HOW LONG WILT THOU SLEEP?

A question well placed when drowsiness has come upon us, and when we are content with our professed religion. It is already past time that we should awaken to the evils of our day.

The Lord’s judgments are upon us, the wise and foolish have fallen asleep. Well may the words of Jeremiah 22:29, ring in our ears; “O, earth, earth hear the words of the Lord.” We are at the threshold of the Lord’s departing from His church, of which we read in II Thess. 2:3, “For that day shall not come except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition.” Today this prophecy is fulfilled. Woe unto us that the Lord has departed. The collapse of the doctrine of Christ has taken place, and the work of false teachers is having its effect in the church world. The World Council of Churches has endorsed violence within the church at its recent meeting held in Uppsala, Sweden.

A document entitled
“Revolution and Nonviolence”
was approved by the Youth
Assembly of the World Council
on July 9, 1968, and endorses
violence as “a last resort” in
the “struggle for liberation.”
It is as follows:

“A. The main issue for the churches today is not whether to endorse guerilla warfare or not. It is rather that the churches find de facto (actual) support of the status quo, (things as they are) and throw their whole weight behind the demands for radical change in the present international structures, and particularly in the domination of these structures by the rich countries.

“B. We affirm that the Gospel of Christ is a message of nonviolence and love. We differ, however, in our understanding of the relevance of the Gospel for the struggle for freedom and justice. Some of us hold that Christians may well participate in a violent struggle for liberation, if there appears to be no other way left. Others of us would argue that as Christians we are committed to nonviolence under all circumstances. Despite this difference of opinion, we are agreed that as Christians we cannot condemn liberation movements which take recourse to violence as a last resort against oppressive systems. We recognize that the maintenance of many of these oppressive systems often involves the routinized use of massive and cruel violence. Therefore it is essential to arrive at a positive understanding of and express active solidarity with liberation movements as agents of social change for freedom, justice, and self-determination. It is primarily the responsibility of the particular liberation movement to judge the appropriateness of a certain strategy in the situation and in the process to take into account such factors as the possibility of controlling the violence and minimizing the loss of human life in the struggle.

“C. Since violence can in any case, if at all, only be a last resort, we are also agreed that it should be the special responsibility of the churches to contribute to the development of effective alternative strategies of revolution and social change. Special attention should be devoted to how nonviolent strategies can be used effectively to achieve change. One important aspect of this is to provide for empirical research on the effectiveness of different strategies in various situations.”

The Lord grant that the faithful Pastors on Zions Walls may cry aloud to warn the wicked from his way, and give Elders, parents, and teachers to instruct our youth to be, and remain ever faithful to the Word of God. May we not be swallowed up with the wickedness of the enemy of the church of Christ, lest we be consumed in God’s wrath.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: John G. Paton was one of the great missionaries of all time. He is often compared to the Apostle Paul in his sufferings, his perseverance under tremendous difficulties and his unwavering determination to seek souls for Christ. Above all he was a man of faith. His own account of his experiences in the South Sea islands among cannibals is one of the most remarkable in missionary history.

The experiences of our missionary, Rev. Kuijt, in Indonesia have in many ways been strikingly similar to Paton ‘s, according to his reports from time to time. It was with this in mind that we thought our readers would be interested in a condensed version of John Paton’s career as appeared recently in a paperback edition entitled Five Pioneer Missionaries. For those who would like the larger version we recommend the book John G. Paton, running some 500 pages, but full of interest and suspense from cover to cover. It is available in most religious book stores.

In following the installments from month to month the serious reader will not be able to escape the impression that compared to Paton his contributions to the cause of Christ are nothing. May this account stir up a desire to do more for our missionaries who are bringing the gospel to those who have not heard the joyful sound.

The first installment follows:

JOHN G. PATON

Preparation (1824–58)

‘The Cannibals! You will be eaten by the Cannibals!’ This was the old Christian’s final argument why the young man should not go to the South Seas as a missionary. The reply of 32 year old John Paton was characteristic: ‘Mr. Dickson, you are advanced in years now, and your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms; I confess to you, that if I can but live and die honoring and serving the Lord Jeses, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by Cannibals or worms; and in the Great Day my resurrection body will arise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer.’ This single-minded purpose endured throughout fifty-years of missionary service - despite the cannibals and many another trial. We must, therefore, begin by tracing the origins not only of this purpose, but of everything which went into the making of a great missionary.

John Gibson Paton was born on May 24, 1824, on a small farm near Dumfries in southern Scotland, the eldest son of James and Janet Paton. Five years later the family moved to the village of Torthorwald, still only four or five miles from Dumfries. The influence of the Covenanters thus surrounded Paton from his earliest days as he grew up among the memorials of those who had fought and suffered in that very region for the crown-rights of Jesus Christ, among whom were the ancestors of his father’s mother. Furthermore, his parents were themselves cast in the same mold as their godly forbears. James Paton, by trade a stocking-maker, was no ordinary man; he belonged to the Reformed Presbyterian Church, which represented the purest stream of Covenanting tradition, and in addition established his own house as a nursery of true godliness. After his conversion at the age of seventeen, he introduced family prayers to his parents’ home, and later continued in the doctrine and spirit of the Covenanters in the cottage at Torthorwald. He made the deepest and best of impressions on his children, especially John, who bears witness to the influence upon him of his father’s godliness and habitual communion with God. Tradition had it that James Paton had only three times missed public worship in Dumfries, twice owing to exceptionally bad weather, and on one occasion to a cholera attack. Family prayers began and ended every day, and an immoral woman of the village later revealed that on winter nights she had crept up to the window and had heard the good man praying that God would convert sinners. This alone had kept her from suicide and at last brought her to Christ. The Sabbath, with church attendance, Bible-reading, catechizing and instruction was ‘a holy, happy, entirely human day’. Paton tells us that the continual study of the Westminster Shorter Catechism ‘laid the solid rock-foundations of our religious life’. In later days he never departed from the Covenanting faith of his fathers, although he lived well into the days of scepticism, when even evangelicalism became a very diluted thing.

Young John had a great desire to learn, and though before he was twelve he left school and began learning his father’s trade, he used every spare moment to study Latin and Greek. (These ‘spare moments’ were snatched during the one-and-a-half-hour meal breaks in a working day lasting from six in the morning to ten at night.) The reason for this study must be given in his own words: ‘I had given my soul to God and was resolved to aim at being a Missionary of the Cross or a Minister of the Gospel … How much my father’s prayers at this time impressed me I can never explain nor could any stranger understand. When, on his knees and all of us kneeling around him in Family Worship, he poured out his whole soul with tears for the conversion of the heathen world to the service of Jesus, and for every personal and domestic need, we all felt as if in the presence of the living Saviour and learned to know and love him as our Divine Friend. As we rose from our knees, I used to look at the light on my father’s face and wish 1 were like him in spirit - hoping that, in answer to his prayers, I might be privileged and prepared to carry the blessed Gospel to some portion of the heathen world.’

It was in these days too that he learned an all-important lesson concerning God’s providential care over His children. During a very bad time the Paton family were caused much distress, and on one occasion while James Paton was away overnight selling his work, they ran out of food. The hardpressed mother told her children that she had told God everything, and that He would send them food in the morning. Next day a present of food from her father arrived, for which thanks were duly given, and the lesson, which Paton never forgot, impressed upon them.

Paton furthered his education by saving enough to spend six weeks at Dumfries Academy, and then took a post as visitor and tract-distributor with a congregation in Glasgow, which gave him a free year at the Free Church Seminary. This, of course, meant that he had to leave home, and his father walked with him the first six miles of the way. ‘His counsels and tears and heavenly conversation on that parting journey’, wrote Paton many years later, ‘are fresh in my heart as if it had been but yesterday … We halted on reaching the appointed parting place; he grasped my hand firmly for a minute in silence, and then solemnly and affectionately said: “God bless you, my son! Your father’s God prosper you and keep you from all evil!” Unable to say more, his lips kept moving in silent prayer: in tears we embraced and parted… I watched through blinding tears till his form faded from my gaze; and then, hastening on my way, vowed deeply and oft, by the help of God, to live and act so as never to grieve or dishonor such a father and mother as He had given me… It is no Pharisaism, but deep gratitude, which makes me here testify that the memory of that scene not only helped, by God’s grace, to keep me pure from the prevailing sins, but also stimulated me in all my studies, that I might not fall short of his hopes, and in all my Christian duties, that I might faithfully follow his shining example.’

Ill health cut short this year, but after convalescence and a period teaching and saving, he returned to the college, only to run short of money once again. He was on the point of giving up once more, when in God’s providence an advertisement for a teacher caught his eye. He applied for and gained the post. Here he prospered until his very success in taming ruffians and increasing the number on the roll led to his replacement by a better qualified teacher. Again it seemed as if Paton would have to give up his studies, but once more God opened the next stage of his preparation. A previously written application to become a Glasgow City Missionary now brought an acceptance and appointment to a degraded area around Green Street in the Calton district of the city.

Paton began visiting and preaching, but the only place for a Sunday service was in a hayloft — with the cows underneath. After a year’s hard work he had six or seven regularly attending this meeting and another held in a house on a week night. The Mission directors, judging the inhabitants ‘unassailable by ordinary means’, proposed to move Paton to another district, but he pleaded for another six months’ trial, during which great progress was made and after which the work never looked back. As the converts multiplied so did his meetings, and after a short while we find five or six hundred attending regularly. Apart from Sunday meetings (which began at seven in the morning) he held Bible classes, prayer meetings where he expounded the Scriptures systematically, and a communicants’ class based on ‘Paterson on the the Shorter Catechism’. So Paton led many of the inhabitants of this degraded area into the riches of Covenanting Christianity.

Paton was always a vigorous advocate of total abstinence and he encountered much opposition from the publicans of the area, who organized disturbances at his meetings and endeavored to get him into trouble with the police. He had friendly relations with the many Roman Catholics in the district as he visited and talked with them, but when some were converted the priests were roused and caused much trouble. Matters came to a head when Paton tried to prevent an ex-Catholic from being abducted by her former spiritual guides. He was assailed in the press, received anonymous letters threatening his life, and was publicly cursed from the altar by the priests. Stones were thrown at him, pails of boiling water emptied above him, but, apart from one stone which found its target, he was unscathed, and as he refused to run away or to allow himself to be given a short ‘holiday’, he was eventually left at peace.

Although there were many social and moral results of his work, his chief emphasis was on evangelism. Among his converts were the Irish woman and her drunken husband who had allowed him to hold meetings in their house, an infidel lecturer who burned his former ‘Circulating Library’ and turned to the Bible on his supposed deathbed and found Christ, and a doctor who was both an unbeliever and a drunkard until Paton persevered with him.Children, too, were among his converts, such as a lad named John Sim who, on his deathbed, pleaded with Paton, ‘Oh, do tell me everything you know or have ever heard about Jesus, the spotless Lamb of God’. A friend of these early days, Thomas Binnie, declared later, ‘Dr. Paton realized, as no other man I ever met did, the awful danger of the unsaved. He realized that salvation was possible and that he might be the means of bringing the perishing to the Savior, and that he must live for that and that alone.’ This applied in Glasgow first of all, but Paton tells us that, though happy and successful there, he ‘continually heard … the wail of the perishing heathen in the South Seas; and I saw that few were caring for them, while I knew well that many would be ready to take up my work in Calton … Without revealing the state of my mind to any person, this was the supreme subject of my daily meditation and prayer’.

Throughout these ten years Paton struggled on with his studies at Glasgow University, at the Reformed Presbyterian Divinity Hall, and also in unfinished medical studies. ‘I was sustained’, he says, ‘by the lofty aim which burned all these years bright within my soul, namely to be owned and used by Him for the salvation of perishing men.’ At this time the Synod of Paton’s church was deeply concerned to find another missionary for the South Seas, and Paton was grieved at the lack of response. His own response was as follows: ‘The Lord kept saying within me, “Since none better qualified can be got, rise and offer yourself.” Almost over-powering was the impulse to answer aloud, “Here am I, send me.” But I was dreadfully afraid of mistaking my mere human emotions for the will of God, so I resolved to make it a subject of close deliberation and prayer for a few days longer and to look at the proposal from every angle … I felt a growing assurance that this was the call of God to His servant. The wail and claims of the heathen were constantly sounding in my ears. I saw them perishing for lack of the knowledge of the true God and His Son Jesus, while my Green Street people had the open Bible and all the means of grace within easy reach;…. from every aspect at which I could look the whole facts in the face, the voice within me sounded like a voice from God.’ Would that all missionaries so tested their call and had such a clear vision of the perishing heathen!

When Paton and a fellow student offered themselves and were accepted for the New Hebrides Mission there was opposition from nearly everybody. ‘Some retorted upon me, ‘There are heathen at home; let us seek and save, first of all, the lost ones perishing at our doors”. This I felt to be most true, and an appalling fact; but I unfailingly observed that those who made this retort neglected those home heathen themselves… They would ungrudgingly spend more on a fashionable party at dinner or tea, on concert or ball or theater, or on some ostentatious display or worldly or selfish indulgence, ten times more, perhaps in a single day, than they would give in a year, or in half a lifetime, for the conversion of the whole heathen world, either at home or abroad.’ This reaction only increased Paton’s determination, and the matter was finally settled by seeking his parents’ opinions. They assured him that they had long ago given him to the Lord, and that their prayers had been that, if the Lord saw fit, He would call and prepare him to be a missionary of the Cross.

We have lingered over these early days because it is here that we see God’s hand upon His servant leading and preparing him for a great work. We can trace the work of preparation in his background, in his parents’ training and example, in his struggles and self-discipline, in his battles for the Lord, in his work in heathen Glasgow, and not least in the increasing conviction and widening experience of his Father’s providential care. Well might he remember his mother’s words, ‘O my children, love your heavenly Father, tell Him in faith and prayer all your needs, and He will supply your wants so far as it shall be for your good and His glory.’ The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Covenanters, the God of his father, and the God who had kept him in every situation would go with him. ‘I saw the hand of God very visibly, not only preparing me for, but now leading me to, the foreign mission field.’

(to be continued)

Deze tekst is geautomatiseerd gemaakt en kan nog fouten bevatten. Digibron werkt voortdurend aan correctie. Klik voor het origineel door naar de pdf. Voor opmerkingen, vragen, informatie: contact.

Op Digibron -en alle daarin opgenomen content- is het databankrecht van toepassing. Gebruiksvoorwaarden. Data protection law applies to Digibron and the content of this database. Terms of use.

Printen