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About the Book
"On the Anvil" by Max Lucado is a collection of reflections on faith, resilience, and the purpose of trials in a Christian's life. Through personal anecdotes and biblical insights, Lucado encourages readers to trust in God's plan and find hope in the midst of adversity, believing that God is shaping and molding them into something beautiful on the anvil of life.
William and Catherine Booth
William Booth
The Salvation Army founder, William Booth was born in Nottingham, England, on 10 April 1829.
Salvation Army founder General William BoothFrom his earliest years, William was no stranger to poverty. He was just 14 when his father died and was already working as a pawnbroker’s apprentice to supplement the family’s income.
As a pawnbroker, William saw poverty and suffering on a daily basis. By the time he finished his six-year apprenticeship, he had developed a deep hatred of it.
William, a fiery and impulsive teenager, became a Christian at 15 and began attending the local Wesleyan Chapel. There, he developed the passion that would be the driving force in his life; to reach the down and out of Britain's cities through the Gospel of Christ.
William, a talented preacher from a young age, went on to work as a travelling evangelist with the Methodist church. But it was through preaching in the streets of London's slums that he discovered his life's purpose and The Salvation Army was born.
Catherine Booth
The Salvation Army "mother", Catherine Mumford was born in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, on 17 January 1829.
The Salvation Army founder and Army mother Catherine BoothFrom an early age, she was a serious and sensitive girl with a strong Christian upbringing. By the age of 12, it's said that she had read the Bible through eight times.
At 14, Catherine became ill and spent a great deal of time in bed. She kept herself busy, especially concerned about the problems of alcohol. She wrote articles for a magazine, encouraging people not to drink.
But at 16, she came wholly into her faith. Reading the words, 'My God I am Thine, what a comfort Divine' in her hymn book, she realised the truth of them for herself.
A gentle woman with powerful appeal, Catherine would go on to co-found The Salvation Army and prove an inspiration to women in a harsh time.
Life together
Catherine and William met when he came to preach at her church. They soon fell in love and became engaged. During their three-year engagement, William continued his work as a travelling evangelist. Catherine was a constant support to William, writing him letters of encouragement on his travels.
They married on 16 June 1855.
Together, William and Catherine embarked on a lifelong journey to answer the call of God to bring the Gospel to the people. While William was a natural speaker, Catherine was a quiet woman and not at all accustomed to speaking at gatherings. It took time for her to find her voice, but she was driven by a conviction that woman had the same rights as men to speak. She grew into a courageous speaker, known for her gentle manner but powerful appeal, counselling alcoholics in their homes and holding cottage meetings for new faithfuls.
They were also parents to a growing family of eight children, who were brought up with a firm Christian education and a great love for their God’s mission. Two of their children, Bramwell and Evangeline would go on to be Generals of The Salvation Army.
In 1865, William, by now an independent evangelist, along with Catherine founded The Christian Mission. William preached to the poor while Catherine spoke to the wealthy to gain support for their financially demanding work. In time, she began to hold her own fundraising campaigns.
It was not until 1878 that The Christian Mission became known as The Salvation Army. Modelled after the military with William and his fellow ministers a part of God’s Army, seeking salvation for the masses. William was appointed the first General and his ministers became “officers”.
Catherine became known as “The Army Mother” and remained a strong voice on The Salvation Army’s ideas on social issues and matters of belief.
With its strong focus on the downtrodden and dispossessed, The Salvation Army began to grow beyond Britain’s borders. In William’s lifetime, the Army would be established in 58 countries and colonies. Its mission was and is still guided by William’s book “In Darkest England and the Way Out”, which maps out a revoluntionary approach to social engagement never before undertaken by a church.
Both Catherine and William worked tirelessly to bring the Gospel to all, establishing a movement in the form of The Salvation Army. But, on 4th October 1890, Catherine lost her ongoing battle with ill health. Her son, Bramwell, described her passing as “a warrior laid down her sword to receive her crown”.
William continued on for many years, traveling all over the world to oversee his growing Army. On 20th August 1912, William Booth was, in Salvation Army terms, promoted to glory.
Though passed, both William and Catherine continue to be guiding influences in The Salvation Army and stand as the mightiest examples of how God uses the ordinary to create the extraordinary.
you can’t fake what you love
The soul is measured by its flights, Some low and others high, The heart is known by its delights, And pleasures never lie. I was 25 years old when John Piper’s book The Pleasures of God  was first released in 1991. My wife and I had been attending Bethlehem Baptist for two years and had read John’s book Desiring God , which unpacked what he called Christian Hedonism. His fresh emphasis on the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him  was working its way into our spiritual bones. But as I read the introduction to The Pleasures of God , the one-sentence poem above crystalized the truth of Christian Hedonism for me, opening my mind to the role delight plays in the Christian life. One Sentence Begets Another John wrote that life-changing sentence as a kind of exposition of another  life-changing sentence he had read four years earlier. In fact, the whole sermon series that birthed the book was born of his meditation on that sentence written in the seventeenth century by a young Professor of Divinity in Scotland named Henry Scougal. Scougal had actually penned the sentence in a personal letter of spiritual counsel to a friend, but it was so profound that others copied and passed it around. Eventually Scougal gave permission for it to be published in 1677 as The Life of God in the Soul of Man . A year later, Scougal died of tuberculosis before he had reached his twenty-eighth birthday. John Piper describes what gripped him so powerfully: One sentence riveted my attention. It took hold of my thought life in early 1987 and became the center of my meditation for about three months. What Scougal said in this sentence was the key that opened for me the treasure house of the pleasures of God. He said, “ The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love .” (18) John realized that this statement is as true of God as it was of man. The worth and excellency of God’s  soul is measured by the object of its love. This object must, then, be God himself, since nothing of greater value exists than God. John previously devoted a whole chapter in Desiring God  to God’s happiness in himself — the God-centeredness of God. Scougal’s sentence, however, opened glorious new dimensions of this truth for John as he contemplated how the excellency of God’s soul is measured. And John’s sentence opened glorious new dimensions for me as I began to contemplate that a heart, whether human or divine, is known by its delights. Pleasures Never Lie It was the last line of John’s poem that hit me hardest: The heart is known by its delights, And pleasures never lie. Pleasures never lie.  This phrase cut through a lot of my confusion and self-deceit to the very heart of the matter: what really matters to my heart. “Our lips can lie about what we love, but our pleasures never lie.” “Pleasures never lie” doesn’t mean things we find pleasurable are never deceitful. We all know, from personal experience as well as the testimony of Scripture, that many worldly pleasures lie to us (Hebrews 11:25). Rather, it means that pleasure is the whistle-blower of the heart. Pleasure is our heart’s way of telling us what we treasure (Matthew 6:21). When we take pleasure in something evil, we don’t have a pleasure problem ; we have a treasure problem . Our heart’s pleasure gauge is working just like it’s supposed to. What’s wrong is what our heart loves. Our lips can lie about what we love, but our pleasures never lie . And we can’t keep our pleasure-giving treasures hidden, whether good or evil, at least not for long. What we truly love always ends up working its way out of the unseen heart into the plain view of what we say and don’t say, and what we do and don’t do. My heart, like God’s heart, is known by its delights. I found this wonderfully clarifying. It resonated deeply; all my experience bore out its truth. And I saw it woven throughout the Bible. The more I contemplated it, however, the more devastating this truth became. Devastated by Delight It’s devastating because if the worth and excellency of my soul is measured by the heights of its flights of delights in God, I find myself “naked and exposed” before God, without embellishment or disguise (Hebrews 4:13). No professed theology, however robust and historically orthodox, no amount of giftedness I possess, no “reputation of being alive” (Revelation 3:1) can compensate if I have a deficit of delight in God. And to make sure I understand what is and isn’t allowed on the affectional scale, John says, You don’t judge the glory of a soul by what it wills to do with lukewarm interest, or with mere teeth-gritting determination. To know a soul’s proportions you need to know its passions. The true dimensions of a soul are seen in its delights. Not what we dutifully will but what we passionately want reveals our excellence or evil. (18) As I place my passions on God’s soul-scale, my deficits become clear. I’m a mixed bag when it comes to my passion for God. I can savor God like Psalm 63 and yet still sin against him like Psalm 51. I have treasured God like Psalm 73:25–26, and questioned him like Psalm 73:2–3. Sometimes I sweetly sing Psalm 23:1–3, and sometimes I bitterly cry Psalm 10:1. At times I keenly feel the wretchedness of Romans 7:24, and at times the wonder of Romans 8:1. I have known the light of Psalm 119:105 and the darkness of Psalm 88:1–3. I’ve known the fervency of Romans 12:11 and the lukewarmness of Revelation 3:15. Many times I need Jesus’s exhortation in Matthew 26:41. “We must know our spiritual poverty before we will earnestly seek true spiritual wealth.” It is devastating to stand before God with only what we passionately want revealing the state of our hearts, measuring the worth of our souls. But it is a merciful devastation we desperately need. For we must know our spiritual poverty before we will earnestly seek true spiritual wealth. We must see our miserable idolatries before we will repent and forsake them. We must feel our spiritual deadness before we will cry out, “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” (Psalm 85:6) That’s all true. However, the longer I contemplated John’s sentence over time, the more I realized the devastating exposure of my spiritual poverty is meant to be a door into an eternal world of delight-filled love. Pleasures Forevermore I made this discovery in the story of the rich young man (Mark 10:17–22). When Jesus helped this man see his heart’s true passions (when he exposed his spiritual poverty), the exposure wasn’t Jesus’s primary purpose. Jesus wanted the man to have “treasure in heaven,” to give this man eternal joy (Mark 10:21). And Jesus knew the man would never joyfully sell everything he had to obtain the treasure that is God unless he saw God as his supreme treasure (Matthew 13:44). So he tried to show him by calling the man to the devastating door of exposure and knocking on it. And he grieved when the man wouldn’t open it, because the door led to a far greater treasure than the one he would leave behind. God created pleasure because he is a happy God and wants his joy to be in us and our joy to be full (John 15:11). When he designed pleasure as the measure of our treasure, his ultimate purpose was that we would experience maximal joy in the Treasure. And that the Treasure would receive maximal glory from the joy we experience in him. It is a marvelous, merciful, absolutely genius design: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him . If God has to expose our poverty to pursue our eternal joy, he will. But what he really wants for us is to experience “fullness of joy” in his presence and “pleasures forevermore” at his right hand (Psalm 16:11). And so it is a great mercy, even if at times devastating, that our pleasures never lie.
