CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
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Born Into Sorrow, Called Into Glory
✦ ✦ ✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦ ✦ ✦
My name is Andrew Alexander Bonar, and I was born on May 29, 1810, in the great city of Edinburgh, Scotland. Looking back now from the far end of a long life of ministry and grace, I can see with perfect clarity what I could not fully see at the beginning: that every moment of my life, every tear shed, every joy experienced, every doubt wrestled through in the quiet of my room — all of it was ordered by the hand of Jesus. He who calls the stars by name knew my name before I drew my first breath. He fashioned my story long before I could read a single page of it.
I was the youngest of seven brothers in a household that feared God. The Bonar home was no ordinary place. My father saw to it that Scripture was the foundation of our daily life, and that reverence for the things of the Lord was not merely performed on the Sabbath but woven through the whole fabric of our family. My brother Horatius would one day write hymns that would bless believers all across the English-speaking world. My brother John would preach with eloquence and grace. And I — the youngest, the last to come — would spend more than fifty years in the pulpit, pointing souls to the Saviour who had found me in my own desperate need.
(Proverbs 11:30 KJV)
“The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he that winneth souls is wise.”
That verse became the motto of my life. But before I could win a single soul for Jesus, I first needed to be found by Him myself. And that finding did not come easily or quickly. It was a long, painful road through confusion, darkness, and grief.
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
THE SHADOW THAT FELL EARLY: THE DEATH OF MY FATHER
When I was just seven years old, my father died. I do not think a child of seven can fully measure the weight of such a loss, but he feels it nonetheless — in the empty chair at the table, in the sound of his mother’s quiet weeping, in the strange and heavy silence that settles over a house when the man who led it is gone. My father had been the spiritual pillar of our home. His death removed that pillar, and though my mother was a woman of extraordinary faith and love — a woman worthy of every honor her children gave her — the loss pressed itself deeply into my soul.
In those early years, I was left fatherless at eleven years of age. My siblings and I clung closely to our mother and looked to our oldest brother James as the family’s representative. The weight of that season shaped me in ways I would not fully understand until many years later. I believe now that God was preparing me even then — teaching me through grief what no classroom could teach, making me acquainted with sorrow so that I might one day minister to the sorrowful with something deeper than words. He who was called a Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with grief, was already making me a companion of His sufferings, though I did not yet know His name in the full, saving sense.
(Isaiah 53:3 KJV)
“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
My mother was the anchor of our family in those dark years. She trained us in the ways of God with a tenderness and a seriousness that left its mark on every one of her children. She prayed for us, read the Scriptures with us, and kept the lamp of faith burning in our home even when the winds of sorrow threatened to extinguish it. I owe her more than I can express. She was one of the greatest instruments God ever used in my life, and I think of her still with deep gratitude and love.
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
A YOUNG MAN WITHOUT ASSURANCE: MY YEARS OF SPIRITUAL STRUGGLE
Though I was raised in a home where the Gospel was faithfully taught, I did not immediately possess the assurance of salvation. This may surprise those who think that growing up in a godly family guarantees a swift and clear conversion. But it was not so with me. The early nineteenth century in Scotland was a time when many earnest young men wrestled deeply with questions of grace and faith. We had been taught the doctrines. We could recite the catechism. We knew the stories of the Bible as well as we knew the streets of Edinburgh. But knowing about Christ is not the same as knowing Christ — and it is that second kind of knowing that the heart truly needs.
For years I wrestled with uncertainty. I read books like Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, and I felt the weight of what was being described, but the peace it promised seemed always just beyond my reach. I attended church services faithfully. I heard powerful preaching. I even heard the preaching of Edward Irving, which my daughter’s later account tells us “cast into my soul some of the first beams of light as to spiritual truth.” The light was beginning to dawn, but morning had not yet fully come.
What pressed upon me most deeply during those years was watching others find Christ. I would see a friend — someone I had known, studied with, walked beside through the streets of Edinburgh — come to a settled peace in Jesus, a peace I could plainly see on their face and hear in their words. And I would go home to my room and wonder: Why not me? Why does the assurance that others seem to find so readily remain hidden from my searching heart? I longed to know that I was truly born again. And that longing became, under God’s hand, the very engine that drove me to seek Him with all the desperation that a young man’s soul can muster.
(Matthew 5:6 KJV)
“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.”
I was hungry and thirsty in those years. The Lord has told us that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be filled. He was faithful to His word. The filling was coming. I simply had not yet arrived at that quiet Saturday afternoon in October when everything would change.
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
THE BOOK THAT BROKE THE DARKNESS: GUTHRIE’S TRIAL OF A SAVING INTEREST IN CHRIST
It was on the Sabbath, the fourteenth of October, 1830, that Jesus finally found me — or rather, that I fully understood that He had been finding me all along. I was twenty years old. I was sitting quietly in the room I shared with my brothers, the one we used for study, and I was reading a book. The book was William Guthrie’s Trial of a Saving Interest in Christ, a work sometimes described as being in the tradition of the great Puritan divines of Scotland.
I had come to it in my searching, hoping that its clear explanations might throw light on the question that had haunted me for so many years: How can a sinner know that he truly belongs to Christ? Guthrie wrote with the plainness and directness that my soul needed. He explained, without unnecessary mystery, what saving faith looks like and how a soul may know it possesses it. He pointed not to emotional experiences or dramatic visions, but to the simple act of receiving — opening the empty hands of faith and taking what Jesus freely offers.
As I read that afternoon, something happened in the quiet of that room that I have never been able to explain fully, and have never needed to. I began to have what I can only describe as a “secret joyful hope” that I truly believed on the Lord Jesus. The fullness and freeness of divine grace filled my heart in a way that was entirely new. I did nothing but receive. That is all. I simply received. And that simple, quiet receiving was the moment of my new birth — or rather, it was the moment I finally understood the new birth that had been taking place in me through all those years of searching and longing.
“I did nothing but receive.” —Andrew A. Bonar, on the day of his conversion
After that day, no doubt of my acceptance in Christ ever again dimmed the clearness of my faith. Thirty years later I would write: “I have been many, many times unhappy for a time, but never led to doubt my interest in the Lord Jesus.” And fifty years later I could say: “For fifty years the Lord has kept me within sight of the Cross.” And on my eighty-second birthday, looking back over the whole of my journey with Jesus, I wrote these words, which I believe with my whole heart:
“It was in the year 1830 that I found the Saviour, or rather, that He found me and laid me on His shoulders rejoicing, and I have never parted company with Him all these sixty-two years.” —Andrew A. Bonar, on his eighty-second birthday
He found me and laid me on His shoulders. That image from the parable of the Good Shepherd — the one lost sheep recovered and carried home with joy — has always seemed to me the most accurate description of what happened in that quiet study room in Edinburgh. I had not climbed up to the Shepherd. He had come down to find me. And He found me, not in a moment of dramatic revival or public spectacle, but in the solitude of my own room, in the company of a good book, on an ordinary Scottish Sabbath afternoon.
(Luke 15:5–6 KJV)
“And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost.”
The joy that filled me that day was quiet, deep, and utterly real. I was not the kind of man given to extravagant emotional display. But the joy was there — steady, bright, and permanent. It was the joy of a man who had been lost and was now found. It was the joy that Jesus Himself spoke of: the joy that belongs to those who have been received by grace.
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
THE CONSCIENCE THAT KEPT ME WAITING ENTERING THE DIVINITY HALL
After my conversion in 1830, I faced a question of deep conscience. I had long felt drawn to the ministry of the Word. But I had always kept myself back from entering the Divinity Hall — the school where ministers were trained — until I was sure I was truly in Christ. My own words on this are plain: “I always kept back till I was in Christ before I could think of entering the Hall.”
This was not false humility or delay for delay’s sake. It was the deep seriousness of a man who understood that there was something terribly wrong about standing in a pulpit to tell others how to find Christ if he had not found Christ himself. The thought of being unsent, of running on my own motion rather than God’s call, was a kind of misery I refused to accept. And so I waited — patiently, painfully, but with a settled conviction that I must not enter the work of God until I was genuinely in God’s work.
In 1831, a year after my conversion, I passed through the preparatory examination before the Presbytery, and my theological studies began in earnest. I poured myself into those studies with a hunger that the years of searching had only sharpened. I studied divinity at the University of Edinburgh, and I was known among my fellow students for my seriousness and my devotion to prayer. Those who knew me then would later say that even as a student, my great burden was the salvation of souls. I could not shake it. Every lecture, every book, every conversation in the university halls — it all seemed to flow back toward that one consuming question: How can sinners be brought to Jesus?
Among my companions in those years were men who would become lifelong friends and partners in the ministry. One of them, Dr. Moody-Stuart, later wrote of those early days:
“My introduction to your father was in 1836, through his attached friend Robert M’Cheyne, when they were still students for the ministry... It was to me a golden day when I first became acquainted with a young man so full of Christ. He introduced Andrew Bonar and then Horace and Somerville, and I invited them to meet in my house once a week for prayer. It was a singularly pleasant and fruitful meeting, for we were of one heart and one mind, and the Lord Jesus, according to His promise, was in the midst of us with the joy of His salvation.” —Dr. Moody-Stuart
That weekly prayer meeting — a small company of young men gathered in a house in Edinburgh, crying out to God for the salvation of souls and the blessing of the Church — was the kind of thing that would mark my ministry for the rest of my life. I believe to this day that nothing of lasting worth in the Kingdom of God is accomplished apart from prayer. The prayer meetings of our student years were not merely exercises in piety. They were the engine room of a ministry that would eventually touch thousands.
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
THE FRIENDSHIP THAT SHAPED A MINISTRY: ROBERT MURRAY M’CHEYENE
Of all the gifts God gave me in those student years, none was more precious than my friendship with Robert Murray M’Cheyne. We met during our theological studies and became, almost immediately, close companions in prayer and in the pursuit of God. He was a year or two younger than I, but in some ways he seemed already far ahead — ahead in holiness, ahead in heavenly-mindedness, ahead in the burning desire for the glory of Christ that would mark his brief but extraordinary life.
M’Cheyne was unlike any man I had ever known. Those who met him remarked on his holiness as something almost tangible — not a performance, not a spiritual manner put on for effect, but a reality that flowed from a life lived in the presence of Jesus. A minister in the north of Scotland who knew him well said simply: “He is the most Jesus-like man I ever met with” — and then went to his room to weep. Dr. Candlish of Edinburgh remarked to Dr. Moody-Stuart: “I can’t understand M’Cheyne; grace seems to be natural to him.”
For me, his friendship was an education that no university could have provided. He sharpened me, challenged me, prayed for me, wrote to me with both encouragement and honest correction. His letters from those early years are treasures that I have carried in my heart far longer than I have carried them in my pocket. In one letter, written when I was serving as a missionary in Edinburgh before receiving my own charge, he wrote to me these words:
“Dear Andrew, God is keeping you in the hollow of His hand. When a warrior begins to fight, he never throws his best dart at the enemy first. He throws some weak arrows among them, just to begin the contest; he keeps his polished shaft for the hottest of the fight. Your day is coming.” —Robert Murray M’Cheyne, letter to Andrew Bonar, January 19, 1838
Your day is coming. Those words sustained me through many a long and uncertain season. And when my day did come — first at Jedburgh, then at Collace, then at Finnieston in Glasgow — I never forgot the friend who had spoken them over me in faith.
In another letter, written to congratulate me on my appointment to the parish of Collace in 1838, M’Cheyne wrote with a warmth and a grace that still moves me whenever I recall it:
“Now then, dear Andrew, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech men by us. We, then, as fellow-workers with God must beseech men not to receive the grace of God in vain. May God count you faithful, putting you into the ministry, and may the arms of your hands be made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob.” —Robert Murray M’Cheyne, letter to Andrew Bonar, July 17, 1838
That was the spirit of the man. Even in a letter of congratulation, he could not help turning our eyes back to the work — the great work of imploring men and women to be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ. That was always the center. That was always the point.
(2 Corinthians 5:20 KJV)
“Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.”
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
FIRST STEPS IN MINISTRY: JEDBURGH AND THE HARVEST OF FIRST FRUITS
In 1835, having completed my studies in the Divinity Hall, I preached my first sermon. This took place in Jedburgh, a market town in the Scottish Borders, where I had come to serve as an assistant. It was in Jedburgh that my first ministerial experiences were gained, and they were experiences that left their mark on me for a lifetime.
I remember what it felt like to stand in that pulpit for the first time with a congregation before me — men and women with immortal souls, living in time but bound for eternity, looking up at a young man who had been entrusted with the most serious message in the universe. I felt the weight of it. Later, when reviewing my notes from that first sermon, I recognized a significant mistake I had made: I had no “heads” — no clear, organized points by which the congregation could follow the truth. I said afterward: “When we are young men we are apt to think this is the right way to preach — going straight on from topic to topic; but the hearers need pegs on which to hang the truth.”
The people were not greatly impressed by that first sermon. And honestly, neither was I. But one of them said to me years later, with honest Scottish plainness, “It’s a gude thing, sir, we didna like ye at first, or we wadna hae had ye noo!” That made me laugh. And it reminded me that God does not always choose to open doors through immediate triumph. Sometimes He opens them through patient faithfulness, through year after year of quiet, steady sowing until the harvest comes.
One of the most sobering and instructive experiences of those Jedburgh days was the visitation of the prisoners in the local jail. Going into that dark place, sitting with men and women whose lives had taken terrible turns, listening to their accounts of themselves — this gave me an insight into the evil of the human heart that I never forgot. One prisoner, asked to describe her experience of life, said simply: “An absent God and a present Devil.” I have never forgotten those words. They capture, with terrible precision, the spiritual condition of every soul that has not found Christ: a sense of God’s absence on one side, and the tyranny of the enemy on the other.
But even in that jail, Jesus was present. Even there, the Gospel was good news. And I learned in those early visits to dark and desperate places that the message of salvation is most powerful not in comfortable sanctuaries but in the places where human need is most raw and undeniable.
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
THE OLD MAN AND THE LIFTED HAT: A LESSON IN WALKING WITH JESUS
During my student days in Edinburgh, on my daily walk to one of the college classes, something happened that made a deep and lasting impression on me. My companions and I used to pass an old man who was going to his business each morning. What was peculiar about him was that he would sometimes walk along holding his hat a little way off his head — not on his head, but hovering just above it, lifted up by his hand. The action was so unusual that it excited the notice of everyone who met him, and eventually someone gathered the courage to ask the old man what he meant by it.
He was reluctant to tell at first. But at last he said, “Well, if you will know, I will tell you. As I walk along the street I have sometimes such fellowship with the Lord Jesus, that I feel as if He were close beside me, and I lift my hat in token of reverence.”
I have never forgotten that old man, and I have told his story more times than I can count. He was not a famous preacher or a celebrated theologian. He was simply a man who had learned to walk through the ordinary streets of Edinburgh in the conscious presence of Jesus Christ — so conscious, so immediate, so real, that he could not help tipping his hat in reverence as he walked. That is the kind of faith I have always wanted. That is the kind of fellowship with the living Christ that I have pursued through all the years of my ministry.
On my own eighty-second birthday, I wrote these words: “It was in the year 1830 that I found the Saviour, or rather, that He found me and laid me on His shoulders rejoicing, and I have never parted company with Him all these sixty-two years.” That is my testimony. Not sixty-two years of dramatic visions and perpetual ecstasy, but sixty-two years of steady, daily, real companionship with the living Jesus. He has been the companion of my study, the presence in my pulpit, the comfort in my grief, and the joy of my heart.
(Hebrews 13:5–6 KJV)
“For he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me.”
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
A NATION AWAKENING: THE SETTING OF MY EARLY MINISTRY
To understand my story, you must understand something of the world into which my ministry was born. The Scotland of the 1830s was a nation in the grip of deep spiritual darkness in many places, yet on the verge of an extraordinary visitation from God. The Gospel, because it was so little preached in many quarters, was little sought. Spiritual deadness lay over many congregations like a fog that no human effort could lift. But even as that darkness lay heavy, God was raising up a band of men whom He would use to pierce it.
A circle of young ministers — M’Cheyne, myself, and several others — had been formed in those student years into a fellowship of extraordinary depth and purpose. We prayed together, studied together, encouraged one another, and shared our burden for the souls of Scotland. We were, in a sense, an unlikely army. But God has always delighted in doing great things through unlikely instruments.
In 1838, each of us found our sphere of labour. M’Cheyne was called to St. Peter’s in Dundee. I was called to Collace, a small parish in Perthshire at the foot of Dunsinnane Hill. And though those were quiet, rural postings — far from the great cities and the great stages of the world — God was about to pour out His Spirit upon them in ways that none of us had imagined.
The times were indeed peculiar. And God raised up men of peculiar grace, mighty in the Scriptures, full of the Holy Ghost and of faith. Like the sun bursting through clouds came the great revival of 1839–40, which spread over all the land. But before that revival broke, there was a mission — a remarkable mission to a remarkable people — that would mark my ministry for the rest of my life.
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
ORDAINED FOR HIS PURPOSES: THE CALL TO COLLACE
In 1838, I was ordained as the minister of the parish church in Collace, Perthshire. My ordination followed a short assistantship at Jedburgh and some months of missionary work in the parish of St. George’s Church in Edinburgh. The call to Collace came in an interesting way — one that I have always recalled with a smile and a sense of God’s good humor.
Mr. Nairne of Dunsinnane, a true friend of the cause of Christ in that region, asked M’Cheyne whether he would leave Dundee and come to Collace. M’Cheyne replied, “No; but I will tell you of a much better man” — and named me. I am not sure whether to be flattered by M’Cheyne’s recommendation or humbled by his swift refusal to come himself! But the result was that I found myself called to a beautiful, rural parish in Perthshire, with a square-towered church half-hidden among trees, a manse close by the churchyard wall, and a flock of souls who needed a shepherd.
M’Cheyne wrote to me to mark the occasion, and his letter was full of the tenderness and spiritual fire that characterized everything he wrote:
“May it indeed be a gift from His hand who hath done and will do all things well. There are many tokens for good about it, so that you must feel yourself very much called by God... Now then, dear Andrew, we are ambassadors for Christ... May God count you faithful, putting you into the ministry.” —Robert Murray M’Cheyne, July 17, 1838
I arrived at Collace a young man of twenty-eight, full of hope and prayer, carrying into that quiet parish all the burden and all the joy of a soul that had been found by Jesus and set on fire by His love. The old minister who had been there before me had served the parish for nearly fifty years, but there was only one woman in the whole congregation who was known to have received any spiritual good from his ministry. He himself was very much afraid that someone might come who would preach what he called the “new doctrines.”
I was that someone. And the doctrines I preached were not new at all — they were as old as the New Testament, as old as the Cross, as old as the moment when the first sinner was told that there was forgiveness through the blood of the Lamb. When I came to Collace, there were perhaps not more than half a dozen living Christians in the whole place. What I could not yet see — what only God could see — was what Collace would look like after years of faithful preaching and fervent prayer.
(Ezekiel 37:3–5 KJV)
“And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest. Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.”
That was my Collace. A valley of dry bones. And I had come to prophesy. Not in my own strength — never in my own strength — but in the name and by the power of the Lord who had sent me. He who had breathed life into dry bones before could do it again. He who had raised Lazarus from the dead could raise a dead parish to life. I believed it with my whole heart. And I went to my knees to pray that He would do it.
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
THE CHARACTER OF A MINISTRY: WHAT I CARRIED INTO THE PULPIT
Before I close this first chapter of my story, I want to say something about the kind of minister I was determined to be — or rather, the kind of minister I believed God was calling me to be. I was not a great orator. Those who heard me preach in later years would sometimes remark, with kindness meant, that I was not a speaker so much as a talker. That is fair. My voice had peculiarities. I had a habit, as one good lady once remonstrated with me, of letting it drop suddenly just when the hearer’s attention was most fixed — so that my very best passages were sometimes inaudible to those in the back pews.
But what I lacked in oratorical polish, I prayed that God would supply in spiritual power. I was never interested in impressing people with my eloquence. Those who knew me best knew that I was more concerned about the eternal destiny of my hearers than about how they rated my sermons. The pulpit was not a stage. It was a place where a sinner saved by grace stood before other sinners, holding out the Bread of Life and the Water of Life, and begging them to eat and drink.
As early as 1835, before I had even begun my ministry at Collace, I wrote these words in my diary: “I never before felt the extreme difficulty of being absorbed in the desire of saving souls as my sole object, and of taking the glory of God as my simple aim.” That difficulty — the difficulty of keeping one’s eye truly fixed on Christ and on souls rather than on oneself — was a battle I fought in every sermon I ever preached.
And thirty-six years into my preaching ministry, I could write: “Christ is more than ever precious to me in His atonement, righteousness, merit, heart. Nothing else satisfies me. I only yearn to know Him better, and preach Him more fully.” That is what I wanted. That is what I pursued. More of Christ. Always more of Christ.
(Philippians 3:10 KJV)
“That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death.”
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD: THE SHAPE OF A LIFE
As I reflect on these early years — the years of childhood sorrow, of spiritual searching, of student fellowship and growing call — I can see with perfect clarity the hand of Jesus in every season. He allowed the early loss of my father to teach me grief. He allowed the years of spiritual uncertainty to teach me the preciousness of assurance. He gave me M’Cheyne to teach me holiness. He gave me Jedburgh and Collace to teach me faithfulness. And through all of it, He was shaping me into the man He intended me to be: not a great man by the world’s reckoning, but a man with one great purpose — to win souls for Jesus Christ.
The Proverb that had lodged itself in my heart as a young man — “He that winneth souls is wise” — was not merely a text to me. It was a vocation. It was the north star by which I navigated every decision of my ministry. Should I go to this city or stay in this country parish? The soul-winner asks: Where will I win the most souls? Should I write this book or spend the afternoon visiting? The soul-winner asks: Which of these will do the most good to the most souls?
I was not always wise in answering those questions. I made mistakes. I had times of discouragement when the harvest seemed impossibly distant. I had times of grief that nearly overwhelmed me. But through it all, Jesus was faithful. Through it all, He kept His hand upon me and His call before me. Through it all, He was working out His purposes — purposes that would eventually touch the lives of thousands of men and women in Scotland and beyond.
The story of those purposes — the story of revival and prayer and faithful pastoral work, the story of grief and joy, the story of a life spent at the feet of Jesus — is what the rest of this book will tell. I invite you to walk with me through those years. I invite you to see what I saw: the grace of God poured out upon an unlikely vessel, making him useful beyond anything he could have imagined or deserved.
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
THE SECRET OF A SUSTAINED JOY: WALKING IN THE LIGHT OF THE CROSS
One of the things that marked my life from the moment of my conversion in 1830 was a deep, consistent, almost unbroken joy in Jesus Christ. I know this may seem like a boast, and I want to be careful to frame it rightly. I was naturally inclined to depression. Humiliation and self-abasement were everyday exercises of my spiritual life. There were shadows, seasons of discouragement, moments when the work seemed fruitless and the burden seemed crushing. But through all of it, a steady current of joy flowed — not because my circumstances were easy, but because my Saviour was real.
Those who knew me well remarked upon this joy with consistency. One wrote that the joy of the Lord was my strength, "with a fulness and a constancy that were quite singular." Another noted that I seemed to live in a perpetual sunshine, spreading not gloom but brightness wherever I appeared. I did not think of these observations as compliments. I thought of them as testimonies to the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, who had promised that those who abide in Him would have a joy that no one could take from them.
The secret of that joy was not complicated. It was the Cross. I lived near the Cross. I preached from the Cross. I drew every cup of consolation from the fountain that flowed from Calvary. Later in my ministry, when Mr. Moody asked me at the Northfield Conference to tell young ministers the secret of a consecrated life, I said: "I can only say to my young brethren that for forty years there has not been a day that I have not had access to the Mercy-seat." Daily access to the Mercy-seat. Daily coming to Jesus in prayer and in the Word. That was the whole secret. There was no other.
(John 15:11 KJV)
"These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full."
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
THE BROTHERS WHO WALKED BESIDE ME: JOHN, HORATIUS, AND THE BONDS OF FAMILY FAITH
No account of my early life would be complete without speaking of my brothers — and particularly of John and Horatius, who walked the same road of faith and ministry alongside me for many years. The three of us were in the ministry, and though each of us had our own distinct character and calling, we shared the same foundational convictions: the authority of Scripture, the centrality of the Cross, the necessity of conversion, and the urgency of bringing souls to Jesus.
My brother John, though less widely known than Horatius or myself, was distinguished for his culture and scholarship, and for the eloquence and grace of his preaching. He had an immense fund of humor and held a quite unique place among his friends with his genial kindliness and exuberant flow of spirits. His loving interest in my spiritual welfare in those early years was one of the great supports of my soul. And then there was Horatius — my poet-brother, the man whose hymns have blessed believers around the world and through many generations. When I think of Horatius, I think of faith expressed in song, truth clothed in beauty, the Gospel made accessible to every heart willing to receive it.
Horatius was taken home in 1889. Two years later, brother John quietly fell asleep in the eighty-ninth year of his age. And so I was left the last of that long fellowship of brothers — the youngest, outliving them all. When the last of my brothers was buried and I stood beside his grave as the only mourner, I turned to a friend and said, "I know that he shall rise again!" There was a smile on my face as I said it. Not because I felt no grief — I felt it deeply — but because the grief was swallowed up by a hope more real to me than the grave I stood beside.
(John 11:25 KJV)
"Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
THE REPROOF THAT SHAPED MY PREACHING: M'CHEYNE AND THE LOST IN THE PEWS
There is one story from my friendship with M'Cheyne that I must tell here, because it shaped the whole direction of my preaching ministry. On one occasion, I preached in St. Peter's, Dundee — M'Cheyne's own church — upon the text, "Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty." It was a sermon about the glory that awaits the believer, the vision of the eternal Christ in all His beauty. As M'Cheyne and I walked home together afterward, he said something I never forgot: "Brother, I enjoyed your sermon; to me it was sweet. You and I and many, I trust, in our congregations shall see the King in His beauty. But, my brother, you forgot there might be many listening to you to-night, who, unless they are changed by the grace of God, shall never see Him in His beauty."
That gentle, brotherly reproof pierced me to the heart. He was right. I had preached a beautiful sermon to the already-converted, and had forgotten the unsaved sitting right before me. From that night forward, I determined that I would never again preach a sermon in which I did not commend Christ to the lost. Whatever my subject — whether Leviticus or the Psalms or prophetic Scripture — I always found a way, before the sermon ended, to turn toward the lost and say: Here is a Saviour. He is able to save you. He is willing. Come to Him now, while there is still time.
I often repeated these words: "A sinner, so long as he is unpardoned, has a right to only one thing in the universe — only one — and that is the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ." That was always the message. The blood that cleanses. The Saviour who receives. The grace that is free to all who will come.
(Revelation 22:17 KJV)
"And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely."
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
LOOKING FORWARD WITH EYES OF FAITH: THE STORY THAT LIES AHEAD
The chapters that follow will trace the full arc of my life and ministry — from the fields and thatched cottages of Collace to the crowded streets of Glasgow; from the years of the great revival of 1839–40 to the campaigns of Moody in 1873–74; from the loss of my beloved wife Isabella in 1864 to the long final years of ministry that stretched into my ninth decade. They will tell of M'Cheyne's early death and the Memoir I wrote to preserve his legacy. They will tell of the Disruption of 1843, when more than four hundred ministers walked away from security to preserve the freedom of Christ's Church. They will tell of prayer meetings and deathbeds, communions and conversions, setbacks and breakthroughs — all the texture of a life fully given to Jesus Christ.
But whatever else those chapters contain, they will always return to this: the grace of God is sufficient. His power is perfected in weakness. He who begins a good work carries it through to completion. The man who rests everything — absolutely everything — upon the blood of Jesus and the promises of His Word will never be put to shame. I know it because I lived it. For more than sixty years, through sunshine and shadow, through joy and grief, through seasons of abundance and apparent barrenness, the Lord kept faith with me. He never left me. He never forsook me. He kept me within sight of the Cross, and the Cross was always enough.
(2 Corinthians 12:9 KJV)
"And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me."
Let us walk forward together into this story. Let us see what God can do with a young man who had no extraordinary gifts, no remarkable eloquence, no particular advantages — only a heart that had been found by Jesus, and a will surrendered to His service. Let us see what happens when a sinner who has been laid on the Shepherd's shoulders simply stays there, year after year, and lets the Shepherd carry him where He will.
That is the story of Andrew Alexander Bonar, the soul-winner of Scotland. And it begins not with his triumphs, but with his being found — on a quiet Sabbath afternoon in October 1830, in a study room in Edinburgh, while reading a book that pointed him to the free and full grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
THE PRAYER LIFE THAT SUSTAINED EVERYTHING: CLOSET BEFORE PULPIT
Before I leave this first chapter, I must say something about prayer — because prayer was not simply one feature of my life among many. It was the foundation. It was the atmosphere. It was the hidden root from which every visible fruit of my ministry grew. Those who knew me most intimately testified consistently that my private prayer life sustained everything else. What they saw in the pulpit — whatever warmth, whatever spiritual power, whatever ability to speak to the heart — was the overflow of what had happened on my knees in private.
I believe that the greatest danger facing any minister of the Gospel is not the danger of poor scholarship, nor the danger of inadequate preparation, nor even the danger of personal sin — though all of these are real dangers. The greatest danger is prayerlessness. The minister who does not pray is a soldier who goes to battle without weapons, a gardener who plants without watering, a lamp that has oil in the bowl but no flame. I said this plainly to my own people, and I said it even more plainly to myself. In my diary I wrote words that still rebuke me when I recall them: "I often feel quite certain that my own prayerlessness is the reason why so few of my people are awakened. The thought fills me with pain, and excites me to a new course of prayer."
Prayer was not merely my duty. It was my delight. When I had no sermon, I had prayer. When I had no words for a troubled soul, I had prayer. When the revival seemed far away and the congregation seemed unmoved and the work seemed fruitless — I had prayer. I once described prayer as "seed sown on the heart of God" — meaning that prayer is not wasted merely because it seems unanswered. It is seed. It is going somewhere. God is not deaf, and He is not indifferent, and He does not forget the prayers of His people. He keeps them, like a treasury, until the appointed time for their fulfillment.
(Psalm 102:17 KJV)
"He will regard the prayer of the destitute, and not despise their prayer."
One of my prayers that my congregation remembered long after I was gone was this: "Lord, we bespeak blessing for to-morrow." I prayed that on Saturday evenings at family worship, looking ahead to the Sabbath that was coming. I went into the pulpit every Lord's Day in the expectation that this prayer had been heard and would be answered. I believed that God desires to bless His people when they gather in His name, that He is never reluctant to pour out His Spirit upon earnest worship, that He is always more willing to give than we are to receive.
And the blessings came — not always in the ways I expected, not always with the dramatic outward signs that would have made the harvest obvious to human eyes, but they came. Souls were quietly changed. Hearts were steadily warmed. Lives that had been dark were slowly filled with light. It was not usually spectacular. It was usually the quiet, persistent work of the Spirit in response to the quiet, persistent prayer of a pastor who refused to stop asking.
✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦
THE VISION THAT NEVER FADED: HE THAT WINNETH SOULS IS WISE
Over the doorway of the new church we built in Finnieston in Glasgow, I had carved in Hebrew the words from Proverbs: "He that winneth souls is wise." I put them there as a declaration of the purpose for which that building existed, and as a reminder to every person who walked through its doors — including myself — of what the church of Jesus Christ is fundamentally for. Not for the preservation of tradition. Not for the comfort of the already-saved. Not for the maintenance of respectability or the management of religious programs. The church exists to win souls.
The word that is translated "winneth" in that Proverb is, in the original Hebrew, the word used to describe a hunter stalking game — moving with patience, with focus, with wisdom, with the goal always in view. That image stayed with me throughout my ministry. I was a hunter. The souls of men and women were the quarry. And I could not rest — would not rest — as long as there were souls within reach who had not yet been brought to Jesus.
This was not a grim obsession. It was a joy. To see a soul come to Christ — to sit with someone in the dark night of their conviction and watch the dawn of faith break across their face — was the greatest pleasure I knew on earth. When souls were being saved in Finnieston, I said that "there was more joy even in happy Heaven, because lost ones were being found." I believed it completely. Jesus Himself had told us that there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents. If heaven rejoices, how can the man who preaches the Gospel do anything less?
(Luke 15:10 KJV)
"Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth."
That joy — the joy of the soul-winner — is what kept me going through the long years and the lean seasons. When the harvest was slow in coming, I went back to the Proverb: "He that winneth souls is wise." Not "he that winneth many souls in a short time is wise," but simply he that winneth souls. The faithful, patient, prayerful work of bringing even one soul to Jesus is the wisest investment a human life can make. It produces fruit that will last not merely for a generation, not merely for a century, but forever — in the eternities of glory, where every soul that found Jesus will shine like the stars, as the Scripture promises.
(Daniel 12:3 KJV)
"And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever."
As the stars for ever and ever. That is the reward that awaits the faithful soul-winner — not earthly fame, not scholarly recognition, not the admiration of colleagues, but the everlasting light of those whose lives were changed by the Gospel we preached. I want to shine like that. I want to stand before the King of glory and see around me the faces of men and women who heard the Word from my lips and found Jesus and came home. That has always been my deepest desire. That has always been the vision that kept me at my post when everything in me wanted to give up.
He that winneth souls is wise. It is the simplest summary of my ministry. It is the inscription I would want on my tombstone, if I could choose only one. And it is the legacy I leave to every pastor, every evangelist, every Sunday school teacher, every believer who reads these pages: give yourself to the winning of souls, and you will never have wasted your life.
He found me. And I never got over the wonder of it.
✦ ✦ ✦ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ✦ ✦ ✦