I am working in my office today, organizing ten different writing projects–ten different books I would like to get in print before the sand in the top of my hourglass is done. Lord willing, He will give me time to complete each one for His glory. Some of the beginning work on these projects is pretty mundane. Cleaning up files, collecting books, reading books and journal articles, and researching new threads of thought and argumentation that have to be considered is not very exciting, but it is necessary.
Just now, in my computer files, I found an article written in 1944. I never heard of the author before. F. W. Boreham (1871-1959)was a famed English-born Baptist preacher, essayist, and author who spent most of his life ministering and writing in New Zealand and Australia.
He was notably the last student personally accepted by Charles H. Spurgeon into the Pastor’s College in London prior to Spurgeon’s death in 1892. He apparently was a prolific author, writing over 50 books and thousands of newspaper columns, essays, and devotional reflections. His unique style blended everyday personal observations, nature, storytelling, and spiritual insights. An internet search told me that his best-known collection of essays was his “Texts That Made History” series (including A Bunch of Everlastings and A Handful of Stars) as well as essay collections like The Luggage of Life, Mountains in the Mist, and Mushrooms on the Moor.
The essay I found in my files was from a different collection titled, ‘The Candle and the Bird,’ Boulevards of Paradise (London: The Epworth Press, 1944), 103-113. In it he makes a historical argument for the advance of the gospel from place to place and one time period to another seems to follow a pattern. It looks like the snuffing out of candle in one place, while at the same time, the gospel flourishes in another place. And yet, he points out that it would be better to see it not as an extinguishing of the gospel light but as the fleeing of bird to another place. He moves in the essay from the Bible itself and follows the gospel around the world down to his own time when he wrote this essay in 1944.
Here’s one paragraph that I found interesting:
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Similarly, on the very day on which the French mob tore the Cross from Notre Dame in Paris and angrily abjured the Christian faith, William Carey landed in India and claimed a new continent for the Saviour whom France was renouncing. Both events took place on November 11, 1793. A pessimist in France would have regarded the act of the populace as the extinction of a great light: anybody who reviews the incident in the calm perspective of history can see that it was merely the frightening away of a bird.
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Is that not encouraging?
God is always moving, always bringing His good news to people, always spreading the seed of the gospel to new people groups, always inviting people to repent and believe the gospel of the Kingdom.
Don’t despair if your church is small, or results are meagre. God is using you and your sharing of the gospel. The truth will out. And His glory will one day cover the earth, like the waters cover the sea.
