The great evangelist George Whitefield spoke to an enormous Bradford, England crowd in September 1755. He preached at a makeshift outdoor pulpit on John 3.15 “that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him [Jesus].” John Fawcett (1739-1817) who worked as an apprentice to a tailor, listened intently to the message and later wrote about the moment in his diary, “In the sixteenth year of my age it pleased God…to work upon my mind and give me a deeper sense of my lost condition.” John eventually quit his job to become pastor of a rural church comprised of farmers and shepherds. He went wherever an open door presented itself and the “spirit of inquiry was excited.” This tiny church began to grow, and a gallery was added. Revival was in the air! John and his wife Mary lived in humble circumstances with their four young children. He was paid twenty-five pounds per year (two hundred dollars), supplemented by parishioners giving them wool and potatoes. After seven years, he attracted the notice of a larger, more influential church in London. He consented to go, preparing for their departure by selling books and furniture. Yet, in the words of his biographer, “His affection for his little flock would not suffice him to leave them.” He resolved to stay and asked if the church could raise his salary to forty pounds. Leaders weren’t confident they could raise the money and declined his offer. John’s biographer recorded, “His attachments to them were so firmly fixed that he concluded to cast himself upon Providence and live and die with them.” His sermon after the decision to remain was based on Luke 12.15, “Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” He stayed another forty-seven years! Fawcett collected one hundred of his songs written to accompany his sermons into a hymnbook. A friend said that the hymn Fawcett wrote in 1772, “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” commemorated his decision to remain at the rural church of Wainsgate. When John joined a church and was baptized at nineteen, he wrote the following prayer in his diary:
John Fawcett
I here bind myself, O Lord, to be thine, by a sacred and everlasting obligation; I devote myself to be thy servant, to perform the work which thou assigned to me; I renounce the glories and vanities of this present evil world, and chose thee as the source of my happiness, my supreme felicity, and everlasting portion. This is my deliberate, my free and sincere determination—a determination, which by thy grace, I will never retract.
Oh! Thou, by whose power alone I shall be able to stand, put thy fear in my heart that I may never depart from thee—Let not the world with all its flatteries, nor death, nor hell with all its terrors, induce me to violate this sacred judgment. Oh! Let me never live to abandon thee, nor draw the impious breath that would deny thee…Thus, have I subscribed myself to be the Lord’s. God is my Father and Friend. Christ is my all-sufficient Savior; and the Spirit of God will, I trust, be my Sanctifier and Comforter.
“God is my all-sufficient good,
My portion and my choice;
In him all my vast desires are fill’d,
And all my powers rejoice.”
An Account of the Life, Ministry and Writings of the late Rev. John Fawcett, 1818.
Rev. Dr. Peter James served 42 years as the senior of Vienna Presbyterian Church in Vienna, VA — 21 years in the 20th century and 21 years in the 21st century. He retired in 2021 and now serves as Pastor-in-Residence at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Even as a pastor, prayer came slowly to Pete. Read Pete’s story.