CHAPTER three
CHAPTER three
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The Hidden Life: Prayer, Grief, and the Walk with God
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆
There is an outward life and an inward one. The outward life of a minister — his sermons, his visits, his meetings, his letters, his published books — is what the world sees and what history records. But the inward life is the root from which all of it grows. A tree may be known by its fruit, but the fruit cannot be understood without the root. And the root of everything I did in over fifty years of ministry was something very simple: a daily, persistent, wonder-filled walk with the Lord Jesus Christ.
I am not a man who found it easy to speak about his private religious life. The inner chamber of a soul’s fellowship with God is not a place to which the public is invited. But I have been asked, and I believe it may be of some use to younger servants of Christ, to say something of what that inward life was like — what sustained it, what tested it, what kept it alive through fifty years of joy and grief and labour and loneliness. And so I will try to speak of it plainly, without either false modesty or false pride.
The secret — if it can be called a secret — was simply this: the Mercy-seat. Once, when asked by Moody to tell the young ministers gathered at the Northfield Conference the secret of a consecrated life, I had nothing more profound to offer than this: “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.” Forty years of daily access. That is not heroism. It is not even discipline, exactly. It is more like the habit of eating — the soul knows that it will die without it, and so it comes, morning after morning, to the place where God has promised to meet with His people through the blood of Jesus Christ.
(Hebrews 10:19–22 KJV)
“Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus… let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.”
I was inclined naturally to depression. That may surprise those who knew me in my later years, when the joy of the Lord had written itself so visibly on my face that even strangers remarked on it. But the natural tendency of my temperament was toward despondency, and I do not think I ever fully escaped it. What I learned — and what I want to pass on — is that joy and depression are not opposites in the way we usually think. A man may feel the pull of the one and still walk fully in the other, because joy is not a feeling. It is a possession. It is something given by Christ and held by faith, and it does not depend on the weather of our emotions.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE OLD MAN WITH HIS HAT: WALKING WITH CHRIST
During my student days I used to walk each morning to one of the college classes, and along the way I regularly passed an old man going to business. He had a peculiar habit: he would sometimes walk along holding his hat a little way off his head. The action was so noticeable that someone finally asked him the reason for it. He was at first reluctant to say, but at last he told us: “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 told that story many times over the years because it lodged in me the first morning I saw it, and has never left. That old man was not doing anything spectacular. He was walking to work. He was not in a prayer meeting, not in a church, not on his knees in a study. He was walking through an Edinburgh street on an ordinary weekday morning, and he was in such conscious fellowship with the living Christ that he felt it would be disrespectful to keep his hat on. That is the kind of Christian life I wanted. Not merely correct doctrine, not merely faithful service, not merely regular attendance at the means of grace — but that: the sense of Christ close beside me, walking with me, as real as the cobblestones under my feet.
On my eighty-second birthday I wrote in my diary: “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.” Sixty-two years. I was not a perfect man in those sixty-two years. I failed in many things. I sinned in ways that shamed me when I remembered them before God. I had long seasons of spiritual dryness, and days when prayer felt like speaking into an empty room. But He never left. He was always there. And the older I grew, the more certain I became that the Saviour’s faithfulness is not contingent on ours — that He holds us even when we feel our grip on Him loosening.
A friend who knew me well wrote of me in later years: “Calvinism and the evangelical creed were never so fairly recommended as by this man who stood by every doctrine, even the most severe and difficult to believe, while he seemed to live in a perpetual sunshine, and to spread not gloom, but brightness and good nature wherever he appeared.” I was glad to read those words, not for my own credit, but because they pointed to something I had always believed: that a man who truly understands the doctrines of grace — election, atonement, the sovereignty of God, the perseverance of the saints — cannot be gloomy for long. These are not gloomy doctrines. They are the most joyful doctrines in the world, because they rest the whole weight of salvation on God and take it entirely off the trembling shoulders of man.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE DIARY: THE HONEST RECORD OF A SOUL
I kept a diary for much of my life — not a detailed account of events and appointments, but a record of my soul’s dealings with God. Its pages contain the honest testimony of a man who was often humbled, often rebuked by his own conscience, often brought back from coldness and formality to the warmth of genuine fellowship with Christ. I would not have those pages made entirely public. But some of what was written there I can share, because it shows the sort of inward life that undergirded the outward ministry.
There were seasons in the later years at Collace when the full tide of revival had ebbed, and the work of God was not so apparent as in earlier years. I wrote in the diary with a sorrowful frankness that I find, even now, both painful and instructive to read. I was not satisfied with what I was, or what I was doing, or what God was doing through me. I wrote about my prayerlessness as a cause of the barrenness I observed. I wrote about the gap between what I knew of Christ and what I actually experienced of Him. I wrote about sins that I had thought long since conquered, reasserting themselves with an energy that shamed me.
But I also wrote — and this is what I want the younger reader to attend to — about the faithfulness of God in meeting me even in those dry seasons. I had a text printed for myself, framed and hanging in my study: “But Thou remainest.” That text — taken from Hebrews, where the writer is contrasting the passing away of all created things with the eternal unchangeableness of Christ — was my anchor in every dry season, every grief, every disappointment, every year when the harvest was thin and the prayer meetings were poorly attended and the church seemed half asleep. But Thou remainest. When the revival feeling fades, He remains. When the beloved colleague is taken away, He remains. When the congregation is cold and the preacher is weary, He remains. No circumstance of ministry, no condition of soul, can alter that one fact.
A lady came to see me one day, in great sorrow and depression of mind. Nothing I said seemed to bring her any comfort. Then, all at once, I saw her face light up, and she said: “You don’t need to say anything more. I have got what I need.” And she pointed to the framed text behind me: But Thou remainest! She had been looking past me to the wall, and the words had gone straight to her heart. I gave God thanks for that. The text I had put there for my own encouragement had become the word of life for a suffering soul. That is how God often works — our provisions for our own need become provisions for other people’s need as well.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE DEATH OF ISABELLA: THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
In October of 1864, the greatest sorrow of my life fell upon me. Isabella, my beloved wife — my companion in ministry for sixteen years, the mother of my five children, the woman whose steady grace and wisdom had been woven into everything good in my life and work — was suddenly taken from me. She was fifty-four years old. I was fifty-four years old. We were in the height of what I had thought would be many more years of useful service together.
She had nursed her own mother through a long and trying illness with unwearied devotion, and the Twenty-third Psalm had been her unfailing resort through that dark time. She once said of that Psalm: “Oh, if you only knew all that I have got by it! Sometimes when they sing it in church it is too much for me. I don’t know what I would have done without it and the orphan’s verse, Psalm twenty-seven, verse ten.” I often thought of those words in the weeks and months after her death, as I sat with those same Psalms and tried to find in them the comfort she had found. I did find it. But the finding was slow and painful, as all genuine comfort must be.
I wrote to my brother Horatius shortly after her death: “I think that the Lord who used to give me health to work is now saying, ‘Will you seek to glorify Me by bearing and enduring?’” That is a remarkable sentence, and I have returned to it many times since. Bearing and enduring are not the same as work and service. They are harder, in some ways. To preach a good sermon in the morning gives a kind of satisfaction that sustains the preacher through the evening. But to bear a grief all day and endure it all night and find it still waiting when you wake in the morning — that is a different kind of ministry altogether. It is the ministry of the suffering servant, not the triumphant conqueror. And I believe it is, in its own way, as fruitful.
(Romans 8:28 KJV)
“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
To other friends I wrote in those first weeks: “Our time is shortening. The Master has been reminding me of this very solemnly, changing the blue sky over my head by the shade of lasting sorrow. But yet I know I shall Him praise.” The last clause of that sentence was not bravado. It was faith. I could not always feel it. There were mornings when the study felt very empty, and the walk to church very long, and the pulpit very lonely. But I knew — as a fact independent of my feelings — that God was working all things together for good, and that the shade of lasting sorrow He had permitted was not the end of the sentence He was writing with my life.
I had been engaged to give an address to the Young Men’s Literary Society on an evening just a day or two after Isabella’s funeral. I could not take the subject I had intended, but I came as I had promised. I gave an address on some things connected with the Holy Land. The inexpressible sadness of my whole appearance, and what one witness called my marvellous self-control, made a deep impression on all who were present. I said: “God does not tell us to feel that it is for the best. But He does ask us to believe it.” That distinction has served many a grieving person since, and I was glad to be able to give it. Feeling and believing are different things. We cannot always command our feelings. But faith — the deliberate choice to trust God’s character and His Word regardless of how we feel — that is something He gives us grace to exercise even in the sharpest grief.
An old friend came to see me soon after Isabella’s death. As we talked about the many friends who had gone before, and specially about my own great loss, I was for a few moments quite overcome. Then, quickly recovering myself, I said in my old bright way: “But the best is yet to come!” The friend never forgot it. Nor have I. In that sentence, in the moment when grief had loosened my usual self-command, out came the thing that was deepest in me — not resignation, not stoic endurance, but genuine, forward-looking joy in the certainty of what lay ahead. The best is yet to come. That was not a platitude. It was a conviction about the character of God and the promises of His Word.
I also found, in those months after Isabella’s death, that the discipline of continuing to preach was itself a kind of medicine. “I find preaching the Word one of my best consolations,” I said at one point. That sounds strange, perhaps, to those who have not experienced it. But the minister who must stand in a pulpit on Sunday and speak of the faithfulness of God, of the love of Christ, of the certainty of resurrection — that minister is forced, by the act of preaching to others, to preach to himself. The truths he declares to his congregation must pass through him on the way out, and they do their healing work as they go. I could not have sustained that year of grief with anything less than the Word of God, preached and re-preached until it had burned its way through the numbness and done its work.
The children of course felt her loss most immediately and most daily. Five of them, ranging from teenagers to younger children, now had a father who was their only parent. I was not naturally the most domestic of men — my mind was too often full of the parish, the sermon, the next meeting, the unanswered letters on the study desk. Isabella had been the one who held the household together with an unobtrusive competence that only became fully visible when it was gone. In her absence I learned to lean more heavily on the Lord for what I could not provide myself, and I believe the children saw that dependence and were shaped by it. God became more visibly central to the life of our home, simply because there was no one else.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
SYMPATHY MADE USABLE: GRIEF AS MINISTRY
I have found, over many years, that the sorrows God sends us are never wasted — not if we bring them to Him and let Him use them. Isabella’s death made me a better pastor to bereaved people than I had ever been before. I knew from that point forward, with a knowledge that no amount of reading or study can produce, what it is to walk into a house where the light has gone out. I knew what it is to sit beside a table where one chair is always empty, and to open a Bible whose margins are annotated in handwriting that will never write another word. That knowledge became pastoral capital — currency in the currency of human suffering, that only those who have paid the price can spend.
After Isabella was gone, when I heard of the sudden death of one of my people, I hastened to the house to see the daughter who had been left an orphan. I did not say almost anything to her. I simply put my arm round her and laid her head on my shoulder. She needed no words from me at that moment. She needed the presence of someone who had been there. My sympathy with those in sorrow had been learned by passing through the same sad discipline, and it was recognised as such by the people I served. They knew I was not offering them polished theological comfort from a safe distance. I was sitting beside them in the valley, having been there myself.
I used to say to sick and suffering people: “It is worth while being wounded to have the hands of the Great Physician upon you.” Those who know only health cannot say that with any credibility. Those who have been wounded know it is true. The hands of Christ upon the wound are worth the wound. Not because the pain is not real, but because what He does with it is so far beyond what any painless life could have produced.
To those who were prevented from active work and were serving God amid the small duties of daily life, I used to say: “Remember, there is a reward for thinking upon His name. That is a quiet way of doing good, and open to every one.” And again: “We are to be rewarded, not only for work done, but for burdens borne. And I am not sure but that the brightest rewards will be for those who bore burdens without murmuring.” That last sentence is worth pausing over. The murmur-free endurance of a long bereavement, of a chronic illness, of a disability that removes a person from all the work they had hoped to do for God — that endurance is not a lesser form of service. It may be the highest form. It most closely resembles the sufferings of the One who bore our griefs and carried our sorrows without a word of complaint.
(Isaiah 53:4 KJV)
“Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
JOY THAT WOULD NOT BE EXTINGUISHED: THE SUNSHINE OF THE SOUL
I said that I was naturally inclined to depression, and that is true. But I must also say that over the course of my life, the joy of the Lord became increasingly the dominant colour of my days, in a way that I cannot account for except by the grace of God. Those who observed me in later life remarked on it almost universally. Dr. Moody-Stuart, who had known me since our student days, wrote of “my unfailing buoyancy of brightness through his daily rejoicing in the Lord. The joy of the Lord was his strength, with a fulness and a constancy that were quite singular.”
The joy was not shallow. It was not the cheerfulness of a man who has avoided hard things. I had lost my father at seven, had watched M’Cheyne die at twenty-nine, had buried my wife at fifty-four, had worked in a cold parish for years before seeing fruit, had passed through the public ordeal of the Disruption, had known many seasons when the heavens felt like brass. The joy that survived all of that was not the thin joy of pleasant circumstances. It was the deep, root-level joy of a man who had found that God is who He says He is, and that His promises are what He says they are.
I often said: “A gloomy believer is surely an anomaly in Christ’s kingdom.” I meant it as a rebuke to a certain kind of piety that seems to think holiness requires a long face. The Bible does not associate holiness with gloom. The Psalms are full of shouting. The New Testament epistles ring with exhortations to joy. Paul wrote “Rejoice in the Lord alway” from a prison cell. The fruit of the Spirit is joy — not happiness when circumstances are pleasant, but joy as a permanent characteristic of the Spirit-filled life, present in darkness as well as light.
God’s people, I sometimes said, take fits of seasickness in sailing to Immanuel’s Land. They give way to hard thoughts of God. They forget where they are going and why. I asked some friends on whom I was calling how they were getting on. They said: “Not very well. We are not getting the rich food for our souls we used to get. We were just saying we are getting husks now.” “Oh, I see,” I replied. “You’ve been having a grumble-meeting! Did you ever notice when we grumble to one another we grow discontented and bitter, and that is grieving to the Holy Spirit? But when we go and tell the Lord, it has a very different effect. We get tenderness and sympathy.” That is not a shallow answer. It is a recognition that the difference between a grumble-meeting and a prayer-meeting is the difference between speaking to one another about our troubles and speaking to God. The first makes things worse. The second makes them better.
I never thanked God for my joy the way I should have. I received it too much as a given, and not enough as a gift. But looking back now, I see it clearly as one of the chief mercies of my life — that God kept a current of joy running through me even in the darkest seasons, so that the people who came to me in sorrow did not find a man overwhelmed by his own troubles, but one who could say with genuine conviction: “But the best is yet to come.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
HOLINESS AS A DAILY PURSUIT: THE COSTLINESS OF GRACE
I have spoken of joy. I must also speak of holiness, because the two are inseparable. Joy without holiness is mere sentiment. Holiness without joy becomes legalism. But together — the pursued holiness that comes from love of Christ and the irrepressible joy that flows from confidence in His grace — they produce the kind of Christian life that is both attractive and durable.
I was formed in my understanding of holiness by the great Reformed and Covenanting tradition of Scotland. Samuel Rutherford was my father in the faith in many ways — not my direct father, for he lived two centuries before me, but the father of a way of thinking and feeling about Christ that has marked my life as clearly as any human influence. Like Rutherford, my one desire was to get a deeper insight into the love of the only lovely Lord Jesus. Like him, I believed that the closer a man draws to Christ, the more clearly he sees his own sin and the more deeply he is humbled by it — and the more, at the same time, he finds in Christ’s love something inexhaustible and glorious.
I used to say: “You are not very holy if you are not very kind.” That is a test that I found searching when I applied it to myself. A man can maintain the formal disciplines of holiness — prayer, Scripture reading, regular attendance at the means of grace — and still be cold, critical, impatient, and unkind in his dealings with the people around him. That is not holiness. It is its caricature. Real holiness, the holiness that flows from fellowship with Jesus Christ, shows itself above all in love — patience with the difficult, gentleness with the stumbling, warmth toward the cold and the lost.
The sins of teachers are the teachers of sins — that was a saying I used often when speaking to ministers. I meant it to drive home the point that the minister’s inconsistency is not merely his own private business. It undoes the work of his preaching. When a man preaches grace on Sunday and lives gracelessness on Monday, his congregation learns to treat the Gospel as a Sunday performance rather than a daily reality. The preacher’s life is, whether he likes it or not, a second sermon. His people will read both sermons, and they will give more weight to the one he lives than to the one he delivers.
I was not a perfect man, and I have no wish to be remembered as one. But I can say honestly that I tried, every day, to live close to the Saviour — not because I feared His displeasure, but because I had found His company to be the most satisfying thing in the world. He had more delight in me than I in Him, no doubt. But whatever delight I had in Him was real, and I found more of it with every year that passed. 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.
(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.”
There were two thoughts I often left with God’s people in sickness. One was that they might do a great work for the Lord by praying much, and that it is really promotion to be, not down in the valley with Joshua, but with Aaron and Hur on the mountain-top. The other thought was that they are teaching angels. Angels know nothing of suffering themselves, but they learn from the patience and joyfulness of suffering believers. When the sick one enters heaven, some of the angels will say: “Oh, here is my teacher come!”
On one occasion I was called to see a young man who was hopelessly ill. As I went into the room he closed a ledger that was lying on the table before him, and said: “There, now, I’ve written the last word I’ll ever write in it.” “And what then?” I asked. We drew our chairs to the fireside and began to talk together. Little by little the Spirit of God began to work, and the dying man was led to Christ. His joy was quite unusual — so great that his mother was afraid it might be a delusion. One day when I was with him, I said: “You will be experiencing something of the joy unspeakable.” He answered: “It’s more than that. It is so great. It is joy unthinkable.” I never forgot that phrase. Joy unthinkable — beyond the capacity of thought to contain, let alone of words to express. That is what Christ gives to a soul at the very moment when everything else is being taken away.
A young woman was taken to the hospital, incurably ill. Before leaving after one of my visits I said to her: “Remember us in prayer.” She had been feeling very sad, and those words were like new life to her. Not “we will remember you” — which would have been kind but would have left her passive. Rather: “You will remember us.” And she saw there was still work for her to do, though laid on a bed of sickness. A sick person given a task of prayer is a person restored to usefulness. That is no small gift.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
PILGRIMAGES TO HOLY PLACES: FEEDING ON THE PAST
I was always a man who loved to visit the places where God’s servants had walked before. The grave of a martyr, the house of a saint, the church where a great sermon had been preached two centuries before — these things moved me deeply and fed my soul in a way that I could not always explain. I made a pilgrimage through Dumfriesshire and Kirkcudbrightshire to the places associated with the Covenanters. I visited the grave of Samuel Rutherford and stood in the ruins of the church at Anwoth where he had preached. I kept a panel of Lady Kenmure’s pew from that church on the mantelpiece of my study.
When I was in America in 1881, I visited Northampton out of love for the memory of Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd. I sat under the two great elm-trees that Edwards and his wife had planted in front of their house — the trees under which they used to sit in the evenings, so that the spot had become like the oak of Mamre, where God met His servant. I walked in the grove of pines where Edwards had prayed. I wrote in my diary that evening: “I bless the Lord for this day with all its sacred memories. Is the Spirit of the Lord straitened? Is not Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever? Father, Thou hast brought me at this time of my life across the sea, to stand at this spot, and there pray and call to mind the days of the right hand of the Most High. Surely Thou hast in store very much blessing for me and my people and my land! Come as near, come in the revelation of the same glorious holiness as to Thy servants then.”
That prayer was not nostalgia. It was faith. The same Christ who had met Edwards in Northampton was the Christ who could meet Andrew Bonar in Glasgow. The Spirit who had breathed upon the Scottish Covenanters was the same Spirit who could breathe upon a Finnieston prayer meeting. The history of the Church is not a record of things God once did and no longer does. It is a record of what God is willing to do wherever He finds a people willing to seek His face with the same urgency and faith as those who went before them.
I kept a piece of Samuel Rutherford’s pulpit in my study — a physical fragment of the place where he had stood to preach that daring, tender, Christ-drunk Gospel which had burned through Scotland like a fire in dry heather. When I looked at it, I was reminded that I stood in a great company — that the work I was doing in Glasgow in the nineteenth century was part of a work that God had been doing in Scotland for centuries, and that the saints who had done it before me had passed on something to me, and I must pass it on to those who came after.
That is the inner life as I lived it: not dramatic, not always marked by great experiences or powerful assurances. But steady. Daily access to the Mercy-seat. Daily reading of the Word as a letter from the King. Daily walking with the Christ who had said He would never leave nor forsake. Daily borrowing of grace for daily need. And underneath it all, beneath the dry seasons and the grief and the sense of insufficiency, the great unshakeable bedrock: But Thou remainest.
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆