George Whitefield is perhaps the most famous American preacher that you’ve never heard of. When we think of great American preachers we might name Billy Graham, or Rick Warren, or to go back a little ways we might name a host of others like Charles Spurgeon or Jonathan Edwards. None of them, arguably, had more impact on the spread of Christianity in America than Whitefield.
In truth, Whitefield was probably the most famous religious figure of the 18th century. Born to a poor family in Gloucester, England, Whitefield got interested in the theater at an early age and put himself through college at Oxford by waiting on the tables of wealthier students. While he was at Oxford, he fell in with a group of other students who called themselves “The Holy Club”—a group led by John and Charles Wesley, the founders of the Methodist movement. Under the influence of the Wesley brothers, Whitefield became a zealous Christian and became ordained a deacon in the Anglican church.
As he began to preach, he found that crowds began to gather—attracted, no doubt, by the theatrical flare he gave his sermons. That was unusual in an age where preaching was generally dull recitation from the reading of notes. Whitefield, on the other hand, portrayed the lives of biblical characters as an actor would. He cried out, he danced, he screamed. One of the most famous actors in England at the time, David Garrick, said, “I would give a hundred guineas if I could say ‘Oh’ like Mr. Whitefield.” He was that good.
So good, that he came to the American colonies on a preaching tour and caused quite a stir. Thousands came to hear him preach. Jonathan Edwards, who became the leading figure of what we now call the Great Awakening, learned much from Whitefield—though Edwards’ style was much more sedate. His famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sounds like fire and brimstone, but was actually delivered in a quiet, flat monotone as Edwards pored over his notes. When you went to see Whitefield, however, you were in for a show. Some of the crowds were estimated at about 30,000—all in the open air, which is a testament to how powerful Whitefield’s preaching and voice must have been. Benjamin Franklin, who was not very religious himself, said of Whitefield:
I happened… to attend one of his Sermons, in the Course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a Collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my Pocket a Handful of Copper Money, three or four silver Dollars, and five Pistoles [Spanish coins] in Gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the Coppers. Another Stroke of his Oratory made me asham’d of that, and determin’d me to give the Silver; and he finish’d so admirably, that I emptied my Pocket wholly into the Collector’s Dish, Gold and all.
You could make the argument, then, that it’s because of George Whitefield that the sermon has generally considered to be the centerpiece of American Protestant evangelical worship ever since. In my doctoral research I confirmed that preaching is the number one thing congregations are concerned about when there’s a pastoral transition. For good or ill, visitors to a church tend to evaluate it based on the preaching. Famous preachers in our culture still have a lot of pull, like Rick Warren hosting both candidates for President in his church a few years ago, and if Whitefield was around in our day he’d be on the cover of Time magazine fairly regularly.
But, really, it’s always been this way. The central figures of the New Testament were all preachers. The book of Acts is full of sermons by the apostles, Paul’s preaching got him an audience in the ancient Roman world among crowds of people. Wherever the good news is preached effectively, people tend to gather. God promised it would be that way in Isaiah 55:11—God’s Word goes out and doesn’t return to him empty. The good news always bears fruit.
But as Jesus says in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13), the fruitfulness of the harvest often depends on the receptivity of the hearers. The seeds of the kingdom get sown when the Word is preached, but it takes rich soil in order to make it grow, flourish, and mutiply. We preachers are taught in seminary how to study the Word, to interpret it, and to present it. We spend hours each week wrestling with the Holy Spirit in prayer to get the Word into words to be delivered to the congregation as good news.
For me, it’s every Thursday—time spent in my basement study at home with Bibles, books, and commentaries strewn everywhere. It’s both my favorite and most stressful time of the week as I think and pray about how the sermon will land on the ears of the hearers.
But like we said last week that most of us have never really been taught how to worship, most of us have also never really learned how to listen to sermons for maximum benefit. That includes us preacher types, who are really good at preparing sermons but not as good at listening to them without thinking we could do it better! In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus warns his disciples to “pay attention to how you listen” so that you might become “the good soil… the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.”
George Whitefield was concerned about cultivating good soil, and that the crowds who came to hear him would also listen carefully and intently to the Word of God in the preaching, so he preached and published a sermon titled “Directions on How to Hear Sermons.” I found these helpful and I’m hoping they will help you as you get ready to come to worship each week.
The first direction Whitefield gives is this: “Come to hear [the sermon] not out of curiosity, but from a sincere desire to know and do your duty. To enter His house merely to have our ears entertained, and not our hearts reformed, must certainly be highly displeasing to the Most High God, as well as unprofitable to ourselves.”
Preaching, at its best, is about call and response. We come not to evaluate the sermon or the preacher, or out of a sense of wanting to be religiously entertained for a while, but rather to hear the Word of God and obey it. As I’ve often said, there are two questions you need to ask at the end of every sermon: “What did God say to me?” and “What am I going to do about it?” It doesn’t matter if the oration is exciting like Whitefield’s or flat like that of Jonathan Edwards, or squeaky and fast like mine—God’s Word is in here somewhere, and you’ll hear it if you come prepared to receive it. Even the most poorly prepared and discombobulated sermon can be powerful if our hearts are opened by the Spirit to hear it.
That leads to Whitefield’s second piece of advice: Give diligent heed to the things that are spoken from the Word of God. If a king or President were to issue a life or death proclamation, and your survival depended on whether or not you listened to it and did what was necessary, you’d put aside everything else to listen to it. So, says Whitefield, “Shall we not pay the same respect to the King of kings and Lord of lords, and lend an attentive ear to His ministers when they are declaring, in His name, how our pardon, peace, and happiness may be secured?”
The Scriptures offer us the word of life—in them is contained everything necessary for salvation. The reading of the Word each week should cause us to lean in and listen for the truth that will save us and save the world.
But while that Word brings us the good news of salvation, it can also bring us the bad news of our own sin and idolatry. If all the sermons you are hearing make you feel comfortable, happy, and content with the way things are, then you’re probably not hearing the Word of God! As Paul says in our New Testament Lesson from I Corinthians 1, “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God…[for we] proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Do you hear that? When a sermon sounds like foolishness when compared to the way we normally think, we have to listen in even more closely. Good preaching, like the Word of God from which it comes, will often poke at our idols—and the best preaching comes from preachers who have had their own idols poked first. “The Word of God is living and active,” says the writer of Hebrews. “It’s sharper than any two edged sword.” It’s a word that will cut through our pride, our worldview, our idols, and our way of life. It’s like surgery for the soul—and surgery usually hurts.
When people say, “That was a good sermon” it usually means they enjoyed it on some level. I always like it when people say, “That sermon messed with me” because, well, it messed with me first! Scripture messes with us and good preaching will always meddle in our lives by giving us the good news that overcomes the bad news.
But how do you know whether the word you’re receiving is from God? Friends, that’s why I encourage you to bring your Bible to worship every week. The minute you open it, you have the opportunity to check the preacher’s work. The less Bible there is in a sermon, the more BS you can expect to hear. It’s irresponsible to sit and listen to a sermon without checking it against the Scriptures. Yes, there may be times you disagree over the interpretation, but when in doubt, the Scripture itself is there for you to explore and study for yourself. Good preaching is vital to the worship of the community and enhances our ability to hear the good news, but it’s never a substitute for your own daily engagement with the Word of God!
Next, Whitefield turns to the subject of the preacher himself . “Do not entertain the least prejudice against the preacher,” he says, but also “be careful not to depend too much on the preacher or think too highly of him (or her) than you ought to think.” We touched on this a little bit last week. Jesus said of the Pharisees, “Do what they tell you, but don’t do what they do.” Even if the preacher is a hypocrite, that doesn’t mean that the Word of God isn’t being preached. Preachers do not speak on their own, but in Christ’s name—and a lot of people have been converted to Christ under bad preaching from cracked and broken preachers because God’s Spirit is the one that makes the preaching effective.
Let me tell you, in every church I’ve ever served I’ve had people who have hated my guts. In one church, a lady came every week, sat in the back pew wearing sunglasses, never looking at me directly. And yet she was there every Sunday—apparently she had somehow decided that even though I was an idiot, the Word of God was somehow being preached. There are lots of church hoppers out there who bounce from place to place looking for the perfect preacher and the perfect church—I always say, “If you find them, let me know. I’ll drop what I’m doing and join it myself!” God’s Word finds its way outward even from people who have no business preaching it. If you don’t believe me, just thumb through your Bible—Moses, Gideon, Samson, Peter, and even Paul, just to name a few, were completely unqualified and yet God qualified them with his Word.
On the flip side, we shouldn’t hold preachers up on pedestals, either. We live in a celebrity culture where there are lots of celebrity preachers with bigger congregations, nicer buildings, and better hair (or any hair). It’s easy to compare the sermons of our local church preacher to that of a celebrity preacher who’s on TV, on the radio, or on a podcast, or compare them to the preacher in our last church. People get attached to preachers and preachers get attached to fame. It was as true in Whitefield’s day as it is today and even in Paul’s day. Earlier in I Corinthians 1, Paul addresses the division in the church over which preacher they preferred. Some said Apollos was best, others Peter, and others Paul—it was like a preaching popularity contest. And Paul says, Wait, “has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” No, he says. In fact, Christ sent me to “proclaim the gospel and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.”
Every preacher is merely an ambassador, a messenger for Christ. As Whitefield put it, “Other men may preach the gospel better than I, but no man can preach a better gospel.” We don’t preach ourselves, says Paul, but Christ crucified. If you listen for Christ in the sermon, it won’t matter who’s preaching. And if you don’t hear Christ, then it’s not preaching at all no matter how good it sounds.
Good preaching is not just about Christ, however, it’s about what we will do with what Christ has told us. “Make particular application in your hearts of everything that is delivered,” says Whitefield. It’s so easy to think that the sermon we’re hearing is for someone else instead of for us. When the disciples were confronted with the reality that one of them was going to betray Jesus, their first response was, “Is it I?” That’s a great question to have in your mind as you hear a sermon. We hear the word and we turn it on ourselves, and then we repent—we change our thinking—and believe—we change our way of being and living. Good preaching will not just stir our hearts, it will move us, under the Spirit’s direction, toward a new trajectory of life. Again, those two questions: What is God saying to me? What am I going to do about it?
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Whitefield says that we should “Pray to the Lord, before, during, and after every sermon, to endue the minister with power to speak, and to grant you a will and ability to put into practice what [the Lord] shall show from the Book of God to be your duty.” Prayer is the best preparation for worship and for hearing a sermon. Pray that God will reveal his Word and will to you today. Pray for the preacher who delivers the sermon (trust me, I need it!). A good friend of mine who preaches in the African Methodist Episcopal Church jokes that the ladies in his congregation will often pray out loud right in the middle of the sermon, shouting, “Help him, Jesus, help him!” We need the help (and the silent prayer). And then after worship, pray that God would strengthen and encourage you toward transformation.
George Whitefield was a great preacher—but every great preacher is only great because he or she works with good material. Let us come together each week to hear the Word of the Lord, expecting that no matter the circumstances, that word will not return to him empty!
