19 June 2010

Whitefield's Early 'Holiness'

I began to fast twice a week for thirty-six hours together, prayed many times a day and received the sacrament every Lord's Day. I fasted myself almost to death all the forty days of Lent, during which I made it a point of duty never to go less than three times a day to public worship, besides seven times a day to my private prayers.

Yet I knew no more that I was to be born a new creature in Christ Jesus than if I had never been born at all.
--George Whitefield in 1769 reflecting on his early years in the Oxford Holy Club, quoted in Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the 18th Century Revival (Banner of Truth 1970), 1:60

'Two men went up to the temple to pray . . .' (Luke 18:9ff)

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