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- Author: John Loren, Paula Sandford
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About the Book
"Letting Go Of Your Past" by John Loren and Paula Sandford is a guidebook that offers practical strategies for releasing the emotional burdens of past experiences and traumas. The authors provide insights and tools to help readers heal from their past wounds, forgive themselves and others, and move forward with renewed hope and purpose. Through personal stories and biblical principles, this book empowers individuals to break free from their past and embrace a brighter future.
Hannah More
Beyond any doubt, Hannah More was the most influential female member of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade. She was educated at Bristol, an important slave-trading town, and began to publish her writing in the 1760s, while she was still a teenager. Her first play, The Inflexible Captive, was staged at Bath in 1775. Later in the 1770s, and for much of the 1780s, she spent time in London and made the acquaintance of many important political and society figures, including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and Elizabeth Montagu. Her play Percy was produced by David Garrick in 1777, and Fatal Falsehood was staged in 1779, but she came to regard the theatre as morally wrong, especially after the death of her mentors; Garrick and Johnson. She turned to religious writing, beginning with her Sacred Dramas in 1782. In 1784-5, she 'discovered' Ann Yearsley, the so-called 'poetical milkmaid of Bristol', whose poems More helped to publish, although the two later fell out.
In the 1780s, More widened her circle to include religious and philanthropic figures, including John Newton, Beilby Porteus and William Wilberforce. In the summer of 1786, she spent time with Sir Charles and Lady Margaret Middleton at the their home in Teston in Kent. Among their guests were the local vicar James Ramsay and a young Thomas Clarkson, both of whom were central to the early abolition campaign. More and Clarkson met again in Bristol in 1787, while he was on his fact-finding mission to the city, but they did not become close. However, in the same year More met Wilberforce, and their friendship was to become a deep and lasting one. More contributed much to the running of the newly-founded Abolition Society including, in February 1788, her publication of Slavery, a Poem which has been recognised as one of the more important slavery poems of the abolition period. Her relationship with members of the society, especially Wilberforce, was close. For example, she spent the summer of 1789 holidaying with Wilberforce in the Peak District - planning for the abolition campaign, at that time at its height, formed a great deal of their conversation.
By the mid-1790s, More had become closely involved with the 'Clapham Sect' of evangelical Christians, many of whom were involved in the abolition campaign. The group centred on Henry Thornton's home in Clapham and included Wilberforce, James Stephen, and Zachary Macaulay, among others. Throughout the 1790s, she wrote a number of religious tracts, known as the Cheap Repository Tracts, that eventually led to the formation of the Religious Tracts Society. Several of the Tracts oppose slavery and the slave trade, in particular, the poem The Sorrows of Yamba; or, The Negro Woman's Lamentation, which appeared in November 1795 and which was co-authored with Eaglesfield Smith. However, the tracts have also been noted for their encouragement of social quietism in an age of revolution. She continued to oppose slavery throughout her life, but at the time of the Abolition Bill of 1807, her health did not permit her to take as active a role in the movement as she had done in the late 1780s, although she maintained a correspondence with Wilberforce and others. In her later life, she dedicated much time to religious writing. Nevertheless, her most popular work was a novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, which appeared in two volumes in 1809 (and which ran to nine editions in 1809 alone). In the 1820s she grew gradually less well, and decreased - but did not entirely halt - the amount of writing she produced. On her death in 1833, she left more than Ă‚ÂŁ30,000 to charities and religious societies (equivalent to about Ă‚ÂŁ2,000,000 or $3,000,000 in 2004).
© Brycchan Carey 2004
Secret Allies in the Human Heart - The Advantage We Have in Evangelism
One warm, dusty midday, Jesus sat alone near Jacob’s well outside the Samaritan town of Sychar. His disciples had gone into town to buy food, but he had planned a different meal for himself (John 4:34). Soon a solitary woman arrived at the well with a large clay jar and began to draw water. Jesus asked her for a drink. So began one of the most famous evangelistic conversations in history. And this conversation is remarkably relevant to us twenty-first-century Christians. Because in it, Jesus demonstrates that hidden in the human heart are secret evangelistic allies, as Scottish preacher James Stewart once observed (Heralds of God, 53). These secret allies are deep-seated intuitions and longings that can help a person recognize the truth of the gospel. And like Jesus, if we listen carefully and prayerfully, both to the person and the Holy Spirit, we can engage these allies in the pursuit of that person’s ultimate joy. Obstacles to Evangelism In numerous ways, this woman would have appeared to most of us as an unlikely candidate for conversion. “Hidden in the human heart are secret evangelistic allies.” First, she was a Samaritan, which meant she was viewed and hated by most Jews as a member of a heretical, idolatrous religion. We would have assumed she reciprocated the hatred. She was a woman, which meant (according to ancient Near Eastern social norms) that she would have been reticent to enter into such a conversation alone with a strange man. And given the odd, hot time of day she chose to fetch water, we might have intuited some social estrangement from her own townspeople. In other words, there were layers of complex awkwardness about the whole situation — the kind of awkwardness most of us want to avoid, the kind we tend to assume will make fruitfulness unlikely. But Jesus, alert to the Holy Spirit and lovingly eager for this woman to experience grace and forgiveness and liberation and joy, stepped into the awkwardness. And notice how he navigated this conversation, engaging several secret allies along the way. Secret Allies in an Unlikely Convert It began with a mundane-sounding yet provocative request: “Give me a drink” (John 4:7). This simple question caught the woman off guard. Not only was a man addressing an unaccompanied woman, but a Jew was addressing a Samaritan. In doing so, however, Jesus acknowledged her as an image-bearer of God, according her the dignity due such a creation. Her deep, intuitive knowledge of the rightness of this became one secret ally in helping prepare her to receive the grace and mercy he offers. Then, given the immediate context of their conversation, Jesus used the metaphor of thirst to raise the issue of the woman’s deep, inconsolable longing for lasting hope, joy, meaning, and love — a longing she shared with all fallen humanity (John 4:10–15). He wasn’t put off by her skepticism and derogatory comments. He was after her joy, not defending himself. What he did was engage her soul-thirst as a secret gospel ally for her highest good. Then he gently stepped into another very awkward place: the woman’s sinful, painful past littered with the ruins of broken relational cisterns that had only left her more parched (Jeremiah 2:13; John 4:16–18). And he offered her the only water that could quench her thirst: the gracious, merciful love of God. Her pain proved to be the pivotal gospel ally in her heart (John 4:39), because she had an undeniable desire and need for God’s forgiveness, reconciliation, and redemption. But there was one more massive issue to deal with: What about the deep, bitter, complex, hostile, centuries-old ethno-religious disagreements between the Jews and the Samaritans (John 4:19–22)? Notice where in the conversation Jesus chose to address this (he ignored the controversy in verse 9). Jesus discerned that this woman needed to taste God’s care and kindness toward her before she would be open to hearing that she and her ancestors had worshiped in ignorance (John 4:22). So, he did deploy the ally of the truth she already knew from Jewish Scriptures, but not until he had developed some initial trust first. Having glimpsed the Great Well and tasted the living water (John 4:23–24), this woman forgot her jar by Jacob’s well and ran back to town to share the good news she had received (John 4:28–30). And her testimony resonated with the secret allies in the hearts of many of her neighbors in Sychar. Common Secret Allies This evangelistic conversation is admittedly exceptional because Jesus is exceptional. We rarely receive such supernatural insight into someone else’s life — though such gifts sometimes are given to believers by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 14:24–25). But we can still learn from how Jesus engaged secret evangelistic allies in the hearts of his hearers. And while we may not be able to discern all he discerned as the God-man, we can still ask good questions, listen carefully, and pray for the Spirit to help us identify allies in each conversation. Certain allies are specific to particular people, like the Samaritan woman’s painful past. But there are allies that God has implanted in the hearts of every person. Here are some of them: We all instinctively recognize design in creation (Romans 1:19–20). We all are irresistibly drawn to transcendent glory (Psalm 8:1–4). We all have an intuitive knowledge of providence — that there is a purposeful intent to the created world, the events in it, and our own lives (Acts 17:22–31). We all know deep down that nihilism (ultimate meaninglessness implicit in metaphysical naturalism) is not true (Ecclesiastes 3:1–14). We all know we must have hope to keep going (Psalm 43:5; Lamentations 3:20–24; Romans 15:13). We all have an irrepressible longing for joy (Psalm 16:11; 43:4; Ecclesiastes 3:12; John 15:11; 1 Peter 1:8). We all intuitively recognize the moral law (Romans 2:14–15). We all know that we have transgressed the moral law and to some degree long to be free from guilt (Romans 3:23–26). We all at various times experience an undeniable desire for justice to prevail (Deuteronomy 16:19–20; Job 19:7–11; Proverbs 17:23; Micah 6:8; Matthew 12:18–21). We all have a sense of eternity in our hearts — we instinctively know death is not our ultimate end (Ecclesiastes 3:11). We all recognize the supreme beauty of love (Matthew 22:36–40; John 15:13; 1 Corinthians 13:13; 1 John 4:7–8). In claiming that we all know these things, I don’t mean that we all admit them, recognize them to the same degree, or explain them in the same way, but they are all part of the universal human experience. And the fact that we continually discuss and debate them is evidence of their presence. They are internal witnesses and pointers to the existence and nature of God, and in that way they become allies in our evangelism. Take Them to the Well On that warm, dusty day, on the slope of Mount Gerizim, the Lord himself became one massive, momentous fulfillment of the words of the old prophet: How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (Isaiah 52:7) “We all have eternity in our hearts — we instinctively know death is not our ultimate end.” He employed gospel allies already residing secretly in the heart of an unlikely convert to lead her to the living water she so desperately needed and longed for. Isn’t that essentially our story too? When it comes to evangelism, we can be too easily intimidated, especially when someone looks unlikely to respond well. It can appear to us like the ground isn’t level, like we occupy the less defendable ground because our hearer is likely to judge our gospel as foolish or weak (1 Corinthians 1:22–25). In truth, the ground is often not level, but not in the way we might fear. Often, we have the advantage because, as with Jesus that day outside Sychar, we have unseen gospel allies residing in the hearts of our hearers. And if we listen carefully and prayerfully to our hearers, the Holy Spirit can show us how to employ them. Because when it comes to the power of God in evangelism (1 Corinthians 1:18), “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25). We don’t need to be experts in apologetics or trained theologians to share the good news with others, even with the most resistant and entrenched. Often, we simply need to care more about helping them find the living water they so desperately need than about protecting our reputation or demonstrating how right we are. And if we do, we will find that we have secret allies in the pursuit of that person’s highest joy. Article by Jon Bloom Staff writer, desiringGod.org
