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About the Book
"Tools of Titans" by Tim Ferriss is a compilation of insights, advice, and strategies from over 100 successful individuals interviewed on Ferriss's podcast. The book covers topics such as health, wealth, and wisdom, and offers practical tips and techniques for achieving success and personal growth.
Charles Finney
Childhood and Teen years
Charles Grandison Finney was born the year after Wesley died on 29th August, 1792 in Warren, Connecticut. In 1794 his family moved to New York state, eventually settling at Henderson, near Lake Ontario. Although he received only a brief formal education he decided to study law and joined the practice of a local lawyer, Benjamin Wright. He was also very musical, played the cello and directed the choir at the local Presbyterian Church pastured by Rev. George Gale.
His conversion
His conversion on October 10th 1821 reads like something out of the book of Acts. Smitten with conviction from Bible reading he decided to ‘settle the question of my soul’s salvation at once, that if it were possible, I would make my peace with God.’ (Autobiography)
This conviction increased to an unbearable level over the next couple of days and came to an head when he was suddenly confronted with an ‘inward voice.’ He was inwardly questioned about his spiritual condition and finally received revelation about the finished work of Christ and his own need to give up his sins and submit to Christ’s righteousness.
As he sought God in a nearby wood he was overwhelmed with an acute sense of his own wickedness and pride but finally submitted his life to Christ. Back at work that afternoon he was filled with a profound sense of tenderness, sweetness and peace. When work was over and he bade his employer goodnight, he then experienced a mighty baptism in the Holy Spirit, which was recorded as vividly as the day he experienced it, though it was penned some fifty years later.
The next morning Finney announced to a customer that he was leaving his law studies to become a preacher of the Gospel.
Charles Finney licensed to preach
He was licensed to preach in 1823 and ordained as an evangelist in 1824. His penetrating preaching was quite different from many local ministers and included an obvious attempt to break away from the traditional and, as he saw it, dead, orthodox Calvinism. He married to Lydia Andrews in October 1824 and was also joined by Daniel Nash (1774-1831), known popularly as ‘Father Nash.’ Undoubtedly Nash’s special ministry of prayer played a great part in Finney’s growing success as an evangelist.
Things really took off when he preached in his old church, where Rev. Gale still ministered. Numerous converts and critics followed! Similar results were experienced in nearby towns of Rome and Utica. Soon newspapers were reporting his campaigns and he began drawing large crowds with dramatic responses.
Soon he was preaching in the largest cities of the north with phenomenal results. Campaign after campaign secured thousands of converts.
The high point of Finney’s revival career was reached at Rochester, New York, during his 1830-1 meetings. Shopkeepers closed their businesses and the whole city seemed to centre on the revivalist. Responding to his irresistible logic and passionate arguments many of his converts were lawyers, merchants and those from a higher income and professional status.
His Preaching
Finney openly preached a modified Calvinism, influenced with his own theology of conversion and used what were perceived to be ‘revivalistic techniques.’
These ‘means’ included the use of the anxious bench (a special place for those under conviction), protracted meetings, women allowed to pray in mixed meetings, publicly naming those present resisting God in meetings and the hurried admission of new converts into church membership. Opponents viewed his preaching of the law as ‘scare tactics’ and his persuasive appeals for sinners to come to Christ for salvation were seen as over-emphasising the responsibility of men and ignoring the sovereignty of God.
His theology and practise soon became known as the ‘New Measures’ and attracted many opponents from the Old School Presbyterians led by Asahel Nettleton (himself no stranger to true revival and , the revivalistic Congregationalists headed by Lyman Beecher.
Pastor at Chatham Street Chapel
Finney accepted an appointment as pastor of Chatham Street Chapel in New York City in 1832 where he remained until 1837. It was during this time that he delivered a series of sermons published in 1835 as ‘Lectures on Revivals of Religion.’ Here he clearly stated his views regarding revivals being products of the correct use of human means. Such was the controversy that he left the Presbyterian denomination and joined the Congregationalists in 1836.
Oberlin College
The next year he became professor of theology at Oberlin College (Ohio) where he taught until his death. He was President here from 1851 until 1866, but still continued regular revival meetings in urban settings (twice in England, 1848, 1851) until 1860. During his stay at Oberlin he produced his, Lectures to Professing Christians (1836), Sermons on Important Subjects (1839) and his famous Memoirs.
The Father of Modern Revivalism
There is no doubt that Charles Grandison Finney well-deserves the title ‘The Father of Modern Revivalism.’ He was an evangelistic pioneer whose model was followed by a long line of revivalists from D. L. Moody to Billy Graham. His writing have made a massive impact on the entire evangelical world and particularly the ‘Lectures on Revivals’ which has, arguably, ignited more fires of revival than any other single piece literature in evangelical history.
This ‘Prince of Revivalists’ passed away peacefully at Oberlin on Sunday, 16th August, 1875 aged almost 83 years.
Bibliography: I Will Pour Out My Spirit, R. E. Davies, 1997; Ed: A. Scott Moreau, Baker Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, 2000; Dictionary of Evangelical Biography 1730-1860, Vol. 1, 1995.
Tony Cauchi
Though Dead, He Still Speaks - How Satan Remembers C.S. Lewis
The scene is in hell at the annual dinner of the Tempters’ Training College for young devils. The principal, Dr. Snufftub, has just proposed a toast to the health of the guests. Grimgod, a very experienced devil, who is the guest of honor, rises to reply: Headmaster, favorite Decadents, Ghouls, Fiends, and Imps, to my Intolerable Tempters, Ghastly Graduates, and Gentledevils: Gladly do I assume my place in our great tradition to charge our recent graduates towards highest malevolence, mischief, and devilry. I could begin my remarks by dribbling on about how honored I am to have been invited — but you, my lowly esteemed guests, are not humans to be flattered, and I, not a man to feign humility. I tell you plainly: I both deserve and expected to address you this evening. If but for that incompetent Dr. Slubgob — whose faults and failings (and finish) you are all keenly aware — I would have said my piece centuries ago. You would search in vain to find one more suitable in all of Satandom to enflame you in such crucial times as ours. Now that I have your attention, let me direct it to the point of my address: As the tide begins to turn decisively in our favor, we must not let the enemy regain his footing. To initiate a final push, to rally the closing campaign, we must do what young devils tend to relax: We must sever the humans from voices of the past. Now is the time to dispel the great cloud of witnesses, silence those terrible men and women who, though they died, still speak — should they continue to make fools of us? In the name of all that is unholy, they will not! Some of you — and this to your disgrace — do not mind old books lying peacefully upon nightstands. Some of these (and check the registry to recall which ones) cast light upon our shadows, point out ancient traps, inform them of our designs, and thus threaten to rouse this otherwise slumbering generation — but there they lie, tolerated. Many of you are too young to have grown already so careless. As we feast in celebration, I for one agitate to hear their voices sound disgracefully, mockingly outside of our gates. Can you not hear them? For every scrap of the damned that lies upon your plate, for every bite that inspires your snorts and howls, awaken to the fact that negligence in this matter allows the dead to steal meat from our bellies and drink from our cups. Gnash your teeth to realize that they caused us — during this past shortage — to sup on the relatives of most in this room. Their shrieks of protest, still fresh in my mind, commission us all to exorcise these voices from the earth. Should our war efforts continue to be frustrated by ghosts? Appraise one such a phantom — whose birthday happens to fall on this very day — that Irksome Irishman whose very name has become a curse: C.S. Lewis. Stories of Aslan First recall, with trembling voice, that embarrassment, Soretongue, who lost the patient after so many decades in his grasp. A blunder, young Graduates, that few listening to my voice could hope to surpass. His influence took a staunch atheist, a reviler of the faith, and turned him into one of these haunting voices of which I now warn you. Consider the error in full. Consider what this Lewis became. For one thing, this man — unlike so many of their drab ministers and colorless academics whose work we most heartily support — made ghastly impressions upon even our most prized possessions: the children. Through that otherwise terribly useful faculty, the imagination, he corrupted boys and girls across the globe with stories containing the Enemy’s horrible Echo scribbled across their pages. In a make-believe world, with a make-believe lion, and all sorts of other bumbling characters, he captured more than their attention. Can you believe that after losing the man, this dimwitted Tempter actually laughed over Clive’s shoulder as he wrote? “Pure rubbish,” I believe he called it. He could not discern the Enemy’s propaganda smuggled into fictional stories featuring the children, princes, rats, dragons, magical kingdoms, white witches, curses, and fauns. “As threatening to our designs as an old, blind, toothless tiger,” Soretongue reported. But this seducer beckoned into Narnia to show them earth. He introduced Edmund, Lucy, Peter, Eustace, Reepicheep to introduce them to themselves. He told of Aslan — and excuse me for my exasperation — to bring them to that nasty Uncreated One of Judah. He discovered how to preach sermons to children, and Soretongue smiled at it. The Enemy plundered our keepsake through the back of a wardrobe. Wicked Leaks In another turn, that logic, which we knew those many years only as an ally, betrayed us in the end. With each passing essay, with each published book, with each responded letter, radio broadcast, and sermon, he toured them up the mountain to look above to the Enemy and then below upon the labyrinths we so carefully devised for their destruction. Soretongue grossly underestimated the danger of this topographer in our war efforts. Our twisted and turned paths, knotted by delicious deceits and half-truths, began to be spoiled by his mapping out our temptations and pits. Our smoke of relativism, atheism, materialism — and our other favorite isms — availed minimally against this crow who made his nest above the fog. In the last, you might have thought, after Soretongue was through with him, that this fattened pig turned wizard to have broken so many of our spells of worldliness. So often did he — with great exaggeration and deceit, to be sure — appeal to that other world beyond, that many of our enticements fell useless against the bewitched souls of his hearers. His many embellishments about the “weight of glory” and other such nonsense, gross as such slobber stands to us, moved countless humans to take seriously the Enemy’s lies about such things as eternal life. He, pirating the Enemy’s horrible Book, talked often and much of holidays at sea, the country beyond, about the scent, the sight, the longing for a land that they were “made for” — a home standing just over the hill, just around the bend. And something called Joy with a capital J. He fooled the vermin, with pretty colors and poetic potpourri, that the Enemy’s torture and death somehow ensured that his followers — who also take up their own crosses and endure their own sufferings after him — might be the better off in the end. May it never be! Should not the mere existence of our established kingdom below expose the slight of hand? If heaven was as the Enemy so shamelessly boasts it is, why should a host of us so violently leave? But Lewis, with his wand in hand doodling fictions, compelled the swine towards the true ruin we so narrowly escaped. They will find him out eventually. Yet, though they will be sorely and deliciously disappointed at the road’s end, we will still remain the hungrier for it. Silence the Skunks But, enough of the man. I do not mean to honor the vermin by speaking too much of him. The point is this: Do not let the message of the departed saints survive. Should we, of all beings, not know how to silence the dead? Cut out the tongues of the mischief-makers. Six feet below is too shallow — dig deeper. A toast, then. You have studied. You have hungered. You have tempted, watched, and waited for this day. Each of you has, with the indispensable help of your more fiendish advisor, damned one human soul. The dish prepared so perversely before you contains remnants of your spoil — the lion’s share going, of course, to your mentor. May it be the beginning of uninterrupted success — for you know what awaits any alternative. Raise your glasses. To a future brim-filled with courage, cruelty, and conviction. To the setting of sun and the fleeing of the light. To the return of the age of devils. To the silencing of the skunks — to one we mock, “Happy birthday!” Onward and downward! Article by Greg Morse
