Whitefield and the New Birth

Whitefield’s Experience of the New Birth
George Whitefield, the eminent evangelist of the Great Awakening, began his formal education at Oxford.  There, in 1733, he met Charles and John Wesley.  After being a student for almost a year, he accepted their invitation to join their Holy Club.  The Holy Club consisted of the Wesley brothers and a handful of other students when Whitefield joined their ranks.  Sincere in their efforts to live righteously and obtain salvation, they were, nonetheless, initially legalists intent on meriting salvation themselves.  This group exercised a strong influence upon Whitefield.  This influence was altered, however, when Whitefield picked up a copy of Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man in the autumn of 1734.  When he first picked up the Scotsman’s work, he knew nothing of the miracle of the new birth.  Assuming previously his righteous deeds and religious zeal placed him on the narrow path that leads to life, the book convinced him such notions were completely false.  Whitefield recalled this moment in the following manner:

“God showed me that I must be born again, or be damned!  I learned a man may go to church, say prayers, receive the sacrament, and yet not be a Christian…. Shall I burn this book?  Shall I thrown it down?  Or shall I search it?  I did search it, and holding the book in my hand I thus addressed the God of heaven and earth: ‘Lord, if I am not a Christian, or if not a real one, for Jesus Christ’s sake show me what Christianity is, that I may not be damned at last!’  God soon showed me, for in reading a few lines further, that ‘true Christianity is a union of the soul with God, and Christ formed within us,’ a ray of divine light was instantaneously darted into my soul, and from that moment, and not till then, did I know I must become a new creature.”

Great fear of being eternally lost gripped Whitefield, hurling him into a deep depression.  He had no sense of comfort whatsoever, was overwhelmed with dread, and spent entire days, many sleepless nights, and even sometimes weeks laying on the ground praying.  When he failed to experience the life of God spoken of by Scougal, Whitefield began to exercise self-denial to a greater degree than he had been.  He ate meager foods, refusing fruits or sweets, wore old clothes and dirty shoes, and purposely spoke as little as possible.  During the six-week season of Lent in 1735, Whitefield ate only bread and drank unsweetened sage tea, committed himself to Lenten devotions regularly, and read the Greek New Testament incessantly.  His body weakened to the point by Passion Week that he was unable to climb stairs.  Confined by medical orders to bed rest in the dormitory of Pembroke College, Whitefield spent the next seven weeks listing his past and present sins and confessing them to God several times each day.  Still, he found no rest for his soul by these efforts.  He came to the point he felt there was nothing else he could do.  His self-reliance was shattered.  It was at that point, Whitefield writes, “God was pleased to remove the heavy load, to enable me to lay hold of His dear Son by a living faith, and by giving me the Spirit of adoption, to seal me, even to the day of everlasting redemption.”

Whitefield’s Preaching of the New Birth
From that point in 1735 until the end of his life, Whitefield was devoted to pointing others to the only One who could bring about this experience.  In 1736, Whitefield graduated from Oxford and was ordained to the ministry within the Church of England.  While in Philadelphia a few years later, in 1742, Whitefield preached a sermon entitled “Marriage of Cana.”  He proclaims to his hearers:

“Did I come to preach myself, and not Christ Jesus my Lord, I would come to you, not in this Plainness of Speech, but with the enticing Words of Man’s Wisdom.  Did I desire to please natural Men, I need not preach here in the Wilderness.  I hope my Heart aims at nothing less than what our Lord’s great Fore-runner aim’d at, and which ought to be the Business of every Gospel Minister, that is, to point out to you the God-Man Jesus Christ.—Behold then, by Faith, behold, the Lamb of God, who taketh away the Sins of the World.—Look unto him, and be saved….

The Polite, the Rich, the Busy, the Self-righteous Pharisees of this Generation have been bidden already, but they have rejected the Counsel of God against themselves.  They are too deeply engaged in going, one to his Country House, another to his Merchandize.  They are so deeply wedded to the Pomps and Vanities of this wicked World, that they, as it were with one Consent, have made Excuse….

It was Grace, free Grace, that moved the Father so to love the World, as to give his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting Life!  It was Grace that made the Son come down and dye.  It was Grace, free Grace, that moved the Holy Ghost to undertake to sanctify the Elect People of God; and it was Grace, free Grace that moved our Lord Jesus Christ to send forth his Ministers to call all poor Sinners this Day.  Let me not then, my Brethren, go without my Errand….

Remember then this Day I have invited all, even the worst of Sinners, the most abandon’d Adulterers and Adulteresses to the Lord Jesus.  If you perish remember you do not perish for lack of Invitation—You yourselves shall stand forth as the last Day, and I here give you a Summons to meet me at the Judgment Seat of Christ, and to clear both my Master and me.—Would weeping, would Tears prevail on you, I could wish my Head Waters, and my Eyes Fountains of Tears, that I might weep our every Argument, and melt you into Love.—Would any Thing I could do or suffer influence your Hearts, I think I could bear to pluck out my Eyes, or even to lay down my Life for your Sakes.  Or was I sure to prevail on you by Importunity, I could continue my Discourse till Midnight.  I would wrestle with you even till the Morning Watch, as Jacob did with the Angel, and would not go away till I had overcome.—

But such Power only belongeth unto the Lord,—I can only invite; it is He only can work in you both to Will and to Do after his good Pleausure; It is his Property to take away the Heart of Stone, and give you a Heart of Flesh; It is his Spirit that must convince you of unbelief, and of the everlasting Righteousness of his dear Son.—‘Tis he alone must give Faith to apply his Righteousness to your Hearts, It is He alone can give you a wedding Garment, and cause you to sit down and drink New Wine in his Kingdom.—Whatever others may boast of Man’s Free-will, I know of no Free-will any one hath, except a Free-will to do Evil continually—As to Spirituals we are quite dead, and have no more Power to turn to God of ourselves than Lazarus had to raise him self, after he had lain stinking in the Grave four Days.

—If thou canst go, Oh Man, and breathe upon all the dry Bones that lye in the Graves, and bid them live, if thou canst take thy Mantle and divide yonder River as Elijah did the River Jordan [then] will we believe thou hast a Po[wer] to turn to God of thyself: But [as] thou must despair of the other, without Christ’s preventing and quickning Grace; In him is thy only Help;—Fly to him then by Faith; Say unto him, as the poor Leper did, Lord if thou wilt, thou canst make us willing; and he will stretch forth the Right-Hand of his Power to afflict and relieve you: He will sweetly guide you by his Wis[do]m on Earth, and afterwards take you up to partake of his Glory in Heaven.”

Conclusion
By conservative estimates, George Whitefield was an instrument God used in bringing thirty to forty thousand people to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  The mere thought of one individual being used to bring about the conversion of that many individuals is staggering.  These conversions were not “decisions” registered for statistical success, but life-altering encounters.  Benjamin Franklin, who became a close friend of the English evangelist, was the publisher and editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette.  In it, the famed American described the effect of Whitefield’s first visit to Philadelphia:

“It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants.  From being thoughtless and indifferent about religion it seemed as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk through Philadelphia in the morning  without hearing psalms sung in different families on every street.”

Whitefield preached the gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit, and with the conviction that a conversion is just that – a fundamental change in one’s nature.  His preaching, with its emphasis upon the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in bringing about the new birth, helped stifle spurious conversions.  His sermons were often very aggressive in attacking antinomianism, which teaches the law of God is superfluous in the life of the Christian and that justification may exist entirely without the presence of sanctification in one’s life.  He warned those who used the doctrine of the eternal security as an excuse for licentiousness that although they may claim to have been “converted twenty or thirty years ago,” the fact they display no concern for practical righteousness in the present shows they are “perverted now.”  A true believer, according to the English evangelist, mourns over indwelling sin and desires to live according to the whole counsel of Scripture.

What may modern evangelicals learn from Whitefield?  First, that it is the power of the Holy Spirit using His Word – not gimmicks, giveaways, or the uttering of simplistic formulas (e.g, Accept / Believe / Confess) – which God uses to bring about the new birth (1 Corinthians 1:18-2:5).  Second, that the new birth is of divine origin.  Human beings have neither the power nor the ability to raise themselves from spiritual death to attain spiritual life (John 3:3-8).  Third, that conversion – the reality of experiencing the new birth – means life-transformation.  Those who profess Christ but live like the devil have no part of the Kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).