Christ’s love

“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5.22-23)

In his humanity Jesus exhibited all of the fruit of the Spirit and did so to perfection. If we wish, then, to see it in all its beauty and glory there is no better place to go than to the records of Jesus’ life on earth.

There is spiritual pleasure in looking at Jesus. When God planted a garden in Eden he made trees to spring up that were “pleasant to the sight” (Gen.2:8-9). As human beings we were created with a capacity to appreciate beauty and God gave us lovely things to look at. That capacity is enlarged when we are born again. A measure of it that was lost in the fall is restored to us. We are able once again to appreciate the beauty of holiness. It gives us spiritual pleasure to see it in our Christian brothers and sisters. It gives us pleasure to see it in Jesus.

There is also spiritual profit in looking at Jesus. It is how we become like him. The theme is explored in a fine sermon by Alexander Maclaren entitled Transformation by Beholding[1]. The text is 2 Corinthians 3:18: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another”. It is the Spirit’s way of shaping us into Jesus’ likeness. As we look at him with faith, with love, with understanding; – with self-examination, humility, shame, and penitence; – with eager longing to be like him and earnest prayer for that longing to be fulfilled, the Spirit makes it happen.

In a previous post (February 2026) we began to gaze at Christ’s love. The fruit of the Spirit in his earthly life was love. We reflected first on how he loved his parents and then on how he loved his friends.

Jesus loved his enemies    

 If Jesus had friends he also had enemies. What a dark shadow they cast over his life! And to what terrible lengths their enmity drove them! But if they hated Jesus Jesus for his part loved them.

One of the ways in which he showed it was by praying for them. It was what he first of all taught his disciples to do: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27-28). Jesus’ disciples are to love their enemies and to show it by praying for them. And what our Teacher taught us he himself practised. He prayed for his enemies. How movingly he did so! At the very time they were doing their worst to him by crucifying him Jesus prayed that his Father would forgive them, “for”, he said, “they know not what they do” (Luke 23.34). The many who were responsible for his crucifixion were guilty of a terrible sin. One day they would have to answer for it. But in his great love, knowing that they were acting in ignorance, Jesus prayed for their forgiveness. And in the multiple conversions of the Day of Pentecost and beyond, how magnificently that prayer was answered!

The fruit of the Spirit is love, Christ-like love. What does it do? Like his love it not only embraces friends but enemies as well and shows itself in our prayers for them. What an example of it in Stephen, the first Christian martyr! Falling to his knees as his enemies were stoning him, “he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them’” (Acts 7:60). In and of ourselves we are not equal to such love. Our instinct is rather to hate. But with the Spirit of Christ in our hearts we are able to do what left to ourselves is impossible. For the very worst and cruellest of enemies the Spirit enables us to sincerely, earnestly, and lovingly pray. And not just for those who have wronged us personally but for those both inside and outside the church who are the enemies of Christ’s cause.

Jesus loved sinners      

From enemies we move to sinners in general. Paul tells us that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). That mission, from beginning to end, was carried out in the power of love.

Jesus showed his love by welcoming sinners. Luke tells us at the beginning of Ch.15 of his Gospel that “the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear [Jesus]. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them’”. They regarded such behaviour as shameful. But it was not – as the three parables that follow make clear. The joy over the finding of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son is a picture of God’s joy when sinners come to him in repentance. Jesus’ welcoming of sinners is a window into the loving heart of God – and not just of God the Father but of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit too.

Supremely, Jesus showed his love for sinners by laying down his life for them. It is what coming into the world to save sinners inescapably involved for him. It was not enough that the Word should become flesh and make his dwelling among us (John 1:14). Nor was it enough that he should live for us the perfect life we ourselves have so miserably failed to live. If Jesus was to be the Saviour we needed it was necessary that he should suffer and die for us. And in that – more than in anything else – we see the greatness of his love for us. How much did Jesus love us? Enough to go to the cross for us. Calvary is the stunning proof of the greatness of the Father’s love. But so too of the love of the Son. It brought him from heaven. It took him at last to suffering and to death. For sinners!

The fruit of the Spirit is love, Christ-like love. What does it move his disciples to do? After the pattern of Jesus to self-sacrificially seek the salvation of sinners themselves. Here is the grand secret of the missionary service that has involved such labour, has taken so many Christians far from home, and has cost so many of them their lives. The love for sinners that filled the heart of Jesus has filled their hearts too. 

Jesus loved his God and Father   

 We come in the last place to Jesus love for his God and Father. The Gospels leave us in no doubt as to the Father’s love for Jesus. At his baptism, for example, “a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well-pleased’” (Luke 3:22). The love was mutual. If the Father loved the Son the Son, for his part, loved the Father. How did he show it? By living the very way so warmly commended at his baptism. “I always do what pleases him”, he could say (John 8.29). It takes us back to our previous post and to what was said about the beautiful relationship between love and God’s law. People today are eager to divorce the two. They think that the law of God shackles love or drives it in repressive, even abusive, directions. In Jesus we see how beautifully they belong together. Under the impulse of love Jesus did all the things his Father wanted him to do. For him, as for his people, the law of God was love’s guide. His obedience to it was the shining proof of his love; his obedience unto death, even the death of the cross, the measure of its greatness.

What blessing, too, has come from his obedience! Paul exclaims, “For as by the one man’s disobedience” – Adam’s disobedience – “the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience” – Jesus’ obedience – “the many will be made righteous” (Rom.5:19). Jesus loved his God and Father and out of that love obeyed him. And from that obedience there flows to all who put their trust in him the most priceless of blessings. Righteousness, justification, and eternal life are each freely given to us.

So also the gift of the Holy Spirit to produce in us the same love for God that shone so brightly in Jesus’ life.

[1] Sermons Preached in Manchester, Second Series

Why good?

We call it Good Friday. Why good? As far as the original reason is concerned, a definitive
explanation seems lost in the mists of the past. The day has borne the name for
centuries and no-one can be quite sure who bestowed it and why.
Of this at least we can be certain: it is well-named. Good Friday is absolutely the best of
days. Let me tell you why.

On the face of it, the first Good Friday was about as bad a day as it’s possible to
conceive. Imagine crucifying the one only man in all of human history who had done no
wrong! Worse still, imagine executing our loving Creator who had assumed our nature
for no other purpose than to do us good! From the standpoint of human behaviour,
Good Friday is far and away the wickedest of all days.

And yet, still the best. Why? Because from the standpoint of God the crucifixion of Jesus
was no tragedy, an event he would have prevented if he had been able to. It was rather
the culmination of the most amazing of plans. Here is his own explanation of it, given to
us through the Apostle Paul: “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2
Cor.5:19). We might very well call it, World Peace-making Day.

Do note carefully who it is who’s doing the peacemaking: the very God whom we, both
as a race and as individuals, had offended by our sins. Isn’t that great love? The fault for
the disruption of relations between us was one hundred percent ours. Yet God was the
one who effected the reconciliation. And at such enormous personal cost as well. In the
crucifixion of Jesus, it was none other than God himself who was suffering and dying –
taking the place of the guilty and bearing our sin so that we might be freely forgiven and
forever enjoy his friendship.

It is only too possible to be rebuffed when seeking reconciliation with a fellow human
being. That ever happened to you? It will never happen if you seek to be right with God!
Because of the wonders of Good Friday, World Peace-making Day, God only ever gives
one response to the heart-cry of a sinner for a restored relationship with himself: Yes!

The fruit of the Spirit in the life of Christ 

Christ’s love

“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5.22-23)

We saw in an earlier post that in his humanity Jesus exhibited all of this fruit and did so to perfection. If we wish, then, to see it in all its beauty and glory there is no better place to go than to the records of Jesus’ life on earth.

Our task in this post (and a later one) is to gaze at Christ’s love. The fruit of the Spirit in his earthly life was love. It is a huge topic! More can be said about Christ’s love than about any other kind of fruit that he bore. Exhaustiveness is impossible. We can only touch on a few points. Our focus will be on the objects of his love and some of the ways in which his love was shown to them.

Jesus loved his parents                             

Jesus loved his mother Mary. So too Joseph who, though he wasn’t Jesus’ natural father, was nevertheless a father to him. We may say indeed that given the perfection of Jesus’ nature no child, no son, ever loved his parents more than Jesus did.

We see it in his submission to them. Part of what it means for children to obey the fifth commandment, “Honour your father and your mother” (Ex.20:12), is to be submissive to their authority. Doing what their parents tell them to do. Not doing what their parents forbid them to do. That is how Jesus lived when he was a child. Luke tells that after his visit to Jerusalem at the age of twelve, “he went down with” his parents “to Nazareth and was submissive to them” (Ch.2:51).

It tells us that he loved them. And nor is that difficult to see. Both in the Bible and in holy living love and God’s law are friends, not enemies; inseparable companions in fact. God’s law is love’s guide, for example. In the lives of those who are walking in the Spirit love flows in certain channels or directions. It is the law of God that cuts these channels; that sets these directions. We love as God’s law directs us to love. Law-keeping, too, is an evidence of love. It is love’s proof. Here is someone who says that they love God. Do they? If they do, they will keep his commandments. Furthermore, love is the very thing that God’s law commands. The Bible sums up the whole demand of God, both with regard to himself and our fellow men, in one word: love. We are to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind, and our neighbour as ourselves. If we do so we will have kept the whole law.

It is in the light of this marriage between law and love that we are to interpret the submissiveness of Christ to his parents. It is an outflow of his love both for God and for them. And in the life of every child and young person who has been truly born again love will take the same direction. Under its impulse they will want to and endeavour to live in obedience to their parents’ will.

For a second glimpse of Jesus’ love we fast-forward to the end of his life and to the provision that he made for his mother as he suffered on the cross. John tells us that “near the cross of Jesus stood his mother…When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby” – a reference to John himself – “he said to his mother, ‘Dear woman, here is your son’, and to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother’. From that time on, this disciple took her into his home” (John 19.25-27 NIV). Mary, it is generally supposed, was a widow and Jesus was her eldest son. It was going to be impossible for him to provide a home for her and look after her in her latter years. So he did what he could. He entrusted her to the care of the Apostle John. We may be sure that there was more in that than a concern for Mary’s physical needs. Of all the Twelve Jesus loved John the most. There was a bond between them that was peculiarly close. John, he knew, would care for his mother’s spiritual needs as well. And what makes Jesus’ action especially beautiful is that it happened on the cross. Though he was in physical agony and was bearing the sin of the world his loving heart went out to his mother and moved him to make this provision for her.

Like Jesus’ loving submissiveness this too has its parallels. There comes a point where honouring our parents no longer means obeying them. It passes into a duty of care, especially as they get older. What that looks like in practice will differ from family to family and will change over time. But if there is love it will happen. And if the love is more than natural love, if it is genuinely the fruit of the Spirit, it will manifest itself in a care for their spiritual needs as well as for their physical and mental needs. If our parents are unbelievers we will continue to do what we can to lead them to Christ. And if they are believers it will be our endeavour to help them in their walk with God.

Jesus loved his friends        

 We move on in the second place to Jesus’ friends. And by his friends I mean his followers; the men and women who believed in him and loved him. Jesus loved them.

He showed it by serving them. On one occasion he said to them, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” (Mark 10:45). On another he said, “I am among you as the one who serves” (Luke 22:27). Jesus’ life was one of service. He served his fellow Jews; he also served those who were his disciples and friends. And on the eve of his death that service was explicitly linked with his love for them. John tells us, “when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1). Or, as the New International Version renders it, “he showed them the full extent of his love”. How did he do so? In the first instance by washing their feet. He “rose from supper”, says John, “laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it round his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him” (vs.4-5). His love for his friends was manifested in humble service.

So it will manifest itself in our own lives as Jesus’ followers. His new commandment is that we love one another as he has loved us. What does that mean in practical terms? It means serving one another after the pattern he has set for us. The fruit of the Spirit is love. And if it is truly there both in our hearts and in our churches it will become visible in the humility and selflessness with which we help and care for one another.

Another way in which Jesus showed his love for his friends was by teaching them. The same night on which he washed their feet he said to them, “You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants” – i.e. merely servants – “for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:14-15). What the Father taught him he, in turn, had taught them. That was how he showed his love for them. And through the twin gifts of the Bible and the Holy Spirit it is how he shows his love still. Think of what Jesus’ teaching does for us when it comes to us with power – how it sets us free, how it sanctifies us, how it equips us for service, how through it we come to know him better, how it gives us life and hope and joy and peace. Why are we blessed with such teaching? Jesus’ love for us! He is treating us as his friends. He is making known to us what the Father has first made known to him, and doing so in such a way that our own lives and the lives of others are immeasurably enriched.

Finally, Jesus showed his love by dying for his friends. “Greater love has no one than this”, he could say, “that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15.13). On Calvary it is the very thing he did himself. And the same apostle who recorded his words gives us the inspired application of them: “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk” – i.e. only in word or talk – “but in deed and truth” (1 John 3:16-18). So Jesus loved us. So we are to love one another.

The Disruption, the West Port, and the close

There was much that was bright and inspiring about Chalmers’ early years in Edinburgh. The influence of evangelicalism both in the pulpit and the church courts was increasing all the time. Many of Chalmers’ students were men of great giftedness and godliness who afterwards became outstandingly useful ministers. At last, too, the Church of Scotland was sending out missionaries, Alexander Duff being the first in 1828. There was much to encourage. In 1834, however, a dark cloud came over the Church of Scotland. In that year what is known as The Ten Years Conflict began, a conflict that culminated in the Disruption of 1843 when almost five hundred ministers, with Chalmers at the head of them, severed their links with the Established Church to form the Free Church of Scotland.

The Disruption                                                                                                                                                                             

Chalmers was a firm believer in an established or national church. His great vision was for a nation thoroughly Christianised through the influence of the state-supported Church of Scotland. He believed, says James Dodds, “that there was nothing unscriptural, nothing wrong in any way, but, on the contrary, that it was most salutary, and in accordance with Scripture, that the State, for the religious instruction and moral improvement of its people, should engage the services of the Church…making over to it certain endowments for the support of its clergy, and the efficient performance of its function as the National Church”. In his own words, he viewed it as getting at the government’s hands “a maintenance for our clergy, and engaging in return for the Christian education of the people – a conjunction, we think, fruitful of innumerable blessings both to the Church and to Society, but in which the value given is many hundred times greater than the value received”. Or again, “the establishment and extension of National Churches afford the only adequate machinery for the moral and Christian instruction of a people”.

There was one condition, however, that had imperatively to be fulfilled if the connection between church and state was to be a success: the church’s spiritual independence. In the exercise of its spiritual functions it must be absolutely free. And for generations that had been the case in Scotland. In the course of a famous series of lectures in London in 1838 on the subject of Church Establishments he could say to his English audience, “We have no other communication with the State than that of being maintained by it, after which we are left to regulate the proceedings of our great home mission with all the purity, and the piety, and the independence of any missionary board. We are exposed to nothing from without which can violate the sanctity of the apostolical character, if we ourselves make no surrender of it. In things ecclesiastical we decide all. Some of these things may be done wrong, but still they are our majorities which do it. They are not, they cannot be forced upon us from without. We own no head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ”.

But things were in the process of changing. During the course of the Ten Years Conflict, from 1834 to 1843, the government through its civil courts began to interfere with the workings of the church and to rob it of the spiritual independence it had so long enjoyed. For Chalmers, that was a price too high to pay for the benefits of an Establishment. His language is strong: “I have uniformly stated that the least violation of the spiritual independence of the Church in return for a State endowment was enough to convert a Church Establishment into a moral nuisance”. His view, writes W.G. Blaikie, was “that a church enthralled to the state could never be that beneficent instrument, that powerful agent, for which he valued it, – could never be the means of training the people in those holy ways, those high moral and spiritual habits, on which their highest welfare depended”.

Sadly, there was to be no redress or retraction. The state refused to allow the church the continuance of her spiritual independence. Encroachment after encroachment was made on the prerogatives of the church’s divine Head. A severance of the relationship became necessary and on the 18th of May 1843 it happened. With the greatest reluctance Chalmers and his like-minded fellow ministers dissolved their connection with the state. But it was a step that God greatly honoured. The Free Church of Scotland flourished, without state help, in a way that few, if any, could have imagined.

The West Port                                                                                                                                                                               

On the 17th of March 1840 Chalmers reached his sixtieth birthday. It had long been a favourite thought with him that the seventh decade of life ought to be turned into a kind of Sabbath, and he had looked forward to it as a period of comparative rest when more time could be given to communion with God. The seven years that remained to him till his death in 1847, however, were, as W.G. Blaikie puts it, “if not the very busiest of his life…years of peculiar tension, anxiety, and disappointment”. We have touched on the principal reason for this. By 1840, the Ten Years Conflict was at its height. Before him was a further three years of conflict. Then would come the massive task of organising a new church, something in which Chalmers had a critical role to play.

Passing over that we come to what Chalmers described as “the most joyful event of my life”. ln a letter to his friend, Mr. Lennox, of New York City, written just weeks before his death in 1847, he says, “I have been intent for thirty years on the completion of a territorial experiment, and I have now to bless God for the consummation of it. Our church was opened on the 19th of February…I presided myself, on Sabbath last, over its first sacrament. There were 132 communicants, and 100 of them from the West Port.” In the early 1840s the West Port was one of the worst districts in the city, notorious as the scene of the Burke and Hare murders, and infested with beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. The following gives us a sense for just how bad it was:

“When Mr. Tasker, the minister of the West Port, made his first visits to some of the filthiest closes, it was no uncommon thing for him to find twenty to thirty men, women, and children, huddled together in one putrid dwelling, lying indiscriminately on the floor…Upon one occasion he entered a tenement with from twelve to twenty apartments, where every human being, man and woman, were so drunk they could not hear their own squalid infants crying in vain to them for food…He went once to a funeral, and found the assembled company all so drunk around the corpse, that he had to go and beg some sober neighbours to come and carry the coffin to the grave.”

It was this poor and depraved district that Dr. Chalmers selected for his “territorial experiment”. The term is his and so also the explanation: “The very essence of our scheme lies in the thorough operation of what we have called the territorial principle. We limit our attention to a single district or locality, itself split into sub-districts, having each a Christian agent attached to it; so that not a home or family which might not be frequently and habitually visited by one having the charge of not more, if possible, than twenty households.” Chalmers believed this to be the only effective way of evangelising the degraded and over-crowded districts of major towns and cities, and for years he had been eager to demonstrate what, with God’s blessing, could be achieved. With its 411 families and 2000 inhabitants, its poverty and depravity, the West Port of Edinburgh was an ideal place for the attempt. It was a work, he admitted, “greatly too much for my declining strength”. But he threw himself into it heart and soul – and with wonderful results.

The first step was the opening of a school. Almost three-quarters of West Port children were growing up without any education at all. So successful, however, were the district visitors in persuading parents to take advantage of the provision (even though it wasn’t free), that when the school opened on 11th November 1844 there were 64 day students and 57 evening students. In the course of the first year the numbers grew to 250. Most of them were from the West Port.  The school was located in an old tanning-loft. In the same place, on Sunday morning the 22nd of December 1844, public worship was held for the first time. It was a far from attractive location: “The interior was bare and dilapidated; the walls coarse and unplastered, pierced here and there with little, dingy, unsightly windows; the roof low and scantily slated, scarcely affording decent shelter; the floor decayed, uneven, and shaking at every tread.” 

William Hanna was present at the evening service. “When we looked round”, he writes, “and saw that the whole fruit of the advices, and requests, and entreaties which for many previous weeks had been brought to bear upon all the families by the visitors, was the presence of about a dozen adults, and those mostly old women, we confess to strong misgivings as to the result.” In April 1845, however, Chalmers secured the help of William Tasker, later the West Port minister, and attendance grew under his ministry.

Dr. Chalmers himself, as health permitted, met with the district visitors once a week for discussion, encouragement, counsel, and prayer. He also habitually attended the Sunday services, sometimes as a preacher, often as a hearer. An eyewitness records that “when he was a hearer only, one would see him near the pulpit, in a crowd of deaf old women, who were meanly clothed, but who followed the services with unflagging attention and interest. His eye was upon every one of them, to anticipate their wishes and difficulties. He would help one old woman to find out the text; he would take hold of the Psalm-book of another, hand to hand, and join her in the song of praise. Anyone looking at him could see that he was in a state of supreme enjoyment; he could not be happier out of heaven.”

The West Port was deeply upon his heart. In prayers that only came to light after his death we hear requests like this: “Moving fearlessly onward, may I at length obtain such possession of the West Port, as that the gospel of Jesus Christ shall have the moral ascendancy over a goodly number of its families”. “O that I were enabled to pull down the strongholds of sin and of Satan which are there”. “Do thou plentifully endow him [Mr. Tasker] with the graces and gifts of the Apostle Paul. May he have many souls for his hire”. “O may he not only be himself saved, but may he be the instrument of salvation to many.”

On Friday 19th February 1847, the West Port Church was formally opened by Dr. Chalmers. On the following Monday he wrote to William Tasker, “I have got now the desire of my heart – the church is finished, the schools are flourishing, our ecclesiastical machinery is about complete, and all in good working order. God has indeed heard my prayer, and I could now lay down my head in peace and die.” When only a few weeks later that is exactly what happened it was feared that the work would founder. It did not. Three hundred seats had been let when the church opened and attendance continued to grow steadily. By 1879 the membership was in excess of eleven hundred. By 1896 the number of communicants was upwards of thirteen hundred. Also, and almost from the beginning, through the educating of the children, through the efforts of the visitors, and through the public preaching of God’s word, the district itself began to visibly change for the better. It was all a magnificent monument not just to Chalmers’ labours and prayers, but to his faith. He loved the maxim of John Eliot, missionary to Native Americans, that “prayer and pains can do anything”. He used to quote it often. And be believed it.

“With more than kingly honours…”                                                                                                                                              

 The end came suddenly and peacefully. On the Sunday evening of 30th May 1847, Chalmers retired to bed seemingly well. The next morning there was no sound from his room. When his housekeeper at last went in and threw open the window shutters and drew aside the curtains of his bed, there he was, says Hanna, “half erect, his head reclining gently on the pillow; the expression of his countenance that of fixed and majestic repose. She took his hand – touched his brow; he had been dead for hours; very shortly after his parting salute to his family he had entered the eternal world”.

His funeral took place on the 4th of June. On the following day, in the columns of the popular evangelical newspaper the Witness, there was a moving account of it from the pen of its editor Hugh Miller: “Dust to dust; the grave now holds all that was mortal of Thomas Chalmers. Never before did we witness such a funeral; nay, never before, in at least the memory of man, did Scotland witness such a funeral. Greatness of the mere extrinsic type can always command a showy pageant; but mere extrinsic greatness never yet succeeded in purchasing the tears of a people; and the spectacle of yesterday – in which the trappings of grief, worn not as idle signs, but as the representatives of a real sorrow, were borne by well-nigh half the population of the metropolis, and blackened the public ways for furlong after furlong, and mile after mile – was such as Scotland has rarely witnessed, and which mere rank or wealth, when at the highest and fullest, were never yet able to buy. It was a solemn tribute, spontaneously paid to departed goodness and greatness by the public mind…There was a moral sublimity in the spectacle. It spoke more emphatically than by words, of the dignity of intrinsic excellence, and of the height to which a true man may attain. It was the dust of a Presbyterian minister which the coffin contained; and yet they were burying him amid the tears of a nation, and with more than kingly honours”.

I close this sketch with what Walker calls “the great lesson of Chalmers’ life”. It “is the same”, he says, “as that which is suggested by the story of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. God needed a man to roll back the tide of irreligion, and to make his Church in Scotland better serve its ends; and the man was found among that very class of ministers who were most unfriendly to the supernatural in religion. Hence his call was a great act of grace. What he would have done had not God found him, we can only guess. What he did accomplish, in consequence of his being found of God, is matter of history. That divine touch, which altered the direction of his life, made him a lasting blessing to his country; and as we glance back upon his career, and see what grace enabled him to do, we are led anew to think what a bright new century there would be for Scotland if the Spirit were to exercise His sovereign power and divert some of the energy now given to the world into the channel of the gospel”.

This is why he came!

News is out that a highly respected member of the royal family is in town. Why is he here? No one is
quite sure. Everyone’s guessing – one suggesting this, another suggesting that – until at last, at a news
conference, he says why he is here.

It’s coming up to Christmas and Christians are talking a lot about Jesus. How he came from heaven to
earth. How he was born in a stable in Bethlehem and laid in a manger. What a very special person he
was, God’s royal Son. But the big question is this, “Why did he come?” With the help of the Bible we can
hear the answer from his own lips.
On a certain occasion, referring to himself as the Son of Man (as he frequently did), he told his hearers
that “…the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for
many” (Mark 10.45). We note the following:

Jesus came to serve. Not to be served (though given who he was, people should have been falling over
themselves to serve him), but to serve. It was his great concern throughout life: “What can I do for
others?” And he did lots. He healed the sick. He cast out demons. He raised the dead. He fed the hungry.
And at the end of it all he died for people. The whole orientation of his life was outward toward others.
He had come into the world to serve, and serve he did. We who are his followers are to be like him in
this. Always we should be asking, “What can I do for others?”
Jesus came to suffer. On every battlefield in the world men suffer and die for others. But that isn’t the
reason they were born. Suffering is something forced on them later by the cruel circumstances of war. In
Jesus’ case suffering and death were the reason. He actually came to give his life. To lay it down for
others.

It’s the extraordinary link between Christmas and Easter. Jesus’ death on Calvary was no unforeseen
tragedy, a defeating of the great end of his existence. On the contrary, it was the very object of his
coming. He quite literally was born into our world to die.
Jesus came to set people free. Here we come to the climax of his statement. He gave his life “as a
ransom for many”. We all know what a ransom is. It is a price that is paid to set someone free. Jesus is
saying – “that’s why I came – so that by my death I might set people free”. Free from what? From the
guilt of our sin. From the punishment that our sin deserves. From sin itself. From the dreadful effects of
sin on our bodies. From its disastrous impact on our friendship with God. It couldn’t be done for nothing.
Only at the price of Jesus’ life. And freely, lovingly, for our sakes, he paid that price.
So we don’t need to guess, do we? We know why he came. He tells us himself. To serve. To suffer. To set
people free.

But we mustn’t leave it at that. The freedom Jesus purchased at such a very high price is a freedom each
of us needs. It is a freedom, too, that each of us may have. It’s what makes the story of his birth the best
news in the world. In Jesus a liberator was born who can set you free from the damning guilt and
destructive power of your sin. Look to him for that freedom and give him no rest until it is yours.

Thomas Chalmers   

Part 2:  Glasgow, St. Andrews, and Edinburgh                                                                                                                                                                                           

   In the autumn of 1814 Glasgow’s Tron Church became vacant and when it was put to a vote, the majority of members of the Town Council (in whose gift was the parish church) voted for Chalmers. He accepted the call and on the 23rd of July 1815, at the age of thirty-five, he was inducted to his new charge. It meant a massive change for him. For the first twelve years of his ministry he had had a small country parish where he knew the people well. Now he was minister of a city parish with between eleven and twelve thousand inhabitants. Expectations were different too and in his early days they were a source of considerable vexation to him.

“This, sir”, he writes, in a letter to a friend, “is a wonderful place, and I am half entertained and half provoked by some of the peculiarities of its people. The peculiarity which bears heaviest upon me is the incessant demand they have, upon all occasions, for the personal attendance of the ministers. They must have four to every funeral, or they do not think it has been genteelly gone through; they must have one or more to the committees of all the societies; they must fall in at every procession…I gave in to all this at first, but I am beginning to keep a suspicious eye upon these repeated demands ever since I sat for an hour in grave deliberation with a number of others upon a subject connected with the property of a corporation, and that subject was a gutter, and the question was whether it should be bought and covered up, or let alone and left to lie open”.

Preaching          

   During his Glasgow days Chalmers’ fame as pulpit orator was at its height and many stories have come down to us about the effects of his preaching. The Tron Church could hold fourteen hundred people and it was crowded to the doors Sunday after Sunday. The crowdedness was vexing to Chalmers and on one occasion at least he took the following (unsuccessful) step to lessen it. His friend and fellow minister, Dr Ralph Wardlaw, heard him preach one evening and afterwards the two men, who lived near each other, walked homeward together. “On the way home”, says Dr. Wardlaw, “he expressed in his pithy manner, his great annoyance at such crowds. ‘I preached the same sermon’, said he, ‘in the morning; and for the very purpose of preventing the oppressive annoyance of such a densely-crowded place, I intimated that I should preach it again in the evening’. And with most ingenuous guilelessness he added, ‘Have you ever tried that plan?’ I did not smile – I laughed outright. ‘No, no’, I replied, ‘my good friend; there are but few of us that are under the necessity of having recourse to the use of means for getting a thin audience’. He enjoyed the joke, and he felt, though he modestly disowned, the compliment”.It was in the course of his Glasgow ministry that Chalmers preached a series of sermons later published under the title, Astronomical Discourses. It had been the custom of the city ministers to preach in turn in the Tron Church every Thursday. On the weeks that Chalmers preached the church was more than ordinarily crowded and he took as his subject what was then an important topic of discussion both in science and apologetics. An objection had been raised to the gospel on account of discoveries made by the telescope. Since the universe was so immense and the earth with its inhabitants inconsequentially small by comparison, it was held to be inconceivable that the Son of God should have intervened in its affairs in the extraordinary way that he did. It was Chalmers’ great object to refute this and he did so by combining popular science and biblical exposition in a way that had never been done in the pulpit before and with an eloquence and passion that were well-nigh overwhelming. The published discourses sold in vast numbers, no fewer than nine editions being required in the first year alone.  

From the first Chalmers read his sermons. It drew from the English Baptist preacher, Andrew Fuller, the remark that, “if that man would but throw away his papers in the pulpit, he might be king of Scotland”. Chalmers certainly made the attempt but soon pronounced it a failure. His biographer, James Dodds, explains: “His mind was so full of his subject, yet so mathematically anxious that every premise should be understood, every proof followed, that, without the confining mould of a written composition, he could not restrain and regulate his ideas; he could not keep them in shape and fluxion; and when time was up, he found himself only in the middle of some preliminary explanation…He sometimes compared himself to a bottle full of liquid; when suddenly turned up, it cannot flow from its very fullness, not a drop comes out at first, and for a while only bursts and splutters. He deliberately gave up the attempt to preach extempore and commonly adhered closely to his manuscript”.

But his hearers were far from being the losers by it. “He composed rapidly”, continues Dodds, “and with a constant view to an audience, so that his compositions had all the animation of extempore; and then, from his intensity, and from practice, his reading far transcended any other man’s delivery in fervour and in force. The manuscript was never thought of, as people thrilled under the blaze of that face, and the lightning sweep of that arm. As the old woman said of him, ‘Ah, it’s fell reading yon!’… So impossible is it”, Dodds concludes, “to calculate from ordinary rules, when you have to deal with a man of original power”.

Chalmers was immensely popular, then, as a preacher. He was regarded in fact as the greatest pulpit orator of his age. And God blessed his preaching.  Speaking after Chalmers’ death, the Rev. William Anderson, one of Glasgow’s Secession ministers, said, “Little do many of our religious youth know how much, under God, they are indebted to him. When he first made his appearance in Glasgow, it was as if an angel had visited it. Some of us recollect what was the general state of preaching before that time - solid and Scriptural and argumentative enough, but cold and dry and formal, with little application to the every-day life and feelings of men, and still less accommodation to the advanced literature and science of the age. All this was rectified by his sanctified genius; the mocking of infidelity was quashed, and Christianity lifted up its head in triumph, and with heart greatly enlarged for her evangelical enterprise”. W.G. Blaikie adds his voice: “Under Chalmers the tide of sentiment turned decisively to evangelical religion. Before he came, evangelical preaching had been looked on as a combination of sour fanaticism and weak sentimentalism; under his preaching it attained its true rank and glory as the very essence of the Gospel message”. There were numerous cases, too, of conversion.

Preaching, however, was by no means Chalmers’ only work in Glasgow. As a parish minister he held himself responsible not only for those who attended church but for the people of the parish as a whole. Chalmers’ time in Glasgow was divided between two parishes. From 1815-1819 he served as minister of the Tron Parish and then, from 1819-1823, as minister of the newly formed St. John’s Parish. In both he set himself the mammoth task of caring for the many thousands within the parish bounds, doing all in his power to promote their temporal, educational, and spiritual welfare. It was obviously too much for one man to do alone and therefore one of his first tasks was to gather around him a band of able and willing Christians to assist, something for which Chalmers had a real genius. He himself took as full a part as he could and in later years could speak of “the ten thousand entries I have made at different times into the houses of the poor in Glasgow”.

It is a fascinating period in his life. Chalmers had very definite views on poor relief, for example. One of the reasons that he agreed to take on the newly created parish of St. John’s lay in the freedom that he would have to apply his deeply held principles without constraint. Proper management of the parish’s poor was best done, he was persuaded, through collections at the church door, regular visitation, encouragement, and offers of practical help. He believed that a legal entitlement to relief (through government taxation) did more harm than good. Its tendency was to erode the qualities of independence, spontaneous benevolence, and kindness to poor relations that Chalmers was so anxious to develop and thereby actually increase both pauperism itself and the expense of caring for the poor. There are differing opinions as to just how successful the St. John’s “experiment” actually was. Enormous good, however, was unquestionably done. And nor is the story of it of merely antiquarian interest. In the light of the problems and expense of 21st century welfarism Chalmers’ principles and practices are worthy of careful study.

St. Andrews    

   It came as something of a shock when in 1823, after eight years in Glasgow, Chalmers accepted the professorship of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews University. But there were good reasons for it. First and foremost was his health. The demands on him in Glasgow were so great that if he continued on there a breakdown in health was inevitable. There was also the positive attraction of an academic life. In his early days, as we have noted, it was Chalmers’ chief ambition to be a professor of mathematics. Things, of course, had changed enormously but the life of a professor was still very attractive to him. In later years he could speak of “the rooted preference which I have ever felt for the professorial over the ministerial life”. He believed, too, that the position would actually increase his Christian influence. “Moral philosophy is not theology” – he’s speaking to his fellow workers in St John’s – “but it stands at the entrance of it, and so of all human sciences is the most capable of being turned into an instrument either for guiding aright or for most grievously perverting the minds of those who are to be the religious teachers of the age”. 

To appreciate the significance of what Chalmers is saying we need to bear in mind that all students for the Christian ministry had to study moral philosophy before beginning their divinity studies proper. Here then, in St. Andrews, was a golden opportunity to influence these young men in the right direction and in doing so to advance the interests of the church as a whole. Anti-evangelicalism, too, was peculiarly strong in St. Andrews – so much so that for the spiritual good of his family Chalmers took seats for them in one of the Secession churches. What potential in a powerful evangelical figure like Chalmers for shaping aright the rising generation of ministers! And it happened. “There were not a few who complained, in a rueful way, of Chalmers’s withdrawal from the pulpit”, writes N.L. Walker. “It was indeed a great blow which Glasgow sustained when he was taken away from the peculiar work he had been performing there. But in his case no fair comparison could be made between chair and pulpit. Wherever he went he carried the fire with him; and although in Fife his audiences were smaller, this was also to be said, that they were more select. In St. Andrews he dealt with the men who were to be the future ministers of Scotland; and in acting as he did he told, through his students, upon a whole generation of his countrymen”.

And not only on his own countrymen. After his arrival in St. Andrews Chalmers was asked to become president of a small missionary association which had been formed for the promotion of foreign missions. He gladly accepted. The monthly meetings had been sparsely attended but now they grew so large that they had to be held in the Town Hall. There, month after month, and to crowded audiences, Chalmers would talk about the various missionary societies and the work in which they were engaged. The St. Andrews Seven, by Stuart Piggin and John Roxborogh, documents how significant Chalmers’ involvement in this missionary association proved to be. The sub-title of the book is The Finest Flowering of Missionary Zeal in Scottish History. It tells the story of Chalmers and six of his St. Andrews’ students – Alexander Duff, John Urquhart, John Adam, Robert Nesbitt, William Sinclair Mackay, and John Ewart. These young men were profoundly influenced by Chalmers and, with the exception of John Urquhart, who died before his ambition to serve Christ on the mission field could be realised, all became missionaries to India. It is a remarkable and deeply moving story.

Edinburgh    

  Chalmers’ time in St. Andrews proved to be short for in 1827, four years after his arrival, he was unanimously elected by the Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh to the chair of theology at the University of Edinburgh. At the time it was perhaps the most influential and distinguished position a Scottish clergyman could occupy. He took up the post a year later, in November 1828. Leaving the quiet of St. Andrews and plunging, once again, into the life of a busy city admittedly wasn’t easy. But there was no question in Chalmers’ mind as to the rightness of it. Theology was of greater importance than moral philosophy and Edinburgh offered a wider sphere than St. Andrews.

His thinking was the same as when he left Glasgow five years before: “To influence in a right direction a considerable proportion of the future ministers of his native land was, in his judgment, a more important function than to fill one pulpit or superintend one parish anywhere”. That conviction only strengthened with his move to Edinburgh. When, after a year or two, it was proposed that he be presented to the West Church in Greenock, then the most lucrative living in the Church of Scotland, he had no hesitation in declining. His reason was “the firm conviction of the superior importance of a theological chair to any church whatever”. He was at “the fountainhead”, writes one of his biographers, where “it was largely in his power to make or mar the ministry of the immediate future”. By the blessing of God it was in the making of the ministry that he was privileged to share.

Part 1: The early years

When Thomas Chalmers gave his inaugural lecture as Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh in November 1828 people came in such numbers that a strong police presence was required to keep things in order. Imagine! Nor did the interest diminish. “His class-room continued to be crowded all through the session”, writes one of his biographers, Norman L. Walker. It was all so very different from how things had been. Theology lectures in the past, says Walker, had been “often clear, sometimes learned, and students had come forth from the Hall with a more or less competent knowledge of theological systems. But there had never been any approach to ‘an explosion’, and youthful enthusiasms had been rather dulled than fanned into a flame. Now there was a professor in possession to whom Christianity was not a mere framework of dry bones, but a living force. His own soul was on fire; and whatever he felt himself he made his audience feel. And as a consequence, there immediately began a process which in time told visibly upon the face of Scotland – the inspiring of a race of men who carried the life with them into the pulpits which they filled, and became the means of bringing about a great revival of religion”.

So, who was Thomas Chalmers? The aim of this sketch is to introduce you to the man, to his work, and to his remarkable and widespread influence. It is written in the hope that you will be eager to find out more. 

Beginnings     

Thomas Chalmers was born on the 17th of March 1780 in Anstruther, a fishing village on the Fifeshire coast of Scotland. He was part of a large family of eight brothers and five sisters, with parents who were fine Christians. His father is described as “a man of fervent but unostentatious piety”, whilst of his mother, after her death, Chalmers could write of “the deep and immovable trust of her spirit upon her Saviour” which “shed a singular and beautiful light on the evening of her days”.

To enter a university at the age of eleven, as Chalmers did, seems an extraordinary thing to us. But St. Andrews University in those days, as one writer puts it, was “little more…than a school for big boys from the neighbourhood”. During the first two sessions Chalmers showed far more interest in golf, football, and handball than in academic studies. But a change came when he began to study mathematics at the age of fourteen. His intellect awoke and mathematics became the absorbing interest of his mind. He now applied himself more diligently to his other studies and became an outstanding student.

At the age of fifteen, and again it seems an extraordinary thing to us, Chalmers was enrolled as a divinity student and began to prepare for gospel ministry. The key event of this period was the reading of Jonathan Edwards’ The Freedom of the Will. It made a profound impression. “I remember”, he says, “when a student of divinity, and long ere I could relish evangelical sentiment, I spent nearly a twelve-month in a sort of mental elysium, and the one idea which ministered to my soul all its rapture was the magnificence of the Godhead, and the universal subordination of all things to the one great purpose for which He evolved and was supporting creation”.

Chalmers’ admission that he had no relish in those days for what he calls “evangelical sentiment” is a sobering one. But neither among students for the Church of Scotland ministry, as he was, nor among Church of Scotland ministers, was it at all uncommon. The closing years of the eighteenth century were dark years for Scotland’s national church. The warmth and light of evangelical life and ministry were largely to be found outside her communion among the various branches of the Secession Church. In God’s grace, however, a remarkable change for the better was soon to begin – a change in which Chalmers himself would both participate and play a major role.

Chalmers was licensed to preach on the 31st of July 1799, at the age of eighteen. It was not generally the case that a divinity student would be licensed by a presbytery until he was twenty-one, but in the case of Chalmers the rule was waived. An old statute of the church was invoked which allowed exceptions to what was then then the minimum age of twenty-five if the candidate in question showed “rare and singular qualities”. In the judgment of the men who pleaded his case, Chalmers’ did. “A lad o’ pregnant pairts”, they said.

He preached his first sermon on the 25th of August 1799 in the Lancashire town of Wigan. According to one of his brothers, who was present on the occasion, “it is the opinion of those who pretend to be judges that he will shine in the pulpit”. Chalmers himself, however, had little interest in preaching. “His mathematical studies”, comments his brother, “appear to occupy more of his time than his religious’”. 

From 1799 till his ordination in May 1803 Chalmers did a variety of things. During the academic year 1799-1800, for example, he studied mathematics and natural philosophy at Edinburgh University. The following year was taken up with the study of chemistry, moral philosophy, and political economy. He also spent some enjoyable months as an assistant minister in the Scottish borders town of Hawick. What came next lay much closer to his heart, however – a mathematical assistantship at St. Andrews University over the academic year 1802-1803. Chalmers poured his very considerable energies into it and was immensely popular with his students.

Minister of Kilmany  

Only a few days lay between the close of his teaching session at St. Andrews and his ordination to the Christian ministry, and his father hoped that he would come home to Anstruther and devote the time to the preparation of his heart. But no. For such a thing his son felt no need whatsoever. He was already prepared for ministerial work and felt that there was nothing to be gained from a few days given to meditation and prayer. They were spent elsewhere.

Chalmers was ordained to the small country parish of Kilmany in Fife on the 12th of May 1803. He was twenty-two years old. The surroundings delighted him and he warmed to the people. Kilmany’s chief attraction, however, was its proximity to St. Andrews where he hoped to continue teaching mathematics. This would help toward the realisation of what was then his chief ambition, to become a professor of mathematics.

His attitude toward the work of the ministry in those days is nowhere better seen than in a pamphlet he wrote in 1805. It was his first publication. The mathematics’ chair in Edinburgh University had become vacant and one of the candidates, a Rev. Dr. Macknight, hoped to both secure the chair and retain his Edinburgh parish. It led to a complaint. Such a conjunction of offices was wrong, it was said. No one could successfully fill them both at one and the same time. Chalmers was indignant. This “cruel and illiberal insinuation” against the “the whole order of churchmen” needed to be refuted. Hence the pamphlet. There is a passage in it that is quoted in all the biographies: “The author of this pamphlet can assert from what to him is the highest of all authority, the authority of his own experience, that after the satisfactory discharge of his parish duties, a minister may enjoy five days in the week of uninterrupted leisure for the prosecution of any science in which his taste may dispose him to engage”.

There is a moving sequel to this from Chalmers’ later years when he was a leader of the church’s evangelical party. In the course of a discussion at one of the General Assemblies he argued vehemently against the very combination of offices, minister and professor, that in his early days he had so boldly defended. One of his opponents had his old pamphlet to hand and quoted from it amidst much laughter. It drew from Chalmers the following moving response. Thanking the man for the opportunity thus afforded of making a public renunciation, he said, “I now confess myself to have been guilty of a heinous crime, and I now stand a repentant culprit before the bar of this venerable Assembly…I was at that time, sir, more devoted to mathematics than to the literature of my profession; and feeling grieved and indignant at what I conceived an undue reflection on the abilities and education of the clergy, I came forward with that pamphlet to rescue them from what I deemed an unmerited reproach, by maintaining that a devoted and exclusive attention to the study of mathematics was not dissonant to the proper habits of a clergyman. Alas, sir! so I thought in my ignorance and pride. I have now no reserve in saying that the sentiment was wrong, and that, in the utterance of it, I penned what was most outrageously wrong. Strangely blinded that I was! What, sir, is the object of mathematical science? Magnitude and the proportions of magnitude. But then, sir, I had forgotten two magnitudes: I thought not of the littleness of time; I recklessly thought not of the greatness of eternity”.

Conversion     

 We come now to Chalmers’ conversion. The distaste for “evangelical sentiment” which he admitted to be his during his student days continued for the first six years of his ministry. “The death of Christ”, writes one of his biographers, “had, in some manner inexplicable, removed all the obstacles that lay in the way of man’s salvation; and man had nothing now to do but obey the commandments of God and, by a life of virtue, prepare himself for the perfection and unalloyed felicity of heaven. He must do his best, and the death of Christ would make up for his deficiencies. Such was about the sum of his present theology”.  “Christ”, by Chalmers’ own confession, “through whose blood the sinner, who by nature stands afar off, is brought near to the heavenly Lawgiver, whom he has offended, was scarcely ever spoken of, or spoken of in such a way as stripped Him of all the importance of His character and His offices”.

The change came at last. When Chalmers was twenty-nine a severe illness confined him to his room for four months and for six months kept him out of the pulpit. Recovery took almost a year. He thought that he was going to die and it made him think more seriously about his relationship with God than he had ever done in his life. The result, in the words of his principal biographer, William Hanna, was “the effort after a pure and heavenly morality”. “Every thought of his heart, every word of his lip, every action of his life he would henceforth strive to regulate under a high presiding sense of his responsibility to God; his whole life he would turn into a preparation for eternity. With all the ardour of a nature which never could do anything by halves, with all the fervour of an enthusiasm which had at length found an object worthy of its whole energies at their highest pitch of effort, he gave himself to the great work of setting himself right with God”. A year of fruitless toil was to follow before, in Hanna’s words, “the true ground of a sinner’s acceptance with God” was reached, and “the true principles of all acceptable obedient” were implanted in his heart.

It was through the reading of William Wilberforce’s Practical View of Christianity that the light eventually came. There is such a lovely irony about this. Chalmers loathed evangelical literature and on occasion even denounced it from the pulpit: “Many books are favourites with you which, I am sorry to say, are no favourites of mine. When you are reading Newton’s Sermons, and Baxter’s Saints Rest, and Doddridge’s Rise and Progress, where do Matthew, Mark, Luke and John go to?” Yet, it was through one of those very books that he so disliked that he was brought to an understanding of justification by faith alone and the experience of peace with God.

One of the first and most noticeable effects of his conversion was his regular and earnest study of the Bible. There was a frequent visitor to the manse by the name of John Bonthron. One day, prior to Chalmers’ illness, he said, “I find you aye busy, sir, with one thing or another; but come when I may, I never find you at your studies for the Sabbath”. “Oh, an hour or two on the Saturday evening is quite enough for that”, was his minister’s reply. How different things were now! John often found him at his Bible and one day remarked on it: “I never come in now, sir, but I find you aye at your Bible”. “All too little, John, all too little”, was the reply.

A great change took place in his preaching of course. He had always been earnest but now his earnestness was channelled into the pursuit of his people’s conversion. And God blessed his ministry to that end. In his remarkable Address to the Inhabitants of Kilmany, written and published just after leaving them for Glasgow in 1815, he reflects back over the twelve years of his ministry and its two sharply contrasting periods. Before his conversion his emphasis had been on “the meanness of dishonesty, on the villainy of falsehood, on the despicable arts of calumny; in a word, upon all those deformities of character which awaken the natural indignation of the human heart against the pests and the disturbers of human society.” But it was all in vain. “I never once heard of any such reformations having been effected…I am not sensible that all the vehemence with which I urged the proprieties of social life had the weight of a feather on the moral habits of my parishioners”

Chalmers did at last witness a change in his parishioners’ lives. But only after God changed his own life and, with it, his message. “[I]t was not till reconciliation to God became the distinct and the prominent object of my ministerial exertion; it was not till I took the Scriptural way of laying the method  of reconciliation before them; it was not till the free offer of forgiveness through the blood of Christ was urged upon their acceptance…that I ever heard of any of those subordinate reformations which I aforetime made the earnest and the zealous, but, I am afraid, at the same time the ultimate object of my earlier ministrations.” His conclusion? “You have…taught me that to preach Christ is the only effective way of preaching morality in all its branches; and out of your humble cottages have I gathered a lesson, which I pray God I may be enabled to carry in all its simplicity into a wider theatre, and to bring with all the power of its subduing efficacy upon the vices of a more crowded population.”

The fruit of the Spirit in our Saviour’s life  

In our July post we were thinking about the fruit of the Spirit in the lives of believers; in this we turn our thoughts to the Lord Jesus and to the fruit of the Spirit in His life.

We begin with the contrast noted at the outset of the July post between the works of the flesh (Gal.5.18-21) and the fruit of the Spirit (Gal.5.22-23). In even the best of the Lord’s people we find both sides of this contrast. There is the fruit of the Spirit as the Spirit does his sanctifying work. But we are not yet rid of our sinful natures. In a significant measure the power of sin has been broken. It no longer rules. But it does still manifest itself. That is why the Christian life is one of continual repentance and why confession of sin is invariably an element of our prayers. Yes, we bear the fruit of the Spirit. But to our shame we are also guilty of works of the flesh. Not so our Saviour! With but one exception Jesus was like us in our humanity. Unlike us he was altogether free from sin. And though he was often and sorely tempted that is what he remained. Never once did he succumb to the solicitations of evil. It means that in his case works of the flesh are completely absent. It is only ever the one side of the contrast that we see in him – the fruit of the Spirit.

Christ displaying the fruit of the Spirit   

It had been the plan of God from eternity to make the nature in which humans sinned and fell the instrument by which he saved us. Sin entered our world through a man, our first father Adam. It would also be through a man that salvation would come. That was the plan! It led as we know to the incarnation of the Son of God: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1.14).  We think about it every Christmas. Without ceasing to be what he had been from eternity God’s Son became one of us – a man among men. In our nature the divine Son lived among us. And he did so exactly as humans should live – by the power of the indwelling Spirit. From beginning to the end, from conception to the cross, there was a very special ministry of the Holy Spirit in the life of the man Christ Jesus.

It had been prophesied long before by the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the LORD will rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD” (Is.11.2). It is a prophecy of the coming Messiah. What would he be like? He would be a man on whom the Spirit of God would rest. And here is how it would be seen: in his wisdom, his understanding, his counsel, his power, his knowledge, and, most remarkably of all, in his fear of the LORD; in all the things, in other words, that made him a man of God, that made his humanity a godly humanity, that made his nature holy.

When we turn to the New Testament records of Jesus’ life we are able to trace out the details of this ministry. It is a large, important, but sadly rather neglected topic. We touch here on but one aspect of it, the Spirit’s fruit. Through the presence and ministry of the Spirit Christ’s humanity was a holy humanity. And that holiness showed itself in the very same way as it does in the lives of his people, namely, in the love, the joy, the peace, the patience, the kindness, the goodness, the faithfulness, the gentleness, and the self-control that the Spirit alone can produce. The qualities we exhibit in our humanity – if we are Christians – he exhibited in his. And it is to the presence and power of the very same Holy Spirit that we trace it.

Christ displaying all the fruit of the Spirit   

How badly has sin damaged us? How much of a ruin has it made of us? We see much how of a ruin enemy bombing can make of a city. What has sin done to us? One way of answering that is to say that sin has so damaged us that until the Spirit comes to live in our hearts we exhibit none of his fruit. None of it! We go back to something we noted earlier: the character qualities listed by Paul are to be found in those who do not have the Holy Spirit. It is also the case, however, that in the unbeliever each and every one of these qualities is defective. They lack what makes them the fruit of the Spirit. In our unconverted days we loved – but we did not love God. We had joy – but it was not a joy in God. We had peace – but it was not the peace of God. Apart from the presence and ministry of the Spirit in grace we did not display any of the fruit of the Spirit. Until we were born again all the things that make this fruit distinctively the Spirit’s were absent.

With Jesus, it was entirely the opposite. If we by nature lack all the fruit of the Spirit he by nature exhibited it all. The Spirit created his human nature holy – as he did in Adam’s case. And in his holy human nature all the Spirit’s fruit was present; none was missing.

Christ displaying this fruit to perfection      

We can take things a step further. Not only did Christ display all the fruit of the Spirit, he displayed it all to perfection. We return once more to ourselves and to the question we were asking earlier: what do we find when we look for the Spirit’s fruit in our own lives and in the lives of others? Unevenness! There are always some characteristics that stand out from the others. All of us are strong in some areas but not so strong in others. Not so Christ! He had all these things – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And at every stage of life he exhibited them to perfection.

That is not to say that there was no development. There was. We may think of him maturing in his love for God and man as his knowledge grew. We may think of him coming to have a deeper, fuller, richer joy both in God and in his gifts as he progressed from boyhood to manhood. But nothing was ever lacking. He never had to repent of the shortcomings with which we are so familiar. That is why we become more and more like Jesus the more of the Spirit’s fruit we bear. That is why when the Spirit has finished his work in us we will, like Jesus, bear the Spirit’s fruit to perfection.

Our need of the Holy Spirit 

We close with our absolute need of the Holy Spirit. A growing resemblance to the Lord Jesus in his love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control is impossible apart from the Holy Spirit. We must first be born again. We must first have the Holy Spirit living and working in our hearts. We may look at the life of Jesus in the four Gospels and find much that is attractive. But that attractiveness can never become ours by self-effort. It is entirely supernatural. That is the way in which God created human nature. It can have no holiness unless the Spirit of God gives it holiness. “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor.3.18).

It is the Holy Spirit who made Christ’s humanity beautiful with the beauty of holiness. And it is he alone who can make us like him in his holiness. So we first must come to God in our need. We first must come to him with our desperately sinful hearts. And our cry must be that he would give to us a new heart, a clean heart, a holy heart; a heart that the Spirit will flood and fill with Jesus’ love and Jesus’ joy and Jesus’ peace and Jesus’ patience and Jesus’ kindness and Jesus’ goodness and Jesus’ faithfulness and Jesus’ gentleness and Jesus’ self-control. It was precisely so that we might have such a heart that Jesus suffered and died. It was so that we might have such a heart that the Spirit was afterwards sent into the world. And it is just such a heart that God, for Jesus’ sake, will delightedly give to all who seek his mercy.

Is that heart yours? And if it isn’t, will you not seek God until it is?

Andrew A. Bonar        

  The youngest of the three Bonar brothers

In the introduction to her Reminiscences of Andrew A. Bonar, Marjory Bonar writes, “Our father’s name can hardly be dissociated from the names of his two older brothers, John and Horatius. Both of them were in the ministry before him, Horatius only a year earlier, and John some years before. Through a long life of service, they followed the same course, preaching the same truths, bearing the same testimony’. Andrew Bonar has a diary entry to the same effect. On April 6^th 1888 he writes, ‘Last night was my brother Horace’s Jubilee…The Lord helped me to say a few words about the very uncommon fact that three brothers of us had each for about fifty years preached the same Gospel, etc. O what a privilege! What an honour to each of us!’ He then adds, with characteristic humility, ‘But O that we had always been full of the Holy Ghost!’ In previous posts we have looked at John, the oldest of the three brothers, and at Horatius, the second; in this we turn to Andrew, the youngest of the three.

Andrew Alexander Bonar was born in Edinburgh on the 29^th of May 1810. From the age of eleven he attended Edinburgh High School; afterwards, in 1825, he became a student at Edinburgh University. In both he excelled in Latin. The Rector of the High School, Dr. Carson, is reported to have said that ‘without doubt Andrew Bonar was the best Latin scholar who had ever passed through his hands’; in his Latin class in 1827 he was awarded the Gold Medal given by the Society of Writers to the Signet.

Reminiscences is one of the two primary sources for our knowledge of Andrew Bonar. The other is his Diary and Letters. It was published in 1893, the year after his death, and edited by his daughter Marjory. The diary ‘is the revelation’, she writes, ‘of the life of one who prayed always, who prayed everywhere, who, the nearer he came to the other world, was every day enjoying closer intercourse with it’. She acknowledges that it ‘does not reveal much of the bright, joyous, happy spirit which was so characteristic of him’, but adds, ‘his letters are pervaded by it, as was his whole life and conversation’.

Conversion  

 The first diary entry is for August 21^st 1828 and begins as follows: ‘About this time I thought of marking occasionally my thoughts and God’s dealings. It was this week that I resolved to enter upon the study of divinity’. By his own decision, however, his formal training for gospel ministry did not begin till three years later. A few of the early entries put us in the picture. May 3^rd 1829: ‘Great sorrow because I am still out of Christ’. May 31^st 1829: ‘My birthday is past, and I am not born again’. November 8^th 1829: ‘Still am not in Christ’. December 4^th 1829: ‘Thoughts of delaying my going to the Divinity Hall for another year, because I feel still so far from Christ’. But the change soon came. Writing in 1892 to his son James he says, ‘[I]t was in the year 1830 that I found the Saviour, or rather that He found me and “laid me on His shoulders rejoicing”, and I have never parted company with Him all these sixty-two years’. The diary entry for October 17^th 1830 tells the story: ‘In reading Guthrie’s Saving Interest I have been led to hope that I may be in Christ though I have never yet known it. All the marks of faith in a man which he gives are to be found in me, I think, although very feeble. This is the first beam of joy, perhaps, that I have yet found in regard to my state’. Two weeks later he writes, ‘ever since I read a passage in Guthrie’s Saving Interest, I have had a secret joyful hope that I really have believed on the Lord Jesus’. His daughter Marjory assures us that ‘no doubt of his acceptance in Christ ever again dimmed the clearness of his faith’.

After finishing his studies at the Divinity Hall in 1835 Bonar had two brief periods of ministry – the first in the town of Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders as an assistant to the Rev. John Purves, the second in Edinburgh as an assistant to the Rev. Robert S. Candlish. There then followed an eighteen year ministry in the Perthshire village of Collace, first of all as assistant and successor to the parish minister and then, after the Disruption of 1843, as minister of the Free Church congregation. When Bonar went to Collace in 1838 the ‘old minister’ (as he is frequently referred to) had been there for nearly fifty years. He is described as belonging ‘to the extreme moderate school’ and was no friend to the fervent evangelical preaching that the people heard from the new assistant. Nor, sadly, did that change. In early 1842 Bonar did a four-week exchange with his friend Robert Murray M’Cheyne of Dundee. When someone asked the old minister how he was getting on with ‘that wild man from Dundee’, his reply was, ‘Mr Bonar is bad enough, but that man is ten times waur [worse]’. There are some moving references in Bonar’s diary to his concerns for the old minister’s soul as he drew near to death.

Ministry in Collace 

1839, the year after Bonar’s arrival in Collace, brought a long and unexpected break. There was a growing burden in the Church of Scotland in those days for the conversion of the Jews. It resulted in a deputation being sent to Israel to explore the possibilities of establishing a mission station there. Both Bonar and M’Cheyne were asked to form part of the deputation. ‘It is a very solemn matter to me’, Bonar writes. ‘How strange is the doing of God sending me here for a short time, then away to another part of the earth!’ In his Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jews from the Church of Scotland in 1839, jointly authored with M’Cheyne, Bonar records that ‘those of us who had Parishes to leave behind, felt that, in a case like this, we might act as did the shepherds at Bethlehem, leaving our flocks for a season under the care of the Shepherd of Israel, whose long lost sheep we were now going to seek’. He adds, ‘Nor have we had any cause to regret our confidence, and one at least of our number found this anticipation of the Good Shepherd’s care more than realised on his return’.

The reference is to a revival that had begun in M’Cheyne’s church in Dundee under the preaching of William Chalmers Burns. Collace was blessed as well. ‘When Mr. Bonar came to Collace’ – this is from Marjory Bonar’s Reminiscences – ‘there were perhaps not more than half a dozen living Christians in the place. From those days of revival the parish began to assume a different aspect even outwardly. Few, if any, idlers were to be seen outside the cottage-doors on a Sabbath day, and family worship was conducted morning and evening in nearly every household’. It greatly pained Bonar that there weren’t more conversions. Again and again he mourns over it in his diary – and over himself. ‘I feel altogether sinful, worthless, something very small and insignificant’, is a typical entry. On his final Sunday, October 19^th 1856, he writes, ‘O what these eighteen years might have been had I only lived nearer Christ!’ But the changes wrought were deep and lasting. More than thirty years later, on the occasion of his Jubilee in 1888, representatives of his old congregation spoke as follows: ‘When you came among us in 1839 Collace, as regards spiritual life, was comparatively a desert. When you left it, it was like a watered garden – “a field that the Lord had blessed”. The effects of your faithful testimony remain to this day, both in living souls and in the social and religious habits of the people’.

Two further matters before we leave Collace for Glasgow, one sorrowful, the other joyful. The diary entry for March 25^th 1843 records the death of his beloved friend Robert Murray M’Cheyne: ‘This afternoon about five o’clock, a message has just come to tell me of Robert M’Cheyne’s death. Never, never yet in all my life have I felt anything like this. It is a blow to myself, to his people, to the Church of Christ in Scotland…My heart is sore…Life has lost half its joys, were it not for the hope of saving souls. There was no friend whom I loved like him’. Later that same year Bonar would write his Memoir of M’Cheyne. It was destined to become a spiritual classic. Over the course of the next almost fifty years Bonar heard constantly of blessing attending the reading of it. And nor has the blessing ceased. There are references to M’Cheyne throughout the Diary. Bonar often reflected on his life, his preaching, his passion for souls, his holiness, and his early death. ‘In him’, he could say, ‘have we been taught how much one man may do who will only press farther into the presence of his God, and handle more skilfully the unsearchable riches of Christ, and speak more boldly for his God’. Many other books came from Bonar’s pen as the years went by. Reference is made in the Diary to biographies of David Sandeman, James Allan, and James Scott; commentaries on Leviticus and the Book of Psalms; an edition of Samuel Rutherford’s Letters; another of Scots Worthies; and books such as Redemption Drawing Nigh, The Old Gospel Way, and The Visitor’s Book of Texts.

If the Collace years were darkened by the loss of M’Cheyne they were brightened by his marriage to Isabella Dickson in April 1848. She had come to Christ during times of revival in Edinburgh in 1842. ‘[S]he attended a prayer-meeting for the Jews, held in St. Andrew’s church’, her daughter tells us. ‘Mr. M’Cheyne spoke at this meeting, and what he said interested her, but it was the impression of his personal holiness, rather than his words, that most deeply affected her. “There was something singularly attractive about Mr. M’Cheyne’s holiness”, she told her husband afterwards. “It was not his matter nor his manner either that struck me; it was just the living epistle of Christ – a picture so lovely, I felt I would have given all the world to be as he was, but knew all the time I was dead in sins”’. ‘[T]here could not be a happier home than she made mine to be’, he wrote, after Isabella’s death in October 1864.

The Glasgow years   

In 1856 Bonar accepted an invitation to move to Glasgow. A new church was to be planted in the Finnieston area of the city. It was poor and densely populated. ‘Ten or twelve people’, we are told, ‘formed the nucleus of the congregation’, but by the end of 1857 there were one hundred and thirty –six communicant members and an attendance of between four and five hundred. The church continued to grow and knew times of remarkable blessing – especially in the revival of 1859-60 and the later ones associated with the American evangelist D.L. Moody. A new church was opened in 1878. The opening services, he records, were ‘conducted by Dr. Somerville and Dr. Robert Macdonald; old friends. Together we have preached Christ for forty years, the same Gospel of the grace of God. Great attendance’. By the time of Bonar’s death in 1892 the church had over a thousand member

Andrew Bonar was blessed with remarkable health. Of Sunday July 13^th 1856, for example, he says, ‘the first time, so far as I can remember, during eighteen years in which I have been prevented from preaching by sickness’.  On Sunday December 7^th 1873 he could write, ‘This day seventeen years ago I began my ministry in Glasgow. I have never been even once kept from preaching by sickness’. James Stalker, in the course of a sermon preached after his death, recalls the following: ‘A few years ago  he said to me laughingly, when I was perhaps advising him to spare himself – “The young men nowadays cannot preach more than twice; it needs an old minister to preach three times”. And he did it many a Sunday when he was nearly four score’.

He continued to the end to write the severest things about himself. Here, for example, is the entry for August 20^th 1885:  ‘It is this day exactly forty-seven years since I was ordained. My ministry has appeared to me to be wanting in so many ways, that I can only say of it, indescribably inadequate’ [emphasis his]. But if the humility and self-reproach continued so did his joy in the Lord. In the tributes paid to him after his death on the last day of December 1892 it is a recurring note. ‘[H]is religion’, says one, ‘was free from gloom. He was pre-eminently a happy Christian; the joy of the Lord was his strength’. Another speaks of how ‘his words, his looks, his magnetic influence were a perpetual sermon’. A third relates how ‘he seemed to live in a perpetual sunshine, and to spread not gloom but brightness and good-nature wherever he appeared’. And as was his life so was his preaching: ‘full of peace, full of comfort, full of joy, full of the living sympathy and love of Jesus Christ’.

Alongside of these “works of the flesh” Paul then places something else – something of so entirely different a character that it contrasts as sharply with them as light does with darkness. He calls it “the fruit of the Spirit” – “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (vs.22-23). It is another opposite! If the works of the flesh are morally ugly, the fruit of the Spirit is morally lovely. If the works of the flesh are offensive to our holy God, the fruit of the Spirit is delightful to him. And the more we have of the mind of Christ, the more our thinking is shaped by the Holy Spirit, the more clearly we see and feel that and long to shun the one and exhibit the other.  

The fruit of the Spirit in the lives of believers

We begin with the fruit of the Spirit in the lives of believers. In a later post we will take up our main topic – the fruit of the Spirit in the life of Christ. But before we come to that we need to give some thought to the Spirit’s fruit in the lives of Christ’s people. Believers in Christ have the Spirit of God living in their hearts. And this is one of the things that he does. He enables us to bear a certain kind of fruit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Apple trees bear apples, plum trees bear plums, peach trees bear peaches. And Christians, by the inner working of the Holy Spirit, bear love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control. 

What makes these the fruit of the Spirit

Why are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control called here the fruit of the Spirit? There is an important reason for asking that question. Think of the kinds of fruit Paul lists here as character qualities. We can find each one of them in the lives of those from whom the Spirit of God is absent. People who are still “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph.2.1) can love, for example, and often with remarkable selflessness. They can be joyful and patient and kind and good and faithful and gentle and self-controlled. They can be quite at peace in their hearts. All these character qualities that are said in Galatians 5 to be fruit of the Spirit’s work can be found in those whose hearts are closed to him.  

Hence the question, ‘Why are they called the fruit of the Spirit?’  It’s helpful to think about it like this: the role of the Spirit is to take qualities that are common to human beings and do something unique with them; something only he can do through his presence and ministry in grace. Take, for instance, love.  It is common to Christians and non-Christians alike. Both love. But it is only Christians who love God and who under the impulse of that love obey and serve him. It is only Christians who have a distinctively Christian love for other Christians and show that by their prayers for them and concern for their Christian walk. In the hands of the Spirit love is enriched. It comes to have new objects and is exercised in new ways. So it is with joy. Like love, joy is common to Christians and non-Christians alike. Both have joy. But it is only the Christian who can rejoice in the Lord and in his great salvation and the progress of the kingdom of God. In the hands of the Spirit joy, like love, is enriched. It too comes to have new objects and is exercised in new ways. And what is true of love and joy is equally true of all the other kinds of fruit Paul lists.      

What we find when we look for the Spirit’s fruit

When we look for the Spirit’s fruit in our own lives and in the lives of others we find a great unevenness in the way in which these qualities are present. One Christian, for example, may be very loving but not very joyful. Another may be joyful but lacking in self-control. A third may be a model of self-control but not of patience. A fourth may be wonderfully patient but know little of God’s peace in their heart. 

Or think about it in terms of ripeness. You go into a supermarket and look at the fruit. It’s in various stages of ripeness. The apples and oranges are deliciously ready for eating. The bananas, however, are green; the peaches, pears, and plums are hard. They still have some ripening to do. So with the different kinds of fruit the Spirit produces in our lives as believers. They are at different stages of ripeness. In some, love is far ahead of peace; joy than self-control; faithfulness than gentleness. There is always more work for the Spirit to do!      

Charles Simeon of Cambridge once made a visit to Henry Venn’s rectory in Yelling. After he had ridden away, “first one Miss Venn and then another exclaimed” about his harsh and self-assertive manner. “‘Come into the garden, children’, their father said, and led them out into that favourite schoolroom. ‘Now, pick me one of those peaches’. But it was early summer, and ‘the time of peaches was not yet’; how could their father ask for the green fruit? ‘Well, my dears, it is green now, and we must wait; but a little more sun, and a few more showers, and the peach will be ripe and sweet. So it is with Mr. Simeon’”¹. And so it is with us as well! The Spirit still has plenty of work to do in us before his fruit is fully and equally ripe. 

What we become when the Spirit produces this fruit

There is something that we become as the Spirit produces his fruit in our lives, and that is increasingly like the Lord Jesus. We often hear about it, think about it, pray about it – being like Jesus. But what does it actually mean? What do we look like if we look like Jesus? Tie it in with Romans 8.29. Paul tells us there that “those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son”. What do we come to be as God’s purpose is worked out in our lives? One way of answering that question is with reference to the fruit of the Spirit. The Spirit comes to live in our hearts. He gets to work in us. He takes the common qualities of love and joy and peace etc. and begins to do something with them that only he can do. What are we becoming as he does his work; as under his influence we begin to bear this fruit? The answer is, like Jesus. And the more of the fruit of the Spirit we exhibit the more like our Saviour we become. But that is a topic for a later post!

¹ Charles Simeon, by Handley Moule, p.44 

For almost thirty years – from November 1837 till June 1866 – Horatius Bonar was a minister in the Scottish border town of Kelso. Communion times were especially precious. Looking back at them, one of the older members particularly remembers the short meeting for prayer after the evening service, ‘when our own Dr. Bonar and the other two Drs. Bonar, sometimes all three together in the pulpit, asked for a special blessing, concluding with the verse –

‘O may we stand before the Lamb,

When earth and seas are fled,

And hear the Judge pronounce our name,

With blessing on our head!’

I used to wish that we did not need to go down to the world again, but that we might go straight up into heaven, which seemed so near’. The ‘other two Drs. Bonar’ were Horatius’s brothers, his older brother John and his younger brother Andrew, both of them ministers like himself. In a previous article (the blog post for November 2024) we looked at John, the oldest of the three; in this we turn to Horatius, the second of the three.

Horatius Bonar was born in Edinburgh on the 19^th of December 1808. His future brother-in-law, Robert Lundie, in a sermon preached after Horatius’s death, says that ‘those who knew him best and longest scarcely remember a time when he did not appear to be under the influence of divine things’. He goes on to speak about how indebted Horatius felt to his godly parents and then quotes some lines by Horatius himself in which he gives expression to this:

‘I thank Thee for a holy ancestry;

I bless Thee for a godly parentage;

For seeds of truth and light and purity,

Sown in the heart from childhood’s earliest age’.

If he was blessed in his parents he was no less so in the men under whom he trained for gospel ministry, especially Dr. Thomas Chalmers whom he always considered ‘the greatest man he had ever met’. In a sketch of Horatius’s life in Disruption Worthies, William Cousin, a fellow minister, tells us that ‘by his magnificent exposition of the Evangelic system, and his own intense spiritual life’, Dr. Chalmers had, under God, rendered the Divinity Hall ‘a grand Missionary Institute and centre of spiritual power, from which our students went forth to their work as preachers of the Gospel, inflamed with a zeal that shrank from no labour, and strong in a faith that knew no doubt’.

Leith

After being licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Edinburgh in April 1833 Horatius became an assistant to James Lewis, minister of St. John’s Church in Leith, Edinburgh’s port. His task was to engage in mission work. From a fragment of autobiography written towards the end of his life we learn the following: ‘The district which [Mr. Lewis] allotted to me had a population of more than 3000, – its streets and lanes were amongst the very worst in the town. But the work soon became pleasant, and we were welcomed even by the worst and wickedest. My commencement was of a peculiar kind. Mr. Lewis had secured a hall, which held about 200, in one of those lanes; and I was to occupy it every Sabbath, forenoon and afternoon, with the Sabbath school in the evening. It had hitherto been used by a small body of Roman Catholics. I had scarcely begun the forenoon service when the door was thrown open, and a furious woman walked in, shouting, “My curse and the curse of God be upon you.” But there was no disturbance, and the curse did not come; but in many ways, both among young and old, the blessing followed us. That was the starting-point of my work in Leith’.

Something else started in Leith – the writing of those hymns with which the name of Horatius Bonar is inseparably connected. Among the boys and girls who began to attend his Sabbath school there was little enthusiasm for the singing of God’s praise. What could be done to help them? ‘They were fond of music’, writes his son, ‘and on week-days could sing songs heartily enough’. That gave Bonar the clue he needed. He would choose some of the tunes that the children liked to sing and put words to them. And it worked! The first hymn to be written, I lay my sins on Jesus, is sung in our churches to this day. (It may interest readers to know that Bonar was surprised at how popular it became. It ‘might be good gospel’, he used to say, ‘but was not good poetry’!). Another hymn written for the children, I was a wandering sheep, was long popular too. So too a third hymn dating from his Leith days: ‘It was probably in the year 1836’, says his son, ‘that my father first wrote a hymn not primarily intended for the young. To encourage his faithful fellow workers in his mission district, he wrote (to the tune of the Old Hundredth) the now familiar hymn, Go, labour on’.

The details just given are from an essay prefacing a collection of Bonar’s hymns published in 1904. It is full of interesting facts. One is that he had little ear for music. Another is that a number of his best-known hymns were to be found in Roman Catholic hymnals. His son remembers the answer he gave to someone who strongly advised him to refuse to allow this: ‘Would you think it right if I were to decline an invitation to preach to a willing audience merely because they were Roman Catholics?’ We learn, again, that it was generally when he was away from his ordinary work that he wrote poetry. ‘[T]o write verses was one of his holiday recreations…Often at the sea-shore as a boy, after our swim, I used to withdraw and sit aloof and watch my father pacing up and down some level beach or stretch of turf, writing, sometimes repeating a line or two aloud to try how it sounded to the ear, ere he committed it to paper’. Reference is also made to his strong sense of humour, a ‘side of his character…scarcely suspected by those who did not know him in private’. It came to expression in poems and rhymes written for a little holiday magazine that was circulated among the wider Bonar family. They show him, writes his son, ‘in a light which would astonish many of those who only knew him through his published writings’. ‘[F]rom first to last’, he says, ‘…there have been published over 600 hymns and poems by Horatius Bonar’, that figure including a number of translations from Latin and Greek.

Kelso

On the 30^th of November 1837 Horatius Bonar was ordained minister of the new North Church in Kelso. ‘It was’, writes William Cousin, ‘a blessed time for any man to enter on his ministry…The very air seemed charged with hope and expectancy’. ‘I found there plenty of work’, – this is Bonar’s own reminiscence, – ‘plenty of workmen, and plenty of sympathy, – zealous elders, zealous teachers, and zealous friends. The keynote that I struck was, “Ye must be born again”; and that message found its way into many hearts. It repelled some, but it drew many together, in what I may call the bond of regeneration’.

The disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843, in which Bonar sided with those who left to form the Free Church of Scotland, brought an expansion of the work. ‘Until the Disruption came’, he says, ‘I had no access to the neighbouring parishes, but after that I found open doors and open ears in that populous district among all ranks of people’. The work so grew that it was necessary to employ first one and then another evangelist, a Mr. Stoddart and a Mr. Murray. These two men ‘traversed the counties of Roxburgh, Berwick, and Northumberland, with blessed success…whole villages being awakened, besides many stray souls, both young and old, gathered into the Church of God from various quarters’.

Bonar did more than just preach. He also wrote tracts, the first of which, The Well of Living Water, dates from 1838. Many more followed and in 1846 they were gathered together and published in book form as the Kelso Tracts. The circulation of some of these tracts is astonishing, a million copies being sold of one of them, Believe and Live. In a chapter on Horatius Bonar in his A Scottish Christian Heritage, Iain Murray writes that ‘the freeness with which Bonar pressed an acceptance of the gospel upon sinners was startling to some, and offensive to others, but the message was the power of God unto salvation. “I am truly delighted with your tract, Believe and Live”, Dr. Chalmers wrote to him. “I hold by that theology”’.

A steady stream of books came from his pen as well, both in Kelso and later in Edinburgh. Among them were Words to Winners of Souls, The Night of Weeping, Truth and Error, God’s Way of Peace, a biography of his friend and fellow minster John Milne, another of his son-in-law, George Theophilus Dodds, two books about his own Eastern travels – The Desert of Sinai and The Land of Promise – a book of short sermons for family reading, and a five-volume work entitled, Light and Truth: Bible Thoughts and Themes. He also edited for many years the Quarterly Journal of Prophecy and the Christian Treasury. His son comments, ‘When I look back on the way in which his day was filled with the affairs of his own ministerial work, I wonder how he could possibly make room in his life for anything else. Yet he edited a magazine (for a considerable time, two of them), and was, in addition, perpetually publishing prose works. In fact, one special table in his study was entirely devoted to proof-sheets, and he used to say that for a period of thirty years he had been continually in the hands of three separate printers, for his editorial, his prose and his poetical work’. Robert Lundie sums it up well: ‘Vigorous alike in body and mind, he was gifted with a singular tolerance of toil’. 

Edinburgh

In 1866, after almost thirty years in Kelso, Bonar moved to Edinburgh to pastor a new Free Church congregation in the Grange area of the city, the Chalmers’ Memorial Church. ‘Here’, he writes in 1888, ‘I have spent twenty-two chequered years of my ministerial life’. And they were chequered years. On the one hand the new work grew considerably. By 1886 the communion roll had risen to 800. His books and hymns, too, gave him a world-wide audience. But there were shadows as well as lights. A controversy with Dr. John Kennedy of Dingwall arose over D.L. Moody, of whom Bonar was a strong supporter. There were stresses and strains in the Free Church as a whole, first because of a major difference of opinion over union with the United Presbyterian Church and then afterwards with the rise of Higher Criticism.  In the early 1880s there was also a division in Bonar’s own congregation over the introduction of hymns into public worship.

He had his personal sorrows as well. In October 1882 his son-in-law George Dodds died; two years later, in December 1884, his wife Jane died. Then came increasingly fragile health and the close of his public work. In September 1887 he preached what proved to be his final sermon, at his Jubilee celebration the following April he was unable to speak, and for the final months of his life he was confined to bed – weak, in much pain, and troubled at times with feelings of uselessness.  In his last hymn, Abiding Peace, written for New Year’s Day 1886 he had looked forward to the bright eternity ahead and wondered when it would begin for him:

Long years of peace:

I see afar in front of me

A heaven made up of years like yours,

A whole, a bright eternity.

Long years of peace:

I think of you as yet to come,

And wonder when Time’s last New Year

Shall gladly bid me welcome Home.

It would be fully three and a half years before his wondering would be over and his longing fulfilled. On the 31^st of July 1889 he at last entered his rest.

The following words were written with reference to his Edinburgh years but they equally apply to the Kelso and Leith years that preceded them: ‘God has been gracious, and has not disowned the work and the message. Righteousness without works to the sinner, simply on his acceptance of the divine message concerning Jesus and His sufficiency, – this has been the burden of our good news. “Through this Man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins, and by Him all that believe are justified from all things”. It is one message, one gospel, one cross, one sacrifice, from which nothing can be taken, and to which nothing can be added. This is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of our ministry’.

Dale Ralph Davis

For several months we have been exploring together on Sunday mornings the Old Testament book of Daniel. What can I recommend for further reading? Dale Ralph Davis’s The Message of Daniel is right at the top of the list.

Dr. Davis combines what is not often found together: accessible scholarship, fine writing, faithful exposition, clear structure, helpful lessons, good illustrations, and humour. If you have read his commentaries on Joshua, Judges, 1^st and 2^nd Samuel, 1^st and 2^nd Kings, or the early Psalms you will know what I mean. I was delighted some years back to find that he had contributed The Message of Daniel to The Bible Speaks Today series. I bought and read it eagerly and have appreciated re-reading it for our recent Sunday morning series.

The first six chapters of Daniel are expounded over six chapters of the book. The very titles are appealing: Saints in the hands of a saving God (Ch.3); The strut stops here (Ch.5); The night the lions were fasting (Ch.6). But please don’t skip the introduction. A number of important matters are addressed, the last of which has to do with why Daniel was written. It is a book for the long haul. God makes his people wait and wait and wait for his kingdom to fully come and they suffer persecution as they do so. Daniel is in the Bible to help us as the waiting and the suffering continue. In Dr. Davis’ own words, it is ‘a realistic survival manual for the saints’ (p.26).

Chs.1-6 of Daniel are among the best-loved chapters in the Bible, rich in interest and instruction for young and old alike, and it is refreshing to have them so helpfully expounded. But what about Chs.7-12? I expected a sober treatment of these chapters and I was not disappointed. Daniel’s visions and prophecies have given rise to a great deal of speculative, even sensational interpretations. The tendency of many is to be overly-dogmatic both in identifying prophetic details with past and present events and in mapping out the future. Dr. Davis avoids these extremes. His focus is on the big picture and the main lessons. Nor is he slow to acknowledge difficulties in interpretation and to indicate where it is wise not to be over-confident.

These final chapters of Daniel are designed both to help us to live well as Christians in the difficult present and prepare us for the difficult future. Things have been hard for God’s people from the outset and we are to expect that to continue to the end. But the enemies of God only ever ‘triumph’ for so long. The day of their destruction always comes. The God who has all history in his hands ensures that. So too the final deliverance of his people. That is the message of Daniel. Dr. Davis’ exposition will help you to see that – and to take courage.

Imagine a very important piece of work being entrusted to you. It is put into your hands to do. And what a task it proves! There are all kinds of difficulties to be overcome along the way. Some very powerful individuals are not friendly to the project and make no secret of their hostility. And at times it is not easy to keep going. But you do keep going until, at last, it is finished.

So it was with the Lord Jesus. He came into our world with a very important piece of work entrusted to him. Put into his hands, by God the Father, was the task of obtaining salvation for sinners; a salvation that would cover all their guilt, change their hearts, put them right with God, secure for them eternal life, and be freely offered to all. And what a task it proved! The difficulties were enormous. The opposition was fierce. It took him a whole life-time to accomplish it. And at the end there was tremendous suffering to be faced. But he didn’t give up. He kept on going until, on the cross, he cried out, “It is finished” (John 19.30). All that was necessary for him to do and suffer was at last fully done.

How he began it

Some people are able to start a particular work because they have become rich. Christ began his work by becoming poor: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor.8.9). We might sum it up like this: the Rich One became poor so that we poor ones might become rich. And we were poor! Our sin had taken from us the favour of God and made us objects of his wrath. It had taken our freedom away and made us slaves. It had taken God himself away and placed us in the power of Satan. It had taken from us the prospect of eternal life and set us on the road to destruction. And it had done this to all of us. We were – and are! – in dire spiritual poverty!

This is the dark background against which we are to view the mission of Christ. His task was to come into our world and to so live and so die that sinners might become rich – spiritually rich. And if we have taken him to be our Saviour we are rich. In material terms we may be desperately poor. But in spiritual terms we have become wonderfully wealthy. For in Christ we have been restored to the favour of God, freed from the guilt of our sin, delivered from the power of Satan, assured of eternal life, and through the ministry of the Holy Spirit are enjoying the first instalment of a glorious future inheritance. Rich indeed!

The cost to our Saviour, however, was enormous. For us to become rich it was necessary for him to become poor. Think of it in terms of the contrast between the place where he lived before his incarnation and the world into which he was born; between what he had enjoyed in heaven and the conditions amid which he would live on earth. It is why Bethlehem is such a humbling place to visit. The Jesus born there had come from heaven with its light, its love, its worship, and its freedom from all suffering and want. And now here he is in our very dark world, one of us, unknown and unrecognised, with such a difficult life ahead of him and, at the end, such a dreadful death to die.

How powerfully it speaks to those of us being called to give up something for him! To relinquish an affluent lifestyle, perhaps, and go and live and work for him in some desperately needy housing estate. Or to leave the family and friends in whom we are so rich and relocate to the other side of the world. Or to live and serve where it is dangerous to be a Christian. What will help us if we are wrestling with such a call on our lives? One thing that will help is the recollection of what it meant for Jesus to come and be our Saviour. The degree of self-impoverishment that entailed for him makes any sacrifice we may have to make a very small thing indeed.

How he took a lifetime to do it

We sometimes refer to someone’s work as their life’s work. And we say it without meaning it in a strictly literal sense, as if it occupied them from infancy to old age. We have in mind their adult life or their working life and how it was devoted to such and such a cause. In the case of Jesus, however, the accomplishing of the great task entrusted to him was, quite literally, a life-long matter. It took him no less than a lifetime to do it.

The three years of his public ministry were, of course, of immeasurable importance and especially at the end. There would be no redemption enjoyed by sinners were it not for these remarkable three years and the atoning death in which they reached their climax. But they were not the whole. Everything that went before them was just as important. A key verse in this connection is Romans 5:19: “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous”. Two men are being contrasted here, Adam and Christ. Adam, on the one hand, disobeys God and with terrible results for the many whom he represents. They are all made sinners. Christ, on the other hand, obeys God. And what blessing comes of that! All who will receive him will be made righteous. To what obedience, however, is the apostle referring? Not just to the obedience of the final years with its culmination in his submission to death. The statement takes in the whole of his obedience. There is righteousness, justification, and life for all believers because as a child and as a youth Jesus as perfectly pleased the Father as he did in adult life.

How he went about finishing it

What did you do to finish the last piece of work you were doing? Jesus finished his work by dying. It is interesting in this connection to think about the different ways in which these two things, finishing and dying, go together. Sometimes dying prevents the finishing. Charles Dickens left an unfinished novel. So did Robert Louis Stevenson and Elizabeth Gaskell. Franz Schubert left an unfinished symphony. In General Eisenhower’s farm in Pennsylvania there is an unfinished painting of Culzean Castle in Ayrshire. At other times dying follows the finishing. The last great work of Dr. Thomas Chalmers was the planting of a church in a very deprived area of Edinburgh, the West Port. It was his great joy to sit down with its founding members at their first Communion; a few weeks later he was dead. There are cases, too, where dying helps others to finish something, a fact that could be endlessly illustrated from wartime.

And then we come to Christ. In him we have a combination of finishing and dying that is unique. He finished his work by dying. Dying was part of his work. It was indeed the climactic part. His work could not be completed apart from his death. Had he declined death it would have been the utter undoing of his work. It would have meant that everything that had gone before – his teaching, his miracles, his example, his obedience – was of no account whatsoever. Leave out the cross and there is no redemption for anyone. It is why these great words, “It is finished”, are spoken when they are – not before the cross; not even as he is being nailed to the cross; but right at the close, as he is about to breathe his last.

And what a death it was! Two others were crucified with him and at the level of the physical there was nothing that made Jesus’ death any different from theirs. But in other respects it was without parallel. We see it, for example, in his identity. This was the Son of God, the Lord of glory, the eternal Word who in the beginning was with God and was himself God. We see it, too, in the extraordinary union of sinlessness and guilt. Death is the wages of sin and Jesus was without sin. He had always done what pleased the Father. Yet his guilt was greater than that of any man who had ever lived. How could that be? Scripture tells us. The Lord had laid on him the iniquity of us all (Is.53.6). He was bearing our sins in his own body on the tree (1 Peter 2.24). He who knew no sin had been made sin for us (2 Cor.5.21). The guilt with which he was guilty was our guilt; the death that he was dying was the death that we deserved to die. And all so that we might not perish but have eternal life.

How welcome we are to the blessings of it

Back in the 1860s, when the Scotsman John G. Paton was a missionary on the island of Aniwa in the New Hebrides, there was no permanent supply of fresh water. The natives were dependent on the rain. So Paton decided to sink a well, much to the amusement and concern of the natives who had never heard of such a thing. Showers came from the sky, not out of the ground! But Paton pressed on, day after day, until, at a depth of thirty-two feet, water! In Paton’s own words, his well broke the back of heathenism on Aniwa. Jehovah had done what no other god had done; he had made rain come up from the earth.

But here’s the point of the story. When Paton’s well was finished the fresh water was made available to the whole island. Everyone needed it and everyone was welcome to it. And that is how it is with Jesus. Having finished the work the Father gave him to do a well of living water has been opened by Jesus for the world. All may come and drink. The blessings of Jesus’ finished work are both available to all and offered to all. Christians may say to all without exception, “there is a Saviour for you; a Saviour to whom you may come in your need as a sinner and with absolute confidence that he will never turn you away”.

Shortly before his death in 1884 an Edinburgh doctor by the name of Alexander Wood received the following letter: “I cannot help writing to thank you that I am here. I am only an insignificant unit in the countless number of sufferers whom your remedy has helped through their saddest hours, but my gratitude is very sincere, and I want to tell you so, although I know that the consciousness of having conferred so immortal a blessing upon the world must be a sufficient compensation to you of itself without any spoken thanks”. 

The remarkable remedy to which the writer refers is the hypodermic or subcutaneous syringe. More than three decades earlier, in 1853, the question was weighing on Dr. Wood: how best to introduce a dose of morphine into the circulation so that a patient could get the pain relief and rest that they needed? In the case of one patient, an eighty year-old woman, the matter became critical. If she was to survive she needed sleep. Dr. Wood’s biographer, Thomas Brown, takes up the story: “A certain line of reasoning had led Dr. Wood to the belief that benefit was to be expected from the injection of morphia [morphine] under the skin. Taking as his model the sting of the bee, he had constructed a small glass syringe, to which was attached a fine perforated needle point. This needle he passed under the skin, and through it he injected a small dose of morphia, which he could not give by the mouth…The strikingly beneficial result which followed this bold experiment made Dr. Wood aware that he now held in his hand a new method of treatment, which promised far-reaching results”.

Far-reaching indeed! Writing in 1886 his biographer says that “in his most sanguine thoughts he could little have imagined, as he stood at that bedside, how in a few years every physician would be armed with that syringe, and countless patients would have cause to bless his skill”. His syringes were initially used for pain relief and sleep alone (they were advertised as Dr. Alexander Wood’s narcotic injection syringes) but before many years had passed they were being utilised in the treatment of an increasingly wide range of conditions. A recent article identifies Wood as the man who “invented the first true hypodermic syringe that has made today’s mass vaccinations possible”. Thomas Brown’s assessment is fully warranted: “It is no exaggeration to say that Dr. Alexander Wood, by this discovery, stands out as one of the prominent benefactors of humanity”.

Birth and early years

Alexander Wood was born in Cupar, a town in the Fife area of Scotland, on December 10^th 1817. His parents were fine Christians. His father, Dr. James Wood, had been deeply influenced by Thomas Chalmers at the time of Chalmers’ conversion some years before. Cupar is not far from Kilmany where Chalmers was parish minister and Chalmers was a friend of the family. Brown says that “all who knew James Wood in after life were well aware of how unobtrusively, yet how consistently, for long years he took his part in the duties of the Christian life”. He adds, “it need not be said how much his son owed to the example of a father whose decision and weight of character were felt by all with whom he came in contact”.

Alexander’s mother, Mary Wood, was her husband’s cousin. They shared the same surname before their marriage. She is described as “a devout and earnest follower of Christ” who “commended the truth by all that was amiable and kindly” and who “was regarded by all who knew her (and especially by those who knew her best), as a bright example of Christian excellence in its most attractive form”.

She is referred to by name in a couple of entries in Thomas Chalmers’ journal. They date from 1811, the time of the great change in Chalmers’ life:

“January 28^th – Miss Mary Wood called and spent the day with us. We had much conversation about religion; and, O God, may I grow every day in faith and in charity.

“January 30^th – I am certainly obliged to Miss Wood. Through her I have enlarged my observations on religious sentiments. I have imbibed a higher respect for the peculiar doctrines. I feel more cordially than ever that my sufficiency is of Christ, and that faith in Him is the most comprehensive principle of practice”. (Memoirs, Vol.1, p. 201)

Thomas Brown comments, “It was no slight service to have, in some measure, aided such a mind in the crisis of his spiritual history”.

The Woods moved to Edinburgh when Alexander was a small boy. He was to remain there his whole life. It was in Edinburgh that he went to school and later trained to be a doctor, it was in Edinburgh that he practised medicine, and it was in Edinburgh that he ended his days. He loved the city. One of his delights in later life was to reminisce about the Edinburgh of his boyhood. The first two chapters of his biography, in fact, are wholly taken up with memories of the city as it was sixty years before and of what it was like to grow up there.

Serving the city

Alexander Wood also served the city, in the first instance as one of its doctors. Coming as he did of a long line of doctors it is perhaps no surprise that that should have been his chosen profession. Here is his mother’s counsel to him as he began his medical studies in 1834: “Your profession is unlike most others in this, that as by lengthening life you may save the immortal soul, every energy of mind should be given to the study and the practice of it, keeping in mind that even a clergyman, in many instances, must yield to you in usefulness, as you gain admittance where he is excluded”. She adds, “Think seriously of this, my dear boy, and pray God to enable you to turn your profession to the noblest ends”.

After graduation and some hospital work Wood established his own private practice. It grew large. His biographer informs us that “sometimes from thirty to forty professional visits a day were required before he could overtake his list of patients”. He also taught. Medical training in Edinburgh was not just University based. Extramural lecturers had a major part to play and in 1841, at the age of twenty-four, Wood became one of them, lecturing on the Practice of Medicine. He was both a gifted public speaker and a hard worker who prepared his lectures carefully. “Six large folios of manuscripts, which now lie before us”, says Brown, “are visible proof that lecturing was to him no routine work. Sometimes rising in the early morning, sometimes sitting far into the late hours of the night, he soon showed that it was no superficial or commonplace treatment of the subject that would satisfy him”. He was popular with his students. “I have, every day I live”, says one, “to be thankful for the information I gained; and, above all, for the precise method of arrangement, without which knowledge, however abundant, is all but valueless”.

Involvement in Edinburgh life was by no means confined to his medical work. Sanitary Reform, for instance, occupied his attention for a number of years. The problem of air pollution, sewage, and the diseases and numerous deaths that they brought was a huge one for Edinburgh. “Who will venture”, he asks, “to raise the curtain that hides from our view all the misery and wretchedness with which such death is often associated? There are racking pains of body with none to alleviate, and agonies of mind with none to soothe; there are weeks of wasting sickness, slowly dissipating the little all…above all, there are the searchings of an immortal soul about to enter an unknown eternity”. What could be done?

Sanitary arrangements, strange as it sounds, were in the hands of the Commissioners of Police. So Dr. Wood became a Commissioner of Police! – a position that, unsurprisingly, entailed responsibilities beyond those connected with foul air and filthy streets. Unsurprisingly too he had the frustration of not seeing all the changes that were so desperately needed. Nevertheless, his biographer assures us that “the services which he rendered to the cause” (with regard to drainage, for example)“were neither few nor unimportant”, and that “he had the satisfaction of knowing that step by step the sanitary condition of the city was being steadily improved”.

A related concern was housing for the poor. A report prepared by Dr. Wood in 1867 highlighted the needs. Considerably more than a third of Edinburgh’s citizens lived in single-room houses, with over fifteen hundred of these having from six to fifteen occupants. “What the effect must be where diseases, and especially those which are infectious, break out”, he writes, “imagination can scarcely picture. The healthy, the diseased, the dying and the dead, crowded together in a single small room, present a picture of misery of constant occurrence, which only those who have witnessed it can possibly realise…But”, he continues, “that the moral disease engendered is even more awful than the physical will readily be supposed. How can morality and decency be preserved among a population so circumstanced?”

In 1868 the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor was formed and for eight years Dr. Wood served as chairman of its Acting Committee. The object of the Association was to help the poor to help themselves, and to give relief in such a way “as to preserve the honest and industrious from sinking in the struggle of life”. “It was a noble work”, says Thomas Brown, “to which he gave himself heart and soul”.

Christian Education

One other service to the city was his management of the Edinburgh Tramway Company, a work that he took up in the years after his retirement from General Practice. Passing from that with nothing more than a mention, however, we turn to a work which occupied him throughout the whole of his adult life, namely, Christian Education. Brown informs us that “the first Christian work in which Alexander Wood engaged was in connection with the Sabbath-school carried on by Dr. Muir of St. Stephen’s”. He cared deeply for the children, taught them faithfully, visited them in their homes, kept up the contact, and was able to be of practical help to some of them in later life.

After the disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843 Dr. Wood became a member and later an elder of St. Bernard’s Free Church. St. Bernard’s had both a day-school and a Sabbath-school. The day-school was known as the Northern District School and Dr. Wood was one of its directors. “Seldom a day passed”, writes the headmaster, a Mr. Dingwall, “that he did not call for a few minutes at least. He knew the major part of the scholars by name – often considerably over 200 in attendance – and was conversant with the environments of not a few of them”. He loved to watch the children at play and would often time his visit so that it would coincide with their recess. Pupils, he believed, should be at lessons no longer than two hours at a time whilst five hours, in his opinion, was quite long enough for the work of a school day. His biographer comments that his leadership helped to give the Northern District School a “high educational position. Strangers from a distance wishing to have a specimen of the common schools of Scotland at their best, began to find their way to” it, “and the influence and example of the school, and especially of Dr. Wood as an educational authority, began to be more widely felt”.

Dr. Wood was also involved in Free St. Bernard’s Sabbath-school. It met in the same building as the day-school and to a large extent was attended by the same children. “The object aimed at”, says Thomas Brown, “was to have the lessons of the week days pervaded by the sacred influence of the Sabbath, and in the Sabbath teaching to have the same intellectual energy which was conspicuous in the school during the week”. At three out of every four meetings Dr. Wood was able to be present. It was he who would round things off with a general lesson for all the classes on the topic of the day. He would also lead the closing devotions. An often-prayed prayer was as follows: “Do Thou, our great Master, enrol us all among Thy disciples; and when we pass through the dark valley of the shadow of death, be our rod and staff; and above its clouds and beyond its shadows do Thou, our Father, be our great reward”.

Closing days

A house-move in his latter years took Dr. Wood to the Grange district of Edinburgh. There he became a member and elder of Dr. Horatius Bonar’s congregation. It remained his delight to teach Bible classes. Dr. Bonar speaks of how his “large knowledge of Scripture” enabled him “to illustrate Bible truths with clearness and power”. This knowledge was the fruit of his own extensive personal study. His wife Rebecca, whom he married in 1842, says that “the part of his home life which I think so peculiarly characteristic of him was that even in the midst of his many arduous duties he found time for years to make…a profound study of the Bible. He used to rise early in the mornings and study hard before going out to his public duties; and eleven bound volumes of his manuscript notes bear testimony to his industry”. Nor are we left in any doubt as to his theological convictions. “In his views of inspiration”, Brown writes, “and in his doctrinal beliefs, he adhered with unshaken faithfulness to the evangelical system in its strictly orthodox form. The faith, once delivered to the saints, was the foundation of all his hopes”.

There is much more that could be told. In the course of his extraordinarily busy life Alexander Wood was elected President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh no fewer than three times. For some years he was a member of the General Medical Council. He served on the Free Church of Scotland’s Education Committee and edited the short-lived Free Church Educational Journal. He was both a formidable debater and, as a doctor, tender-hearted, “his whole bearing” at the bedside of his patients “that of extreme gentleness and delicacy”.

Dr. Wood died on the 26^th of February 1884, his death hastened by anxiety over the illness of his beloved wife and the distressing death of a relative. His friend and pastor, Horatius Bonar, touchingly describes his end: “During the last weeks of his life, weeks of weariness, weakness, and pain, he could speak but little, but what he did say, brokenly and by snatches, showed that his thoughts were of things above. ‘Behold the Bridegroom cometh’, he said at one time; and then at another, ‘Peace which passeth all understanding’. These were his last audible words, indicating the inner rest of his departing spirit – a rest which the many and sharp trials through which he had been passing, especially during the later months of his life, had not been able to shake. With that peace within, he passed upward to the City of Peace above, the rest which remaineth for the people of God”.

Anne Ross Cousin is best known as the authoress of the hymn, The sands of time are sinking. Its nineteen verses (in its original form) are based on the death-bed sayings of a remarkable seventeenth century Scottish preacher, Samuel Rutherford. What is not so well known is that Anne Ross Cousin put into verse some of the death-bed sayings of a Scotsman who died nearly a century earlier, the great Reformer John Knox. Readers who have access to a biography which records the things Knox said in his final days (such as the one by Thomas M‘Crie) will be struck by the accuracy of Mrs. Cousin’s rendering. The poem is long (fully thirty-five verses!) but well worth the time it takes to read.

THE DEATH-BED OF JOHN KNOX

He has come down the pulpit stair,
Creeps slow along the street;
And eager groups are gathered there,
The care-bent man to greet.

And loving eyes look fond farewell
On him they’ll see no more;
And boding hearts in fear foretell,
“John Knox’s work is o’er”.

He has gone up into his bed,
To rest him and to die;
He layeth down his fainting head,
And lifts his soul on high.

He who ne’er feared the face of man,
Before his God lies low;
He who fought sternest in the van
Breathes sacred quiet now.

He lieth in a solemn calm;
No sound is near him heard,
Save voice of prayer and holy psalm,
And of the blessed Word.

But list! He speaks. “The hour is near
That I have sighed to see;
Have prayed with many a groan and tear,
Might shortly come to me.

“Sore weary of the world am I,
And thirsting to depart;
Now God doth end my misery,
And comforteth my heart.

“Thou know’st, Lord, what my wars have been,
What burdens I have borne;
Thou know’st the sorrows I have seen,
How weak I am and worn.

“I kept my watch on Zion’s wall.
And to my trust was true;
Thou bidst me lift the trumpet’s call,
And a loud blast I blew.

“Men have miscalled me harsh and stern,
A man of war and strife:
They knew not how I sighed to turn
From that sore troubled life;

“How I had loved to serve my Lord,
Far from the battle’s shock,
A faithful preacher of His Word
And pastor of His flock.

“What time I rained on evil men
God’s threats, like burning coals,
Albeit I loathed their sins, e’en then
Full well I loved their souls.

“And in yon galley, fevered, chained
Beside the slavish oar,
One fervent hope my soul retained,
Here to preach Christ once more.

“The long thirst of my sorrowing heart
Might never be allayed
Till this bruised land, through every part,
Christ’s name had fragrant made.

“I leave with Him – her Head and Lord –
His precious chosen spouse,
To keep her faithful in His Word,
True to her covenant vows.

“All ‘neath the sun is toil and irk –
Is vanity and loss;
Nought is abiding save Christ’s Kirk
Fighting beneath the Cross.

“Last night for her I wrestled long –
I wrestled and prevailed;
She shall be built – stand fair and strong,
By whomso’er assailed.

“The Eternal, our own God shall rise,
And this long warfare close;
Shall wipe the tears from His saints’ eyes,
And give them sure repose.

“My meditation was most sweet
In the mid-watch last night;
My glad soul did its glory greet,
And well-nigh walked by sight.

“Oh! I have tasted and possessed –
Drunk pleasures with the Lamb –
Have reigned within my heavenly rest,
Where even now I am.

“Death has no victory – no sting –
Thanks be to Christ the Lord!
O salutary solacing!
O comfortable word!

“I take good night of all the saints
In both these realms that be;
My flesh beneath its burden faints;
Let them toil after me.

“With my dead hand, yet gladsome heart,
I hail them to the fight;
Bid them lift up when I depart,
The pure Evangel’s light.

“Now read the Mediator’s prayer –
Great utterance of His will;
I cast my soul’s first anchor there,
And it is steadfast still.”

He sleeps; but mark, a troubled sleep;
For, ever and anon,
There comes a sigh – heart-drawn and deep –
There comes a heavy groan.

It is a sleep disturbed – oppressed –
By some dim anguish moved –
Not like the tranquil child-like sleep
God gives to His beloved.

He wakes; deep awe is in his eye,
But peace is on his brow;
Whate’er the ill that brooded nigh,
Its spell is broken now.

“Ofttimes”, he sighs, “in this frail life,
Hath Satan tempted me;
And oft it was a deadly strife
Ere he was forced to flee.

“But now – O serpent subtilty!
O coil of cunning lies!
He tempted me to think that I
Had merited the prize;

“That I had earned a conqueror’s place –
A palm – a crown – a throne –
Not by the gift of God’s free grace,
But deeds that I had done.

“Oh! but mine ancient enemy
Had well-nigh won the field,
Till the last dart that he let fly
I quenched upon my shield.

“And then I drew the Spirit’s sword –
‘The grace of God, not I’;
And from that quick and piercing word
The vanquished fiend did fly.

“And now, I know, without more pain,
Or anguish of the mind,
The fair deliverance I shall gain –
The abundant entrance find.

“All hail, sweet rest and free reward!
Yet – hear my latest breath! –
Live – live in Christ and serve the Lord,
And ne’er need flesh fear death”.

E’en now the sight fails from his eyes,
And now ‘tis come at last!
With lifted hand – with two deep sighs,
That kingly soul hath passed.

An address given at the Thirty-Fourth Annual Graduation of The Christian School of Grace Baptist Church, June 2005

I wonder how many of you have looked at a fellow student or at someone else and said to yourself, ‘I wish I was like him’, or, ‘I wish I was like her’? I won’t ask you to raise your hand, but I would be surprised if there are any of you who haven’t done that. It’s a very human thing to do – to look at other people and because of their looks or talents or personality or popularity or success to say to yourself, ‘I wish I was like him’, or, ‘I wish I was like her’.

I want to talk to you this evening about four young people whom many of you, I’m sure, would like to be like – at least in some respects. They were probably not much older than you are and, like you, were members of the same graduating class. Their names were Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, and Daniel, and for three years they had been studying together at King’s College, Babylon. There is an ancient and famous King’s College in Cambridge in England, but it wasn’t at King’s College, Cambridge they had been studying. These young people had been studying at King’s College, Babylon. They graduated somewhere around the year 600BC, and in the Old Testament book of Daniel, Ch.1, we learn three things about them.

I. They were strikingly GOOD LOOKING

Daniel and his three friends did not go to King’s College, Babylon, because that was the school that they themselves or their parents had selected. They were there because of orders given by the king of Babylon himself. He was looking for young men who would one day be able to serve in his palace, and Daniel and his three friends were amongst those who were picked. 

And here is one of the reasons they were picked: they were strikingly good looking. The king didn’t want anyone serving in his palace who was ugly. Nor did he want anyone who was just ordinary looking. He wanted young men who had no physical defects and were handsome. And Daniel and his three friends were amongst those who were chosen.

So there’s the first thing that we learn about them: they were strikingly good looking. I wonder how many of you have said to yourself, ‘I wish I was like that’? You look at some movie star or some singer or a fellow student and they are very good looking and you say to yourself, ‘I wish I looked like him’, or, ‘I wish I looked like her’. Any of you ever done that? It’s a very human thing to do. Most people are not strikingly good looking and it’s very easy to look at those who are and say, ‘I wish I was like that’.

Then there’s a second thing that we learn about these young people –

II. They were extremely BRIGHT

You didn’t just have to be good looking to go to King’s College, Babylon. You had to be academically very able as well. The king’s students had to show ‘aptitude for every kind of learning’; they had to be ‘well-informed’; and they had to be ‘quick to understand’ (v.4).

Right at the top of the graduating class of 600BC were these four young men – Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, and Daniel. We are told that when ‘the king talked with them…he found none equal to’ them. In fact, ‘in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king questioned them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom’(vs.19&20). Imagine it! Ten times better than all the wise men in the kingdom! These were A-Honour Roll students with a vengeance! – young men who were all extremely bright.

And I wonder again how many of you have said. ‘I wish I was like that’? You look at one of your fellow students or at one of your siblings or at a favourite class teacher or at someone else whom you know and they are very bright. And you say to yourself, ‘I wish I was as clever and as knowledgeable as he is’, or ‘as she is’. Any of you ever done that? It’s a very human thing to do. I am now three times the age of most of you and I confess that I still do it! I look at fellow ministers whom I know are far brighter than I am; who know and understand far more than I do, and I say to myself, ‘I wish I had a mind like him. I wish that I had the knowledge and understanding that he has’. It’s a very easy thing to do – to look at those who are brighter than we are and say, ‘I wish I was like that’.

Then there’s a third thing that we learn about these young people –

III. They were deeply DEVOTED TO GOD

Now this was not one of the qualifications for studying at King’s College, Babylon. You did have to be good looking and you did have to be bright but you didn’t need to be deeply devoted to God. But Daniel and his three friends were. Even though they had come from Judah where most people were worshipping false gods, Daniel and his three friends were deeply devoted to the living God. It’s what they were in their student days; it’s what they were afterwards.

It comes out, for example, in a decision they made about dining. These four young men resolved that they were not going to eat the royal food and drink the royal wine – probably because it would involve the honouring of Babylonian gods. Rather, out of devotion to God, they chose to survive on vegetables and water.

More famously, their devotion to God comes out in the later events of Daniel Ch.3 and the events of Daniel Ch.6. In Daniel Ch.3, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah – or to give them their Babylonian names, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – were told to bow down and worship a golden image on pain of being thrown into a blazing furnace. And they wouldn’t do it. Out of devotion to God they chose to be thrown into the blazing furnace rather than worship this golden image.

Then in Daniel Ch.6 we read of an order being given that no-one pray to anyone other than the king of Babylon on pain of being thrown into a den of lions. And Daniel wouldn’t do it. Out of devotion to God he chose to be thrown into a den of lions rather than pray only to the king of Babylon.

You see then what they were like – these four young members of the graduating class of King’s College, Babylon. Both in youth and in manhood they were deeply devoted to God.

Now the question that I want to ask you is this: how many of you have said, ‘I wish I was like that’? You’ve looked at your parents, perhaps, or at a class teacher or at some missionary whom you’ve read about or some other Christian whom you know, and they are deeply devoted to God. God comes first in their lives. And they are not wimps! They are strong Christians – the stuff of heroes – ready to do the will of God even when it’s costly. And I ask you – have you ever said, ‘I wish I was like that’?

When I talked to you a moment ago about wanting to be good looking, or wanting to be very clever, I said that that’s a very human thing to do. Sadly, that is not how it is when it comes to wanting to be devoted to God. Quite the opposite. As human beings who have sinned against God it is actually the most natural thing to not want to be devoted to God. And some of you can identify with that. It would be nice to be strikingly good looking, and it would be nice to be extremely bright – but to be deeply devoted to God? No. If that’s what others want that’s fine – but it’s not for you.

I want to say to you, however, that the deep devotion of these four young people to God was actually their most attractive and important quality.

It was their most attractive quality. The king of Babylon would have looked at these four young men and said, ‘what fine looking young men they are!’ And they were. But the most attractive thing about them was not their face or their shape or their skin or their teeth. It was their deep devotion to God.

And that is wonderfully encouraging. You may look at yourself in the mirror and think, ‘I’m not particularly good looking’. Believe me, I’ve done the same! But if you are deeply devoted to God; if you love the Lord Jesus Christ; you have the best kind of beauty, the loveliest kind of loveliness in all the world. There are no lives more beautiful than those that are devoted to God. And the more devoted you are to him, the more you love the Lord Jesus, the lovelier you will be in the truest and highest sense. Remember that in a world where so much is made of the physical, where people are so obsessed with how they look. The best kind of beauty, the loveliest kind of loveliness, belongs to those who are deeply devoted to God.

But these young people’s deep devotion to God was not only there most attractive quality. It was also their most important quality.

A day is coming when all of you who are here this evening will be together again. I’m thinking about the Day of Judgment when all the world will be gathered before God. On that day it will count for nothing if you have been good looking. It will count for nothing if you have been clever. The one thing that will count will be the relationship with God that you had when you were here on earth. Were you deeply devoted to him? Did you love and serve the Lord Jesus? That’s the thing that alone will ensure you enter heaven. That’s the thing that alone will count for eternity.

Members of the Graduating Class, I sincerely congratulate you on your hard work and achievements. You have done magnificently. I wish you well as you go on to High School. I only plead with you that whatever else you do in coming days you seek with all your heart that quality that is more attractive than any other, that quality that is more important than any other – that deep devotion to God that comes through believing in Jesus Christ. God bless you.

This is about the person who has given his name to Christmas, Jesus Christ. It will only take you a few moments to read. A single word, special, sums up why you shouldn’t grudge the time.

Special person

Had you seen Jesus him after he was born in Bethlehem special is not the word that would have sprung to mind. Judging by appearances he was as ordinary a baby as they come. But there was so much more to him met the eye. The truth, in fact, is utterly extraordinary. In this little baby God himself had come to be with us. Charles Wesley, in his carol Hark! The herald angels sing, gets it exactly right: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see! Hail, the incarnate Deity!” God had taken our nature and come into our world as one of us.

One of Jesus’ first disciples, John, puts it like this. This is from the Gospel that came from his pen. Calling Jesus “the Word” (because he is the one through whom God the Father speaks to us), John tells us that he was with God in the beginning, already in existence when this world came into being, and that he was Himself God. And then John says this: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. Without ceasing to be what he had always been, God the Son, he began to be what he had never been, truly human. Another of Jesus’ early disciples, Matthew, in the Gospel that came from his pen, links it with an ancient promise: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel”; – a name which means, Matthew adds, “God with us”. Special person? Special indeed!

Special birth

You would expect that the entrance of such a special person into our world would have something about it that marked it out as special. And you would be right. For one thing, angels appeared and celebrated his birth in song. But before that there was the birth itself. In the words of the ancient Apostles’ Creed, “Jesus Christ…was…born of the virgin Mary”. By the power of God the Holy Spirit, Jesus had been miraculously conceived in his virgin mother’s womb. No man had been involved.

Let’s hear from Matthew again. He tells us about Joseph, the man to whom Mary was betrothed, and how he thought about ending his relationship with her when he discovered that she was pregnant. “But as he considered these things”, says Matthew, “an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit’”. Mary hadn’t been unfaithful to him. The son to whom she later gave birth was in her womb because God had worked an amazing miracle. Special birth? Special indeed!

Special work

Here’s something else you would expect: such a special person, coming in such a special way, must have a special work to do. And again you would be right. It’s all in his name. Jesus is from a Hebrew verb meaning, to save. Why was he given it? Because saving would be his special work. Specifically, he would save people from their sins. Here is Matthew again. He’s reporting the last words of the angel to Joseph: “You shall call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins”. One of Jesus’ later disciples, Paul, puts it like this: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”.

It is simply the best news this world has ever heard. Our greatest need as human beings is for someone to save us from the guilt and the power and the dreadful penalty of our sins – for we can’t do it ourselves. And Jesus came to be that someone. It’s why he took our nature. It’s why he lived the beautiful life that he did. It’s why he died the sacrificial death that he did. It was all for us, so that as sinners we might have a Saviour to whom we could go for forgiveness and eternal life. Special work? Special indeed!

I end with a question: Is he your Saviour? He wants to be. He’s ready to be. And he will be if you will cry to him in your need and welcome him into your heart and life. Millions have done that. They have turned from their sin to Jesus and given him his rightful place as lord of their lives. Why not do the same?

Sunday 15^th May 1881 was a memorable day for the congregation of St. Andrew’s Free Church, Greenock (a town on the south-west coast of Scotland). Almost two years had passed since they vacated the building that had housed them for the first forty years of their history and now, at last, their new building was ready for use. It had seating for over eight hundred, was full of light from its great windows, and was so constructed that speaking was an easy task. There were three services that day and the three preachers were brothers: John James Bonar, Free St. Andrew’s minister, Horatius Bonar, and Andrew Bonar. John preached from Acts 3:22-23 on Christ the Prophet, Horatius from Hebrews 5:1-2 on Christ the Priest, and Andrew from Revelation 19:16 on Christ the King. Two of these brothers are remembered to this day – Horatius for his hymns and Andrew for his biography of Robert Murray M’Cheyne. John, by contrast, has been largely forgotten. It is a pleasure to introduce him to you.

Early years

John James was the oldest of the three Bonar brothers and was born in Edinburgh on the 25^th of March 1803. Some sixteen and a half years later, on the 30^th of September 1819 to be precise, his father recorded the following in his diary: ‘My son John has expressed to-day his wish to become a minister – a determination with which I am well pleased, provided only I shall find it to be from motives of real love to God, and desire to be useful to others in their immortal concerns’. He would not be the first Bonar to serve the Scottish church in this way. An uncle, a grandfather, a great-grandfather, and a great-great grandfather were all ministers too (besides others!).

In April 1827 John was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Edinburgh and two years later became an assistant to Dr. George Brewster of Scoonie (or Leven) in Fife. ‘This day’, writes one of his relatives, ‘our much beloved John left us to enter on his work at Leven…Sincerely do I pray that he may be made useful in that station to which the Lord hath called him…O Lord, do Thou honour him to be successful in winning souls to Christ. Bless him, and make him a blessing’. After quoting these words in a sermon preached after John’s death, the preacher, the Rev. John G. Cunningham, added, ‘This prayer was very graciously answered. He knew much of the joy of harvest during the five years in which he laboured at Leven’.

Greenock

John’s connection with Greenock began in March 1834 when he was appointed assistant to Dr. John Scott, minister of the Middle Parish since 1793. A stroke in 1829 had disabled Dr. Scott for public ministry and when a search began for a colleague and successor John Bonar was named as a suitable candidate. He was on the eve of his appointment to Leven, however, so choice was made instead of one of John’s close friends, William Cunningham (afterwards Principal Cunningham of the Free Church’s New College). It was after Cunningham’s acceptance of a call to the Trinity College Church in Edinburgh in 1834 that attention turned again to John Bonar.

Some months after John’s ministry in Greenock began Dr. Scott wrote the following letter to the elders of the church: ‘I need not say how entire was my conviction of Mr. Bonar’s fitness for the post of assistant minister…at the time when he entered on its functions. Since that period all that I have learned of his manner of performing his various duties, the impression which he has left on the minds of others, and especially my ample opportunities of personal intercourse with him, have done more than confirm the estimate which I had then formed of his natural and spiritual qualifications for the ministry, and leave me at a loss to express with adequate force my persuasion that it is most desirable for your church and congregation that he should be their permanent instructor and spiritual overseer’.

It was not to be, however. Over John’s settlement as Dr. Scott’s successor there was a division of opinion in the congregation which continued for almost a year. It was a painful time and only ended with the decision being made by John’s supporters to separate from the church and form a new church and parish. Provost James Watt, one of those supporters, put it in this way: ‘Cordially approving…of Mr. Bonar, both as a minister and Christian, I have resolved, along with other friends, rather than make any contest or dispeace about his appointment…to aid in providing a separate church, where we may enjoy the benefit of his ministrations, and to leave those who think differently of Mr. Bonar’s qualifications to find…a pastor after their own mind’. The separation took place at the beginning of March 1835 and on August 20^th of the same year John James Bonar was ordained as the first minister of the new St. Andrew’s Parish. It was the forming of a pastoral bond that remained unbroken until Bonar’s death fifty-six years later in July 1891.

In a speech given at his ordination dinner Bonar alludes to how difficult the division had been for him personally. The honour of being ‘enrolled a citizen’ of the Greenock community, and of being ‘admitted as a member of its clergy’, was ‘well fitted’, he said, ‘to compensate any annoyances I may for a season have sustained, and to supplant the recollection of every wrong by nobler and more grateful feelings’. It had been a hard time for Bonar’s mother too. ‘That day’, said John’s brother James, ‘had brought to her a relief from many a heavy burden, and had witnessed the removal of sorrows far too deep to be poured into any human ear’.

Looking forward, Bonar was determined to reciprocate the sympathy and affection shown to him by his congregation: ‘I now do make them offer of my undivided strength – my undivided heart!...[M]y own convictions would term it dark ingratitude were there one fibre of my power, one moment of my time, I refused to consecrate to their eternal interests. Such therefore as I have of talent or attainment I give it unto them. It is theirs without grudge and without deduction. It is theirs without reluctance and without reserve’.

William Cunningham also made a speech. ‘He rejoiced’, the report of it reads, ‘in the proceedings of that day, because he had seen one whom for many years he had most intimately known, most cordially loved, and most highly esteemed, and whom he loved and esteemed the more he had known him, ordained to the pastoral office and invested with the cure of souls’. He rejoiced, too, in anticipation of the blessing Bonar’s ministry would be both to Greenock itself and to the Church of Scotland within its borders.

A fruitful ministry

The first church building was opened on the 29^th of May 1836, with seating for nine hundred and fifty. Here are some interesting statistics from the year 1841: seven hundred and ninety two seats were let, the number of communicants was seven hundred and forty, and the average attendance of worshippers on the Lord’s Day was about nine hundred. Unlike many congregations St Andrew’s was able to retain its building at the time of the disruption of the national church in May 1843. It also continued to engage in mission work in the area of Greenock in which it had been planted, employing a succession of missionaries or evangelists. Their work bore much fruit. At the Jubilee both of himself and his congregation in June 1885 Bonar could say of the mission, ‘when I think of [it], once all thistles and thorns choking every seed, but now a fair garden which the Lord hath blessed, I am as one that dreams’.

One of the principal sources for this article is the Jubilee Memorial of Saint Andrew’s Parish and Congregation, Greenock, and of their first minister, John James Bonar D.D. John G. Cunningham, in his funeral sermon, describes it as ‘one of the most concise, yet complete records of a faithful and successful ministry which exists in any language’. His summary of its contents gives us an invaluable insight into the kind of minister St. Andrew’s had in John Bonar: ‘There you will see’, says Cunningham, ‘how he loved the young, and received in their grateful life-long affection the recompense of his unwearied care for their spiritual interests. There you will see how he loved this congregation, and, cherishing no distracting ambitions to be known elsewhere, sought continually to approve himself as a minister of God among you; and how, in the prosperity and blessing which crowned his labours, he had his abundant reward. There you will see how much he loved his Bible as the pure Word of God…There you will see how worthily and fearlessly he bore his part in all that pertained to truth and righteousness in this community, as well as in all public questions which occupied or agitated the Church of Christ; and how diligently he sought to promote Christian missions, and to advance the circulation of the Scriptures amongst all nations, kindreds, and tongues’. An examination of the contents themselves (along with information from other contemporary sources) confirms the accuracy of Cunningham’s summary.

The Jubilee Memorial reports the speech that Bonar himself made on the occasion. Toward the close he made the following powerful appeal for prayer: ‘And now let us more than ever abound in all Christian zeal, in all gracious labour. Still it is neither by might nor by power, but by the Spirit of the Lord that we shall prosper. It is the Holy Ghost we need. Let us therefore lose no time in getting up to Carmel. Let us bend the knee with Elijah-like humility; let us cry aloud with Elijah-like fervour; let us watch upon our mountain-top with Elijah-like patience, and faint not, till we see the speck of cloud, till we see the entire sky overcast, and the rain coming down in plenteous showers’.

Among the tributes paid at the Jubilee was one by Greenock’s Congregational minister, J.M. Jarvie: ‘As a Christian citizen Dr. Bonar has honourably maintained his position from the beginning…As a Christian spirit Dr. Bonar has written his name imperishably on many a heart…But as a Christian minister who can say how much Dr. Bonar has done? No statement of the numbers can give us an idea of the silent, moulding, permeating, sanctifying power he has exercised upon successive generations, from the time he came here in his youth till his rich and ripe old age’.

The close

Like his two brothers, Horatius and Andrew, John was blessed with a strong constitution. He was able to continue on as sole pastor until early 1888 when his public ministry came abruptly to a close. He preached on the 12^th of February from the words, ‘I am come a Light into the world, that whosoever believeth on Me should not abide in darkness’ (John 12:46). It proved to be his final sermon. A serious illness and the weakness with which it left him made a return to the pulpit impossible. ‘It was sometimes feared’, writes his son James, ‘that one so full of spirit as Dr. Bonar was, would murmur at seclusion; but, when it came, he yielded meekly to his Father’s will, and signalized his closing years, by patience, by tender consideration for others, and by habitual cheerfulness’. ‘You will bear me witness that I am not gloomy’, he said, on the day before his death.

He died on Tuesday 7^th July 1891 at the age of eighty-eight. His wife, Isabella, whom he married in 1838, had died sixteen years earlier in 1875. Writing about his father’s funeral James says, ‘On Monday the 13^th July a multitude of mourners followed their ancient friend to the grave; and, as they laid him down, and sang around him, while the leaves were rustling softly, and the breezes playing merrily, and the sunshine was brightening all things, one thought no more of death, but of that hour “when Christ, who is our life, shall appear”’.

A hymn

Horatius was the hymn-writer of the family but John composed a few as well. The following, written in December 1861, was suggested by the last words of his beloved friend, William Cunningham, ‘I am going quietly home’. It is a fitting note on which to close.

‘Going Home’

‘I’m going home!’ The Saint exclaimed;
Bright grew his closing eye;
He thought of Jesus and his rest,
And did not fear to die.

‘I’m going home! I’m winged for flight
To yonder peaceful clime;
Prepared to go, I only wait
My God’s appointed time.

‘I’m going home, to dwell with Him
Who bled and died for me;
For He hath said that where He is
There shall His servants be.

‘I’m going home, transporting thought!
Lord Jesus, quickly come,
And bear my ransomed soul away
To her celestial home!’

‘I’m going home!’ the Saint exclaimed;
Bright grew his closing eye;
He thought of Jesus and his rest,
And did not fear to die.

Something was making it difficult for Abram and Lot to remain together. Each had become so wealthy in flocks and herds, “that the land could not support both of them dwelling together” (Genesis 13.6). What made the situation especially serious was the strife to which their problem was giving rise. There is no indication of any fall out between Abram and Lot themselves. But with their herdsmen it was different. Between the herdsmen of Abram’s livestock and the herdsmen of Lot’s livestock there was strife (v.7). And it forced on Abram the conviction that the time had come for Lot and him to part.

Sadly, it is not at all uncommon for believers to find themselves in very similar situations. Significant differences of opinion over matters of doctrine, worship, and practice threaten, fracture, or even break the church’s unity. Members fall out with fellow members – or with the church officers. The officers themselves fall out with one another. Or if, as with Abram and Lot, things don’t go the length of quarrelling, the possibility of it is only too real as believers live with tensions seemingly impossible to resolve.

The purpose of this short paper is to reflect on Abram’s twofold counsel at this crisis in relations and to try and apply it to some of the parallel situations that arise in our churches.

1. “Let’s not fight”

The first part of Abram’s counsel is as follows: “Then Abram said to Lot, ‘Let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herdsmen and mine’” (v.8). What is of particular interest is the reason Abram gives for this. In the ESV it reads, “for we are kinsmen”. Literally, Abram says, “for we are men, brothers”. For such close relations as he and Lot to be quarrelling and falling out was quite inappropriate. Better to separate than for brothers to fight with one another.

The connecting link between this and our contemporary church disputes is very direct. What is the quarrelling of Christians but the quarrelling of brothers? Membership in God’s family makes us sons and daughters of God and therefore brothers and sisters to one another. That is why strife, with us too, is so inappropriate.

Inappropriateness, of course, is not the only reason for shunning strife. There are other reasons. Fighting among ourselves, for example, makes us vulnerable to the attacks of our adversary the devil (or rather, to yet further attacks; he has already won a victory by the fact that things have gone as far as they have).

Then there is the damage to our witness. Is this what the narrator has in mind when he points out that at that time “the Canaanites and the Perizzites were dwelling in the land” (v.7)? What a poor witness to these idolaters that the sole worshippers of the one living and true God couldn’t get on together! Certainly it is a poor witness when Christians can’t. People should see in the church the unity and peace that are so sadly missing in the world.

Once more, there is the sheer painfulness of it. Preceding tensions can be painful enough. How much more an actual disruption. If it is a good and pleasant thing when brothers dwell together in unity (Psalm 133.1), what a sore and unpleasant thing it is when they cannot.

But let’s stick with inappropriateness. “Let’s not have any quarrelling between you and me…for we are brothers” (v.8 NIV). It’s just not right, is it? Not among brothers. Nor is it difficult to see why.

There is the intimacy of the family bond. God’s grace to us in Christ has bound us more closely to our Christian brothers and sisters than blood has done to the members of our earthly family.

Again, there is the high price paid to make us brothers. It is a privilege dearly bought. For us to be part of God’s special family it was necessary for Christ to give himself up to the sufferings and death of the Cross.

Finally, there is the light in which Christ regards us. We are his brothers as well as brothers to one another.  Does Christ wish to see his brothers falling out with one another? All these things, taken singly and together, underscore the inappropriateness of brothers giving way to strife.

2. “Let’s separate instead”

We come now to the second part of Abram’s counsel: “Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right, or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left” (v.9). It was the most practical and God-honouring solution. The difficulties were such that to remain together would mean continual friction. And given the inappropriateness of that, it had evidently come time to part. And part they did. “So Lot chose for himself all the Jordan Valley, and Lot journeyed east. Thus they separated from each other” (v.11).

One wonders in what spirit they did so. The gracious demeanour of Abram together with the after history would suggest that they did so lovingly – at least on Abram’s part. In the very next chapter, for example, we find Abram risking life and limb in order to rescue Lot from Chedarlaomer and the other kings who had made him their prisoner. Then later, in order to prevent Lot being destroyed with the rest of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham (as he is by that time) famously intercedes with the Lord for the cities’ preservation.

That Christian brothers should remain together is unquestionably the ideal. We rightly shrink from separation. The principle of Genesis 13, however, is that it is better to separate than to fight. If the resolution of difficulties is not possible, if serious tensions continue, if there is a strong likelihood that quarrelling will occur (or recur), then in the interests of peace and unity we ought seriously to consider separating. So too if it will help to restore a unity already lost.

In this connection the opening words of v.9 are relevant: “Is not the whole land before you?” There was plenty of space in Canaan for these two men and all their livestock. So too for believers who are finding the strain of togetherness too great. There is plenty of gospel work for us to do in our towns and cities without having to step on one another’s toes. Indeed it is in just such ways that God overrules our separations for good. Much more may be accomplished by believers going their separate ways than by staying together in a situation darkened by divisions.

One final thought. When it is necessary to separate, let it be done as lovingly as possible. Since separation doesn’t sever the bond – we are still brothers! – let a gracious and loving brotherliness be displayed whenever there is occasion. It’s what we see in Abram in Genesis 14 and 18. Surely it ought also to be seen among brothers in the Lord.

So how do we show it? Gracious and loving brotherliness? Here are at least some ways. By forgiving those who have wronged us (or whom we suppose have wronged us). By standing together when issues arise in which we are clearly of one mind. By offering practical help if some trial is being faced. By being jealous for one another’s good name. By rejoicing in our brothers’ blessings and sympathising in their sorrows. By praying for one another. And by earnestly seeking – for the glory of God and the joy of all Christian hearts – the coming of the Saviour who will bring all our differences and separations to an eternal end.

May the Lord help us!

Margaret started school in Newcastle in the year 1818. The following summer she returned home to find her mother gravely ill, nearing the end, but radiant with Christian hope. Marjory Oliphant, to give her her maiden name, had come to Christ when Margaret was five years old – largely through the witness and then the death of her sister Amelia. Fearing that her illness might deprive her of speech she had written a letter to Margaret, ahead of her return from Newcastle, giving expression to her hope and urging her daughter to “rejoice in the happy change”. “It is…a satisfaction I wish to give you and other dear friends”, she wrote, “that I trust I shall die reconciled to God by the death and resurrection of my Saviour; that is the only plea I can make for pardon and acceptance – by free grace I am saved”. 

Marriage and conversion

A year later, when she was seventeen, Margaret married a Mr. Glas Sandeman. Readers who know something of the errors of Sandemanianism may be interested to know that Glas Sandeman was a great grandson of the Robert Sandeman with whom that system is principally associated. The Sandeman family owned Springland, a fine house on the opposite side of the River Tay to the one on which Margaret had grown up. Glas and Margaret later inherited it and it remained Margaret’s home to the end of her days. In a notice of her death in one of the local newspapers it is said that “from the days of William Burns and Robert M’Cheyne, the days of revival at Kilsyth, and Dundee, and Perth, and up Strath Tay, through Disruption times, on to the great spiritual movement of 1859-61, and the beginning of the Perth Conferences, under Mr. John Milne, her house was a centre of evangelical life and blessing, the fruits of which remain, and will remain through the days of heaven”.

What of God’s work in Margaret’s own life? Her conversion took place, as noted above, when she was twenty-nine. The “rankling sore within” that had been there since she was in her teens, the loss of loved ones, a serious illness, and a concern for the souls of her children, all seem to have played a part in preparing the way. The change itself we can give in her own words. A cousin of her husband had sent her children some books, “and among them, with The Holy War, was a little pamphlet, in brown paper, lettered outside, The Fountain of Life. To the best of memory [she’s writing this in June 1865, thirty-three years later] I have never seen it since…It was a little spiritual allegory, but began by describing a fountain to heal all diseases. An old man, one of the otherwise incurable, was standing arguing on the brink, that he could not get in. Said one standing by, ‘Will you not let the waves flow over you?’ When my eyes fell on the words it was done. Salvation flowed into my soul. Heaven on earth was begun”. Later she could write, “I long…to live in Jesus, to breathe in Jesus, to bask in the beatific vision. My whole soul says Amen to the Gospel plan. It is my life to enjoy Him. He is my choice”.

Bereavements

Margaret had nine children; six sons and three daughters. Two of her daughters died in infancy; the third, named after her mother, became her future biographer. Three of her six sons, Alexander, Hugh, and David, though spared to adulthood, also predeceased her, Alexander dying in India, Hugh in South America, and David in China. “It seems, my friend” – this is her minister, the Rev. John Milne of St. Leonard’s Free Church – “ as though our Lord  would have you in a sense possess the earth; India has one, South America another, and now China; they shall come from the east and the west to sit down in the kingdom”. Her son David, who had gone out as a missionary to China, was the subject of a previous article. He had always, says his sister, been the most like herself.

Her three sons all died within a few years of each other. In the midst of these bereavements her husband died too, of cholera as David would later do. In her journal for 17^th October 1858 she writes as follows: “Alone here, but ah! not alone in communion; Jesus in the midst of the throne, and the spirits of redeemed ones around Him. My husband, saved by the blood of the atonement. The three brothers there, lovely in life, now undivided. How much more a home for me in heaven than here?”

The journal from which the above was taken was kept by Margaret for over forty years and became a principal source for her biography. It was no ordinary record. “As we write”, says her daughter, “there stand before us forty-three portly quarto volumes, with broad, massive backs…altogether containing about fifteen thousand pages of manuscript and printed matter…In it she preserved from day to day the things that chiefly interested her, making large contributions from newspapers or journals, and often letters from friends. The first volumes were almost entirely devoted to the rise and progress of the Free Church, and the brave struggle of ministers and people in its early years. Full accounts also were kept of evangelistic work throughout the country”. In later volumes the work of God in revival both in Perth and beyond were recorded at length. “Everything that interested her was put in…above all, anything in which she felt the direct breath of the Spirit of God, and recognised His special working, whether in public event or private life, in great national disaster or in the simple faith of some little child”. The final entry was made on the very last day of her life.

A worker for Christ

Margaret was an active worker for Christ. During the revival in 1860, for example, when meetings were held in Perth City Hall for seventy nights in succession, Saturdays excepted, she took charge of the side-room for women on fifty-seven of those nights. Later in life, when largely confined to home, she would still go on market-days to the road outside the grounds of her house, give out little books to passers-by, and say a few words to them. Above all there was her children’s work. For twenty years she conducted a Saturday afternoon class for children. She would spend the day preparing for it and guests in her home were often asked to give the address. A list was kept of all the children who attended and by the time she had to give up her class there were over two thousand names on it. It was her doctor who forbade her to continue after an illness in 1878. Her daughter says that “to the end of her life, any one sitting by her on a quiet Saturday afternoon when the clock struck five, might observe a tear escape at the remembrance of her life’s work being over”.

After her death on February 27^th 1883, the day after her eightieth birthday, tribute was paid to her prayerfulness and joy: “I need not say to anyone who knew her at all that she lived in an atmosphere of constant prayer…This…was no doubt the main secret of the Christian gladness and happiness that so characterised her – of the spring and freshness as of young life, which were hers to the end, and which made it hard for us to feel as if the end could be near… [It] was essentially and unmistakably ‘joy in the Lord’. It did much to commend Christ”.

If you have seen the film Chariots of Fire you will know about the British athlete Eric Liddell. At the time of the 1924 Olympics in Paris, France, he was one of the fastest men in the world and a favourite to win the gold in the 100 metres sprint. Then the news came out: the preliminary heats were going to be run on a Sunday. And very quietly, without any fuss, he said, “I’m not running on a Sunday.”

His decision sent shock waves throughout Britain. A gold medal in the 100 metres was regarded as “the jewel of the Games”, and in people’s eyes Liddell had simply thrown it away. Cruelly and hurtfully, they even called him a traitor to his country.

So what on earth was Liddell thinking about? Why was Sunday not a day for competitive sports? And what does his decision have to say to us, 100 years on?

It’s helpful to begin by thinking about Sunday as the Lord’s Day. It is called that in the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, and indicates to us whose day it is – not ours, but the Lord’s. It is a day that he has marked off from all the other days of the week as special. And as we read through the New Testament and look at church history we find Christian people keeping it special – fencing it off, as it were, and using it as far as possible for the purposes for which the Lord has given it. It is a day for resting from the activities of the other six days, for worship, for Christian fellowship, and for the service of others.

It is also a very valuable gift. To keep one day different from all the other days is not a burden (or at least it shouldn’t be!) but a blessing, and generations of Christians have found that the more carefully they fence off the day the more of a blessing it is to them.

But there is often a cost. So many sporting events are held on a Sunday now that Christians who are committed to keeping the Lord’s Day holy may find that the limit to which they can go in their sport is all too quickly reached. They may well be unable to achieve the success levels of which they are evidently capable.

Nor is sport the only area where sacrifice may have to be made. The Christian who would honour the Lord by keeping Sunday special may find himself in exactly the same position in regard to employment opportunities, or participation in recitals, musicals, plays, and other performances.

The Lord himself would assure us, however, that we will not be the poorer for such sacrifice. His promise is that “those who honour me I will honour” (1 Sam.2:30). Anything we give up for him he will certainly in some way or other make up to us.

So Eric Liddell found. On the morning of the 400 metres final – not Liddell’s best distance – one of the British team masseurs passed him a note which he read at the stadium: “In the old book it says, ‘He that honours me I will honour’. Wishing you the best of success always”. And Liddell got it, too, not only winning the gold but setting a new world record!

I cannot say how the Lord will honour you. But in some way he will if you faithfully honour him. It may be very costly to do so, but you have the promise of God himself that those who honour him he will honour. God will certainly bless any sacrifice that is made for him and for his special Day.

Running the Race

Running the Race is a biography of Eric Liddell. The author, John Keddie, a former runner himself, has had a life-long interest in Eric Liddell and is an acknowledged authority on his subject. He is also in complete sympathy with Liddell’s Christian faith and commitment to the Lord’s Day. Running the Race focuses particularly on Liddell’s prowess and achievements as an athlete. In one of the appendices, in fact, the full details are given of Liddell’s track record from 1921-1925. The biography relates, of course, the story outlined above of Liddell’s historic victory at the 1924 Paris Olympics. But it tells us the rest of his story as well.  

In 1925 Eric Liddell returned to the land of his birth – China. His father, the Rev. James Liddell, had gone out from his native Scotland to China in 1898 as a missionary with the London Missionary Society (LMS). Eric, now 23, was to serve with the same missionary society for the next twenty years. For twelve years he taught in the influential LMS School in Tientsin, the Anglo-Chinese College. Afterwards, until the Japanese invasion of China made it impossible to continue, he worked as an itinerant evangelist in the vast and densely populated North China plain.

In 1943 Eric and his missionary colleagues were taken to a Japanese internment camp for civilians in Weihsein, south of Beijing. There, two years later, on the 21st of February 1945, he died from a brain tumour.  He was only 43.

Eric Liddell was wonderfully human, a man who loved to run and who, when running, loved to win. He was ever the gentlemen – thoughtful, considerate and kind. Above all, he was a dedicated and deeply attractive Christian.  “His”, said a speaker at his funeral, “was a God-controlled life and he followed his Master and Lord with a devotion that never flagged and with an intensity of purpose that made men see both the reality and power of true religion”. Another said, “Of all the men I have known, Eric Liddell was the one in whose character and life the spirit of Jesus Christ was pre-eminently manifested”.

Running the Race is a fine piece of work. It will be of especial interest to young people passionate about sports. For Eric Liddell is an outstanding example of what a Christian athlete should be. Certainly in regard to the Lord’s Day. But more generally in making obedience to God’s will the controlling factor in all of life.

In a later article we will reflect on the lovely Christian life that Margaret Stewart Sandeman lived. In this we look at her son David. After his death in 1858 a biography of him was written by Andrew Bonar, author of the well-known Memoir of Robert Murray M’Cheyne. There are striking similarities between Bonar’s two subjects. Both were dear friends, both were Scottish ministers, both died young (M’Cheyne was twenty-nine, Sandeman thirty-two), both had an extraordinary passion for evangelism, and both were eminent for their godliness. Bonar’s Memoir of the Life and Brief Ministry of the Rev. David Sandeman, Missionary to China, to give it its full title, will be our principal source.

Conversion

David Sandeman was born in Perth on April 23rd 1826. The family home, Springland, was on the east side of the River Tay, less than a mile from Perth itself, and close to the ancient palace of Scone. It was in one of its rooms that, in 1844, at the age of eighteen, God’s salvation became his. The following is from a diary entry made in October 1851: “Here I am in the very room where my adorable Lord manifested the fullness of His love, mercy, beauty, and glory, to my soul, which he rescued out of the horrible pit and miry clay. O how sweet was His love to my soul. O how did he fill me all the day, in this sweet room and everywhere, with His overcoming love!”

The great change took place after returning to Perth from Glasgow where he had been training for a career in business. The time was drawing near for the Lord’s Supper to be dispensed in his home congregation, St Leonard’s Free Church. Was he in a state fit for that ordinance? “His honest conclusion”, writes Bonar, “was that he could not go to the Lord’s Table, for as yet he was not willing unreservedly to give himself to the Lord. ‘I was still rejecting’ (these are his words) ‘the waiting Saviour’s free calls to come. I was wilfully sinning against what I knew so well. I was an open rebel, so much the guiltier because brought up near Him, and so well acquainted with His law’”.

But the Lord’s time had come. “On the Sabbath evening”, continues Bonar, “with these feelings disquieting him, he…retired to his room. Then it was that the Lord found the sheep that was lost, and laid it upon his shoulder. While pondering alone on his spiritual condition, his heart

was drawn out ‘by the omnipotent hand of God’ to think simply of Christ, and the ‘willingness of Christ to receive all who have true wish to come to Him’…That was the evening (7th April) when he for the first time felt his soul cast anchor on the Rock of Ages”. The following Sunday he took his place for the first time at the Lord’s Table.

Zeal for souls

A book given to him by his mother at this time, Life of Harlan Page, had a profound impact on him. It prompted the following prayer: “Lord, who holdest the hearts of all men in Thy right hand, do Thou be pleased to make me, by Thy grace, a means of bringing poor, careless, and dying sinners to the Rock of Ages, and make me indefatigable in labouring for their conversion”.

How the Lord answered that prayer! Here is a diary entry from October 1848. After four years of study at Edinburgh University he is about to enter the Free Church’s New College to begin formal training for gospel ministry. “Living to the glory of God”, he confesses, “was in my unconverted days a mere name, but I should be denying the grace of the Lord, did I not say that, since my conversion, it has been one of the chief ruling desires of my heart. Love to souls has been many times as the breath of my spiritual life…” In illustration of this Bonar records the testimony of one of Sandeman’s friends, a Mr. Tait. The two of them had been on a walking holiday. Tait’s estimate is that in the course of that holiday Sandeman must have spoken to “not less than five hundred persons” in his zeal for Christ.

Hillhead to China

In early 1855 he went for several months to the then mining village of Hillhead (it is now part of the city of Glasgow). A probationer of the Free Church of Scotland, James Allan, had been labouring both there and in neighbouring Jordanhill since the previous year and there had been a significant movement of the Holy Spirit, especially after an outbreak of cholera. Bonar writes, “At this day [1861], I am personally acquainted with very many of those who were then brought to Christ, and can testify to the decided character of that awakening”. When James Allan had to leave for reasons of health David Sandeman was invited to take his place. “O for souls now!” he exclaimed. “What would I not give for those! and for faith, wisdom, and zeal to win them!” The few details preserved are enough to show that his desires were granted.

It was in China rather than Scotland that his all-too-brief ministry was to continue. For five or six years it had been the burden of his heart to serve as a missionary there and now the time was approaching. Back in 1847 the English Presbyterian Synod had sent out William Chalmers Burns as their first missionary to China. In April 1856 David Sandeman was ordained by the Synod to go out and join him. He sailed for China in the October of that year, arriving in Swatow in early December. He writes, “Went ashore and called on Dr. De la Porte. A door opened, and out came, in full Chinese dress and tail, W.C. Burns! Taking me into his room, according to his old wont, he said, ‘Let us engage in prayer’”.

Some nineteen months of gospel work followed and then, with startling suddenness, came the end. In July of 1858 Amoy, where he was stationed, was in the grip of a cholera epidemic.

“Hundreds said to be dying daily”, he wrote. Around midnight on the 30th he began to display the symptoms of cholera himself. After an illness of only twenty hours he was dead.

Some six weeks later, on the 8th of September 1858, his friend James Allan, whom he had succeeded in Hillhead, also died, “rejoicing in Christ and saying he was going home”. Comments Bonar, “Both seemed instruments fit for the Master’s use, and yet both were speedily called away. The resurrection-morning will cast light on these mysterious ways of our sovereign God”.

“Do not think his labours in China have been in vain”, writes one of his colleagues. “I believe he has been one of the greatest blessings to all the missionaries in Amoy. Through his unwearied prayerfulness, through his labours of love, through his great humility and fidelity, he contributed greatly to raise the tone of godliness in the entire missionary circle, and to effect a more distinct separation between the church and the world”.

The inscription on his tomb-stone may fitly close this short sketch: “Sacred to the Memory of the Rev. David Sandeman, Missionary to the Chinese from the Presbyterian Church in England. He died of cholera at Amoy, July 31, 1858, aged 32 years. From the time he gave himself to his Lord’s work, he entered upon a career of self-surrender which seemed to know no pause, and no abatement till he entered on his blessed rest”.

It was now the sixth day of the creation week; the earth had produced “living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind” (v.24); everything else that God had planned to create had been created. Nothing remained to be made now but man.

When we ourselves are making something, it is not always the case that the last part to be made is the most important. So also when we are writing something. It is not always our final paragraph or final sentence that clinches the argument or carries the greatest weight. But with God in creation it was different. In creating man God didn’t just bring his work of creation to completion; he brought it to a climax. Human beings constitute the crown of God’s creative work. We are in fact the reason for everything else that preceded us. 

What I want to do in this brief article is point out the main lines of evidence for that. What gives us the right to think that we humans constitute the very centrepiece of God’s created world? We get our answer first of all,

A. By listening-in to God taking the decision to make us

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness’” (v.26). This is different. Up till now we have simply had the decisions of God being implemented. There are no recorded deliberations. Just actions: “let there be light”; “let there be an expanse between the waters”; “let there be lights in the expanse of the sky”, and so on. We are not taken behind the scenes. We are not given glimpses of God formulating his plan. No! All the way through the creation week God is simply at work creating by the word of his power. 

When God comes to man, however, there is a pause. And before he proceeds to the making of us we are given the privilege of ‘listening-in’, as it were, to the decision itself being taken: “Let us make man in our image”; words that “indicate that there is a unique engagement of divine thought and counsel, and bespeak the fact that something correspondingly unique is about to take place” (John Murray).

Notice the word “us”: “Let us make man…”. To whom is God speaking? Genesis doesn’t answer. In the light of revelation that is given afterwards of a plurality in God, however, we need have no hesitation in saying that the “us” are the persons of the Trinity. This is the Triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – taking the decision to make human kind.

So there’s the first thing. We are looking at the evidence that in creating man God is bringing his work to a magnificent crescendo. And we find it in the unique privilege that is granted to us of listening-in to God taking the decision.

We find it secondly,

B. In the decision itself

In Ch.2 man is described as a “living being”: “And the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being” (v.7). In this respect man is not unique. We can say that because identical language is used of other creatures that God made. In Ch.1.24, for example, when God says, “Let the land produce living creatures”, the underlying Hebrew word is the same as in Ch.2.7 where it is used of man. In common with all the rest of the animals we are “living creatures”.

There are two things, however, that mark us out as qualitatively different from other creatures.

1.) In making man God made a God-like creature

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness’” (v.26). And he did. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him” (v.27). In doing this God placed man in a category of his own. Of no other living creature is it said that God made it in his image. This is not to say that there are no similarities. In terms of anatomy and physiology we have many features in common with the members of the animal kingdom. That is why in heart surgery, for example, a valve from a pig can be used to replace a faulty human valve. There are many respects in which we are like the other creatures and they are like us.

Only of man, however, is it said that he is made in the image of God. When God made us, he fashioned us in certain important respects after himself. He gave us immortality, for example. He made us with the capacity for fellowship and communion with himself. He made us holy and righteous. These things both separately and together set us apart from all other living creatures.

Then there is a second thing that marks us out as qualitatively different:

2.) This God-like creature is given a God-like task

This brings us to the second part of v.26 where God says, “…let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground”. Accordingly, when God made our first parents, he “blessed them and said to them, ‘…fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (v.28). For man the God-like creature God has a God-like task.

God is the Lord and as the Lord he rules. The sphere of his rule is the whole of creative reality. What he made he governs. And here now is man made in the divine image. What is he? A ruler too! To use the old terminology, man is God’s vice-regent. God himself is always supreme. It is he who always has the final authority. Under him, however, we also bear rule. And the sphere of our rule is the earth in its entirety. It is what David celebrates in Psalm 8: “You have given him dominion over the works of his hands; you have put all things under his feet” (v.6).

When we put all this together we see how man is not just the conclusion but the climax and crown of God’s creative work. Everything else is leading up to this: the creation of man. We see it when we listen-in to God taking the decision to make us. We see it when we look at the decision itself: a God-like creature with a God-like task. Man is more than just the final piece to be added. He represents the crowning glory of creation.

Application

The importance of this – especially in today’s world – is immeasurable. What does evolution do? I’m thinking here about the evolution that has no place for God; that denies any kind of intelligent design; that says there is no Creator. What does that do? It robs us of our dignity. What are we, according to atheistic evolution? We are the result of an infinite series of random occurrences, a chance product, something that might conceivably never have been, intrinsically no different or more valuable than any other members of the animal kingdom. You see how that destroys our God-given dignity as creatures made in his likeness? How fatal it is to our position as God-like creatures with a God-like task? How it puts us on the same level as all the rest of the creatures?

It destroys, too, the notion of any ultimate ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ in life. In an article entitled, Life’s Great Riddle, and No Time to find its Meaning, British journalist Bernard Levin wrote: “To put it bluntly, have I time to discover why I was born before I die?...I have not managed to answer the question yet, and however many years I have before me they are certainly not as many as there are behind. There is an obvious danger in leaving it too late…Why do I have to know why I was born? Because of course, I am unable to believe that it was an accident; and if it wasn’t, it must have a meaning”.

If the evolutionary theory of our origin is correct, however, human existence is an accident. It is something that simply happened. As one writer has put it, “We are merely the product of matter plus time plus chance”. All search for ultimate meaning is fruitless. It is a waste of time. We are just an accident. And in the light of the immensity of the universe around us a very insignificant accident at that.

Over against that we assert on the authority of the word of God that we have a creator. He has made us in his own image. And he has made us for a purpose commensurate with that high honour. He has made us to rule over all of his creation. And beyond that, to know him, glorify him, and enjoy him forever.

The God who knows everything about himself has by no means told us all.  There are many things that remain a secret, known only to himself. Much, we may be sure, has been passed over in total silence. And when he has spoken, he has told us only a very little. The mysteries of Christianity which form the subject of this book arise from this latter fact. We know only in part. And what we do know we by no means fully comprehend.

One example is the doctrine that God is a trinity. Another is the union of the divine and the human in the person of Christ. A third, Christ’s work of atonement. A fourth, what the Holy Spirit does in conversion. A fifth, the outworking of God’s purposes regarding sin and salvation. Dr. Crawford labels these mysterious doctrines. Not because they are unintelligible. But rather because we reach so quickly the outer limits of our understanding of them.

The chapters of this book (originally a series of lectures) are apologetic in purpose. They are a response to the charge that the above doctrines are too mysterious and incomprehensible to be true.  Dr. Crawford’s thesis (which he powerfully defends) is that ‘the mysteriousness of certain doctrines is not in itself… any sufficient reason either for excluding them from the articles of the Christian faith, or for discrediting the Christian system on account of them’ (p.28).

That of course may suggest a reason for Christians deciding not to read the book. The mystery inseparable from the key truths of Christianity is something with which you are contentedly living. That there is a vast and impenetrable ‘beyond’ is not a problem for your faith. Nor is this feeling of remoteness from the subject the only potential obstacle. The treatment of it is by no means easy. This is a mind-stretching book. Readers will need to be wide-awake and ready to give it their best attention.

For all the difficulties, however, this is a very valuable work which will repay the effort involved in reading it. For one thing, it is fitted to curb unwarranted speculation. There is a natural and healthy inquisitiveness that has been productive of great good in every walk of life – including the life of faith. And God’s revelation has been given to us to explore. But the temptation to go beyond what has been revealed is strong. Crawford’s Mysteries of Christianity brings us face to face with the limits of what God has revealed and discourages the attempt to transgress them.

More positively, the exposition of the doctrines themselves is first-rate. I would highlight, in this connection, lectures ten and eleven on the purposes of God. My suggestion, in fact, would be that a reader start with these. They will hopefully whet his appetite for the book as a whole. Certainly they will provide him with an illuminating treatment of a controversial yet foundational truth.

One helpful feature is the side notes. In the margins of many of the pages are brief summaries of what a particularly important paragraph or section is teaching. If you are losing your way or needing a reminder of the gist of the argument these side notes are invaluable.

This new Banner of Truth edition comes with an introduction by Sinclair Ferguson. Don’t skip over it. In it you will meet Dr. Crawford himself. You will also be given a persuasive argument for taking the time to read his book.

David Campbell