CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Born at the Bell
The Boy from Gloucester
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I was born in a tavern. If that sounds like the opening line of a man who grew up knowing something about life in the raw — you are right. The Bell Inn on Southgate Street in Gloucester, England, was not a palace. It was not a parsonage. It was not a place of quiet study or gentle refinement. It was a working inn, full of the noise and smell and color of ordinary people living ordinary lives — travelers coming and going, laughter and argument rising through thin walls, the clanking of cups and the scraping of boots across stone floors. And on the twenty-seventh day of December, in the year of our Lord 1714, that is precisely where I entered the world — the seventh and youngest child of Thomas and Elizabeth Whitefield, welcomed into a world that was loud, busy, and entirely unprepared for what God intended to do with me.
I have thought about that fact more times than I can count. There is something in it that I believe Jesus intended from the very beginning of my story. Not the grandeur of a cathedral. Not the quiet of a country estate. Not the drawing room of a theologian or the study of a scholar. A noisy inn — and a noisy inn is not entirely unlike that stable in Bethlehem where my Saviour Himself first drew breath. If the Son of God could be laid in a manger, wrapped in rough cloth, announced to shepherds who smelled of sheep and earth, perhaps it was fitting that the man who would one day stand in the fields and market squares of two continents and cry the Saviour's name to tens of thousands should first cry his own name in a common lodging house. God has always loved to take the ordinary and make of it something extraordinary for His glory. He has always loved to begin His most unlikely stories in the most unlikely places.
Gloucester in 1714 was a cathedral city, ancient and proud, with its great Norman church casting its shadow over streets that had been walked by Romans and Saxons and Normans before the first Englishman thought to call them English. It was a city of merchants and craftsmen, of river trade and market days, of the kind of solid, unhurried English life that had not changed much in centuries. The Bell Inn sat in the middle of that world — a place where all of Gloucester's ordinary life passed through its doors. As a child, I watched that life from my earliest days: the farmers and the merchants, the traveling gentlemen and the working poor, the laughter and the grief, the arguments and the reconciliations. I did not know it at the time, but God was giving me an education that no university could have offered. He was teaching me people.
My father, Thomas Whitefield, was a wine merchant and innkeeper — a man of modest standing and decent reputation. He was, as far as I can piece together from the fragments of memory and the accounts of those who knew him, an honest man, a working man, a man who took his responsibilities seriously and his pleasures in moderation. But he died when I was barely two years old. Two years old. The loss was, of course, not something I could feel in the moment — I was far too young to understand what death meant or what his absence would cost me. But the shaping power of that absence would work itself out over years and decades, in ways I am still, even now, in the process of understanding. I grew up without a father's voice. I grew up without his hand steadying my shoulder, without his example of what a man of God looks like when he wakes up every morning and faces a world that does not always cooperate with his intentions. That absence left a hollow place in me — a hollow place that I filled, for many years, with all the wrong things before I finally found what it was actually shaped to hold.
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My mother, Elizabeth, was left a widow with seven children to raise and an inn to manage. She was a woman of uncommon strength. She had to be — there was simply no alternative. Life in eighteenth-century England was not kind to widows, particularly those with large families and modest means. She did not have the luxury of grief, at least not for long. She had to get up every morning and keep going, keep feeding mouths and minding rooms and holding a household together through sheer force of will and practical wisdom. I honor her for that. I honor her deeply, even as I acknowledge that the pressures of her situation meant that none of her seven children received as much of her time and focused attention as they might have needed.
She remarried, in time — a man named Longden. But this second marriage brought its own complications and its own tensions, as second marriages often do when children are involved and resources are limited. I will not speak ill of anyone who is not here to speak for themselves, but I will say honestly that my childhood, while not without its moments of genuine warmth and joy, was also marked by periods of real uncertainty and instability. We were not rich. There were seasons when we were genuinely poor. There were seasons when I felt the particular loneliness that comes to a child who senses, rightly or wrongly, that the adults around him are too burdened to notice what he is carrying.
And yet — and I want this to be absolutely clear — I do not tell these things to invite pity or to cast blame. I tell them because they are part of the story, and the story matters. The God who would one day use me to shake two continents began His work in me in those early years of loss and uncertainty and quiet longing. He was present in the hollow places. He was working in the gaps. He was using the very absences and deprivations of my childhood to shape in me a hunger that would one day send me running, breathless and burning, across the fields of England and the mountains of Pennsylvania and the squares of Boston to cry out to every desperate, lost, lonely soul I could find: there is a Father who does not die. There is a God who does not leave. There is a Jesus who says, in the words recorded by the Apostle John:
(John 14:18 KJV) "I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you."
He was coming to me. I just did not know it yet.
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England in the Age of Coldness
Before I go any further with my own story, I want you to understand the world into which I was born — because without understanding it, you cannot fully understand why what God did through the Great Awakening was so staggering, so unexpected, so desperately needed. The England of 1714 was not a godless nation in the sense of having openly rejected Christianity. It was something more insidious than that. It was a nation that had reduced Christianity to a social arrangement, a cultural habit, a form without fire — and had convinced itself in the process that this lifeless husk was perfectly adequate.
The Church of England dominated the religious landscape. Its clergy filled its parishes from one end of the country to the other, conducting services every Sunday, reading from the prayer book in the same measured, careful tones that had been used for generations. Most of them were decent men by the standards of their era. But very few of them were on fire. Very few of them preached as though eternity depended on what their congregation did with the message. Very few of them had themselves experienced the kind of transformation that I would later experience in an Oxford room — the kind that turns a religious routine into a living encounter with the Son of God. They were keepers of a tradition, not heralds of a living Gospel.
The result, across the parishes and market towns and cathedral cities of England, was a Christianity that had grown cold and formal and socially obligatory. People went to church because it was what decent people did. They observed the sacraments because they had been baptized and confirmed and that was simply the expected pattern of a respectable English life. They accepted the broad framework of Christian doctrine without allowing any of it to actually reach the level of personal application. They were, in the language I would later develop in my preaching, almost Christians — churchgoing, morally decent, doctrinally respectable, and wholly unregenerate.
The poor were, in many cases, entirely outside the reach of the established church. The Church of England's parish system was designed around settled, property-owning communities. The coal miners of Kingswood outside Bristol, the factory workers of the new industrial towns, the laborers and the servants and the destitute — these people were largely invisible to the established church and the established church was largely invisible to them. They had no regular access to preaching, no one to tell them that the God who made them had not forgotten them, no voice raised on their behalf to declare that the Gospel was for them too — for the rough and the poor and the uneducated, not only for the refined and the comfortable.
Into this cold and stratified world, God was preparing to send a revival. Not a polite improvement of religious culture. Not a gentle uplift of the existing system. A revival — the kind that the Prophet Habakkuk prayed for: (Habakkuk 3:2 KJV) — "LORD, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid: O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy." God was about to revive His work. And the instrument He chose for the task was a boy born in a Gloucester tavern who had not yet been born again himself. His ways are not our ways. His choices are not our choices. And for that, I am eternally grateful.
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The Gift Hidden in a Tavern Boy
My childhood had one quality that stands above all others in my memory, and that is this: I was passionate about performance. From the earliest age I can remember, I was drawn to the spoken word with an almost physical hunger. I would read plays — any plays I could lay my hands on — and commit long passages to memory. I would act them out, sometimes for an audience of whoever would watch, sometimes alone in the corners of the inn when the evening grew quiet and there was no one about to think me strange. I threw myself into characters. I inhabited voices. I understood, even as a small boy, that there is a power in the spoken word that reaches places nothing else can reach — that a story told with passion and conviction does something to a listener that mere information never can.
I had, from very early on, what my elders called a gift for oratory. I could speak in front of people without the paralysis of fear that seized most of my contemporaries. I found it natural — thrilling, even — to stand up and address a crowd. My voice was expressive. I could shift from tenderness to urgency to sorrow to joy within a few sentences and bring my listeners along with me. I could make people laugh, make them lean forward, make them hold their breath. These were gifts, and I recognized them as gifts even then, though I had no language yet for the One who had given them.
I also read voraciously. The inn had a small supply of books, and I worked through all of them. I read the Bible — not yet with any sense of personal weight or spiritual urgency, but with the same appetite I brought to everything else. I read its stories as a boy reads adventure: the battles and the journeys, the prophets and the kings, the dramatic moments of deliverance and disaster. I did not yet know that the Book was reading me back. I did not yet know that behind its words was a living God who was watching a small boy in Gloucester develop the very capacities He intended to use in him.
There is a principle here that I have observed over and over again across a lifetime of watching God work in human lives. He does not waste anything. He does not discard a single experience, a single talent, a single passion — even those that seem, in the moment, to have nothing to do with holiness or ministry. Every gift He plants, He intends to harvest. Every capacity He builds, He means to employ. The boy who memorized plays in the corners of the Bell Inn was being trained by the same God who would one day send him to preach under the open sky to thirty thousand people at once. The theatrical instincts, the expressive voice, the hunger for the spoken word — none of it was wasted. All of it was preparation.
Jesus said in (Matthew 25:29 KJV): "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance." I believe that principle applies to gifts as much as to money. When we use what God has given us — when we develop it, invest it, offer it back to Him — He multiplies it beyond anything we could have achieved on our own. The gifts He planted in a tavern boy in Gloucester were real gifts, and He had plans for them that would take me to both sides of the Atlantic.
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Leaving School and Coming Back
My early education had been promising enough. Gloucester offered a decent grammar school education, and I had taken to it with genuine enthusiasm, particularly anything to do with language and rhetoric. But there came a point — somewhere around my fifteenth year — when my enthusiasm ran dry. I had persuaded myself that higher education was simply not a realistic prospect for a boy in my circumstances. Why should I labor over Latin and Greek when I had a perfectly useful trade at hand? The inn needed workers. My mother needed help. And I had convinced myself, with the convenient logic of a fifteen-year-old who wants an excuse to stop studying, that leaving school and working at the Bell was simply the responsible thing to do.
And so I left school. I put away my books and took up the work of an innkeeper's assistant — fetching and carrying, serving and cleaning, all the practical labor that keeps a lodging house functioning. I worked hard. I want to be honest about that. I was not a lazy boy, and the work at the inn was genuine, demanding work. But something in me was not satisfied. There was a restlessness beneath the surface of those months that I could not name and could not quiet. I would lie awake at night, long after the inn had gone dark and quiet, and I would feel the press of something I could not identify — a dissatisfaction, a longing, a sense that I was meant for more without any clear idea of what that more might be.
Looking back, I recognize that restlessness for exactly what it was: the hand of God. He would not let me settle. He would not let me find contentment in a life that fell short of His purpose for me. And He raised up a most unlikely instrument to redirect my course. A student from Oxford came to visit my mother — I do not know the circumstances exactly, only that he was a young man who had managed to work his way through the university as a servitor, paying his expenses through service rather than wealth. As he talked about his experience, I listened with a hunger I had not expected.
Here was proof that Oxford was not exclusively the preserve of wealthy gentlemen's sons. Here was a living example that a man of modest means could pursue a university education if he was willing to work for it. Something in that conversation struck a flint in me. The restlessness that had been vague and inarticulate suddenly found a direction. I wanted to learn. I wanted to go higher. I wanted to take my gifts — whatever they were — and sharpen them, develop them, press them toward their fullest potential. I went to my mother and told her I wanted to return to school and work toward Oxford.
She agreed. I went back. And in 1732, at the age of seventeen, I entered Pembroke College, Oxford, as a servitor. I want you to understand what that means in the social context of eighteenth-century England. The English university system of that era was built on a hierarchy as rigid and unforgiving as anything in the wider society. Gentlemen students paid substantial fees, lived comfortably, and were treated with the deference their social station demanded. Servitors, by contrast, were students who earned their place by serving — waiting at table, running errands, blacking shoes, fetching coal, performing whatever domestic tasks the wealthier students required. We ate the leftovers. We lived in the less desirable rooms. We were, in the eyes of most of our fellow students, useful inferiors.
I will not pretend that this did not sting. I was a young man with a proud streak that I had not yet learned to surrender, and there were moments in those early Oxford days when the condescension of wealthier students hit its mark. But I was also, by now, too determined to let wounded pride turn me aside. I had come to Oxford for a reason, and I intended to make the most of it. I buried myself in my studies. I developed my mind. And in that very process of being humbled — of being compelled, day after day, to serve others, to occupy the lowest place in the social order, to be overlooked and undervalued by those who judged by appearance — God was doing something in my character that no comfortable circumstances could have accomplished. He was working humility into me, even when my flesh was still resisting it.
Years later, I would preach often from the words of the Apostle Paul in (Philippians 2:3 KJV): "Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowhness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves." I preached those words because I had lived them — not naturally, not without struggle, but through the grinding mercy of a God who knew that a preacher who was full of himself would be of very little use to anyone. The servitor years were part of His curriculum. Every cold morning fetching coal was a lesson. Every condescending look from a wealthy student was a tutor. Every moment of swallowed pride was making room for something better.
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The Holy Club: Finding Brothers
It was at Oxford that I first encountered the men who would redirect the entire course of my life. John Wesley was already there when I arrived — older than me by eleven years, already a fellow of Lincoln College, already gathered around him a small circle of students who had resolved to take their Christianity with deadly seriousness. His brother Charles was there too, younger than John but equally earnest, equally committed to a faith that was not merely nominal but real and lived and costly. Together with a handful of others, they formed what they called — with no sense of self-congratulation, only genuine purpose — a small society for mutual encouragement in the Christian life.
The rest of Oxford called them the Holy Club, and the name was not meant as a compliment. It was delivered with the raised eyebrow and curled lip that comfortable, irreligious young men use when they want to put serious young men in their place. They also called them the Methodists — on account of their methodical, disciplined approach to religious observance. They met regularly. They fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays. They visited the poor and the imprisoned. They gave money away that they could barely spare. They examined their consciences with a rigor that made ordinary church attendance look like a very light nap. They were, in a word, in earnest — and that earnestness called to something deep inside me that had been restless and unnamed for as long as I could remember.
I was not immediately welcomed into their circle. I observed from a distance first, watching with a mixture of fascination and unease. There was something about these men that unsettled me — not because they were unpleasant, but because they were the genuine article, and I was not, and some part of me knew it. Charles Wesley in particular had a quality of spiritual depth that I found both attractive and convicting. When he spoke, it was clear that he was speaking from somewhere real — that his religion was not a performance or a habit but a living encounter with a living God. I wanted what he had. I was not yet sure I could have it.
But then Charles Wesley lent me a book. That single act of generosity — the casual, friendly gesture of one Oxford student handing another a slim volume and saying, in effect, you ought to read this — changed everything. The book was Henry Scougal's small and devastating work, The Life of God in the Soul of Man. Scougal was a Scottish minister who had died at the tragically young age of twenty-eight, leaving behind this single treatise that had already, in the decades since his death, proved itself to be one of the most quietly powerful documents in the history of Protestant spirituality. I opened it expecting something edifying and pleasant. What I found instead was a mirror — and what it showed me shook me to my foundation.
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The Book That Broke Me Open
Scougal's argument was devastatingly simple. True religion, he wrote, is not located in orthodoxy of belief alone. It is not located in outward ceremony or church attendance or moral respectability. It is not located in the performance of religious duties, however earnest or consistent that performance might be. True religion is the life of God in the soul of man — a divine nature actually implanted within the believer, a real, internal transformation that works from the inside out and changes everything about a person: their desires, their delights, their fundamental orientation toward God and toward other people.
He described several counterfeit versions of religion — the kind that looks right from the outside but is hollow at the center. There was the orthodoxy that had sound doctrine but no living experience of what it taught. There was the moralism that was decent and upright but had never been broken before God. There was the enthusiast who had powerful feelings but no deep root. And then there was the real thing — the person in whom God's own life had been planted, who loved what God loved and hated what God hated, not because they were trying to perform goodness but because they had been remade at the level of desire.
When I read those pages, something happened in me that I can only describe as the lighting of a torch in a room that had always been dark. Not the full blaze — that would come later. But the first catching of flame — the moment when the darkness is no longer complete, when you can begin to see shapes you had only stumbled over before. I saw myself in Scougal's description of the counterfeit. I had been religious. I had attended chapel. I had said my prayers. I had read my Bible. I had, in a general way, tried to be a decent person. But this — this life of God in the soul of man — this I did not have. This I had never had. And the moment I recognized that fact, I could not un-recognize it.
I closed the book and sat for a long time in the half-dark of my small Oxford room. The inn where I had grown up, the early years, the loss of my father, the restlessness that had driven me back to school and forward to this university — all of it began to arrange itself around this single, terrible, clarifying realization: I had been pursuing an empty form. I had been carrying the shape of religion without its substance. I had been, in the very terms that Jesus used in the third chapter of John, unregenerate — unborn from above — and therefore, however sincere my religious efforts, still far from the Kingdom of God.
(John 3:3 KJV) "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."
I had read those words before. I had heard them preached. But they had never reached me as they did in that moment, sitting in my room with Scougal's book in my hand and the hollow place in my chest suddenly identified and named. Except a man be born again. I had not been born again. I was not born again. And with that recognition came a hunger — a desperate, urgent, consuming hunger — to know what that meant, and how it happened, and whether it could happen to me.
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A Dangerous and Holy Seeking
What followed was one of the most painful and transformative seasons of my entire life. I threw myself into seeking God with an intensity that alarmed my friends and, looking back, alarmed even me. I am not recommending everything I did during those months as a model to be followed. Some of my methods were unwise. Some were, frankly, extreme to the point of self-destruction. But underneath all of it was something genuine and right and necessary — a soul that had seen its own emptiness and refused to make peace with it, a man who had heard the words of Jesus and could not rest until he had their reality in his own chest.
I began to fast. Not the gentle, occasional fasting of a man who is keeping a spiritual discipline, but the kind of fasting that left me weak and lightheaded. I reduced my food to bare subsistence. I gave away what money I had to the poor. I spent hours on my knees in prayer — sometimes outdoors in the cold of the Oxford winter, kneeling on the frozen ground in the darkness, pleading with a God I was not yet sure was listening. I curtailed my sleep. I cut myself off from the social pleasures that most Oxford students considered their rightful reward for the rigors of university life. I read everything I could find — devotional works, biblical commentaries, the writings of the early church fathers, anything that might throw light on the path I was trying to find.
My body began to protest. My health deteriorated in ways that could not be ignored. I became genuinely ill. At one point, one of my hands began to turn black — a sign, my companions believed, of the serious physical toll my self-imposed disciplines were taking. My friends grew worried. I was moved to a room where I could be cared for more easily, and there I lay, sick and searching, fighting on the inside what my body was fighting on the outside. The physicians attended me. Rest was prescribed. But even lying ill, I could not let go of the searching. There was a fire in me that would not go out.
I want to say something important to anyone who may read these pages and find themselves in a similarly desperate place. The methods I used during those months — the excessive fasting, the physical extremes — were not spiritually wise, and I would not counsel anyone to repeat them. God does not require us to destroy our bodies in order to gain His favor. The very Gospel I would spend my life preaching is a Gospel of grace, not of human achievement. But what was right and necessary in that season was the honesty — the refusal to pretend, the willingness to acknowledge my real condition before God, the determination to press through until I had the real thing rather than the counterfeit. That quality of honest, desperate seeking is not something I would retract. God honors a genuine hunger. He has promised to fill those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, and He keeps His promises.
I held onto the words of (Matthew 7:7-8 KJV) during those dark months like a drowning man holds a rope: "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." I was asking. I was seeking. I was knocking — sometimes with the desperate pounding of a man who believes the door is his last hope. And God had said that the door would open. I chose to believe that. Even when the belief was hard. Even when the answer seemed long in coming. Even when I lay sick in my Oxford room with a blackened hand and a hungry soul and nothing to show for months of desperate seeking, I chose to believe the promise of Jesus.
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The New Birth: May 1735
The moment came in the spring of 1735. I was twenty years old — though I would not turn twenty-one until December — and I had been seeking for months. My health had begun to recover, slowly, though I was still weak. I was reading and meditating, as I had taken to doing every day, on the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion. I had read those chapters many times before. I knew them, as they say, by heart. But on this particular day, in this particular season of raw and open seeking, they did not stay on the page. They came off it.
I came to the account of the final hours of Jesus on the cross — the darkness that fell over the land, the tearing of the temple veil, the cries of the dying Saviour. And I read the words recorded in the nineteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, where Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished, looked up and spoke:
(John 19:28 KJV) "I thirst."
Something happened to me at those words that I am still not able fully to explain or adequately to describe. The best I can say is this: the thirst of Jesus on the cross reached across the centuries and met the thirst of a young man in an Oxford room who had been hungry and desperate and seeking for longer than he knew how to bear. His thirst and my thirst recognized each other. And in that moment of recognition, something broke open in my soul.
I cried out — I thirst! Not with any pretense of matching His suffering, not with any claim to deserve His mercy, but with the raw confession of a soul that had finally stopped trying to earn what it needed and simply acknowledged the depth of its need. And in that cry, something changed. The weight that I had been carrying — the guilt, the striving, the exhausting performance of religious duty, the constant sense of falling short and trying harder and falling short again — began to lift. Not all at once, and not in the way of a dramatic vision or an audible voice. But a lightness came. A cleanness. A sense that something long dark was beginning, slowly and unmistakably, to fill with light.
I wept. I do not mind telling you that. I wept freely and at length, not with grief but with something more like release — the tears of a man who has been holding his breath for years and has finally, finally been told he may breathe. The new birth had come, not through my striving or my fasting or my long nights on the frozen ground, but through the mercy of a crucified Saviour whose grace is sufficient for the most broken and hungry and desperate of souls. I had not achieved it. I had received it. And that difference — between achieving and receiving — is the difference between religion and the Gospel, between the almost Christian and the altogether Christian, between a life spent performing and a life spent in the freedom of genuine grace.
I understood now, with the understanding that only experience can bring, what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote in (Ephesians 2:8-9 KJV): "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." Salvation is a gift. It is received by faith. It is not the product of fasting or self-mortification or years of religious effort. It is the gift of God, pressed into the open and empty hand of a sinner who has stopped pretending to deserve it. I had stopped pretending. And the gift had come.
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What the New Birth Actually Is
I want to spend a few paragraphs here making plain what happened to me in that Oxford room, because the new birth would become the single most important theme of everything I would ever preach for the next thirty-five years. It is not a subject I can treat lightly or pass over quickly. It is the very center of the Gospel, and it is the very thing that the comfortable, church-going England of the eighteenth century had almost entirely forgotten.
The new birth is not a reformation of behavior. It is not turning over a new leaf or making better choices or resolving to do differently. It is not the adoption of a religious identity or the performance of religious duties. A man can reform his behavior and still be lost. A man can attend church every Sunday of his life and still lack the one thing that will determine where he spends eternity. The new birth is a transformation at the level of nature — a change in what a person fundamentally is, in what they love, in what they desire, in the deep orientation of their heart.
Scougal had described it as the life of God in the soul of man — and that is precisely right. When a soul is born again by the Holy Spirit of God through genuine repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, something is planted in that soul that was not there before. A new nature. A new desire. A hunger for what God loves and a genuine revulsion toward what God hates. Not a perfect nature — we will wrestle with the old nature until the day we die — but a real one. A new birth produces a new life, and a new life, however imperfectly, begins to look like the life of Jesus.
I want to be direct about something that will run through every chapter of this book, because I believe it matters enormously and I have seen too many souls deceived by a cheap substitute. Salvation is conditional. It is conditional upon genuine faith in Jesus Christ — not merely intellectual agreement with doctrinal propositions, but real, living, active faith that reaches out to Jesus as a drowning man reaches out to the one who can save him. And it is conditional upon obedience — not the perfect, performance-based obedience that the law demands and none of us can produce, but the genuine, whole-hearted submission of a person who has said yes to the Lordship of Jesus and means it.
The writer of Hebrews makes this unmistakably plain: (Hebrews 5:9 KJV) — "And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him." Not to all who agree with Him. Not to all who attend the services that honor Him. Not to all who were baptized in His name. To all who obey Him. Obedience is not the basis of our salvation — Christ's righteousness alone is the basis of our salvation. But obedience is the evidence of salvation, and a life of willful, unrepentant disobedience is evidence of a faith that is not genuine. I preached this distinction for thirty-five years and I will not soften it here. The stakes are too high.
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Ordained at Twenty-Two
The transformation that took place in me during those Oxford months was not merely private and interior. It changed the way I spoke, the way I related to people, the way I understood the purpose of my life. I found that I could not keep quiet about what had happened. The experience of genuine conversion creates an almost irresistible pressure toward proclamation — toward telling others what you have found, toward crying out with the urgency of a man who has discovered a fire and sees his neighbors sleeping. I was that man. The discovery was too large and too urgent to keep to myself.
Word of my transformation reached Bishop Benson of Gloucester — the bishop who oversaw my region of England. He sent for me. I came before him and spoke honestly about what had happened — the seeking, the crisis, the new birth — and apparently what he heard satisfied him deeply. He gave me five guineas to buy books, a generosity that a poor servitor-student could not take lightly, and he offered to ordain me to the diaconate of the Church of England, though I was only twenty-two years old. The canonical age for ordination was twenty-three, and he was willing to make an exception on my behalf.
I was ordained on the twentieth of June, 1736. The service was held at St Mary-le-Crypt in Gloucester — the very church in which I had been baptized as an infant, in which I had sat through countless services as a boy, in which the same familiar liturgy had rolled over me for years without penetrating. Now I stood inside those same ancient stones, beneath the same carved wooden beams, in the same light filtering through the same old windows — but everything was different. I was different. And as Bishop Benson laid his hands upon my head and spoke the words of ordination, I was aware of something that went far beyond ceremony or tradition. I was being set apart. I was being commissioned. And the God who had brought me from the Bell Inn to this moment was not done yet.
I answered every question in the ordination service from the very bottom of my heart. When they asked whether I believed myself to be inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost to take upon myself this ministry, I said yes — and I meant it as I have never meant any other word in my life. I had no idea what that yes would cost me. I had no idea of the oceans I would cross or the fields I would stand in or the enemies I would make or the years I would wear myself to a shadow in the service of the calling I was accepting. But I said yes with my whole soul, and I have never — not once, not in the darkest and most exhausting season — wished that I had said anything else.
I thought, in that moment, of the words of the prophet Isaiah, called by God in the temple and asked: (Isaiah 6:8 KJV) — "Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me." Here am I. Send me. Those five words became the motto of my life from the day of my ordination forward. Not my will, but Thine. Not my comfort, but Thy purposes. Not my reputation or my safety or my ease, but the proclamation of a Gospel that every soul in England — and in America, and in Scotland, and wherever God would send me — desperately needed to hear.
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The First Sermon and Its Staggering Fruit
The first sermon I ever preached as an ordained minister of the Church of England was delivered in that same church, St Mary-le-Crypt, in the city of Gloucester, in the summer of 1736. I was twenty-two years old. I had prepared for weeks — praying over every paragraph, choosing my scripture carefully, thinking hard about how to communicate not just the content of the Gospel but its urgency, its glory, its pressing relevance to every person who would sit before me. I wanted them to feel what I had felt in that Oxford room. I wanted them to see what I had seen. I wanted them to come, as I had come, to the end of their own resources and find Jesus waiting there.
I will not pretend I was not nervous. I was. But the nervousness of that morning was a particular kind — not the nervousness of a man who fears ridicule or failure, but the nervousness of a man who understands the weight of what he is doing. These were human souls before me. They would stand one day before God and give an account of their lives. What I said to them in the next hour might echo in their hearts for the rest of their days, for good or for ill. That awareness was not paralyzing — it was galvanizing. It drove me to my knees before I stepped into the pulpit, and it drove the words out of my mouth with a passion and urgency that I could not have manufactured if I had tried.
The congregation, by every account I have heard, was disturbed. That is the word that was used — disturbed. Not bored, not merely edified, not politely interested. Disturbed. Something in what was said that morning pierced through the comfortable numbness that eighteenth-century English church attendance had settled over the souls of the congregation. Fifteen people — fifteen — went afterward to seek counsel from their minister, troubled in spirit, asking what they must do. On the very first day. The very first sermon.
I wept when I heard that report. Not with pride — there was no room for pride in a man who knew how recently and how thoroughly he had been broken — but with a gratitude so large it had nowhere to go but out through tears. Fifteen souls on the first day. Jesus had done it. He had taken the effort of a young man who barely knew what he was doing and breathed on it with His Spirit, and fifteen people's lives had been touched in a way that mattered eternally. If He could do that on the first day, I thought, what might He do if I gave Him every day? What might He accomplish if I held nothing back — if I crossed oceans for Him, stood in fields for Him, preached until my voice gave out and then rested and preached again?
The answer to that question is the story that fills the rest of these pages. But the story begins here — in a tavern on a December night in 1714, in a young man's desperate seeking, in a moment of grace before a crucified Saviour, and in an old stone church in Gloucester where a twenty-two-year-old with everything still ahead of him stood up and opened his mouth and found that the Spirit of the living God had something to say through him.
The voice of the Great Awakening had found its tongue. And across the water, across the fields, across the decades, the echo of it would not stop. It has not stopped yet. (Isaiah 55:11 KJV): "So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."
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The Almost Christian and the Altogether Christian
Even in those first weeks and months after my ordination, as I was finding my footing as a preacher, one theme pressed itself upon me with a force that I could not ignore. It was the theme that had broken open my own life through Scougal's book — the distance between a religion that looks right from the outside and a religion that is real from the inside. I began to develop what would become one of my most characteristic and most challenging lines of address: the distinction between what I called the almost Christian and the altogether Christian.
The almost Christian, I told my congregations, is not a bad person. He is not an obvious sinner. He is not the drunkard or the profligate or the openly immoral. He is, by the standards of his neighbors, a perfectly respectable man. He attends his church. He avoids the grosser vices. He is honest in his business dealings, decent in his family relations, moderate in his habits. He knows his catechism. He can answer the questions of orthodox doctrine with accuracy and ease. He has never, in his own estimation, done anything particularly terrible. And he is, with all of this, on his way to damnation — because the one thing that matters most, he does not have.
What is that one thing? The new birth. The life of God in the soul. The genuine, transforming encounter with Jesus Christ that changes not just a man's behavior but his very nature — his desires, his loves, his fundamental orientation toward God and the world. The almost Christian has religion as a system but not religion as a life. He knows about Jesus without knowing Jesus. He can recite the articles of faith without having experienced the faith itself. And this, I told every congregation I ever stood before, is the most dangerous condition a human being can be in — because it is the one condition most likely to deceive him about his own standing before God.
It is far easier to awaken a man who knows he is asleep than a man who believes he is already fully awake. The openly immoral man knows something is wrong. His conscience has not been entirely silenced. There is a crack in his defenses through which the light of the Gospel can enter. But the almost Christian — the man who has inoculated himself against genuine conversion by means of a steady dose of formal religion — he is the hardest case of all. He does not feel the urgency. He does not see the danger. He is very nearly saved, in his own estimation, and that very nearness is what makes the distance so terrible.
Jesus Himself warned of this in the most sobering of terms. In (Matthew 7:22-23 KJV) He said: "Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity." Many. Not a few. Many will stand before the judgment seat of Christ with a full religious resume — prophesying, working wonders, doing remarkable things in His name — and hear those five words: I never knew you. The issue is not what they did. The issue is whether they knew Him — genuinely, personally, transformative — and whether He knew them. Religion without relationship. Activity without intimacy. Service without surrender. These are the marks of the almost Christian, and they are not enough.
What does the altogether Christian look like? He looks like a man who has been broken before God — not once and long ago, but in an ongoing pattern of humility and surrender. He looks like a woman who loves the Word of God not because she is required to but because in it she meets the One who saved her and in whose presence she finds life. He looks like a person whose faith is not a performance for others but a constant inward reality — a daily, moment-by-moment dependence on the grace of Jesus Christ to do what he cannot do in his own strength. He is not perfect. He stumbles. He fails. He rises and repents and begins again. But the direction of his life is settled — the orientation of his heart is toward Jesus — and that orientation, held through all the failures and all the fallings and all the long stretches of ordinariness, is the mark of a soul that has been genuinely born from above.
I preached this contrast — almost Christian versus altogether Christian — from the earliest days of my ministry, and I never stopped preaching it. I preached it in the genteel drawing rooms of London and I preached it in the coal fields of Kingswood. I preached it to Presbyterians in Philadelphia and Congregationalists in Boston and Anglicans in Savannah. I preached it to audiences of thousands outdoors and to handfuls of people in country meeting houses. Because the need for it was everywhere the same — everywhere there were people who had mistaken the shell of religion for the kernel, the map for the territory, the form for the reality. And they needed to be told the truth in love, clearly and urgently, while there was still time to respond.
I asked my congregations, and I ask every reader of these pages: which are you? Have you been born again? Not — have you been baptized. Not — were you raised in a Christian home. Not — do you attend church regularly and live by decent moral standards. Those things are not wrong, but they are not the question. The question is whether you have personally, genuinely, in your own heart and your own experience, come to the end of yourself, repented of your sin before a holy God, and placed your living trust in the finished work of Jesus Christ upon the cross — and whether the evidence of that new birth is visible in the daily shape of your life. (2 Corinthians 5:17 KJV): "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." New. Not improved — new. Is that your testimony? If not, I urge you — I plead with you — do not rest until it is.
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A Word to Every Reader
Before we move forward into the story of the fields and the revivals and the ocean crossings and all the fire that was still to come, I want to speak directly to you — whoever you are, wherever you have found this book, whatever season of life you are in. I want to speak to you as I spoke to the crowds in the fields of England and the squares of Philadelphia — plainly, urgently, with no interest in impressing you and every interest in reaching you.
The story of my early life is not chiefly a story about me. It is a story about what God does with a willing, imperfect, ordinary human being when that person encounters the living Jesus and refuses to settle for anything less than the real thing. I was nothing remarkable. I had no great family name, no inherited wealth, no extraordinary natural advantages beyond a voice and a love of words. What I had was a hunger — a hunger that God Himself had placed in me — and a willingness, however fumbling and imperfect, to follow that hunger wherever it led.
That hunger is available to you. That same grace that broke through to a twenty-year-old Oxford servitor in May of 1735 is available to you today — right now, in the moment you are reading these words. The Gospel has not grown old. The Spirit has not grown tired. Jesus Christ is not a figure of history who was relevant once and has since faded. He is alive, risen, reigning — and He is still in the business of finding the hungry and filling them, the desperate and delivering them, the lost and bringing them home.
But you must come. That is the condition that cannot be avoided or softened or explained away. You must come in genuine repentance — which means not a feeling of regret that quickly passes, but a real turning, a real acknowledgment of what you are before a holy God and what you need that only Jesus can provide. You must come in living faith — not the faith that merely nods at the Gospel on Sunday and ignores it the other six days of the week, but the faith that reaches out and takes hold of Jesus as the only Saviour and the supreme Lord. And you must come prepared to walk in obedience — not perfectly, not without stumbling, but genuinely, persistently, with the orientation of your whole life pointed toward His will rather than your own.
The door is open. It has been open since the day He died and rose again. (Revelation 3:20 KJV) records the words of Jesus: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me." He is still at the door. He is still knocking. And the boy from the Bell Inn who heard that knock and opened — however haltingly, however imperfectly — has spent a lifetime standing in fields and squares and churches on two continents urging others to open the same door. Do not wait. Do not delay. Do not settle for the counterfeit. Come to Jesus Christ, just as you are — poor, lost, undone, and hungry — and find in Him the life that Scougal wrote about, the life that I found in an Oxford room in May of 1735, the life that is the only life worth living.
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The Voice of the Great Awakening
— George Whitefield —