Conclusion

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. 2 TIMOTHY 4:7

Fourteen chapters can make it look as though George Whitefield preached a great many things. He preached one thing, and everything else was that one thing applied. The one thing is this: true religion is a work of God in the heart, by which a sinner is born again, joined to Christ and clothed in His righteousness.

Follow it through and the whole shape appears. The new birth is that work begun. The method of grace is the way God brings a sinner to it, stripping away every false peace. Christ our righteousness is its ground, the robe that covers us before God. The indwelling Spirit is its life. The almost Christian is the man who has everything but it; the unconverted minister is the preacher who has never known it. The open field is where Whitefield carried it when the churches would not have it, and the offer of Christ to all is its open door. Walking with God, searching the Scriptures, intercession and family religion are the ordinary means by which the life it begins is kept and fed. And friendship across disagreement is what it looks like when two people who have received it look at one another.

The danger of this book

If you have read this far, you are in some danger, and Whitefield would have named it first. It is possible to admire the new birth without being born again. It is possible to learn the method of grace and never have peace spoken to your heart. It is possible to read a whole book about an evangelist and remain, in his own terrible phrase, an almost Christian.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

So the plainest counsel this book can give is this. Do not close it with a vague sense of having been stirred. Ask Whitefield’s question of yourself: has God done a work in my heart? If you are not sure, go to Christ, as Whitefield urged thousands to go, without anything of your own. If you are sure, then go back to the chapter that made you least comfortable, and take its application points slowly over the coming months.

Two things to carry

First, carry the question of the new birth. Not as a source of anxiety but as a matter of first importance. You do not need to remember the day it happened. You do need to know whether Christ lives in you — whether you trust Him, love Him and are being changed by Him. Everything else can wait for that.

Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates? 2 CORINTHIANS 13:5

Second, carry the open door. Whitefield’s gospel was for colliers and countesses, for the respectable and the notorious, for the young women of Fetter Lane and the enslaved of the southern colonies. There is no one to whom you may not offer Christ, and no one to whom He will not come. The weariest are the most welcome.

A last word about the man

We have been honest about his failures. He censured other ministers harshly and rashly in his early years, and he admitted it. He was an actor by gift, and the drama of his preaching sometimes carried his hearers further than the Spirit did; he knew that too. He neglected his home. And above all, he campaigned for slavery in Georgia and owned enslaved people to support his orphan house, knowing the trade to be wrong. That last failure is not a blemish on an otherwise spotless life. It is a grave sin, and his admirers should grieve over it rather than explain it away.

None of this has been said to diminish the good he did. It has been said because his own gospel requires it. A man whose whole message was that our best duties are filthy rags before God, that self-righteousness is the last idol, and that only Christ’s righteousness can stand, cannot be honoured by pretending he had a righteousness of his own. He would have been the first to say that whatever was good in him was grace.

Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy, and for thy truth’s sake. PSALM 115:1

On the last day of his life, weary and ill, he preached for nearly two hours in the open air. Before he went out, he is remembered as praying that, though he was weary in his Lord’s work, he was not weary of it, and asking to speak for Him once more in the fields. Early the next morning he died, and was buried, as he had asked, beneath a pulpit. It is a fitting resting place. For thirty-four years the servitor from the Bell Inn had stood up wherever he could find a place to stand and told whoever would listen that they must be born again, and that Christ was offered to them freely. The message outlived the voice. It is offered to you.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Answer Whitefield’s question honestly before God: has He done a work in my heart? Write down your answer and why.

2. Return to the chapter of this book that made you least comfortable, and choose one application point to work on for a month.

3. Think of one person you have never told about Christ. Pray for an opportunity, and take it when it comes.

4. Ask God to show you any blind spot, like Whitefield’s, that your society or your good causes have hidden from you.

5. Choose one of Whitefield’s sermons from the Reader’s Guide that follows, and read it this week.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have read about the new birth, the righteousness You give and the Spirit You send. Do not let me be only a reader.

If I am not born again, bring me to new birth; if I am, carry on the work You have begun.

Give me a heart as open as Your invitation, and eyes clearer than Your servant’s were to the wrongs around me.

And as You gave George Whitefield strength to preach You to the last, give me grace to follow You to the end. Amen.