Please keep in mind that the preface below is from October 2019....as the coronavirus was incubating. The post that follows it from March of 2017. I thought it apropos to bring back with the sad news of the past few days. For the last month I have been purposely listening to sermons that Charles Spurgeon gave in the last four or five years of his life....1887-1891. Few people were getting saved....and the pastors themselves had lost any unction for the gospel that they may have once had. It must have a very difficult time for Spurgeon....and I could detect his frustration in about every other sermon....as he described what was happening. That is easy for me to explain....but this will not be. The church at that time had no idea that it had in effect....been compromised. Spurgeon and Ryle were dealing with a London Christianity that considered itself fine...when it was dying. It is a powerful force to work against....when both the congregations and their pastors have slid into a uselessness for the gospel. How do you explain it to them? They think that they are God's faithful ministers! Even Spurgeon couldn't do it. Well that is where we are at today. On the bright side....there is always the remnant! May God in His mercy....and to His glory....increase this remnant....and winnow His church if it be His will....as this world heads for a....cataclysmic implosion.
I have a few peripheral fascinations in life and one of them would be the Titanic. I never saw the James Cameron film. Oh I did pay for a ticket and sit in one of the comfortable seats with every intention of watching the movie but I walked out about a half hour into the film as its message started to unfold. I watched the 1958 black and white A Night To Remember when I was a child.....and I watched it again for the umpteenth time last night.
With a little research I came up with this quote from the main female character in the Cameron film..."....there was a man named Jack Dawson and that he saved me...in every way that a person can be saved." It put in my mind a real life quote from the sinking of the Titanic. I've written about this before. John Harper was a British Baptist pastor and passenger on the Titanic. He was headed to America as a guest preacher with the possibility of accepting a call at a famous American church. He was travelling with his six year old daughter for he was a widower. After he placed his daughter in a lifeboat it is reported that he shouted "women, children, and the unsaved into the lifeboats."
It is also reported that as he swam up to other people, and as hypothermia was setting is, he challenged them with the gospel of Jesus Christ. There was a meeting of survivors in Ontario, Canada a few years after the disaster. One man stood up and testified how John Harper swam up to him twice as he was holding on to debris and said "believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." John Harper....with no life vest for he had given it to another....sank to his death. The man giving this testimony was rescued by a returning lifeboat. He told the gathering this...."I am the last convert of John Harper." Yes, I walked out of Cameron's film and will never view it.
I believe that the sinking of the Titanic was a message to Britain and to America. Everyone thought that the great ship was unsinkable. Two world wars followed. The space shuttle Challenger had a multi-cultural crew...male and female...scientist, military and civilian...Caucasian, Asian, African-American...Christian, Jewish and Buddhist. Those iconic pictures of the breakup of the Challenger are still hard to look at.
We don't seem to learn from disasters of the past but we do sometimes learn when we are in them....and this world certainly has disasters ahead of it. May the church begin to prepare.....and be encouraged with the same words that Paul gave those on his stricken ship.....only to us they point to eternal life...."Yet now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship,"
