Miracles and the Supernatural Throughout Church History by Tony Cooke

Author:Tony Cooke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781680314908
Publisher: Harrison House Publishers

CHAPTER ELEVEN

GREAT AWAKENINGS IN AMERICA

(Edwards and Finney)

I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love.

—Charles Finney

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

JOHN Wesley was not the only great spiritual leader born in the year 1703. Across the Atlantic, another child—born in East Windsor, Connecticut—would have tremendous influence during a season called the Great Awakening. This was an extended period of revival and outpouring of the Holy Spirit that radically impacted the American colonies.

Jonathan Edwards enrolled in Yale University at the age of thirteen, and after earning two degrees, began serving as an assistant pastor to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard in Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards had not only excelled in his educational pursuits, but had also experienced God’s presence and goodness in a profoundly personal and heartfelt way.

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. I had an inward, sweet sense of these things, that at times came into my heart; and my soul was led away in pleasant views and contemplations of them. And my mind was greatly engaged, to spend my time in reading and meditating on Christ; and the beauty and excellency of his person, and the lovely way of salvation, by free grace in him…And [I] found, from time to time, an inward sweetness, that used…to carry me away in my contemplations; in what I know not how to express otherwise, than by a calm, sweet abstraction of soul from all the concerns of this world…. The sense I had of divine things, would often of a sudden…kindle up a sweet burning in my heart; an ardor of my soul, that I know not how to express.1

Following a sixty-year tenure of ministry in Northampton, Edwards’ grandfather passed away in 1728, and at the age of twenty-five, Jonathan Edwards assumed spiritual oversight of a congregation with more than six hundred members. Edwards was aware of five different “waves” or seasons of revival that had occurred during his grandfather’s pastorate, but at the time Edwards assumed leadership of the Northampton congregation, it was a dry season, a period of spiritual recession. Edwards describes it as “a time of extraordinary dullness in religion” and said there was significant carnality and ungodliness in the community.2

In 1733, Edwards begins to describe a moving of God’s Spirit that produced an unusually high number of people coming to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. He writes, “The Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in, and wonderfully work among us.”3 Edwards explains that people of all ages were spiritually impacted, and asserts that the awakening was so profound that “There was scarcely a person in the town, old or young, left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world.

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