Arthur Walkington Pink, a writer of good theological books, was born in Nottingham, England, on April 1st, 1886. His father was a diligent Christian, who read the Bible and good religious books to his children. He had a younger brother and sister. Pink joined the theosophy movement as a young man. His father, however, awakened his son’s soul by quoting to him the text, “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Prov. 14:12). A. W. Pink was converted by this text in the year 1908.
The wise man prepares for eternity today; the foolish man puts off his preparation for eternity till tomorrow. The wise man has his eye always on the day of his death; the foolish man shuts his mind to the obvious fact that death, and what follows death, must soon be experienced by everyone.
We often pray for unction on the preaching of god’s word but we seldom pause to define what we mean by this term. We know instinctively as Christians that for preaching to be effective it needs something from above to enhance and empower the spoken word. This need which we feel, and which moves us to pray, does not imply any defect in the word of God. Rather, it recognises that there is inadequacy in those who preach that word and also a profound deficiency in the heart of those who hear it preached. Consequently, when we pray, as we should pray, for unction in preaching we are rightly confessing to God that something supernatural is necessary if His word is to have its proper effect on our hearers.
We do not usually pause to think what we might learn from Judas Iscariot. He is rightly regarded by Christians as the cruel traitor who sold his Master, Jesus Christ, for thirty pieces of silver. He is rightly judged to have been a hypocrite and a deceiver. But even so, we would be wise to pause and reflect on the rather surprising fact that Judas’ life and conduct have valuable lessons to teach us today, 2,000 years after he committed suicide.
The greatest lesson to learn in life is how to die well. To die well is to pass from this sad and fallen world into paradise, and so to bid farewell to all our pains and cares and sorrows, into the glorious presence of Almighty God. To enjoy this great and blessed change, we must all in this life prepare.
One of the greatest preachers of modern times is a Chinese man named John Sung. It is thought that, in China today, there are at least one hundred million Christians. This wonderful fact is, under God, owing a great extent to the remarkable preaching of John Sung, who, after a very powerful ministry which swept thousands into the kingdom of God, passed away in 1944. His labors and influence deserve to be known more widely in the English speaking world.
We ought never to forget the great work which early Christian missionaries did to promote the Gospel in different parts of the world and in different languages. One of these eminent missionaries was John Eliot, who has been called “The Apostle to the Indians,” because he was among the first to dedicate his life to the strenuous task of taking the Gospel to the American Indians in the seventeenth century.
No one who has taken the Bible seriously and who knows it to be the inspired Word of God can believe the world to have begun with a Big Bang. Attempts are made to profess faith in the Big Bang, as an event which can be believed along with the biblical account of creation in Genesis. “Why can we not believe both the Genesis account and the Big Bang to be true?” it is asked.
Terrible as the doctrine of God’s wrath is, it is a doctrine which, perhaps more than any other, wakes sinners up to appreciate the love of God in the gospel. Jesus puts it in these lovely words: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
Such is the state of our modern world that we long for God to send revival of religion upon us all. The greatness of societal decline, allied with spiritual weakness of so many churches in the Western world, burdens the soul and constrains us to cry in our hearts to God to visit us again with an outpouring of His divine and heavenly grace.
