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 Marshahi, 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 Marshahi.

Thank you so much, Brother Chris, for your kind words. And I am 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 of 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,

C -H -E -L -T -E -N -H -A -M .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 Pouillon 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,

Pouillon? 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.

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.

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 in 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?

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. Well, 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 laid a hold of 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. And 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 it 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 and 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, Paula. 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 sort of 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 was 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 he, 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 translation.

Why was that? 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. Or there was 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 the 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, no.

So yes, Cambridge made him famous but the Lord Jesus Christ made him useful and 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 sovereign

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 Braynard.

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 Braynard 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.

And 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 and 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 convinced 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, he didn't wanna be poor at the beginning.

He said, I don't wanna 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 asked 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 makes 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, it said that her name appears on almost every page of parts of his journal in one of the books that I 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. Sorry, you are happy? 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. 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? And 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 canonizes 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. That's a needed word for young men and young women and pastors who are counseling them.

Jesus Christ must come first. 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.

Did Lydia ever marry anyone else? I don't know.

I have not looked into her life. I don't think she did. 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 chrisarnson at gmail .com.

And as always, give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

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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.

So I hope that you tune into that. He has been paraded around on some of the most highly viewed podcasts on the internet, such as Tucker Carlson's program and the former

Navy SEAL Sean Ryan's program. So I think it would be very valuable to listen to this interview and warn others about this

Chad Rippiger exorcist. 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 sixdaycreation .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 Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 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. 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 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. In many ways, true missionary work was awkward to the interest of the

East India Company. They didn't like it. They made things difficult for people like William Carey and Martin and others.

And so East India Company men wanted order, yet they wanted commerce.

And the least disturbance possible. So men like Martin wanted conscience of people awakened, and they wanted souls converted, and they wanted to make the truth of Christ known.

And those things don't always sit comfortably together. They don't match. And so that's how he went.

He sailed under the East India Company's authority, but his conscience actually belonged to the

Lord Jesus Christ. And that's every servant of the Lord Jesus. And he wasn't waiting to begin the work.

He carried the work with him onto the ship. He was engaged in evangelism. And there's a whole moving account about some of the things that he got himself involved in.

And he knew he might never return. And his biographer,

John Sargent, he makes it plain that he left under the sense that this wasn't a temporary adventure, but a possible final farewell.

And I'm sorry, folks, my guest is frozen again. There's a little internet.

We see his seriousness. And we see the range of his work. He arrives in India and doesn't settle into a sort of a soft chaplain's existence.

He could have. He preaches to British soldiers. He visits the hospitals. He starts schools. He studies languages.

He translates. He speaks with Indians. He argues with their elders.

He ministers among the sick. He keeps pressing on when results are small.

And there was so much opposition as well. So, for example, he found himself often much more encouraged in the hospital than in the houses of the wealthy

British folk. In the homes of the upper ranks and attempts to...

He tried to introduce serious Christian conversation amongst these upper ranks.

It was straight away disregarded. It was... His conversation was chilled.

And he talks about the fact that he tried to talk about Christianity and found the response so cold that it dampened his efforts.

But then instead of giving way to bitterness, he turned to the Lord. And he says, in effect, that though almost the whole world seems united against God and his

Christ, still he must go on for perhaps some poor soul may yet become better.

There's so many examples in his life. So, in India, for example, he had long arguments with his

Munshi, who was his administrator, admin, personal assistant.

And one of these men mocked the Trinity and said, it makes God weak, he says, if he is obliged to have a fellow.

And then another one tried to degrade the Lord Jesus by saying that the higher beings wouldn't be born of a woman.

And Henry Martin, he answered them fully. And he kept laboring with them, though it was wearying and often fruitless.

Well, these predominantly Muslim or Hindu individuals?

They were a mixture. But at that time, I believe he was, the people who were working with him were

Hindus. And when he goes into the open air, he engages with beggars and he engages with individuals that he would see.

There is one account that talks about the fact that how hundreds of these fakirs, who are the poor people, the beggars, and the yogis would gather around him and he would tell them plainly to repent of sin and look to the

Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. And he talks about the uselessness of Ganges River that they believe that washed away their sins.

And he spoke against the foolishness of sacred cows in India.

And after these kinds of scenes, he would return to his bungalow exhausted and sometimes almost collapse under this strain.

So this is not kind of a romantic missionary life. It's sort of rugged.

It's raining. It's persistent. And yet he kept going because he believed that the

Lord Jesus Christ is worthy of being preached even when there is heat and when there's danger and when there is no air conditioning and when there is misunderstanding and when there is very little visible response.

So he didn't just carry a burden for souls in his heart. He turned burden into labor with his hand.

That's important. And perhaps the most encouraging thing for pastors is this.

He often thought he had seen little fruit, but God was working more than he knew.

So one of the talks, one of the, sorry, the books that I read, it speaks about, talks about that he left a city called

Kanpur believing no one had been converted. And yet there was at least one man,

Sheikh Salah his name is, who had in fact come to Christ and later he served faithfully in Christian ministry.

He became a preacher of Christ. But Henry Martin, he never knew that in his own lifetime.

And that's... And my guess is frozen again, folks. I'm sorry about that.

And we... It's so hard. And you may preach and pray and labor and leave thinking little has happened and only heaven will show what

God actually did. Now, his time there was also riddled with physical illness.

All the time, wasn't it? That's right. That's right. He was extremely ill.

And his illnesses were very severe. And they shadow nearly the whole of his ministry, missionary life.

He came from a physically weak family line and his own constitution was never strong.

So in India, in Persia, he had a fever, he had exhaustion, he had constant chest pain, he had headaches, he fainted many times, he was coughing all the time.

There was a weakness everywhere and he was slowly wasting away. And one of the most vivid examples in his journey to Kanpur, he chose to travel by foot through the fierce heat of that hot season.

And it was a dreadful mistake physically. You see the hot wind blew on him like fire from a furnace and every bone ached.

And by the time he arrived, he collapsed in a faint at the house of a family called the

Sherwoods. And they thought he was going to die.

They said that he was between death and life. So because of that, so he suffered a lot.

He was a thin man, he was sick and he was hardly able to endure the journey of mission work.

But he continued. In one place he says, it is the speaking that kills me.

And that's quite important, that's quite powerful because it shows the cost of his calling.

The very work he believed Christ had given him to do was actually tearing at his strength.

So preaching and public speaking and disputations and travel and endless labor were wearing him out.

So he knew that death was drawing near. And at one point he told his sister that he felt death was settled in his lungs, that he was going to die of some sort of a lung disease.

But he wasn't merely tired, he knew his body was breaking and yet he kept going.

Not recklessly in sort of foolish sense, but with a deep inward persuasion that his time was short and that God's work must be done while he had strength.

So his body was frail, but his obedience was muscular. His lungs were failing, but his purpose wasn't failing.

And so that's important because this is especially helpful for pastors and men who feel physically limited.

Henry Martin is reminding us that usefulness isn't reserved for the naturally strong.

You know, the Lord Jesus Christ often writes deeply, as one has said, with broken pens.

And so you might feel broken, whoever is listening, you might feel broken, but you can be a broken pen in Christ's hand and the

Lord Jesus Christ can still write with you. And tell us something about one of the most important aspects of his ministry, that is his

Bible translation while he was in India. Yeah. Yes, well, in India, he gave himself to the

Hindustani language. And by March 1808, the

New Testament in Hindustani had been completed. He also translated the Book of Common Prayer.

He was an Anglican. He worked on Genesis and other materials. And, but that was just after a few short years of arriving in the country.

And so that's extraordinary when you think of the circumstances.

He wasn't sitting in some quiet, well -funded academic retreat. He was preaching, visiting, traveling, arguing, falling sick, laboring under heat and opposition.

Yet in the middle of it all, he was translating the New Testament. And he believed that as a missionary, he could preach for an hour, but a faithful translation can preach for centuries.

And that's so true, isn't it? And the translation work itself often fed into his public witness.

The more he worked at the language, the more he could speak directly. The more he heard objections and questions from Muslims and Hindus, the more carefully he could refine the wording of the text.

And so translation and evangelism were not sort of separate compartments in his life.

They strengthened each other. And there's also moving words when the

Persian New Testament was finished. I'll come to it later on, but there's one phrase from that.

There's a prayer that he prays about his spirit. He referred to himself as one whom

God had called to be an interpreter of the world.

So he didn't speak as a literary genius. He spoke as a servant entrusted with a sacred task.

So he didn't want people merely to hear about Christ from foreigners. He wanted them to hear

Christ speaking in their own tongue. So he worked at language like a sort of a miner who works at a rock because he knew there was gold in the text.

So he worked hard. He produced the two translations, the

Hindustani in India and then the Persian New Testament.

So praise God for that. And by the way, Joseph in Alta Vista, Virginia, wrote in and says, after a little research,

I was able to confirm what Pouillon said earlier that Lydia Grenfell never married another man.

And so we are now entering into our midway break. And if anybody would like to join us, just like Joseph in Alta Vista, Virginia, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

When we come back, we'll be hearing more about Henry Martin's journey to Persia, the original homeland of my guest today,

Pouillon Meshahi, and we'll be finding out what happened there. And we'll be right back after these messages.

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So that's royaldiadem .com. Before I return to Pouyan Mershahi as we continue the fascinating story of 19th century

Anglican minister, missionary, and Bible translator

Henry Martin, we just have some important reminders. If you love the show, folks, you do not want it to go off the air, please go to ironsharpensironradio .com,

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Pouyan Mashahi is the pastor in Cheltenham, England, I have helped people in my audience spanning the entire globe find churches that are biblically faithful, sometimes within just a couple of minutes from where they live.

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Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. So now, Pouyan, tell us exactly what the

Lord used to place in the mind of Henry Martin to set sail for Persia, and why did he have such a burden on his heart for those people, and what happened there?

Okay, well, Persia or the Iran of today was one of the great final chapters of Henry Martin's life, and in some ways, it's one of the most moving.

He had already begun Persian work while in India. He already began to be convicted that there is a whole nation of people, a language group of millions of people who do not have any portion of the scripture in their language.

And so he was already working on these things, studying the languages, but when he actually reached

Persia, he realized something humbling, that the Persian language that he had learned in India was not enough.

It wasn't of the quality that he wanted for a New Testament worthy of the language and of the sacred text of the scriptures.

So instead of defending his earlier efforts out of pride, instead of just saying, no, this is good enough.

What I've done is good enough. He humbled himself and began again in earnest, especially in the city of Shiraz, which is actually very close to Shushanda Palace.

And that says a lot about the man. A lesser man might have sort of clung stubbornly to what he had already done, but Martin wanted accuracy.

He wanted faithfulness more than personal credit. And Persia or Iran was not just a place of study.

It was a place of witness for him. He was involved in repeated conversations, arguments, diaries full of it, of discussions with Muslim scholars, with learned men, with inquirers.

So the setting changed from India. He was less of an open air missionary there and more of a sort of a man engaged in close searching conversation.

So for example, one time as he and an Iranian man were walking in a garden or sitting together, they spoke of Christ's death and the sweetness of the gospel.

And Martin said that the bed of roses and the nightingales were not so sweet as hearing a

Persian speaking of Christ's death. So you see, he wasn't there merely to defeat

Islam in debate. He was there because he wanted Iranian men and women to know the son of God.

And so there were also sort of searching inquirers, questions from inquirers.

Somebody asked him what inward evidence he had that Christianity was true.

And he said, well, from his experience, God has saved him. He spoke about the change that he had taken place in his own life and the peace that he has received.

Now he has peace with God through Jesus Christ. Now he desires God, the things of God more than anything else.

And that's important because his apologetic wasn't just intellectual. It was doctrinal.

It was moral. It was experiential. And so in Persia, he wasn't only translating the

New Testament, he was living it before the eyes of the Muslims. He carried

Christian truth, not only in his own mouth or in his writings and manuscript, but in his whole manner of life.

So Iran or Persia then was a place of refinement. His translation was refined.

His witness was refined. And in a way his own soul was being sanctified by the

Lord. And if I say something about the translation that he did, that Persian translation, that's one of his greatest achievements.

It is still in print today. And I have worked for 10 years on the

New Testament while I was pastoring. And it was the revision of the

Henry Martin's translation was published in 2019.

And it's gone through various reprints and revisions and it's being distributed by the many thousands now throughout the world.

But after many, many hours, the last sort of sheet of the

Persian New Testament was completed on 24th of February, 1812.

And when that happened, Henry Martin didn't sort of congratulate himself for the success.

What he did, he prayed and he thanked God. And he said this, and I quote, he said,

I have many mercies for which to thank the Lord. And this is not the least. Now may that spirit who gave the word and called me,

I trust to be an interpreter of it, graciously and powerfully apply it to the hearts of sinners, even to the gathering and elect people from among the long estranged

Persians. And isn't that wonderful, he's grateful, he's humble, he's doctrinal, he's missionary, he's

God -centered, he longs for fruit. And so he doesn't say, he doesn't say

I've finished a great work, but he says in effect, may the spirit now use it. And that's an important lesson for pastors and Christian workers.

Finishing a task is not the same as seeing fruit from it. And we can prepare sermons, we can translate books, we can plant churches, we can labor in catechizing, in teaching and writing articles, but unless the spirit of God applies the word, all is vain.

And Henry Martin knew that. And he didn't stop there. He, sooner afterwards, he began to translate the

Psalms. And he says, I was engaged in a sweet employment.

So even near the end, he was weakened, he was worn, he still found sweetness in putting

God's word into Persian. So then a copy of the

Persian New Testament was given to the Shah. And the

Shah of Iran considered it such a high quality that he said, this is the kind of a book, this is the kind of the style of the translation as befitting sacred books, he said.

And we shouldn't overestimate what that means. It doesn't mean Iran or Persia was converted, but it does mean this was no careless work or amateur effort.

It had real quality, his translation and real significance. And so, yes,

Martin died young, he was only 31. But he left behind him a book that would keep speaking where his own voice had fallen silent.

So there is a missionary who dies, but then the scriptures remain. And that's powerful legacy for any man.

Yeah, how did he die? He died of illness, he was weakened.

He was coming actually back, he knew he was dying. He was coming back by land and he arrived in Turkey and he died in the city of Tokat.

And he was buried there at the age of 31. We have a listener in Point Lookout, Long Island, Timothy, who asks,

I heard your first two interviews with your wonderful guest, Pouyan.

And I know that he is from a Zoroastrian background before he converted to Christ.

Do you know of any encounters that Henry Martin had with Zoroastrians in Iran?

He had brief encounters, but very little is written. Only very short excerpts of his conversation with those, he calls them,

I believe, fire worshippers and sun worshippers.

But he doesn't seem to engage with them. And the reason for that is because the

Zoroastrians are and were extremely self -righteous and they were within their own groupings.

They would not come out and engage others outside. So Henry Martin was mainly engaged with Muslims.

And tell us something about the details on how he engaged Muslims. So he was a courageous man.

He was weak, but he was courageous. He was serious. He was tender. He was truthful.

He didn't like controversy for its own sake. He wasn't sort of a combative man.

But when the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ and the truth of the gospel were at stake, he wouldn't soften the message.

And that's important for us today, especially in the West. We don't need more sort of shrillness.

We don't need more cowardice either. We need the kind of clarity

Henry Martin had. So he spent much time in direct conversations with Muslims.

He didn't run away from them. And some of those discussions were quite searching and very affectionate as well.

Men would ask him about the Lord Jesus Christ. Men would ask him about prophecy, prayer and truth and the

Christian view of paradise. And Henry Martin, he contrasted the

Christian joy of communion with God with the sort of the sensual descriptions that he could see amongst the

Muslims in the Islamic ideas of the life to come. And he says, look, we are looking for sensual pleasures.

He could say that his true happiness was in God's presence and in knowing him and conformity to him, not in some sort of earthly pleasure that is multiplied forever.

And that's important. He wasn't merely saying Islam is wrong in abstract terms.

He was showing that Christianity gives what Islam can't give, reconciliation with God, holiness of heart, delighting in God, joying in God.

Muslims don't rejoice in their God. They don't have joy. Their God doesn't give them joy.

It gives them loss. And he talked to them about eternal fellowship with God through Jesus Christ.

So one time there was this conversation with a Muslim who was listening closely and had questions.

And the questions weren't merely argumentative and they became very personal and very spiritual.

They were tears in his eyes. They were serious, earnest questions.

And it seemed that God was moving in his heart. So Henry Martin writes about this and he treasures those moments and prayed that God would work in this man who was shedding tears.

So he didn't go to Iran to win arguments and lose men. He went to win men by telling them the truth.

So he neither feared Muslims nor flattered them. He loved them too much for that.

So that's a great line, by the way. He never feared them nor flattered them.

I love that. Yeah, well, that's what it was. And so you see some people become timid and then they become very vague.

They don't talk clearly. They don't talk directly to the needs of the men. And then there are other people who become very harsh and fleshly.

But Henry Martin, he said, no, he was a student.

He learned how did these people think. So he learned seriously and he spoke plainly.

He listened to them and he loved them sincerely and he confessed Christ boldly before them.

And he then trusted the Holy Spirit with the results. And that's a pattern that we need as well.

So there was a situation, there was this major conversation or confrontation that happened that he writes in his diaries, if you don't mind me.

You know? Oh yeah, definitely. And he regarded as a greatest moment and opportunity in his life.

And so he was brought into a room, into a large room lined with Mullahs, the religious leaders.

And there was this learned Muslim scholar at the head called

Mirza Ibrahim. And so he was standing there, this weak, thin English man, one sort of spokesman for the

Lord Jesus Christ and the Christian faith. And the issue that they wanted to talk to him about was the person of Christ.

And so they pressed at him, pressed at him on what Christians mean when they call

Jesus Christ, the son of God and God in the flesh. And so then there was, they asked him this very serious question.

They said, is Christ creator or creature? And he answered them plainly.

He answered them unflinchingly. He said, they're creator. And they were stunned.

They'd never heard anything like this, that a man could say that Jesus Christ is

God. And so he was direct. He was unqualified. He didn't apologize.

And he was doctrinally exact. He knew perfectly, perfectly well what was at stake.

They could have done anything to him. And so, but he said, if Christ is not the eternal son of God, if he is not divine, then

Christianity is emptied at its heart. And that's what it makes this account where he was standing there very powerful, because he wasn't resort to diplomacy at the point where faithfulness was required.

He didn't say something vague to avoid offense and say, oh, well, I want to, I don't want to offend these people.

No, he confessed Christ. And so there was one account that says that, that these people had never heard anybody saying that Jesus Christ is the creator.

So he was, there's a weakened, weak -bodied missionary. He's worn, he's ill.

He stands in a room of the scholars and he says, in effect, Jesus Christ is not mere creature, but he's the creator.

And there's other place where he was challenged and was being pressurized to say the formula.

It is called the shahadah. When a person converts to Islam, they have to say the shahadah, which is

Muhammad is the prophet of God and so on. But rather than submit and say the shahadah, he said, no,

Jesus Christ is the son of God. And people were greatly disappointed and offended.

But that was said at his own personal risk. So, and this is where Henry Martin becomes very important for the present day

Christians in the West and in Britain, in United States. You see,

Islam is not now something happening on sort of distant mission fields.

It is on our streets, in our schools, in our workplaces. It's among our neighbors.

We don't need to be arrogant about what we believe, but neither do we need to be embarrassed, you know, to be silent about what we believe.

We need Christians who can, with kindness and firmness, say who

Jesus Christ is. So, here is a man in a room full of mullahs. One sick

English man stood up and told them plainly who Jesus is.

And so he didn't go to Persia to apologize for Jesus Christ. No, he went to confess

Christ. And that's important. Now, what were, what was the fruit of those labors with the

Muslims? You've mentioned their reactions to him and sometimes it was, they were led to weeping.

Sometimes they were angered. What about conversions? Well, certainly there were oppositions, but it would be wrong to say that was, that there was no fruit or even no hope, hopeful sign of fruit.

One of the encouraging things in Henry Martin's Persian period, Iranian period, is that some of the men who, that he spoke with, didn't remain merely argumentative.

They became more serious. They became more thoughtful and they became very tender in spirit.

He believed that God had begun a good work in them. There's an important example.

There was a man called Mirza Syed Ali. And he didn't, this man didn't sort of simply continue as a sort of detached enemy of him.

There were times when he seemed really moved. He asked earnest questions about rare and truth and the

Christian faith. And he was dissatisfied with the falsehood and the looseness that was all around him.

And so Henry Martin believed that God was working in this man. And so he labored patiently with him.

And so there's one particular sort of lovely moment where he talks about this man who was talking about the death of Christ.

And he said that these, it was so sweet to hear this man speaking in Persian, in the

Farsi language, speaking of Jesus Christ's death. And so he didn't, that's not the language of a man who likes debates, right?

But it's the language of a missionary hearing the first note of sort of gospel understanding in another tongue.

There is other incident. One of these Iranians, he asked

Henry Martin what inward evidence he had that Christianity was true.

And he didn't talk about abstract thing, but he pointed to the change that the grace of God had made in his life.

He said, look, I am not what I was. God has saved me. God has changed my heart. This is what

Jesus does. And that's important. And you see, it shows that his witness wasn't just doctrinal, but it was, and it wasn't emotional.

It was doctrinal. It was moral. It was experiential. And he could say in effect, the proof is not only in the books, it's the transformed soul.

And so, and that's important for us when we think about it, because we may preach and pray and labor and leave with your heart heavy, thinking nothing has happened while God is quietly bringing souls to himself.

Ultimately in time, there were those who were beginning to read the

New Testament and hundreds came to know the Lord in that 19th century, by the end of the 19th century.

And then now, again, as the Henry Martins New Testament as the basis of so many of the translations, the thousands upon thousands, if not millions have come to know the

Lord. So he set a good foundation. So heaven will likely show fruit that faithful servants never knew they had born.

So he translated the New Testament with ink, but he also translated it with his own life.

And that's what we should be doing. Amen. And we have to go to our final break. Do not go away because we are going to be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

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Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur.

In the film Chariots of Fire, the Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt

God's pleasure when he ran. He knew his efforts sprang from the gifts and calling of God.

I sensed that same God -given pleasure when ministering the word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God.

That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a savior who died for sinners, and that God forgives all who come to him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.

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That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New High Park Baptist Church, a congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's word, and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.

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Also, all men in ministry leadership, don't forget that my next free biannual

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio pastor's luncheon will be held on Thursday, October 1st, 2026, featuring for the very first time as our keynote speaker,

David A. Harrell, who is pastor of Calvary Bible Church in Jolton, Tennessee, and the author of a number of books, including the one he will be highlighting and whose theme will be his keynote address, and that is,

Why America Hates Biblical Christianity. That's Thursday, October 1st, 11 a .m.

to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, always free of charge.

Everything is free, your meal, your admission, your time of fellowship with old friends, new friends alike, hearing

David A. Harrell preach, and also on top of everything, every man who attends will receive one, possibly two heavy sacks of free brand new books personally selected by me and donated by generous

Christian publishers all over the United States and United Kingdom. So if you'd like to register, just send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com, and put Pastors Launching in the subject line.

Please make sure you give us your full name, the full name of your church or ministry and its location, and the number of men who will be joining you.

That's Thursday, October 1st, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania.

Send me that email to register at chrisarnson at gmail .com and put, I need a shirt, I'm sorry, and put

Pastors Launching in the subject line. And that's also the email address to send in a question for Poojan Marshahi on Henry Martin, the 19th century

Anglican minister and missionary to India and Persia that we've been discussing. chrisarnson at gmail .com,

give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. And we have Lenny in Jensen Beach, Florida.

Lenny says, I always find it a joy to discover these hidden treasures like Henry Martin that I've never heard of before.

Thank you for having such an informative guest on the program. I was wondering if Henry Martin faced the same kind of life -threatening danger evangelizing

Muslims back in the early 19th century as he would today, because I understand this is over 100 years prior to the

Islamic revolution. That's a good question to ask.

He certainly faced dangers, but he was not living in a country where was a police state, where the government was using technology and had the

Islamic revolutionary guards to be constantly keeping a watch over any kind of deviancy from Islam.

So he didn't face the same kind of challenges to the same extent, but certainly he was facing dangers at different times and disappointments.

So today it's because of the fact that everything, any technology that Christians use is being tapped and the whole system, the country is under surveillance.

That is the challenge. Henry Martin could speak to people privately without having to have the fears that many face today.

But that in itself leads us to the actual oppositions that he faced, which were a lot of oppositions.

And this is why he is so useful for ministers and Christian workers and any

Christians today, because we often imagine the missionary battle is mainly with outsiders. But in Henry Martin's case, some of the more painful trials came from those nearer home to him.

So for example, certain Europeans in India disliked his plain preaching.

They disliked his seriousness. They disliked his concern for Indians. They said, why are you talking to the Indians? You are the chaplain for the

British East India Company. And they wanted a chaplain.

They didn't want somebody to be like a prophet declaring the word of God. They wanted sort of religious formality, not sort of piercing gospel truth.

So he also faced that very human and very wearing burden of difficult associates.

There was a man called Sabbat, who is an obvious example.

He was talented, this man Sabbat, and at points very helpful, but also jealous.

He was a jealous man. He was unstable. He was quarrelsome. And at one point, Martin simply says, my greatest trial is

Sabbat. And that's a sobering thing. And there are even almost absurd examples of Sabbat's behavior.

And you think, people see it today, this kind of behavior. We are told of him storming off in temper over a chair, complaining bitterly about other people and behaving in ways that made life exhausting for Henry Martin.

And so it makes his life realistic. Many pastors will recognize that some of the hardest things in ministry aren't sort of grand persecutions, but this long wearing personal vexations.

And yes, he endured misunderstandings too. He had his bodily weakness, his inward sort of seriousness, his unusual seed, all of that made him easy for some people to misread.

So on many occasions, he was very lonely. He wasn't some sort of so naturally a buoyant extrovert.

He was already drawn to these inward happiness and melancholy.

So he was misunderstood at different times. And so some of Henry Martin's sharpest battles were not with Mullahs in Persia, but with thorns much nearer home.

And so it's one thing to face enemies, but it's another thing to be worn down by disappointments among your own people, like in East India Company, which were all

British. And yet it doesn't become sour. And that's important.

He knew what it was to be grieved, but he kept going. He didn't turn bitterness into a sort of a companion that he was nursing.

And so there are all these useful lessons. So a man may be sorely pride by people, and yet remain sweetened by the grace of God.

And that's not a small thing. All of us experience things that could make us really bitter, but he wasn't a bitter man.

And it's a joy to read his letters and his diary. So yes, he faced opposition.

Sometimes it was life -threatening, but he hardly speaks about them. He doesn't worry about his life.

He doesn't care about it in one sense. He's caring for those souls, and he's caring more concerned about, was he faithful in telling people about the

Lord? And in the couple of minutes that we have left, why don't you summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners about Henry Martin?

Okay. So I would say

Henry Martin is especially helpful for people today, to pastors especially, because he reminds us what ministry often really looks like.

A great deal of his life was not made up of sort of heroic scenes, but ordinary faithfulness, preaching to difficult hearers, visiting the sick, translating patiently, enduring bodily weaknesses, all of these things, that's real ministry.

And he's reminding us that a ministry may be outwardly thin and inwardly rich.

And it teaches us stuff about the modern church in the West. He says, he's saying to us that Christ is worth more than all of our comfort.

Britain and the United States, I'm sure is spiritually thin in many places. We are over -entertained, we are under -prayed and often frightened of seriousness.

We talk much, but sacrifice little. And Henry Martin's life rebukes all of that.

And he says, you need to have holy seriousness. You need to engage with Islam in a better way.

Islam is not far away, it's among us. So the answer isn't panic.

It's not political sort of uprising. It's not sort of sentimental interfaith vagueness.

It's the kind of clear, compassionate, informed Christian witness that Martin spoke about.

So there's so much to say about all of these things. But friends, be encouraged.

He prayed this, and I say this at the end. He prayed, increase my zeal, that though I am but a feeble and obscure instrument,

I may struggle out my few days in great and unremitting exertions for the demolition of paganism and the setting up of Christ's kingdom.

That's what we're about. And that's what by the grace of God, the Lord enabled

Henry Martin to achieve. So the glory of Henry Martin is not Henry Martin. The glory of Henry Martin is

Jesus Christ who takes weak and proud and frail sinners and teaches them to spend themselves for his name.

That's what it is. Well, I want to thank you so much for being such a superb guest again on Iron Shelf and Zion Radio.

You have an open door here in this studio. Anytime you'd like to return and just contact me with the topic you'd like to address, and I would be delighted to have you back on.

For any of you listening who want to find out more about Providence Baptist Chapel in Cheltenham, England, where my guest

Pouyan Meshahi is the pastor, go to Cheltenham .church,

Cheltenham .church. Cheltenham is spelled C -H -E -L -T -E -N -H -A -M .church.

And don't forget to look up all of Pouyan Meshahi's interviews on Iron Shelf and Zion Radio.

Go to irontripandzionradio .com and type in the search engine

Pouyan, P as in Peter, O -O -Y -A -N. I want to thank you again.

I want to thank everybody who listened. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater