August 29, 2025 Show with John William Noble on “Advancing the Classical Christian School Movement in the U.K.”

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, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 29th day of August 2025.

Grace Baptist Church Aberdeen and the Reformed Baptist Landscape in Scotland

I'm thrilled to have a first-time guest today to address a couple of issues, one of which we have addressed on the program several times in regard to classical Christian education. But today we have joining us for the first time John William Noble, pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Aberdeen, Scotland, a confessionally Reformed Baptist congregation, and he's also the director of the Doxa Theo Christian School, the first classical Christian school in Scotland.

Today we're going to be addressing advancing the classical Christian school movement in the United Kingdom and the fight against pragmatic evangelicalism. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Radio, Pastor John William Noble.

Thanks for having me on, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here.

It's a pleasure to have you on the program. Well, first of all, tell our listeners something more about Grace Baptist Church of Aberdeen, Scotland.

So the church is a relatively new church in terms of it's existed for six and a half years, literally being planted from scratch. I began serving as a pastor over 10 years ago, and then a few years into my first pastorate, I became a member of a Reformed Baptist church in Edinburgh with a view to aiming to begin a church planting work in Aberdeen because there are very few confessionally Reformed Baptist churches anywhere in Scotland, and there's nothing in the northeast of Scotland.

And so in 2019, I was sent to begin a church with no building, no people, no money. So it was certainly quite an undertaking, especially given the spiritual apathy in our land, something I'm sure we'll discuss more about later.

And I started that with my wife coming with me, and there was another brother and his wife that were a significant blessing. He's now my fellow elder, another man and another couple of people. So we had a kind of core group of seven people that began the work.

We were aiming to be very evangelistic from the beginning, distributing gospel content, evangelizing in the local area, preaching the gospel in the city center. And in the large providence, the church has grown.

It grew particularly off the back of how we challenged the COVID mandates. And since then, we've had a membership that has risen up to 50 members, which in Scotland has been quite encouraging. And we've been able to acquire two buildings, which also connects with what we've been able to do in the realm of Christian education.

So it's been a very busy, intense, at many times challenging, but very fruitful six and a half years since Grace Baptist Church Aberdeen has begun.

Well, 50 members is quite impressive, considering if you had 200 members in Reformed Baptist circles, you'd be a mega church.

Yeah, certainly in Scotland.

To what do you attribute the scarcity of Reformed Baptist churches in Scotland? I mean, Scotland has such a rich history of Reformed theology, what was at one time a bastion of Calvinism. Is the scarcity of Reformed Baptist churches because of the predominance of Presbyterianism or is it just the decline of Reformed theology altogether in Scotland?

Yeah, how long would you like me to spend answering that question?

Take as long as you want.

Yeah, okay, I'll try to be brief with the longer answer to that, because I am conscious that people, especially in America, will have some understanding of the history of the Scottish church scene, but maybe other aspects more recently are not so known.

So people will certainly know that there's a rich heritage of Reformed orthodoxy within the church climate of Scotland, particularly Presbyterianism. But even once the particular Baptists began to form and the churches were being planted in England and so on, there was a kind of move for confessional Reformed Baptist churches following that.

But I would say maybe in the 19th century, when there were an increasing number of Baptist churches at that point, there would have been quite an emphasis on the importance of Reformed doctrine, even confessionalism.

But over the then hundred years taking us into the 20th century, not just in Baptist churches, but in Presbyterian churches and denominations across Scotland and throughout the United Kingdom, they increasingly liberalized, they apostatized in many regards.

And what we're kind of dealing with now, when it comes to the Reformed Baptist scene on the whole, is sort of like the dying embers of a previous generation. Now, there are some really godly saints who are still responsible, some of which are still in positions of eldership in some confessionally Reformed Baptist churches in Scotland, but there would only be, I mean, roughly a dozen, if that, in Scotland now.

And the numbers of people that would attend or be members would be anything from like 10 to 30. Now, as a general rule of thumb, and this is only a sweeping statement, if you imagine the average church size of maybe an American context, maybe if you remove a zero from that, that gives you a more of a like-for-like comparison in the Scottish church scene.

So even though maybe people hearing of a church with only 10 or 15 people attending and a membership of 10, they might think, well, that church is about to close. Not necessarily. It could be depending on the age and other aspects of finances, but that would be the reality for a few of the remaining Reformed Baptist churches.

I would say that when I was actually involved with another pastor to begin a Reformed Baptist publishing house called Parousia and we released a copy of the Baptist Confession, that was very popular in America and we had contact with many Reformed Baptist churches that part of the world.

There was limited interest in the UK. I did contact the Baptist Union and they weren't being sarcastic or funny when they said this, but they told me that they would contact the history department within the Baptist Union about this book that was being released.

I think that was quite symbolic of the attitude towards not just Reformed Baptist confession of faith, but just generally in terms of Reformed doctrine nowadays, we deal with more sweeping, broad and vague statements of faith.

There's not such a specificity of confessionalism across the board. So, it's quite a new thing, even though it's obviously an old and historical thing with such a rich heritage. Most people now don't really understand what that is, sadly.

Yeah. Well, if anybody wants to find out more information about Grace Baptist Church of Aberdeen, Scotland, go to graceaberdeen .org, graceaberdeen .org, and you will find all the information that you need.

We do have listeners in Scotland and in other parts of the UK and in Ireland and places all over the world, and people do travel. So, even if you're not from Scotland, you might wind up there on vacation or something in the future.

So, that website is graceaberdeen .org, Grace A-B-E-R, I'm sorry, yes, graceaberdeen .org. Well, now tell us about this exciting classical Christian school that you have founded, which is the first classical Christian school in all of Scotland.

Doxotheo Christian School.

Yes.

Doxa Theos Christian School and the Need for Christian Education

So, this, again, would probably take me back to when we started our church, because the fight to advance Christian education in our country, in some ways, it won't be surprising to the listeners. In other ways, it may be somewhat surprising when I just give a bit of the details and context to get us to the point where we are today.

So, I do need to give a bit of background and context just to help people understand how we've got to this point. So, again, in line with when we started the Reformed Baptist Church at that point, my wife and I, we've now got four children in the Lord's Providence.

At that point, we had our two-year-old son, and we were expecting the birth of our second child when the church began. And we were, on a personal level, talking about beginning the more structured home-educating of our children.

And then at that point, I started to, for the first time ever, think more widely about what are the Christian education provisions in Scotland? Because historically, before we got to the 19th century and people started to reform education, and by reform we mean liberalize and turn it into something pagan, the church had responsibility over schools that existed.

But then in the past couple of hundred years, they have become government-controlled, and governments have become more secular, more pagan, not only becoming more neutral in inverted commas regarding the things of God and the word of God, but even outright attacking it.

The schools have obviously been one of the main things that have become an infiltration in the minds of young people. So, with all that in mind, I was aware that the percentage of even Christian families home-educating was very small, even though in Scotland, mercifully, it is legal to home-educate your children.

In addition to that, I was conscious that the subject of Christian education and even actual applications of parents raising their children in a biblical way was a significant contradiction, sadly, to the reality of what state education was offering.

But I just was not hearing of churches and even groups of churches, if you like, being involved in looking to start up many schools anywhere, really. I mean, I knew of maybe, I think, three at that point, 2019, three Christian schools that I knew of that would have been within a Protestant bracket in Scotland, one in Glasgow, one in Edinburgh, and one in Stornoway in the Isle of Lewis.

So certainly in Aberdeen, there was nothing. So that's when I began looking into the option of what it would look like to try to begin a school, because I was hoping that there might be an opportunity for a provision, not simply for if, for example, any family in my church were wanting to go down this route, but even more widely.

So I spoke with one or two people who I knew were involved in organisations like, I mean, for UK listeners, the Christian Institute and Christian Concern. So these are organisations that look to support Christians who face any mild degree of persecution in workplace or because of their faith in another setting, just to get an idea of where they believe that the spiritual climate was and the need for Christian schools.

And I remember one man saying to me, well, you need this school last year. He was saying it's becoming so urgent, especially with things like the woke ideologies on gender that was infiltrating the state schools in such a prominent way.

So I went to the point of, OK, well, we need to try and get this done. But we were only a church of about 7 members. And I knew we as a church in and of ourselves were not in a position to be able to set up our own school.

So I contacted any of the Reformed and even evangelical church leaders that I knew in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, and I got no responses apart from one church leader in a Reformed Presbyterian church.

So that already gives an indication. I wasn't even getting dialogue with most. So I did meet with that minister and we ended up having discussions and started to put together the plan to set up a school.

Now, I should say, this was not the setting up of Doxa Theochristian School, because I've actually now set up two schools. So this was another school that we set up. There were many challenges in seeking to do so.

One thing that I would say is that in my experience over the past few years, there are some people who are zealous to try to advance the cause of Christian education. But unfortunately, pretty much anybody in our nation, because of the fact that there's been such a secular and pagan education bracket for any professing Christian, this is now really a new thing.

It's not something that's been taught about. It's not something that's been applied. So there's certainly been a lot of trial and error and mistakes that have been made. But even with all of the challenges that COVID brought and the delays in trying to get things started, we eventually managed to set up this first school.

Now, at this point, I'll let you know, when we managed to set it up, which was in 2022 at the end, we had two pupils enrolled. Now, this is a city of over 200 ,000 people with over 100 churches. And there is Aberdeenshire, an area that's very vast with many churches and professing.

Christians.

And the two pupils that were enrolled was my son and my fellow elder's daughter. We had a few other people who had expressed an interest in enrolling their children, but they didn't do it. So it's just to give an idea of the actual interest in doing this from the beginning.

Now, in time, what we find is once something's established and some others have been able to see, okay, this is what that looks like, more people jump on board. But the fact that there was that little amount of interest in this starting out, because in my mind, I anticipated there would surely be a reasonable number of Christian families, that even if it's just because they're so disillusioned with how bad state education has become.

And from the 2010 to 2020 period, under the Scottish government, the education standards, as well as the liberalizing and the wicked ideologies that have come in, it's outright against biblical Christianity.

That's the level of it. But even with all that stated, that's all we got. So that was significantly problematic. We had difficulties with staffing and on a board level, even eventually financially. And when we got to about maybe two years ago or just under two years ago, in the Lord's Providence as a church, we were in a position to put in a bid to buy a Church of Scotland parish building.

So this was quite significant because we currently at that point owned a small but sizable church hall and a side hall, which we were using as our place of worship, which we were beginning to not outgrow, but we were certainly quite full in it.

But the Church of Scotland parish building would have been a very big building for us to consider buying. But we decided to move forward and put a bid in for that building for a couple of reasons. Number one, because as many may already know, Church of Scotland as a denomination has become outright apostate and often they'll happily sell their buildings to become nightclubs, pubs, turned into blocks of flats or apartments, as it would be called, all of these sorts of things.

And we desperately wanted to see this building, which is so beautiful. It's got an organ, a pulpit, all of these things. We wanted to see that continuing to be used as a place where the Word of God would go.

Forth.

So we were able to put in a bid and eventually after some challenge, we were able to buy that building. And in line with that, another key reason for doing so was that the current building that we were worshipping in would become a building that we would set apart to set up our own school.

Now, this is really significant to mention because, and now I may be wrong about this, but certainly from my kind of wide research and discussions with people, I don't know of any other church in Scotland, and this may even apply to the UK, that has set up their own school.

Now, that might seem quite shocking when we think of the size of the United Kingdom and the heritage in our nation, but this was what we thought we were now in a position to do, given our church had grown so much.

And another crucial thing, which there is such a distinct lack of across our nation, sadly, for me and then others increasingly in the church, we were repeatedly preaching about this subject, about how children are to be raised, about what it means for children to be educated in the ways of the Lord.

And in time, what we saw happening is the culture in our church was shifting away from what was the mainstream position of children go to state school and you might get the odd home educator, which is the average situation within evangelicalism.

But what was happening in our church is that more and more families were home educating, more and more couples who were yet to have children or had just had children being born were already very clear in their minds, when we have children that are primary school age, like that kind of age four, five to 10, 11, we would want our children to either be home educated or in a Christian school.

Now, this is really important to stress because sadly, this is not happening in our nation. It's why there's such an apathy towards this. But this has been crucial to steering even our church in a direction where we are fully behind this because there's been teaching on it and we have now families and Christians in our church that are discussing these points in a matter that is serious to their own families.

So that's the developing culture that we had. And in line with that, we had a young man who went through the teacher training qualifications in Scotland, which I mean, being realistic, most of that, not all of it, but most of it's a complete waste of time because it's preparing you for a brand of educating and being an educator, which the state wants, which is contradicting the Bible.

But we were still investing in him as a church. And even because we have a couple of people who are on our school board who have decades of teaching experience, that's been quite significant also in preparing for the beginning of the school.

So quite a number of the pieces have come together where we were able to have our own building. We were able to have a board of people in our church. And so officially, this school has been a ministry of our church, which has been established.

It started with classes being allowed by the Scottish government, giving the legal green light back in January this year. We started with five pupils. And as of this academic term, beginning in August of 2025, we now have 12 pupils with more parents expressing interest.

And this is, I mean, given what I mentioned three years ago about the two pupils in that other school that we started with, this has been greatly encouraging given the spiritual climate of this subject in our country.

Yes. Well, if anybody wants more details about this Christian school, Doxa Theo Christian School in Aberdeen, Scotland, go to doxatheochristianschool .org, doxatheochristianschool .org. Can you tell us what that means in Latin, doxa theo?

Yeah, it's the glory of God. It's actually the Greek word for glory and God. We contemplated going for a Latin term, but we went for an original biblical language in terms of the title of the school.

Great. Well, when we come back from our first commercial break, we're going to have you do what all of our first-time guests do. We're going to have you give a summary of your salvation testimony that would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which you were raised and the kinds of providential circumstances our sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to himself and saved you.

And we'll look forward to hearing you do that momentarily. But right now, we are going to our commercial break. If you'd like to join us on the air, folks, with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

James White here of Alpha and Omega Ministries announcing that this September, I'm heading out to Pennsylvania to speak at two events that my longtime friend Chris Arnson has lined up for me. On Thursday, September 18th at 11 a .m., I'm speaking to men in ministry leadership at Chris's Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Free Pastors Luncheon at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville.

Then on Sunday, September 21st at 1 .30 p .m., I'm speaking at Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle on the theme, Can We Trust the Bible is the Authentic and Inerrant Word of God? I hope you can join Chris and me for both events.

For more details on the Free Pastors Luncheon, visit ironsharpensironradio .com. That's ironsharpensironradio .com. For more details on Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle, visit trbccarlisle .org.

That's trbccarlisle .org. God willing, I'll see you in September in Pennsylvania for these exciting events.

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I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, originally from Cork, Ireland. The Lord and his sovereign providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County at TRBC.

We joyfully uphold the Second London Baptist Confession. We embrace congregational church government, and we are committed to preaching the full counsel of God's word for the edification of believers, the salvation of the lost, and the glory of our triune God.

We are also devoted to living out the one another commands of scripture, loving, encouraging, and serving each other as the body of Christ. In our worship, we sing psalms and the great hymns of the faith, and we gather around the Lord's table every Sunday.

We would love for you to visit and worship with us. You can find our details at trbccarlisle .org. That's trbccarlisle .org. God willing, we'll see you soon.

Well, folks, you may have heard me announce for the first time yesterday that our dear friends and faithful supporters for many years, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com, is closing its doors permanently before the end of the year.

It might even be even sooner than that. It is very regretfully that I make this announcement. And at this point, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service is selling only in-stock books, and they are discounted at 40 off plus an extra 10 off if you're buying them in the store.

There are thousands of Reformed books available, so check out the website of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service at cvbbs .com, cvbbs .com, or stop in if you live locally here in the Carlisle, Pennsylvania area or can travel there.

And I am so sad to know this news, because not only has this been an enormous financial support for Iron Trip and Zion Radio, but it's also been such an excellent resource for solidly Reformed Christian literature at reasonable prices.

So, we are very sad to say goodbye to such a wonderful ministry owned over the decades by two different families, and they've been supporting us for many years, even before the most recent family, who is currently sponsoring the show, before they purchased it.

But we hope that you will at least take advantage of the wonderful sales that they're having. One of those Romans 8 -28 situations, where even though there was very sad news of cvbbs .com closing permanently, the good news is that you can get books less expensively than you've ever gotten them before.

So, go to cvbbs .com and find out more about what discounts and what books are still available. And we are now back with our guest today, John William Noble, who, as we said earlier, is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Aberdeen, Scotland, and the founder of Doxa Theo Classical Christian School.

If you have a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Well, as I said before the break, whenever we have a first-time guest, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony, and we'd love to hear your story.

Salvation Testimony and the Doctrines of Sovereign Grace

So, I grew up in a town north of Aberdeen. So, if you can picture the map of Scotland, there's the point right at the very top, which would be the Highlands. Not there, but there's another easterly point, that area north of Aberdeen called Peterhead, and my parents were Bible-believing Christians, and my grandfather had actually been a minister of the Church of Scotland.

He would have been very much evangelical and reformed in his doctrine. So, I was very much blessed to be in that Christian home environment when I was growing up, and I remember actually, for a while, when I was listening to the testimonies of people who had these dramatic conversion stories, thinking, well, my conversion story is quite undramatic and a bit boring by comparison.

But as the Lord has matured my thinking doctrinally over the years, I've come to cherish this more and more when I give my testimony, because to be in a home where my father and mother were teaching me, obviously encouraging me to be reading the Bible, to be studying it, that was an immense blessing, because I was growing up with a worldview that was centered upon the existence of God and the gospel.

So, I don't actually know the definitive point in which I became a born-again believer. I do remember a sermon in a Baptist church which had a bit of an Arminian undertone in terms of praying to ask Jesus into your heart, but I do remember a sense of real conviction about my sin and the importance of being saved by the blood of Christ.

In my early teenage years, it would have been when I was studying biblical doctrine, even systematic and reformed doctrine in more detail. Providentially, with my father being a teacher and then later becoming a head teacher, he was actually the person who was teaching the class I was part of when I was in my mid-teens, systematic theology.

So, I learned systematic theology from my father in that kind of more official setting, if you like, as well as the Christian environment that I was growing up in. One thing that does even tie into me many years later, beginning the church plant, the church situation was certainly a struggle.

I was a member of a Church of Scotland church, which wasn't apostate, but yeah, I mean, they were certainly moving in a direction that was increasingly liberalizing, and it became quite surprising to me, beginning to study theology in more detail and then starting to be subjected to such things.

When I went to Aberdeen University to study theology, when I was confronted with people who would have claimed to be Christian, some even saying they were going into pastoral ministry, who were female, they were liberal, they denied even some of the basics of Christian doctrine.

And in years to come, then meeting ministers who were even denying the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, calling that ghastly theology, it really was becoming an increasing eye-opener to the spiritual climate of the land in which once was called the land of the book.

I would say outwith my parents, who were a significant blessing in my upbringing, it was probably one or two people outwith my own church setting that were quite formative in shaping my theological understanding.

I benefited from studying Louis Burckhoff's Systematic Theology when I was doing some detailed study in that. There were one or two lectures at university that were a blessing. Also the one or two online preachers in my early 20s as I began to have opportunities to preach and to serve in that capacity.

But one thing that I never had that now I guess I have quite a big responsibility in doing myself as the pastor of a Reformed Baptist church, I never had biblically grounded discipleship investment for me growing as a young man of God and as a preacher and even in discerning a call for pastoral ministry.

That's something that I think is definitely a major concern across the board in our land. But I would say that one thing that has been formative for me in preparing me not just as a pastor but even just as a man of God is in my early adult life being subjected to difficult church situations, the Lord used that to break and to mold and to humble me because probably when I was maybe 20, 21 years old and I started to preach in one or two sizable churches, I was thinking, well, I'm quite a preacher, that kind of thing.

And so as time went on, the Lord was certainly beginning to very much realign and humble the thinking in that regard and start to properly prepare me for what would be pastoral ministry in the future.

So these have been quite significant moments. It's not the standard thing that you would want as a young man to be prepared and developed for ministry. But at the same time, it's still been a way where perhaps the Lord has prepared me for any pioneering type work given where we're at spiritually.

But yeah, the blessing of being in a Christian home and having that grounding has certainly been formative to shaping me as a man of God.

Now, how was it that you came to discover and fall in love with and embrace the doctrines of sovereign grace?

Yeah, so that's an interesting one, actually, because I didn't actually read the London Baptist Confession of Faith until I was in my 20s. I knew of the Westminster when I was younger, of course. I mean, not that I'm saying that I just thought Reformed meant Presbyterian.

I know that's quite a discussion, but that was certainly what I had studied of Reformed history, if you like. I hadn't looked much into the particular Baptists and that stuff at that point. But because I went through, I guess, the Bible in a systematic way and I studied the attributes of God, I looked at the doctrine of original sin without actually going through, these are the five points of Calvinism and these things.

By reading the Bible and studying it, these were the kind of doctrinal convictions I was coming to. So by the time I started to, at that more university age, look at, for example, Calvin's Institutes and the like and start to look more in depth at the Reformed history, I was actually realizing that, well, these are actually things I already believe.

Similarly, when I started to read the London Baptist Confession of Faith, I wouldn't say that that was in any significant way shaping my theological convictions. It was more just confirming, yeah, that's pretty much in line with what I believe.

I'm not saying that one way is better or worse, but it was quite interesting just to think that just mainly through that study of the Bible on certain doctrinal grounding, that was the way by which I came to believe in the doctrines of grace and have, yeah, basically a Reformed biblical grounding of understanding.

And it's why anytime someone says, oh, how should I go about studying the Bible and so on, as well as encouraging daily Bible study and reading certain books of the Bible, I always emphasize the importance of having a systematic theology, understanding the doctrine of who God is and his attributes, the God we worship, the one who has created us, and then understanding who we are as made in God's image and the fallen, depraved nature of who and what we are.

And that brings us to the picture of redemption that we have being built through the Old Testament and the desperate need we have of Christ and this glorious gospel, and that it is only by the Spirit of God regenerating one who is spiritually dead that we can become spiritually alive, a new birth, a new creation in Christ Jesus.

Just that picture, that glorious, beautiful picture that we have in Scripture, and that's something that I think is very important to have in view and certainly has been my testimony.

And when and how did you come to believe that God had placed a call upon your life to enter into pastoral ministry?

The Call to Pastoral Ministry and the Shape of Classical Christian Education

Yeah, that's within the framework of some of the things I've shared specifically. When I started studying theology at university, I thought about pastoral ministry, but I'd considered law or teaching, these sorts of things.

So I wasn't thinking, okay, I'm going to become a preacher or a pastor, but it was something I gave thought to. The reason I did that as my subject at university was just because it was actually the subject I did best at when I was doing my hires, which are the qualifications you do to get to university.

So I was strong at that, and I thought, well, I should do quite well at that at university. As it turns out, I did well at the stuff in the New Testament and certain other subjects that were more within, let's say, Reformed theology.

The Aberdeen University theology department has some really liberal and, yeah, crackpot, if I can use that phrase, courses as well that's got nothing to do with the Bible. So it was a bit of a mixed bag.

But towards the end of that, I started to think more seriously about what I'm going to do in the future. Initially, I started for a period of time listening to some sermons by John Piper on the Desiring God website.

And I remember a couple of sermons he preached was making reference to Jonathan Edwards. So I started looking into some of Edwards' teachings, and I remember looking at his character, and I remember reading something specifically about his attitude at the age I was at.

I think I was maybe a year younger, but it was basically a list of resolves that he had as a 21-year-old man regarding seeking to do all that he can, maximizing all that he is for the glory of God. And this really challenged me because I was thinking about disciplines that I was trying to bring in, even in terms of things like physical fitness and just how I would manage my time, even with regards to the Scriptures.