Monday 20 April 2015

Christian articles - Burry Green Magazine


1 Pause that film! – 2 The brother-in-law's advice – 3 A tale of two lighthouses  - 4 A new perspective – 5 The Wilberforce connection – 6 Her last recorded words – 7 I remember Mr Cowper – 8 An influential Christian – 9 Stockbroker stoned in Hay – 10 Not the triple-jumper! – 11 Pantycelyn – 12 Here is love – 13 The outward appearance – 14 It nearly did not happen! – 15 The catastrophe at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall - 16 The anniversary of 9/11 – 17 A response to suffering

1 Pause that film!


Do you remember when films used to break down halfway through, and there would be a delay while the projectionist tried to get it going again?  Several years ago at a Swansea cinema (on the site of the old Plaza, the largest cinema in Wales when built in 1932) we were at a one-off viewing of ‘Only two can play’, the Peter Sellers film made in Swansea in the early 1960s - when the film broke down!  It was a convivial occasion, for during the break the small audience got talking about old Swansea until the screening re-commenced.
Let us ‘pause the film’, as it were, with a well-known Bible story.  In the book of Daniel we read that three young Jewish men in exile in Babylon are threatened with being cast into a fiery furnace if they will not worship the golden statue which Nebuchadnessar had erected.  We probably recall what happened in the end, but stop the narrative at the time when they have just spoken to the king, as recorded in Daniel chapter 3, verses 17 and 18.  They state that God is able to rescue them from the furnace, and they even go as far as to assert that He will do so.  Then they inform the king that even if God chooses not to rescue them, they will not worship the statue, and they are prepared to take the consequences.
Surely that was the situation for many who were actually burned in Britain for the faith – people like Robert Farrar, Bishop of St David’s, in Carmarthen (a small plaque in Carmarthen’s Nott Square commemorates his martyrdom).  Of course a similar situation applies in parts of the world today, with people still being put to death because they determine to worship the one true God.  But in far less dramatic and perhaps not life-or-death ways, that situation applies to many of us now.  God is well able to heal you or me of that disease, to sort out that estranged marriage, to bring about  reconciliation with a wayward relative, to grant that deserved promotion at work, to remove us from that difficult situation….  yet He may choose not to.  Can we go on worshipping Him, even when He apparently does not fly to our aid?  God did not save Stephen from being stoned (Acts 7v59), nor James the brother of John from being killed (Acts 12v2), nor those five American missionaries from being martyred by the Auca Indians in Ecuador in 1956 … and you can add your own examples. 
In the language of accountancy we cling to the ‘bottom line’ – it is that ‘God is good’ (Psalm 34v8, 52v1, 73v1, etc).  He is well able to do all that we desire, to sort out those difficulties with which we are contending, and perhaps have been contending for a long time - yet sometimes He who is ‘God only wise’ chooses not to, at least for the present.  We know that His grace is sufficient for us, and like those three young Jewish men we determine to worship God and to seek to honour Him, in spite of there being no swift solution to our particular troubles.  If we ‘roll the story on’, in the book of Daniel there is a ‘happy ending’…. but that may not happen to you or I in this life (although Jesus will be with us, just as He was with those three in the furnace). 
We read in the New Testament that many followed Christ Jesus when He gave them what they wanted, but few followed when He set out His requirements for discipleship.  May you and I not be ‘fair-weather followers’, but echo the attitude of a worship song:
When I’m found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed be your name.
Only in the world to come shall we find the conclusion of what is happening in our individual lives here on earth - then we shall see how the Master Builder has worked all these things together for His glory and for the good of His people.  Meanwhile may He grant us the grace and resilience to persevere amidst present trials, trusting in Him who knows the future.

2 The brother-in-law’s advice
In 2006 the Royal Mail brought out a first-class stamp depicting the Royal Albert bridge over the Tamar at Saltash, one of a set of six stamps to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  In the Swansea area the Loughor railway bridge was the only surviving timber viaduct of his design (others, such as the Landore viaduct, have been rebuilt in brick or stone). 
s engineer of the Great Western Railway, Brunel’s innovative achievements included the two-mile long Box tunnel near Bath, and the Maidenhead viaduct over the Thames – with two of the flattest brick arches ever built.  His venture into marine engineering produced the SS Great Western, the first trans-Atlantic steamship, and the SS Great Britain, the first iron ship to cross an ocean and the first with screw propulsion: since 1970 this has been on display in the Bristol dry dock where the ship had been built.  While Brunel was involved in constructing Paddington railway station, building Chepstow’s timber bridge over the Wye to complete a direct rail link between London and Swansea, and commencing work under the Tamar for the Royal Albert bridge, he visited Swansea for a public breakfast in a huge marquee on the Burrows (where the South Dock, now the Marina, was later built), to celebrate the railway reaching the town.
Never one to rest on his laurels, two years later Brunel made a preliminary sketch for ‘an East India steamship, 600ft long’.  That would become his nemesis – the gigantic PSS Great Eastern (eventually 692ft in length), with a double iron hull and driven with both paddle wheels and a screw propeller.  It dwarfed all other ships (imagine the QE2 beside the Golden Hind!), and there were horrendous problems in her construction at the Isle of Dogs and with her sideways launching into the Thames.  The strain of this contributed to Brunel’s early death aged 53.        
Amidst his all-consuming involvement with this project, his brother-in-law, portrait painter John Horsley, wrote ‘your life has been one of almost unparalleled devotion to your profession, to the exclusion, to far too great an extent, of that which was due to your God and even to your family, and with an utter disregard of your health’.  He urged Brunel to consider ‘whether your way of life is such as to give you a reasonable hope of entering into the mansions of heaven’.
We might not presume to compare ourselves with a person who was second only to Churchill in BBC2’s ‘Great Britons’ series, yet what about you and I?  However high-profile or humble our work may be, does it take over our lives?  Or perhaps other things – sport, entertainment, the internet - even our family – do so?  Such things can distract us from living to the glory of God, for Jesus commands us to ‘seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things [that is, what we need in life] will come after’.  This is not escapism from the ‘real’ world of business or commerce, rather it is a call to prioritise a right relationship with God, and thus to gain the best perspective on how to order our lives. 
We may never be honoured with a statue on the London embankment, but if we seek God’s kingdom then we shall experience the wisdom of John Horsley’s advice and become channels of God’s grace working through us to His glory.

3 A tale of two lighthouses
The Gower peninsula has an active lighthouse at Mumbles and a disused one at Whiteford Point in north-west Gower.  Mumbles lighthouse was designed in 1793 by William Jernegan, known as the ‘Architect of Regency Swansea’, whose designs included Stouthall, Kilvrough Manor, Swansea’s Assembly Rooms and the now demolished Countess of Huntingdon’s chapel (near the Museum).  Although Mumbles lighthouse was first lit by two coal-burning braziers, within five years these were replaced by enclosed oil lamps in a cast-iron lantern made at Neath Abbey ironworks, and nowadays the light is electrified.   
Whiteford lighthouse was erected in 1865 to replace a wooden structure from ten years earlier.  It is the only cast-iron wave-swept lighthouse in the British Isles, standing 44 ft high, and at high tide stands 20 ft above the water.  But apart from a brief time in the 1980s, this lighthouse has been derelict since 1933 (it was replaced initially by an automatic light on Burry Holms), and it is now merely a perch for kittiwakes and oystercatchers.
In spite of appearances, without the life of Christ flowing through us, you and I are as useless as Whiteford lighthouse.  Our purpose on earth is that we might live to God’s glory (Ephesians 1v12), and we can only do that when Jesus is Lord of our lives.  He commands us to ‘let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in Heaven’ (Matthew 5v16).  Left to ourselves we cannot do that, for the ‘self’ dominates.  Like the apostle Paul we come to admit ‘I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.  For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing’ (Romans 7v19).   Even worse, this applies not just to our actions but to our thoughts!  How we need to come before God and confess our sins time and again, for we have the warning in 1 John 1v 8 that ‘If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.’  In the following verse is the promise ‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.’  We do not have to wait until we are in a church or chapel to do this, we can individually speak to God, asking for his forgiveness and praying that Jesus will reign in our lives by his Spirit.
Just as the moon needs the light of the sun to have something to reflect, so we need the light of Christ in us.  ‘Without me you can do nothing’, said Jesus (John 15v5); we need to abide (or dwell) in Him in order to live fruitful lives, letting the light of Christ shine out, just as Mumbles lighthouse shines out on dark nights.   

4 A new perspective
At different stages of life our interests change – we move on from playing with dolls or toy soldiers - but some changes are more profound than just acquiring new interests or hobbies.
I used to be a keen bell-ringer, and in the 1970s visited North America with a group of Worcestershire ringers.  As well as seeing Niagara Falls, we rang at Washington Cathedral, where a lift takes you up to the ringing chamber, and I rang in a peal (about 3 hours of high quality ringing) at a place called Northampton in the state of Massachusetts.  However, if I were to revisit that town today, on alighting from a Greyhound bus I would not suggest to my wife that we visit Smith College where I had rung that peal: that would hold little interest to me now.  Rather, we might look for a memorial to Revd Jonathan Edwards, who ministered in Northampton at the time of the Great Awakening in the 1730s.  We would enquire if the Parsonage is still standing (probably not) where David Brainerd, a missionary to the Indians, had died aged twenty-nine of tuberculosis in 1747.  Subsequently Edwards published An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd, a hugely influential spiritual journal that has inspired many since then.  Then we would hope to visit Brainerd’s grave, beside that of one of Edwards’s daughters, Jerusha, who had nursed him through his final illness and who herself died the following year.
This different emphasis is because I have changed.  Thirty years ago I would have had no interest in Edwards or Brainerd, but now like John Bunyan (himself a bell-ringer, at Elstow prior to his conversion) bell-ringing holds slight interest to me, compared with matters concerning God and His kingdom.  However I haven’t yet reached the place of the missionary C.T. Studd, who came to regret the hours he had frittered away (very successfully – England could beat Australia in those days) on the cricket fields of England: being still interested in cricket I have a long way to go as yet.  Of course on this hypothetical trip to Massachusetts we would also aim to visit the small town of Swansea, to see the grave of its co-founder, Revd John Myles of Ilston, whose local memorial stands in Gower’s Ilston valley.
Though I have been changed, that does not mean I am now perfect – merely ‘work-in-progress’.  God’s Spirit seeks to shape and change each Christian into persons whose lives are lived to His glory.

5 The Wilberforce connection
In 2007, on the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, the film Amazing Grace opened in cinemas.  Unlike the Mal Pope musical of the same title about Evan Roberts and the 1904 Welsh Revival, this film concerns the parliamentary campaign led by William Wilberforce, while acknowledging the contributions of researcher Thomas Clarkson, freed slave Olaudah Equiano, and former slave ship captain John Newton.  Departures from historical accuracy, such as using the familiar tune to Newton’s hymn Amazing Grace (that tune was not used until 1831), are minor. Although not mentioned in this film, of special interest to us is the connection with Diana, Lady Barham, who was responsible for building six nonconformist chapels in Gower in the early nineteenth century.
Diana Middleton (1762-1823) was the only daughter of Sir Charles Middleton, MP for Rochester and first Lord of the Admiralty at the time of Trafalgar.  Her mother Lady Margaret was known for her charity to the poor.  Among the Middletons’ circle were George Whitefield, Selina Hastings Countess of Huningdon, and playwright and philanthropist Hannah More, who wrote Slavery: A Poem.  Diana Middleton grew up at Barham Court in Teston (near Maidstone), whose vicar James Ramsay had seen Caribbean slavery at first hand, and had written several tracts on the subject.  It was at Teston that both Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce decided to work for abolition, and at Barham Court the parliamentary campaign was planned.
When aged seventeen in 1780, Diana Middleton had married landowner Sir Gerard Noel Edwards, who changed his name to Gerard Noel Noel, and was heir to the 6th Earl of Gainsborough.  It seems she had 22 children, though her somewhat eccentric husband did not share her evangelical faith.  On her father’s death in 1813 she inherited the title Lady Barham, and her inheritance enabled her to move to Gower, settling at Fairy Hill (now a five-star hotel), and to have six chapels (which were also used as schoolrooms) built in the peninsula between 1814 and 1822.  Of her children, one daughter Juliana later lived at Fairy Hill after marrying the vicar of Cheriton, while Lady Barham’s eldest son Charles Noel, who became Earl of Gainsborough, conveyed the chapels of Burry Green and Cheriton to the Calvinistic Methodists in 1855.  Today four of her six chapels are still in use as places of worship, while another still stands but as a private house.
In spite of having what appears to be a less than ideal marriage, Lady Barham’s upbringing among several prominent Christians of her generation, and contact with leaders of the movement to abolish slavery, bore much fruit, from which Gower benefits to this day.
 
6 Her last recorded words
We sometimes speak of a person’s ‘famous last words’.  As King George V was dying, his physician murmured encouragingly that his majesty would soon be well enough to enjoy visiting Bognor Regis, whereupon the monarch’s reply was less than                      complimentary to Bognor.  There were spin doctors in 1936, as it was given out that the King’s final words were ‘God bless the Empire’.  A more edifying remark was that of Revd John Wesley, who died in 1791 at the age of 88.  He pre-empted Alex Frith by two centuries in remarking: ‘The best is yet to come!’  The following is not anyone’s famous last words, but the last words recorded in the Bible of a person who lived on for many years, and was among the believers mentioned by name in the Early Church.    
John 2 verse 5
Her last recorded words
at the wedding in Cana:
an embarassing situation -
guests continue to drink
but the wine has run out.
Could Jesus help?
Would Jesus help?
Servants await instructions -
here is the advice
(and it applies to you and me),
it’s from Mary, mother of Jesus:
'Whatever He tells you to do -
DO IT'

    7 I remember Mr Cowper
‘I first met him when calling on Mrs Unwin in Huntingdon, after her husband had died following a fall from his horse.  Mr Cowper had lodged there for some time, but now they decided to settle in Olney.  He was a sensitive soul, whose spirit had been marred by his mother’s early death, and by bullying at boarding school.  But he had come to a firm faith in Christ, and he used to assist me around the parish with visiting and ministering to the poor.  To counteract times of depression we tried to keep him active so as to feel of use.  After a few years he and I began writing hymns for the midweek meetings held in the Vicarage, although they outgrew that so we moved into the large room in the Great House, belonging to Lord Dartmouth, patron of the parish.  Of course Mr Cowper’s poetical gifts were far greater than mine, and I expect his hymns like ‘Hark, my soul, it is the Lord’, ‘There is a fountain filled with blood’, and ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ will be still be sung a hundred years from now.  Yet in spite of God’s blessing on those meetings we could not avert the depression that came over him again like a dark cloak, seeming to envelope him for month after month.  That is why by the time the Olney hymns were published - it was the year before I moved to London - he had written hardly a quarter of them. 
Sometimes there is no happy ending in this life, but victory is experienced in the world to come.  That is his situation now, for as I said at his funeral what a glorious surprise it must be to find himself released from all his chains in a moment and to be in the presence of the Lord whom he loved and whom he served.  Yes, I remember Mr Cowper.  In spite of all his depression and mental instability, I can hardly imagine a closer walk with God than he uniformly maintained.’      
Revd John Newton (writer of such hymns as ‘Amazing Grace’) conducted the funeral of his friend William Cowper in 1800.

8 An influential Christian
For many persons the name of Rowland Hill is just that of the man who introduced the penny post.  For some Christians it is also the name of the former minister of London’s Surrey chapel and the chapel at Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire - at whose pulpits C.H. Spurgeon took great pride in later preaching, in fulfilment of a prophetic prayer of Richard Knill.  But to me it is primarily the name of the Swansea man who played a vital part in my coming to Christ.  This Rowland Hill belonged to the congregation of Mount Pleasant Baptist chapel in the Kingsway, where he used to lead the Saturday evening Youth for Christ meetings. 
A tall man with a powerful singing voice, in work he would not hesitate to admonish a Post Office worker who took the Lord’s name in vain.  Later he worked as a chiropodist and physiotherapist with a surgery at his home at 43 Henrietta Street (near where the Christian bookshop used to be).  His waiting room contained several tracts and Christian books, for he was always alert to gently turn any conversation towards the Lord.  Both my wife and my mother visited him and could affirm this.  It was when needing treatment for a sporting injury that I first encountered him there.  Rowland spoke to me of a personal relationship with Christ, and gave me O. Hallesby’s book ‘Why I am a Christian’, which several years later was instrumental in my conversion. 
A powerful preacher at many Christian chapels, Rowland walked with a limp from polio, but there was no impediment – not even the cancer that led to his death in 1992 – that could dull his love for the Lord.  Of modern worship songs he particularly liked ‘I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice’. 
Revd Geoffrey Fewkes (former minister of Swansea’s Pantygwydr Baptist Church) took Rowland’s funeral at Mount Pleasant Chapel, prior to burial in Dan-y-graig cemetery.  I still have Rowland’s supportive letter to me when he had been grieved to hear of some problems I was doing through: I look forward to the time when with resurrection bodies we shall meet again - and I can thank him for his concern and for witnessing Christ to me.

9 Stockbroker stoned in Hay
Even in Wales it used to be a dangerous business being a Methodist – both for Welsh (Calvinistic) Methodists and for Wesleyan Methodists.  Perhaps nowadays the radical edge of Methodism has become dulled since those often tumultuous days of Howel Harris, George Whitefield, and the Wesleys in the eighteenth century.
William Seward was born at Badsey in the Vale of Evesham in 1702, and went as a young man to London, where he acquired considerable wealth as a successful stockbroker.  He also enjoyed a reputation as a generous benefactor of the poor, supporting the London charity schools, and before he was 30 had given to Badsey Church an altar table, a clock and box pews.  These gifts are recorded on the charity board inside the church, where Seward had been churchwarden.  Yet his generosity did not necessarily mean that he was a converted man – George Whitefield later told him that his ‘nine years round of duties were no effects of the new birth at all, but in preparation for conversion itself’.
The change seems to have come in November 1738 when Charles Wesley described him at first as a ‘zealous soul knowing only the baptism of John’, but a week later noted that Seward ‘testified faith’, and was present at the conference of Oxford Methodists.  Whitefield wrote in his diary in April 1739 that he ‘went to Badsey and preached in Mr Seward’s brother’s yard’.  In all, Whitefield preached at Badsey on three consecutive days, on the third occasion to ‘a weeping audience’.
William Seward was with Whitefield in Cardiff on 8 March 1739 - the famous occasion when Whitefield first met Howel Harris, greeting Harris with the question ‘Do you know your sins are forgiven?’  Seward, who was a widower, then accompanied Whitefield on his 1739 American tour, providing information and extracts of Whitefield’s writings to newspapers and booksellers to publicise the forthcoming meetings.  He also supported Whitefield financially, much to the annoyance of his brother Henry, a Baptist who strongly opposed Methodists and who blamed Charles Wesley for what he perceived to be his brother’s ‘downfall’.
In the autumn of 1740 William Seward and Howel Harris preached together in the open-air to hostile crowds in South Wales.  Whereas inside churches preaching by clergy was tolerated, neither Seward nor Harris were ordained ministers and it was sometimes local clergy who stirred up the mobs.  At Caerleon on 9 Sept 1740 while supporting Howel Harris, Seward’s right eye was blinded by a stone flung at him.  The following month, he was preaching alone in the open at Hay-on-Wye when the crowd became particularly aggressive.  Seward was struck on the head by a stone at short range on 22 October, and died a few days later.
His death sent shock waves through Methodism, for Seward was a vital organiser and supporter of the work, especially for Whitefield.  The First Methodist Martyr is buried in the village churchyard at Cusop, near Hay, where a memorial tablet was dedicated in 1978.
Isaiah says ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so God’s ways are higher than our ways and God’s thoughts than our thoughts’.  Though it seems strange to us, the Sovereign Lord sometimes allows His servants to be removed at comparatively young ages – David Brainerd and Robert Murray McCheyne both died aged 29, William Seward was 38, and the book of Acts records Stephen, another who died through stoning, who presumably was a fairly young man. 
The theologian Tertullian observed that ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church’, so we honour the memory of those like William Seward who gave their lives (and who still do) so that the gospel could be proclaimed.                            

10 Not the triple-jumper!
Which great American minister whose church was at the hub of the Great Awakening, but was subsequently dismissed by his congregation by a large majority, shares his name with a British athlete?  This is Jonathan Edwards, who lived from 1703 (when John Wesley was born) until 1758. 
Following his conversion at the age of seventeen through reading 1 Timothy 1v17, he wrote (and this is worth quoting in full): ‘I made a solemn dedication of myself to God, giving up myself and all that I had to God, to be for the future in no respect my own, to act as one who had no right to himself in any respect, and solemnly vowed to take God for my whole portion, looking on nothing else as a part of my happiness, nor acting as though it were, looking to God as being the only source of my happiness, and not acting as though anything else that I have in my life is a source of happiness and strength to me’.
Edwards followed his eminent grandfather Solomon Stoddard as congregational minister in Northampton, Massachusetts.  New England was swept by the ‘Great Awakening’ of 1740-42, partly though the preaching tours of twenty-five year old George Whitefield, who preached powerfully four times for Edwards over a weekend at Northampton in 1740.  Jonathan Edwards upheld Calvinist theology – affirming God’s sovereignty - and the Puritan heritage.  His sermon ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ (preached in 1741) emphasized God’s just wrath against sin, by contrast with God’s provision for salvation in Christ Jesus.  In the pulpit Edwards was not demonstrative, for he would stand still and read his sermons, but the intensity of his preaching could result in members of the congregation fainting, and other similar reactions, though he never encouraged any fanaticism. 
In 1747 a young missionary to the Indians in New Jersey, David Brainerd, arrived at the Parsonage for a few months where, after being nursed by one of Edwards’s daughters Jerusha, he died of tuberculosis aged twenty-nine.  Edwards preached his funeral sermon, and edited An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr David Brainerd.  This had a huge influence – Brainerd’s journal has inspired many to seek a deeper spiritual life, and motivated a large number to serve God on the mission field.
Edwards wrote ‘A work of God without stumbling-blocks is not to be expected’, and there was a price to pay for the time of Revival they had experienced.  Nominalism in spiritual matters still prevailed in the well-attended New England churches, so when Edwards sought to limit membership to those who could testify to a conversion experience, he was opposed by powerful people in the community who had vested interests in maintaining a ‘half-way’ membership.  After being dismissed from the pulpit in Northampton, Edwards moved to the frontier town of Stockbridge where he ministered among the Indians (this was the time of the uprising portrayed in ‘The Last of the Mohicans’), and wrote his account of the Revival.  Prior to his death aged fifty-four, as a result of a vaccination against smallpox, Edwards was briefly president of Princeton College (later University), where he was succeeded by Samuel Davies, who wrote the hymn ‘Great God of wonders’.  Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote: ‘I am afraid, and I say it with much regret, that I have to put Jonathan Edwards ahead even of Daniel Rowland and George Whitefield … He has always seemed to me to be the man most like the Apostle Paul’.        

11 Pantycelyn
A young medical student was walking through Talgarth in mid-Wales when he heard Howell Harris preaching in the churchyard.  He was speaking powerfully on future judgement and the return of Christ – subjects about which we do not hear a great deal nowadays.   This led to the conversion of twenty-year-old William Williams, who was to become Wales’s foremost hymn writer and poet. 
He is often called just ‘Pantycelyn’ or ‘Williams, Pantycelyn’, to distinguish him from others of the same name, such as the minister of Swansea’s Argyle Presbyterian church who wrote the memoir of William Griffiths, ‘The Apostle of Gower’.  Although born near Llandovery in 1717, after his marriage William Williams lived in the Carmarthenshire farm ‘Pantycelyn’ where his mother had grown up.  He became a deacon in the established church and served for a time as a curate in Breconshire, but he did not proceed to ordination, becoming an itinerant Welsh (Calvinistic) Methodist preacher, who travelled thousands of miles during his lifetime.  He was one of the movement’s leaders, along with Howel Harris and Daniel Rowland of Llangeitho, and was with them at the historic Association meeting of Welsh and English Methodists in Watford, Caerphilly, on 5 January 1743; this was chaired by George Whitefield, who had been married at Caerphilly church.
A gifted poet, William Williams combined theology and experience to write eight hundred hymns in Welsh, and another hundred in English: these were published in books and tracts.  His best known hymn ‘Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah’ became a favourite among the students at the Countess of Huntingdon’s college in Tefecca, and nowadays is sung with gusto to the tune Cwm Rhondda at Welsh rugby internationals.  Among his other hymns are ‘O’er the gloomy hills of darkness’ (written in English), ‘Speak, I pray Thee, gentle Jesus!’ and ‘Jesus, Jesus, all sufficient’; he is known as Y Pêr Ganiedydd (the Sweet Singer).  He wrote about ninety books and pamphlets, notably in 1777 the influential pamphlet Drws y Society Profiad (Door to the Experience Society), a guide for groups meeting for fellowship and instruction, similar to Wesley’s class meetings.  He also wrote about 28 elegies, of which the ones on Howel Harris and Daniel Rowland attain lofty standards. 
Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones points out that even some secular literary authorities consider him the greatest Welsh poet.  Williams died in 1791, the same year as the founder of English Methodism, John Wesley: twenty years later the Welsh/Calvinistic Methodists separated from the Church of England.                         

    12 Here is love
What connection is there between an American Baptist minister and the ‘love song of the 1904 Revival’?
The hymn referred to is Here is love, vast as the ocean, written originally in Welsh as Dyma gariad, fel y moroedd by Revd William Rees (1802-83).  Born in Denbigh, he lived as a child at ‘Cae Du’, the farmhouse where William Salesbury, translator of the New Testament into Welsh in 1563, had lived.  For over thirty years William Rees was the minister of a congregational church in Liverpool, where he edited the radical Welsh paper Yr Amserau (The Times).  He did much to make Welsh readers aware of the evils of slavery and adapted ‘Uncle Tom’s cabin’ into Welsh.  Furthermore his lectures on William Williams, Pantycelyn, helped Welsh people appreciate the greatness of that preacher and poet.  William Rees’s most famous hymn was translated into English by Dr William Edwards (1848-1929), a tutor in New Testament Greek who himself brought out a Welsh translation of the New Testament.
The tune for Here is love, vast as the ocean is Dim ond Iesu (which means ‘Jesus only’) and surprisingly this was composed by an American Baptist minister, Revd Dr Robert Lowry (1826-99) of Pennsylvania.  Dr Lowry also wrote the Easter hymn ‘Low in the grave He lay’, and the tune for ‘I need Thee every hour’, a hymn written by a member of his congregation at Hanson Place Baptist church, Booklyn, New York.  He also wrote one of the tunes for Isaac Watts’s ‘Come ye that love the Lord’ (adding a chorus to that hymn), as well as tunes for other hymns such as Fanny Crosby’s ‘All the way my Saviour leads me’. 
Here is love, vast as the ocean,
Loving kindness as the flood,
When the Prince of Life, our ransom,
Shed for us His precious blood.
Who His love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He will never be forgotten
Throughout heaven’s eternal days.    

13 The outward appearance

Shocked to be confronted by the grotesque figure on the doorstep, the maid screamed before slamming the door firmly shut.  The young man sadly gathered up his wares and turned away, shuffling off to the next house – and probably a similar response.
The person who had aroused such a reaction was Joseph Carey Merrick.  Born in Leicester in 1862, he appeared to be a normal child until the age of two, when his upper lip began to curl upwards: this was followed by other abnormalities, leading to gross disfigurement, until much of his body was deformed – probably through multiple neurofibromatosis.  To add to his difficulties, a fall as a child had damaged his hip and left him permanently lame.  Furthermore, his mother had died when he was but ten years old, following the death of a younger brother.  His father married a widow with children of her own, but she was unsympathetic to her ungainly step-son with such a hideous appearance.
Merrick’s condition was degenerative, so after the increasing difficulties in hawking goods from door to door, he was admitted to the Leicester Union Workhouse, where he joined nine hundred others who were ‘on the parish’.  After a few years of this dismal existence, he took the initiative in contacting a showman, and joined a travelling show where he was exhibited as a freak and known as ‘The Elephant Man’.  This enabled him to build up some savings, and more importantly while being exhibited in a rented shop in Whitechapel he was noticed by a London Hospital surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves.  The surgeon arranged to examine Merrick – as a specimen of deformed humanity – and gave him his visiting card, in order for Merrick to be admitted to the Hospital.
But Victorian society’s revulsion against displays of abnormality led to such shows being closed down, so Merrick was taken abroad on the Continent.  There an unscrupulous showman robbed him of his savings, leaving him nearly destitute in Belgium.  With great difficulty he managed to return to London, where Merrick was rescued from a curious crowd by the police from the third-class waiting room at Liverpool Street railway station.  Amazingly Treves’s visiting card had been retained amidst the vicissitudes of  travel over the years, so the surgeon was summoned by the police officers.  The London Hospital would not normally accommodate untreatable cases, but a public appeal in The Times enabled funds to be raised for Merrick to remain there, where he was treated with kindness, and even became something of a celebrity, until his death aged 29.
Merrick’s mother had been a Sunday school teacher at a Leicester Baptist church, and named her firstborn after the missionary William Carey, so it seems that through her influence he acquired an understanding of God.  But how Merrick’s self-image must have withered from the ostracism and horrified reaction from most ‘normal’ persons.  He could have become bitter towards God, yet in spite of all his disabilities he managed to retain a humble regard for God’s goodness and sovereignty.  Merrick had memorised parts of the Bible, and was grateful to God that the remainder of his life could be spent in safety and care at the London Hospital.  When confirmed privately in the hospital chapel, he told Bishop William Waltham How: ‘I thank God every day for His mercy in bringing me to this place’.  He would quote a verse from an Isaac Watts hymn:
‘Were I so tall as to reach the Pole,
or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul,
the mind’s the standard of the man.’
However immense our difficulties may be, God’s grace can enable us to maintain as   thankful an attitude towards God as did the ‘Elephant Man’, in spite of his huge handicaps.

14 It nearly did not happen!
An article in a church magazine mentioned the Victorian pastor C.H. Spurgeon who, at the time of the Indian Mutiny in 1857 when he was aged just 23, led the Service of National Humiliation at London’s Crystal Palace.  Yet only twelve months earlier his fruitful ministry was nearly cut short by a tragedy at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall.  Let me first outline what would have been lost, before I write about this deliberate attempt to sabotage his ministry.
For 38 years from 1854 Charles Haddon Spurgeon was pastor of a large London church, where he preached twice on Sundays to congregations of over 5,000, often also preaching on weekday evenings throughout London and across the country, travelling by coach and rail.  When in his 20s and 30s he might preach as many as ten times a week!
From 1855 Spurgeon would edit one of his sermons every Monday for publication, and these were reprinted into an annual volume.  You can still buy these Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit volumes, published by Banner of Truth.  Spurgeon’s sermons were read – and the first language into which they were translated was ….Welsh!  They were translated into Dutch, German, Swedish, and many other languages, and were also made available in Braille.  In some places people would gather together to hear his sermons being read aloud.
In 1861 the Metropolitan Tabernacle (by the Elephant & Castle) was opened, seating 5,000 and able to take another 800 persons standing.  This replaced New Park Street Baptist Chapel in Southwark, which was sold with the proceeds going towards a new school and almshouses.
Spurgeon was not afraid of controversy, and he caused a great stir when he preached on ‘baptismal regeneration’, daring to oppose Roman Catholic tendencies influencing the Church of England from those influenced by the Oxford Movement like Keble, Pusey and Newman.  The Book of Common Prayer suggested that sprinkling an infant led to regeneration, which Spurgeon denounced as a form of ‘salvation by works’.  His sermon on baptismal regeneration sold over 300,000 copies.
Spurgeon also founded a Pastors College, not as an academic institution but geared to practical work, piety and prayerfulness, in order to train preachers, to proclaim Calvinistic truths.  He defined Calvinism as adhering to the tenet that ‘Salvation is of the Lord’ (Psalm 3v8), rather than being of human endeavour.  He also established an Orphanage in Stockwell (initially this was for boys, but later one for girls was added), and produced a monthly magazine The Sword and the Trowel.  Among his publications was the seven-volume commentary on the Psalms entitled The Treasury of David, which took him 20 years.
With the impact of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and the spread of higher criticism or ‘new theology’, which undermined the deity of Christ and the authority of Scripture, Spurgeon urged the Baptist Union to adopt a statement of faith.  He published articles on ‘The Downgrade Controversy’ in The Sword and the Trowel.  But he was almost a lone voice in his warnings, and with much sadness he resigned from the Baptist Union in 1887.  Spurgeon died five years later aged 57, his death hastened by overwork, kidney disease, and the stress of years of standing firm for Biblical truth.
Yet all this might not have happened - if the catastrophe at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall had achieved its devilish purpose….                                          

15 The catastrophe at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall
When 19 year old Charles Spurgeon, minister of a rural chapel in Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire, first preached on a Sunday morning at the historic New Park Street Baptist chapel in Southwark, London, it was to about 80 persons - in a building that could seat 1,200.  The congregation, who were used to hearing dry, philosophical sermons, encountered a young man who was original, dynamic, and confidant in God!  Such was his impact that during the afternoon many absent members were contacted, so that the evening congregation numbered hundreds.  Afterwards people were greatly stirred and reluctant to leave the chapel, talking of a ‘second Whitefield’ emerging.  After some more Sunday visits Spurgeon became their Pastor, and within a month the chapel was crowded as people gathered to hear God’s Word proclaimed with power.  As New Park Street chapel needed to be enlarged, for four months services were held at the Exeter Hall in the Strand, which had a seating capacity of 4,000, with room for another 1,000 standing.  With Spurgeon preaching even this building was filled, and people had to be turned away each time.  But there was criticism, since the Exeter Hall was normally used for ‘worldly’ activities such as concerts and lectures, Spurgeon was not a college graduate, and the young man was accused of being flippant, and of being more of an entertainer than a minister.  In fact the vitality of his ministry challenged the complacency of London religious life, for he had a wide learning with a profound Bible knowledge, and drew on the writings of the Puritans and the Reformers.  Spurgeon proclaimed the doctrines of grace – that salvation is of the Lord – and affirmed human depravity and divine election.
When the meetings at Exeter Hall had to cease, Spurgeon announced a move to the much larger Surrey Gardens Music Hall – where three galleries could seat 10,000, bringing the capacity up to 12,000.  The first service there was to be on Sunday evening 19 October 1856.  Though the 22 year old Spurgeon had preached to 5,000 at the Exeter Hall, that number would be dwarfed in such an auditorium as the Surrey Gardens, and several feared that the young minister had over-stretched himself 
But such was the interest in hearing Spurgeon that people flocked to the Surrey Gardens, and when he commenced the service the auditorium was crowded.  During the prayer before the sermon, when most eyes were closed, there were sudden cries of ‘fire! fire!’ from some parts, with a rush forwards in one of the galleries.  People pushed to get out, panic was contagious, and during the uproar a staircase collapsed - injuring twenty-eight persons and killing seven.  There was no fire.  A distraught Spurgeon was helped back to his home - it was nearly the end of his ministry.  This brought him unwanted national prominence, for he was vilified in the press.
Recovering from the shock, despair and depression (though newspaper reports were kept from him) at a friend’s home in Croydon - it was only a month since his wife had given birth to twin sons - the breakthrough came when Spurgeon concluded ‘What does it matter what becomes of me, if the Lord shall be glorified?  If Christ be exalted, let Him do as He pleases with me; my one prayer is that I may die to self, and live wholly for Him and for His honour!’   That was the turning point, for with God’s grace out of disaster could come triumph.
Spurgeon took one Sunday off, and then a month later began three years of preaching on Sunday mornings at Surrey Gardens Music Hall (with evenings at New Park Street), until the congregation moved into the newly built Metropolitan Tabernacle.  God honoured his faithfulness when he was chosen to preach to 23,652 persons, his largest congregation, at the National Fast-Day at the Crystal Palace at the time of the Indian Mutiny.  This was on 7 October 1857, almost a year to the day since the catastrophe at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, which so nearly ended the ministry of C.H. Spurgeon.

16 The anniversary of 9/11
Before he became famous, the singer David Bowie wrote and recorded a song about a person caught shoplifting; the chorus said ‘God knows I’m good, God knows I’m good, God will surely look the other way today’.
The first thing is - no, God knows we are not good and that’s why Jesus came into the world, not for the righteous or ‘good’ people but for those who are bad, for sinners.
But today I want to concentrate on the fact that God never looks the other way, He is never taken by surprise – not even when nearly 3.000 were killed on 9/11 in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
God’s grace was operating on 11th September 2001.  Most of us remember seeing on our TV screens pictures of smoke pouring from the north tower of the World Trade Centre in New York, and then to our shock and horror seeing a second plane fly into the south tower, which showed that this was no catastrophe, like when the Hindenburg airship caught fire, but a deliberate, planned act of terrorism.
Yes, nearly 3,000 people were killed that day - but God was not unconcerned or looking the other way, He was involved …..  particularly in damage limitation
The four planes that were hijacked were capable of carrying 1,000 passengers, and they would generally have been 75% full… but on this occasion they were only a quarter full.  There were just 44 people including the crew on United Airlines flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, which crashed in Pennsylvania instead of [probably] the Capitol in Washington DC.
The World Trade Centre towers held 50,000 workers, and would usually have been very busy between 9 and 10am.  Strangely for a Tuesday there were considerable traffic delays, hundreds had called in sick (not unexpected if it had been a Monday, after the weekend), but on that Tuesday instead of 50,000 there were less than 20,000.
Of course it was still a huge tragedy, yet those structures held long enough for 3 out of every 4 persons to escape.
The Sovereign Lord of the universe is in control, permitting some leeway to Satan, yet He is restraining the evil that otherwise would run amok in this fallen world, until the appointed time when Christ returns in glory at the end of the age.
Whatever befalls, God never looks the other way.

17 Why doesn’t God do something about all the suffering in the world?
(an attempt to reply to a question on this aspect of  Christian faith)
This question is frequently asked, both by Christians and by those who are not Christians. The only person who can answer this is God himself, so my attempt to do so will be neither comprehensive nor entirely satisfactory.
As you might imagine several books have been written on this subject, like C.S.  Lewis’s The Problem of Pain (his wife died of cancer), and She said ‘yes’ by the parents of 17-year-old Cassie Bernall, shot dead at Columbine High School. They are better qualified than me to write about this whole subject.
If God is good and all-powerful one might assume that there would be no evil in creation. So if evil flourishes one could conclude that either God is not all powerful or that He is not completely good.  God is both good and all-powerful, so the problem is how God, who is good, can apparently tolerate evil, which He is quite capable of preventing.
The reason for all the suffering in the world is mankind’s sin, for God declared that the world was good when He had finished his act of creation, as the first chapter of Genesis tells us.  Once creation was polluted by mankind’s sinfulness, God could have destroyed it and started again: He nearly did so in the time of Noah.  But God chose to work with what there was, rather as we might work on a ‘damage limitation’ basis, which may not sort out the real problem.
However God has dealt with the real problem.  He is not into short-term solutions, but has dealt with human sinfulness by sending Jesus Christ into the world to die as an offering for sin, so that those who put their trust in Christ come into a relationship with God as their Creator and their Heavenly Father.
I shall take one or two particular examples of apparently undeserved suffering (which you can check out on the Internet), rather than writing in general terms.
Fifty years ago a 17 year old American girl named Joni Eareckson broke her neck when she dived into a pool and hit her head on a rock.  Since then she has been a quadriplegic, paralysed from the neck down, dependant on carers for the remainder of her life.  At first she wanted to die, but was helpless to do so unaided, which must have added enormously to her frustration and desire to end her life I imagine.
She certainly felt that God did not care about her, or perhaps was punishing her for some imagined sin or sins, though other apparently far worse sinners than her seemed to be enjoying pleasant fulfilled lives.  In reality of course God was not punishing her, and He did indeed care very much for her, though it took her quite a long time to realise this.  I am certainly not criticising Joni Eareckson at all – without God’s mercy and grace I would react no better in such a situation. 
Now fifty years on, Joni is aged in her late sixties, she is still a quadriplegic and dependant on carers, but is adjusted to her limitations and lives a very fulfilled life.  She should be trying to answer your question, because she has had to work it through, slowly, agonisingly and prayerfully.
Our television news brings us a steady diet of bad news which included major catastrophes like floods, famines and the effects of civil war.  Of course reports of bad news sells newspapers, and we are more inclined to read about disasters than about the occasional good and edifying news that filters through.  Yet even amid these disasters God is at work - when relief organisations send aid, manpower and funds.  Often Christian organisations like Tear Fund and Christian Aid are in the forefront, and many Christians are working in other relief agencies, like Oxfam.  So God is doing something about suffering.
Over the centuries there have been movements to combat some of the evils in the world, such as slavery and the slave trade, or the conditions in prisons, and Christians – people inspired and motivated by God – such as Wilberforce, Elizabeth Fry and Thomas Clarkson have been in the forefront of these.  One might say that those movements have taken a long time starting, and still slavery and people trafficking has not been stopped.  That is correct, but what do we really want God to do? Should he remove from you and me the freedom to do good and to do bad, the freedom to help the needy as well as to exploit others?  Would we not become like a race of robots, all programmed to work and react in given set ways?
May I move onto another particular case, again it is someone who should be tackling this question rather than I.   There is a teacher in Blackpool, Mrs Joan McLean, whose daughter Rachel went to Oxford University, and I imagine she was very proud of that.  Her daughter had a boyfriend and perhaps he might have become a future son-in-law.  Then something went very wrong, Rachel went missing in 1991, the boyfriend appealed on television for help in finding her.  But it turned out that he had murdered Rachel; he was imprisoned, and has now served his sentence and returned to New Zealand.  Rachel’s parents are Christians, perhaps they have better reason than most to feel that God has let them down.  Why did He not protect Rachel, why did He not stop her becoming friendly with a potential killer?  Why did He allow this suffering on them?
What happened in that family reminds us that being a Christian, a follower of Jesus, does not make us exempt from any of the disasters of this world.  But what do the McLeans say?  We get some idea of how they feel about God by their attitude to the man who killed their daughter. They say (I am quoting from the Daily Telegraph of 6 December 1991) after John Tanner had been sentenced to life imprisonment ‘We have forgiven him. You have to, otherwise it eats into your life and into the lives of those around you.  If you forgive then you can start to build your lives again’.  Furthermore they have been in contact with the parents of John Tanner and had regular contact by letter.
Their reaction does not answer the question of why God does not stop all the suffering in the world, but it does show that people can find God worth worshipping, in spite of the fact that He may not necessarily protect us from all evil, misadventure, or disaster in this life.  I expect the Jewish people wondered why God had allowed heathen armies to invade the city of Jerusalem and bring upon them their own version of 9/11 - when their beloved Temple was desecrated, defiled and destroyed (this was by the Babylonians, around 586 BC).   Their reaction is in many of the Psalms, particularly the one that inspired the song By the waters of Babylon – it is number 137, composed when a large number of them had been forcibly removed from Israel to a foreign country. Furthermore they affirm time and again in the Psalms the truth that God is good!  ‘Good’ is rather a weak word in English, we say ‘better’ and ‘best’, but it is much stronger in Hebrew, like the word ‘pure’ or ‘unique’. For the truth that gradually emerged for the Jews in exile, as for Mrs McLean, or C.S. Lewis, or Joni Eareckson, or the parents of Cassie Bernall, is that God feels our hurt, and that He helps us in our needs and distress, often using mere human beings to give support, comfort, or just to come alongside and listen.  I don’t know why some people seem to be exempt from tragedies and disasters while others undergo them, but I suspect those people I have mentioned above would all say that God was their support and help throughout, and that He remains so to this day. 
Could it be that God like a great architect is chiselling and shaping them and their characters though all that has happened?  The all-powerful God could have totally destroyed Satan (the Devil, though he is no figure with horns and a fiery tale) when Jesus was raised from the dead on that first Easter Sunday.  Yet for reasons that are not revealed to us He has chosen to allow Satan to wreak havoc in this world for a limited time - until Christ returns in glory at the end of the age.
As you suspected there is no easy answer to your question, but I hope that some of my observations, and the reactions of those who have suffered greatly yet continue to worship God, help you understand something of how many people follow Him - not for what God can do for them, but because God is worthy of our love and devotion, whatever befalls.

 

 

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