Life & Letters: If God Has Given Me Christ

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

If God Has Given Me Christ

A selection from a letter by the Welsh preacher, Thomas Charles, to his wife to be, Miss Sarah Jones. Charles expressed a thought that brought him comfort in the midst of trials that might enable her bare up during times of trial. The letter was written June 5, 1780.

As to your complaints, I shall be always glad to hear them with attention, and esteem myself very happy to bear a part of your burden. I could likewise repeat numberless complaints in return; but instead of that, permit me to mention my ‘cordial,’ which, amidst all my complaints, helps me to many a quiet thought and many a sound sleep, which is—‘If God has given me Christ, what can I have to complain of?’ But then you must know, that I take him as a free gift, and attempt to cast myself wholly upon him; and according to Luther’s advice, throw all I am and do into one heap, and lay it down at the foot of his cross. O! He has a world of merit in his hands for you, for me, and a gracious heart to bestow it…

Thomas Charles’ Spiritual Counsels: Selected from his Letters and Papers, by Edward Morgan, first published in 1836, reprinted by the Banner of Truth, 1993, p. 234.

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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"

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

If God Has Given Me Christ

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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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