Jonathan Edwards had written a sermon that he felt would make an impact upon his church. He promised God that he would keep an absolute fast (no water) for three days before preaching the sermon. He spent His time praying for God’s power upon the sermon.
At approximately four o’clock on Sunday afternoon, two hours from ending his fast, Jonathan Edwards began to choke and gag. He knew he couldn’t preach, and he felt he would die from choking. So he violated his fast and drank water.
That night he was a broken man as he ascended the steps to the pulpit. He was devastated in his lack of self-discipline to carry the fast through until sundown. Holding a kerosene lamp in one hand and the sermon in the other, he read Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God. And the Spirit of God poured forth on his listeners, so much so, that they grabbed the post of the church, thinking they were slipping into hell.
That sermon began the First Great Awakening and revival swept through the 13 colonies. It wasn’t the fast that God had used, God anointed the brokenness of Jonathan Edwards so that one sermon touched Colonial America.
His famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was taken from Deuteronomy 32:35:
To Me belongeth vengeance and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.
He preached this sermon with power from on high, and Eleazer Wheelock who was with Edwards, reported that before Edwards was done, these “thoughtless” people were “bowed down with an awful conviction of the sin and danger.” The people were consumed with conviction as the Holy Spirit revealed their hearts to them. Knowing the terror of the Lord” (a thing seemingly forgotten in our day both by pulpit and pew)” Edwards smoldered with holy wrath. Impervious to any consequences of such severity, he thundered these words from his pulpit:
The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and His arrows made ready upon the string. Justice points the arrow at your heart and strings the bow. It is nothing but mere pleasure of God (and that of an angry God without any promise or obligation at all) that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.
To utter truth like that with tears and tenderness takes an anointed and therefore fearless and compassionate man.
But in the hearts and minds of the hearers, there must also have been some prevenient grace at work. Apart from this, men would have rebelled at this stern sweep of power on their souls. As it was, before Edwards’ spiritual hurricane, the crowd collapsed. Some fell to the earth as if pole-axed. Others, with heads bowed, clung onto the posts of the temple as if afraid of failing into the nethermost depths of hell.
As pastor of one of New England’s largest, wealthiest, and most socially-conscious congregations, Edwards had a rare perception of the needs of his flock. He also had a heart of great tenderness for spiritual health. Let’s go to the woods where Edwards is alone with his God. Let’s creep up behind that old gnarled tree and listen to his broken prayer:
I have had very affecting views of my own sinfulness and vileness; very frequently to such a degree as to hold me in a kind of loud weeping, sometimes for a considerable time together; so that I have often been forced to shut myself up. I have had a vastly greater sense of my wickedness, and the badness of my heart, than ever I had before my conversion….
I know not how to express better what my sins appear to me to be than heaping infinite upon infinite, and multiplying infinite by infinite. Very often, for these many years, these expressions are in my mind, and in my mouth, Infinite upon infinite….Infinite upon infinite!” When I look into my heart, and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell.
I have greatly longed of late for a broken heart, and to lie low before God…it is affecting to think how ignorant I was, when a young Christian, of the bottomless, infinite depths of wickedness, pride, hypocrisy and deceit, left in my heart.
In one of the revivals, Edwards recognized a certain amount of deception among some of the people, an action that would grow as the revival did. He made it very clear that with the acceptance of Jesus and the presence of the Holy Spirit, a life ought to be quite changed.
If a person confessed Christ but continued unabated in sinful ways, Edwards was apt to note that as a false confession and would not count the person among the number saved.
To him, as it is written in James, there had to be outward signs of a changed life from inward salvation. The work of the Holy Spirit went beyond convicting the sinner of the need for repentance and Christ. Edwards wrote that:
For the people, it was a “dreadful thing” to think of being outside of Christ when hell awaited them daily.
The Spirit also burrowed into the hearts of believers. An example of the powerful work of the Holy Spirit is the story of an elderly woman in her 70s, who had spent most of her adult life under the solid teaching of Solomon Stoddard. Reading about Christ’s suffering for sinners; she seemed to see it for the first time. She wondered how Stoddard could have missed such a wonderful concept, and then realized she had heard him many times.
She understood how ungrateful she had been to sin against God and such a loving Savior, even though everyone vouched for her as one of the pious and good women in the town. But she was so overcome with the conviction in her heart through the Holy Spirit that her family thought she was dying.
The revival reached its peak in April 1735. Edwards recorded an average of four conversions daily during this portion of time. Entire families were saved, and at least as many more repented of backsliding and committed themselves anew to the Lord.
Edwards wrote the book A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in response to the requests for more information. The book made it into the hands of two elderly men of God in London, who re-published it there, in what was practically the capital of the world at that time.
Publishing the Narrative was a fateful decision, for God would use it as a spark for His Spirit elsewhere. With that London publication, events in New England gained worldwide attention.
Iain H. Murray wrote:
It was possibly the most significant book to precede the great evangelical awakening on both sides of the Atlantic.
The book went through twenty printings and influenced groups of men who desired just such an act of God—including John Wesley, who wrote of it in his journal, and George Whitefield, who would put feet to his faith.
Space and time forbid writing more about this flaming revivalist. The question is: Lord, what will it take to break me?
