CHAPTER six
CHAPTER six
The Long Run
Later Ministry, Deeper Grace, and the Interior Life
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There is a kind of Christianity that burns hot for a season and then cools — that produces great warmth and great fruit in its early years and then settles, gradually and almost imperceptibly, into a comfortable religious routine. The fire never goes entirely out, but it no longer throws the same heat, and the people who sit near it know the difference even if they say nothing about it. I have seen this in other ministers, and I have feared it in myself. The long ministry is not the young man's test. The young man's test is courage and urgency and the willingness to stand in the field and cry out when every respectable voice around him is telling him to sit down. The long ministry's test is perseverance — the ability to keep doing the same essential thing, with the same essential quality of fire, across decades of accumulated weariness, accumulated disappointment, accumulated physical decline.
I want to speak honestly in this chapter about what the middle and later years of my ministry looked like from the inside. Not the version that appears in public accounts and hagiographies, where the great evangelist moves from triumph to triumph with undiminished energy. The more complicated and more truthful version — the one that includes the seasons of exhaustion and the moments of doubt and the physical suffering that accumulates when a man crosses the Atlantic thirteen times and preaches more than eighteen thousand sermons and gives his body to a pace that would have broken most men in their thirties, let alone their forties and fifties.
I also want to speak about the interior life — the prayer life, the devotional practice, the daily walk with Jesus Christ that was the only thing that made the exterior life possible. Because the fields and the crowds and the sermons were all built on a foundation of something quieter and more private, something that happened in the early morning darkness before the first service began and in the late-night hours after the last one ended. If you want to understand where the fire in the preaching came from, you have to understand where I spent the hours when nobody was watching.
I often thought of the Apostle Paul's remarkable confession in (2 Corinthians 4:16 KJV): "For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day." The outward man perishing. The inward man renewed. That is as accurate a description of the second half of my ministry as I know how to give. The body was failing. The voice was less powerful than it had been in those first Bristol fields. The face was lined and the hair was gray and the asthma was a constant companion that made every sermon a physical act of will as much as a spiritual one. But something else was happening simultaneously — something that I could not have manufactured and did not deserve — a deepening of the inward life that the outward deterioration was, somehow, creating space for. God was working in me as He had always worked: not despite the hardship, but through it.
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The Daily Discipline: Four in the Morning
I want to begin where every fruitful day began for me — at four o'clock in the morning. Not because I am naturally inclined to early rising. I am not. The flesh has always preferred its bed to the cold floor of a pre-dawn prayer room. But I had learned early in my ministry that the choice between sleeping and praying in those first hours of the day was not simply a choice about personal convenience. It was a choice about the character and quality of everything that followed.
I rose at four. I spent the first hour of the day in prayer — not the formal, obligatory prayer that discharges a religious duty and returns the worshipper to his ordinary consciousness unchanged, but the kind of prayer that the Puritans called wresthng with God. The kind where you come to the throne of grace with specific, named needs — your own need for grace and wisdom and the filling of the Spirit, the needs of the people you are about to address, the needs of the orphan children in Georgia, the needs of the friends and correspondents whose letters were piled on the desk — and you stay there until you have laid them all before God and received some assurance of His presence and His purpose in them.
I spent the second hour in the Word of God. Not reading quickly for material to use in the next sermon, though such reading was also necessary. Reading slowly, meditatively, with the specific intention of allowing the Scripture to do what only Scripture can do when the Spirit of God breathes on it — to address the reader personally, to reach beneath the surface of theological knowledge and touch the soul at the level of specific need and specific encouragement. I found that the Bible never became familiar in this sense. No matter how many times I had read a passage, it had the capacity to speak freshly — to find some need I had not fully articulated, to answer some question I had been carrying without realizing it, to apply some principle to some situation with a precision that could not have been manufactured by any human planning.
At six I began to preach, if there were people to preach to — and there almost always were. The discipline of four and five o'clock was the foundation on which six o'clock rested. The message I delivered in the field or the tabernacle was not merely the product of the previous day's preparation, however thorough that preparation had been. It was the product of years of accumulated time in the Word and years of accumulated time in prayer — years in which the substance of the Gospel had been driven so deeply into my own soul that I could preach it from memory and from experience rather than merely from notes.
I tell young preachers who ask me about the source of the preaching's power: spend more time on your knees than on your notes. Not instead of your notes — preparation matters, and lazy preaching is dishonoring to God and to the people who have come to hear Him. But the preparation of the heart must precede and undergird the preparation of the mind. A sermon that has been worked out on paper but not prayed through on your knees will carry information into the ears of your hearers but not fire into their hearts. (Acts 6:4 KJV): "But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word." Prayer first, then the Word — that is the apostolic order. And in my experience it is the only order that produces the apostolic result.
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Letters, Friendships, and the Network of Grace
One of the things that is sometimes overlooked in accounts of my ministry is the extraordinary volume and quality of my correspondence. I was a letter writer of considerable industry, and the letters I wrote — hundreds of them across dozens of years, to ministers and laypeople and friends and seekers on both sides of the Atlantic — represent a significant portion of my pastoral ministry. Much of what I could not do in person, because I was always moving, I did through ink and paper.
I wrote to encourage. When a minister in some remote corner of England or a distant colony wrote to tell me that the work was hard and the opposition fierce and the fruit apparently thin, I wrote back with the kind of honest encouragement that comes from a man who has been in exactly that place himself — not the hollow cheerfulness of someone who has never known discouragement, but the grounded, tested, specifically biblical encouragement of someone who has been cast down and has found, repeatedly, that God lifts up. I could write with authority on the subject of dark seasons because I had been through them, and I could write with genuine faith about God's faithfulness in those seasons because I had witnessed it.
I wrote to correct. When friends fell into theological error, when young ministers began to preach things that were not sound, when believers in the congregations I had planted were being led astray by voices that substituted spiritual excitement for genuine substance, I wrote honestly and firmly and with love. I did not enjoy writing letters of correction. Who does? But I believed that genuine love for a person required the willingness to tell them the truth even when the truth was uncomfortable, and I tried to do it with enough grace and warmth that the correction could be received rather than resisted.
I wrote to pray. Many of my letters contain extended passages of intercessory prayer for the recipient — not as a formal religious conclusion but as a genuine expression of what I felt. When I cared about a person, when I had received their news and their needs into my own heart, I found it natural and necessary to bring them before God in the language of the letter as well as in the private language of my own prayer room. The letters were, in this sense, a form of pastoral prayer as much as a form of correspondence.
Among the most treasured of my friendships across those years were a handful of men who were, in effect, my own pastoral covering — men who watched over my soul with the kind of honest, affectionate accountability that I tried to give to others. I needed this more than I sometimes wanted to admit. The itinerant life is a lonely life in ways that are not always visible from the outside. You are always the pastor, rarely the pastored. You are always the one with the answer, rarely the one with the question. You are always receiving the trust and the confidence and the need of others, rarely able to give your own trust and confidence and need to someone else. Those friends who were willing to receive my letters honestly, who wrote back with genuine inquiry into my soul's state and genuine challenge when they detected something that needed challenging, were among the most important of God's gifts to me in the long run.
I wrote to one such friend in the American colonies that the agonies my soul had undergone in a period of quiet reflection had shaken me as thoroughly as any public battle. The remembrance of past sins had overwhelmed my soul, I told him, and caused tears to be my meat day and night. But then — always but then, in my experience of God — I had been enabled to see the freeness and riches of His grace, the infiniteness and eternity of His love, and my soul had received comfort. (Lamentations 3:22-23 KJV): "It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness." New every morning. The man who rises at four and spends an hour in prayer is not doing so out of mere discipline or religious obligation. He is going to find what is new every morning — the mercies that are always fresh, always sufficient, always waiting for the person who has come to the end of themselves and found that God is there.
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The Returning Pilgrim: Later Atlantic Crossings
I crossed the Atlantic thirteen times in the course of my ministry. The crossings were not comfortable. Eighteenth-century Atlantic passage was a months-long ordeal of confinement, seasickness, storms, tedium, and genuine danger. Ships were lost regularly on those crossings, and the passengers who survived arrived in port exhausted, sick, and profoundly relieved. I have a sailor's knowledge of the Atlantic earned by repetition — I know the way the wind changes in the middle latitudes, the way a winter storm builds from the northwest, the peculiar color of the water when land is three days away.
But I also know something else about those crossings that the sailors could not measure: they were, regularly, among the most spiritually productive seasons of my life. Stripped of the constant demands of a preaching schedule, confined to a small ship for weeks or months with nowhere to go and nothing urgent to do, I found that my inner life expanded to fill the space that the outer demands had been consuming. I read more deeply. I prayed at length without the constant interruption of the next engagement. I thought through the implications of things I had been preaching, finding angles and depths that the pace of active ministry had not given me time to explore. The ship was, in a strange and providential way, a kind of enforced retreat — a monastic cell moving at the speed of wind across the face of the Atlantic.
I also ministered on those ships. The crew and the passengers who shared the crossing with me were not people I could pass by. I held services on the deck. I preached to the sailors — rough, weather-hardened men who were rarely in the way of Gospel preaching — and I found them more responsive, often, than the settled congregations of established cities. A man at sea, in a wooden vessel in the middle of a vast ocean, has a clarity about his own vulnerability that tends to make him honest about his need. The comfortable self-sufficiency that shields so many people from the Gospel is hard to maintain when the wind is screaming through the rigging and the ship is being thrown about like a toy.
I was very ill on at least one of those crossings — reduced to what seemed like the last extremity, convinced at times that I would not see England or America again. And I found in those moments of extremity something that I have tried to preach ever since: the peace of Jesus Christ is not dependent on comfortable circumstances. It is not a fair-weather companion that deserts you when the storm comes. It is precisely when the storm is at its worst that His presence becomes most real — a presence that does not remove the storm but inhabits it, that does not make the waves smaller but gives you something so solid to stand on that the waves no longer have the last word.
On one of those ocean voyages, I wrote in a letter that I could find no difference between sea and land, meaning that the presence of God was as real and as sustaining on a heaving deck in the mid-Atlantic as it was on a dry morning in a tabernacle. That was not a performance. It was the truth. The God who promises to be with His people is not subject to geographical limitations. He goes where they go. He is present in the ship as in the sanctuary. And the man who has learned to find Him in one place will find Him in the other, because he is not really looking for a place — he is looking for a Person, and that Person is everywhere. (Psalm 139:9-10 KJV): "If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me." Even there. In the uttermost parts of the sea. Even there, His right hand holds. I have tested that promise on thirteen Atlantic crossings, and I have never found it wanting.
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The Later American Tours: A More Seasoned Voice
My later visits to America — the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth and seventh crossings — differed from the first great tour of 1739 and 1740 in ways that I think are worth describing. The first tour had the quality of a sudden spring after a long winter — everything fresh and starthng and unexpected, the crowds enormous, the responses dramatic, the sense of something unprecedented happening in the spiritual atmosphere of a continent. The later tours were different. Not lesser — I would never say that — but different in tone and character.
The Great Awakening had done its work. The denominations had been reshaped by it. The educational institutions it had spawned were producing ministers who had been formed in its theological convictions. The communities that had been transformed by it were, in many cases, producing second and third generation believers who had grown up in the faith rather than coming to it dramatically in a field meeting. The role that the preaching needed to play in those communities was not the same role it had played in the initial awakening. It was less about ignition and more about sustaining flame — less about breaking through to communities that had never heard the Gospel and more about deepening and clarifying the faith of communities that had been hearing it for a generation.
I adapted. Not by changing the message — the message never changed. Not by softening the urgency — the urgency was always real, because souls were always on the edge of eternity. But by adjusting the tone and the emphasis to meet the actual need of the actual people before me. With communities that had strong revival roots but were in danger of formalism, I preached on the marks of genuine spiritual life and the dangers of second-generation religion losing its first-generation fire. With individuals who were in personal spiritual crisis, I spent less time in the field and more time in what I began to call pious conversation — the kind of one-on-one pastoral engagement that the busy itinerant rarely has time for but that is sometimes exactly what a particular soul needs.
I found, in those later years, that I was reaching people I would not have reached in the early revival years. Settled, respectable, educated people who were skeptical of emotional religion but who were genuinely seeking something real — people who had watched the more dramatic manifestations of revival from a cautious distance and had been put off by what seemed like excess, but who had never stopped asking the underlying question: is there something more than this? Is there a God who is actually present and actually knowable? These were people that the early revival's style had not always been able to reach, and they were often the very people most hungering for what the Gospel had to offer.
One of my closest friends in those later American years was Benjamin Franklin — a man who represented, as perfectly as any individual I have known, the intelligent, cultivated, sincerely seeking skeptic who is not hostile to God but who will not be moved by anything less than the real thing. Franklin never professed conversion. I preached to him for thirty years through our friendship and our correspondence, and he maintained to the end his position of respectful engagement with the Gospel without personal commitment to it. I prayed for him, and I continued to believe until my last breath that the God who had opened the most unlikely hearts could yet open his. (Luke 18:27 KJV): "The things which are impossible with men are possible with God." What I valued in Franklin, beyond the friendship and the practical help he gave to my ministry, was his honesty. He did not pretend. He did not perform a religion he had not received. He told me plainly what he believed and what he doubted and what he could not yet accept, and that honesty gave me something to engage with that the polite performance of religion never can. Give me an honest skeptic over a dishonest churchgoer any day. The honest skeptic at least knows he has not found what he is looking for. The dishonest churchgoer has convinced himself he has, which makes him much harder to reach.
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Suffering as Teacher: What Long Ministry Costs and What It Gives
I have already touched on the physical cost of the long ministry. Let me speak more specifically now, because I think honesty about suffering in the service of Christ is one of the most practically useful things I can offer to any reader who is considering a life of serious, sustained Christian calling.
My health was poor by my early forties in ways that alarmed my friends and sometimes alarmed me. The asthma that had been a manageable inconvenience in my twenties became, in my later years, a serious limitation. There were mornings when the simple act of breathing was a labor, when I rose from bed uncertain whether I would be able to sustain the physical demands of the day's preaching. There were evenings when I finished a sermon and could barely stand, when my companions had to support me as I descended from whatever improvised pulpit I had been occupying, when the physical machinery that had served me for so many years was visibly, undeniably failing.
I preached anyway. Not out of stubborn pride — or not only out of stubborn pride — but out of the conviction that I would rather use up whatever remained of my physical capacity in the service of the One who had given it than hoard it for a comfortable old age that I had no reason to expect and even less desire to pursue. I said, in those later years, that I would rather wear out than rust out. I meant it. The alternative — retreating to a comfortable pastoral position in some settled congregation, preaching twice on Sundays to the same familiar faces, tending the institutional garden rather than sowing in the open fields — felt to me like a betrayal of the calling that had been given to me. I was a field preacher. I was a voice crying in the open air to whoever would listen. I could no more do that from behind a settled pulpit than a fisherman can practice his trade from a library.
What did long suffering give me? Several things that I could not have received any other way. It gave me a freedom from the fear of death that I had not fully possessed in my younger years. When you have been genuinely ill, genuinely close to the edge, you discover that dying is not quite the terror that the imagination of the healthy person projects onto it. The presence of Jesus Christ, which I had known in health, proved itself equally present in illness — more present, in some ways, because illness has a way of stripping away the props and distractions that fill the space in healthier days and leaving you with nothing but Him. And nothing but Him, I found, was entirely sufficient.
It gave me a compassion for the suffering of others that I could not have acquired through theology alone. I had always believed, intellectually, that God is present with those who suffer. In my later years I knew it, in the way that only experience produces genuine knowing. When a sick person told me they were afraid, I could sit with them in that fear not as a theologian presenting a solution but as a fellow sufferer who had been in that place and had found the promise true. That kind of pastoral presence — the kind that has been tested in actual suffering — is a gift that no degree and no study can produce. It comes only through the furnace.
And it gave me an increasing homesickness for heaven that I can only describe as one of the sweetest aspects of the aging Christian life. I had always believed in heaven. I had preached about it with genuine conviction. But in the later years, as the body deteriorated and the friends departed — some dying, some drifting, Elizabeth gone in 1768 — the reality of the world to come pressed closer and closer against the thin veil of this present one. I wrote to a dear friend that I wanted to leap my seventy years. I longed to be with Christ. Not from despair, but from an increasing clarity about what was waiting — and an increasing sense of the distance between what is available here and what is prepared there. (Philippians 1:23 KJV): "For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better." Far better. Those two words carry more theological weight than many pages of argument about the afterlife. Paul did not say heaven was marginally preferable or somewhat better. He said far better. And the man who has lived long in the fellowship of Jesus Christ, and has tasted something of His presence even in this fallen world, begins to understand — begins to feel — just how large that far better is.
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On Pride and Its Constant Battle
I cannot write honestly about the interior life without writing about the sin that I believed, throughout my ministry, to be my most dangerous personal enemy. Not the sins of the flesh — those were real in their season, but they were, in my experience, less subtle and therefore more easily identified and resisted. The sin I found most persistent and most dangerous was pride.
Pride in a preacher is a particularly insidious thing because it feeds on the very things that make him effective. The crowds validate it. The conversions confirm it. The correspondence from grateful souls nourishes it. The fame that gathers around a man who has been used significantly by God provides exactly the kind of environment in which pride flourishes most freely — an environment in which there is always, if you are not extremely careful, a quiet inner voice saying: you are doing this, you are responsible for this, the success is yours.
I fought this voice for thirty-five years. I cannot say I always won. There were seasons — particularly in the early, heady years of the revival when the crowds were largest and the responses most dramatic — when I am certain that something in me was feeding on the success in a way that was not entirely godly. My friends knew it. Some of them told me, with the directness that genuine friendship requires. I received those corrections with more or less grace depending on the day and the state of my soul, but I always knew, underneath, that they were right.
The remedy for pride, I found, was the same as the remedy for almost every other spiritual ailment: return to the cross. Return to the place where the Son of God, who had every right to glory and honor and the worship of all creation, emptied Himself and became a servant and died a criminal's death for the people who had put Him there. When you stand at Calvary honestly — not performing theological meditation but genuinely looking at what happened there and why — pride has nowhere to stand. The ground is too level at the foot of the cross for anyone to be elevated above anyone else. All have sinned. All fall short. All stand in need of the same mercy. The preacher who has fifteen thousand people before him in a field is not a superior being to the most broken and desperate soul in the crowd. He is the same — saved by the same grace, dependent on the same mercy, heading toward the same judgment, hoping in the same Saviour.
I wrote to a minister friend in Boston that I had been deeply humbled by the sight of my own heart during a season of quiet reflection on a ship. The mystery of iniquity that lay in my heart, I told him, had been opened to my view in ways that shook me. I had seen something of what I was apart from the grace of God, and the seeing had been both terrible and necessary. Necessary, because a preacher who does not know his own bankruptcy cannot preach with genuine urgency the riches of Christ. The man who stands in a field and cries 'come to Jesus' must be crying from a place of genuine need, not performing a religious invitation from a position of imagined sufficiency. (1 Timothy 1:15 KJV): "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." Of whom I am chief. Paul did not say was chief — he said am chief. Not a former sinner who has now ascended to a position of spiritual authority, but a present sinner who is present moment by moment dependent on the grace of a present Saviour. That posture — the posture of the chief of sinners, saved and sustained and used despite himself by a sovereign and gracious God — was the only posture from which I found it possible to preach the Gospel with genuine fire and genuine humility at the same time.
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The Orphans, the Letters, and the Ordinary Work of Ministry
Between the great revival seasons and the famous sermons and the Atlantic crossings, there was a vast amount of what I can only call ordinary work — the unglamorous, unheralded, repetitive daily labor of keeping the ministry going. Managing the affairs of Bethesda across three thousand miles of ocean. Writing the hundreds of letters that sustained the network of relationships on which the revival's fruits depended. Raising the money that kept the orphan children fed and clothed and educated. Responding to the endless stream of requests from ministers seeking advice, seekers seeking counsel, critics seeking debate, and friends seeking encouragement.
Bethesda was a particular ongoing concern that consumed enormous amounts of my energy and my attention across the full span of my active ministry. An orphanage in colonial Georgia sounds, from a distance, like a straightforward charitable institution. In practice it was a permanent administrative and financial challenge that required constant attention. The climate was harsh. The supply of necessities was unreliable. The staff turned over. The funding was always precarious — I was perpetually raising money for Bethesda in my American and British preaching, perpetually writing to wealthy friends and patrons who might be persuaded to contribute, perpetually worrying about the next emergency that would drain whatever reserves had been accumulated.
But when I stood in the Bethesda dining room and watched a hundred children eat a meal that would not have existed without the preaching and the praying and the fundraising of the past months, I found that every letter written and every collection taken and every awkward appeal to a reluctant donor had been entirely worth it. These were the least of these — the children that Jesus said were in His arms when they were received in His name. The orphanage was not a side project. It was, in its own way, as central to the ministry as the preaching, because it was the physical, daily, bread-and-clothing expression of the same Gospel that the preaching proclaimed in words.
I also gave considerable energy, in those later years, to raising funds for educational institutions — for the college in New Jersey that would become Princeton, for the development of Dartmouth, for the school that Benjamin Franklin would transform into the University of Pennsylvania. Education mattered to me because the long-term fruit of revival depends on it. A generation that has been awakened to the Gospel needs ministers who can sustain and deepen that awakening — ministers who are theologically educated, biblically literate, pastorally skilled. Without those ministers, revival fervor burns out in a generation. With them, it can be transmitted and sustained across generations and across centuries. (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." Commit to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also. The chain of transmission is the chain of the Gospel's survival in any culture. I could preach to ten million souls, but if the next generation of preachers was not trained, the harvest would rot in the fields. The educational work was not separate from the evangelistic work. It was its necessary continuation.
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The Trial of Opposition: Mobs, Mockers, and the Sovereign Protection of God
I want to speak about something that the polished accounts of revival ministry tend to gloss over: the violence and the opposition that were regular features of my public ministry, especially in the early and middle years. The open fields were not always peaceful. The crowds were not always friendly. And the opposition I faced was not limited to theological pamphlets and the cold shoulders of disapproving bishops.
Mobs attacked my meetings on multiple occasions. I have been pelted with stones, mud, dead animals, and objects I would rather not name. I have had meetings interrupted by organized groups of men whose purpose was not merely to express disagreement but to inflict physical harm on me and on the people who had come to hear. I have been thrown out of inns. I have had windows broken in houses where I was staying. I have preached through noise and chaos and the constant threat of physical injury, and I have had to learn — it did not come naturally — to keep my voice steady and my message clear when the crowd in front of me was throwing things at my head.
One of the most striking of these confrontations happened at a cudgel-fighting tournament — a rough entertainment favored by people who had little interest in evangelical religion and considerable interest in demonstrating that publicly. I arrived to preach at the site of this tournament. I was met with mockery, then hostility, then physical confrontation. I was struck — I have mentioned this earlier in these pages. I was thrown out of the inn where I had planned to stay. My companions and I were in genuine danger of serious injury. I wrote about it to my friends with what I hope was appropriate honesty: I had been treated roughly and I had not enjoyed it. But I also wrote that my spirit had been stirred within me. There was something in the confrontation that sharpened my sense of the seriousness of what we were doing — that reminded me that the Gospel we were preaching was not a polite cultural offering but a declaration of war on the kingdom of darkness, and the kingdom of darkness was not going to concede ground without a fight.
The Apostle Paul was beaten with rods, stoned, shipwrecked, imprisoned, constantly in danger from robbers and rivers and false brothers and the cities he preached in. He counted these afflictions not as evidence that he had gone wrong but as the fellowship of Christ's sufferings — as the mark of the genuine apostolic calling in a fallen world that does not welcome the light. I was not Paul, and my sufferings were not comparable to his. But I drew from his example the same conclusion he drew from Christ's: the servant is not above his master, and if the Master was despised and rejected, the servant should not expect better treatment from the same world that rejected Him.
What protected me, across all those years of opposition, was not personal courage — I am not a naturally brave man, and anyone who thinks the itinerant preacher is a fearless hero has not been inside the mind of a man walking toward a hostile crowd while trying to remember why he chose this particular day to preach in this particular place. What protected me was the simple, tested, absolutely reliable truth of the promise of Jesus: (Matthew 28:20 KJV): "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Always. Not in the comfortable meetings. Not only when the Spirit was moving powerfully and the crowd was responsive and the fruit was visible. Always. Even in the hostile crowd. Even when the stone was in the air. Even when the inn door was being slammed in my face. He was always with me, and that presence — that constant, unsentimental, utterly faithful presence — was the only thing that made the opposition bearable and the continuation possible.
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What Prayer Actually Looks Like: Lessons From Decades at the Throne of Grace
I have spoken of my prayer discipline in general terms, but I want to go deeper here, because I believe that prayer is both the most important and the most misunderstood aspect of the Christian life, and that honesty about what it actually is — and what it actually is not — is one of the most practically useful things I can offer.
Prayer is not primarily a technique for obtaining results. I have read books on prayer that are essentially manuals for getting what you want from God — detailed instructions on how to frame your requests in ways that maximize the likelihood of a positive response. I have heard preaching on prayer that treats it as a kind of spiritual leverage, a method for compelling God to act according to the petitioner's will. I reject this understanding entirely. Not because I do not believe in answered prayer — I have seen prayers answered in ways so specific and so starthng that no natural explanation could account for them. But because the understanding of God that underlies the technique-based approach to prayer is deeply and fundamentally wrong.
Prayer, as I understand and practice it, is primarily a response to the reality of God — an acknowledgment that He is present, that He is sovereign, that He is good, and that I am dependent on Him for everything that matters. It is the natural language of the creature addressing its Creator — not a formal performance but a genuine conversation, not a polished presentation but a raw confession. It includes praise and gratitude, because the person who has experienced the grace of God cannot be in His presence long without being moved to worship. It includes confession and repentance, because the person who genuinely understands the holiness of God cannot be in His presence without being aware of the distance between that holiness and their own actual condition. And it includes petition — specific, urgent, detailed petition for specific, urgent, detailed needs — because God has invited us to ask, and because the God who knows all things is also a God who chooses, in His mysterious wisdom, to work through the prayers of His people as instruments of His purposes.
I have found that the most powerful prayers I have ever prayed were not the polished, well-constructed prayers I delivered in public — though I tried to make those as honest and as substantial as I could. The most powerful prayers were the ones that no one else heard: the ones prayed in the darkness before dawn, the ones prayed in a ship's cabin with a storm raging outside, the ones prayed on my knees in some small room after a meeting that had not gone well and I was alone with my failure and my inadequacy and the One who remained faithful despite both. Those prayers were not eloquent. They were not structured. They were sometimes barely coherent — the groaning of a spirit that had run out of words and was simply holding on to God with both hands and refusing to let go.
I tell you this because I have met many people who gave up on prayer because they thought it required an eloquence they did not possess, or a faith more certain than the faith they had, or a spiritual condition more advanced than the condition they were in. This is not true. The prayer that God most honors is not the prayer that is most polished. It is the prayer that is most genuine. The prayer that comes from the very bottom of a genuine need, without pretense and without performance, from a soul that has nowhere else to go and no one else to go to — that prayer reaches the throne of grace with a power that the most eloquent liturgy cannot match.
I think of the tax collector in Jesus's parable — the man who could not even lift his eyes to heaven, who stood at the back of the temple and beat his breast and said only, God be merciful to me a sinner. Not a theological argument. Not a list of personal virtues. Not even a request for anything specific. Just the bare confession of need, addressed to the only One who could do anything about it. And Jesus said that man went home justified — not the Pharisee with his impressive prayer resume, but the broken, wordless, self-aware tax collector. (Luke 18:13-14 KJV): "And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other." That prayer. That posture. That bare, honest, self-emptied cry for mercy — that is the prayer that moves heaven. And every genuine prayer I have prayed in thirty-five years of ministry has been, at its core, some version of that same confession: God be merciful to me a sinner. Because that is what I am. That is what we all are. And that God is merciful — abundantly, freely, specifically, persistently merciful — is the one truth without which nothing else in the Christian life is possible.
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The Battle Unseen: Spiritual Warfare in the Ministry
There is a dimension of the Christian minister's life that is rarely discussed in polite company and almost never addressed in the public accounts of great ministries — the dimension of what I can only call spiritual warfare. Not in the theatrical, sensationalized sense that the word sometimes conjures in more excitable religious circles. In the plain, sober, scripturally grounded sense of a genuine ongoing battle between the purposes of God and the purposes of His adversary, fought out not only in the visible world of crowds and institutions and social forces but in the interior world of the minister's own mind and soul.
I have experienced temptation in every form that a man in my position is vulnerable to. The temptation to pride I have already described. There were also, in different seasons, the temptations to discouragement — that particular darkness that descends after a period of intense ministry when the body is exhausted and the visible fruit seems to have fallen below what the effort seemed to deserve, and the quiet voice of hopelessness whispers that perhaps it is not working, perhaps it never was, perhaps the whole enterprise is less than it appeared. I have sat in those darknesses. I have written letters from inside them that I am not entirely proud of now — letters that are more honest than elegant about the depths to which a minister's interior life can sometimes sink.
There were temptations to compromise — to soften the message in ways that would have made it more palatable to the people I most wanted to reach. The intelligent skeptics wanted me to moderate my claims about eternal judgment. The Reformed purists wanted me to stop offering the Gospel so freely to everyone. The Armenians wanted me to stop preaching election. The bishops wanted me to stop preaching in fields. Every direction offered me a version of the Gospel that would have been more comfortable to preach and more comfortable to receive. And every version would have been less than the whole Gospel, and therefore less than what the people before me actually needed.
I resisted those temptations most effectively, I found, not through the exercise of sheer willpower — I did not have enough willpower, and no one does — but through the regular, deliberate return to the primary sources. Back to the Bible, which does not soften or compromise. Back to the cross, which does not negotiate. Back to the moments when God had broken through in power — Kingswood, Cambuslang, Philadelphia, Northampton — and asking myself: was that real? Yes. It was real. Could it be reproduced by compromise? No. It could not. Therefore the message must remain what it has always been, however uncomfortable, and God must be trusted to use it as He has always used it.
I also found, in those later years, that the opposition from the enemy was most intense precisely when the most significant spiritual work was about to happen. This is a pattern that I believe every serious minister would recognize if they examined their own experience. The darkness before the dawn. The attack before the breakthrough. The exhaustion and the doubt and the sense of futility that arrives, with suspicious regularity, just before God does something remarkable. I learned — slowly and not without repeated lessons — not to interpret the intensity of the resistance as evidence that the work was failing. Often it was evidence that the work was about to succeed, and the enemy knew it before I did.
The Apostle Paul's description of the Christian's armor in the letter to the Ephesians was not, for me, a theological metaphor. It was a practical description of the reality I lived in every day of active ministry. (Ephesians 6:12 KJV): "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Principalities and powers. The rulers of darkness. These are not metaphors for sociological forces or psychological pressures, though they may operate through both. They are the actual, personal, intelligent opponents of the Gospel's advance in every generation. And the only armor that is any use against them is the full armor of God — the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the Gospel, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit. Not some of these. All of them. Not occasionally. Every day. The minister who goes into the field without this armor is not a brave man. He is a foolish one. But the minister who goes in wearing it, with the Word in his mouth and the Spirit in his heart and the promise of God's faithfulness as his only ground — that minister will find, as I found in Kingswood and in Philadelphia and in Edinburgh and in every field I ever stood in, that the enemy cannot ultimately prevail against what God has determined to do.
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Living Close to Heaven: The Deepening of Later Years
I want to close this chapter by describing something that I believe is one of the most undervalued aspects of the long Christian life — the deepening that happens, when a person is genuinely walking with God, in the later seasons of their journey. The early Christian life tends to be characterized by peaks and valleys, by dramatic swings between spiritual exhilaration and spiritual drought, by the intensity of a relationship still finding its footing. The later Christian life, if it is genuinely maturing, begins to have a different quality — not less intense, but more settled. Less dependent on the specific emotional texture of any given season, more rooted in the bedrock certainties that have been tested and proven over decades.
I want to be specific about what that bedrock looked like for me, because I think generalities about spiritual maturity are far less useful than honest, concrete descriptions of what it actually consists of. The bedrock for me was not a general sense of spiritual well-being. It was specific truths — truths that I had tested against specific crises and found to hold. God is sovereign. I had watched Him bring good out of the worst of my situations — the Wesley controversy, the difficult return of 1741, the loss of our infant son, the long years of physical decline — and I had never found an exception. God is faithful. He had promised things, through His Word, that I had then watched Him fulfill in my own experience so many times that the promises had ceased to feel theoretical and had become something much more like reliable facts about a Person I knew well. God is good. This was the hardest one, in the seasons of grief. But it was also, ultimately, the most deeply tested and the most deeply confirmed.
These truths — not feelings about these truths, but the truths themselves — were what remained when everything else was stripped away. In the darkness of a difficult night, when the feelings were wrong and the circumstances were hard and the future was unclear, these truths were still standing. They had stood through everything my life had thrown at them. And the person who has tested a truth against actual suffering and found it true in the testing has something that the person who has only believed it in favorable circumstances does not yet have: not just belief, but knowledge. The knowledge that comes through fire. The gold that comes out refined.
I found, in my forties and fifties, that I had less of the dramatic spiritual experiences of my twenties and thirties — fewer of the moments of overwhelming joy or devastating conviction that had marked the early years. But what I had in their place was something I would not have traded for any of those earlier experiences: a deep, quiet, absolutely settled confidence in the love of God that did not fluctuate with my feelings or my circumstances. A certainty that was not emotional but theological — grounded in what I had read in the Word and what I had seen in thirty years of watching God work in hundreds of lives in ways that could not be explained by any natural cause.
I found myself, in those later years, increasingly able to enter quickly into the presence of God in prayer — not because the discipline had become effortless, but because the path was so well worn. I had been walking it for so long that my feet knew the way even when my heart was cold. I found that the promises of Scripture had become, over time, something very close to personal correspondence — words addressed specifically to me, from Someone who knew me and loved me and had been keeping those promises faithfully for three decades. The freshness of the early years had been replaced by something more profound: the deep, secure intimacy of a long relationship with a faithful God.
I believe this deepening is available to every genuine believer who stays the course — who does not give up in the middle years when the fire seems low and the fruit seems scarce and the body is tired and the opposition seems endless. The man who perseveres finds, in the later years, that he has become something that no early season of dramatic spiritual experience could have made him: a person whose faith is not performance but nature, not discipline but character, not something he works to maintain but something he simply is. (Job 23:10 KJV): "But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold." Gold refined by fire. That is the product of the long ministry — of the sustained, faithful, costly, unglamorous, daily work of following Jesus Christ across an entire lifetime. I commend the long run to you. Not because it is easy. Because it is worth it. Because the gold that comes out of the furnace of a long and tested faith is worth every degree of heat it took to refine it.
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The Voice of the Great Awakening
— George Whitefield —