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A lesson about Jonathan Edwards, a pastor and theologian in Massachusetts.

This portrait is a representation of Jonathan Edwards, the Congregationalist minister and theologian whose preaching and writing helped spark the Great Awakening.

This portrait is a representation of the colonial American preacher Jonathan Edwards. It is a detail of a larger painting, titled The History of American Evangelism.

Jonathan Edwards wrote this sermon in August, 1750. In it he describes the experience of Christians after their conversion. This sermon may be profitably compared to the much better-known "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." While "Sinners" does describe the anguish that people felt before their conversion, this sermon offers a complementary description of the peace they felt afterwards.

In this sermon that he preached in 1740, Jonathan Edwards describes the efforts that the unconverted should make before obtaining salvation. The doctrine of the sermon—the point that Edwards is trying to make—is that "we should be willing to engage in and go through great undertakings, in order to our own salvation." Edwards was not arguing for salvation by works, but he was pleading with his audience to care enough for their own souls that they would be sure to lay hold on God's saving grace.

Jonathan Edwards preached this sermon in 1733 at Northampton, Massachusetts, and it was printed a year later. The sermon describes how people come to understand God's truth not merely through their reason. It deals with the question of how people experience God, especially in conversion. The application section asks listeners whether they have experienced the "divine and supernatural light" of salvation.

Jonathan Edwards preached this sermon at Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741. It is probably the most famous of all American sermons.

The sermon lays out the dreadful consequences of man's sin, and Edwards sought to persuade his listeners that they might at any moment be called to judgment for their sins. Reportedly some in Edwards's audience cried out in response to his terrible imagery. At the end of the sermon, though, Edwards preached about "an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open."

Jonathan Edwards is probably the best-known figure associated with the Great Awakening. He has often been caricatured, however, simply as the “fire-and-brimstone” preacher of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Indeed, some secular writers, embarrassed by this distortion, have even attempted to reverse that picture completely, portraying a brilliant New England thinker who was only incidentally religious. The truth is that Edwards was a multifaceted man—certainly brilliant and undeniably a keen logician, but also an intensely religious man of deep and reverent piety. It is Jonathan Edwards, perhaps, not philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who deserves the description “the God-intoxicated man.”