The greatest gift of a Christian leader to his people is his own personal holiness – a reflection on John Owen

If you have not yet discovered John Piper’s biographies then I heartily recommend them. They can all be downloaded free of charge from the Desiring God website and are great for car or train journeys, walks and runs. 

I’ve just listened again today, during a long run, to John Piper’s biography on John Owen, ‘The Chief Design of My Life: Mortification and Universal Holiness’.

John Owen (1616 – 1683) was an English Nonconformist church leader, theologian, and academic administrator at the University of Oxford. 

He was also briefly a member of parliament for the University, sitting in the First Protectorate Parliament of 1654 to 1655 under Oliver Cromwell.

He also chaired the committee which in 1658 drew up the Savoy Declaration, the statement of faith that became the foundation document for the Congregational Churches. So Owen takes me right back to my childhood roots.

His influence on subsequent church leaders has been immense and yet most people today—even pastors and theologians—don't know much about him. 

Owen was born in England in 1616, the same year that William Shakespeare died and four years before the Pilgrims set sail for New England. This is virtually in the middle of the great Puritan century (roughly 1560 to 1660).

Puritanism was at heart a spiritual movement, passionately concerned with God and godliness. It began in England with William Tyndale the Bible translator, Luther's contemporary, and was essentially a movement for church reform, pastoral renewal and evangelism, and spiritual revival.

Owen was born in the middle of this movement and became its greatest pastor-theologian as the movement ended almost simultaneously with his death in 1683. He was also responsible for the publication of John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, the best-selling book in history outside the Bible.

Piper’s whole study is worthy of careful study (or listening) but I was particularly struck today by his comments on Owen’s guiding passion, his quest for personal holiness. The following notes are abridged from Piper.

The words of Owen which come closest to giving us the heart and aim of his life are found in the preface to the little book: Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers which was based on sermons that he preached to the students and academic community at Oxford:

‘I hope I may own in sincerity that my heart's desire unto God, and the chief design of my life ... are, that mortification and universal holiness may be promoted in my own and in the hearts and ways of others, to the glory of God, that so the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ may be adorned in all things.’

Even in his political messages—the sermons to Parliament—the theme was repeatedly holiness. He based this on the Old Testament patter— that ‘the people of Israel were at the height of their fortunes when their leaders were godly’. So the key issue for him was that the legislature be made up of holy people.

This humility opened Owen's soul to the greatest visions of Christ in the Scriptures. And he believed with all his heart the truth of 2 Corinthians 3:18 that by contemplating the glory of Christ ‘we may be gradually transformed into the same glory’. And that is nothing other than holiness.

Owen grew in knowledge of God by obeying what he knew already. In other words Owen recognized that holiness was not merely the goal of all true learning; it is also the means of more true learning. 

This elevated holiness even higher in his life: it was the aim of his life and, in large measure, the means of getting there.

Thus Owen kept the streams of the fountain of truth open by making personal obedience the effect of all that he learned, and the means of more. Owen passionately pursued a personal communion with God.

J I Packer says that the Puritans differ from evangelicals today because with them:

‘ ... communion with God was a great thing, to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small  thing. The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way that we are not. The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it. When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology—but rarely of their daily experience of God.’ 

From Owen’s writings, and from the testimony of others, it seems fair to say that the aim of personal holiness in all of life, and the mortifying of all known sin really was the labour not only of his teaching but of his own personal life.

This was the conviction that controlled him:

‘A man preacheth that sermon only well unto others which preacheth itself in his own soul. And he that doth not feed on and thrive in the digestion of the food which he provides for others will scarce make it savoury unto them; yea, he knows not but the food he hath provided may be poison, unless he have really tasted of it himself. If the word do not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us .’

Lessons about depression from the life of poet and hymn writer William Cowper

William Cowper (1731-1800) was the leading poet of the evangelical revival in the 18^th century. He was also for a brief period associated with our church in St Albans and was converted within 50 meters of the front door.

In 1763 Cowper suffered a severe bout of depression. His brother John placed him into the care of Dr Nathaniel Cotton who ran a private hospital in his house known as the Collegium Insonorum which stood on the corner of what is now College Street and Lower Dagnall Street.

Dr Cotton was a great friend of Dr Samuel Clark, the minister of the chapel in Dagnall Lane where our predecessors met before our present church building was erected (the current building is just around the corner in Spicer Street so one walks past the site of Cotton’s home walking the 60 or so metres from one site to the other).

Dr Cotton used to leave Bibles opened at strategic places around the house and in this way it was in reading Romans 3:25 that Cowper was delivered from the gloom of terror and despair to comfort and delight in knowing Christ ‘whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God.’

Cowper described his reaction: ‘Immediately I received the strength to believe it, and the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the fullness and completeness of His justification. In a moment I believed, and received the gospel.’

Later he was to pen such hymns as ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ and ‘There is a fountain filled with blood’ which are still sung in many churches today.

But Cowper’s conversion did not mean that he was permanently delivered from his depression. In fact he suffered four serious episodes throughout his life and attempted unsuccessfully on several occasions to commit suicide. He often suffered periods of profound doubt and after a dream in 1773 believed that he was doomed to eternal damnation.

It is not difficult to identify possible triggers to his illness. Cowper’s mother died when he was four years old and his father, with whom he never had a good relationship, sent him shortly afterward to boarding school. Later he was prevented by his uncle from marrying his cousin Theodora, with whom he was very much in love and had enjoyed a close relationship for five years. He never saw her again and neither of them ever married although she secretly supported his work financially through an intermediary. And he lived at a time when the clinical treatment of depression was far more rudimentary than it is now.

After leaving St Albans Cowper moved to Huntington where he was to meet Mary Unwin, later widowed after her husband was killed in a fall from a horse, and John Newton: former slave-trader, pastor and author of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’.

Unwin and Newton took Cowper under their wings and were a wonderful support to him in the years to come, enabling him to function to the level he did and grace us with his legacy of wonderful poetry and hymns.

Recently, on a long run, I listened again to John Piper’s excellent reflections on Cowper’s life, ‘Insanity and Spiritual Songs in the Soul of a Saint’.

I highly recommend the audio (I have listened to it several times already), but particularly wanted to recommend Piper’s six ‘lessons’ about mental illness in Christians, and to add a seventh of my own.

1. We can all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of his pessimism. But we have seen that Cowper is not consistent. Some years after his absolute statements of being cut off from God, he is again expressing some hope in being heard. His certainties were not sureties. So it will always be with the deceptions of darkness. Let us now, while we have the light, cultivate distrust of the certainties of despair.

2. We must love children and keep them close to us and secure with us. John Newton lost his mother just like Cowper. But he did not lose his father in the same way. In spite of all the sin and misery of those early years of Newton's life, there was a father, and who can say what deep roots of later health were preserved because of that. Let us be there for our sons and daughters. We are the crucial link in their normal sexual development and that is so crucial in their emotional wholeness.

3. May the Lord raise up many John Newton's for us, for the joy of our churches and for the survival of the William Cowpers among us and in our churches. Newton remained Cowper's pastor and friend the rest of his life, writing and visiting again and again. He did not despair of the despairing. After one of these visits in 1788 Cowper wrote: ’I knew you; knew you for the same shepherd who was sent to lead me out of the wilderness into the pasture where the Chief Shepherd feeds His flock.’

4. In the very research and writing of this lecture I experienced something that may be a crucial lesson for those of us given to too much self-absorption and analysis. I devoted about three days from waking till sleeping to William Cowper, besides leisurely reading of his poetry up till that time. Those three days I was almost entirely outside myself as it were. Now and then I ‘came to’ and became aware that I had been absorbed wholly in the life of another (which)… seemed to me extremely healthy… For the most part mental health is the use of the mind to focus on worthy reality outside ourselves.

5. The first version of this lecture was given in an evening service at Bethlehem Baptist Church. It proved to be one of the most encouraging things I have done in a long time. This bleak life was felt by many as hope-giving. There are no doubt different reasons for this in the cases of different people. But the lesson is surely that those of us who teach and preach and want to encourage our people to press on in hope and faith must not limit ourselves to success stories. The life of William Cowper had a hope-giving effect on my people. That is a very important lesson.

6. Let us rehearse the mercies of Jesus often for our people, and point them again and again to the blood of Jesus. These were the two things that brought Cowper to faith in 1764. In John 11 (the story of Jesus and Lazarus) he ‘saw so much benevolence, mercy, goodness, and sympathy with miserable men, in our Saviour's conduct, that I almost shed tears’. And on the decisive day (of his conversion) he said, ‘I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the fullness and completeness of His justification’.

And my seventh point? Don’t take feelings, dreams and ‘revelations’ too seriously, but rather test them all by Scripture. Cowper was best when he took God at his word, trusting his sure promises in the Bible, rather than placing his trust in his fickle feelings and a dream which it sounds had its origin in the depths of his wounded psyche or in the pit of hell itself.

As the Apostle Paul reminds us, ‘If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny 

Himself’ (2 Timothy 2:13).

Our eternal security lies ultimately in the faithfulness of God. Although we may feel at times like baby monkeys clinging on to God for dear life through the storms of our existence - at any moment at risk of losing our grip - our real situation, regardless of how we might feel, is more like that of baby kittens secure in the faithful grip of their mother’s jaws.

Oliver Barclay (1919-2013) made an immense contribution to evangelical Christianity worldwide

Oliver Barclay, the second General Secretary of what is now known as the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF), was promoted to glory this week. 

Christian Medical Fellowship (CMF), for which I work, grew out of IVF/UCCF in 1949 and was founded by Oliver’s immediate predecessor Douglas Johnson (DJ), who features in this obituary abridged from the UCCF website.

Both Oliver and Douglas made an immense contribution to the growth of evangelical Christianity worldwide.

Oliver Barclay, a scion of the banking family and second General Secretary of IVF/UCCF, died at his home in Leicester yesterday, 12 September 2013, aged 94.

He was born in Kobe, Japan, on 22 February 1919, the son of Joseph Gurney Barclay (who served with what is now the Church Mission Society). His great grandfather was the MP Thomas Fowell Buxton who campaigned with William Wilberforce as part of the influential Clapham Sect.

Oliver first joined the small IVF team in 1945, having completed a doctorate in zoology.  His original hope was to teach in one of China’s newer universities, but Douglas Johnson, IVF founding General Secretary (always known as DJ), persuaded him to defer his departure by two years. It soon became clear that the universities of Britain and Ireland would instead be his life’s work.

Oliver Barclay served for two years as a wartime President of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU) and as Chairman of the students’ national IVF Executive Committee.  From his days in Trinity College, Cambridge, he formed a lifelong friendship with John Stott, also at Trinity, and two years his junior. Both men would serve as lifetime Honorary Vice-Presidents of the CICCU.

As Chair of the student national IVF Executive, Oliver was privy to DJ’s plans that the IVF should found a Centre for Biblical Research in a university town, to strengthen the roots of the church in the then very liberal Theology faculties of the universities. What would soon become Tyndale House, Cambridge (secured in 1944 and opened in 1945) had originally belonged to a member of the Barclay family. It now hosts one of the finest libraries for biblical research in the world.

In 1953, Oliver became the first IVF Universities Secretary, supporting the IVF travelling secretaries [now UCCF staff workers] around the four nations. The liberal hold in the university theology faculties, and in the churches, created much opposition to evangelical influences among students.

In 1964 Oliver Barclay succeeded Douglas Johnson as IVF General Secretary. This was the same year his first wife, Dorothy, a consultant surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital (whom he had married in 1949) died of cancer, leaving four children. The following year, Oliver married Daisy Hickey, a family friend.

Oliver Barclay steered the Inter-Varsity Fellowship through its own significant expansion to engage with the times, as new universities and colleges were founded, and as a surge of change swept through societal norms.  In 1975 the movement’s name was changed to the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) to reflect the growing work in the polytechnics and colleges of education. Its publishing wing, by then known as Inter-Varsity Press (IVP), was the UK’s leading evangelical publishing house.

Oliver Barclay urged clear-thinking evangelical graduates to consider two major directions: to pursue an academic career; or if ordained to apply for vacant churches in university towns.  Gradually the tide of liberalism began to turn. Oliver was succeeded in 1980 by Robin Wells under whom from the mid-late 1980s the regional teams would be formed, opening the way for the appointment, under Bob Horn’s leadership, of the first relay workers.

In retirement, Dr Barclay continued to serve on the IVP long-range planning group, and was instrumental in the founding of the UCCF Research Council to oversee the work of Tyndale House in Cambridge and the new Whitefield Institute in Oxford. He was co-founder in 1989 of the journal Science and Christian Belief, joint organ of the Victoria Institute and of Christians in Science.

Oliver served on the Executive Committee of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) from 1959-1983, and as its chair from 1971-79. He served as an Honorary Vice-President from 1983-91, and was always particularly thrilled to see its pioneering work pass into the hands of national leaders. This global movement now has presence in over 150 nations.

Oliver Barclay wrote several books including Evangelicalism in Britain 1935-1995 (IVP, 1997) and in the 1980s he edited a book series entitled When Christians Disagree. He had no formal theological training but developed in himself – and cultivated in his staff – the ability to ‘think theologically’. He read through Calvin’s Institutes each year and prayed daily for a deeper understanding of the meaning of the death of Christ. He never lost sight of his dual task, to strengthen a witness to Christ both in the student world and among faculty.

We thank God for Oliver Barclay’s tenacity and far-sightedness, his shrewd judgment and his passion for the gospel; and we commend his widow Daisy and his four children to your prayers.

Today is JRR Tolkien’s 121st birthday - a tribute

Lovers of ‘The Lord of Rings’ Trilogy, and now ‘the Hobbit’ will be interested to know that today, 3 January 2013, is JRR Tolkien’s twelfthty-first birthday.

Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on 3 January 1892 and died on 2 September 1973.

He is of course best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which have had a major resurgence in the light of Peter Jackson’s award winning films.

But as well as being an accomplished English writer and poet he was also a philologist and university professor: Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College, Oxford from 1945 to 1959.

He was also a close friend of CS Lewis, fellow Oxford professor and author of the 'Chronicles of Narnia' (also now a film series) and many favourite books on Christian apologetics of which ‘Mere Christianity’, ‘Miracles’, ‘The Problem of Pain’ and ‘The Screwtape Letters’ are probably the best known.

Tolkien was a major factor in Lewis’ Christian conversion and they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings which met at the Eagle and Child Pub just over the road from St John’s College.

Tolkien was appointed CBE by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’ and Forbes ranked him the 5th top-earning dead celebrity in 2009.

After his death, Tolkien's son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion.

These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda, and Middle-earth within it.

Tolkien, throughout his life, was a devout Catholic, and behind all his books lies a Christian cosmology or worldview.

This is most evident in the Silmarillion, which has striking parallels with the biblical narrative and especially with the concept of an omnipotent, omnipresent God who created angels as well as men.

For those who wish to know more about the origins of balrogs, wizards, giant spiders, trolls, orcs and Sautron himself the Silmarillion is essential reading. The narrative is densely packed and one is left with the impression that had Tolkien been granted several more lifetimes he would have filled it out in much more detail as he has done with the familiar tales of Middle-earth.

The Silmarillion’s first chapter rings loudly of the biblical creation narrative:

‘There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad.’

As the narrative progresses we learn that these created Ainur, or angelic beings, included the more powerful Valar and the subordinate Maiar, who Tolkien describes as ‘other spirits whose being also began before the world’ who act as ‘servants and helpers’ to the Valar. Balrogs, Wizards (including Saruman and Gandalf) and Sauron himself are all Maiar.

This angelic hierarchy is reminiscent of the similar celestial strata we see in the Bible consisting of cherubim, seraphim, angels, archangels and others. And, as in the Bible, some Ainur (angelic beings) are good and some are bad.

In the Silmarillion, the lead ‘bad’ Vala (singular of Valar) is Melkor, who became Morgoth, and conscripted Sauron, the dark master of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Like the biblical Satan, or devil, he started out good, but fell on account of his pride and rebelled against Iluvatar (ie. God).

‘But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar, for he sought therein to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself.’

Having fallen he then led others astray:

‘Then the discord of Melkor spread ever wider, and the melodies which had been heard before foundered in a sea of turbulent sound.’

In the same way Satan is described in the Bible as ‘the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty’ who was ‘in Eden, the garden of God’ and ‘blameless’ but whose heart ‘became proud on account of (his) beauty’ and was thrown to earth (See Ezekiel 28 and Revelation 12).

However Eru’s plan, like that of the God of the Bible, was not to destroy him immediately or stop his evil but rather to turn it for good:

‘And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.’

So we see here Christian concept that evil is fallen good and that, despite evil, God uses it to bring about something even more beautiful than was first created.

Eru’s words to Melkor bring echoes of Joseph’s words to his brothers after they had betrayed him in Genesis 50:20:

‘You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.’

And of course most importantly they foreshadow the life of Jesus Christ who, although crucified by the hands of sinful men, thereby provided, through his death and resurrection, the path by which sinful human beings can be reconciled with God himself.

So, if I have whetted your appetite you might be interested in reading the Silmarillion for yourself (£5.99 on Amazon), and perhaps even reading it alongside the Bible.

David Brainerd – Reflections on the life and ministry of this great inspirer of missionaries

On a run this morning I listened again to John Piper’s excellent biography on the life of David Brainerd, widely known as the missionary to the American Indians.

I love Piper’s missionary biographies and listen to them again and again always picking up something new.

In this one Piper particularly recommends Jonathan Edward’s ‘Life of Dave Brainerd’ which he says has never been out of print, but the only copies I could find on the web were several hundred dollars each so I will have to give that a miss. The biography though is an inspiration in itself and well worth the listen (or read).

Piper begins as follows:

‘David Brainerd was born on April 20, 1718 in Haddam, Connecticut. That year John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards turned 14. Benjamin Franklin turned 12 and George Whitefield 3. The Great Awakening was just over the horizon and Brainerd would live through both waves of it in the mid thirties and early forties, then die of tuberculosis in Jonathan Edwards' house at the age of 29 on October 9, 1747.’

He then outlines how he was present at Yale University at the beginning of the Great Awakening when Whitefield visited. Later he was thrown out of the university for his part in it, but God turned this disappointment into 'His appointment'.

‘Brainerd preached to the Indians at the Forks of the Delaware for one year. But on June 19, 1745 he made his first preaching tour to the Indians at Crossweeksung, New Jersey. This was the place where God moved in amazing power and brought awakening and blessing to the Indians. Within a year there were 130 persons in his growing assembly of believers.’

He then sums up the impact he has had upon other great missionaries who followed:

‘It was a short life: twenty-nine years, five months and nineteen days. Only eight of those years as a believer, and only four of those as a missionary. Why has Brainerd's life made the impact that it has? One obvious reason is that Jonathan Edwards took the Diaries and published them as a Life of Brainerd in 1749. But why has this book never been out of print?

Why did John Wesley say, "Let every preacher read carefully over the 'Life of Brainerd'"? Why was it written of Henry Martyn that "perusing the life of David Brainerd, his soul was filled with a holy emulation of that extraordinary man; and after deep consideration and fervent prayer, he was at length fixed in a resolution to imitate his example"? Why did William Carey regard Edwards' Life of Brainerd as a sacred text? Why did Robert Morrison and Robert McCheyne of Scotland and John Mills of America and Frederick Schwartz of Germany and David Livingston of England and Andrew Murray of South Africa and Jim Elliot of modern America look upon Brainerd with a kind of awe and draw power from him the way they and countless others did?

Gideon Hawley, another missionary protégé of Jonathan Edwards spoke for hundreds when he wrote about his struggles as a missionary in 1753, “I need, greatly need something more than human to support me. I read my Bible and Mr. Brainerd’s Life, the only books I brought with me, and from them have a little support.”’

Piper speculates as to why Brainerd’s life had such an impact and asks specifically why reading about Brainerd has encouraged him to press on in the ministry and to strive for holiness and divine power and fruitfulness in his life.

He concludes that Brainerd’s life ‘is a vivid, powerful testimony to the truth that God can and does use weak, sick, discouraged, beat-down, lonely, struggling saints, who cry to him day and night, to accomplish amazing things for his glory’.

He then outlines the struggles Brainerd faced as follows, expanding on each in turn:

1. Brainerd struggled with almost constant sickness.
2. Brainerd struggled with relentlessly recurring depression.
3. Brainerd struggled with loneliness.
4. Brainerd struggled with immense external hardships.
5. Brainerd struggled with a bleak outlook on nature.
6. Brainerd struggled to love the Indians.
7. Brainerd struggled to stay true to his calling.

Piper concludes as follows:

‘I think the reason Brainerd's life has such powerful effects on people is that in spite of all his struggles he never gave up his faith or his ministry. He was consumed with a passion to finish his race and honor his Master and spread the kingdom and advance in personal holiness. It was this unswerving allegiance to the cause of Christ that makes the bleakness of his life glow with glory so that we can understand Henry Martyn when he wrote, as a student in Cambridge in 1802, “I long to be like him!”

Brainerd called his passion for more holiness and more usefulness a kind of “pleasing pain.” “When I really enjoy God, I feel my desires of him the more insatiable, and my thirstings after holiness the more unquenchable; ... Oh, for holiness! Oh, for more of God in my soul! Oh, this pleasing pain! It makes my soul press after God ... Oh, that I might not loiter on my heavenly journey!”’

William Wilberforce was an extraordinary reformer but what was the secret of his motivation and perseverance?

John Piper’s Christian biographies are a must if you enjoy inspirational MP3s. I listened to his masterly treatment of William Wilberforce for the third time today on an eight mile run and still found it profoundly refreshing.

William Wilberforce was the British Parliamentarian who led the campaign to abolish the slave trade and just three years ago we celebrated the bicentenary of his success in 1807. He has inspired many social reformers and those who desire to shape public policy today can still learn a great deal from studying his methods.

But Piper’s account goes right to the heart of understanding where Wilberforce’s motivation, inspiration and dogged perseverance actually came from. As always Piper draws on original sources and in particular Wilberforce’s own book, A Practical View of Christianity, which was first published in 1797.

‘What made Wilberforce tick’, says Piper, ‘was a profound biblical allegiance to what he called the "peculiar doctrines" of Christianity. These, he said, give rise, in turn, to true affections – what we might call "passion" or "emotions" – for spiritual things, which, in turn, break the power of pride and greed and fear, and then lead to transformed morals which, in turn, lead to the political welfare of the nation.’

In other words Wilberforce’s political ambitions - and principally his lifelong commitment to abolishing slavery - were the direct product of his evangelical Christian faith. He said, ‘If . . . a principle of true Religion [i.e., true Christianity] should . . . gain ground, there is no estimating the effects on public morals, and the consequent influence on our political welfare.’

Piper goes on to explain that Wilberforce ‘believed with all his heart that new affections for God were the key to new morals and lasting political reformation. And these new affections and this reformation did not come from mere ethical systems. They came from what he called the "peculiar doctrines" of Christianity. For Wilberforce, practical deeds were born in "peculiar doctrines." By that term he simply meant the central distinguishing doctrines of human depravity, divine judgment, the substitutionary work of Christ on the cross, justification by faith alone, regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and the practical necessity of fruit in a life devoted to good deeds.’

Wilberforce in fact felt so strongly about the real root of his commitment to abolishing slavery that he called the practice of ‘considering Christian morals as distinct from Christian doctrines’ a ‘fatal habit’.

However don’t let me spoil it for you. If you want a brilliant introduction to the life of Wilberforce based on his own writings which goes far deeper than the 2006 movie ‘Amazing Grace’ to describe his early life and conversion, his relationship with John Newton, the story of slavery’s abolition, the identity of his other main lifetime ambition, his family life, mystery illness and the secret to his amazing perseverance then you can’t do much better than John Piper’s MP3 (or, if you prefer, the online transcript).