The Method of Grace

They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace. JEREMIAH 6:14

Of all Whitefield’s sermons, The Method of Grace is the one most often reprinted, and it is the best single place to hear him. He preached it in the open air in Scotland, in a churchyard, to people who had been baptised, catechised and brought up in a Reformed church. His text is the complaint of Jeremiah against the false prophets of his day, who told a sinful people that all was well. Whitefield’s question is simple and alarming: how does a sinner come to true peace with God, and how can he tell it from a false one?

Religion is an inward thing

He begins with a caution. He takes it for granted, he says, that his hearers believe religion to be an inward thing, a work in the heart wrought by the Spirit of God. If they do not, they will not understand a word he is about to say. The kingdom of God is within. He is a Jew who is one inwardly. And so, before he describes the way to peace, he warns that there is a false peace, spoken by false physicians, which heals the wound slightly and leaves the poison inside.

There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. PROVERBS 14:12

Then, like a surgeon, he lays out what must happen before a sinner can speak peace to his own heart. He names five things.

Four convictions

First, a person must be brought to see and feel and mourn over his actual sins — the particular transgressions of his life, in thought, word and deed. The law requires perfect obedience, and a single failure brings its curse.

Second, conviction must go deeper, to the root: original sin, the corruption of nature that every child of Adam brings into the world. Whitefield argues for it with a characteristic flash of the imagination. Look at the world, he says, and ask whether this is the paradise in which God placed man. Everything is out of order. Even the wolf and the tiger rising against us, he suggests, are a kind of witness that we have sinned against their Master.

Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. PSALM 51:5

Third — and here he goes further than most preachers — a sinner must be troubled not only for his sins but for his best duties and performances. When a soul is first awakened, he says, it runs straight back to the covenant of works. Like Adam and Eve sewing fig leaves, the sinner flies to his prayers and reforms and patches up a righteousness of his own. Whitefield will have none of it. A sinner must be brought to see that “God may damn you for the best prayer you ever put up.” It is a startling sentence, and he means it to startle. He is not saying prayer is worthless. He is saying that nothing we do can be offered to God as a reason for Him to accept us. Our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.

But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. ISAIAH 64:6

Fourth, there is one sin that must trouble us above all, which few think they are guilty of. He calls it “the reigning, the damning sin of the Christian world”: the sin of unbelief. His hearers, he knows, will be offended. Are they not born in Scotland, in a Reformed country? Do they not go to church and keep up family prayer? But a historical faith, a belief that the Bible is true and Christ is the Son of God, is not saving faith. “I am persuaded the devil believes more of the Bible than most of us do,” he says. The devil believes and trembles.

Closing with Christ

Only after all this does Whitefield reach the fifth and last thing: a sinner must be enabled to lay hold by faith on the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. Then, and only then, he shall have peace. The invitation of Christ is to the weary and heavy laden, and it is received by coming and believing.

Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. ROMANS 5:1

He asks his hearers whether they have ever been married to Christ, whether Christ has ever given Himself to them, whether peace has ever flowed into their hearts like a river. And then he turns to the different groups before him. To those who have found peace he says, All hail! Nothing can now happen to them but what is the effect of God’s love. But even to them he adds a caution worth keeping: “beware of resting on your first conversion.” Young believers should be looking for fresh discoveries of Christ every moment.

To the rest he pleads. They are sleeping in a false peace; he comes to them, he says, as the angel came to Lot, to take them by the hand. Come away, he cries, and “fly, fly, fly for your lives to Jesus Christ.” Beg God to convince you of sin; beg Him to give you faith.

Where care is needed

The Method of Grace is a great sermon, but it can be misread. Whitefield describes a sequence — actual sin, original sin, the sin of our duties, unbelief, then faith — and some readers have taken it as a ladder that must be climbed rung by rung before anyone may come to Christ. That would turn grace into a new kind of work: the work of being sufficiently convicted. Whitefield himself did not intend it so. The invitation of Christ is to all who are weary, and conviction and faith often come together, not in neat order. No one needs to feel their sin enough before they are allowed to trust the Saviour.

Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. JOHN 6:37

Some of his language, too — that God may damn us for our best prayer, that his hearers are children of the devil — is deliberately harsh. It was the language of an age of plain speaking, and it was meant to wake the complacent. Read it in the spirit in which it was spoken: not as contempt but, as he says himself, out of love to their souls.

The physician’s question

The deepest point of The Method of Grace is that there is such a thing as false peace, and it is very common. It sounds like religion. It goes to church. It says, I have always believed. Whitefield’s question to his Scottish hearers is the same question he would ask us: has God spoken peace to you, or have you only spoken it to yourself?

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God. ROMANS 8:16

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask where your peace with God comes from. Can you name the ground of it, or is it simply a feeling that all is well?

2. Think about your best religious duties. Are you, in any way, offering them to God as a reason to accept you? Confess it and rest on Christ alone.

3. Distinguish in your own heart between believing facts about Christ and trusting Him. Which describes you?

4. If you have peace with God, heed Whitefield’s caution and do not live on your first conversion. Seek a fresh sight of Christ this week.

5. Read The Method of Grace in the Ochorus library, slowly, aloud if you can.

A PRAYER

Lord God, do not let me be healed slightly. If my peace is false, break it; if it is true, deepen it.

Show me my sins, my corrupted nature and the pride that hides in my best duties. Forgive the unbelief that takes Your word as fact and never trusts it.

Clothe me in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, and speak peace to my heart Yourself.

Keep me from resting on what You did in me long ago, and give me fresh sight of my Saviour every day. Amen.