Wednesday, May 12, 2010

May Your Life and Health Be Long Spared


A letter to C. H. Spurgeon from the faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, on the great preacher's 50th birthday. They rejoiced in the good ministry of the London preacher and expressed their appreciation for him and doctrinal agreement with him. The letter was written June 27, 1884.

The undersigned professors in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, beg leave to offer respectful and hearty congratulations on your fiftieth birthday. We thank God for all that he made you and by his grace enabled you to become and achieve. We rejoice in your great and wonderful work as preacher and pastor, and through your Orphanage and your Pastor's College; as also your numerous writings, so sparkling with genius, so filled with the spirit of the gospel. Especially we delight to think how nobly you have defended and diffused the doctrines of grace; how in an age so eager for novelty and marked by such loosening of belief you have through long years kept the English-speaking world for your audience while never turning aside from the old-fashioned gospel.

And now, honored brother, we invoke upon you the continued blessings of our God. May your life and health be long spared, if it be his will; may Providence still smile on your varied work, and the Holy Spirit richly bless your spoken and written messages to mankind.

Life and Letters of John Albert Broadus, by Archibald Thomas Robertson, 1901, reprint by Gano Books, pp. 341-42.

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