Utumishi Blog

Jonathan Edwards was born to Timothy & Esther Edwards in 1703 and died aged 54 in 1758. Timothy (his father) was a pastor in East Windsor, Connecticut (then a British colony).

Edwards was converted while in college in 1721. He writes in his ‘Personal Narrative’ of how he felt a new sense of things especially after reading the words of 1 Tim. 1:17 “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour & glory for ever and ever, Amen.”

“From about that time, I began to have a new kind of apprehensions and ideas of Christ and the work of redemption, and the glorious way of salvation by him… The appearance of every thing was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything… Prayer seemed to be natural to me, as the breath by which the inward burnings of my heart had vent.”

After college in August of 1722, Edwards began a regular preaching ministry in New York. He loved writing since his school days and his writing would cover a variety of topics with titles such as ‘Of Rainbows’ ‘Of Insects’ ‘Of Atoms’ e.t.c. to which he gave very close attention. But for the next 12 months, his interests changed. This was evident when he wrote his ‘Resolutions’ where he first acknowledges that he’s unable to do anything without God’s help. But one notable resolution was ‘I frequently hear persons in old age say how they would live, if they were to live their lives over again: Resolved, That I will live just so as I can think I shall wish I had done, supposing I live to an old age.’ He also writes of how there was this growing desire for holiness.

Later on, in 1724, Edwards took up tutorship at Yale. His subject of interest was natural sciences, an interest that had been stimulated by Isaac Newton and William Whiston. Edwards also worked in the library, and from his religious catalogue, the names that predominated it are those of old authors of Reformed & Puritan persuasion more than his contemporaries. They included Calvin, Perkins, Van Mastricht, Sibbes, Manton, Flavel, Owen and Charnnock.

In August 1726, the church of his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, at Northampton, New England, invited him to come with a view to his appointment of assistant minister. Preaching was to be his life-work and for next twenty-three years he was to be ‘Mr. Edwards of Northampton’.

After arriving in Northampton, Edwards later wrote

“The gospel has seemed to me the richest treasure; the treasure that I have most desired, and longed that it might dwell richly in me.”

His convictions grew and developed as a result of his heartfelt awareness of the power and desert of sin. Men must be saved by sovereign mercy or not at all, and the more he saw of this way of salvation – God giving grace to those who had no claim or right – the more was his own dependence on it. His convictions would later be heard beyond Northampton when at the age of 28, he was invited to give a Public Lecture in Boston on July 8, 1731.

In the later part of December 1734, using Edwards’ words:

“the Spirit begun extraordinarily to set in and there were a number conversions. There was a great and earnest concern about the great things of religion and the eternal world in all parts of the town and among persons of all degrees and all ages.”

This was the beginning of the revival. In preaching, there was a new degree of earnestness. Their understanding of what was required of a preacher was different, they knew their purpose was not to induce regeneration in the hearts of the hearers. The work of giving new life to the spiritually dead is solely the act of the Spirit of God. None can enter the kingdom of God without first being born from above.

But they also believed that it was God’s usual way & manner, in bestowing grace, to work in sinners prior to their regeneration in order to reveal their false security and to bring them to conscious emptiness and need.

In the words of Robert Bolton:

“A sinner must feel himself misery, before he will go about to find remedy; be sick before he will seek a physician; be in prison before he will seek a pardon. He must be cast down, confounded, condemned, a cast away, and lost in himself, before he will look about for a Saviour.”

The preacher’s work then comes in: thoughtless, worldly hearers have to be addressed as Paul addressed Felix (Acts 24:25):

“The pastor’s work is not only to exhort men to a voluntary examination of themselves, but also by the sword of the Spirit, he must labour to open the apostums (festering sores or abscesses) of proud sinners, discovering unto them as occasion serves, their wickedness, and denouncing the wrath of God against them, if possibly the Lord shall give them repentance, as he did to the hearers of Peter, Acts 2:37.” (Edwards, quoted by Murray p. 129)

Continued… Next Post

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Billy Sichone of Emmanuel Baptist, Mpika, Zambia (a friend of Conrad Mbewe) has written an open-source text The Spirit-Filled Christian which is well worth a read. 

One thing I share with Sichone is a love for J.C. Ryle’s, Christian Leaders of the 18^th Century (originally published in the 19^th century as Christian Leaders of the Last Century).  It might sound a bit dull, dry and dusty but if you’ve read it you’ll know it is gripping, inspiring, fantastically relevant stuff.  It’s basically the story of the English and Welsh revivals of the mid 18^th century told mainly through brief biographies of 11 men who were greatly used by God to bring thousands to Christ and turn around their church and nation.  You can freely and legally download or read online the whole book here. 

Sichone reviews the Christian Leaders here and picks out these five lessons:

• ‘One unique feature about each of these men was that they were eminently holy and loved the Lord with a sincere heart.’
• They were almost all ‘University men‘ – they worked extremely hard at their studies, they knew their Hebrew and Greek, they never preached their human knowledge in the pulpit but no-one could accuse them of being ignorant or stupid.
• ‘They were entirely given and sold out to the gospel, literary abandoning all else for the sake of Christ’
• ‘They are human like us‘ – they sinned, they were sometimes unwise, they had character flaws, it took many of them a long time to move from darkness into full gospel light, they were certainly very vulnerable to illness and disease and most died in their forties or fifties.
• ‘God can use anyone from anywhere, as long as they are truly consecrated to his cause, with fidelity and integrity’ – the eleven leaders were from town and village, privileged and less-privileged backgrounds, ex-Pharisees and ex-drunkards, the full range of character-types and temperaments, polished speakers and rough speakers.

Eight other lessons stand out for me:

• The terrible state of society and church before the revival  – if we ever lose hope for our day you just have to look at the state of England before the 18^th century revival – Christianity was all but dead, a gospel-less moralism was preached from the pulpit while the same morality ‘was thoroughly trampled under foot in the streets’ (p. 14), fighting, sexual immorality, gambling, swearing and drunkenness ‘were hardly recognised as vices at all – they were the fashionable practices of people in the highest ranks of society’ (p. 18), the country was completely undeveloped, uneducated and had no influence in the world.
• The primacy of preaching – the instrument of conversion of individuals and of the transformation of society was the preaching of the gospel; the leaders of the revival were generous and compassionate men but they were men of one thing: preaching Christ crucified; their focus was on eternal things rather than on social transformation – social action did not precede the message or always accompany the message but a massive outpouring of social transformation followed their preaching (education, workers rights, protection for children, abolition of slavery, animal welfare, economic development).
• The purity of the gospel – their preaching was gospel preaching – both to the unconverted and the converted – and their gospel was very clear and sharply focussed – it was all about Jesus, all about his righteousness, his death as the only and sufficient sacrifice for sins, they were always talking about your heart, your sin, repentance, the need to be born again, the joy of knowing Christ.
• The straightforwardness and earnestness of their preaching – this is something that really hit me – they crucified their style and spoke as plainly as possible straight to the heart of their listener with great love and authority and humility and pleading and an uncontainable passion for Christ.
• Un-strategic places became strategic – one or two of them were based in London for a time, a few of them ranged very widely over the UK as itinerant evangelists for much of their ministry but the majority laboured away based in one place – not a city or even a major market town but an apparently un-strategic place that became a beacon of gospel life and hope for miles around.
• Many of these leaders were converted in their thirties – often while already in ordained ministry (!) – which shows that while the ‘4/14 window’ is very important, God can do powerful miracles of conversion in later life and the effects can be even more dramatic.
• Church unity – they were all Anglican but many were rejected by the authorities in the Church of England; they were far less concerned about their denomination than the Church of Christ; with one exception they all pursued peace with their brothers every bit as hard as they fought for the truth and related with great love and generosity and humility towards those they disagreed with.
• They died well – of the twenty to forty pages Ryle gives to each leader, three to six pages are devoted to the final 24 or 48 hours of their life – several of these accounts made me cry – this is when their gospel convictions really pass the test, as they stick to the sufficiency of Christ alone to the very last, as they pass into the eternity and joy that they preached and go to the Lord they lived for and had completely cast themselves on.

 Sichone ends his review like this:

A small company of eleven men shook England 250 years ago. Visiting England some years ago, I could not help but see the evidence of God’s work among the British people. The evidence, unfortunately, remains in magnificent church structures and historical sites. My heart felt sad and yet elated to see the holy “relics” of the past. Oh for showers of blessings on that land once again! May Zambia not go that way as well? Pray brethren.

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One of the many things that I know little about and would like to understand better is the East African Revival of the mid-twentieth century.  I was very grateful that a Rwandan brother recently corrected me in personal correspondence on a blog post below in regard to Rwandan ‘Christian’ names as a testimony of the parents’ Revival faith.  Apparently the background to these God-related names is more often found in Catholic mass proselytism (the king Rudahigwa Mutara III converted in 1943 encouraging a wave of baptisms) or in pre-colonial traditional religion.

The question remains though – have there been problems in the passing on of the EA Revival heritage to the second and third generation?  It does seem that there were wonderful features of the Revival that are lacking in many of our churches in the region today – features we would do well to recapture. Wes, on the a mission-driven life blog (which is well worth a look) posted the following on one of the leading figures of the Revival, the Ugandan Festo Kivengere:

John Senyonyi identifies three emphases in Festo’s preaching: (1) the Cross of Jesus; (2) the Love of Jesus; and (3) the Holy Spirit. Festo became an international advocate for the love of Christ, exemplified in the cross. The Cross is where the love of God is exemplified, in that Jesus paid for sin. At the cross, all sinners are seen equally. The love of God was demonstrated in the cross because that is where Jesus died on behalf of sinners. The Holy Spirit testifies to Jesus through the word. It was Jesus who went to the cross to conquer sinners’ sin. Rather than preaching “Revival” or about the revival, Festo preached Jesus. Senyonyi argues that this is where Festo excelled over the revival, in that he focused so much on the love of God through the cross. The revival message was not that revival had come; rather, the revival message was that Jesus had come, died on the cross for each sinner, and raised from the dead. The revival quickly matured because of this christo-centric focus. This also led Festo and other revival leaders to fight against splinter movements within the revival that tried to add another step in the gospel, such as the “reawakening” movement. That the revival leaders took these steps without outside intervention demonstrated the maturity of the revival.

You can listen to Kivengere preaching on the glory of God (climaxing on the cross of Christ) at the Sermon Index site (which has got lots of other very useful stuff on it).

East African brothers – please help me to learn more on this.  In particular:

a)  What are the important stories we need to hear?  Tell them to us or point us to where we can hear them.

b)  What were the strengths of the Revival that we need to return to?

c)  What were the weaknesses or lessons to learn?

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