Alexander Whyte: A Childhood Anecdote

Tony Reinke spurgeon

How can you not appreciate a Christian biographer who captures an unflattering event in the life of their subject and writes about the event with fitting humor and candor! From Barbour’s The Life of Alexander Whyte:

In the summer of 1921 the present writer had the privilege of a short talk in a cottage far up the Glen with a retired farmer of over ninety who had seen two sons enter the ministry of the Church of Scotland. He told that his wife had known Alec [Alexander] Whyte when both were “wee toddlers,” playing at the side of the field while their mothers worked. Later still, Alec himself was able to gain employment in herding at a farm, now demolished, on the east side of the Glen.

Beyond securing keep for the summer months, this work cannot have done much to support the family finances, for the wages of a herd laddie at that time were only about twenty or thirty shillings for the season. The boy’s thoughts were already rather with the books which he so earnestly desired to read than with the cattle which he was engaged to watch.

On one occasion, like a second and youthful King Alfred, his dreams of his future kingdom had made him forget his immediate task; and the farmer’s wife, seeing the cattle stray into the corn, ran out “raging him”—

“I dinna ken fat ye’re gaen to dae, or foo in the hale warld ye’ll ever earn an honest living.”

The delinquent appears to have met this onslaught calmly—

“What wad ye think if ae day I was to wag my pow in a poopit?”

“You, ye feckless cratur!”

But unhappily the rest of the justly angered dame’s retort was couched in Forfarshire speech so racy as to elude the present chronicler.*

—–

Notes:
* G. F. Barbour, The Life of Alexander Whyte (Hodder & Stoughton 1924), pp. 18-19.

On Preaching Preparation

Tony Reinke Preaching

“I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as a crystal. I find the getting of that sentence is the hardest, the most exacting, and the most fruitful labour in my study. To compel oneself to fashion that sentence, to dismiss every word that is vague, ragged, ambiguous, to think oneself through to a form of words which defines the theme with scrupulous exactness—this is surely one of the most vital and essential factors in the making of a sermon: and I do not think any sermon ought to be preached or even written, until that sentence has emerged, clear and lucid as a cloudless moon.”

—J. H. Jowett, The Preacher: His Life and Work (Harper & Bros, 1912), p. 133.

“He made us face our sin”

Tony Reinke Preaching, Sin, Sin in the church

Looking at our sin is an uncomfortable thing. Our natural impulse is to “love ourselves,” so when the preacher climbs into the pulpit to open the Word of God and to confront our sin through reproof, rebuke, and exhortation, we feel the discomfort (2 Tim 4:1-5). We’d rather not be reminded of our remaining sin. We’d rather accumulate teachers who avoid the topic of sin altogether. And they are easy to find nowadays.

But it is not hard to imagine how this itching-ears disorder effects the confidence of the Bible preacher. He feels the resistance from his congregation. “So,” he asks himself, “should I continue preaching about sin, or is it time to preach only gentler themes of the Christian life? Perhaps I have said enough, and they have heard enough, about sin?”

The notable Scottish preacher Alexander Whyte (1836-1921) wrestled with this question. He was faced with a crucial, ministry-defining, decision: continue preaching about sin, or leave the topic of sin and preach on the more gentle features of the faith? This moment of decision—a decision that would define the remainder of his ministry—is captured in G. F. Barbour’s classic biography. Listen to his description of Whyte’s struggle…

For ten days the loch and the late harvest-fields lay steeped in quiet sunshine, and the great hills towered higher in the faint haze. Twice within a week he disappeared for five hours, and on his return reported that he had walked some seventeen or eighteen miles over beautiful but mountainous roads. … It was on one of these walks—by the Strome Ferry road to where it overlooks Lochcarron, and then round by Plockton—that Dr. Whyte found himself wrestling with the question whether he should not, for the remainder of his ministry, preach more than he had been wont to do on the gentler and more hopeful aspects of Christian truth, and less on sin and its fruits. But, as he told his congregation when he returned to Edinburgh a fortnight later:

“What seemed to me to be a Divine Voice spoke with all-commanding power in my conscience, and said to me as clear as clear could be: ‘No! Go on, and flinch not! Go back and boldly finish the work that has been given you to do. Speak out and fear not. Make them at any cost to see themselves in God’s holy Law as in a glass. Do you that, for no one else will do it. No one else will so risk his life and his reputation as to do it. And you have not much of either left to risk. Go home and spend what is left of your life in your appointed task of showing My people their sin and their need of My salvation.’ I shall never forget the exact spot where that clear command came to me, and where I got fresh authority and fresh encouragement to finish this part of my work.” *

Whyte continued to show sinners their sin, in order to show sinners the saving grace of God.

Now fast-forward to a Sunday morning in 1921, just three days after Whyte’s death, and just two weeks before his 85th birthday. George Adam Smith stood in Whyte’s pulpit. During one section of his sermon, Smith recalled and commended Whyte’s imagination and creativity in describing the Christian’s ongoing struggle with indwelling sin. Smith said,

In Scottish preaching of the ‘seventies [1870s], sin had either with the more evangelical preachers tended to become something abstract or formal, or with others was elegantly left alone. But Dr. Whyte faced it, and made us face it, as fact, ugly, fatal fact—made us feel its reality and hideousness, and follow its course to its wages in death. He did this not only by his rich use of the realism of poetry, and fiction, and biography, but as we could feel through his experimental treatment of it, out of his own experience of its temptations and insidiousness, and of the warfare with it to which every honest man is conscript.**

Such a preacher like Alexander Whyte—faithful to persevere in preaching about sin until his dying breath—is, and always will be, a rarity. But if they don’t, who will? Without the reminder of our sin, how will we be reminded of God’s saving grace and who will push us each day to live under the shadow of the cross?

————-

Notes:
* G. F. Barbour, The Life of Alexander Whyte (Hodder & Stoughton 1924), pp. 531-532.
** G. F. Barbour, The Life of Alexander Whyte (Hodder & Stoughton 1924), p. 300.

Comfort and the Victory of the Cross

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ

“True Gospel comfort never plays down to natural weakness: it lifts up to supernatural strength. There is nothing enfeebling or demoralizing about it, no flying to the drug of fantasy. It is essentially virile, bracing, reinforcing. And what gives it this character, preserving it from the risk of sentimentalism, is the Cross at the centre of it. In the last resort, the human heart is too big to find its comfort in any soothing anodyne of consolatory words. There is no comfort short of victory. And it is this, nothing less, that the preacher of the Gospel is empowered to offer to all who turn their faces to the Cross—the comfort of mastering every dark situation, and triumphing in every tribulation, through the grace of Him who conquered there.”

—James S. Stewart, Heralds of God (Hodder & Stoughton, 1946), p. 79.

Core sins

Tony Reinke David Powlison, Sin

What is the core sin of the human heart? Is it pride? Is it the sin of unbelief? Theologians have debated this topic for centuries. But According to Dr. David Powlison, the sins of pride and unbelief are really “two doors into the same room.” And he adds a third door—the fear of man.

These three core sins are interrelated, and it’s not difficult to see how. Pride is the act of installing myself as the king of my own autonomous kingdom. Unbelief is the act of erasing God from my kingdom (functionally, if not deliberately). Fear of man is the act of installing other sinners as big players in my kingdom (When People are Big and God is Small).

And it’s no surprise that all of the lies and lusts of our hearts are to be found rooted in these three core sins. These lies and lusts are expressions of the three core sins.

3 questions to ask your spouse

Tony Reinke David Powlison, Marriage, spurgeon

This past week I was mostly in downtown Baltimore at the NEXT 2009 conference. The conference seemed to be a success. It was a great opportunity to meet up with friends, many I get to see in person only once a year (or less).

But the previous week we had the pleasure of hosting biblical counseling guru David Powlison in Gaithersburg. As you can imagine, the week was filled with rich biblical wisdom and applicable elucidations of biblical truth. I’ve set aside time over the next couple of days to return to my notes and to meditate further on what I learned. I’ll be posting some of these meditations.

One topic Powlison addressed: How to spark substantive conversation with your spouse?

Powlison suggested three categories of questions to ask your husband or wife. Each of these categories can be asked on a daily basis. And each of these categories are simple and broad, but certainly provide helpful reminders. Here are the three:

1. What are your present burdens? The Bible tells us that we are born for trouble (Job 5:7). So what is the trouble? A sin? A responsibility? An issue at work? A particular conflict? What weighs you down? What was your lowlight of this day? These burdens are the “heat of life.”

2. What are your present joys? What were your highlights from the day? These joys are the “dew of blessing.”

3. What is your calling? This could include the mundane tasks, or broader life-purpose questions. What are your duties for this day? What do you need to do? What are your goals for this day? For example, a parent could say, “Today, I don’t want to lose my temper with the kids.” It could be as simple as this.

These three categories are helpful in getting to substantive conversation with your spouse. And Dr. Powlison alluded to, this list can be useful in talking with your children as well. The answers to these three categories of questions will help us better know how to serve and care for those in our lives.