The Life of God in the Soul of Man

George Whitefield was one of the most influential preachers the world has ever known. He is widely regarded as the greatest human stimulus of the eighteenth century Christian awakening. The evangelical effects of that revival have reverberated through our country for the best part of 250 years - many of its effects are still visible today, though they are waning fast in our post-christian era.

The reason Whitefield is held in such high regard is because of the way in which God used his gospel preaching. His ability to preach persuasively extended to great crowds. What we would consider a packed concert hall today would have been the kind of crowd Whitefield’s preaching would have drawn regularly. He took those gifts and put them to relentless use, both in this country and in the United States, and thousands came to know Christ.

Whitefield was easily as influential as Jonathan Edwards (widely considered America’s best theologian) and both of the Wesley brothers, and yet it was from one of these others that Whitefield received a book that transformed his life. It was during his time at Oxford University that he became aware of a group that was run by John Wesley - referred to disdainfully by detractors as the ‘Holy Club’. The society consisted of midweek meetings for prayer, discussion and the reading of good books. Whitefield was keen to join and got to know Charles Wesley well. And it was Charles who gave him a book to read called, ‘The Life of God in the Soul of Man’ by Henry Scougal.

In a sermon preached in the last year of Whitefield’s life he said:

”I must bear witness to my old friend Mr Charles Wesley; he put a book into my hands, called The Life of God in the Soul of Man, whereby God showed me that I must be born again, or be damned. I know the place: it may be superstitious, perhaps, but whenever I go to Oxford, I cannot help running to that place where Jesus Christ first revealed himself to me, and gave me new birth…holding the book in my hand, thus [I] addressed the God of heaven and earth: Lord, if I am not a Christian, if I am not a real one, God, for Jesus Christ’s sake, show me what Christianity is, that I may not be damned at last. I read a little further … ‘O, says the author, ‘they that know anything of religion, know it is vital union with the Son of God, Christ formed in the heart’; O what a ray of divine life did then break in upon my poor soul…from that moment God has been carrying on his blessed work in my soul: and as I am now fifty-five years of age, I tell you my brethren, I am more and more convinced that this is the truth of God, and without it you never can be saved by Jesus”.

What Scougal’s book had awakened in Whitefield was a knowledge of the nature of true religion; that, conversion has taken place when, ‘religion stops being a duty and becomes a delight’. For Whitefield, his religion was a performance first, but Scougal showed him that ’true religion is a union of the soul with God, a real participation of the divine nature, the very image of God drawn upon the soul, or, in the Apostle‘s phrase, “it is Christ formed within us”’. In other words, it is first and foremost the life of God within a person - a new nature altogether.

God used Scougal’s little book to bring Whitefield to a realisation about himself - he wasn’t saved. To put it in his own words, he was a ‘baptised heathen’; a ‘professor but not a possessor’; a ‘believing unbeliever’; ‘talking of Christ, talking of grace, orthodox in creed, but heterodox in [the] life [of the soul]’. After his conversion he wanted men and women to turn to Jesus, that 'God [may] turn you inside out…may that glorious Father who raised Christ from the dead, raise your dead souls!’

The Life of God in the Soul of Man is a penetrating book. It lays bare your soul a little, and dares to ask what might really be there - a true delight in Jesus or an outward performance that looks like the real mccoy, but is really a deceptive illusion. The Life of God in the Soul of Man warrants a read.

This account is based on J I Packers introduction to Henry Scougal’s book ‘The Life of God in the Soul of Man’.