billy Graham, and others.
You know, praise the Lord.
You know, I'm thankful for Brother Charles Finney.
There are a lot of things that I
could say about him.
I have a tremendous amount of material on
his life.
You know, he was a man of like
passions and sufferings just as we are.
Did you know that he lost two infant
children?
He lost a child, I believe, at the
age of two, a daughter, and another child
at the age of eight.
Before he had passed away, he had buried
two wives.
One passed away, and then 14 years later,
after he had remarried, another one passed away.
He was acquainted with grief.
And in the midst of all this sorrow
and grief, you still see this man continuing
on serving the Lord with all of the
fervor that he had at first.
I look at his life, and I'm inspired.
There are a lot of things about Brother
Finney that really, really touch my heart and
life.
I don't know if you're familiar with this
or not about him, but later on, he
would go to teach at Oberlin College, I
believe it was around 1830 or 1833 or
so.
The school opened up, had roughly 100 students.
Later, he would go to teach.
He would teach there for some number of
years, and would become the dean.
I think he spent all total of about
40 years or so there at the age
of 32 years old.
Just to kind of give you a few
things here in my notes about Brother Finney.
At the age of 32 years old, he
was licensed to preach, and then he was
commissioned to be a missionary.
He was also married that same year.
He had all these things that happened while
he was 32.
But when he was 34 years old, he
began preaching revival.
He preached revival all of these years.
His first sermon, or one of the sermons
that are really noted here in my notes,
is Can Two Walk Together, Except They Be
Agreed.
He went on to, over many years, he
had, I believe it was four children that
survived, if I'm not mistaken, that survived and
lived and grew up.
As a matter of fact, he was quite
a family man.
It wasn't just that he abandoned his family
even after he had them.
He continued on to make sure they were
taken care of.
If you go on to some of the
records at Oberlin College, you can actually go
in and read some of the letters that
he had sent to his children while he
was out of town preaching.
It just goes to show you that it's
important not just that we reach the world,
that we also reach our children.
I heard a preacher say one time, he
said, He said, Brother Finney had that in
view many, many years before that quote was
ever brought out.
But there are a lot of things about
Brother Finney that we could really go to
and discuss.
I would recommend that you go through and
certainly read his lectures on the Revival and
read through them as we're doing the sermon
readings.
He's also got a lot of sermons that
he had ministered.
As a matter of fact, he's got an
entire sermon on slavery that I've got.
He was big on seeing slavery done away
with.
You've got to understand that his ministry and
a lot of the revivals took place prior
to the Civil War that took place here
in the United States.
He was a man that was big on
morality.
You read his theology and I mentioned it
actually today in talking to someone there on
the internet that my pastor and really a
lot of our churches going all the way
back in my family for many, many decades
has had an Oberlin or a semi-type
of Oberlin theology that they have lived their
lives by and they were very much holiness
and they were very big on holiness and
I believe that these things were revived much
by Brother Charles Finney.
But as time began to pass him by,
he lived a healthy life for the most
part.
At one time, he did contract cholera.
As a matter of fact, I think it
was the same day that he took the
church that took, I think, that may have
even been his first church if I'm not
mistaken.
He took cholera and wasn't even able to
minister right away For anyone who knows anything
about that disease, that's a pretty gruesome disease
and God raised him up from that and
he continued to go on and to serve
the Lord and lived for many, many years
serving God and he served Him very faithfully.
I think even on Sermon Index you can
find some pictures.
I even was able to track down some
pictures if you'd like to hunt them down
of the home where he was born and
all these different things.
There's a lot of information about Charles Finney
if you want to do some personal research
on your own.
But I want to just basically close out
tonight with some words from someone that had
written at the Oberlin College by the name
of Francis Hosford.
They wrote in July 1934 in the Oberlin
Alumni Magazine of course.
Brother Finney wrote a lot of articles that
you can research and look at for the
Oberlin Magazine or the magazine that they had
and a lot of lectures they placed in
there.
But she wrote some words about the closing
of his life that I'll share with you
as we're closing up our introduction to his
life.
She writes this.
She says, His last day was Sunday, August
16th, 1875.
The preacher had not been ill but his
strength was failing and perhaps the family feared
that the end was drawing near for all
the Munro's come in the early evening for
an hour in the old homestead.
Of course, any assemblage with Finney as its
center would have included music and they sang
hymn after hymn.
Mother leading us, says Miss Stitch with her
beautiful soprano.
Finally the president, that being Brother Finney, sat
down at the instrument and he played and
he sang.
Then he walked the floor singing in a
full strong voice.
When they had gone, Miss Finney, this young
Charles Chegan, a student of the Theological Seminary,
to walk out with the president, Dr. Cregan,
never knew whether Miss Finney had learned that
the first church was to sing this hallelujah
chorus.
However this may be, the president heard it
through the windows.
Open to the summer night and soon after
his return home, he was seized with a
terrible pain.
You see the parallels between his life and
that of the Apostle Paul can hardly have
escaped the view of Charles Granson Finney.
The youthful ambitions, the spectacular conversion, the utter
renunciation and the devotion to the master, the
journeys often to care of all the churches.
You see a lot of people didn't really
care for Brother Finney.
Even though he had a tremendous ministry, there
were a lot of people that were not
friendly to him.
But he always seemed to treat them with
kindness and with love.
She continues, she continues.
He may have prayed that he too might
be able to say, even as Paul the
Apostle, when the time of his departure was
at hand, that he had fought a good
fight.
And as he lay there struggling, mortal suffering,
he gasped out these last words, I have
kept the faith.
Wife, I have kept the faith.
And then he passed on through the veil.
You know, he left a legacy behind.
And I believe there's a lot that we
can learn from Charles Granson Finney.
I believe we can learn a lot about
revival.
I don't believe it's necessary to point to
anyone's shortcomings who perhaps had done more to
influence the church in which at least I
attend, and the holiness circles, the likes of
which, of course, were Whitfield and Wesley and
others.
But Brother Finney certainly has his place among
them.
I appreciate God.
I appreciate all God has done in my
life.
I appreciate the lectures that he left behind,
because they have thoroughly changed my life.
I appreciate Sermon Index for them and for
offering us the opportunity to come together.
I appreciate Brother Grave, and I thank God
for him and all that he is doing.
Can we end in closing prayer tonight?
Heavenly Father, I just want to say, God,
Lord, that we need revival in our land.
God, I pray that somehow, Lord, that reading
God some of these old works and learning
about these old men and seeing some of
their old methods, God, that really are not
old, but, God, they are really fresh, Lord,
in your heart.
And, God, you can make them fresh in
ours.
Lord, I pray today, God, that you would
send revival in this land, that you would
raise up people, God, both men and women,
if so be it your will, God, to
preach this message, God, a message of repentance
and revival in our lands, God.
Lord, I pray that we would preach without
the fear or the favor, God, that we
would not seek to be eloquent, Lord, or
we would not seek to have favor with
the people, but, God, we would speak what
you would say to us.
And, God, I just pray for our nation,
I pray for our land, I pray for
our churches, and I pray for Sermon Index,
God.
Use it, Lord, as a mighty weapon in
your hand.
God, again, we pray that you would protect
Brother Greg, protect, God, the servers, protect everything
that needs to be protected, God, that your
word could go out.
In Christ's name we pray.
Amen.