Selected Sermons of George Whitefield

It is a collection of fifty-nine sermons from George Whitefield, the great preacher of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening. Plain, direct, and aimed straight at the conscience, they show why crowds no building could hold gathered in the open fields to hear him, and they preserve the substance of a preaching ministry that helped kindle revival on both sides of the Atlantic.

George Whitefield was an English evangelist of the eighteenth century and one of the founders, with the Wesleys, of the evangelical revival. He crossed the Atlantic thirteen times and preached in the open air to enormous crowds in Britain and America, becoming perhaps the most famous preacher of his age and a central figure in the Great Awakening.

Plain, urgent, and pressed home to the conscience. Whitefield assumed his hearers needed to be born again and preached to bring them to that new birth, using vivid, direct language and earnest appeal rather than ornate argument. His sermons aim not to inform but to convert, and even in print they carry the directness that moved his vast field-congregations.

The great themes of the gospel: the new birth, justification by faith in Christ, the danger of a merely formal religion, and the free offer of salvation to sinners. Above all he preached the necessity of being born again, a message he returned to constantly, calling nominal Christians to a real and inward conversion.

Because the crowds who came to hear him were far too large for any church, and because he wanted to reach the unchurched masses who would never enter one. Open-air preaching, then unusual and controversial, let him address thousands at once — miners, labourers, and the poor — and it became a hallmark of the revival he helped lead.

A central one. Whitefield's tours through the American colonies drew immense crowds and helped spark the widespread revival known as the Great Awakening, uniting scattered colonies in a common religious experience. His preaching, alongside that of men like Jonathan Edwards, made him one of the best-known figures in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world.

Anyone interested in the preaching of the Great Awakening, in the history of revival, or in plain, earnest gospel proclamation. Preachers in particular have long studied Whitefield for his directness and passion, and any reader will find in these sermons the urgent evangelistic voice that stirred a generation.

With any sermon that draws them, since each stands on its own — though the sermons on the new birth go to the heart of Whitefield's message and are a natural place to start. Read a few at a time and aloud if possible, for these were spoken words meant to reach the conscience, and something of their original power survives on the page.