Andrew Fuller — Michael Haykin

Andrew Fuller and the Eighteenth-Century Church

And our thoughts are going to be focused on a man named Andrew Fuller. And I suspect that unlike the other figures that we have thought of in the past few weeks that we have spoken of, men like Wedley and Whitfield and Edwards, that the name of Andrew Fuller is not a familiar one.

And yet I hope to, in looking at Fuller, I hope to show you that he has much in a number of areas to teach us. There will be, in fact, a number of names mentioned tonight that are not familiar names. John Gill, Andrew Fuller, John Ryland, Jr., and maybe a number of others.

And yet they are men from whom we can learn much. Now I want to speak something more broadly before we look at Fuller's life about the 18th century. We have been speaking of the 18th century over the last few weeks as a century of revival and blessing upon the Church of God.

And when we consider the lives of men like Wesley, John and Charles Wesley, and George Whitfield, and Johnson Edwards, and his wife Sarah, we're thinking of some of the great blessings that God gave to His Church in the form of these individuals, their experiences, and their writings.

And yet I'm sure you're also aware, if you've ever taken a course in Western civilization, or if you cast your thoughts back maybe to courses you did on history in high school or university, you'll be aware that the 18th century is often described as the age of reason.

It's Christians who remember it as the age of revival, or the age of rapture, the age in which God poured out His Spirit and great blessing upon His Church, and in many respects laid the foundations for what we call the Victorian era, and many of the kind of moral advances of that period are laid in the foundations of the 18th century.

But the 18th century is also the period of the age of reason, in which there came to be a great emphasis, at least among intellectuals, and by the end of the century, beginning to peter down, as it were, into other classes of society, that human reason was to be the supreme judge of truth and falsehood, right and wrong.

Descartes, Newton, and the Rise of Rationalism

And I want to spend a little time on this, a few minutes, and then, because it has some import for what we want to think about, with Andrew Fuller. The origins of that great emphasis can be traced back into the 17th century, and sometimes it's helpful to identify individuals who characterize this way of thinking, and often the figures who are chosen are a French philosopher, René Descartes, who died in the year 1650, D-E-S-C-A-R-T-E-S, and Isaac Newton, the English scientist, physicist, very interested in religious matters, who would die in 1727.

It is Descartes who, in the 1620s, as Europe at that time was in the midst of a massive religious war, at least Central Europe, was gripped by Protestants and Catholic armies, marching back and forth, laying waste to villages and towns, killing each other on the battlefields of Central Europe.

Descartes, somewhat perplexed, he was a Roman Catholic, somewhat perplexed about this scenario, began an experiment in the mind, by which he sought to doubt all things, and wanted to find, as it were, an unshakable foundation for the Christian faith.

He hoped that his philosophical reflections would provide a good, solid underpinning for Roman Catholicism. What he did not foresee was the way in which his thoughts would be used in the years to come to undermine Christianity, to attack Christianity, and to lay foundations for what we have seen in the last hundred or so years as a very secular society.

Because as Descartes began to doubt all things, he began with the various external things that he would doubt, and kind of pared his way down to eventually he doubted the existence of God, and then came to that point where he felt he could no longer doubt, and that was the point at which he was thinking.

He argued that when he was doubting, he could not doubt that he was doubting, and therefore thinking. And thus he comes up with a very famous line, not original to him, but he had found it actually in Augustine, but he gives it new meaning in the Western world, I think, therefore I am.

I think, therefore I am. And then from that foundation, as it were, he rebuilt what he thought was the whole framework of human knowledge of the world and of God, and so on. And what he did by that experiment, unknowingly, very likely, was to reduce humanity to being thinking beings.

What is the essence of us as human beings? It is that we are thinkers, that our reason is what defines our humanity. And I hope as Christians you see that there is something wrong with that, there is something lacking in that.

It's not the whole story, it's not the complete story of what it means for us to be human. But it's very much part of the Western thinking over the last 200 or so years. And reason eventually is divorced from any sort of religious framework and becomes the arbiter of truth.

And that position was being enunciated in the early 1700s, within 50 years of Descartes' death. A variety of things had taken place, most of them actually in the areas we call the British Isles. There was a reaction against Puritanism, there was a reaction against the English Civil War, and there began to be great emphasis on human reason.

Human reason is the arbiter of truth. It's the sieve through which all ideas have to pass. Some are accepted, some are rejected. The other key figure who stands at the fountainhead of the modern world is Isaac Newton.

Very religious individual. Often touted as a Christian scientist. If you believe that one can hold that the Lord Jesus Christ is not fully God, but was a creation of the Father, and that you believe that that can be described as Christianity, then I think you could describe Newton as a Christian.

I do not believe that. Newton, as his notebooks were read after his death in 1727, it became clear he did not believe in the full deity of our Lord Jesus. He had deep problems with it. He accepted what is historically known as Arianism.

He denied the deity of Christ, his eternal deity, and argued that Christ, the pre-incarnate Christ, pre-incarnate Son of God, was a creation of God the Father. But he was a very religious individual, and spent, in fact, his last dozen years of his life poring over the book of Revelation, writing out schema after schema as to how this book was to be understood, and how the history of the world was going to end.

Interestingly enough, those notebooks which still exist, I think in Cambridge, one of the archives in Cambridge University, have never been published, and most likely probably never will be published.

But Newton is remembered by us as the architect of that understanding of the universe which dominated Western science until this century, until Einstein. And the men and women of the 17th and 1800s lived in what we call the Newtonian universe.

And Newton's great emphasis was that all of the physical phenomena we see around us can ultimately be understood by human reason and reduced to mathematical formulae which the human mind can grasp and understand, and so on.

And thus he argued that God, in effect, was a great machine maker. He was the one who, to use an image of that period, of a particular type of machine, he was the great clockmaker. He had made the universe as a great clock.

And if only we know enough, we would understand perfectly how the whole thing works. And it can, in fact, many of the basic workings of the universe can be reduced to formulae that we can use to exploit and develop nature for our own benefit.

And so these two ideas, the idea that the universe is understandable, it is a way to objective truth, and the idea that human reason is to be the arbiter of truth, in many respects laid the foundations for the modern world.

Because in the modern world, especially revealed in this century, the human mind is the thing which determines what is true and what is false. And in this century, science has been hailed as the pathway to true knowledge, the idea being that science is objective, the way that, say, theology or history or other humanities are not.

Rationalism’s Assault on the Trinity and Incarnation

Now, in recent days, all of this has been challenged. We're obviously not going to be getting into this. In the last 30 years, there has been a massive assault on this whole worldview. So much so that observers of contemporary culture now talk about us living in a post-modern world.

It's something of a conundrum, how you can live in the modern times, but it's post-modern, it's after the modern era. But that's the term that is used. We no longer live, and I think the key point is that we no longer live in a world that is shaped by the intellectual assumptions of a Descartes or a Newton, where we assume that human reason is the determiner of truth and falsehood, and that science is going to give us true knowledge.

We increasingly live in a world which has turned its back on that and where there is the idea that there is no such thing as truth. And it introduces a whole set of different problems for us as Christians.

Now, in the 18th century, the way that this impacted the Church was in the beginning of the 18th century, there were massive assaults on some key aspects of the Christian faith. The Trinity is the first one to come under heavy attack in the 1690s through to around 1715, and then from there on it was assumed by many that the doctrine of the Trinity is not rational.

It cannot be demonstrated to be true in accord with human reason. Joseph Priestly, the discoverer of oxygen, among other things, one of the great chemists of the late 18th century, whose main preoccupation, though, was theology, and who was the father of Unitarianism in Britain and here in North America, and for whom Andrew Fuller was one of his main antagonists.

Fuller had a major work published against Priestly. Priestly argued, mathematically, 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 3. And it doesn't equal 1. Therefore, there's no way that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can be one God.

There are three gods there, he argued, if you're going to accept that sort of argument that has been the traditional argument of the Church. Now, what you're dealing with here, obviously, and again, I'm not going to take a lot of time to develop this, what we're dealing here, obviously, is one of the mysteries of the Christian faith.

That Christianity, while it is not irrational, is indeed super-rational. That the heart of the Christian faith, many of the deep truths that we hold dear, they are not irrational, but they go beyond our human reason to grasp and to understand.

And not surprisingly so. If God is God, as we declare Him to be, it should not be surprising that He surpasses our finite, fallible minds. And the doctrine of the Trinity is an excellent illustration of this.

There are others, we'll look at one tonight, the whole issue of conversion and salvation. There are others, though. The Incarnation is another here. It's not surprisingly, again, in the 18th century, the Incarnation came under heavy attack.

It is in the 1700s, particularly, that books are starting to be published that deny the deity of Christ, that assert His mere humanity, and so on. But there again, we are confronted by a mystery. Who among us can fully understand the way in which our Lord Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man?

We can see the attributes of both at work, but how can He be both in one and the same person? How can these two natures be in one person? So the 18th century, then, is a period in which there are great attacks being leveled against the Christian faith.

There are some, in the early part of that period, men like Joseph Butler, in his analogy of religion, who feel that they have to defend the Christian faith, but they do so at the expense of giving away the heart of the Christian faith.

Because what the opponents of Christianity in this early period, when their opponents say to them, well, look, Scripture says this, they'll say, oh, no, no, you can't use Scripture in our arguments. Because the inspiration of Scripture is one of the things we call into question.

So if you're going to argue against it, you've got to argue on our grounds. Well, whenever you're choosing, if you know anything about military history, whenever you're choosing a battlefield, you don't allow the opponents to choose the ground.

One of the periods of history I have great interest in, in recent years, actually it's been going back a long time, is the American Civil War. And probably the key battle of the American Civil War is Gettysburg.

And the great push of the battle of Gettysburg was to get what was called the high ground. That area of land at Gettysburg, and if you ever go there, you can go to it, that overlooked the rest of the field.

And the realization was, if that was controlled, it would determine the course of the battle. And both Confederates and the Union wanted the high ground, and the Confederates lost enormous numbers of men trying to attain the high ground.

Well, in the same way, in the theological battle, the early defenders of Christianity in the 18th century, those who sought to defend Christianity, gave away the high ground to their opponents. They said, okay, you don't believe in the inspiration of Scripture, we will not argue with you from Scripture, we'll simply use our human reason.

And that gave away, in many respects, the high ground. And they were forced to fight on the fields that their theological opponents chose. Ultimately, God's answer, and this is very important to note, God's answer to the anti-Christian attacks on the Church and on the faith in the 18th century, God's answer was the revival that we've been thinking about.

It was raising up a Whitefield or a Wesley to proclaim the faith. Now, if you read especially Wesley's writings, you will read his defense of the faith from time to time in what we will call reasoned arguments.

And yet he knew ultimately that it is the proclamation of the word that is the means by which God overcomes the foes of the Church. Well, we want to turn then to looking at Andrew Fuller. His dates are 1754 to 1815.

Andrew Fuller’s Background and Self-Education

He was a man who had little formal education, and I was thinking on the way here what grade we would put the end of that education at. Possibly grade 8, most likely grade 6. In other words, he was in his very early teens, 12 or 13, when his formal education really stopped.

And his parents were farmers, dairy farmers. They rented a series of dairy farms, basically trained him to work on the farm. He'd already had some experience, but he was brought up through his teens expecting that he would follow in their footsteps, be a dairy farmer like them.

It's a very important lesson that his life has for us, which is that God does not always use those who have gone through the formal channels of education. Formal education is not the most important thing in God's service.

One thinks of numerous other individuals who you could put in the same category as Andrew Fuller. John Bunyan is in that category. William Carey, who was a very good friend of Andrew Fuller, is in that category.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon is in that category. What was critical in all of these men's lives, though, was a hunger for knowledge. Yes, they didn't attain it in a formal sense, but they gave themselves to study in private and so on.

Now, Fuller would become what one man has said to be the greatest theologian that the Baptists, and he was a Baptist, had in the 18th century. Spurgeon, in fact, looking back on his life, and he was born many, many years later after Fuller lived, Spurgeon could say he was the greatest theologian of the 18th century.

And he's thinking here of greatest in terms of Baptist theologian. He was the youngest of three brothers. He was born in 1754, raised in an area near Cambridge, a little village, actually, called Wiccan, not that far from Cambridge, and he would eventually settle down in his early years, into his teen years, at a place called Soham.

And these are very small villages, maybe even we would want to describe them as hamlets, not far from the university town of Cambridge. His parents were members of the Baptist church there. And it was a church which had had some blessing in the past, but in the period when Fuller was going there, it had plateaued, or it stagnated.

Hyper-Calvinism and Fuller’s Conversion

And in many respects, that was because of the theology of the minister, a man named John Eve. He was what we would describe as a hyper-Calvinist. He was a man who believed that when God intended to save an individual, God would do it, and it didn't need any of his help, or anybody else's help.

And the consequence was that he did not encourage his congregation to put their faith in Christ. He expected God would save them, independently of his ever urging any of them to respond to the gospel.

And so Fuller grew up in this context, and soon came to realize the man had nothing to say for anybody who was unconverted in the congregation. And what is interesting, or what is important to note, is that Eve's theology was prominent in many Baptist circles in England.

Not completely, it didn't dominate the entire scene, but many Baptist circles in England were like this in this period of time. And if we had time, we could trace it back to various causes and roots and so on.

But Fuller grew up then in a context where he felt that the minister had nothing to say to him, because he was an unconverted individual. The man had nothing to say to those who were not converted. And so Fuller basically turned off anything the man said from the pulpit.

And yet, because he's in that environment, he is hearing some things. And he knows he's not a Christian, and he's wrestling with various areas. And he goes through a number of experiences in his teen years, which are very important.

The first is in 1767, when he was around 13 or 14, possibly, years of age. He, like many of the culture, that kind of Christian subculture of which he was a part, believed that if a Bible verse came to your mind with great force and great suddenness, if you had not been thinking about a Bible verse, and suddenly it was there with great power and force, the idea was that this was a message from God, speaking to you personally.

So it is on this particular day, he was out in the fields, and Romans 6, verse 14, came with such power to him, that he felt God was speaking through the verse. And the verse was, Romans 6, verse 14, King James Version.

And he took this as a sign of God telling him that he was converted. That he was not outside of Christ, he was actually converted. And the experience brought from within the depths of his heart such overwhelming gratitude that he felt to God that he began to weep profusely.

The following day, though, he said he returned to his former vices as eagerly as ever. And for the next six months, he lived without prayer, without any thought of God, and with no evident change in his life.

He had had a deep religious experience, but no change. About six months later, and by this time it's the year 1768, so the first event must have been the late summer or fall of 1767. By 1768, about six months later, he began to think about that earlier experience, and began to think, why is it, though, that I haven't lived like a Christian for these last six months?

Well, he concluded, I must be factual in it. And again, he had a profound, deep religious experience. He again went through a time of weeping. In fact, so much did he weep, he said the next day he woke up and his eyes were swollen from the evening before.

But again, over the next year, he lived with no victory over sin, no victory over sin's temptations, and with total neglect of prayer. Looking back many years later, he could say the great deep of my heart's depravity had not yet been broken up.

And one of the things I think is very important about Fuller's experience is it teaches us that people can have what appear to be profound religious and emotional experiences, but doesn't necessarily mean that they're conversion.

I'm sure if Fuller had been in a typical evangelical church in North America, and had gone forward in an altar call, and had been weeping so profusely, the people would have said to him, you're converted.

But he was not. It was not until the autumn of 1769 he begins to think about the meaning of his life, and begins to think about these past experiences, and begins to realize he was fooling himself. He was not backslidden, he never prayed, he had no interest in scripture, he had no desire for the word of God, he went to church out of force of habit, or to please his parents.

He realized that he was not a Christian. He said later, the fire and brimstone in the bottomless pit seemed to burn within my bosom. I saw that God would be perfectly just in sending me to hell, and to hell I must go unless I was saved of mere grace.

He realized he needed both cleansing and pardoning. He needed to be pardoned and purified. And yet the theology of the church of which he was part argued, and this is a very interesting twist, argued that because it is God who saves sinners, which I think is a biblical point, and yet they pushed it beyond that, because it is God who saves sinners, men and women cannot respond in their own strength.

In fact, the argument was, you have to know you're among the elect to go to Christ for salvation. Which is crazy. It's ugly crazy. Because how can I know I'm among the elect until I'm actually converted?

But Fuller then is in 1769, he is in the throes of an actual conversion, but he thinks he has no warrant to go to Christ for salvation. He needs something inwardly that will tell him that Christ is going to save him as one of the elect.

Finally though, he is reduced to such a pitch, he said that he felt like Queen Esther in the story of Esther and Ahasuerus. And if you recall the story, one of the customs of the Persian king was that his wife could not enter.

In fact, no one could enter into their presence unless they were bidden to do so. And given the nod, as it were, the royal nod, yes, you can come in. If they came into the presence of the king without being encouraged to do so, they did so at risk of their own lives.

Well, Fuller said, I felt I was like Queen Esther. But he said, I will trust my soul, my sinful lost soul, in Christ's hands. If I perish, I perish. That was November of 1769, and Fuller, in that experience, finally came to the point where he said he found peace with God and that the great deep of his heart was broken up.

There are three things that Fuller learned out of that experience. First, it is wrong to maintain that men and women need to look within themselves to find out that they've got something in themselves to come to Christ.

The gospel is to look to Christ, and not in themselves. The second thing that he found is that conversion is issues in a radical change of lifestyle. Things change. Prayer starts now to become a part of the Christian life.

A love for the people of God, and so on. And thirdly, and this is building on that, there's a change in the affections of the heart. And that latter point is very important. Fuller would eventually come to the realization that at the heart of conversion is the changing of the heart's affections.

It's not merely intellectual knowledge, but there is a reorientation. There's now a love for Christ, and a love for his word, and a love for his people. The church of which he became a member, a Soham Baptist church, and he became a member in 1770, was soon thrown into a controversy.

Fuller’s Pastoral Ministry and the Duty of Sinners

And the controversy had to do with a man who was a member of that church who habitually got drunk. It was discovered. And he told, in fact it was Fuller who discovered the man. The man was regularly getting drunk.

And Fuller told the man it was wrong for him to do so. The man's response was, this is typical of the environment, he'd love to stop getting drunk if only God gave him the power. But he was waiting, and when God gave him the power he'd stop getting drunk.

In other words, I'd love to stop sinning, but until God gives me the power to stop sinning, I can't help it. Well, Fuller thought there was something screwy about that, something wrong about that kind of theology.

But it fits with the whole environment. The whole environment is, we have to wait for God to do, as it were, everything for us. Well, the pastor got involved, and the whole congregation was involved in this kind of theological controversy.

Does, do sinners have any power? And should they be encouraged? Do sinners have a responsibility before God to live in a way that honors Him? That's the issue. And the pastor actually found himself arguing against his own theology.

Eventually, the pastor had to resign. And within three years, Andrew Fuller found himself as pastor. Nineteen years old. And they call him to be pastor. And he struggled in those early years. He will be pastor of the church until 1782.

From 1774 to 1782. It's a period of time in which he talks about his life as going through a theological labyrinth. He struggles, because the only style of preaching he has heard is one which never urges the unconverted to do anything.

And although he had gone through that, he knew of no other style of preaching. And so he begins to preach like that. He doesn't preach anything to the unconverted. But he's reading scripture. He's reading especially the book of Acts and the Gospel of John in which he sees a different style of exhortation which we'll mention actually in a few minutes in the Gospel of John from our Lord Jesus.

And he realizes that there's a dissonance between his preaching and the preaching of scripture. Now one of the ways in which the hyper-Calvinists got around this was they argued while the early Christian preachers they had a special gift from God to urge the unconverted to respond to the Gospel.

We don't have that anymore. That's the argument. And Fuller is not satisfied with that. He doesn't know what the answer is. He's a young man. He has basic gifts in terms of the reading and writing. But he has to educate himself.

And so the 1770s are a period of education. Thankfully he will be appointed to the writings of Jonathan Edwards. And in the writings of Jonathan Edwards you'll see how the sovereignty of God in salvation can be faithfully combined with human responsibility.

That yes it is God who saves sinners from beginning to end. But yes it is true that men and women have to respond to the Gospel. And that they are held responsible to respond to the Gospel. That it is their duty to respond.

And if they do not respond to the Gospel and reject the Gospel God will hold them guilty. And they'll be judged for that. And that when it comes to conversion and the actual repenting and believing the human individual has to do that.

Yes they're gifts from God but they're also duties for men. And so Fuller is wrestling with all of this in the 1770s. Eventually he will write a book and I want to speak a little bit about this book. Now you might be thinking what has all this got to do with the Age of Reason?

Well Fuller will go on as we will see in the next hour to write against some of the things that we've mentioned right at the beginning. But what is fascinating about what we're talking about is that unseen by those who adhere to this hyper-Calvinist theology they actually were shaped by their age.

The age was an age of reason. Who saves sinners? It is God. And what they did was they pushed that thought to its rational, logical limit. If God saves sinners then he doesn't need anything we do. And they were against missions, they were against preaching and urging the lost and they were against emphasizing the duty of the unconverted and so on.

It all sounds very logical but this is not biblical. And unbeknownst to the men who held this view they thought they were being biblical. But actually they were being shaped by their age that could only be seen upon hindsight.

Looking back you could see how their theology was shaped by the age of reason. And that's why it is a very good thing for us as Christians to be aware of what our culture thinks and how it thinks and how it reasons.

Because if we don't it will be all too easy for us to get pressed into the impress and the mold of our culture. We are not to live as Christians. You may disagree with me. But we are not to live as Christians with our heads in the ground or only looking back.

We are to live as men and women fixed in Scripture understanding the Word of God but also knowing the culture in which we live so we know how to address that culture, how to speak to that culture and how to avoid some of the pitfalls of that culture.

And these men and some of these men and women whom we've been talking to, these hyper-Calvinists they thought they were being faithful to Scripture but what they were actually doing is they were allowing their culture which had become focused on human reason to shape their understanding of Scripture.

The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation

Now Fuller would write a book and it's called The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. It's a phrase from 1 Timothy 6 I believe. It's a very important book. He started work on the book in the 1770s.

He knew the book would bring him into controversy and there would be odium poured upon his head and he didn't like the idea of that. And yet he felt constrained to push on and to write the book. It was finished by 1781.

It was not published until 1785. He rightly saw that a book like this would cause great controversy and it did cause great controversy. It split Baptists in England and North America and others, Congregationalists, into two groups.

Fullerites, those who followed Fuller and those who followed a great theologian who preceded Fuller, a man named John Gill. And John Gill was a bit of a Hyper-Calvinist. He wasn't a complete Hyper-Calvinist but he was a bit of one.

So you had Gillites and Fullerites. And Fuller knew that controversy would come and in the next hour we'll detail a little of that. The title of the book, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation the subtitle is this The Duty of Sinners to Believe in Jesus Christ.

The Duty of Sinners to Believe in Jesus Christ. That tells you the theme of the book. That what he is going to seek to do from the Word of God is to lay out the responsibility of men and women to believe the Gospel, to respond in faith to the Gospel and the parallel or the ancillary truth which is if it is a duty for men and women to believe the Gospel it is also a duty for the church to proclaim the Gospel to sinners.

And he recognized that men like John Eve no matter how good they may have thought they were doing were guilty before God of the blood of men and women who sat in their congregations lulled to sleep thinking if God's going to save me, God's going to do it and I'd love to get saved but until He does it I'm not going to feel any need to respond.

And Fuller knew he was sitting in Christian congregations where these men and women with this false thinking. It is also important to note that Andrew Fuller was a very close friend of William Carey and William Carey would never have been grit as we saw two weeks ago by the need to take the Gospel to the nations if he had not learned much of his theology from Andrew Fuller.

Many years later long after Fuller was dead near the end of Carey's life in the 1830s Carey would say that his theology as he thought back who was it who taught him among those who he remembered were Andrew Fuller.

Well, I want to mention a couple of things in the book. One of the first things that Fuller emphasizes is that faith is focused outward. It's not focused inward. It's not looking within to see if when you come to faith if I'm among the elect or if Jesus wants to save me.

It's focused outwards. The Scriptures, Fuller writes always represent faith as terminating on something without us namely on Christ and the truths concerning Him. Faith is not curved inward. It is looking out to our Lord Jesus embracing what He has done.

In the second part of the work which is the biggest part of the work and that's the first part where he takes the idea of what faith is in the second part of the work he has six arguments why men and women are responsible to believe the gospel and God will hold them responsible.

Why it is a duty of unbelievers to put their faith in Christ. The first argument is that this is a way that you find our Lord teaching and preaching. And let me take you through a number of passages he refers to.

For instance, John 12, 36 and I have a King James version that I'm reading from because this is the version that Fuller used. John 12, verse 36 and that's the passage in which our Lord says while ye have light believe in the light that ye may be the children of light.

While ye have light believe in the light that ye may be the children of light. And Fuller focuses on that exhortation believe in the light. Who is he talking to? Well, first, who is he talking about? Well, he's talking about himself.

He is the light. He's urging men and women to put their faith in him. But who is he talking to? Well, Fuller looks at the context. Very, very good way always of interpreting scripture. You look at the context of a verse or a passage.

Well, he says if you look at the context you'll find out in verse 37 John 12, verse 37 that these were people who didn't believe in Jesus. Though he had done many miracles before them yet they believed not on him.

In other words, here is our Lord exhorting unbelievers to believe in him. He doesn't simply tell them about the light and then leave them with information. He urges them in the response of their wills to turn to him and believe in him.

He doesn't just give information for their minds but through their minds giving information he challenges their wills believe in me. Or John 6, verse 29 is another verse that Fuller notes. John 6, verse 29 where Jesus says this This is the work of God that ye believe on him whom he, that is God hath sent.

Now, again, Fuller looks at the context. Who is Christ talking to? Well, he's talking to men verse 26 who saw the miracles the miracle of the feeding of the 5 ,000 they were fed but they didn't believe.