April 27, 2026 Show with Pooyan Mehrshahi on “What Should We Learn From Henry Martyn, Missionary to India & Persia”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet.

Earth.

We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 27th day of April, 2026. I am thrilled to have back for the third time on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio a brother that I truly enjoyed, beyond my description, interviewing, and I'm looking forward to doing that again today.

His name is Pouyan Mershahi, and he is a native of Iran, now pastoring a Reformed Baptist congregation in the United Kingdom, Providence Baptist Chapel of Cheltenham, England, who leads the translation team of the Persian Bible through the Trinitarian Bible Society, leads Para Trust, which is translating Reformed Christian literature in the Persian language, and has been a founding member, trustee, and lecturer at Salisbury Reformed Seminary in England.

And today, Pouyan will be addressing, what should we learn from the 19th century English Anglican missionary to India and Persia, Henry Martin, today, especially young men and pastors. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pouyan Mershahi.

Thank you so much, Brother Chris, for your kind words, and I'm looking forward to our discussion on this great man of God, whose life still speaks to us to this day. He is one of my heroes, especially as he went to my home country of Iran, and whose work of translation still is powerfully speaking to the people of Iran.

So, thank you for having me on.

Oh, the pleasure is all mine, Brother. And before we get into the subject of Henry Martin, please, for the sake of those listeners who missed our previous two interviews, tell our listeners something about the congregation where you pastor in Cheltenham, England, Providence Baptist Chapel.

Thank you. By the grace of God, I was called to this congregation in 2007, August 2007, so it's been nearly 19 years since I have been the pastor of this congregation. They're a faithful group of God's people from different nationalities who come, and the thing that unites us is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God.

We are a 1689 Reformed Baptist church, and we seek by the grace of God, humbly and faithfully, to preach the Word of God and to serve the Lord. In this locality, the town is Cheltenham, but the county is called Gloucestershire, and people come from great distances to our congregation, and the reason being because there is such a dearth in the United Kingdom, and people nowadays have to travel for many miles to find a Bible at the leading church.

So, I'm very thankful for the way the Lord has brought me here and has given such a wonderful congregation to serve.

Amen, and if anybody lives in the Cheltenham, England area, or just in the United Kingdom in general, and you're willing to travel, and you want to find out more about this wonderful congregation, go to Cheltenham .Church.

And God willing, we will repeat that information later on in the program. And I also want everyone listening who is a man in ministry leadership to mark your calendars for June of 2027, because Pouyan is going to be my keynote speaker for the first time at one of my 2027 biannual Iron Trip and Zion Radio Free Pastors Luncheons.

And do you remember the exact date, Pouyan?

It is the 3rd of June. It's Thursday, the 3rd of June.

Thursday, the 3rd of June, and that's 2027. So, not this year, but next year. So, put that on a Post-it note or something. If you don't have a 2027 calendar yet, do something to mark that down on your calendar, on your computer, on your cell phone, wherever you do that kind of thing, if you're a man in ministry leadership.

And you can send me an email to register at chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com, and put Pastors Luncheon in the subject line. And if you want to be more specific, put 2027 Pastors Luncheon in the subject line, because we do have one coming up on October 1st of this year, and we hope as many of you will register for that as well.

These are always free events. Well, Henry Martin is not a name, I think, that is readily known, frequently known in the church today, even amongst Reformed Christians, possibly even amongst Anglican Christians.

But, why don't you tell us, why should we care about Henry Martin today, this 19th-century Anglican missionary to Persia and India? And we'll move on from there.

Henry Martyn's Life, Conversion, and Call to Mission

Yeah, thank you. Well, Henry Martin was an English missionary. He was a preacher, he was a Bible translator. He was born in the south of England, in a place called Brouwer, in Cornwall, in 1781. And he gave his short life to Christ in India and Persia, the Iran of today.

And he died in 1812, at only 31 years of age. He was one of the brightest young men of his generation at Cambridge University, and at Cambridge itself, the city. But instead of spending his life climbing in England, he spent it carrying the gospel eastward.

He preached to British soldiers, he visited the sick, he labored among Indians, he translated the New Testament into Hindustani, and then in Persia, completed a Persian New Testament and a translation of the Psalms.

And we should care about him, because he is one of those men who cuts across our excuses and in the West, men especially have many excuses. He was not naturally strong, he was not naturally robust, he was not naturally socially easy.

He was a sensitive man, he was scholarly, he was affectionate, he was physically frail, but the grace of God made him resolute. And we could describe him, we could say he was a man whose body was weak, but whose purpose was strong.

He didn't live long, but he lived a yielded life to the Lord Jesus Christ. And so that makes him so useful today, his life speaks to us, to the precise problems of our age, because we live in comfortable Christianity, we waste our gifts, we fear men, there is softness in men, there is vagueness towards Christianity, towards evangelism, there's vagueness towards Islam, the threat of Islam, and a church that often talks about mission more than it actually sacrifices for it.

There are conferences about missions and such things, but actually are we willing to sacrifice for it? And so there is something sort of bracing about Henry Martin, he makes a modern man ask, what exactly am I doing with the life God has given me?

And there is also something deeply Christ-exalting about him, because when you look at Henry Martin properly, the conclusion isn't for us, well, what a hero. The deeper conclusion should be, what a savior, to take a weak and flawed man, sinner, and make him useful.

So Henry Martin matters because he shows what happens when a gifted young man stops asking, how far can I go in this life for myself? And starts asking, how much is Christ worth? That's why I think Henry Martin, his life is worthy of our attention for us today.

Now, how did you personally discover who he was,.

And what drew you to study him more deeply, and to become so captivated by him? Yes, well,.

Soon after my conversion, I began to be interested in the lives of the missionaries, and as I began studying my Persian Bible, there was in the foreword, the name of Henry Martin. And so I began to investigate, to see who is this man?

So I read a few articles, and then I read the book, which is called, The Life of Henry Martin, by John Sargent, the Banner of Truth Trust, used to publish it, it's now out of print, but it is now available online.

His biography, his diary, his letters are available, and the author of it, I think the classic author, is John Sargent. And so I began reading it, and I have read that book a number of times, and it has every time fired me up to lay down my life for the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, tell us something about his.

Younger years, before he became a minister, and a missionary, like what kind of religious atmosphere was he raised in, and what kind of a boy and young man was he before the Lord really.

Henry Martyn's Early Sinfulness and Conversion

Laid a hold on him? Yes, well, that's important, something of his past is important. He was quite bright, he was sensitive, he was inward, he was ambitious, but also he was proud. And as a boy, he was small in his physique, in his stature, and he was vulnerable enough to be bullied.

And so in the book by John Sargent, he says that little Harry Martin, that's how he was nicknamed, little Harry Martin, he became I'm sure Donald Trump would have called him that, if Donald Trump was alive in the 19th century.

That's right, that's right. But he was bullied by the older children at school. And that's something for us to remember, because it helps us explain something about him. Henry Martin wasn't one of those sort of naturally commanding people, or sort of, we could say, broad-shouldered people, or socially dominant young men.

He was more the sort of a slight, clever, vulnerable kind, and that can produce its own temptations. Sometimes a smaller, clever boy develops inward pride and irritability, and that's how he felt. And that's what happened to him.

One of the examples is that at Cambridge, in a fit of anger, he once threw a knife at a fellow student and he was struck. The wall near to this man narrowly missed him. So that's not the act of a naturally meek saint, that's the act of a sinner with a temper.

And so we look at Henry Martin, he wasn't always a holy and a pious man, but the Lord had to deal with these things in him. And he looks back in his own writings, in his letters, about this side of his life with grief, he laments it.

And when he remembers this last period that he had spent with his own father as well, before his father died, he says how selfish he was, how irritable he was, how proud he had been. And he speaks, and I'm quoting from the book, he says, he speaks of rage and malice and envy, and he uses harshest language to his sister, and even to his father.

And so that makes him more real as a person. So we are not dealing with a man who floated into holiness by his temperament, we are dealing with a proud and sinful young man whom God's grace gradually subdued.

So he wasn't born a missionary, he was born needing conversion. He was, yes, he was a gifted sinner before he became a useful servant. And that's encouraging, because many men feel the weight of what is wrong with them, and they focus on that, and they think that disqualifies them from usefulness.

Well, Martin reminds us that grace doesn't merely decorate our nature, it actually conquers our nature. That's what it is. So that was his past. He was brought up in a Christian home, we could say, a Christianized culture of his day, but that did not save his soul.

But it did expose his inward sins, too. Well, what were the great turning points in his conversion? Well, there are a number of ways the Lord dealt with him, and you can see how each one of those is very human.

First, there was the influence of godly people, especially his sister. She spoke to him seriously about Christianity, and then he later writes about this and admits that what she said was true, but at the time it grated on him.

He hated it. He hated his sister for it. And isn't that how often God begins? So truth comes through various means. First, it irritates before it humbles us. And then another thing was that there was the death of his father.

That was a major blow for him. He received the news while still at Cambridge, and it shook him deeply. He says that after his father's death, he took up the Bible because it seemed suitable, he says, to such a solemn time.

And he began reading it with the acts of the apostles, partly because he found it engaging. He liked the story of it, the narrative. But while he was reading it, he was gradually drawn into the doctrines of the apostles.

Now, that's something to think about. Sometimes people imagine that conversion always begins with a massive experience or a kind of a thunderclap. But in Martin's case, it was more like the dawn, just slowly.

So there was the bereavement that opened the Bible. The Bible opened his conscience, and then the conscience opened toward the Lord Jesus Christ. And he even says that at first, he prayed from a form and thanked God in general for sending Christ into the world.

It is very formal, going through motions. But he had little sense of his own simpleness to begin with. Then gradually, his understanding deepened. He began to see the offers of mercy in Christ, and he says to seek a place in the covenant of grace with eagerness and hope.

And then there is the third turning point, which is one of, I think, the great moments in his life, that he experienced that success actually failed him. Because he rose up to a great point at Cambridge.

He won the highest honors. He became what in Cambridge in those days, they used to call it the senior wrangler. That's the student who came first of all in his field of mathematics. And that was a high position to take.

And then he found that what he had spent himself chasing actually couldn't satisfy him. He was miserable. And so he says this, and I'm quoting, he says, I obtained my highest wishes, but was surprised to find that I had grasped a shadow.

And isn't that amazing? He came to the highest point at Cambridge University and he said, I was grasping at shadow. And you can almost hear Ecclesiastes, can't you, in those words. He had climbed a mountain and then found it to become just a vapor.

So God brought him to Christ, partly by bereavement and partly by disappointment. And one broke his heart, and then the other exposed his idols. So that's how his eyes were opened and the Lord graciously revealed Christ to.

Him. Now, the way you've described him already, he was obviously a brilliant young man, but how brilliant was he really? Was he simply earnest or was he genuinely exceptional?

Well, he was genuinely exceptional. So at Cambridge, he rose to the very top in mathematics. As I said, he became the senior, what they called wrangler, and also took high honors in classical works. He was a clever man.

He was known in college as the man who had not lost an hour. That's what they called it. The man who had not lost an hour. Which tells you something about both his gifts and also his discipline. He was a disciplined man.

And he wasn't just pious, he was formidable intellectually. People feared his intellect. And yet, what is so striking is that the Lord didn't merely sanctify a sort of a warm heart in him. He sanctified a first-rate mind.

And that's important because one of the tragedies of modern Christianity is the waste of intellectual gifts. Yes, men are capable of many things and yet, what are they spending them on? Spending on trivia, spending it on status, they spend it on money, endless opinions, just spending it on screens and swiping up all the time.

Martin took a powerful mind and put it at Christ's feet. And there's this illustration of the intensity of his life in the books that I've read. For example, even while he was traveling, even when he was ill, even while he was under great strain, he kept reading, he kept translating, he kept thinking, he kept preparing.

When he was in India, when his health was failing and he was moving down the Ganges, he had the opportunity to rest but instead he kept preparing sermons and pressing on with translations. Why was that?

He said, because my time is very short. That's how he felt. He did actually believe that he would die young. So he said, I have to use every hour. There is another example of this in Iran of today, Persia of that time, in the city of Shiraz.

He didn't simply rely on what he had already learned in India because when he discovered that Persian language that he had acquired wasn't good enough yet for the kind of New Testament that he believed the people deserved, he started again in earnest.

He wouldn't do the work halfway. He said, I need to be proficient in the language so that I can translate it in a way that is worthy of my savior. And that says a lot about a man. He had intellectual honesty and he had moral seriousness and he had a desire to give people the best he could, not something sort of roughly adequate and say this is good enough.

So yes, Cambridge made him famous, but the Lord Jesus Christ made him useful. He had the kind of mind that could have climbed very high in England and some people told him, forget about missionary work and actually give himself to all the academics.

But it's the grace of God that taught him to spend that mind for souls of men and women and children and for the glory of Christ. And that's desperately needed. It's the needed.

Lesson for men today. Now tell us the providential circumstances that rose up in his life by our Lord that led him from being a Cambridge scholar to a missionary. And why did he choose.

India and Persia as mission fields? Well, this wasn't some sort of a sudden thing that happened. It wasn't something that just came into his mind. He'd been studying, he'd been praying. It was a deep conviction.

He was brought under the influence of men like Charles Simeon. And then the missionary examples of William Carey and David Brainard, that was very powerful to him. And all of these things grew. It wasn't just a sermon that he had heard.

It was a growing conviction. And Brainard especially affected him. He was a man who had spent himself in weakness for the salvation of others. And Henry Martin, he felt something like this holy envy, he says.

So there's also something else important. At Cambridge, he increasingly enjoyed Christian fellowship and spiritual growth. And in the book by Sargent, he says that during one summer, when he was alone, and that being alone forced him to spend time with scripture and with the Lord.

And he says he experienced, and I quote, real pleasure in religion more deeply than before. He became convinced of sin in a deeper way than ever before. He felt more that he needed to flee to Christ. He was desirous of renewal.

There was a revival that was taking place in his soul. That's important because missionary calling didn't grow out of sort of romantic dreams of, oh, we'll go on the mission field and enjoy our time and spend a week or two there or a month here.

It grew out of a deepening enjoyment of God. He enjoyed God. He enjoyed Christ. He loved the gospel. And then there was a growing seriousness about soul. So as he was reading about Cary in India, that really burned within him.

And he could hear the cries of the poor Indians. And later on, when he was in India, as he met some folk, he began to become very convicted that the Iranians or the Persians of his day did not have a copy of the word of God.

And he was that he needs to spend his last days laboring amongst them and translating if the Lord saw fit to use him. So these things are all important because you see, these things were sharpening in his head.

He had originally wanted to go into law, but because he couldn't, and he didn't want to be poor at the beginning, he said, I don't want to be poor. But then God really convicted him about these things.

And he makes this honest admission about this. It was a man like we are, but by the grace of God, under God's grace, he began to see things differently. He came to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ was worthy of far more than sort of respectable admiration.

He was worthy of costly obedience. And so one of the things that I've read about is this internal struggle over discomfort that he might experience. He writes in his letters that he thought of being employed in the same kind of work among the poor and ignorant people.

And he thought if he was going to do that, it made his sort of proud spirit, he says, recoil. And he was honest about these things, and he admitted to it. He knew the flesh in him didn't want to be obscure, and he didn't want hardship, and he didn't want just the sameness all the time.

And then he asks, in effect, whether or not Christ's love should constrain him. And that's important. When I'm talking to men, when we think, and I hope if any men listen to this, you see, calling is not tested by whether something feels heroic.

It's tested by whether Christ is worth the cost. So he didn't go because missions looked exciting. He went because Christ looked worthy. His calling wasn't born in romance. It was born in prayer and scripture and ultimately surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen. Now, there is a woman that had a significant role in his life, Lydia Grenfell. Please explain who she was and why was she so central to the story.

Of this brother that we're discussing today? Yeah, well, Henry Martin had met her, and he loved her. He wanted to marry her, and he wanted her to go with him. And all of these things make this man human.

It exposes one of the deepest tests of any man's life. What happens when love and calling seem to pull against one another? So he loved Lydia deeply. And so it wasn't some sort of passing interest. He hoped for marriage.

He proposed to her. He waited. He suffered. In one of the talks, he said that her name appears on almost every page of parts of his journal in one of the books that I've read. And so it's showing deep feeling for this woman.

That's a man carrying this real affection, real sorrow for a woman who said no to him. And he was troubled by the possibility that his love for her might become too central. It was an idol, he felt at times.

And he said one time, referred to himself as being in the presence of God and his idol. That's important to remember. So he knew that even a sort of a lawful affection, a good affection can become spiritually dangerous when it just consumes us and takes.

Whoops, sorry. He had sailed. No, you just froze on your screen for a second. You're fine now.

Okay, okay. I was just explaining that. Yeah, you froze again. Okay, you're back. Well, I hope it is not my internet connection. But I, yes, well, we will continue. So when he had sailed, for example, he was sailing away, the ship providentially halted near Cornwall where Lydia was.

And he went on the shore, he found her at breakfast time. And he asked her to marry him and come out to India with him. And she said, she didn't say yes. She said no. She asked for time. And later when the ship was about to sail, she still made no objection to his writing to her, but her own private reflections showed uncertainty and sadness.

She didn't want to go. Then years later, when he was worn and ill, he kept remembering Lydia. And that sort of stayed with him. And while he was traveling down the Ganges River, on the way out of India, he wrote to her and said, my affection for you has something sacred in it.

And that's very tender, isn't it? It shows you this was not some coldly sort of suppressed emotion. And yet, the deep issue is this, he would not let even this love sort of displace Christ's call. And that's why this is important for us.

We live in an age that almost analyzes romance. But Henry Martin teaches us that no human love, however real, may sit on the throne where the Lord Jesus should be living. So he loved Lydia truly, but he wouldn't let Lydia sit where only the Lord Jesus Christ should sit.

Young men need to understand this. So his heart was tender enough, of course, to love deeply. But by grace, it was loyal enough to obey the Lord Jesus Christ first. And that's a needed word for young men and young women and pastors who are counseling them.

Jesus Christ must come first.

Tom Hanks. Now, did Lydia, or do you know if Lydia ever explained why she rejected his proposal? Was it that she was not in love with him? Was it that she did not want to go to India on a mission field?

Do you know what it was?

In a general sense, it was the whole concept of going on the mission field. It was a new concept, and it was a fearful thing. And Henry Martin appreciated that. He didn't pressurize her, but he did love her.

He wished things were different, but he left it with the Lord. But she just struggled with that whole concept. The same applies to William Carey's wife. She struggled deeply in India, and she actually had a major mental breakdown, William Carey's wife.

It was a hard, hard place, yeah.

Tom Hanks.

Did Lydia ever marry anyone else?

I don't know. I have not looked into her life. I don't think she did.

Tom Hanks.

Interesting. So we have to go to our first commercial break right now. And when we come back, we'll pick up where we left off. And if anybody has a question of your own about Henry Martin or about missionary work in India and Persia, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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RareDocTraders .com. Welcome back, and folks, I want you to mark on your calendars this Wednesday we are going to have a return visit from Dr. Keith Evans, who is on the faculty of Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina.

He is a biblical counselor and a professor of that subject in North Carolina, and he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the demonic. He is returning for part two of a conversation we recently had on this fascinating subject, and we are going to spend more time during this episode critiquing the exorcist known as Chad Rippiger, who is also a traditionalist Roman Catholic priest, and we'll be seeking to demonstrate why you should not trust this man, why he is theologically dangerous, and why his whole ministry, so-called, as an exorcist is to be called into question.

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Also, on Thursday, Ken Ham, co-founder of Answers in Genesis, returns to the program. We are going to be paying tribute to a very close mutual friend of both of ours, Charlie Liebert, founder of 6daycreation .com, who also used to be a colleague with Ken Ham at Answers in Genesis.

Charlie went home to be with the Lord several weeks ago, and we will be paying tribute to him, and joining us will be Charlie's pastor, Jeremy Brandenburg, of the Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church right here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

So, those are just a couple of shows I wanted to highlight. But we are now back with Pouyanne Marshahi, and we are continuing our conversation on 19th century Anglican minister and missionary to India and Persia, Henry Martin.

And one of the things that we should pick up on is exactly what strikes you most about when Henry Martin arrives in India.

Henry Martyn in India: Mission, Translation, and Illness

Yes, well, he went to India as a chaplain under the East India Company. That means he was appointed to minister among British troops and officials. But from the beginning, his burden was larger than that.

He wants the gospel to reach the people around him, and he wants the scriptures in his own, in their own languages. And that's where we need to be historically careful as well, because Martin, Henry Martin, wasn't just an arm of the empire, the British empire.