William Carey — Michael Haykin

The topic for this evening, and for those for whom this will cause some inconvenience, I apologize. I'm going to do William Carey tonight and Andrew Fuller in two weeks, and I thought it more appropriate, and when we get to Andrew Fuller you'll see why, that we look at the more famous of these two friends, and Carey and Fuller are both very close friends, and so I want to think about William Carey this evening, and the cause of missions, and lay upon your minds and hearts the burden that gripped Carey at the beginning of what is known as the modern missionary movement, which begins in the 18th century, and I think still should grip us.

I have friends, well I have acquaintances who have talked about the day of missions as we have known it, where we in the West send out missionaries to other countries is past, and we need to be supporting, as it were, nationals in these countries.

I do not believe that at all. I think the day of missions is still very much with us, and I hope that as we think about Carey tonight, and his argumentation for missions, that you'll see the force of his arguments are still very persuasive, they're not things that simply are historical in nature, but they pertain to the essence of the gospel, and so I apologize for those who came thinking that we were going to talk about Andrew Fuller, and the challenge of the modern world, what is known as modernity, and we want to think about that in two weeks.

Well, tonight then, we want to think about the legacy of William Carey, born 1761, died in 1834. I venture to hope that William Carey is a name that you do not need to be acquainted with. You know the name.

It could very well be, and I hope it is, that by the end of the evening you'll know more about that name, but I trust that of the names that we have looked at in this course of study, his is as famous as John and Charles Bradley, or George Whitefield, who we looked at in previous weeks.

Now, he was born in the middle of the 18th century, and the 18th century was a period of great achievement for the British people. Great achievement along a number of fronts, and I want to think about one in contrast to the work of Carey.

It was a period of great empire building. The British had had an empire which they had lost a number of years after Carey had reached manhood. In the great war of 1776 to 1783, the first British empire really disappeared as the American colonies that comprised that empire were lost to the British control.

But in these last decades of the 18th century, the British were building another empire, and one thinks of the achievements of men like Clive in India fighting against the French. The 18th century is almost one long war between the British and the French.

Clive in India fighting against the French, defeating the French at a battle called the Battle of Plassey, which opened up most of India to British conquest and domination. Or one thinks of something much closer to home, the year 1759.

I hope that year does ring some bells in Canadian history. That's the year of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, when General James Wolfe, a man at that time, a general in his 40s, who had fought at Culloden in 1745, sailed up to St. Lawrence and with British soldiers did what the French garrison at Quebec City did not think the British would do, they scaled the cliffs at Quebec City, and the French found themselves facing an English or British army outside the walls of Quebec.

You can still go to Quebec City and actually see in the old, as you come into the older part of town, where that battlefield was. The last time I was there, it was a soccer field, which may well be appropriate.

But there were certain markers on that soccer field which indicated where General James Wolfe was killed in that battle, the French General Montcalm was also killed, but it resulted in a British victory and changed the entire course of North American history because it opened up Canada for British domination and so on.

Or one thinks, not now in the realm of the military, one thinks of the voyages of discovery of Captain James Cook, discovering in the South Pacific the islands of Tahiti and Hawaii and Australia and New Zealand.

And it's Cook, for instance, who maps the coastlines of New Zealand and Australia and therefore provides another venue for British emigration and the part of another aspect of the British Empire, the Second British Empire.

But I want to think with you tonight about a different type of empire building, a very distinct, the empire building that was done in the wake of William Carey. It's building a different kingdom. Carey's kingdom would have as permanent, in fact, much more permanent results and that is his mission to India and his inspiration of a host of missionaries through the 19th century.

One thinks of many of the great missionaries of the 19th century, Hudson Taylor, Livingston and so on, nearly all of them read the life of Carey. Carey's life since his death in 1834 has been written up at least 60 times.

I have a strange avocation, a strange hobby, which is collecting biographies of William Carey. I have about 30 of them. His life was abundantly detailed for Victorians and became kind of household reading among evangelicals and provided inspiration on both sides of the Atlantic for many who laid to heart God's great desire for the nations and that is that they hear the gospel and that Christ's name be known from the rising of the sun to its setting.

And so Carey stands at the fountainhead of that. He has been rightly described as the father of modern missions. As we will see, that description of Carey is an appropriate one if we are thinking of the man who was the inspiration of so much of the modern missionary movement.

If we think that title means that he was the first and there were no others in the modern era, then we are wrong because there were others and in particular one community, and I'm going to talk about them briefly, a group known as the Moravians, who are before Carey and from whom Carey himself was deeply inspired by their self-sacrificial going to the ends of the earth.

In Carey's own day, Carey did not have to wait to die to be regarded with wonder by many of his contemporaries. John Newton, who met Carey only twice, John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, could write, now you need to bear in mind that these words are coming from an Anglican.

Newton could say of Carey, such a man as Carey is more to me than a bishop or an archbishop he is an apostle. Newton, like a number of his contemporaries, was what we would describe as a cessationist, did not believe that the miraculous gifts of the apostolic era continued in his day and yet he could say the following, if God were to work a miracle in our day, I should not wonder if it were in favour of Dr. Carey.

Very different Carey's opinion of himself though, and when Carey came to die in 1834 he gave explicit instruction that on his tombstone there be written the following verse from a hymn of Isaac Watts, a wretched, poor, helpless worm, on thy kind arms I fall.

And this evening I do not want to make the mistake, which I think has been often done, of decking Carey out like some sort of medieval saint with halo and flawless character, he was not that. He knew himself that he was not a flawless individual.

There's one area of his life which Victorians generally in their biographies didn't like to talk about, because it was a very painful area, and that is his wife's insanity. And we want to mention a little of that as we get into our looking at Carey.

And yet we also want to note that Carey is the illustration of a man who had gifts that he gave unreservedly to God, and how we want to see how God used those gifts. In one area he is probably brilliant, but in so many other areas he is like us, a man of ordinary character, and yet God through his plodding, he often describes himself as a plodder, God did great things.

Well Carey is born in 1761, he's born in a little town called Paulers Pury, P-A-U-L-E-R-S-P-U-R-Y, Paulers Pury, P-A-U-L-E-R-S-P-U-R-Y. It's a little hamlet in the heart of England, in the area known as Northamptonshire.

And even today it's a sleepy little hamlet. And Carey's day would have been even sleepier in many respects. His father was a parish clerk, or clerk, of the Anglican Church, and the man's responsibilities as such was to keep the marriage registers, the register of burials and baptisms, to make sure that various hymns were announced on time in the church service, to read out maybe one of the lessons in the church service.

And also, we're told, he was to make sure that the children in the village were in the church, and dogs were not. Apparently there must have been some problem with dogs, at least in that area of England, getting into the church unwantedly.

So young William was regularly taken to church, this is the important point of all that. William was taken to church, he learned, he would say, much in the historical nature of the scriptures. But he could say, up until the age of 14, of real experimental, that is experiential, religion.

In the 18th century generally the word religion is a good term. Of real experimental religion I scarcely heard anything until I was 14 years of age. He went to school up until the age of 10, and then his parents took him out and apprenticed him, as we will see, to a shoemaker.

Now young William wanted to be a gardener. His uncle, Peter Carey, was a gardener. And William had great admiration for his uncle. Peter had actually seen something of the world. He had fought with wolves on the plains of Abraham in 1759.

And he had seen something of the vastness and the wilderness that Canada was then. Still vast, whether it's a wilderness or not, is another question. But it was then. And he came home to England, that small island with these tales of the far off North America that gripped William's imagination.

And it is interesting how God is at work in what we often regard as the most mundane of things. And here is God using his uncle's experiences to sink deep into William's heart a longing to see other lands.

But he wanted to be a gardener. Peter Carey returned home from his campaigns in Canada to be a gardener in Polis Puri. And Peter, young William, wanted to follow his uncle's train. But as it turned out he could not.

He could not because whenever he was out in the sun for more than a half an hour or 45 minutes he would develop a very painful rash. And recently, actually, I met somebody who had such an experience and still did have such an experience that long exposure to the sun gave them quite a painful rash.

It's very interesting. Carey will go to India later in his life. Will spend hours out in the much warmer, hotter Indian sun and not experience anything like what he knew as a child. Maybe it was only a childhood disease.

It could very well be that God did the miraculous in Carey's life and healed him. But we don't know. But as a young boy he couldn't spend time in the sun. And so his parents apprenticed him to a shoemaker who trained Carey to be a cobbler.

There's a difference between a shoemaker and a cobbler. A shoemaker makes shoes. A cobbler mends shoes. And England, very socially minded, or class minded, class conscious, on the class scale a cobbler is lower down the social class level than a shoemaker.

Many years later when Carey was a professor of Sanskrit and Oriental literature at the College of Fort William which trained administrators for the British rule in India and Carey was teaching the sons of aristocrats he was invited to a very important dinner and one of the men there who had no liking for Carey's evangelical convictions and had no liking for Carey because of his class wanted to put him down publicly and said in the hearing of probably most of the dinner tables Mr. Carey, I understand that you started off life as a shoemaker and in other words he was a very clear jive and insult and Carey's response was no sir, not a shoemaker, a cobbler which is lower down.

Well, so Carey was apprenticed to be a cobbler and worked for a man named Clark Nichols and Carey went to live with Nichols he lived about seven miles from Polish Puri in a place called Piddington so these are very little villages in this part of England.

Now what is significant, again God is at work in all of this because there is another young boy apprenticed there a boy whose name we now know as John War W-A-R-R John War and it will be this young man through whom God will bring Carey to Christ.

As I said we probably all were familiar with the name of Carey but I'd ask you about the name of John War very few I would suspect of you would know the role that God had designed for this man. In fact up until the First World War John War's name was not known it was known, long known, that Carey had been brought to Christ by a fellow apprentice but the name was not known and then in the First World War during that war the Baptist Missionary Society that would send Carey to India that Carey would be part of the founding group of that society they were moving their offices and somebody noticed in the corner of an office a safe that had been there for eons and somebody thought that instead of simply moving it they should actually check out and see what might be in it and lo and behold as they opened the safe they found a sheaf of papers.

Among them was one letter of William Carey's identifying the man who had brought him to Christ as John War and so the name was discovered. Now John War was a Congregationalist Carey is an Anglican and although Carey comes from a fairly poor social background at least he knew he was above a Congregationalist.

He was an Anglican he was part of the state church and he had great pride in that and it's getting very difficult for us to put ourselves I think back into the period of time in which we're talking in which Anglicans generally looked down was scorned upon anybody who was outside of the Church of England be they Presbyterian be they Congregationalist or Baptist or Quaker and this is the period the Methodists have yet to separate from the Church of England.

There's a very illuminating little note I read recently of an Anglican minister. By the way this is nothing against Anglicans it's simply trying to tell you and give you a feel for what Anglicans often thought of others outside of the Church of England.

An Anglican minister in the 1830s where the article that I read was describing his life and some of his convictions and it mentioned I found this very illuminating that there was a number of ways in which this particular minister's day or week could be ruined and one of the ways in which his week could be ruined is if he had to sit down to lunch with a Baptist minister.

If for some reason he found himself having to have lunch with a Baptist minister it just ruined his entire week. And that I think gives you a good insight into the way many Anglicans felt about others outside of the Church of England.

They may be low down the social scale but at least they belonged to the state church the church that God had instituted and these others. Well, they were far off the beaten track and so it was. Carey looked with scorn on John Moore.

John Moore was a Christian and I hope we are while we are conscious that because there are of historical circumstances etc. and tradition we find ourselves in different denominational bodies. Our glory and joy ultimately are that we are Christians and I have certain convictions that attach me to the body of men and women that I worship with but ultimately the most important thing is that I am a Christian and that in glory it will be that name and not the other names which will be prominent.

And John Moore was a Christian. He was a Congregationalist but he was a Christian and he began to share his faith with Carey but Carey wanted none of it. Who is this man outside of the established church outside of the state church to be trying to instruct him and so he wouldn't listen.

He refused the offer of books. He refused to go with Ward to worship until an event took place in 1777. When Carey was 16 he still apprenticed to Nichols. Christmas time had rolled around and it was a custom at Christmas in that period of time that apprentices would often be given a small gift of money by the businessmen with whom the master had dealings.

Nichols had dealings with a number of businesses in the area and he sent Carey out around Christmas time before Christmas of 1777 to collect some debts and Carey knew that as he went along the way he would be given a small gift by a number of these men at least he hoped he would as a Christmas token or a Christmas gift and so it was.

He came to one village where he had to collect the money from his master from an ironmonger or what we would describe today as kind of a grocery store or a variety store. And this ironmonger decided to play a little trick on Carey.

He gave him a counterfeit shilling. He meant to tell Carey after Christmas of his little joke but he wondered how Carey would take it. Well Carey gets his master's money from the man and gets his gift and he's going back to see Nichols and deliver the money.

And on the way he's looking at the coin and he realizes his counterfeit must have been a very poor replica. And even Carey realized it was a counterfeit coin. And then he starts to think well he didn't like that.

He thought well maybe what I could do is substitute it for one of the other coins. He had collected money from a number of men that morning and his master wouldn't know which one had given him the counterfeit coin and he'd have to write it off as a bad debt.

And so Carey did a switch with Mr. Nichols' money of a genuine coin for a counterfeit coin. Carey was aware that this was wrong and began to pray Lord get me through this and I'll never do anything like this again.

Well Carey many years later would say God did not get me through a gracious God did not get me through because when he got back he gave the money to Nichols. Nichols initially as he went through it he too realized one of the coins was counterfeit.

Had no idea where it came from had to write it off as a bad debt. Until after Christmas he met the eye monger. How did young William enjoy my little joke on him. What was that why I gave him a counterfeit coin.

And suddenly Nichols knew his apprentice had cheated him and it was out all over the village and everyone in the village knew I mean one of the the joys and the griefs of living in a small village or town is you know everything about everybody else which can be good but everybody knows everything else about you too which is not so good sometimes.

And everybody in the town knew that young William had been guilty of dishonesty and Carey said he was ashamed to show his face out of doors but even more he said that subsequently. This was the cause of him seeing more of myself I had ever seen before and to seek for mercy with greater earnestness.

One of the important things that God needs to do in all of our lives is to bring us to realize who we are and what we are to show us the nature of our hearts apart from saving grace that we are sinners in need of a savior in need of a savior for pardon and for cleansing.

And it's not surprising then that this is the critical event that begins to break open Carey's heart and mind and begins to lead him to be attentive now to John Moore. And within two years by 1779 he was converted.

He didn't know many ministers at first. He went with war to the congregationalist church at a place called Hackleton. These are as I say very small villages. He didn't have much opportunity for conversation with other Christians and found himself building his views from scripture and much of his later convictions.

The strength of his convictions was is found in this early period of his life where he developed the habits of the study of the word of God. Deep deep habits and spending time in prayer and the study of the word and it gave him deep convictions and a rich knowledge of God's word in later years he becomes a Baptist in 1785 and within two years finds himself as a pastor in 1787.

During this period of time he's still cobbling mending shoes. He also has become a teacher and although he would have two pastors in England one of them the first one more definitely and I think also the second one he had to keep school as well as do his cobbling to pay for his family.

By the time that he would leave England in 1793 he would have four three children another on the way I've been in the home in which he lived in a place called Moulson which is where his first church was M O U L P O N not far from a large town called Northampton in Northamptonshire and in his home you can actually still go into his home in Moulson.

You can go into the room where he had his workshop which was also functioned as the kitchen the dining room the living room and the study. Now there were two other rooms in that house where Cary lived with his wife three children his wife's parents and I think a sister.

In that context Cary found himself having to do a variety of other things beyond pasturing just simply to make ends meet. One of the things that begins to grip him in this period is the whole area of missions.

He reads as many British people did the story of Captain James Cook's voyages in the South Pacific they had begun in the 1760s they began to be published in pamphlet form in the 1770s and Cary would later say that the first thing that gripped him regarding missions was reading Captain Cook's story of the voyages in the South Sea in particular Cary or other Cook actually when he went to Tahiti he asked the question it's a remarkable question.

He said would the British ever send out missionaries to Tahiti. And then he answered the question he said absolutely not. There is no conceivable reason why the British would ever send out anybody to Tahiti.

Now you have to remember I'm not sure what that name. At least for me it conjures up kind of beaches and kind of one of these places where people go for kind of a paradisiacal holiday and so on Hawaii the same.

Those are not the images of the 18th century. In the 18th century these were places where most of the inhabitants the Polynesians who lived there were still firmly under the control of cannibalistic practices.

In fact James Cook and I forget whether it's I think it's Hawaii. He's killed in Hawaii by some of the Hawaiians. And so when these people when the British thought of these places they weren't thinking of places to kind of fail to where they could lie on the beach for months on ends.

But no these were very cannibalistic societies. And so Cook's thinking about these societies barbarous societies. Would the British ever send people out here as a vandalism. No not at all. And it could well be that that Kerry read those words and began to be gripped by a concern for the people of these lands.

In fact Kerry in his early thinking wanted to go to Tahiti as a missionary. In those days it was called Otahite. O-T-A-H-E-I-T-E. But what is important is that Kerry in the 1780s begins to keep a diary or a table of the nations of the world.

Every opportunity he gets either reading books of geography reading books like Cook's or reading newspapers. He begins to detail what are the nations of the world. How big are they in terms of square miles.

What is their religion. How many people do they have in them. And he begins to realize the overwhelming task that still faced the church in his day a task in which he realized that if we are talking about evangelical Christianity in the 18th century at the end of the 18th century it basically was found in two areas of the world.

It's found in Europe in particular northern Europe Britain Holland Germany Switzerland parts of France Scandinavia Denmark maybe Hungary. In Eastern Europe I'm thinking here primarily of evangelical Christianity.

Obviously if we broaden it to include orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism it's Europe. But the other part of the world is North America strung out along the coast of the continent of North America the American colonies which stretch the United States and the British North America through to South Carolina Florida still being in the hands of the Spanish at this time is the other area of evangelical Christianity.

If you want to broaden it again then you've got areas maybe if you want to include Catholicism areas of South America. But that's it. And Cary realized there was no real evangelical witness at all in Africa and none in Asia to speak of.

And how things have changed radically changed. And we'll touch on that at the end. And so Cary then begins to think about a world beyond the horizon of the fields of England. And you need to realize that Cary lived in a day in which to go 20 miles was a major undertaking.

One major means of transport in England in those days was horse or carriage. The roads were terrible most of them mechanization that is the ability to produce a road that was smooth smooth enough and tough enough to last through the winter doesn't start to take effect really until the next century until the 1800s.

And roads in England even the major roads in England were often in horrific shape after winter. In fact some of them the potholes were so big. I've got a number of stories I can give you true stories of potholes so big that when the men were riding along they would be down almost to the neck of the horse.

That's how deep some of these potholes would be filled with water after the spring run off. So traveling was a very difficult affair in Europe in this period of time. And here is Cary now thinking of going a lot further than 20 miles down the road thinking of going around the other side of the world.

Now Cary was introduced to a number of ministers in a ministerial of which he had the opportunity to become a part by becoming a minister of Moulton. And the ministerial group was called the North Hampton Shire Baptist Association.

And it was the practice or the habit or the custom of the North Hampton Shire Association that the ministers would meet together once a month. It was a very good habit. It provided contact between the ministers contact between churches where they could tell each other concerns and prayer needs and encourage one another with victories and so on.

And so it was that Cary sat in on his probably his first meeting in 1785 1786. And the story is that at that meeting one of the men there was a man named John Ryland Senior number two John Ryland. The younger man who was John Ryland Senior's son would actually become one of Cary's close friends.

But John Ryland Senior was kind of the patriarch of the group of ministers. And he invariably asked a young minister who had just come in for the first time. Please propose for us a question that we can spend some time discussing theologically.

So Cary asked the following question. Matthew 28. At the end there where we read all power is given unto me in heaven and earth. Go ye therefore and teach all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

And Cary's question was this is verse 19 which I've just read. There is verse 19 still in force now. You think that's an easy question to answer. It's obvious. But it was not so obvious. It was a school of thought that had been circulating since the 1600s that the gospel in the early centuries had actually been preached to the ends of the earth that actually the gospel had already been preached to all the nations.

Those who argued this sometimes would get a number of texts that they would refer to. One of them is found in the book of Colossians Colossians chapter 1 where the apostle Paul talking about his ministry.

I can say the following Colossians 1 verse 23. Paul is talking about his readers continuing in the faith. If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel which ye have heard and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven.

Notice that phrase there at the end thank you where he says that the gospel was preached to every creature under heaven. And some theologians in the 1600s and the 1700s look very clearly. Paul preached the gospel to every nation.

Many of those nations rejected it. We have no responsibility to take the gospel ever to them again. And so the question was not an idle question. There were those in Britain who said should we take the gospel to Africa.

Should we take the gospel to Asia. And the argument was no. Those nations are sunk in heathenism and darkness and it's their own fault. They rejected it back in the time of St. Paul. Now it's a fallacious argument as I hope you realize even in the book of Acts where Paul would go to a town and preach the gospel and inevitably went to a synagogue and often at the end the synagogue would toss him out and he would say I turn now to the Gentiles.

The next town he was in. He'd always go first again to the Jews. And that was one of the arguments they used that God has. They've rejected the gospel of the nations. We have no responsibility to take it to them again.

There is no evidence I know of that the gospel was brought to North America back in the days of the apostles. No evidence it was taken to the inner reaches of Africa. No evidence that it was taken to the heartland of Asia.

And what Paul is talking about there is talking from the perspective of a citizen of the Roman world. The gospel had been preached throughout the Roman world but beyond the borders of the Roman Empire.

Certainly not so. But Cary was confronted with this. Cary was also confronted with what we call today hyper Calvinism. And Cary was a Calvinist in his theology and that is his conviction was that when it comes to salvation it is God who saves men and women from beginning to end.

The hyper Calvinist went one step further and upped the ante as it were and argued that if it's God who saves men and women we needn't do a thing. God's going to save who he has elected. He'll save who he wants.

And we don't need to be involved. In fact it brings more glory to God if we're not involved because then it's quite clear that God is doing the saving not us. Well again that's a fallacious argument. One of the things I think that is very clear in the scriptures is that while God saves he does so through means he delights in using feeble fallible men and women as his instruments.

He doesn't need us. We should never make the mistake that we are indispensable to the kingdom but he delights in using us. And so Cary got quite a blast as we now will see. And Cary had asked is that still in force.

And apparently John Ryland senior blasted him. And now there's debate about what exactly the nature of the blast how it was worded. I have no doubt that Cary received a frigid answer. According to one source Cary was told by Ryland you are a miserable fanatic for asking such a question.

Certainly nothing can be done before another Pentecost when an infusion of miraculous gifts including the gift of tongues will give effect to the commission of Christ in the first. What sir can you preach in Arabic Persian Hindustani Bengali.

You think it your duty to send the gospel to the heathen. Another account has this young man sit down. And one thing that Cary is going to have to address is this whole issue theologically. And Cary was not put off by that answer.

He was a young man in his twenties. It probably silenced him at the moment. But he went away from that meeting with a deeper conviction that he needed to study the issue and pray about the issue because over the years that followed the next four or five years we find a number of instances of Cary with other ministers meeting for prayer praying for revival in their own lives in the lives of their churches and to the ascending of the gospel to the ends of the earth.

We find Cary in 1792 preaching a great sermon on Isaiah 54 verses 2 and 3. And I don't have an old testament with me unfortunately. But that's that passage in Isaiah which talks about stretching out the cords of the tent lengthening the stakes.

And we know Cary we don't have the actual sermon Cary preached on that occasion. But we have the two divisions of the sermon. And the two divisions are these. Let us expect great things. Let us attempt great things.

Later history would remember the division this way. Let us expect great things from God and let us attempt great things for God. Cary probably didn't have the from God and the for God explicitly mentioned.

But that's what he had in mind. The order is important. We begin in prayer. All of the great movements of God are birthed in prayer. They're not birthed in our counsel our strength. They're brought into being by men and women of God waiting on God.

I feel distressed when I look out across the evangelical landscape in southern Ontario. And one you ask the question of many about the centrality of the prayer meeting in their churches. And you find so often the answer given oh well we have two hundred and fifty on a Sunday morning.

How many at a prayer meeting. Twenty five. You think that might not be wrong. You might think that might be an exaggeration but about ten years ago I preached in one of the largest evangelical churches west of London and there were about three four hundred on a Sunday morning when I was speaking and I asked somebody because I was speaking on the issue of remodel.

I asked how many at your prayer meeting in the mid week. And I thought well at least seventy eighty but there were twenty five. Now it could be they had other prayer meetings and it could be they had different formats.

I don't know that but I frequently I've come across this whole kind of typical kind of statistic large numbers there on a Sunday morning. Very few. Meaningful prayer. It doesn't bode well. We have lost the conviction that many of our forebears had that if anything is going to be done we begin by waiting on God begin by seeking His will His purpose.

Let us expect great things from God. That's the concept of prayer. But we don't stop there. There was Stunning Kerry's Day. Excuse me he wanted to stop there and they're expecting but they never go on to attempting.

At some point we need to move out. We need to move into translate prayer into action. Let us expect great things from God. Let us attempt great things for God. And so it is that Kerry finds himself meeting with other like-minded men among them Andrew Fuller who will talk about in a at least at his bottom.

We have a duty. God has called us to be his witnesses. I know there are some whom God and his providence calls into what we call full time vocational service. But that has left the rest of us off the hook.