Reference; Mansfield, Stephen, Forgotten Founding Father. Highland Books Cumberland House. Nashville, TN: 2001.
At my 50th high school reunion in 2010 at the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire I was walking near my hotel on the main campus of Front Street, viewed a low marble monument and became captivated by the life of evangelist George Whitefield. The monument indicated that on Sep. 29, 1770 Rev. George Whitefield preached his last sermon of perhaps a stunning total 18,000 sermons in his life time at this exact spot in Exeter. He spoke, "Works! Works! A man get to heaven by works! I would as soon think of climbing to the moon on a rope of sand." He preached a very simple message of salvation through grace, the unmerited favor of God. When he finished, he rode his horse to Newburyport, Massachusetts and died that night!
Whitefield had been born in Gloucester, England in 1714 in Bell's Inn, preached his first sermon at St. Mary de Crypt Church a few blocks away and attended Pembroke College at Oxford. We walked past all three sites on a trip to England. Whitefield's teaching and preaching was needed in England and the American colonies. Darkness had covered England in the decades prior to his birth. Mansfield wrote, "In 1662 an anti-Puritan Parliament ejected more than two thousand Puritan ministers from their pulpits...rationalism...and Deism, transformed God into an absentee landlord, Jesus, into a deluded fool, and the Bible into a collection of empty myths." England had begun a period of newfound wealth "with all the soul-numbing entanglements of materialism in tow." England had become "a land of spreading spiritual darkness." Into this environment our Lord brought George Whitefield to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus all across England.
Then he began several trips by ship across the Atlantic and Whitefield's preaching in the colonies was of such importance and impactful that he became "the most famous man in the world." He had been the principal representative of the Christian faith and "...had led the great revival from Georgia to New England . Tens of thousands had flocked to hear him as he roared the glories of the risen Christ." Five years after his death the stirrings of freedom were beginning to be heard in America and the United States of America was birthed. George Whitefield had become a "Forgotten Founding Father." He had been a major reason the colonists had risen up to break the chains of the British rule.
Author Stephen Mansfield, with whom I had visited by phone once, wrote that freedom for Americans and our War of Independence "...grew in large part from the truth he preached. He was their spiritual father, the man who called them to Christ and Christ's purpose for their land. It was his vision of freedom for both soul and society..." that we revolutionaries fought to defend and achieve. George Whitefield with "...a preacher's courageous heart for God,..." began the fires of revival for a land that became a beacon of light proclaiming freedom from oppression of a secular empire. His preaching taught that freedom from oppression of sin and unforgiveness brought freedom from the shackles of the evils of the material world. A great privilege of my life was to have "stumbled across" a monument near where I had attended school for the eleventh grade of my education.
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