Life & Letters: Seek the Lord

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Seek the Lord

A selection from letters of Rev. Charles Colcock Jones (1803-1863), affectionately known as “the apostle of the Negro slaves.” His son Joseph, a professor in the University of Georgia, professed faith in Christ in 1858. But his son, Charles, a lawyer, gave no evidence of knowing Christ, but received many letters from his father that included pleas for him to be converted. There is some evidence that he was brought to faith in Christ after his father’s death. Below are three samples of exhortations of a father to a son to be saved.

“Do not put off making your peace with God. You stand in danger of eternal ruin every hour you live without repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ” (September 6, 1854).

“My dear son, I pray the Lord to open your eyes and open your heart to see and feel your need of a precious Saviour” (February 16, 1858).

“When, my son, will you seek the Lord? Why are you not a Christian?” (October 3, 1859).

Heroes, Iain H. Murray, the Banner of Truth Trust, 2009, p. 233. This is a wonderful volume, especially the chapter on Charles Colcock Jones, and his wife, Mary. He was once the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Savannah, Georgia, and was professor of Columbia Theological Seminary, but his greatest work was that of evangelizing slaves.

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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"

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Seek the Lord

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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"

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