The Autumn of Life III: God’s Advantages to Older Believers

Archibald Alexander on Aging Believers and the Book of Providence

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm John Snyder, and today we're looking at the second letter in a series of letters by a man named Archibald Alexander, and those letters are found in a book that was published by Banner of Truth.

It's out of print by now, and so we had hoped to do some giveaways of this book, but since this book is out of print, we have found a small pamphlet, kind of stapled booklet, that has just the letters we're talking about in it.

So we will get a number of those and make those available for a giveaway. You can see more information on that in the show notes. But this is the book, Thoughts on Religious Experience, and if you were with us a couple of weeks ago, Alexander was a leader in the Second Great Awakening in the United States.

He was a Presbyterian, a fine theologian, and he was an administrator. He was the president of Princeton Theological Seminary and their chair of theology. What's unique about him is that he comes at the end of the period, kind of, we could say, the end of a Reformed view of revival before Finney's views really start to take root, and from after Alexander, Reformed theologians tended not to treat the extraordinary seasons of grace, which would fall under, really, pneumatology, the work of the Spirit, they tended not to treat that as a substantial theological topic.

They believed that they existed, but not having experienced them themselves, and with Mr. Finney's errors, they tended to shy away from it. So I think Alexander really is a valuable person because he is a good theologian, but also still understanding some of these experiential aspects.

In this series of letters, though, we're not talking about revival, we're talking about his advice for older saints, we would say, for elderly Christians, and he gives a series of letters in which he talks about the unique situation that an elderly Christian faces as the body fails, as your ability to serve in the church is restricted by, you know, the lack of strength, and he talks about what are some of the things you can do, perhaps better now at an elderly age than you could before, and also what are some of the particular temptations that the elderly Christian must be prepared to face so as not to be caught in its trap.

Now, before we get to that second letter, I wanted to give one announcement, and that is, we have just gotten this back from the printers, and this is a small book of sermons from Behold Your God, the Weight of Majesty, so the second Behold Your God study.

The sermons in the video series are only available in the video until now, and some had asked about making them available in print, so this is those sermons, and I'm really happy to see them finally get out.

We took the sermons from the videos and edited them so that they would be more appropriate for a book, and which takes more work than I usually expect it will take, so we've edited those and got those printed.

It is, I think, a helpful tool, if you're interested in that, for getting sermons on the attributes of God into the hands of those that perhaps would be interested in that topic. Enough to read a small book, but not enough to do a 12-week study from which that's taken.

Wisdom, Providence, and the Elderly Christian's Advantage

Well, let's look at the second letter in Archibald Alexander's Letters to Aging Believers. He mentions that at this point in the Christian life, when you are elderly, the desire is to be useful as long as you have opportunity to be useful in this life, and so he's going to talk about, in this letter, one of the strengths that comes with old age, and then a number of the failings and the temptations, the ditches that elderly Christians can sometimes be caught up in, and he's going to give a few of those with some advice.

So let's hit those quickly. First, while there are hindrances to our service as we grow older and physically our health is weakened and our strength is weakened, we don't have the same abilities we did before, but he points out that while there are hindrances to our service, there is one thing that we can do that we could not do as a younger believer, and that is we ought to be able to speak with greater wisdom.

Now, wisdom doesn't just come from experience, but biblical Christian experience, you know, godly experience. Not that we look back on our life and we say, well, I have always made the right choices. Sometimes we learn through the wrong choices, but it's not wrong choices themselves that teach us, but it's passing through those times, perhaps making wrong choices, and then by the gracious work of God in our lives, it's as if he takes us by the hand and he leads us back onto the path, and but with with the open Bible in our hands and, you know, crying out to the Lord and the passage of time, we do gain wisdom.

We understand how to walk through life according to God's Word, leaning on the beloved. The way he describes this is he says that the older believer has the book of Providence and not just a scripture, so let's clarify that.

Providence is just our biblical word, our theological word for understanding that God is ultimately in control of all things and guiding all things, and Paul makes it very clear that that ought to be a source of extraordinary hope to the believer, because God is guiding all things and causing all things to work together for good for the believer.

It doesn't mean that all things are good. So in this theme of Providence, of God ruling over all things, and especially the Christian sees that through the perspective of the love and perfect knowledge of the Father, who is also the King, Alexander says that the older believer can look back on life and read the book of Providence.

Now he says when you're young, events happen one after the next, you know, and, you know, there's things with the kids, there's things with your parents, there's things at church, there's things at work, you know, there's things with yourself, there's things with your marriage, and it's just like one thing, you know, one big issue hits you one after the next, and different circumstances in life, and you see what's happening, and Alexander says that the young believer can see what's happening, and they understand that this is part of what God is doing in my life, you know, especially when it's a big thing, it's a big choice, it's a big change, it seems significant, it seems to carry spiritual significance.

But he says it is only when you are older that you can look back and see a series of events, and with the passage of time, and gaining wisdom through life with God, with the Scriptures in hand, we can look back and it's as if, he says, this book of Providence, what we can learn from how God has worked in our life, it's unsealed to the elderly, not to the young.

And so the elderly can see this great span of time, and we can see how even before we were believers, perhaps, how God was working in our lives, the family He put us in, the friends, the church, the books that fell into our hands just at the right time, the answers to prayer, the way God used even our sinful choices to mold us into the image of Christ, the dark valleys we've walked through that resulted in walking in sunshine again, you know, the confusion that was answered, the needs that were met.

So this book of Providence, being able to look back when you're older and see all that God has done, he says, that is a peculiar gift to the elderly believers. It comes to them in a way and in a fullness and clarity that doesn't come when we were younger.

This is what he says, he says, the successive events of our lives we can make known, but the connection which these events have with our character, our sins, and our prayers can be fully understood only by ourselves.

So we can tell people what's going on in our life. This happened, this happened. But how those are woven together with our character, our sins, our prayers, well, only we can really understand that. He goes on to say, the person who neglects to study the pages of this book, Providence, of how God has dealt with you, that person deprives himself of one of the most important means of improvement.

Yet, he says, many professing Christians appear to pay little attention to the providence of God in relation to themselves. If they meet with some severe judgment or some great deliverance, their attention is arrested, and they acknowledge this is the hand of God.

But as to the succession of ordinary events, they seem to have no practical belief that these are ordered by divine providence. He gives a couple of suggested books that you can read on this if you want more help, and the first is the Puritan John Flavel's book, The Mystery of Providence, opened, and the other is Thomas Boston, a little after Puritans and just before the Great Awakening over in the UK, Thomas Boston's book called The Crook in the Lot.

Alright, so that's one of the things that an elderly believer has. They can look back and see the faithfulness of God through all the events of life, and because of the passage of time and the gaining of wisdom, they're able to see that more clearly than when they were young.

The Temptations of Old Age: Harshness, Isolation, and Nostalgia

But now he goes in the letter to talk about some of the particular pitfalls or the failings of old age, and the first he mentions is that we can become harsh, we can grow discontent, we can be austere or morose, depressed, we can become bitter.

And Alexander points out there's no spiritual reason that this has to be, but it is often, too often, the case. And while there are some wonderful examples of the contrary, of people who grew sweeter and more happy as they grew older, Alexander points out that these shifts, these negative things, are not essential spiritually, and there are many who are an example of the opposite.

Yet because of the failing of the body and of the mind and the circumstances that go along with that, as well as the experience of many disappointing things throughout our life, he said, if we are not careful to guard against it spiritually by walking very near the Lord, as we grow older, we can become morose and harsh and austere and bitter.

So he mentions the decay of our body. Our bodies fail, he says, our minds fail, and that affects us spiritually. I remember reading Martin Lloyd-Jones as a physical doctor. Lloyd-Jones warned people when he became a pastor not to ignore the impact that their physical body, their mind, would have upon their spiritual life, that they are interwoven.

And it's not realistic to expect that physical things and the failing of the body would occur without there being a spiritual struggle that would occur at the same time. He also mentions the piling up of sorrows.

If we live long enough in this world, we have many things we can look back on as believers with joy and gratitude, but it seems that in a broken world like ours, even with our own spiritual struggles, the struggles within our homes, in our churches, so even those that we are most hopeful as we look at them, it seems that there are so many disappointments that can come our way that if we don't view them correctly, they can sour us.

He also mentions the fact that as we grow older and we are not able to do what we could do, for instance, in church or in our families, we feel that we're being replaced. And he says oftentimes the older believers are having to hand the baton to young believers in the church who can physically still do the work.

And the older believer can't do that, so they pass that on, but as they do, maybe they notice that what I used to do in church for many decades is now being done by someone that I remember when they were born.

And it feels like, Alexander says, the world is upside down, you know. A kid is, you know, leading worship, or a kid is teaching this class, and I'm not the one teaching anymore, and if we're not careful, you know, we can become disgruntled.

Oftentimes, he says, we can feel isolated. We lose friends that we grew up with because they pass away. Maybe we lose our spouse. As we are older, we lose the ability to get out and travel and go to people's homes and visit like we used to.

Even the loss of hearing. We have some dear believers in the church here who, as they've gotten older, a genetic trait in their family and their parents was that hearing loss was inevitable, and as they have found that to be true as they've grown older, we've noticed that it's easy for them to feel very isolated, which is something I would have not thought of.

You can be forgotten, to some degree, by the younger people in the church. You can be forgotten by your busy family members, your grandchildren, and, you know, so they have their own lives, and you realize that, but you feel isolated, and that can make you morose.

You can also, he says, give in to the tendency of romanticizing the past and always complaining about the present. So you begin to speak as if the old days, the days that you grew up in, were morally and spiritually superior in every way to this dark day, and so it sounds to younger people as if what's old, which, of course, they didn't get to see, that was good, and everything that is contemporary is wicked or of less value, and when we talk like that, Alexander says, then we can isolate ourselves.

Christ's Sufficiency for Cheerfulness, Contentment, and Cheerful Service

Now, none of these, he mentions, are legitimate excuses for growing bitter or harsh or morose or austere as we grow older, and if we can cultivate, starting now, maybe you're not in the age group that you would say is elderly, although I don't know who calls themselves elderly, but if you say, well, I'm not there yet, well, whether you're there or not there, whether you're close or far, Alexander gives some advice, and one thing is that if we can remember all that we have in Christ, that He has provided everything we need for a life of obedience all the way to the end, it's very encouraging, and I would say we could add this, learn to draw upon the treasury of Christ, the forgiveness of Christ, the aid of Christ, the comforts of Christ that we find in Scripture.

Learn to deal with God through these promises now before you have to say, actually, I am an elderly Christian. He mentions that the aim of the Christian is not just to avoid extreme bitterness or, you know, self-isolating habits, but we desire for the sake of Christ's honor to grow in sweetness and in cheerfulness.

To be distinguished, he says, by a uniform cheerfulness as we are devoting ourselves to God in whatever ways that our present circumstances allow. Alexander, when he starts this letter, mentions that he himself is now an older Christian, and he has known many older Christians who have grown happier as they grew older, but it takes, he says, real effort.

It will not happen naturally, because as you grow older, youthful zeal or youthful energy, you know, as you're older, he says, it takes a lot more of the spiritual vitality, of the spiritual health, to kind of get us up and get us moving and to get us climbing over, you know, the temptation to despondency or self-pity.

So, he says, we need to be very active. He also mentions a unique opportunity that comes when our bodies are failing, and one of the things he mentions is that we can delight in suffering the will of God, now that we're older, as much as we delighted in doing the will of God when we were younger.

Now, we don't usually use those terms like that, you know, are you happy suffering the will of God? You know, we don't use that, but what he means is this, when we think of the will of God and the response of the Christian heart to the of God, you can do the will of God.

So, reach out, think of others, you know, serve others, etc., the activities. But then, there's the other side of that, and of course, this goes through all the Christian life, but especially as we're older, he says, enduring the will of God or gladly embracing God's choices for you as you get older.

Your body is failing, but that is God's choice. You know, you may feel isolated, but God has allowed that. You can't do what you once did. God has allowed that. None of these things are out of the Lord's control, so we see these as God's choice for us in the present moment, and Alexander says, can you delight in God's will for you in the present moment, His choice for you, what He has given you to walk through in today's part of the journey, can you love Him in the midst of that, even if it's a difficult path, in the same way that you loved Him in the midst of doing things for Him when you were younger.

Alexander says that he believes that enduring the will of God with a happy, trusting, grateful heart, especially when things are hard, that that is more difficult than doing the Christian duties when you were young.

Of course, there are many reasons that we can think of, but one is that there is a there is a sense of enjoyment in reaching out and being a benefit to someone else, doing things that help other people, and there is not that sense of enjoyment and, you know, usefulness and worth when you are sitting alone in your home and there's pain, or there's, you know, fear of the future, or there's loneliness, and you turn your heart to the Lord and say, I understand that this is part of the human existence, it's part of sin's impact, but it's also what you've allowed.

You've chosen this for me today, and I want to walk with you today and love you and trust you today in the way that I cheerfully embrace whatever you choose. Well, that doesn't have a natural list of wonderful, motivating things to go with it.

People don't show up at your house in the middle of the day and say, I've noticed that you've been embracing the Lord's will for you daily, and that you have cheerfully endured God's choices even when they're hard.

So it's the kind of thing that sometimes it's just between you and the Lord. Because of that, Alexander says, he thinks that that can be a more precious expression of love and worship and trust and obedience between your soul and your Savior than what you did when you were very busy doing a lot of things in the kingdom.

And so, because of that, he says, that's a peculiar opportunity. He mentions an example, the author Hannah Moore. Hannah Moore, he says, wrote a number of books. You may have heard of some of them. But when she was elderly, she lost her memory, dementia.

She couldn't remember the books she wrote. She couldn't remember her family. She couldn't remember the friends that were visiting her when she was bedridden. But what she could do was she could remember the love and loveliness of Christ.

And friends reported how she was, you know, constantly willing to speak to them, even though she didn't recognize them. She would speak to them of the preciousness of Christ. And Alexander says, that is a peculiarly precious thing that we can offer God at the end of our life.

At the church here in New Albany, some of the church members are reading through a book by Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment. I'm not in one of those study groups. I'm in a different one.

But I've read a few pages of it, and I was really struck with just how helpful it is, so I'm eagerly looking forward to the next book study so I can be a part of that. But in his book, he mentions the discontent that comes in God's servants, that looks like it's holy, but it's very unlike Christ.

And it comes when God gives you a task to do that you feel is worth doing, and you do it with all your heart, and people see that, and they're benefited, and maybe they appreciate you. And so you're so happy to be serving God in this way.

But what happens when you can no longer serve in that way, and God gives you a different task? One that doesn't seem so fulfilling, doesn't seem so worthwhile, doesn't seem to help nearly as much as the previous task.

Burroughs points out that if you become a morose, and grumpy, and depressed Christian, then you have to stop and ask, was I doing it for love of Christ before, or just love of me? Love of praise. Love of the sense of worth I got while I was working in the kingdom.

Because if it is love for God, while we will still feel the loss of perhaps usefulness, and that's natural, nothing wrong with that, but we turn our hearts to our God and say, it is for love of you that I did what I did before, and it will be for love of you that I'll get up and do what I do today.

What the Master commands is not the big issue. It's the fact that the Master commands it, so I want to do it with a cheerful heart. Another failing that he mentions for the elderly is greed. Now, not because we want to collect more, and more, and more, and live in greater and greater luxury, but for the elderly, it often happens that what they have pursued in middle age, wealth, and they've stored away to give them a sense of security for the future, when they're no longer able to provide for themselves, that their limited supplies, because they're no longer able to generate an income, the limitations of their earthly wealth scare them.

And it is a failing of old age that fear of what's next in life can grip you, instead of being gripped by who God is, the fear of God, that which is clean, and strengthening, and encouraging. You know, you are more aware of the bigness of your Creator, of the bigness and the infinite immensity of your Redeemer, and the fact that He is taking care of you.

You're more aware of that than the bigness of the bills that are coming around the corner, or maybe failing health that has not yet been, you know, revealed. And so, you don't live in the fear of not having enough.

So, he mentions the fact that as we get older, we can become stingy. We can look greedy. And so, we have to guard ourselves against that fearfulness. And he says, when we are older, as we get older, we need less.

And that's his day. And of course, we have some differences between, you know, the early 1800s and 2023. But with our medical system, with our retirement accounts and things, you know, in many ways, our physical needs might reduce.

And if that's the case, he says, then no longer pursue money for the sake of luxury, but pursue money for the sake of using it in the kingdom. We generally begin our adult life, he said, with very little.

Think of when you first got married, or you had your first child. We get married. We have a family. Our needs begin to increase. And so, we work hard to pay the bills and to feed the kids. And then, as we get older, hopefully, we rise in our occupation and our ability to generate income increases.

And he says, if you are not careful in that middle age period, you're able to make more money. You don't necessarily need that money, and you can become addicted to the false security of finances, of things.

He said, it is very hard to convince a covetous person that they're being covetous, unless that covetous heart expresses itself in some outward sin, like fraud, stealing, cheating on your taxes. And then the person looks and says, oh, yeah, I guess that there must be a problem in my heart, because I was willing to cheat or whatever to get what I wanted.

Well, the best deterrent, again, he says, is to spend your money now, not in a reckless way, but to spend the extra that we have for eternally valuable things. So, that habit will be with us when we grow old, and I hope that you know older believers that are like that, and they're very encouraging and convicting.

Finally, he says, we all die of the same disease, old age. If we live long enough. And so, it is good to focus on the reality that that will be coming, and the active virtues of obeying God. Practice them now, and he says, practice learning to be happy with the circumstances God allows to come your way while you're still young, so that when you are elderly, there will be a habit in the heart, you know, there will be a well-beaten path of contentment, of trust.

So, he says, desire to be useful all the way to the end, but guard against that grumpy, bitter, morose attitude that happens when you feel isolated, when you can no longer do what you used to do, when you feel fearful about the future.

Set the heart on a course of walking as near to the Lord as you can, and of learning to trust and love Him in the present moment. Do that now, so that every day that follows can be of the same kind of devotion.

Well, that's the second letter from Archibald Alexander to elderly Christians. We'll pick up next week with his third letter.