On April 7th some of us from the church went to the theater in Brunswick to see A Great Awakening, the Sight & Sound film about the revival that swept through the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. We bought tickets, got some popcorn and drinks, and settled in for two hours of history most Americans have never been told.
The film is centered on George Whitefield, the young English preacher God used as the human spark of that revival. I have read about Whitefield for years, but seeing his life dramatized on a screen with my family and friends beside me hit differently. There he was, a man who walked the same Georgia ground I walk every day. And there were the questions his life still presses on us. What did God do through one man two hundred and ninety years ago? And could He do it again?
The Preacher God Sent to Georgia
George Whitefield was twenty-three years old when he first set foot in Savannah in May of 1738. He was an Anglican minister, a graduate of Pembroke College at Oxford, and a friend of John and Charles Wesley. He had been converted reading a book by Henry Scougal called The Life of God in the Soul of Man. The book convinced him that being baptized, attending services, and living a moral life were not enough. A man had to be born again.
That conviction became the engine of his ministry. His most famous early sermon was titled The Nature and Necessity of Our Regeneration or New Birth in Christ Jesus. He preached it everywhere. Crowds came in numbers no church building could hold, and after being ordained a priest in 1739, he found many Anglican pulpits closed to him, so he took the gospel to the open air. Fields. Town commons. Hillsides. Estimates suggest that during his lifetime he preached more than eighteen thousand sermons and crossed the Atlantic thirteen times, reaching perhaps 10 million listeners.
Georgia was a young, struggling colony when Whitefield arrived. He saw children who had lost their parents to disease and the harsh conditions of the frontier. So he raised funds in England and America and laid the first brick of the Bethesda Orphan House outside Savannah on March 25, 1740. He wanted those orphans to be fed, clothed, taught a trade, and most of all, brought to Christ. Bethesda still stands today, the oldest continuously operating child-care institution in the country.
It is humbling to live in coastal Georgia and remember that one of the most used preachers in church history walked this same coast, preached up and down this seaboard, and is buried under the pulpit of the Old South Presbyterian Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He died in 1770 at the age of fifty-five, worn out from preaching the gospel.
The Doctrine That Fueled the Awakening
The film does a fair job of showing Whitefield’s preaching, but the deeper story is the doctrine underneath it. The First Great Awakening was not a man-made program. It was not a marketing strategy. It was God reviving sleeping churches through the steady, biblical, Christ-centered preaching of men like Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards.
Whitefield was a Calvinist. He believed and preached the doctrines of sovereign grace. He held that man is dead in trespasses and sins, that salvation is the work of God from start to finish, that the new birth is a sovereign act of the Spirit, and that no one comes to Christ unless the Father draws him. When he opened his Bible to John chapter three, he preached it as Jesus meant it.
That last verse is the key to the whole Awakening. The wind blows where it wishes. The Spirit moves where He pleases. No man schedules revival. No committee plans an awakening. God sends His Spirit, and He uses the means He has appointed, which is the faithful preaching of His Word.
Whitefield’s message was not complicated. He preached three things over and over: the conviction of sin, justification by grace through faith in Christ alone, and the necessity of the new birth. People who had sat under religion for years suddenly saw their need of a Savior. Hardened sinners wept. Drunkards put down the bottle. Whole towns gathered to hear the Word preached. It was not because the preacher was clever. It was because the Spirit of God was moving.
The Awakening We Still Need
Driving home from the theater that night, I kept thinking about the country I live in. Empty pews on Sunday morning. Churches more concerned with cultural relevance than with the Word of God. A generation that does not know the names of Whitefield or Edwards, and worse, does not know the gospel they preached. We do not need a louder church. We do not need a slicker church. We need an awakened church.
Christians have prayed Habakkuk’s prayer for centuries.
That is the prayer of a man who has read the history. He has heard the reports. He knows what God has done in years past, and he begs God to do it again. Not new things. The same things. Revive Your work, Lord. Bring sinners under conviction. Open blind eyes. Make Your gospel run.
The First Great Awakening did not start with a movement. It started with men on their knees, preachers in the Word of God, and the Spirit of God moving as He pleased. If God ever sends another awakening to America, it will come the same way. Through the Word. Through the Spirit. Through Christ lifted up. And it will come to a praying people.
So I am thankful for the film. I am thankful for the night out with the church. But more than that, I am thankful for the reminder. The God who used a twenty-three-year-old preacher in colonial Georgia is the same God today. He has not lost His power. He has not run out of grace. The wind still blows where it wishes.
Before I close, let me say plainly. The film is worth seeing. The acting is solid, the history is handled with care, and Whitefield is presented as the man Scripture and history show him to be. I would happily watch it again, and I plan to buy a copy when it releases on Apple TV or Amazon Prime. If you have not seen it yet, find a showing, or wait for the home release and gather your family around it. It will do you good.
May the Spirit of God blow again in our day just as He did in George Whitefield’s day.