God used George Whitefield in a way seldom seen in this world. He was the main instrument in the spiritual revival known as the Great Awakening, which swept across the United States in the mid-1700s. Whitefield was also good friends with Benjamin Franklin. Their friendship began when Whitefield came to Philadelphia in 1739 and lasted until his death in 1770. During the course of this thirty-one-year friendship, Franklin was the primary publisher of all of Whitefield’s sermons and journals. Forty-five times Whitefield’s sermons were reprinted in Franklin’s newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, and eight times the sermon filled the entire front page. Franklin published ten editions of Whitefield’s journals and sold thousands of reprints of Whitefield’s sermons.

Their relationship extended beyond a business relationship. On more than one occasion when Whitefield came to Philadelphia, he stayed with Franklin in his home. When some of the religious elite criticized Whitefield in another local paper, Franklin wrote a rebuttal. His support for Whitefield, along with a regular correspondence between the two, continued for the next thirty years. Despite their friendship and Whitefield’s continued presentation of the gospel, Franklin never responded in faith. In his autobiography Franklin wrote about Whitefield: “He used sometimes to pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard” (quoted in Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 113). How do we explain Franklin’s rejection of the gospel? He heard and read hundreds of the sermons of America’s greatest evangelist. He spent hours with him discussing the gospel. He received dozens of letters over the span of thirty years, yet he was unmoved. Why didn’t Benjamin Franklin believe? Why does anyone reject the gospel of Jesus Christ?