A Retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ

Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. JEREMIAH 29:12–13

A frontier boyhood. Charles Grandison Finney was born on the twenty-ninth of August, 1792, at Warren, in Litchfield County, Connecticut. When he was about two his family moved west to Oneida County, New York, then largely wilderness, and later further north again, to the country near Sackets Harbor on Lake Ontario. His parents were not professing Christians. He recalled in his Memoirs that he seldom heard a sermon, and that the few he heard from wandering preachers were so ignorant that the people laughed at them on the way home. He went to the common schools, taught school himself, and spent some years in New Jersey and New England teaching and studying. He thought of going to Yale, and was talked out of it. He never went to college.

The law office at Adams. In 1818 he entered a law office at Adams, in Jefferson County, as a student. There, for the first time, he sat under a settled, educated ministry. The Presbyterian pastor, George W. Gale, had trained at Princeton and preached a strict Calvinism. But his law books kept quoting the Bible, and so he bought one, the first he had ever owned, and began to read it alongside Blackstone. He attended the church’s prayer meeting, and was troubled that the people prayed for revival week after week and confessed that nothing came. When they asked whether he wanted them to pray for him, he told them no, because he did not see that God answered their prayers. Yet he kept reading, and slowly became convinced that the Bible was the Word of God.

The woods above the village. In the autumn of 1821 he resolved to settle the question of his soul. For two days he read and prayed in secret, so ashamed of being seen that he stopped up the keyhole of his door and threw his law books over his Bible when anyone came in. On the morning of the tenth of October, on his way to the office, he seemed to hear the question put to him whether he was trying to work out a righteousness of his own. He saw, he wrote, that salvation was an offer to be accepted, full and complete in Christ. He turned aside into a wood north of the village, crept into a hollow among fallen trees, and knelt. He had vowed, “I will give my heart to God, or I never will come down from there.” At first he could not pray at all. Then the sound of rustling leaves showed him his pride — that he was ashamed to be found on his knees before God — and it broke him. A promise came to his mind, the words of Jeremiah above, and he took God at His word. He came back to the village by dinner time, so quiet in mind that he feared he had grieved the Spirit away.

Waves of liquid love. That evening, alone in the law office, he seemed to meet the Lord Jesus face to face and fell weeping at His feet. Then, as he turned back to the fire, he received what he called “a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost.” It came, he said, “in waves and waves of liquid love,” until he cried out that he would die if it went on. The next morning, when a client arrived to remind him of a case to be tried at ten, Finney answered, “Deacon B——, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and I cannot plead yours.” He never practised law again.

The young evangelist. His conversion shook Adams. Within days many of the young people he had led in the choir were converted, and his own parents soon followed. He studied theology under Gale, and their disagreement was fierce and long; Finney would not accept Gale’s teaching on the atonement, original sin or human inability, and said so. The presbytery licensed him to preach in March 1824, and he began work as a missionary in the rough settlements of northern New York. In October that year he married Lydia Andrews. A few days after the wedding he set out to fetch their household goods, found revival breaking out at Evans Mills and Perch River, and did not go back for her; he sent someone else.

The western revivals. From 1824 to 1827 revival followed him through Evans Mills, Antwerp, Gouverneur, De Kalb, Western, Rome, Utica, Auburn and Troy. He preached without notes, in the language of the street and the courtroom, addressed his hearers as “you”, and pressed for immediate decision. He was helped by men of prayer, above all the old minister Daniel Nash, known as Father Nash, who often went ahead of him and gave himself to intercession. At a cotton factory near Utica the workers were so moved when he walked through the mill that the owner ordered it stopped, saying it was more important that souls should be saved than that the factory should run. But his methods and his theology alarmed many in New England, and in July 1827 a convention met at New Lebanon, New York, where Lyman Beecher and Asahel Nettleton confronted him. It settled little, but the opposition lost much of its force.

Rochester. After labours in Wilmington, Philadelphia, Reading and New York, Finney went in September 1830 to Rochester, a booming town on the Erie Canal, and stayed six months. Lawyers, merchants and their families came forward at what was later called the anxious seat. The effects were felt through the town’s business and social life, and the awakening spread through the region. Years later Lyman Beecher, once his opponent, told him it was the greatest work of God in so short a time that the world had seen.

New York and the lectures. In 1832 Finney became pastor of a Free Presbyterian church meeting in the Chatham Street Chapel in New York City, a former theatre. His health was failing, and in 1834 he took a voyage to the Mediterranean. On his return he gave, on Friday evenings through the winter, the Lectures on Revivals of Religion. They were reported in the New York Evangelist and published as a book in 1835. His friends built the Broadway Tabernacle for him, and in 1836 he left the Presbyterian Church for the Congregationalists.

Oberlin. In 1835 he accepted a call to teach theology at the new Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio, on condition that it admit students without regard to colour. The college was poor, surrounded by forest and widely hated for its abolitionism. There, with Asa Mahan and others, he developed the teaching on sanctification that became known as Oberlin perfectionism, and was accused of heresy on every side. He published his Lectures on Systematic Theology in the 1840s. He served as pastor of the church at Oberlin for many years and as president of the college from 1851 to 1866, while still travelling to preach, including two long visits to Britain between 1849 and 1860.

Loss and the last years. Lydia died in 1847. He married twice more, and was widowed again. In 1867 and 1868, at the urging of the Oberlin trustees, he wrote his Memoirs, frank about his opponents and defensive of his measures and doctrine. He died at Oberlin on the sixteenth of August, 1875, less than a fortnight before his eighty-third birthday. The Memoirs appeared the following year.

He left an extraordinary legacy. Tens of thousands had been converted under his preaching. He had shaped American evangelicalism and its habit of calling for public decision more than any man of his century. He had also left a theology that many of the heirs of his revivals could not follow, and a region, the Burned-over District, that had been scorched as well as warmed. He would have wanted to be judged by one thing: whether people obeyed the gospel. On that measure, the lawyer who took the Lord’s retainer never stopped pleading.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Finney’s pride nearly kept him from God in the woods. What would you be ashamed to be seen doing before God? Do it this week.

2. He was converted when he stopped trying to feel something and took God at His word. Find one promise that fits your need and act on it.

3. He had to leave a profession he loved. Is there anything you are holding back from Christ because you have invested so much in it?

4. Behind his preaching stood people like Daniel Nash, praying unseen. Whose ministry could you carry in hidden prayer?

5. Read the chapter of his Memoirs on his conversion in the Ochorus library, slowly, and mark what struck you.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You met Your servant Charles Finney in the woods when he stopped hiding, and You broke his pride with Your love.

Break mine. Let me not be ashamed to be found on my knees before You.

You have retained me to plead Your cause in the world. Help me to set aside whatever competes with that commission.

And give me grace to take You at Your word, as he did, and to be found by You when I seek You with all my heart. Amen.