Life & Letters: What Is My Skin To His Glory!

Sunday, July 13, 2008

What Is My Skin To His Glory!

A portion of a letter by Samuel Rutherford, to Alexander Henderson, written in exile from Aberdeen, Scotland, March 9, 1637:

I protest to you (my witness is in heaven) that I could wish many pound weights added to my cross, to know that by my sufferings Christ were set forward in his kingly office in this land. O what is my skin to his glory! Or my losses, or my sad heart, to the apple of the eye of our Lord and his beloved Spouse, his precious truth, his royal privileges, the glory of manifested justice in giving his foes a dash, the testimony of his faithful servants who do glorify him, when he rideth upon poor weak worms, and triumpheth in them! I desire you to pray that I may come out of this furnace with honesty, and that I may leave Christ’s truth no worse than I found it; and that this most honourable cause may neither be stained nor weakened.

Letters of Samuel Rutherford: A Selection, The Banner of Truth Trust, the first edition of letters was published in 1664, this selection was published in 1973, p. 62.

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Why Life & Letters?

Before e-mails, telephones and text-messaging, people wrote letters to one another. Letters are personal and thoughtful. We can be thankful that biographers have letters to and from the people they write about from generations gone by, for modern forms of commu-nication leave us in want. Letters have a quality about them not found in e-mails. Historian and biographer, David McCullough, says, “I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future gen-erations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, per-haps even impossible to write.”

It is a shame that few of us today craft letters to our children and friends. Letter writing is a lost art. I hope this blog will inspire others to write letters. Letters are valuable. C. H. Spurgeon said, “A man’s private letters often let you into the secrets of the heart.

Most of what appears here are selections taken from letters of Evangelical Christians. There will also be occasional reviews of books of letters.

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

"In the nineteenth century, many biographers wrote books titled The Life and Letters of So-and-So. While this was not always an eloquent way of writing history, it speaks volumes about our cultural distance; if restricted to composing a narrative of someone’s life around his written correspondence today, we wouldn’t be able to write biographies, because people write too few letters to constitute the substance of a book. Further, if you read those nineteenth-century letters, you cannot fail to notice how articulate, thoughtful, and well composed they commonly are. A culture that was accustomed to thoughtful, well-composed letters produced remarkable significant letters, even among fairly common people. Today, we have become a culture of telephone babblers, unskilled at the most basic questions of composition…"

Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2009, pp. 66-67.

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

Sunday, July 13, 2008

What Is My Skin To His Glory!

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Why Life & Letters?

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

A Sample Letter

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