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Smith Wigglesworth

British Evangelist
Date of Birth : 10 Jun, 1859
Date of Death : 12 Mar, 1947
Place of Birth : Menston, United Kingdom
Profession : Evangelist, Missionary
Nationality : British
Smith Wigglesworth was a British evangelist who was influential in the early history of Pentecostalism.

Early Life

Smith Wigglesworth was born on 10 June 1859 in Menston, Yorkshire, England, to an impoverished family. As a small child, he worked in the fields pulling turnips alongside his mother; he also worked in factories to help provide for his family. He was illiterate as a child, being unschooled because of his labours.

Nominally a Methodist, he became a born again Christian at the age of eight. His grandmother was a devout Methodist; his parents, John and Martha, took young Smith to Methodist and Anglican churches on regular occasions. He was confirmed by a Bishop in the Church of England, baptized by immersion in a Baptist church and had grounding in Bible teaching in the Plymouth Brethren while learning the plumbing trade as an apprentice from a man in the Brethren movement.

Wigglesworth married Mary Jane "Polly" Featherstone on 4 December 1882 at St Peter's church, Bradford. At the time of their marriage, she was a preacher with the Salvation Army and had come to the attention of General William Booth. They had one daughter, Alice, and four sons, Seth, Harold, Ernest and George. Polly died in 1913. Their grandson, Leslie Wigglesworth, after more than 20 years as a missionary in the Congo, served as the president of the Elim Pentecostal Church.

Wigglesworth learned to read after he married Polly; she taught him to read the Bible. He often stated that it was the only book he ever read, and did not permit newspapers in his home, preferring the Bible to be their only reading material.

Wigglesworth worked as a plumber, but he abandoned this trade because he was too busy for it after he started preaching. In 1907, Wigglesworth visited Alexander Boddy during the Sunderland Revival, and following a laying-on of hands from Alexander's wife, Mary Boddy, he experienced Baptism with the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. He spoke at some of the Assemblies of God events in Great Britain. He also received ministerial credentials with the Assemblies of God in the United States, where he evangelized from 1924 to 1929.

Death

He died at the funeral of his close friend, Wilf Richardson, on 12 March 1947, at the age of 87.

Quotes

Total 23 Quotes
If you seek nothing but the will of God, He will always put you in the right place at the right time.
There are four principles we need to maintain: First, read the Word of God. Second, consume the Word of God until it consumes you. Third believe the Word of God. Fourth, act on the Word.
The reason the world is not seeing Jesus is that Christian people are not filled with Jesus. They are satisfied with attending meetings weekly, reading the Bible occasionally, and praying sometimes. It is an awful thing for me to see people who profess to be Christians lifeless, powerless, and in a place where their lives are so parallel to unbelievers’ lives that it is difficult to tell which place they are in, whether in the flesh or in the Spirit.
There is nothing impossible with God. All the impossibility is with us when we measure God by the limitations of our unbelief.
Great faith is the product of great fights. Great testimonies are the outcome of great tests. Great triumphs can only come out of great trials.
A man is in a great place when he has no one to turn to but God.
Some people read their Bibles in Hebrew, some in Greek; I like to read mine in the Holy Ghost.
There is something about believing God that will cause Him to pass over a million people to get to you
You must every day make higher ground. You must deny yourself to make progress with God. You must refuse every- thing that is not pure and holy. God wants you pure in heart. He wants you to have an intense desire after holiness... Two things will get you to leap out of yourselves into the promises of God today. One is purity, and the other is FAITH, which is kindled more and more BY PURITY.
God wants us so badly that he has made the condition as simple as he possibly could: Only believe.