Between God and man is a vast, yawning qualitative difference.” Kierkegaard
The Secret Flame and the Source of Power
How is it that that a mere four years in the life of David Brainerd and three in the life of the Lord Jesus outweighs the 969 years of a Methuselah? Such lives are like laser beams with profound penetration rather than the soft glow of a night light, pleasantly revealing nothing.
As I was seeking to understand what created the consistent character, the consuming passion and the consummate power in the life of David Brainerd I believe I have found the answer.
The stammering, solitary shepherd on the backside of the desert discovers the burning bush, and in the Presence of the I AM removes his sandals, only to rise and confront the mightiest potentate on earth;
The tested Joshua, fully committed to the Word and the Sacraments (read of his thorough preparation), a tested warrior and servant was not ready for Jericho until he saw the “Unseen Captain” with upraised sword and discovered that all he could do on the sacred ground was to take off his handles. Then Jericho was his. The lesson here was sovereignty. Addressing the Colossus before him with a hopeful and arrogant question, “Whose side are you on?’ The answer is still the answer. The only answer: “I am not on anybody’s side. Take off your sandals.”
Job, a relatively perfect on the manward side, at the end of one hundred questions from the Creator of the universe could only fall down in abject penitence crying out, “O Lord, I heard Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now I have seen Thee with the seeing of mine eyes, and abhor myself, repenting in dust and ashes.” All the talk of Job and his friends amounted to nothing. Only then did he become a mighty intercessor, and discovered a double portion of restoration.
As for Peter, when he saw the sovereign of the sea in his wisdom, grace and power could only fall on his face in fear and fading petulance crying, “Get out of here, Lord, we cannot be in the same place.” Then the gracious hand and kind countenance speaks forth of grace and calling, “Get up, Simon! You have been catching fish, but from now on you shall catch men” So he got up and followed Jesus.
Perhaps the most sublime experience in all of scripture describing the place of man before God in that “qualitative difference” is the thrice holy vision of Isaiah. The trembling of the temple of God was mirrored in the trembling of the frail temple of man, and all he could do was cry out, “Woe is me, I am undone.” Never could a man utter more proper words before the divine majesty. Only the unfinished and undone man can be purged and pardoned man can present himself unconditionally to the Sovereign God. As Oswald Chambers points out, such a man needs no command from God, he merely overhears God and places all he is and has on the altar without reserve.
This is the secret of David Brainerd. God was in heaven and he was on earth. Hallowing His Name was a kingdom call to the purposes of God, doing his will whether by life or by death. For Brainerd, that later prospect came all too soon.
Take note of the mighty George Whitefield crossed the Atlantic nine times to preach from Savannah to Jonathan Edward’s England. Follow Francis Asbury riding 279,000 miles on horseback to every frontier, with twenty-nine visits to New Jersey and attendant revivals. These two had an eye on the Eternal and lived on the edge of eternity. With Edwards and his son-in-law to be, David Brainerd they preached the depths of man’s lostness and sin, for they, like Isaiah, Peter, Job, Joshua, and Moses, had discovered their own utter misery and alienation from God. They proclaimed the heights of holiness, for they saw themselves in the light of the blinding, transcendence, holiness of God which Paul too had discovered and so cries out, “Therefore, knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade men . . . the love of Christ constrains us.”
The most brilliant young man in the Holy Roman Empire opened and Augustinian theological work called Calvin open his Institutes saying all of the above quite simple. Truly religion has two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. Which comes first is difficult to discern. In beholding God, our eyes descend downward to ourselves. In seeing ourselves, we can only turn our eyes Godward, and in the blazing glory of God we are blinded, for thinking we could see all, we suddenly discover our eyes can see nothing, and we are nothing, and only God can make us something.
Daniel, who also had the ineffable experience, said that “Those who know (not know about) their God stand firm and do exploits.”
David Brainerd knew God, and he knew from the depths of his soul the heights of God’s grace. His solemn conviction before the judgment seat of Christ was demonstrated by his message in life and to the death. The only possible answer to the “vast, yawning” chasm between God and man is the Cross of the Lord Jesus, and be it as deep and wide at the Grand Canyon, that Cross alone makes the qualifying difference.
This writer is also gripped as with a vice with the Gospel, and in part it came through my father, Daniel Iverson, who in composing “Spirit of the Living God” saw the need of break me” before melt, mold, and fill me.” and through Robert Murray McCheyne, dying at a mere twenty-nine years of age. The shadow of that life looms larger and large over me. Then I came to know MCheyne’s secret—he nurtured his soul on the Diary of David Brainerd, published by Jonathan Edwards a hundred years earlier, who also died at twenty-nine in the arms of his beloved Jerusha Edwards, martyred by his own passion for the souls of his beloved Delaware Indians on the New Jersey border.
Think not that he died without any children. I am one of them. John Piper says that this small diary has sent more men and women into the mission field than any book ever written.
Would the reader desire such a passion so that with integral character and holy boldness he or she may proclaim the Cross of Jesus?
Seek the face of the God who is the Spirit, infinite in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth, and discovering yourself, you will die only to rise in the resurrection life of the Lord Jesus. Then the Cross will loom large in all of life, both now and forever.
*********
Observe the ancient apostle in a darkened cell with a young disciple Timothy, a faithful amanuensis, writing each dictated word in quiet reverence. Suddenly the bent figure rises up and snatches the quill from the youth and writes with glaucomic eyes “See with what large letters I write unto you . . . " “
“God forbid that I should boast, save in the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom I am crucified unto the world and the world unto me.” Galatians 6:14
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Of Books and Studies
Dear reader, let me welcome you into the company of bookmen of the past who did so much with head and heart and hand. People like Francis Bacon and John Wesley could think because they wrote it down, and they wrote it down because they could think—and by this they thought about us who would follow, that we might “read their minds.”.
Kenneth Latourette said that the early Christians did “out-think, out-live, and out-die their generation.” It is to our sorrow that we moderns neither know how to think, live, or die in that manner. Indeed, if we did, it would seem that there would be a concomitant effect. One part of the process of “out-thinking” should be study. There must be something to think with besides our brains. There must be content derived from a diligent application to the Book and to books as well,
John Wesley led a movement that was not borne of bare enthusiasm, for it moved a generation for God and set in motion a salutary social revolution that is yet with us. It was a book movement, and a reading revolution. He insisted that his helpers “steadily spend all morning in this employ, or at least five hours in the twenty-four.” A young evangelist says, “But I have no taste for reading: Wesley answers with a “certain violence,” as William Barclay points out, that the young man should “contract a taste for it, or return to his trade,”
Incidentally, Wesley wrote a mere 37 1 books, thirty with his brother, and many hymns. It was not just biblical material, but historical, political, medical, and humane. For every fruitful book one writes, he must read forty or more. He must be, in the historical sense, a Christian humanist. From whence comes good grammar and the vocabulary that captures subtle nuances? And how may the imagination be developed but by books? The effect of television is the opposite, bringing deprivation to the right side of the brain (the imagination and creativity sector), as well as the left—where thinking should transpire. Yet Wesley was an activist, the world was his parish, and he rode over 80,000 miles and preached over 17,000 sermons.
Francis Bacon wrote in an essay of the above title that “studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.” The first is for solitude, the second is to beautify social intercourse, and the third is to bring sound judgment into the world for action. . . . for expert men can execute and perhaps judge of particulars one by one . . . [but) the plotting and marshalling of affairs comes from the learned.” Thus the linear, one dimensional man is not the learned man. The secular generalist, such as Toynbee, and the C. S. Lewis types, religiously speaking, are the need of the day.
Bacon warns us that “too much study is sloth,” and that there are some who use study for escape or mere external ornamentation, with little application to life. There is the requirement of “getting into life.” as he further states:
“They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience...studies by themselves do give forth directions much too large except they be bounded by experience.”
An application for the scholarly pastor is that he have a discipline to be among people in common life, that he might preach and teach incarnationally—in the flesh and blood of life. Let none who take Jesus or Paul as examples of biblical thinkers deny themselves the privilege of a persistent peripatetic lifestyle. They wearily walked many a dusty road sharing their learnings.
Also from Bacon:
“Crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; wise men use them.”
“Read to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be digested.”
“Reading makes a full man; conversation a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
When Paul told Timothy to study, he was not talking about an arduous and unpalatable task. The Greek word meas eager diligence, like an intrepid athlete ready for the race. To be approved of God is to avidly study the Word and study men, that we might “rightly apportion” the Word of Truth—meat for the mature, milk for the babies, honey for the unlovely. “Reading Christians,” said Wesley, “are knowing Christians.”
Read as though your life depended on it “Histories make men wise, poets witty, mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral (philosophy) grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend...there is no impediment of wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies,” (Bacon)
John Wesley commented that the work of grace would die out in one generation if the Methodists were not a reading people.
Friends, if you love God with your mind then make an action study plan and do it now. In His light we see light, for He lights every man coming into the world.
Spirit of the Living God
Spirit of the living God, Fail fresh on me
Spirit of the living God, Fail fresh on me
Break me, melt me, mold me, fill me;
Spirit of the living God, Fail fresh on me
Daniel Iverson, 1926
Dear reader, let me welcome you into the company of bookmen of the past who did so much with head and heart and hand. People like Francis Bacon and John Wesley could think because they wrote it down, and they wrote it down because they could think—and by this they thought about us who would follow, that we might “read their minds.”.
Kenneth Latourette said that the early Christians did “out-think, out-live, and out-die their generation.” It is to our sorrow that we moderns neither know how to think, live, or die in that manner. Indeed, if we did, it would seem that there would be a concomitant effect. One part of the process of “out-thinking” should be study. There must be something to think with besides our brains. There must be content derived from a diligent application to the Book and to books as well,
John Wesley led a movement that was not borne of bare enthusiasm, for it moved a generation for God and set in motion a salutary social revolution that is yet with us. It was a book movement, and a reading revolution. He insisted that his helpers “steadily spend all morning in this employ, or at least five hours in the twenty-four.” A young evangelist says, “But I have no taste for reading: Wesley answers with a “certain violence,” as William Barclay points out, that the young man should “contract a taste for it, or return to his trade,”
Incidentally, Wesley wrote a mere 37 1 books, thirty with his brother, and many hymns. It was not just biblical material, but historical, political, medical, and humane. For every fruitful book one writes, he must read forty or more. He must be, in the historical sense, a Christian humanist. From whence comes good grammar and the vocabulary that captures subtle nuances? And how may the imagination be developed but by books? The effect of television is the opposite, bringing deprivation to the right side of the brain (the imagination and creativity sector), as well as the left—where thinking should transpire. Yet Wesley was an activist, the world was his parish, and he rode over 80,000 miles and preached over 17,000 sermons.
Francis Bacon wrote in an essay of the above title that “studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.” The first is for solitude, the second is to beautify social intercourse, and the third is to bring sound judgment into the world for action. . . . for expert men can execute and perhaps judge of particulars one by one . . . [but) the plotting and marshalling of affairs comes from the learned.” Thus the linear, one dimensional man is not the learned man. The secular generalist, such as Toynbee, and the C. S. Lewis types, religiously speaking, are the need of the day.
Bacon warns us that “too much study is sloth,” and that there are some who use study for escape or mere external ornamentation, with little application to life. There is the requirement of “getting into life.” as he further states:
“They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience...studies by themselves do give forth directions much too large except they be bounded by experience.”
An application for the scholarly pastor is that he have a discipline to be among people in common life, that he might preach and teach incarnationally—in the flesh and blood of life. Let none who take Jesus or Paul as examples of biblical thinkers deny themselves the privilege of a persistent peripatetic lifestyle. They wearily walked many a dusty road sharing their learnings.
Also from Bacon:
“Crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; wise men use them.”
“Read to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be digested.”
“Reading makes a full man; conversation a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
When Paul told Timothy to study, he was not talking about an arduous and unpalatable task. The Greek word meas eager diligence, like an intrepid athlete ready for the race. To be approved of God is to avidly study the Word and study men, that we might “rightly apportion” the Word of Truth—meat for the mature, milk for the babies, honey for the unlovely. “Reading Christians,” said Wesley, “are knowing Christians.”
Read as though your life depended on it “Histories make men wise, poets witty, mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral (philosophy) grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend...there is no impediment of wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies,” (Bacon)
John Wesley commented that the work of grace would die out in one generation if the Methodists were not a reading people.
Friends, if you love God with your mind then make an action study plan and do it now. In His light we see light, for He lights every man coming into the world.
Spirit of the Living God
Spirit of the living God, Fail fresh on me
Spirit of the living God, Fail fresh on me
Break me, melt me, mold me, fill me;
Spirit of the living God, Fail fresh on me
Daniel Iverson, 1926
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Bystanders-Freshman Hitchikers and the Drinking Trucker
I was just seventeen. It was snowing in Davidson as Bob Henderson I started the long hitchhike to Miami. Freshmen. We knew it all. We got to Charlotte and things did not go south. My nice new D-Sweater (for 10,000 hours of football sweat). We were hoping that some lovely ladies from Queens College would come along and pick us up. We were freezing. We were ready to settle for anything, and that is what we got—Chambless Brown. His truck had a fender hanging precariously on the right and a broken window where I sat. He had a piece of cardboard we could hold.
“Going to Columbia?”
“Yep.” Said the rather unkempt driver, a few teeth and tobacco stains fitted his conversational skills.
Bob was next to Mr. Brown and started sniffing. Beer smell. Lots of it. We wondered why the truck was weaving a slushy pattern on old U.S. 21.
We decided he needed to be saved. Right now.
The ninety miles took about four hours. That gave us time to thoroughly convert this half-drunk gnome-like driver, whether God was in on it or not. We have him hell, highwater, and heaven, the love of Jesus and the wrath of God in no particular order or practiced skill. One might only say that this duo of Davidson freshmen were sincere.
We had to get out in the drizzle. We were beyond snow. But before our exit we insisted that Mr. Chambless Brown ask Jesus Christ into his heart.
“Do you know receive Him as your personal Savior, and do you believe He died for all your sins?”
“Yep.” No emotion. No resolve. Not much knowledge. But we prayed for him and stood on the highway happy for our stellar witnessing skills. All we knew was he was from Bamberg.
Bob and I were roommates and prayed for Chambless Brown for a year and then forgot about it.
Later. 1966. On a jumbo jet from New York to Berlin to attend the first World Congress for Evangelism thanks to the kind and benevolent invitation of Dr. L. Nelson Bell. I sat next to an elder from a town I had heard about twenty years before. Bamberg, South Carolina.
Images of an old truck and a man named Chambless came to mind.
“Do you know Chambless Brown?
“I certainly do. Everyone knows Chambless.”
I steadied myself for bad news.
“He is a deacon over at First Baptist Church and has a fleet of trucks. He had a problem with alcohol but made a big change some years ago. What a difference.”
I was tempted to ask how many Chambless Browns were in Bamberg. I rejoiced and told Bob about the amazing Providence and grace of God upon my return.
This is what we learned. God can use a couple college clowns and get all the glory himself.
Once there was an atheistic lawyer who finally came to church with his wife. The pastor changed the sermon and made it palatable for his friend. At the end an invitation was given to receive the Lord Jesus. The lawyer was unmoved until an inept, overzealous lad went over doing the singing of the hymn and whispered, “Don’t you want to go to heaven?” “NO!” was the angry reply, and he stormed out of the church. That evening the pastor had a visitor. It was the lawyer. “I want to apologize for Bobby speaking to you, because whatever he said must have been crude.
“That is precisely why I am here.” said the lawyer. “I want to know about God.”
How about you, my friend?
Note: Incidentally a Reformed pastor from Bamberg visited my church one Sunday in Newark. I asked about Mr. Chambless Brown and the transformation story was confirmed.
Another thing I learned. Even a Presbyterian can help a Baptist Church in Bamberg.
I
“Going to Columbia?”
“Yep.” Said the rather unkempt driver, a few teeth and tobacco stains fitted his conversational skills.
Bob was next to Mr. Brown and started sniffing. Beer smell. Lots of it. We wondered why the truck was weaving a slushy pattern on old U.S. 21.
We decided he needed to be saved. Right now.
The ninety miles took about four hours. That gave us time to thoroughly convert this half-drunk gnome-like driver, whether God was in on it or not. We have him hell, highwater, and heaven, the love of Jesus and the wrath of God in no particular order or practiced skill. One might only say that this duo of Davidson freshmen were sincere.
We had to get out in the drizzle. We were beyond snow. But before our exit we insisted that Mr. Chambless Brown ask Jesus Christ into his heart.
“Do you know receive Him as your personal Savior, and do you believe He died for all your sins?”
“Yep.” No emotion. No resolve. Not much knowledge. But we prayed for him and stood on the highway happy for our stellar witnessing skills. All we knew was he was from Bamberg.
Bob and I were roommates and prayed for Chambless Brown for a year and then forgot about it.
Later. 1966. On a jumbo jet from New York to Berlin to attend the first World Congress for Evangelism thanks to the kind and benevolent invitation of Dr. L. Nelson Bell. I sat next to an elder from a town I had heard about twenty years before. Bamberg, South Carolina.
Images of an old truck and a man named Chambless came to mind.
“Do you know Chambless Brown?
“I certainly do. Everyone knows Chambless.”
I steadied myself for bad news.
“He is a deacon over at First Baptist Church and has a fleet of trucks. He had a problem with alcohol but made a big change some years ago. What a difference.”
I was tempted to ask how many Chambless Browns were in Bamberg. I rejoiced and told Bob about the amazing Providence and grace of God upon my return.
This is what we learned. God can use a couple college clowns and get all the glory himself.
Once there was an atheistic lawyer who finally came to church with his wife. The pastor changed the sermon and made it palatable for his friend. At the end an invitation was given to receive the Lord Jesus. The lawyer was unmoved until an inept, overzealous lad went over doing the singing of the hymn and whispered, “Don’t you want to go to heaven?” “NO!” was the angry reply, and he stormed out of the church. That evening the pastor had a visitor. It was the lawyer. “I want to apologize for Bobby speaking to you, because whatever he said must have been crude.
“That is precisely why I am here.” said the lawyer. “I want to know about God.”
How about you, my friend?
Note: Incidentally a Reformed pastor from Bamberg visited my church one Sunday in Newark. I asked about Mr. Chambless Brown and the transformation story was confirmed.
Another thing I learned. Even a Presbyterian can help a Baptist Church in Bamberg.
I
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Of Books and Studies
Toward Becoming a Bibliophiliac
Dear reader, let me welcome you into the company of bookmen of the past who did so much with head and heart and hand. People like Francis Bacon and John Wesley could think because they wrote it down, and they wrote it down because they could think—and by this they thought about us who would follow, that we might “read their minds.”
Kenneth Latourette said that the early Christians did “out-think, out-live, and out-die” their generation.” It is to our sorrow that we moderns know little of how to think, live, or die in that manner. Indeed, if we did, it would seem that there would be a concomitant effect. One part of the process of “out-thinking” should be study. There must be something to think with besides our brains. There must be content derived from a diligent application to the Book and to books as well.
John Wesley led a movement that was not borne of bare enthusiasm, for it moved a generation for God and set in motion a salutary social revolution that is yet with us. It was a book movement, and a reading revolution. He insisted that his helpers “steadily spend all morning in this employ, or at least five hours in the twenty-four.” A young evangelist says, “But I have no taste for reading.” Wesley answers with a “certain violence,” as William Barclay points out, that the young man should “contract a taste for it, or return to his trade.”
Incidentally, Wesley wrote a mere 371 books, thirty with his brother, and many hymns. It was not just biblical material, but historical, political, medical, and humane. For every fruitful book one writes, he must read forty or more. He must be, in the historical sense, a Christian humanist. Whence comes good grammar and the vocabulary that captures subtle nuances? And how may the imagination be developed but by books? The effect of television is the opposite, bringing deprivation to the right side of the brain (the imagination and creativity sector), as well as the left—where thinking should transpire. Yet Wesley was an activist, the world was his parish, and he rode over 80,000 miles and preached over 17,000 sermons.
Francis Bacon wrote in an essay of the above title that “studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.” The first is for solitude, the second is to beautify social intercourse, and the third is to bring sound judgment into the world for action. . . . For expert men can execute and perhaps judge of particulars one by one . . . [but] the plotting and marshalling of affairs comes from the learned.” Thus the linear, one dimensional man is not the learned man. The secular generalist, such as Toynbee, and the Francis Schaeffer types, religiously speaking, are the need of the day.
Bacon warns us that “too much study is sloth,” and that there are some who use study for escape or mere external ornamentation, with little application to life. There is the requirement of “getting into life.” as he further states: “They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience...studies by themselves do give forth directions much too large except they be bounded by experience.”
An application for the scholarly pastor is that he have a discipline to be among people in common life, that he might preach and teach incarnationally—in the flesh and blood of life. Let none who take Jesus or Paul as examples of biblical thinkers deny themselves the privilege of a persistent peripatetic lifestyle. They wearily walked many a dusty road imparting their very being in word and deed.
Also from Bacon: “Crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; wise men use them.”
“Read to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be digested--reading makes a full man; conference (dialog) a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
When Paul told Timothy to study, he was not talking about an arduous and unpalatable task. The Greek word means eager diligence, like an intrepid athlete ready for the race. To be approved of God is to avidly study the Word and study men, that we might “rightly apportion” the Word of Truth—meat for the mature, milk for the babies, honey for the unlovely. “Reading Christians,” said Wesley, “are knowing Christians.” He adds this cogent insight: “The work of grace would die out in one generation if the Methodists were not a reading people.
Read as though your life depended on it: “Histories make men wise, poets witty, mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral philosophy grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend...there is no impediment of wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies,” (Bacon)
Friends, if you love God with your mind then make an action study plan and do it now. In His light we see light, for He lights every man coming into the world____________________
For Monographs and Essays on Education, Evangelism. And Biblical Worldview:
wtiverson@gmail.com
Toward Becoming a Bibliophiliac
Dear reader, let me welcome you into the company of bookmen of the past who did so much with head and heart and hand. People like Francis Bacon and John Wesley could think because they wrote it down, and they wrote it down because they could think—and by this they thought about us who would follow, that we might “read their minds.”
Kenneth Latourette said that the early Christians did “out-think, out-live, and out-die” their generation.” It is to our sorrow that we moderns know little of how to think, live, or die in that manner. Indeed, if we did, it would seem that there would be a concomitant effect. One part of the process of “out-thinking” should be study. There must be something to think with besides our brains. There must be content derived from a diligent application to the Book and to books as well.
John Wesley led a movement that was not borne of bare enthusiasm, for it moved a generation for God and set in motion a salutary social revolution that is yet with us. It was a book movement, and a reading revolution. He insisted that his helpers “steadily spend all morning in this employ, or at least five hours in the twenty-four.” A young evangelist says, “But I have no taste for reading.” Wesley answers with a “certain violence,” as William Barclay points out, that the young man should “contract a taste for it, or return to his trade.”
Incidentally, Wesley wrote a mere 371 books, thirty with his brother, and many hymns. It was not just biblical material, but historical, political, medical, and humane. For every fruitful book one writes, he must read forty or more. He must be, in the historical sense, a Christian humanist. Whence comes good grammar and the vocabulary that captures subtle nuances? And how may the imagination be developed but by books? The effect of television is the opposite, bringing deprivation to the right side of the brain (the imagination and creativity sector), as well as the left—where thinking should transpire. Yet Wesley was an activist, the world was his parish, and he rode over 80,000 miles and preached over 17,000 sermons.
Francis Bacon wrote in an essay of the above title that “studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.” The first is for solitude, the second is to beautify social intercourse, and the third is to bring sound judgment into the world for action. . . . For expert men can execute and perhaps judge of particulars one by one . . . [but] the plotting and marshalling of affairs comes from the learned.” Thus the linear, one dimensional man is not the learned man. The secular generalist, such as Toynbee, and the Francis Schaeffer types, religiously speaking, are the need of the day.
Bacon warns us that “too much study is sloth,” and that there are some who use study for escape or mere external ornamentation, with little application to life. There is the requirement of “getting into life.” as he further states: “They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience...studies by themselves do give forth directions much too large except they be bounded by experience.”
An application for the scholarly pastor is that he have a discipline to be among people in common life, that he might preach and teach incarnationally—in the flesh and blood of life. Let none who take Jesus or Paul as examples of biblical thinkers deny themselves the privilege of a persistent peripatetic lifestyle. They wearily walked many a dusty road imparting their very being in word and deed.
Also from Bacon: “Crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; wise men use them.”
“Read to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be digested--reading makes a full man; conference (dialog) a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
When Paul told Timothy to study, he was not talking about an arduous and unpalatable task. The Greek word means eager diligence, like an intrepid athlete ready for the race. To be approved of God is to avidly study the Word and study men, that we might “rightly apportion” the Word of Truth—meat for the mature, milk for the babies, honey for the unlovely. “Reading Christians,” said Wesley, “are knowing Christians.” He adds this cogent insight: “The work of grace would die out in one generation if the Methodists were not a reading people.
Read as though your life depended on it: “Histories make men wise, poets witty, mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral philosophy grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend...there is no impediment of wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies,” (Bacon)
Friends, if you love God with your mind then make an action study plan and do it now. In His light we see light, for He lights every man coming into the world____________________
For Monographs and Essays on Education, Evangelism. And Biblical Worldview:
wtiverson@gmail.com
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