Life & Letters: Preaching to the Unsaved

Monday, January 12, 2009

Preaching to the Unsaved

A selection from a letter by A. W. Pink to his good friend, Lowell Green. The letter was written on March 19, 1939.

In preaching to the unsaved I never did anything more than I do in my articles: presented the truth of God so far as I knew it, and left the Holy Spirit to apply and bless it as he saw well. I never held any ‘after meetings,’ never asked sinners to signify by any outward sign they had accepted Christ or desired to be prayed for. If any waited behind to speak with me, I told them frankly I could not help them, and urged them to go home and read God’s Word. Nor did Spurgeon use any of these Arminian methods of ‘casting out the net,’ ‘penitent forms,’ etc., for the simple but sufficient reason that neither Christ nor his apostles ever did so! Needless to say I was often criticized: yet God was pleased to honour my faith as the Day to come will show.

The Life of Arthur W. Pink, Revised and Enlarged Edition, Iain H. Murray, Banner of Truth, 2004, pp. 174-75.

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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"

Monday, January 12, 2009

Preaching to the Unsaved

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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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