Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a man who went at all of life full-on. He laughed and cried much; he read avidly and felt deeply; he was a zealously industrious worker and a sociable lover of play and beauty. Christ and the Bible Spurgeon was soaked in scripture. You can pick almost any sermon —…
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a man who went at all of life full-on. He laughed and cried much; he read avidly and felt deeply; he was a zealously industrious worker and a sociable lover of play and beauty. He was, in other words, a man who embodied the truth that to be in Christ…
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It comes as a surprise to some that Charles Spurgeon had a lifelong battle with depression. His reputation as a famed and powerful preacher, his cheery wit, and his sheer manliness might lead us to imagine there could never be a chink in his Victorian Englishman’s armour. It shouldn’t be a surprise, of course:…
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In writing about Christians and slavery (Guest column, ET January 2018), I suggested that men and women from an earlier era were, like us, people of their time. Therefore, cultural and social factors affected their view of many things, including slavery. So, we should not judge them by 21st century standards. Some were eminently…
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Evangelicals rightly celebrate William Wilberforce. His Christian beliefs motivated his historic effort to secure the abolition of the slave trade, in the British empire, in 1807 (see ET, December 2017). What we don’t talk about so much is how a number of godly Christian leaders, particularly in the Southern USA in the nineteenth century,…
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This month marks the end of Kingston upon Hull’s year as the UK’s City of Culture. One part of Hull’s celebrations has been remembering William Wilberforce, ‘the friend of humanity’ and Hull’s ‘most illustrious son’. Wilberforce’s untiring efforts to abolish the slave trade were rewarded with that famous Act of Parliament of 1807, an…
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It is the glorious privilege of every believer to be able to say, ‘I know the Lord’. But how well do we know him? That is the issue we began to look at last month. The Saviour is ever with us, as he promised, and his Spirit is ever active within us. Yet our…
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‘It is a wonderful thing to know Jesus!’ We would all agree with that. It is something we sing about and rightly rejoice in. Indeed, it is what God promised his people: ‘No longer will they teach their neighbour, or say to one another, Know the Lord, because they will all know me, from…
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In responding to suffering, some Christians have wrongly thought that God can only meaningfully comfort us if he suffers with us in his divine nature and experiences our pain (ET Guest Column, July 2017). This is a tempting point of view, but it is the wrong answer to suffering, because God is transcendent and…
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Suffering is a reality we all experience. Although it is used by some to reject God’s existence, when properly understood, it confirms just how much we need God. But what kind of a God do we need? It is important that we find a thoroughly biblical answer to this question, because many sincere people…
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One thing common to all humanity is the perplexing experience of suffering. Notable examples, like wars and earthquakes, make the news headlines, but most suffering is not on the ‘news’. Yet it is known to all as it walks among our friends, family and communities: the loss of a spouse, the death of a…
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It could be argued that there is something very wrong with the prevailing subculture of much evangelicalism today. We preach the brokenness of life in a messed-up world, but expect our churches to be full of near perfect people. The story is told of a church, outside of which was the following notice: ‘Workshop…
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