11/07/2022 – “7 More Men and the Secret of Their Greatness” by Eric Metaxas // George Whitefield (1714 – 1770) – To say the man who died was an evangelist is almost to do him an injustice. It would be like saying Homer or Dante was a ‘writer’ or Washington or Lincoln a ‘politician’….”
The seven men profiled by Eric Metals in this book are: Martin Luther, George Whitfield, George Washington Carver, General William Booth, Sergeant Alvin York, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Billy Graham. The inside cover notes: “Heroes have always been crucial to inspire us toward greatness. But in recent decades, examples of valor and integrity have become scarcer, and therefore more vital than ever… Each man evinces a particular quality: the courage to surrender himself to a higher purpose, sacrificing something dear to him for the good of others… The long-awaited follow-up to the acclaimed Seven Men is a gallery of great lives worthy of emulation.”
So, let me share some excerpts from the George Whitefield chapter, in hopes that you might read it in its entirety, so as to walk away better for it:
“Two and half centuries ago — on the morning of September 30, 1770 – a fifty-five year old man took his last breath in a home in Newburyport, Massachusetts. In no time, word of his passing went around the world, and encomiums were soon trumpeted from places as far away as Savannah, Georgia, where he had built an orphanage thirty years earlier, and London, where his old friend John Wesley preached a funeral sermon before a rapt ‘immense multitude.’…
“In this men’s relatively brief life, he crossed the Atlantic thirteen times, preached eighteen thousand sermons, and gave twelve thousand other talks. The world he left in his wake, in which the American colonies were on the verge of declaring independence from Great Britain, was profoundly different from the one he entered back in 1714, when the idea of independence wasn’t yet a gleam in any American’s eyes. But owing to this man’s preaching, this great sea change in history would occur. But before we go back to the beginning of his life, it’s worth first entering a scene at the docks in Philadelphia when he came to the American colonies for the second time and began a preaching tour that launched what we now call ‘the First Great Awakening.’ “…
“It took three decades of his tireless preaching, but by the time he died in 1770, he was the single figure everyone in the colonies knew and thought of as a celebrity. In fact, by the time he died, it is estimated that 80 percent of Americans had heard him preach at least once in person. As a result of his years among them, the colonies were united in a way that was unthinkable when he arrived, and their people so changed their attitudes toward authority and toward monarchy that they became a different kind of people than had ever before existed in the world. The small could on the horizon had become a torrential downpour.”
” – For one thing, the ideas that everyone could have a direct relationship with God and that all were equal before God led to the idea that earthly authorities could be judged and should be judged… So Whitefield’s preaching – by causing people to look directly upward to God — greatly tempered their fear of worldly authority and went a long way toward solidifying what we see today as American character… Because of Whitefield, the colonies had become united as never before; and their citizens had a far greater sense of how their Christian faith could – and should – lead to a form of government that was ‘of the people, by the the people, and for the people’ and that guaranteed liberty and justice for all.”
Soli Deo Gloria!