Lady Jane Grey

A recent publication I would encourage you to read is a book by Faith Cook called The Nine Day Queen of England: Lady Jane Grey (Evangelical Press). In the mid-16th century, Jane Grey ascended the throne of England, but was quickly deposed and executed by beheading. She was a Christian, a Protestant, and one who was steeped in the Bible and the catechims. Kneeling at the scaffold, whe recited the fifty first psalm in its entirety, that is, David's great psalm of contrition. Then she turned and witnessed to those in attendance regarding the salvation that one can have through the blood of Jesus! The executioner was so moved that he asked for Jane Grey to forgive him. She put her head on the block, and called out in a clear, strong voice, "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit!" Lady Jane Grey was 16 years old.

Hugh M'Kail, Part II

The morning of his execution, Hugh M'Kail's father came to see him to say goodbye. They prayed together and had a spiritual discussion. The father's last words to his son were "that this suffering would do more hurt to the prelates, and be more edifying to God's people, than if he were to continue in the ministry for twenty years." M'Kail, then, asked his father to leave him so that he would not have further pain and anguish. The son said to the father at the end of their time together: "And I desire it of you, as the best and last service you can do me, to go to your chamber, and pray earnestly to the Lord to be with me on that scaffold; for how to carry there, is my care, even that I may be strengthened to endure to the end."

I believe we in the church today, when faced with hardship, spend much of our time praying and asking that God would take the pain and anguish away. M'Kail did not ask for that . . . but, rather, he asked to be strengthened to face his hardship dead on. Perhaps we should more often respond that way: O Lord, may you give me grace to "man up" as a Christian and squarely face whatever trials you may have in store for me. Indeed, may we live well and may we die well.

Hugh M'Kail, Part I

It is a pity that some of the old Christian books are not more widely available; one such work I have recently found is by Rev. William Wilson, and it is called Naphtali, or the Wrestlings of the Church of Scotland for the Kingdom of Christ (published in 1845). It describes what the Scots call the "sifting time", that is, the great persecutions of the covenanters in Scotland by the English in the 1660's. Part of the "sifting time" was the Great Ejectment when hundreds of covenanter ministers were thrown out of their pulpits in 1662. Many of these men were tortured and some martyred.

Wilson, in one instance, describes the sufferings and death of Rev. Hugh M'Kail. M'Kail preached his last sermon in September, 1662 just days before Parliament removed all the ministers of Edinburgh and its surroundings. M'Kail was later captured by English soldiers, accused of sedition, and placed in jail. He was severely tortured (the English used the "boot", a barbaric mechanism to crush a person's leg), and then sentenced to death on the scaffold. In the days leading up to his execution, the Lord was very graciously present with M'Kail. Two nights before his execution, he was eating supper with the other prisoners and he said to them joyously, "Eat to the full, and cherish your bodies, that we may all be a fat Christmas pie to the prelates!" And he continued speaking, "Many crosses have come in our way and wrought weakly upon us; but here is a cross that hath done more good than all the many that befel us before." What is it that causes a man to face death that way?

Robert Reid Kalley

Robert Reid Kalley, the so-called "Wolf from Scotland", was a pioneer missionary to the Portugese island of Madeira and to the people of Brazil. Kally, however, had wanted to go as a missionary to China. In the 1830's he made preparations to go. He married in 1838, but just before the marriage his soon to be wife developed pneumonia, which proved to be the beginning of tuberculosis. And so the door to missionary service in China was closed to Kalley. However, God is so good to his people that China did in fact benefit greatly from Kalley. W. B. Forsyth comments, "In January 1838 he (Kalley) was invited to speak at a meeting convened by the Church of Scotland Missionary Society, at which he spoke of the urgent need for the gospel to reach the Far East. As he spoke a young man felt the call to offer for missionary service. That young man was William Chalmers Burns who, in 1846, eventually reached China under the auspices of the English Presbyterian Missionary Society and blazed a trail in China for others to follow."

If Burns' name is unfamiliar, he served the church at Dundee in Scotland when Robert Murray McCheyne, the pastor, and Andrew Bonar traveled to Israel to see the state of the Jews there. William Chalmers Burns brought great revivals to that church in Scotland.

Money

No blogs have appeared the last week or so. I have been in London; preaching and giving a paper at a creation/science conference at the John Owen Centre of London Theological Seminary. The title of my paper, "The Exegesis of Genesis 1 and 2: A Question of Genre." As I was in London, the financial sectors of the US seemed to melt before my eyes, and I had to check myself regarding how dependent I often am on finances. I need, as a Christian, to loosen my grip on such things. It reminded me of a letter that George Muller sent to a donor who wanted to give a gift to Muller himself rather than to the orphanages that Muller ran. Muller's response is telling:

"I have no property whatever, nor has my dear wife; nor have I had one single shilling regular salary as Minister of the Gospel for the last twenty-six years, nor as the director of the Orphan-House and the other objects of the Scriptural Knowledge Institution for Home and Abroad. When I am in need of anything, I fall on my knees and ask God that He would be pleased to give me what I need; and He puts it in the heart of someone or other to help me. Thus all my wants have been amply supplied during the last twenty-six years, and I can say, to the praise of God, I have lacked nothing. My dear wife and my only child, a daughter twenty-four years old, are of the same mind. Of this blessed way of living none of us is tired, but we become day by day more convinced of its blessedness."

The potential donor responded by sending 300 pounds to Muller for support of the orphanages.

Our God, Our Help

A commonly sung and loved hymn in reformed circles is "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past" by Isaac Watts. One of the great stanzas of that hymn reads:

Our God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come;
our shelter from the stormy blast,
and our eternal home.

Watts wrote this hymn, based upon Psalm 90, in response to the death of Queen Anne in 1714. That monarch's sympathy was with the Church of Rome, and she was in the process of passing laws in England that would have ended with great persecution of Protestants. She, however, died on the very day the laws were to be enacted. Believers in England understood this to be divine intervention in which God was protecting his people.

Waiter or Guest

In his autobiography Spurgeon relates a wonderful story regarding his own preaching: "I once learnt something in a way one does not often get a lesson. I felt at that time very weary, and very sad, and very heavy at heart; and I began to doubt in my own mind whether I really enjoyed the things which I preached to others. It seemed to be a dreadful thing for me to be only a waiter, and not a guest at the gospel feast.

I went to a certain country town, and on the Sabbath day entered a Methodist Chapel. The man who conducted the service was an engineer; he read the Scriptures, and prayed, and preached. The tears flowed freely from my eyes; I was moved to the deepest emotion by every sentence of the sermon, and I felt all my difficulty removed, for the gospel, I saw, was very dear to me, and had a wonderful effect upon my heart. I went to the preacher, and said, 'I thank you very much for that sermon.' He asked me who I was, and when I told him, he looked as red as possible, and he said, 'Why, it was one of your sermons that I preached this morning!' 'Yes,' I said, "I know it was; but that was the very message that I wanted to hear, because I then saw that I did enjoy the very Word I myself preached.'

It was happily arranged in the good providence of God. Had it been his own sermon, it would not have answered the purpose nearly so well as when it turned out to be one of mine."

Calm Seas

It is a common teaching from pulpits today that Christians ought to seek a life of comfort, ease, and prosperity. The idea is that because one is a Christian, God thus promises the Christian calm seas on the pilgrimage through life. And, moreover, because Christians are God's people then they ought to have expectations of comfort; one should seek the comfortable pilgrimage. But is that really true? Is that the proper understanding of the Christian life?

Isaac Watts asks this very question in his hymn "Am I a Soldier of the Cross?" In stanza 2, he says, "Must I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease, while others fought to win the prize, and sailed through bloody seas?" Isn't the reality that God does not promise calm seas, but only that we will reach port safely! He does not promise us a wealthy, prosperous, easy, comfortable pilgrimage; he only gives his word that we will arrive safely. The truth is that many of us, if not all of us, will go through the crucible of life. And the question is, how will we respond to the fiery ordeal?

Rocky Ground

The great American theologian Jonathan Edwards used to make a distinction between a person who has been awakened by his/her sin and shows remorse, and a person who has truly been saved. He was making the point that some people feel sorrow for what they have done but they never come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. Asahel Nettleton, a Reformed evangelist during the Second Great Awakening in America -- who, by the way, wrote the tune for the hymn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" -- traveled throughout Connecticut preaching the gospel. In the mornings he would preach about sin, and many people would be awakened by their sin. However, he would not preach salvation until the evening service to see who was truly troubled and ready for deliverance. He also preached in a yearly circuit; he would come back to a church a year later to see whose hearts had truly been changed.

This is quite biblical. Jesus teaches in the parable of the sower that the spread of the gospel is like a sower who sows seed in a field. Some of the seeds fall along the path and are quickly eaten by birds; other seeds fall on rocky ground where there is not much soil -- the grass springs up quickly but it does not last, but withers away quickly. Other seed falls among the thorns and is choked; and, finally, some seed falls on good soil and does well. Jesus defines the seed that falls on rocky ground as those who hear the message and receive it, but they endure only briefly and they fall away quickly. There are, indeed, some who hear, are pricked to the heart, but it does not last; it is not a true conversion.