Prayers for Safe Travels and Breakthroughs

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Micah 2:13 The Breaker [the Messiah] will go up before them. They will break through, pass in through the gate and go out through it, and their King will pass on before them, the Lord at their head.

Kristy Whittington, our resident missionary, is returning from Africa this week and should be on American soil by February 28. Could you keep her in your prayers for safe travels?

Also, our mission team leadership has received the following emergency email from our director of missions on the ground in Nicaragua. She wrote: Dear Bethany Friends, The church that was going to sponsor your team to get into the country as a group has not been able to obtain their government paperwork. The government now requires churches and non-profits to register every two months!  It’s ridiculous bureaucracy that is hard for churches/organizations to achieve. Then, when they don’t have the proper paperwork, they are technically operating illegally and the government uses this reason to shut them down. We have another option that we are pursuing but we REALLY need prayers for this to happen quickly! Thank you, Naomi

Soooo, as you can see Kristy and our Nicaragua Mission Outreach desperately needs your prayers.

Thank you and have a great week.

Rend the Heavens

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Frank Di Pietro: ” The Great Commission is not an option to be considered; it is a command to be obeyed.” – Hudson Taylor

“The Will of God – nothing less, nothing more, nothing else.” – F.E. Marsh

“Will the heathen who have never heard the Gospel be saved? It is more the question with me whether we – who have the Gospel and fail to give it to those who have not – can be saved?” – C.H. Spurgeon

“If God calls you to be a missionary, don’t stoop to be a king.” – C. H. Spurgeon

“Never pity missionaries; envy them. They are where the action is – where life and death, sin and grace, heaven and hell converge.” – Robert C. Shannon

“My son set out as a missionary of Christ; but alas! He has dwindled down to a mere British ambassador.” – William Carey

“If I had 1000 lives, I’d give them all for China.” – Hudson Taylor

George Whitefield: The Opposition Grows

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Di Pietro: “The authorities and Anglican power brokers were intimidated by his ministry. They felt something had to be done to stop him. They drew the line in the sand and said they were not going to allow his efforts to go unchallenged. Some New England pastors wrongly claimed that Whitefield destroyed, “New Englands’ orderly parish system, communities, and even families.” A prominent newspaper editor in Charleston, South Carolina labeled him, “blasphemous, uncharitable, and unreasonable.” In many of the Colonial pulpits, Whitefield was accused of being an “imposter, a devil, the beast, the man of sin, the antiChrist.” In 1757, while preaching in Dublin, Ireland, a huge Roman Catholic mob rioted and attacked him. These out-of-control people wounded Whitefield severely and smashed his portable pulpit. Opponents threw anything they could get their hands on – rocks, feces, rotten food, and even dead cats. On one occasion, Whitefield was almost killed by a man who beat him with a brass-headed cane. Another time he was assaulted by a woman wielding, “scissors and a pistol, and her teeth.” Whitefield endured numerous public humiliations including the time an opponent climbed a tree and urinated on him.”

Yet, he “was unwavering in his commitment to preach. He stood whether people received his words or not. When the people became harsh, he said, that they were “being hardened as were Pharaoh and the Egyptians.” Any opposition made him more adamant to set God’s people free.”

Rend the Heavens

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“A dead ministry will always make a dead people, whereas of ministers who are warmed with the love of God themselves, they cannot but be instruments of diffusing that love among others.” – George Whitefield

“Men who long ago lost their anointing still minister, using the same cliche’s and mannerisms. But they are not feared in hell; they are just ‘clouds with out water.’ Lord have mercy.” – Leonard Ravenhill

“And as the circumcission in the flesh, and not the heart, have no part in God’s good promises, even so they that are baptized in the flesh, and not in the heart have no place in Christ’s Blood.” – William Booth

The Stirrings of Revival: George Whitefield

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Frank Di Pietro, Rend the Heavens: “At the age of twenty-one, Whitefield gave his first sermon in the church of St. Mary de Crypt. The people were excited to hear him. When he spoke, the congregation was shaken to the core. A presiding Bishop, who was in attendance, said at least fifteen people were “driven mad!” The people were transfixed, and from that day on, Whitefield’s popularity never waned. Together with the Wesley’s, he preached throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. Thousands attended his services. Revival fires were breaking out wherever he preached. Because of the controversies that came with soul-stirring messages, the Church of England, refused to give Whitefield a pulpit – just like they had done to the Wesleys. Never deterred, Whitefield began preaching in out-of-the way places – parks, fields, wagons, tables, balconies, hills, and boats. Everywhere he spoke, enormous crowds gathered. Over the months, the head count continued to grow. Whitefield went to Hackney Marsh race course and preached to 10,000 who were there for the races. The people largely ignored the races and listened to the Gospel as Whitefield proclaimed it. Whitefield went to other race tracks to preach to the masses. In Marylebone Fields, he preached to 30,000 at the Moorefields in London, he preached to 60,000. “

Rend the Heavens: George Whitefield

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Frank Di Petro, Rend the Heavens: “The English colonies were entering a desperate time with the dawning of the eighteenth century. The church had become inconsequential in the affairs of mankind. Christians had become impotent; instituting little to change society. As the prophet Isaiah foretold, “darkness covered the earth and deep darkness the people…” (Isaiah 60:2).”

Enter George Whitefield, the “flame of fire” who preached 18,000 sermons to ten million hearers. George was born December 27, 1714, in Gloucester, England. His parents ran an Inn and Tavern called Bell’s Tavern. It was a gathering place for malcontents and highwaymen – robbers and pimps. (As a result) George was continually around lying, thievery, gambling, and cursing.

As a young man, Whitefield attended Oxford University in England. Here he met a group of students called the “Holy Club” and his life was changed forever. This small group was led by two brothers, John and Charles Wesley. After years of study Whitefield was ordained an Anglican Minster. Meeting other ministers and speaking in churches, he came to the realization that the religion of his day did not address the inner needs of people. In much of the Anglican Church, there was no teaching on having a personal relationship with Jesus. As he was searching for answers, he came upon Henry Scougal’s work, “The Life of God and the Soul of Man.” What he read shook him to the core. Afterward, he wrote the following in his journal: God showed me that I must be born again or be damned! I learned a man may go to church, say his prayers, receive the sacraments, and yet not be a Christian. Shall I burn this book? Shall I throw it down? Or shall I search it? I did search it; and…addressed the God of Heaven and earth.”

Whitefiled began to pray, “Lord, if I am not a Christian, or if I am not a real one, for Jesus Christ’s sake show me what Christianity is that I may not be damned at last.” This was a sincere prayer that defined the rest of his life. Whitefield became desperate for intimacy with the Living God. Casting the world and self aside, he ran toward his Savior in a hungry search for complete conversion.”

Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening

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George Whitefield preached at Jonathan Edwards’ church in Northampton. Many were reminded of the revival they had experienced just a few years earlier. Edwards (1703-1758) was so deeply touched, he wept through the entire service, as did much of his congregation. Shortly thereafter, Edwards preached what would become his most famous sermon: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

Here is an excerpt of that famous message: The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. He is of purer eyes than to bear you in his sight; you are ten thousand times as abominable in his eyes as the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince, and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else that you did not got to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God provoking his pure eye by your sinful, wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell. 

Reverend Stephen Williams was in attendance at the Enfield sermon, with his diary entry for that day containing the following account of the congregation’s reactions during and after the sermon: [B]efore the sermon was done there was a great moaning and crying out through the whole house — “What shall I do to be saved?” “Oh, I am going to hell!” “Oh what shall I do for a Christ?” and so forth — so that the minister was obliged to desist. [The] shrieks and cries were piercing and amazing.

Interestingly enough, “fire and brimstone was not at all indicative of Edwards’ preaching. Most of his sermon’s were focused on God’s beauty and love. Personally, Edwards was a sensitive individual with a soft, tender voice, who meticulously read his sermons. Unlike Whitefield, Edwards was not a powerful preacher, but he was a powerful prayer who often spent days and weeks in prayer, sometimes devoting up to eighteen hours in prayer before delivering a single sermon. The result was a revival that transformed not only a community but an entire nation.”

The Great Awakening

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Pentecost to the Present – Book Two Reformations and Awakenings, Jeff Oliver: “Finally, in 1733, a revival broke out at Jonathan Edwards’ church in Northampton. During one six-month period in 1734, nearly 300 new converts had joined his church. In 1735, he wrote, ‘The town seemed to be full of the Presence of God…There was scarcely a single person in the town, old or young, left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world.’ The revival featured many miraculous and ecstatic manifestations of the Holy Spirit, which some critics used to try to denounce the revival. This included outbreaks of laughter during the services; some experienced visions or ‘impressions’ and others fell into trances or ‘faintings,’ as Edwards called them. he said, ‘There were some instances of persons lying in a sort of trance, remaining perhaps for twenty-four hours motionless, and with their senses locked up; but in the mean time under strong imaginations, as though they went to heaven and had there visions of glorious and delightful objects.’

A History of the Jerks: Bodily Exercises and the Great Revival

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Douglas Winiarski: Of the various somatic religious exercises that spread across the trans-Appalachian frontier and southern backcountry during the Great Revival, none drew more astonished commentary or more virulent opposition than “the jerks”: involuntary convulsions in which the subjects’ heads lashed violently backward and forward. More than half a century before the derisive phrase holy roller was coined to describe the ecstatic worship practices of Holiness and Pentecostal evangelicals in Appalachia, the subjects of these extraordinary bodily fits were known as “Jerkers.” Sometimes these spasmodic “shuddering” gesticulations of neck and head “operated like the hickups.” Other accounts described jerkers bouncing from “place to place like a foot-ball” or thrashing like a “fish, when thrown out of the water.” The “wondrous quickness” with which their necks pivoted back and forth reminded one observer of a “flail in the hands of a thresher.” The jerks purportedly struck riders on horseback, men plowing in the fields, boys at their school desks, young girls drinking tea, families at supper, people in bed, musicians at play, and nursing mothers. They erupted without warning and without regard to age, class, gender, or physical constitution. Pious saints and notorious sinners were “taken,” “seized,” or “attacked” by the jerks, which were often propagated from person to person like a “sympathetic contagion.” Witnesses recounted stories of the jerkers’ preternatural strength: diminutive women hurling 200-pound men to the ground; floundering men leaving imprints of their knuckles on the massive timber walls of pioneer log churches. Samuel Doak’s congregants near Jonesborough, Tennessee, even cut saplings in the woods surrounding their meetinghouse for use as “jerking-posts” to steady the afflicted.

A History of the Jerks: Bodily Exercises and the Great Revival

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Douglas Winiarski, University of Richmond, April 9, 2018 writes: Between 1799 and 1805, the backcountry settlements of the early American frontier blazed with religious excitement. From western Pennsylvania to northern Georgia, middle Tennessee to the Carolina piedmont—but especially in the Bluegrass Country of Ohio—tens of thousands of frontier settlers gathered for multi-day, open-air religious meetings in which teams of Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian ministers preached from morning until late at night. Ministers claimed to have converted thousands at camp meetings during the first decade of the nineteenth century. From innovations in theology and hymnody to church organization and denominational proliferation, the Great Revival played a decisive role in the development of early American evangelicalism and the southern Bible Belt.  The revivals also stimulated the development of innovative new religious practices known collectively as the “bodily exercises.” Men and women in the throes of conversion collapsed to the ground, then rose up and began dancing. Others lay insensate for hours, enraptured with dramatic visions of heaven and hell. Camp meeting participants barked liked dogs, scampered up trees, engaged in trance walking, ran headlong through the woods, faced off in mock boxing matches, and burst into uncontrolled peals of holy laughter. Observers witnessed people speaking in unknown tongues and claimed to have heard music issuing miraculously from the chests of young converts.

Great Stirrings in America

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Pentecost to the Present – Book Two Reformations and Awakenings, Jeff Oliver: By the 1670’s, New England Puritan leaders began calling out for a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit to revive their languishing churches. Samuel Torrey, pastor at Weymouth, Massachusetts, began raising doubts as to whether the churches’ reform efforts were even possible without an effusion of the Holy Spirit and proactive prayer for revival. In 1705, Samuel Danforth, Jr. wrote: ‘We are much encouraged by an unusual and amazing Impression, made by God’s Spirit on all Sorts among us, especially on the young Men and Women.’ Danforth said he had no time for his regular pastoral duties because of constant visits from young people seeking salvation and believed it to be a sign of greater things to come. He said, ‘I think sometimes that the Time of the pouring out of the Spirit upon all Flesh, may be at the Door.’ In 1713, Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, Massachusetts, grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, wrote, ‘The Spirit of the Lord must be poured out upon the People, else Religion will not revive.’ He believed seasons of revival characterized by special outpourings of the Spirit were necessary to quicken believers’ faith, convert sinners, and make disinterested people interested in the things of God. In 1721, Samuel Whiting’s church in Windham (now Maine) saw eighty new people join the church in six months. Observing this, another minister wrote, ‘Pray that the Spirit may be poured out from on High on every part of the land.’ Then in 1727, an earthquake rocked New England. Suddenly churches everywhere were being filled with anxious people seeking salvation as church leaders began wondering if this was not the nature of all revivals to happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Revival did ensue but not for long.

Carnival of Preachers and Informal Prayer

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Pentecost to the Present – Book Two: Reformations and Awakenings: “One remarkable feature of the early camp meetings was the informal prayer groups that formed between the regular meetings. In these prayer groups, any man, woman, child, white or black, educated or not, could spontaneously exhort anyone within hearing distance. This earned the camp meeting its unofficial title ‘a carnival of preachers.’ In the regular meetings, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist preachers took turns speaking as camp meetings were attended by all denominations, and all denominations experienced their fruit. In Kentucky alone between 1800 and 1803, the Baptists added 10,000 to their rolls, while the Methodists added 40,000. Peter Cartwright, an original convert of the Cane Ridge revival, wrote, ‘The work went on and spread almost in every direction gathering additional force till our country seemed all coming to God.‘”

Cane Ridge Revival Spreads

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Pentecost to the Present – Book Two: Reformations and Awakenings: From Kentucky, the camp meetings soon spread into Tennessee, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and throughout the South. Some were as wild as the frontier itself. In North Carolina, yet another Presbyterian congregation held a similar series of meetings in 1801 in anticipation of revival, but nothing happened. Sorely disappointed, the pastor rose to conclude the last meeting when someone from the audience stood and shouted, ‘Stand still and see the salvation of God!’ Immediately, ‘a wave of emotion swept over the congregation like an electric shock.’ The physical manifestations and speaking in tongues reportedly made it ‘like the day of Pentecost and none was careless or indifferent.’ One University of Georgia student told of a meeting in which “they swooned away and lay for hours in the straw prepared for those ‘smitten of the Lord,’ or they started to flee away and fell prostrate as if shot down by a sniper, or they took suddenly to jerking with apparently every muscle in their body until it seemed they would be torn to pieces or converted into marble, or they shouted and talked in unknown tongues.’

Birthing of the American Camp Meeting and the Cane Ridge Revival

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Pentecost to the Present – Book Two: Reformations and Awakenings, Jeff Oliver: “When McGready announced a similar meeting at his Gasper River Church in July, the response was overwhelming. Some came from as far away as a hundred miles, bringing their tents with them. The crowds grew so large they had to clear some underbrush near the church, build a pulpit, and set up log seats outdoors. The American camp meeting was born. Services lasted well into the night. When McGee preached that Sunday night, the Spirit again fell, and many who were seeking God were slain followed by cries and shouts of joy that seemed to drown out the preaching. In 1801, Barton W. Stone (1772-1844), another Presbyterian pastor, who attended the Red River meetings, decided to use McGready’s principles to start a series of meetings near his church in Cane Ridge, Kentucky. Crowd estimates were reported between 15,000 and 20,000. One minister who was present reported 3,000 slain in the Spirit at once with others breaking into loud laughter and still others running, shouting, barking like dogs, and making other strange sounds. One eyewitness reported, ‘The noise was like the roar of Niagara. The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm. Some of the people were singing, others praying, some crying for mercy in the most precious accents, while others shouted vociferously. A strange supernatural power seemed to pervade the entire mass of mind there collected…At one time I saw at least five hundred, swept down in a moment as if a battery of a thousand guns had been opened upon them, and then immediately followed shrieks and shouts that rent the very heavens.’