Life & Letters: The Lord's Laying Aside His Instruments

Friday, February 6, 2009

The Lord's Laying Aside His Instruments

A selection from a letter by C. H. Spurgeon to the members of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, England. He had been once again laid aside with sickness and was unable to preach. He had gone to Mentone, France, to recuperate. The letter was written December 6, 1890.

I have no question that there is great wisdom in the Lord’s laying aside his instruments. It is for his own glory, for thereby he shows that he is not in need of them, and it is for their humbling, for hereby they learn how deep is their need of him. The uninterrupted reception of blessing through one channel might breed in our foolish hearts an idolatrous confidence in the means; therefore there comes a break in the use of the means that the Lord may be the more tenderly remembered. We may be sure that, if the Lord dries up a cistern, it is because he would have us fly to the fountain of inexhaustible strength.

The Suffering Letters of C. H. Spurgeon, annotations by Hannah Wyncoll, The Wakeman Trust, 2007, p. 71.

2 comments:

Puritan Dilemma said...: Very good...we need reminders like this more often... good to read you...; February 6, 2009 at 8:38 AM
Dean Olive said...: Thanks for stopping by. Glad the letter by CHS was helpful to you. You are right - we need reminders like the one he gave.

Every blessing,
Dean; February 9, 2009 at 3:16 PM

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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"

Friday, February 6, 2009

The Lord's Laying Aside His Instruments

2 comments:

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Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

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

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