The Holiness Of God Order Printed Copy

Author: R. C. Sproul
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About the Book

"The Holiness of God" by R.C. Sproul explores the concept of God's holiness and its impact on humanity. Sproul delves into the biblical teachings on God's holiness, highlighting its purity, righteousness, and perfection. He also discusses how recognizing God's holiness should lead to a sense of awe, reverence, and humility in our relationship with Him. Ultimately, Sproul emphasizes the importance of understanding and honoring the holiness of God in our lives.

Susannah Wesley

If a passing stranger walking through the rural village of Epworth, England, on any given day between 1700 and 1720 had peered through the window of the home of the rector of the local Anglican church, he might have caught sight of something quite strange. Depending on the time of day, this observer might have seen a woman sitting in a chair with her kitchen apron pulled up over her head while ten children read, studied, or played all around her. Two of those ten children would have been little boys — John and Charles — who would grow up to shape the course of Christian history and thus change the world. The woman under the apron would have been Susanna Wesley, who assumed this odd posture for two hours almost every day. In a moment you will understand why. Susanna understood the dynamics of large families. Born the twenty-fifth of twenty-five children in 1669, Susanna Annesley grew up the daughter of a prominent, highly educated minister in cosmopolitan London. She had little formal education, but growing up in an academic household with so many older siblings left her well-read and well-rounded intellectually. She met Samuel Wesley, an aspiring Anglican minister, and married him in 1688, when she was nineteen years old. Susanna’s remaining fifty-three years were far from easy ones. They were characterized by loss, hardship, and struggle. Yet she became a woman of immense legacy, largely through the dual virtues of organization and prayer. Susanna delivered nineteen children, but nine — including two sets of twins — died in infancy. Another was accidentally smothered in the night by a nurse as Susanna recovered from labor and delivery. Her husband, Samuel, did not succeed in his thirty-nine-year assignment as rector of the church at Epworth. An intellectual academic, he simply did not understand or identify with the rural villagers in his parish. Nor did they care for him. When he involved himself from the pulpit in a highly divisive political matter inflaming the entire nation in that era, he earned the hatred of a vast segment of the populace. On two occasions the Wesleys’ parsonage burned down, most likely because of arson on the part of Epworth’s embittered parishioners. Susanna and the children were seldom spared harassment and insults. Samuel was not good with money, and he once spent several months in debtors’ prison. The parsonage came with a small farm, but Samuel was uninterested in and ill-suited for farm work, so this too was left for Susanna to manage. This was in addition to the huge task of homeschooling all of the children, with their varying ages and gifts. For decades, Samuel expended all of his energies and most of the family’s meager wealth working on an exegetical treatise on the book of Job. The sad irony is that while he was away for long periods of time studying and writing about Job’s intense sufferings, his living, breathing wife was enduring real pain and hardship, largely on her own. Susanna’s household organizational skills are the stuff of legend. She knew from personal experience that quality one-on-one time with a parent is hard to come by in a family with many children, yet powerfully important. So she set a rotating schedule through which each of her children spent an hour with her alone before bedtime on a designated night each week. What is more, she somehow found a way to manage the household and give her large brood of children a world-class education that included both classical and biblical learning. Her girls got the same rigorous education as did her boys, something virtually unheard of in that day. Traditionally, girls of that place and time were taught “feminine” skills such as needlework and music before undertaking the most basic education, such as learning to read. Susanna firmly believed this was wrong-headed. Her girls were taught the same curriculum as her boys. Among the “bylaws” by which she ran her home school was this: “8. That no girl be taught to work till she can read very well; and then that she be kept to her work with the same application, and for the same time, that she was held to in reading. This rule also is much to be observed; for the putting of children to learn sewing before they can read perfectly, is the very reason why so few women can read fit to be heard, and never to be well understood.”1 School hours were from 9:00 a.m. to noon and then 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., six days a week. All but the smallest children completed their assigned chores promptly before the start of the school day. As in many one-room schoolhouses in generations past, older children helped teach the younger. No Excuse for Not Praying! Susanna took her relationship to God as seriously as she did her duties as a wife and mother. Early in her life, she vowed that she would never spend more time in leisure entertainment than she did in prayer and Bible study. Even amid the most complex and busy years of her life as a mother, she still scheduled two hours each day for fellowship with God and time in His Word, and she adhered to that schedule faithfully. The challenge was finding a place of privacy in a house filled to overflowing with children. Mother Wesley’s solution to this was to bring her Bible to her favorite chair and throw her long apron up over her head, forming a sort of tent. This became something akin to the “tent of meeting,” the tabernacle in the days of Moses in the Old Testament. Every person in the household, from the smallest toddler to the oldest domestic helpers, knew well to respect this signal. When Susanna was under the apron, she was with God and was not to be disturbed except in the case of the direst emergency. There in the privacy of her little tent, she interceded for her husband and children and plumbed the deep mysteries of God in the Scriptures. This holy discipline equipped her with a thorough and profound knowledge of the Bible. Prayer Leads to Teaching When husband Samuel was away, as was often the case, a substitute minister brought the Sunday morning sermon at the church. Susanna found these messages uninspiring and lacking in spiritual meat. She had a good-sized congregation of her own at home, so she began teaching them the Bible in her kitchen on Sunday afternoons. Soon neighbors began asking if they could attend. Word circulated and others from the area began asking permission to attend as well. So thorough was Susanna’s knowledge of the Bible, and so gifted was she at communicating its truths, that on any given Sunday after church, Susanna would have as many as two hundred people in attendance at her informal family Bible study, which started in her home but soon moved to a larger venue. Susanna passed away in 1742 at the age of seventy-three, living long enough to see her sons John and Charles become world-renowned leaders of the global Christian movement. This is her legacy, forged in large part in those diligent hours of intercession under that makeshift apron tent. The Lasting Legacy of Prayer John Wesley is estimated to have preached to nearly a million people in his long, fruitful life. His powerful, evangelistic services were frequently held in the open air to accommodate audiences in the tens of thousands. Traveling on horseback, he regularly preached three or more times a day, often beginning before daybreak. Even at the age of seventy he preached, without the assistance of modern amplification, to an estimated throng of thirty-two thousand people. It is hard to overstate John Wesley’s theological impact. He remains the dominant theological influence on Methodists and Methodist-heritage groups the world over, including the United Methodist Church, the Methodist Church of Great Britain, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, all of which played a pivotal role in the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century. Wesleyan theology also formed the foundation for the holiness movement in the United States, which includes denominations like the Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodist Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), and other groups which compose the colorful mosaic of Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement in North America. As prolific a writer as he was busy as a preacher, John Wesley has been called the Father of the Religious Paperback. His published sermons, tracts, pamphlets, and booklets number roughly five thousand items. In addition to theology, Wesley wrote about music, marriage, medicine, science, abolitionism, and current events. Although John married, he and his wife, Mary, had no children. Because of his giving nature toward the poor, the oppressed, and the unevangelized, he left little of material wealth behind when he died in 1791 at the age of eighty-seven. One biographer said John Wesley “was carried to his grave by six poor men ‘leaving behind him nothing but a good library of books, a well-worn clergyman’s gown… and — the Methodist Church.’”2 The same writer observed that John’s impact was so profound that he in effect “supplied a new starting-point to modern religious history.”3 John’s younger brother Charles was very much a partner in and vital contributor to these accomplishments. A brilliant musician and lyricist, he wrote more than 6,600 hymns, many of which are still in hymnals the world over today. Charles and his wife, Sarah, had three children who survived infancy, including two boys, Samuel and Charles Jr., who were musical prodigies. Charles Jr. grew up to serve as the personal organist of the English royal family. His brother, Samuel Sebastian Wesley, became one of the most accomplished British composers of the nineteenth century. A contemporary of Mozart, Samuel is sometimes called “The English Mozart.”4 John and Charles Wesley were passionate lovers of God and powerful persuaders of people. As a result, the brothers were viewed by many of their contemporaries as religious fanatics. History has been far kinder in its verdict. It views them as world changers. And every one of the changes they wrought is part of the legacy of Susanna Wesley. In his 1864 biography, John Kirk wrote of Susanna, “Her name has been everywhere received with respect; and by a large and influential Christian Community it has been cherished with strongest affection. Her success in the education of her children has been the theme of universal admiration; and no one has yet ventured to hazard even a conjecture as to how much the cause of religion and the well-being of the human race are indebted to her steady piety and extraordinary talents.”5 We hope that as you read [the story of] Susanna Wesley, you’ll grab on to the power of them. For Susanna Wesley, there was no amount of distraction that could keep her from prayer and the Bible. That kind of life, deeply rooted, produced great fruit, as evidenced not only by the people who came to hear her teach but also by the children she influenced. The great truth in her story is how prayer does not occupy the stage of activity. Its power is in the quiet trust of gentle souls who are willing to pull away from the everyday to commune with God. John Wesley, The Heart of Wesley’s Journal, ed. Ed Hughes and Hugh Price (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008), 127. William Henry Fitchett, Wesley and His Century: A Study in Spiritual Forces (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1906), 1. Ibid. Peter Matthews, Who’s Buried Where in London (London:  Bloomsbury, 2017), 37. John Kirk, The Mother of the Wesleys: A Biography (Ambler, MA:  Tresidder, 1864), vii. Excerpted with permission from Only One Life by Jackie Green and Lauren Green McAfee, copyright Jackie Green, Lauren Green McAfee, Bill High.

The Brave Stunt That Brought Down Slavery

Have you ever heard about the extraordinary effect that the life of David Livingstone (1813–1873) had on the East African slave trade? It received only a passing sentence in an article I wrote two years ago. Then that summer, another world opened to me. I read Jay Milbrandt’s The Daring Heart of David Livingstone: Exile, African Slavery, and the Publicity Stunt That Saved Millions. I would like to give you a window into that world. Milbrandt’s subtitle is not only provocative; it prepares you for what’s coming. “Exile” refers to the long stretches of time Livingstone spent in the eastern interior of Africa, cut off from his homeland — sending, in one season, over forty letters, only to have one get through. “African Slavery” refers to “the devilish traffic in human flesh” feeding not the American plantations from West Africa, but the plantations of Arabia, Persia, and India, especially via the routes through the island of Zanzibar off the eastern coast of today’s Tanzania. “The Publicity Stunt” refers to Livingstone’s internationally hyped expedition to find the headwaters of the Nile. Milbrandt calls it a “stunt” because Livingstone’s deeper motive was not the Nile. “Livingstone was no longer mounting a Nile expedition, but a grand publicity stunt. The Nile quest provided the platform he needed to campaign against the slave trade” (118). The final phrase of the subtitle, “That Saved Millions,” carries more than one meaning. Not only was slavery declared illegal in colonial East Africa 36 days after Livingstone’s death, but his larger dream to see a “Christian Africa” was in one sense realized 140 years later, because “as of 2012, a Pew Foundation study reported 63% of Sub-Saharan Africa as identifiably Christian” (247). Missionary, Doctor, Advocate David Livingstone did not set out to be a global voice for the healing of the “open sore of the world” — the East African slave trade. He set out to heal the disease of sin with the gospel, and the diseases of the body with medical training — all the while believing the Africans were not subhuman. As a young man, he heard Robert Moffat, a missionary to South Africa, say, “I had sometimes seen in the morning sun the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had ever been.” This image captured him. God’s call emerged as Moffat’s testimony mingled with Livingstone’s confidence that the word of God would do its saving work: The Word written shall find its own mysterious tortuous way into every region, dialect, and language of the earth; and men shall be convinced of sin, as well as taught their need of a Saviour by its life-giving power. It shall whisper peace to the agitated conscience, and tell of the love of a Father reconciling the world to himself by the blood of his Son. (Dr. Livingstone’s Cambridge Lectures, 179) Then two more pieces of Livingstone’s calling were put in place. One was his conviction that medical training was crucial. Waiting to be sent by the London Missionary Society, Livingstone studied medicine at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. He said, My great object was to be like Him, to imitate Him as far as He could be imitated. We have not the power of working miracles, but we can do a little in the way of healing the sick, and I sought medical education in order that I might be like Him. (Daring Heart, 21) The other piece of his calling was the conviction that Africans were fully human — as he would discover, to his horror, the slave traders did not believe, with murderous results. In answer to objectors, we would say, Were not the ancient Egyptians true Negroes? They were masters of the civilization of the world. When Greece was just emerging from the shades of barbarism, and before the name of Rome was known, the negro-land of Mizraim was proficient in science and art, and Thebes, the wonder city of the world. Solon, Plato, and a host of our Greek and Roman intellectual masters confess their obligation to the stupendous “learning of the Egyptians” in which Moses was so apt and able a scholar; notwithstanding, too often does the white man of the present day undervalue the humble descendant of that giant who helped to make him what he is! (Dr. Livingstone’s Cambridge Lectures, 124) The seeds were all sown for the fury and perseverance Livingstone would repeatedly experience in the years to come, as he came closer and closer to “the open sore of the world.” ‘Establishing Trade, Destroying Slavery’ At first, he was optimistic that legitimate commerce with East Africa would dry up the need for slave capturing and trading. “I believe we can by legitimate commerce, in the course of a few years, put an entire stop to the traffic of slaves over a large extent of territory” (Daring Heart, 23). He believed this would even have profound effects on West African slave trading with America: England has, unfortunately, been compelled to obtain cotton and other raw material from the slave States, and has thus been the mainstay and support of slavery in America. Surely, then, it follows that if we can succeed in obtaining the raw material from other sources than from the slave States of America, we should strike a heavy blow at the system of slavery itself. (36) Over time, Livingstone came to see that “establishing trade and destroying slavery,” though connected, would not be achieved without working to turn the hearts of the entire British establishment, at home and in the colonies, against a trade that they were almost totally ignorant of. Hence his “stunt.” Picking Up His Pen At great cost to himself, Livingstone probed deeper and deeper into the darkness of the Arab and Portuguese slave trade, with indirect British support. On humanitarian grounds, the expedition had also uncovered the immense and devastating Arab slave trade and its routes through the Nyassa region to Zanzibar. These findings were new, informing the world and the British foreign office of unresolved horrors. (104) In 1864, he returned to England and took up his pen. In his earlier book Missionary Travels, he had written cautiously about the slave trade. But in recent years, in his travels along the Zambezi River, he had seen unspeakable cruelty. So in the preface to A Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and Its Tributaries, he wrote, “It has been my object . . . to bring before my countrymen, and all others interested in the cause of humanity, the misery entailed by the slave-trade in its inland phases” (110). He had set his face to return to Africa and press on with his explorations and his exposure of the “gigantic evil” of the slave trade. “I am going out again. . . . It is only by holding on bulldog fashion one can succeed in doing anything against that gigantic evil, the slave trade” (121). ‘Sick of Human Blood’ What he saw as the years went by got worse. He describes one experience in which four hundred villagers — men and women — were gunned down. A slave trader named Dugumbe wanted complete control of the area without competing traders. One village was complicit in trading with others. Violence broke out. As the assailants continued their indiscriminate slaughter in the marketplace, an armed party near the Creek opened fire on those dashing toward the water. Even as the villagers, mostly unarmed women, attempted to flee across the nearby river, the attackers continued to fire on them. Aiming for their exposed heads, they shot those trying to swim to safety. . . . Dugumbe’s men had gunned down 400 men and women, all unarmed, and even killed two of their own. Then they followed the people back to their homes. The warfare continued. Livingstone counted 12 burning villages. (174) Livingstone wrote with great heaviness, “The prospects of getting slaves overpowers all else, and blood flows in horrid streams. I am heartsore, and sick of human blood” (172). Seeking the Nile, Finding a Mouth In a letter to his brother, Livingstone reasserted the terms of the “stunt”: If the good Lord permits me to put a stop to the enormous evils of the inland slave-trade, I shall not grudge my hunger and toils. I shall bless His name with all my heart. The Nile sources are valuable to me only as a means of enabling me to open my mouth with power among men. (210) In fact, the “stunt” worked. Both in England and America, Livingstone’s “mouth” — that is, his correspondence — was being heard with power. The famous Henry Stanley (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume”) had been sent by the American newspaper the New York Herald to find Livingstone after six years of being out of touch. He found him in November 1871, spent four months with him, came to love and admire him, and gave him a global voice by publishing his letters about the slave trade. On July 2, 1872, Livingstone wrote in the Herald, If my disclosures regarding the terrible Ujijian slavery should lead to the suppression of the east coast slave trade, I shall regard that as a greater matter by far than the discovery of all the Nile sources together. (201) Stanley’s book How I Found Livingstone was very popular both in America and England. It made Livingstone not just a British hero, but a transatlantic one. In another letter to the Herald, he repeated his life priorities: It would be better to lessen this great human woe than to discover the sources of the Nile. . . . May Heaven’s rich blessing come down on everyone, American, English, or Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world. (207) The Awakening of Parliament The effect of Livingstone’s communications in Britain was more than popular. It was political. Livingstone was informed by the head of the Royal Geographic Society, H.C. Rawlinson, that British intervention in Zanzibar was imminent: You will no doubt have heard of Sir Bartle Frere’s deputation to Zanzibar long before you receive this, and you will have learned with heartfelt satisfaction that there is now a definite prospect of the infamous East African slave-trade being suppressed. For this great end, if it be achieved, we shall be mainly indebted to your recent letters, which have had a powerful effect on the public mind in England, and have thus stimulated the action of the government. (214) The sultan of Zanzibar was given an ultimatum: “Consent immediately to the terms of the slave-trade-suppressing treaty, or face a blockade by British naval forces” (215). A little over a month after Livingstone’s death, the Zanzibar slave market closed forever. Queen Victoria announced the success to parliament: “Treaties have been concluded with the Sultan of Zanzibar . . . which provide means for the more effectual repression of the slave trade on the east coast of Africa” (221). Entering Glory on His Knees On May 1, 1873, David Livingstone was found dead, kneeling beside his bed with his face in his hands on the pillow. His longtime African servants and friends removed his vital organs in preparing the body for preservation and return to England. They buried his heart in a tin flour box under a mvula tree. Jacob Wainwright read Scripture and carved Livingstone’s name into the tree (217). After nine harrowing months of an extraordinary labor of love, Livingstone’s body reached the coast of Africa. It arrived in England on April 15, 1874, to a national day of mourning. The April 18 funeral was paid for by the British government. Amid huge crowds, his body was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. His epitaph reads, in part, For 30 years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, to abolish the desolating slave trade . . . this open sore of the world. Punch, a London magazine, muted its satire to bid farewell to David Livingstone: He knew not that the trumpet he had blown Out of the darkness of that dismal land Had reached and roused an army of its own To strike the chains from the slaves fettered hand. . . . He needs no epitaph to guard a name Which men shall prize while worthy work is known He lived and died for good be that his fame Let marble crumble this is Living stone. (228) Article by John Piper