CHAPTER ten
CHAPTER ten
The Echo That Will Not Fade
Legacy, Influence, and the Voice That Still Speaks
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More than two hundred and fifty years have passed since the voice of the Great Awakening fell silent in a New Hampshire parsonage. The world that heard that voice is gone — the colonial towns, the open fields, the candlelit tabernacles, the Bristol commons, the Edinburgh hillsides. The people who stood in those places and felt the Word of God break through the comfortable numbness of their religious lives are dust, every one of them. The barrel in Exeter has long since rotted. The crowds that gathered at Cambuslang in 1742, the press of bodies at Boston Commons, the thousands who wept in the Kingswood fields — all of them gone, all of them standing now in the presence of the One whose message they heard or refused, in the clarity of eternity that no field meeting and no revival sermon ever quite achieved.
And yet the echo has not faded. This is the fact that demands explanation in this final chapter — the fact that the ministry of a wine merchant's son from Gloucester who died at fifty-five and never held any institutional position more elevated than the chaplaincy of a countess has left marks on the world that are still visible and still significant two and a half centuries after his death. The echo has not faded. It has, in some respects, grown. And the reason it has not faded is not, in the end, a matter of historical momentum or institutional inertia. It is a matter of the Gospel itself: the seed that was sown in those revival years was genuine, and genuine seed in genuinely prepared soil produces a harvest that outlasts the sower by generations.
This chapter is my attempt to account for that echo — to trace the lines of influence that run from the barrel in Exeter and the Kingswood hillside and the Boston Commons forward through the centuries, to identify what was genuinely new in what I contributed to the Christian tradition, and to say what I believe those contributions mean for every person reading these pages in whatever century they find themselves. It is also the chapter in which I speak, as directly as I know how, to the reader — not as a historical figure speaking from behind the glass of biography, but as a voice that is still, in these pages, making its case and pressing its invitation. Because the one thing that has not faded across two and a half centuries is not my reputation or my methods or my institutions. It is the message. And the message is addressed to you.
Before I trace the lines of legacy, let me acknowledge the one source from which every genuine legacy flows. (Psalm 127:1 KJV): "Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it." Everything in this chapter that is genuinely worth tracing — every institution, every movement, every continuing influence, every life changed by the ministry across three centuries — was built by the Lord, working through imperfect and expendable instruments. The echo that has not faded is not the echo of George Whitefield. It is the echo of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which was old before I was born and will be new when every institution I helped plant has crumbled and every name I was associated with has been forgotten. My legacy is simply the portion of that larger work that God chose, in His sovereignty, to accomplish through one particular voice at one particular moment in history. To Him be all the glory.
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What Was New: Whitefield's Genuine Contributions
Any honest accounting of legacy must begin with honesty about what was genuinely new — what Whitefield actually contributed to the Christian tradition that had not been fully present in it before, rather than simply restating what the tradition had always contained. There is nothing shameful in being a transmitter of received truth rather than an innovator. Most of the best ministers in Christian history have been primarily transmitters. But Whitefield was more than that, and the more deserves to be named.
The first and most significant contribution was the open-air meeting. This was not, strictly speaking, Whitefield's invention — outdoor preaching has precedents in the ministry of Jesus Himself and in the practice of the early church. But in the English-speaking Protestant world of the eighteenth century, it was an innovation so radical that it seemed, to the bishops and clergy who encountered it, like an attack on the entire established order of religious life. Whitefield took the Gospel out of the building that had come to contain it and stood it in the fields and the squares and the common spaces where ordinary people actually lived — and the result was that ordinary people heard it in numbers and with a directness that the architecture of the established church had not been designed to produce.
The implications of that move have never been fully exhausted. Every outdoor evangelistic meeting since 1739 — every stadium crusade, every open-air service, every summer festival, every street preacher in every city in the world who lifts their voice in a public space — is working in a tradition that Whitefield established. The form has changed enormously. The stadiums of Billy Graham and the stadiums of the twenty-first century are not the Kingswood fields. But the theological principle — that the Gospel belongs in the public square as much as in the sanctuary, that the proclaimed Word is not the exclusive property of the institutional church — is Whitefield's principle, planted in 1739 and still bearing fruit today.
The second contribution was trans-denominational evangelism. Before Whitefield, revival tended to be denominationally specific — it happened within a particular tradition, was shaped by that tradition's theological culture, and produced fruit that remained within that tradition. Whitefield changed this by simply refusing to recognize denominational boundaries as barriers to the Gospel's reach. He preached in Anglican churches and Presbyterian meeting houses and Congregational sanctuaries and open fields that belonged to no denomination at all. He counted as brothers and sisters in Christ everyone who loved Jesus genuinely, regardless of what name was above their church door. And the effect was to create a trans-denominational evangelical fellowship that had not previously existed — a community of genuine believers who recognized each other across every institutional line on the basis of the one essential thing that united them.
That trans-denominational fellowship is the shape of evangelical Christianity today. The parachurch ministry — the organization that serves the church without being identified with any particular denomination — is Whitefield's institutional legacy. The youth camp and the evangelistic crusade and the cross-denominational prayer meeting and the Christian book that crosses every theological boundary — all of these are forms that trace their ancestry to the principle Whitefield established when he refused to let any bishop or any vestry determine where the Gospel could and could not be proclaimed.
The third contribution was the strategic use of media. Whitefield understood — with an intuition that was decades ahead of its time — that the reach of a message is not limited to the live event. He published journals. He published sermons. He advertised his meetings. He understood that the printed word could carry the revival's energy beyond the crowd that was present and plant it in the minds of thousands who were not. Every minister, every evangelist, every Christian communicator who has used the media of their era to extend the reach of the Gospel — radio preachers of the early twentieth century, television evangelists of the mid-twentieth, online pastors and podcasters of the twenty-first — is following a principle of media engagement that Whitefield pioneered. (Romans 10:14-15 KJV): "How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent?" How shall they hear without a preacher? Whitefield took that question seriously and answered it by using every medium available to him to ensure that the hearing was as wide as possible. The principle is not tied to any particular medium. It is the principle of faithful, creative, culturally engaged communication of the Gospel — and it is as valid in the digital age as it was in the age of the hand press.
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The Great Succession: Whitefield, Spurgeon, and Billy Graham
There is a succession of preachers that historians and theologians sometimes describe as the three great evangelists of the modern era: George Whitefield in the eighteenth century, Charles Haddon Spurgeon in the nineteenth, and Billy Graham in the twentieth. Each of them was, in his own time, the most widely heard preacher in the English-speaking world. Each of them carried essentially the same message. Each of them left marks on the church and the culture of his century that are still being felt today.
The comparison is instructive in more ways than the simple fact of their shared influence. Each of these three men shared certain characteristics that I believe are not coincidental but essential — characteristics that explain why their preaching carried such extraordinary weight and produced such extraordinary fruit.
All three preached the Gospel with absolute conviction and without apology. None of them softened the essential claims of the Christian faith to make it more palatable to a skeptical culture. All three told their hearers plainly that they were sinners who needed a Saviour, that Jesus Christ was that Saviour, and that the response required was genuine repentance and genuine faith. None of them offered a less demanding version of the Gospel in exchange for a larger audience. And all three found that the uncompromised Gospel, faithfully and urgently proclaimed, produced larger audiences than any accommodation to the spirit of the age could have produced — because the spirit of the age, in every age, is hungry for something more real than itself, and the Gospel is the realest thing in the universe.
Spurgeon knew my ministry well. He preached at the Metropolitan Tabernacle — itself named after the Tabernacle tradition I had established — and he described himself as standing in the Reformed evangelical line that I had helped to define. He read my sermons, preached some of my texts, and modeled some aspects of his own preaching on the pattern he found in my published works. He was a greater theological mind than I was — I will admit that freely — but we were preaching the same Christ, from the same cross, with the same urgency, to the same essential human need.
Billy Graham crossed the twentieth century the way I had crossed the eighteenth — addressing masses of people in open venues, building the crusade evangelism that was, in structural terms, the great-grandchild of the field meetings of Kingswood and Philadelphia. He preached to more people in his lifetime than any other evangelist in history, in more countries, with more consistently faithful proclamation of the essentials, and with the kind of personal integrity that stood the test of the decades of public scrutiny that every prominent minister faces. When Graham stood in a stadium and pressed the invitation — the same invitation I had pressed from a barrel in Exeter and a hillside in Cambuslang — the lineage was direct and the message was unchanged.
The succession is not coincidental. It reflects the faithfulness of a God who, generation after generation, raises up voices for the proclamation of His Gospel when the existing voices have grown too quiet or too comfortable or too institutional to carry the full weight of it into the open squares where the people actually are. It reflects the enduring relevance of the Gospel itself, which does not grow old or stale or outdated, however much each century's dominant culture wishes it would. And it reflects the principle of spiritual succession — the passing of a flame from one generation to the next — that the Apostle Paul expressed in (2 Timothy 2:2 KJV): "And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also." Faithful men who shall be able to teach others also. The chain of faithful transmission runs from Whitefield to Spurgeon to Graham to whoever stands in the field or the stadium or the digital public square next, carrying the same message in whatever form the next generation's culture can receive it. The chain is unbroken. The message is unchanged. The harvest continues.
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The Institutions That Outlasted the Voice
One measure of a ministry's legacy is the institutions it plants that outlast the planter. I planted several — some deliberately, some as the unplanned fruit of decisions made in the press of a busy ministry — and they are worth surveying, because they represent the organized, ongoing, structural expression of what the revival ignited.
Bethesda Orphanage, Georgia, was the most deliberate of my institutional plantings — the orphanage that was, alongside the preaching, the other half of the calling I carried from the moment of my first visit to Georgia in 1738. Bethesda grew to become the best-known orphanage in the British colonies, providing food, shelter, education, and Gospel instruction to hundreds of children across the decades of its operation. Its legacy is not only the children it housed but the principle it embodied: that the Gospel's claim on the believer includes a claim on their practical care for the most vulnerable, that the mercy of Christ must be expressed in bread as well as in words, in shelter as well as in sermons. Every evangelical orphanage, every Christian social ministry, every food bank run by a church, every Christian school founded to educate children who would otherwise have no access to education — all of them stand in the tradition of Bethesda.
The Moorfields Tabernacle and the network of preaching stations that grew from it became the centers of an evangelical culture in London and the British provinces that shaped the character of British Christianity for generations. The Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, which grew out of my relationship with Selina Hastings, planted dozens of chapels and funded dozens of preachers and created a network of evangelical fellowship that persisted long after both the Countess and I were gone. These were not merely buildings. They were communities — communities shaped by the conviction that genuine Christian faith must be personally experienced, not merely institutionally observed, and that the church exists to be the gathering of genuinely converted people rather than the management of a religious population.
The University of Pennsylvania — the college that grew from the premises I had purchased in Philadelphia and that Benjamin Franklin built into one of the great educational institutions of the Western world — is a legacy I had not exactly planned and would not have predicted. But it stands as evidence of the way in which the resources of a ministry, rightly understood, are not the exclusive property of the minister but belong to the wider work of God in the world, available to be put to use by whoever has the vision and the competence to use them for genuinely good ends. Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and the educational institutions of colonial America that I helped to fund and to promote bear the same testimony: the Gospel that saves souls also values minds, and the Christian's investment in education is an investment in the full flourishing of the people God loves.
The Welsh Reformedic Methodist Church, the evangelical wing of the Church of England that grew from my ministry and the Countess's patronage, the trans-denominational evangelical networks that connected ministers across every institutional boundary — all of these are structural legacies of the revival, expressions in organized form of the convictions that the revival had planted. They are imperfect, as all human institutions are imperfect. They have drifted, as all institutions drift when the living memory of the original fire fades and the institutional habit takes its place. But the framework they established — the conviction that genuine Christian faith is personal, experiential, cross-denominational, and necessarily expressed in both proclamation and practical care — has shaped the character of evangelical Christianity across two and a half centuries. (Matthew 16:18 KJV): "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." The gates of hell shall not prevail against it. The institutions that human hands build will fade. The church that Christ is building will not. Every genuine work — every orphan cared for, every soul converted, every mind educated, every community of genuine believers established — is a piece of that indestructible building. It will all be gathered in at the last, and not one genuine brick of it will be lost.
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The America That Whitefield Helped Build
There is a larger legacy that historians have increasingly recognized across the past century — the contribution of the Great Awakening to the formation of America itself as a distinct cultural and political entity. This is a legacy I would have been surprised by during my lifetime, because I did not think of myself as a nation-builder. I thought of myself as a preacher of the Gospel. But the Gospel, when it genuinely takes hold of a culture, shapes that culture in ways that extend far beyond the ecclesiastical sphere, and the shaping that the Awakening accomplished in colonial America was so deep and so pervasive that it became part of the cultural DNA of a nation.
Approximately eighty percent of the colonial population heard me preach during those American tours. The number is remarkable — more remarkable, in some ways, than anything else about the ministry — because it means that the message of the Awakening was not a peripheral religious event that affected a devout minority while the mainstream population went about its business. It was a central cultural event that reached into the life of virtually every community in the colonies and left its mark on the way those communities understood themselves and their world.
What the Awakening planted in the colonial soul was, at its core, a theology of human dignity. Not as an abstract philosophical principle but as a lived, preached, personally experienced conviction: every soul is of infinite worth in the sight of God. Every soul stands equal at the foot of the cross. No earthly distinction — not wealth, not birth, not education, not race, not social standing — changes the fundamental equality of all human beings before their Creator and Redeemer. This was not political philosophy. It was the Gospel. But it became political philosophy when a generation formed by that Gospel turned to the task of building a new nation and asked: what principles should govern how we treat one another?
The Declaration of Independence does not quote the Bible. Thomas Jefferson was not an orthodox Christian. But the conviction that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights — that the dignity of the human person is not granted by the state and cannot be taken by the state, that there is a higher law above every earthly authority — that conviction has roots that reach deeper than Enlightenment philosophy. It reaches into the soul of a people that had been told, again and again, in fields and squares and commons across three decades, that they mattered to God. That their souls were of infinite worth. That no king and no parliament had the authority to stand between them and their Creator. The Revolution was not caused by the Awakening. But it was carried out by the children of the Awakening, and the language of human dignity in which it was articulated had been shaped, in part, by thirty years of revival preaching.
I did not live to see the nation that was built on that foundation. I died six years before the Declaration of Independence and a decade before the Constitution. But the soldiers who carried scraps of my clothing into battle against the British army were not wrong about the connection. They were the children and grandchildren of the Awakening. The faith that had transformed their communities — the personal, experiential, sovereign-grace faith that the revival had planted — was carrying them into a struggle that was, in their understanding, simultaneously political and spiritual. No king but King Jesus. That battle cry was both a political declaration and a theological confession. It said: there is an authority above every earthly authority, and it is the authority of the risen Lord, and under that authority all human beings stand equal and free. (Acts 17:26-27 KJV): "And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth... That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him." Made of one blood all nations. The universal dignity of the human person, grounded in the one creative act of a God who made all humanity from one common source — that is the theological foundation beneath the political conviction. It was planted by the Gospel. It was watered by the Awakening. And it produced, in the fullness of political time, the most remarkable experiment in human self-governance the modern world had yet seen.
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The Evangelical World Whitefield Made
The form of Christianity that is dominant in the English-speaking world today — the form that is personal rather than merely institutional, experiential rather than merely ceremonial, cross-denominational rather than confined to any single tradition, urgently evangelistic rather than comfortably settled, insistent that religion must be genuinely felt and not merely performed — that form of Christianity is, in its essential character, the form that the Great Awakening established and that I helped to define.
This is not to say that the evangelical world of today is entirely faithful to the revival's best instincts. It is not. Every movement, however pure its origins, develops tendencies over time that its founder would not have endorsed. The evangelical world has produced, alongside genuine fire and genuine fruit, a celebrity culture around preachers that sometimes elevates the instrument above the message. It has produced a prosperity theology that contradicts the cross-centered, self-denying Gospel that the revival proclaimed. It has produced a shallowness of experience and a superficiality of conversion that I would have recognized as exactly the kind of almost-Christian religion against which I preached every day of my ministry. The temptations that corrupt the genuine article are not new. They were present in my own day, and I spent thirty-five years warning against them.
But the genuine article is also present, in the evangelical world of today, with a vitality and a breadth that would have astonished me if I had been told about it at the beginning of my ministry. The Gospel is being preached, with genuine conviction and genuine urgency, in every nation on earth. The trans-denominational fellowship of genuine believers — people who recognize each other across every institutional line on the basis of shared faith in the same Lord — is a global reality. The personal, experiential, transforming Christianity that the Awakening insisted on is the dominant form of Christianity in the fastest-growing parts of the world church. The seed that was sown in the eighteenth century is bearing fruit in the twenty-first in forms and in places that the sower could never have imagined.
And the method — the direct, urgent, experiential proclamation of the Gospel in terms that ordinary people can hear and respond to — is still the method. The medium changes. The language is updated. The cultural context is utterly different. But the essential structure of effective Gospel communication has not changed: a person who genuinely believes the message, speaks it with genuine conviction and genuine urgency to people who genuinely need it, trusts the Holy Spirit to apply it to specific hearts in specific moments, and invites a genuine response. That is what I did in the fields of England and the squares of colonial America. That is what Billy Graham did in the stadiums of the twentieth century. That is what faithful preachers and faithful witnesses are doing wherever the Gospel is being proclaimed today. The method is not mine. It is the Gospel's own method, and it is as effective in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth.
I look at the evangelical world that has grown from the revival's seed and I am humbled — genuinely humbled, not in the performative way of a man claiming humility while privately congratulating himself, but in the way that a person is humbled when they see the full size of something they had a very small part in beginning. I planted some seeds. God gave the increase. And the increase has been, by any honest measure, extraordinary. (1 Corinthians 3:6-9 KJV): "I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour. For we are labourers together with God." Labourers together with God. That is the only accurate description of what any minister is and what any ministry is. We labour together with the only One who can give the increase. The planting matters. The watering matters. The faithful, urgent, costly proclamation of the Gospel matters. But the increase — the actual transformation of actual souls, the genuine building of the genuine church — that is God's work, and God's work does not fail.
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What the Voice Says Now: A Final Address
I have been speaking in these pages from the past — from the perspective of a man describing a life already lived, a ministry already completed, a course already run. But I want to close this final chapter by stepping out of that historical distance and speaking directly, as directly as I know how, to every person who is reading these words right now.
Because the whole point of these ten chapters — the whole reason the story of a preacher who died in 1770 has been worth telling in this much detail and with this much care — is not the story itself. The story is a vehicle. What it is carrying is the same thing that every sermon I ever preached was carrying: the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the urgent invitation that the Gospel always extends to every human soul it reaches.
I do not know who you are. I do not know whether you are reading this in an era of revival or an era of spiritual coldness. I do not know whether you are a confident believer of long standing, or a young person just beginning to take the claims of the Gospel seriously, or a person who has been carrying a private skepticism for years without ever quite finding the courage to name it. I do not know whether you are thriving or struggling, certain or doubtful, close to God or very far from Him.
What I know is this: the message that I carried for thirty-five years across two continents and thirteen Atlantic crossings and eighteen thousand sermons is true. It was true when I first encountered it in an Oxford room in May 1735. It was true on the Kingswood hillside and the Boston Commons and the Cambuslang field and the barrel in Exeter. It is true now, in whatever year and whatever place you are receiving it. The human condition has not changed. The sinfulness that separates every soul from God is as real and as present and as urgent a problem in your time as it was in mine. And the salvation that Jesus Christ accomplished at Calvary is as complete and as freely available and as urgently offered in your time as it was in mine.
You must be born again. Not as a religious slogan, not as a theological formula, not as a phrase I have repeated so often that it has lost its capacity to cut. As the most important and most personal and most urgent fact about your specific situation: you must be born again. Not improved, not educated, not reformed, not made more religious. Born again — receiving the new nature that God imparts through the Holy Spirit to those who come to Jesus Christ in genuine repentance and genuine faith, the nature that changes the deep orientation of the soul from self to God and from death to life.
Come. That is still the word. It was the word in the Bristol fields and the Kingswood commons and the Boston squares in 1740, and it is the word now. Come to Jesus Christ, just as you are — with your history and your doubts and your failures and your best attempts at righteousness that have never quite been enough. Come poor and empty and needy. Come without any pretense of deserving what you are coming for. Come, and find in Him the wisdom that finally makes sense of your existence, the righteousness that covers everything that has been broken, the sanctification that bends your whole person toward the image of the One who made you, and the redemption that is coming to make all things new. (John 6:37 KJV): "All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. Not in any wise. Not under any circumstance. Not for any reason. The door is open. It has been open since the morning of the Resurrection. It will be open until the last soul for whom it was opened has come through it. Come now. This moment. In the condition you are in. The One who receives you is not waiting for you to make yourself presentable. He is waiting for you to come.
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Why the Message Has Never Grown Old
In the two and a half centuries since I preached my last sermon, the world has changed more than I could have imagined from my vantage point in 1770. The industrial revolution has remade the physical landscape of every country I traveled through. The democratic revolutions that my preaching helped to prepare have reshaped the political structures of the Western world. The scientific revolution has produced a body of knowledge about the material world that would have astonished the most educated person of my era. The communications revolution has given every human being on earth access to more information than all the libraries of the eighteenth century combined.
And across all of that change, the Gospel has not grown old. Let me be specific about why I believe this — not as a pious assertion but as a substantive argument, because the question of why the Gospel retains its power across centuries and across radical cultural change is genuinely worth thinking about.
The Gospel has not grown old because the human condition has not changed. The problem that the Gospel addresses — the alienation of a guilty, finite, morally broken human being from a holy, infinite, perfectly righteous God — is not a problem that the industrial revolution or the democratic revolution or the scientific revolution has done anything to resolve. The discoveries of science, however extraordinary, have not provided a way for a person to stand before God with a clean conscience and an unblemished record. The advances of democracy, however real, have not changed the fact that every human soul is accountable to a Judge before whom every human government is itself accountable. The multiplication of information has not given anyone the wisdom to know what life is ultimately for and how to live it in the light of that knowledge. These are the deep human needs that the Gospel addresses, and they are precisely as deep and precisely as unmet by every human alternative in the twenty-first century as they were in the eighteenth.
The Gospel has also not grown old because the solution it offers is unique. There is no other religion, no other philosophical system, no other therapeutic approach that offers what the Gospel offers: not self-improvement but new nature, not moral achievement but imputed righteousness, not spiritual technique but personal encounter with the living God through faith in His crucified and risen Son. The world has produced, in the centuries since Whitefield, an extraordinary variety of substitutes for the Gospel — systems that promise the peace the soul needs without requiring the surrender the Gospel demands. None of them have delivered. The hunger that drives people toward all of those substitutes is the hunger that the Gospel was designed to satisfy, and it remains unsatisfied by everything else precisely because it was not designed to be satisfied by anything else.
And the Gospel has not grown old because Jesus Christ Himself has not grown old. He is the same yesterday and today and forever, and the encounter with Him that genuine faith produces is as fresh and as transforming and as personally specific in the twenty-first century as it was when He walked the roads of Galilee. Every person who has genuinely come to Him in repentance and faith — in any century, in any culture, in any condition — has found the same living Person waiting. The same welcome. The same sufficiency. The same absolute reliability. The Gospel is not an idea that has survived the centuries by cultural momentum. It is a Person who is alive and at work in the world, and the living cannot grow old. (Hebrews 13:8 KJV): "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever." The same. Not similar. Not spiritually equivalent. The same Person, the same power, the same cross, the same resurrection, the same offer of mercy to every soul that comes in genuine repentance and genuine faith. That is why the message does not grow old. Because the One the message is about does not grow old. And the world's need for Him does not diminish.
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The Shape of a Life Given: What It All Adds Up To
I want to stand back, in this final chapter, and look at the whole shape of the life that these ten chapters have described — not to celebrate it, but to understand it. Because the life of George Whitefield is not merely interesting as history. It is, I believe, instructive as example — not an example of what a perfect life looks like, but an example of what a life given to the one essential thing looks like when followed consistently and at full cost across thirty-five years of field and barrel and storm and grief and fire.
The shape of it is simple. A boy born in a tavern, losing his father before he could walk, finding his gifts in performance and words, nearly throwing away his education, entering Oxford as a servant, encountering the Gospel through a book lent by a friend, spending months in desperate seeking, receiving the new birth in a single moment of grace in an Oxford room. Thirty-five years of preaching, crossing oceans, standing in fields, pressing the invitation — always the same invitation, to the same Saviour, with the same urgency. Then a barrel in Exeter on a September evening, and a stairwell with a burning candle, and a morning that did not come. Under the pulpit in Newburyport. And the echo that will not fade.
What does that shape tell us? It tells us that the significant life is not necessarily the long life. Fifty-five years, by the standards of any era, is not old. There was more that could have been done, more of the world that could have been reached, more of the harvest that could have been brought in, if the years had been more. And yet the fifty-five years that were given were so fully used, so thoroughly invested in the one essential work, that their fruit has lasted two and a half centuries and shows no sign of diminishing. Length matters less than depth. Duration matters less than faithfulness. The question is not how many years you are given but what you do with the years you are given.
The shape also tells us that the significant life is not the comfortable life. There was very little comfort in what I described in these pages — not in the Oxford years of desperate seeking, not in the Bristol fields where the mobs threw things, not in the Atlantic crossings in all their danger and discomfort, not in the pain of the Wesley controversy, not in the physical deterioration of the later years, not in the loneliness of the last two years after Elizabeth was gone. The life given to the one essential thing was not a comfortable life. It was a full life, a rich life, a life of genuine joy and genuine fruit and genuine encounter with the living God across thirty-five years of faithful service. But it was not comfortable. And the person who will only follow God as far as the path is comfortable will not follow Him very far at all.
The shape tells us, finally, that the significant life is the life that keeps its eye on what is ultimately real. The crowds were real — real people with real needs and real souls. The revivals were real — genuine transformations that changed the direction of real lives. The institutions were real — the orphanage and the tabernacles and the colleges were physical expressions of genuine convictions. But all of these were real only in the secondary sense. The ultimately real thing — the only thing that was real in the absolute sense, the only thing that was still real when the crowds had gone home and the meetings were over and the voice was finally silent — was the God who had sent the voice and the Gospel that the voice carried. Every genuinely significant life is organized around that ultimate reality. And every life that is not organized around it, however impressive it may appear by the standards of a world that has not yet understood what actually matters, is organized around something that will not last.
I do not tell you this to diminish the genuine goods of ordinary human life — the family, the work, the pleasures, the relationships, the creations of mind and hand that make up the texture of a human existence. These are real goods, and the person who genuinely loves God is freed to enjoy them more fully, not less, because they receive them as gifts from the hand of the One who gives all good things. I tell you this so that you organize your life correctly — so that you put first what is first, seek first what must be sought first, and let everything else find its proper proportion in the light of the one thing that is absolutely ultimate. (Matthew 6:33 KJV): "But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." Seek first. Not exclusively — he does not say seek only, but seek first. Get the order right. Put the eternal before the temporal, the ultimate before the penultimate, the Kingdom of God before the kingdoms of the world that are passing away. And when the order is right — when Jesus Christ is genuinely first and everything else genuinely follows — you will find, as I found across thirty-five years of a life given to that order, that nothing genuinely important is sacrificed. And everything that seemed to be sacrificed turns out, in the fullness of time, to have been seed rather than loss.
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To Every Reader: The Last Invitation
I have one more thing to say, and it is the thing I have been saying in every form available to me since the first sermon in St Mary-le-Crypt in 1736. I want to say it here, at the end of these pages, as directly and as personally as I know how, to every person who has read this far.
You may have read this book as biography — as the story of a remarkable life in a remarkable era, interesting for its historical significance, valuable for the insight it gives into the eighteenth-century evangelical world. If so, I am glad you found it interesting, and I hope the story has been told faithfully and well. But biography was never the point. The point, now as it was always the point in every field and every tabernacle and every barrel I ever stood on, is the Gospel. And the Gospel has a question that it addresses to every person who encounters it: what will you do with Jesus Christ?
Not: what do you think of the historical Whitefield? Not: what do you make of the Great Awakening as a religious and cultural phenomenon? Not: have you found this account of eighteenth-century evangelical Christianity intellectually satisfying? What will you do with Jesus Christ? Will you come to Him — genuinely, personally, specifically, in the precise condition you are in right now — in genuine repentance and genuine faith? Will you receive what He has always been offering and will never stop offering: the forgiveness of everything that has ever been wrong in your life, the righteousness that covers everything that cannot be uncovered, the new nature that the Holy Spirit imparts to every soul that comes in genuine faith, the life that is truly life?
The invitation is not conditional on your being ready. It is not conditional on your having resolved all your doubts or cleaned up all your failures or prepared yourself in any way for the reception of what is freely given. The Gospel does not require you to bring anything except your need — and your need is not something you have to manufacture or exaggerate. It is simply there, whether you have been looking at it honestly or not. The soul that has genuinely looked at itself, in the light of the holiness of God, knows its need with an intimacy that no amount of comfortable religious performance can permanently obscure. Come from that honest place. Come with the need named. Come to the One who was pierced for it and who receives every soul that comes without sending anyone away.
That is the last sermon. That is the last invitation. That is the word that has been carried from Gloucester to Bristol to Philadelphia to Cambuslang to Boston to Exeter across thirty-five years of a voice that could not be quiet about the most important thing in the universe. The voice is silent now. But the One the voice was always pointing toward is not silent. He is speaking still, through the pages of a Book that outlasts every preacher who has ever opened it, and through the internal testimony of a Spirit who is at work in every heart that is genuinely seeking, and through the living community of people who have received what the Gospel offers and who bear witness to its reality in the texture of their daily lives. (Revelation 22:17 KJV): "And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely." The Spirit says, Come. The bride — the church of Jesus Christ in every century and every nation — says, Come. Every person who has heard and received says, Come. And whosoever will — there is the breadth of the invitation, wider than any denomination, wider than any theological tradition, wider than any human category — whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. Freely. Without price, without merit, without any qualification except the will to come. Come. The door is open. It has always been open. Come now.
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Ten Million Souls: The Arithmetic of Grace
Before I conclude, I want to say something about the number that appears in every account of my ministry: ten million souls. Approximately ten million people heard me preach across thirty-five years. It is a number so large that it has always resisted being fully felt — statistics of that magnitude tend to stay statistical rather than becoming personal, and the personal is where the Gospel lives.
Let me try to make it personal. Ten million souls. Not ten million data points in a historical narrative. Ten million individual human beings, each of them made in the image of God, each of them carrying their own specific weight of sin and doubt and longing, each of them standing in a field or a square or a tabernacle on a specific day and hearing, for what may have been the first time in their lives, a voice that addressed them — not as a demographic, not as a crowd, but as the specific, particular, irreplaceable person they were — and told them that the God of the universe knew their name and had sent His Son to die for them.
Some of those ten million received the word with joy and it changed them permanently. Some received it with a shakiness that lasted a day or a week and then faded back into the old patterns. Some rejected it immediately, with the irritation of people who have been disturbed at their comfortable familiarity with the form of religion without its power. Some carried it for years as a seed they did not know what to do with, and it germinated later, in conditions I never saw, through means I never knew, at a time I had long since passed on from the field where I had planted it.
I do not know the full count of the genuinely converted among those ten million. Only God knows that. But I know this: no word proclaimed in faithful dependence on the Holy Spirit of God is ever entirely wasted. Every one of those ten million encounters was, at minimum, a moment in which the truth was spoken into a life that was going to face eternity, and the truth that was spoken was the most important truth that life would ever encounter. Some of it fell on hard ground and was taken away. Some fell on shallow soil and sprang up quickly and died. Some fell on thorny ground and was choked. And some — by the mercy of a sovereign God who prepares the soil, sends the rain, and gives the increase — fell on good ground and bore fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.
Those who bore fruit are the legacy. Not the numbers. Not the institutions. Not the cultural influence, real as all of those are. The people who genuinely came to Jesus Christ and were genuinely born again and genuinely walked with God through the years of their lives and genuinely arrived at the end of those lives in the confidence of the promise that He would receive them — those people are the point of it all. The barrel in Exeter and the hillside in Kingswood and the thirty-one years of Atlantic crossings were all in service of those specific, individual, eternally significant encounters between specific, individual, lost and needy souls and the one Saviour who had the power and the will to receive them. (Luke 15:7 KJV): "I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance." Joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth. Multiply that joy by however many of the ten million genuinely repented and genuinely came home — and the arithmetic of grace, which operates by a mathematics entirely unlike the world's, produces a sum of joy so large that the human mind has no instrument capable of measuring it. That is the final accounting of the ministry. Not what the historians will write about it. What heaven has already written about it, in joy, for every soul that came home.
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The Voice Goes On: What Legacy Actually Means
I want to close with one final thought about the nature of legacy — what it actually is and why the most important part of it is not the part that makes the history books.
The legacy that historians trace is the institutional and cultural legacy — the denominations, the educational institutions, the revival movements, the political influence, the shape of evangelical Christianity across the centuries. These are real and they matter and I have spent most of this chapter tracing them. But they are not the most important part of the legacy, because they are the visible part, and the most important things are almost never the most visible.
The most important part of the legacy is the individual souls. The people whose names no one remembers now — the coal miner in the Kingswood field who wept in 1739 and went home a different person and raised his children in the faith he had found and watched his grandchildren do the same. The Boston merchant who heard me preach on the Commons in 1740 and made the decision he had been deferring for years and lived the remaining decades of his life in the freedom that genuine conversion provides. The nameless woman in some colonial town who came to a meeting out of curiosity and left with a new heart, and who told her neighbors what had happened, and whose testimony started a chain of conversations that brought three more people to faith before the year was out. The ordinary, specific, individual, unremarkable-to-history people whose lives were genuinely changed by the Gospel — those are the legacy. Those are the harvest.
And those people — those individual, specific, transformed lives — are the pattern by which every ministry in every generation is ultimately assessed. Not the crowds, not the institutions, not the cultural influence. The souls. The people who came to the cross, genuinely, in genuine repentance and genuine faith, and left the cross different from how they arrived. Every one of them is more precious to God than any institution that bears my name or any cultural shift that historians attribute to my influence. Every one of them is the point.
If you are one of them — if somewhere in the pages of this account the Gospel has reached you and you have responded to it — then you are the most significant thing in this book. Not Whitefield the preacher, not the Great Awakening the historical event, not the institutions and the universities and the political revolutions. You. Your repentance. Your faith. Your life now and forever changed by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. That is the legacy that matters most. That is the harvest that never stops being gathered. That is the echo that will not fade.
George Whitefield was born in a tavern on a December night in 1714. He died on a September morning in 1770. Between those two dates he gave everything he had to the proclamation of one message: Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, and every soul that comes to Him will be received. That message was not his. He received it from the tradition that received it from the Apostles who received it from the Lord Himself. He passed it on. It is still being passed on. It will continue to be passed on until the last day, when the One who gave it takes it back into Himself, fulfilled and completed, in the fullness of the Kingdom that He has been building since before the foundation of the world. (Revelation 11:15 KJV): "The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever." He shall reign for ever and ever. That is where the voice of the Great Awakening was always pointing. Not to the revivals or the institutions or the cultural legacy. To the reign of Jesus Christ, established at Calvary, confirmed at the Resurrection, proclaimed by every faithful herald in every generation, and coming in its fullness at the end of all things. The voice goes on. The reign is coming. And the invitation is still, and always, and urgently: come.
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FINIS
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The Voice of the Great Awakening
— George Whitefield —
How to Live in the Miraculous!
This is a quick explanation of how to live and move in the realm of the miraculous. Seeing divine interventions of God is not something that just spontaneously happens because you have been born-again. There are certain biblical principles and truths that must be evident in your life. This is a very basic list of some of these truths and laws:
1.You must give Jesus Christ your whole heart. You cannot be lackadaisical in this endeavour. Being lukewarm in your walk with God is repulsive to the Lord. He wants 100% commitment. Jesus gave His all, now it is our turn to give our all. He loved us 100%. Now we must love Him 100%.
My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways (Proverbs 23:26).
So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth (Revelation 3:16).
2.There must be a complete agreement with God’s Word. We must be in harmony with the Lord in our attitude, actions, thoughts, and deeds. Whatever the Word of God declares in the New Testament is what we wholeheartedly agree with.
Can two walk together, except they be agreed? (Amos 3:3).
For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him (2 Chronicles 16:9).
3.Obey and do the Word from the heart, from the simplest to the most complicated request or command. No matter what the Word says to do, do it! Here are some simple examples: Lift your hands in praise, in everything give thanks, forgive instantly, gather together with the saints, and give offerings to the Lord, and so on.
I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me (John 5:30).
4.Make Jesus the highest priority of your life. Everything you do, do not do it as unto men, but do it as unto God.
If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth (Colossians 3:1-2).
5.Die to self! The old man says, “My will be done!” The new man says, “God’s will be done!”
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me (Galatians 2:20).
Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him (Romans 6:8).
6.Repent the minute you get out of God’s will—no matter how minor, or small the sin may seem.
(Revelation 3:19).
As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.
7. Take one step at a time. God will test you (not to do evil) to see if you will obey him. Whatever He tells you to do: by His Word, by His Spirit, or within your conscience, do it. He will never tell you to do something contrary to His nature or His Word!
For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother (Matthew 12:50).
Then went he down, and dipped himself seven times in Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God: and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean (2 Kings 5:14).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Michael and Kathleen Yeager have served as pastors/apostles, missionaries, evangelists, broadcasters, and authors for over five decades. Doc Yeager has authored over 570 books. Helping to establish over 27 Churches. They flow in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, teaching the Word of God with wonderful signs and miracles following in confirmation of God's Word. In 1982, they began Jesus is Lord Ministries International, in Biglerville, where they still pastor as of the writing of this book.
Some of the Books Written by Doc Yeager:
“Living in the Realm of the Miraculous #1to 5
“I need God Cause I’m Stupid”
"The Miracles of Smith Wigglesworth"
“How Faith Comes 28 WAYS”
“Horrors of Hell, Splendors of Heaven”
“The Coming Great Awakening”
"Sinners In The Hands of an Angry GOD”, (modernized)
"Brain Parasite Epidemic"
"My JOURNEY To HELL" - illustrated for teenagers
"Divine Revelation Of Jesus Christ"
"My Daily Meditations"
"Holy Bible of JESUS CHRIST"
"War In The Heavenlies - (Chronicles of Micah)"
"My Legal Rights To Witness"
“Why We (MUST) Gather! - 30 Biblical Reasons”
“My Incredible, Supernatural, Divine Experiences”
PLUS, MORE THEN 550 MORE TITLES