The Banner of Truth Trust: with John Rawlinson | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratia, and I'm here in usually beautiful and sunny Los Angeles, California at the

Shepherds Conference 2019, and I'm joined by my good friend, general manager of the Banner of Truth Trust, John Rawlinson.

John, thanks for sitting down for a few minutes. No problem. Good to see you. Thanks. You know, on the podcast, our listeners know the

Banner of Truth because we're always recommending books to them that the Banner publishes, and we love to just sit down when we get the opportunity and let people have the same experience that I've had, which is when you meet the people who work for the

Banner, you are very encouraged to find out that these folks are not, there's not a disconnect between the books that are on the shelf, so to speak, and the men who are working in really every aspect of your operation.

So I just wanted to introduce our listeners to the general manager of the Banner of Truth. Tell us a little bit about yourself, where do you live, and what do you do?

Okay. Well, I live just outside of Edinburgh, and the head office of the

Banner, as you probably know, is in Edinburgh. We're in a place called Murrayfield, and anybody who's, you know, if you have any

Americans watching this who are rugby fans, then Murrayfield is the home of the Scottish rugby, the national rugby side, so we're just across the road from the stadium.

So I live just outside of Edinburgh, I'm married, I have four children, three of whom are married, we have two grandchildren, so we're very blessed.

All of our children, it amazes me, our children are all believers, I have a son who is training for the ministry, so we feel very blessed.

God has been very gracious towards us. Those of you who've got a keen eye for an accent, or a keen ear for an accent, will notice that I'm not

Scottish, I live in Scotland, but I'm originally from England. And we moved, in fact it's nearly 20 years ago, that our family moved north to Scotland, and I took up the responsibility as General Manager of the

Banner of Truth. So you've been doing this job now for almost 20 years? Yeah, it'll be 20 years in May. Wow, we need to have you at a party.

Maybe I shouldn't be talking about that, there's probably one already planned. I don't think so. So, tell me how you came to know that the

Banner of Truth existed. Well, my connections with the

Banner of Truth, in a sense, go back through my father. So my father was a minister, and I have memories really from a very young age.

My dad used to have, in his study, he had these chairs that had sort of wings to them, and as a sort of, well,

I guess probably six -year -old boy, I would go into a study and at times I would sort of curl up in this chair, it was a really comfortable place to be as a child.

And I have a memory at the time of looking at his bookshelves, and my dad had a lot of books, as most ministers do, and I can still remember seeing this little man on the back of some books, and they had numbers on, and there were two things that struck me as a young child.

One was that on the back of the book, the author of the book was a

John. So that was interesting to me, because that was my name, I could read that, that was John. And then this little man, along with a number, and I would count these things up, and it would perhaps be number two and three, and then perhaps number eight and nine, and then another week might go by and there was an extra number there, and that was very interesting to me.

Well, that was the works of John Owen. Back in the 60s, the Banner of Truth were publishing the works of John Owen, they weren't done all in one go, and so as the next volume came out, my father would buy that and that would be added to his bookshelf.

And I have distinct memories of seeing that set of Owen kind of building on the bookshelf. So that would be really my first memory of the

Banner. But then, and obviously my father in terms of his ministry, he owed a lot to the

Banner of Truth because of the books, and also the Ministers' Conference. My dad was at some of the early conferences in the early 1960s when the

Ministers' Conference first started. But then, as I grew a little bit older, and my first Banner of Truth book was the volume one of Spurgeon's Autobiography.

I bought that at a, it was a small church in a little village near where we lived, and they used to have a preaching convention every year, and my dad took me along one time, and they had a bookstore there, and this man

Spurgeon, who I'd heard a lot about, and my father would talk about people like that. And there was this book, and I was like, oh,

I'd like to get that. So that was the first Banner of Truth book. I think I was about 12 or 13 at the time. And then the next year, we were at the convention again, and I bought volume two.

So that was my second Banner of Truth book. But then, as I grew up, the

Banner of Truth, we still do run a youth conference. I mean, you've been to the youth conference. Yeah, tell the listeners, what is that?

Well, it's a conference. It runs from a Friday evening through to Sunday night or Monday morning. It's for young people, by which we mean the age of, roughly speaking, 16 through to about 25.

That's the kind of age range. And the youngsters gather. We have sessions of preaching, primarily.

And obviously, times of some free time on a Saturday afternoon, a lot of them go out and play a game of soccer or something.

And it's a time of sort of fellowship together, time of getting to know one another, but sitting under God's word and the teaching of God's word.

It's, you know, as a young person, I went along. As an old person now,

I get the privilege of being able to go along again, because we're the organizers. And it's a great blessing to see young people who are serious about the word of God.

Gathering together and just soaking up the preaching of the word. Yeah. So the

Youth Conference is one of the things that the Banner does. What else do you do? Well, directly after the

Youth Conference, we have the Minister's Conference. So the youth runs sort of Friday night to Monday morning. Then the ministers come in Monday afternoon, and that runs through to Thursday.

That's in the UK. Yeah. And you have a U .S. Minister's Conference as well. We do, yeah. We have a U .S. Minister's Conference.

That's usually around the last week of May on the East Coast. This year, we're actually doing a new conference in the

U .S., which is exciting. Not very far from here. Hopefully, the weather will be better than it is in the

Shepherds Conference this year. But so not very far from here at Marietta Springs. And that's in October.

So that's an exciting new venture for us. I've met a number of people here at the conference who have sort of indicated they're hoping to be with us.

So that's good. And I'll put a plug in for our listeners, especially you ministers who are listening.

Make it happen. Get to a Banner of Truth Conference. There are a lot of things that I could say about it, but I'll say this.

It is the most economical conference that you can attend because your registration actually pays for your board and your food.

It's not a lot of different factions going off to this restaurant and that restaurant and in this hotel and that hotel.

You're together. You're on a college campus. You eat your meals together. And that's really where so much fellowship around the

Word. You find out that you have a lot of mutual friends on your bookshelves. So you love

John Owen. Here's a man who loves John Owen. You've been helped by Sibs. Here's a man who's been helped by Sibs.

And so it's really an instant fraternal bond. And so I would urge you, if you're listening, go to a

Banner Ministers Conference. And now that there's one on the East Coast and the West Coast, just go to both of them or pick which side of the

Mississippi River you're on and go to that one. Yeah, I mean, they're always encouraging times.

And, you know, just as in the Youth Conference, you know, I around the UK now, you know,

I have people all over the UK who I know through the Youth Conference back when I was a young person.

And the same would be true of the ministers who come along. There would be friendships that develop. And, you know, all over the states, there are people who would meet together and then stay in contact after the conference.

And the same thing will be true in the UK, you know, people meeting and staying in touch after the conference and bonds of fellowship that grow.

And it's not just between the individuals, too, because it becomes church contacts as well.

You know, we're not a denominational organization. And so you find that these bonds of friendship cut right across denominational lines.

And that's wonderful to see. And that again, that will be true both sides of the Atlantic. So, yeah.

So we know that you do conferences. We know the publishing.

That's probably what people are most familiar with. You also have a book fund that you operate. So tell us just a little bit about that.

Okay. Yeah, it would have been the early 60s. And one of our employees at the time was reading about Susanna Spurgeon.

In fact, in I think it's volume two of the autobiography, there's a little section in there where Spurgeon writes about Susanna Spurgeon and some of the work that she did.

And what our employee discovered was that Susanna Spurgeon started a book fund where she was sending books out to pastor, primarily pastors who couldn't necessarily afford the books themselves.

And she sent out tens of thousands of books over the period of her lifetime that she was doing this.

And this member of staff felt, well, that's very interesting. This is something that we should be doing as well.

And so the Banner of Truth book fund was established. We have people who donate to the book fund. And then, you know, when we sell books, any profits that we're making, we're a non -profit organization.

So profits that we would make get plowed back into the ministry. And some of that will go back into the book fund activities.

So we supply books to colleges, to seminaries, to individual ministers, to perhaps students who are studying, particularly with an aim to the ministry.

A lot of the work of the Banner is focused really towards people in ministry. And that would be true, too, of the book fund.

And the books go all over the world. Sometimes we charge. Sometimes we send them for free.

So it depends on the circumstances. So we might have a situation where we have a seminary somewhere in Africa, and somebody has donated some funds towards buying some books for the library.

So we would then send them books, but at a very high discount. Other situations, we might get a contact from somebody, and they've got no money whatsoever.

And we might send them, again, if it was a library for a seminary or something, we would send them some books there.

But individuals, too. So, you know, we sometimes get people writing to us and asking for something.

That can be difficult because within some parts of the world, there are black markets for Christian books.

So you have to be careful. You have to try and qualify some of these things. And sometimes we would try and develop a contact, almost a relationship with people.

And we would send them something and then hear back from them, you know, how they were helped by that book.

You might send them a little bit something else. But one of the things that has,

I think, has been remarkable, really, is that certainly in my time at the Banner of Truth, and as far as I understand it, in my predecessor's time, and he was there for probably, what

I guess, 27 years or so. I think he started in about 1972, retired in 99.

And I don't think we've ever found ourselves in a situation where somebody has requested help from the book fund and we haven't been able to supply help because of lack of funds.

God has been very gracious. We've had some donors who have been selfless in donating funds to help with the book fund.

And the Banner has been blessed, too, in terms of its sort of more commercial work in selling books.

So we've been able to supply books when we've been requested. I was recently at a conference in the

Philippines and meeting men there who'd received books through the book fund. And some of the stories are just remarkable of the way that literature has affected people's lives and affected their ministries.

We have a time of Bible reading or book reading sometimes and prayer every morning in the office in Edinburgh.

And the staff will all gather and we'll have a short reading and a short prayer just to sort of set the day going.

And I sometimes say to them, you know, we get these stories back from some of the book fund activities and say, guys, this is why we come to work in the morning.

You know, and you hear perhaps a story may not be book fund, it might be maybe something from the first world of how literature has revolutionized a man's ministry, has changed people's lives in the pews.

And, you know, this is why we do what we do. And it's just super encouraging to hear these stories.

I think sometimes, actually, I wish people would tell us. I met a man, it must be 15 years ago now, a gentleman who told me he'd been converted through reading, of all things, volume one of the

Lloyd -Jones biography. And I said to him, you know, why have you not written to tell us?

You know, you should write and tell us. You know, the author, it's Ian Murray's, you know, the author would be super encouraged by that, to hear that something he'd written had been, you know, in God's hands, the instrument of conversion of this man.

And I sometimes think we don't know the half of what goes on with books. That's exactly right. And the day will make it known.

Indeed. Yeah, yeah. So it's very encouraging to be involved in the work of books.

It's encouraging to be involved in the work of the book, and I just see it as a tremendous privilege. Yeah. So you've been there for 20 years, 1999.

The evangelical landscape has changed significantly, would you say, in the last 20 years.

How have you traced that change through being sort of the printer, the supplier of Puritan literature to that?

I mean, certainly that has been part of the fuel that has fuelled the change in the last 20 years.

So I'd be interested to hear your perspective on that. It's actually quite a difficult, well, you're not quite asking me a question as such, but it's a difficult thing, because in different parts of the world, different things have happened.

So here in the States, the situation is quite different to say it is in the

UK. And then the situation in the UK will be quite different to say, somewhere in the middle of Africa.

So there isn't a sort of monolithic view as what's gone on in the last 20 years. I would say, here in America, as I'm sure most of your viewers will know, there have been movements that have taken place probably in the last,

I guess, 10 to 15 years. You've had the sort of Young Wrestlers Reformed, you've got the

T4G, together with the Gospel Coalition. Some of these movements that have been very influential in the evangelical scene.

And I think we've seen some encouragements through those. People have an interest in the sort of thing that we do as an organization, the kind of books that we produce.

We've seen perhaps an upsurge of interest in the Puritans, which maybe wasn't quite...

I think America has always had an interest in the Puritans, ever since we've been in existence, really.

But I think we've seen perhaps an upsurge in the last 15 years or so. I trust that that continues.

I don't know that it will, and we can't presume that it will. But certainly in the last 10 to 15 years here in the

States, we've seen an increasing interest in the Puritans. That wouldn't necessarily be the case in other countries.

So as I say, the situation is quite different in different places. So we're here, and there are 4 ,500 at least pastors, mostly pastors.

I helped set a table of Banner of Truth books up in there four days ago.

It's almost empty now. It was stacked as high as you could go, and they were stuffed under the table, and now we're down to almost nothing.

I mean, there is an undeniable hunger for the kinds of things that you guys are putting out, and that shows up in conferences like this that continue to swell each year.

That's encouraging. We would be rebuked by more careful men if we said that that was revival.

But it is, as a student of history, would you agree, that the Lord does tend to put these kinds of doctrines into the pulpits as a predecessor of revival in some cases?

Yeah, I mean, you have to be careful how you interpret events, and I think there's a truth to the saying that God's providence is best interpreted from a long distance.

So it's very hard to interpret events of today when you're in the middle of it and there today.

And I will give you an example, for instance. You know, I lived, I'm a bit older than you, so I lived through the 60s, 70s, 80s in Britain.

And the part of the country that I spent most of my life in, I guess sort of teenage years, that kind of period of time, was the

East Midlands. So if people know the geography of Britain, about 100 miles north of London, you've got places like Leicester, Nottingham, Coventry, that sort of region.

And, you know, at the time, there were churches being planted in the late 70s, early 80s.

And looking back now, I think there were things happening at the time which when we were living through it, perhaps we didn't really realise.

There was a real work of God taking place in that part of Britain. I think it was true in other parts of Britain too, but, you know, that was my experience because that's where I lived.

You know, as an example, I can remember as a 13 -year -old being allowed to join the young people's group.

It was a teenage group, so when you were 12, you couldn't join, 13. The church that I was a part of, my father was a minister of, it wasn't very old at that point.

It was quite a young church. It had really started off with just a handful of people.

In fact, I'm kind of a bit weird in some ways, I suppose. I like numbers, you know,

I like numbers and graphs and things. I used to always count the congregation on a Sunday morning. I can remember the day when, you know, we hit 20.

I can remember the day coming home over lunch and, you know, announcing with great glee as a youngster, oh, there are 40 people there this morning at church, you know.

There was a growth. There was a growth, yeah. And as a young person, so at the age of 13, I joined the young people's group.

Now, the young people's group was me, my sister, the son and daughter of one of the elders in the church, that's four, and one other person.

There were five of us. Now, by the time I left, you know, went off to university, so 18, 19, 20 years of age, that young people's group was busting out of the homes that we met in, you know.

The growth was phenomenal. Yeah. And it wasn't all just youngsters from church families.

There were young people who'd been converted who had really no church contact before that.

And I look back now and I think, you know, that's only, what, five, seven years. And we saw amazing growth in young people's work.

And the church had gone from, you know, 20, 30, 40 people. By the time

I was, you know, away from home in my early 20s, congregations were over 200.

And I look at that now and I say, that's not a very long time frame. That's a real work of God that was taking place.

And we weren't the only church like that. But at the time, you can't see it.

Right. And I think the same, you know, I would say the same today. When you look at what's happening, you look at the men here and so on, it's hard to interpret these things when you're right in the middle of it.

You know, maybe in 20 years time, we'll look back and say, OK, we've got a better idea now of exactly what's going on.

But I think your point, though, of, you know, the sort of doctrinal stance, the preaching of the

Word, the importance of understanding, the importance of Scripture, all those sorts of things.

Yeah, I think often these things do precede a work of God. And certainly when

God is at work, these things have to be central. Sure. It's not like he would employ some other means to bring about revival.

Absolutely. Yeah. And whether you talk revival or whether you talk blessing of God at a level that perhaps we wouldn't necessarily, you know, say this is revival.

A reviving. Yeah, a reviving of the church. It's always the case, isn't it, that, you know,

Scripture has to be central. Preaching will be central. There'll be a commitment to the doctrines of Scripture.

There'll be a commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture. Commitment to the authority of Scripture.

These sorts of things are going to be central because that's how God works. That's how God blesses. And ultimately, you know,

God has given us his Word. And if that Word isn't, you know, the Word and the

Spirit are not central, then why would we expect God's blessing? So, yeah, it has to be.

At every conference we attend these days, people stop by our booth to tell us how one of our studies or our films has helped or influenced them, their families, or their churches.

Eventually, we started asking if they'd let us record those stories and share them with you. This is

Jordan. Anthony Methenia, one of the contributors to the Behold Your God series, gave him a copy of Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty.

What it does, I think, very well is explains clearly the attributes of God, while at the same time connecting them to these great men in history that we look up to and how they were held up by the attributes of God, by the knowledge of God, and then at the same time applying that to your own life in a practical way.

So it's not just scholarly. It's not just historical. It's also practical, and it pulls them all together, you know, through the stories that Pastor John tells, through the workbook, through the sermons, and then through the application.

It does it all very well. I would say the Behold Your God series is the best series on the attributes of God, as far as contemporary series go, especially with all the materials that they have.

No one's going to take you to the text more consistently. No one's going to connect it to history more consistently, and no one's going to apply it to your life more practically than Behold Your God.

For more information about Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty, visit themeansofgrace .org.

John, I wanted you to tell our viewers and listeners a little bit about three books that you guys publish that you've read and that have been helpful to you.

Okay. Yeah, I've just picked up three titles off the table here, which hopefully give a bit of a flavor of the kind of thing we do as well.

So that's part of the reason I've chosen them. So, thank you. The first one is a

Puritan paperback. I'm just wiping the rain off here. It's starting to rain here. If you look really close, you might see me shivering.

I'm not sure, but anyway. It's The Art of Prophesying, which is William Perkins. So it's a

Puritan paperback. We have in print around about 54 Puritan paperbacks.

And the whole aim of the Puritan paperbacks is to get small parts of the

Puritan works, to make them accessible. They're very affordable. Some of them we modernize, some of them we don't.

So the works of Owen, for instance, some of the selections that we have of Owen in the Puritan paperbacks, they've been abridged and modified.

Other things we don't. They're just as is, so to speak. But this one,

The Art of Prophesying, I just think is a wonderful book. There's a section, it's actually in two sections, but the primary section on preaching that I like, it talks about the

Puritan method of preaching. And it's the simple Puritan method of preaching.

And I think that's a commitment that as an organization we have. You know, we look to produce resources that will help ministers with their preaching.

We look to encourage preaching. Now, you know, we're not saying the only way to preach is the way the

Puritans did, because at times perhaps the Puritan method of preaching is not perhaps quite how we'd want to model ourselves.

You know, with the point, the sub -point, the sub -sub -point, the sub -sub -sub -point kind of thing. And you see that in their writings.

And it was exhaustive, and that's great. But Perkins had this simple method of preaching.

And I just found it a really helpful book. And as I say, it's a good example of a

Puritan paperback, the kind of thing that we're doing. So for clarity's sake, the art of prophesying, someone might hear that in 2019 and say, oh, this means

I need to get, you know, I need to learn how to exercise my spiritual gift of prophecy. What is, what's

William Perkins talking about? Well, he's talking about preaching. Yeah, he's speaking God's word. Speaking God's word, yeah.

And so just to, I was going to quote you a little bit out of the forward to the book, which was written by Sinclair Ferguson.

You know, Perkins' preaching was marked by the so -called plain style, the description is self -explanatory. He believed preaching should conform to the apostolic touchstone of being the open manifestation of the truth.

And this is what the book is all about. It's how to preach in the way the apostles preached, in the way that the prophets in the

Old Testament preached. Preaching God's plain truth. There's actually quite a helpful section at the back, which is to do with the call to the ministry.

So there's the sort of two books in one, in a sense. So it's the calling of the ministry and as a gospel minister, what you should be doing.

So you get kind of two books in one, in a sense. But it's a very helpful book, you know, there's a chapter here, rightly handling the word of God.

You know, how should you deal with the word of God? And that's an example of, as I say, of a

Puritan paperback. Now, we also produce books by modern day authors.

So, you know, we started off back in the late 1950s. What we were doing then was essentially reprinting

Puritan works. Now we do a combination, there's a mixture of titles that we do.

So, you know, you'll find in here, as I just quoted the chapter there to do with the right handling of the word of God.

But then, you know, we also have Sinclair Ferguson's From the Mouth of God, which is a modern day book.

And that is about the authority of Scripture. It has got sections in there about how to study Scripture.

It's got sections in there about how to handle the word of God as a preacher. So, you know, we've got the

Puritans and we've got the modern day authors. And when we're looking at those two things, we're seeing a linking together.

You know, the modern day authors who were publishing and not saying anything different to the Puritans that were publishing.

You know, there's a stream through there, a theological stream. There's an experiential stream that runs right through from the

Puritans into the modern day things that we're producing. So that's a good example of a

Puritan paperback. Then another one I picked up is this one here, which is by Ian Murray. It's The Forgotten Spurgeon.

In many ways, I think Ian wrote this to, you know, the title says it all. It's to recover

Spurgeon. So one of the things you find is that in the early 1900s, sort of 1910 to 20, that kind of period of time, you're after the downgrade controversy that I'm sure many of your viewers and listeners will be familiar with.

And what happened was you found a lot of people, Baptists obviously, who were claiming

Spurgeon, you know, Spurgeon, the mighty preacher. But what they did was to excise his

Calvinism. And so they're presenting and they're claiming Spurgeon as their man and this wonderful preacher.

But they're missing why it was that Spurgeon was such a wonderful preacher. Why it was that Spurgeon was a gospel preacher.

Why it was that Spurgeon, you know, pleaded with people to, you know, get right with God.

And it was his Calvinism. And it was his Calvinism that drove him to that gospel preaching.

And so you actually find there are sermons that were published in that kind of period of time of Spurgeon's.

And they literally edited out his Calvinism. So, you know, if you get hold of those and you read them, you're like, oh, this is this is kind of strange.

It's not the Spurgeon that we recognize. Now, what happened was in that period of time, you know, through into the sort of 50s, 60s in Britain, that became the

Spurgeon everybody knew. Yes, yeah. And so Ian writes this book and the

Forgotten Spurgeon, you know, Recovering Spurgeon. What did Spurgeon really believe? What did he really preach?

And I think one of the things with Ian Murray, if your listeners know much of Ian's writings, they will know that Ian writes theology when he writes history.

And so in this book, The Forgotten Spurgeon, you get biographical insights, you get history of Spurgeon, but you have theology just woven right into it.

That's right. And there are many, many people. In fact, one of my colleagues who I know, you know, Jonathan Watson, who's our general editor.

I know he was very much struck when he first read this as a young man.

It really affected his views. It changed his understanding of the doctrines of grace and so on.

And I've met countless numbers of men who have really had their eyes opened by this book and come to a new understanding of the doctrines of grace.

So you get history and biography and the doctrine just woven through it.

Yeah, you know, I can see that being so helpful for people who have, I mean, where I live in Mississippi, Calvinism is a curse word.

I mean, if you call someone a Calvinist, you don't mean anything good by that. And sometimes it's based on someone that they've met who gives a very, almost a devilish interpretation or view, their view of what

Calvinism is. And so the forgotten

Calvinism of Spurgeon would be, you know, a very helpful thing for someone to come along and say, what is this that this guy believed?

I mean, I trust that Spurgeon loved Jesus and I trust that he preached the gospel. What was it that he did believe?

What is it about this stuff? That would be, in my context, why I would commend that book to someone.

Yeah, it's a tremendously helpful book, I think. There's another book actually that Ian wrote, which is very interesting, and that is a biography of Archibald Brown.

Archibald Brown was a contemporary of Spurgeon's. They were kind of the other side of the river, the Thames.

And again, the story of what happened under his ministry is remarkable, really is quite something.

And yet most people know of Spurgeon, but they don't know of Archibald Brown. You know, Archibald Brown was very much a forgotten character in church history.

And Ian wrote the biography. I think actually Ian would probably say that he himself didn't really know an awful lot about Archibald Brown until a friend of his drew his attention to him and said, you know,

I've got some material, you perhaps are interested in this. And as Ian started to look at this material,

I think he started to get excited by it, and I've got to write about this man. And so the product was then the

Archibald Brown book. But it is fascinating because I think in many ways that one of the reasons that Brown was neglected was the fact he lived longer.

So, you know, he lived beyond Spurgeon. So he isn't, I think it was in the mid 1920s or so that he passed away.

I might be wrong with that, but it's around that sort of period. But you see, what had happened at that point was, you know, think back what we said about Spurgeon's sermons being his

Calvinism been excised. Well, Brown was still preaching the old paths. Brown is still preaching the old truths.

But by that point in British church history, those are no longer acceptable.

So just as they could claim Spurgeon because he's dead, so you can't say anything against it, and they can excise his

Calvinism by editing his sermons, that they ignored Archibald Brown. This man is still preaching the old stuff and we're not interested in that anymore.

And I think that's part of the explanation why his life and work was forgotten in Britain.

Yeah, that's really interesting. People kind of sidelined him. You know, this is the old theology that we're editing out from Spurgeon.

We don't want to know about that. So all you young guys out there who are wearing your Charles Spurgeon t -shirts, that's church history 101.

You need to level up. You need to get your Archibald Brown t -shirts instantly and learn about this.

And actually, after we did Ian's biography on Brown, we did a couple of books of his sermons as well.

They're gems. So the face of Jesus Christ being one of them. Gems, absolute gems.

And I think a lot of people perhaps don't even know they exist. My oldest son actually did a little bit of work for us during a vacation from university when

I was at college. And one of the things that he did was to scan the works, the particular book of sermons of Archibald Brown.

So I can remember coming home and just, you know, saying, Dad, you need to read this stuff. This is just amazing.

And actually going through the work of scanning it, proofing it, getting it ready for typesetting for print, it was affecting him.

So yeah, it's exciting. And they really are great, great pieces of literature to read.

So, you know, the sermons of Archibald Brown. So I'd recommend those too. Yeah, you know, I've been reading Banner books for at least 10 years, fairly.

I mean, I always have one going. I feel like I haven't even started to scratch the surface of the catalog.

So it's just amazing. You know, I sit here and think like, I need to go get that Archibald Brown bio and I need to read those sermons.

And why haven't I read these things yet? Well, you know, there's just, it's like drowning in chocolate.

What else do you have there? Yeah, well, people who know me will know that I was born in Liverpool.

Okay, and I don't have a Liverpool accent. I was born there. I didn't really live there for very long. My father was raised in Liverpool.

So he's a Liverpudlian by birth. And as I was saying earlier, you know, my dad had a lot of Banner books.

And one of the people who was regularly spoken about in our household as I was growing up was a man called

J .C. Ryle. And I think it was probably a number of reasons for that. One was because Ryle, his theology and his stand that he took, he was

Church of England man, were very much where my father stood.

The fact that Ryle was a great cricketer was probably influential too. My dad loved cricket. He passed that on to me.

I love cricket. I realized that that's a really difficult sport. I tried to explain that to one of your colleagues the other night.

He's not talking about grasshoppers, by the way. There's a sport, apparently, allegedly, there's a sport called cricket.

So I spent a long time the other night trying to explain it to one of your colleagues. I'm not sure he even gets it now anyway. But Ryle was a great cricketer and a great fan of cricket.

So there were things, you know, that endeared him to my father and to myself. I love

Ryle. I, you know, spent time reading Ryle. I've spent time trying to find out about him.

So, yeah, I love Ryle. And this is one of Ryle's books. This is Holiness. Yeah, excellent. Holiness by Ryle.

Now, there are other editions of Holiness. You have to be a little bit careful because Holiness went through more than one edition, and Ryle expanded it.

So the one that we've produced at the Banner is sort of the full version rather than the slimmed down version.

But one of the things with it, you know, I always say to people, it's such a helpful book to read.

You know, we need to take the matter of holiness seriously as believers. You know,

I think too often we live our lives trying to see how close to the edge we can live, you know, without breaking some, you know, command, so to speak.

Instead of saying, you know, we need to live our lives and develop holy lives. You know, the attitude of how close can

I get to the speed limit, so to speak, without breaking it. It's just the wrong way around. It is. And it's a misunderstanding of God's character,

His law. The beauty of holiness. Yeah, absolutely. And Ryle really helps with this. Ryle is tremendously helpful with it.

But one of the things I always find fascinating is where he starts, because the first chapter in this is sin.

That's where he starts. And again, I think that's one of the issues in modern evangelicalism, that all too often that isn't where we start.

And I think, you know, we have a Puritan paperback by Venning that's called The Sinfulness of Sin.

Yeah. And, you know, that is so important for us to understand. You know, if you want to understand holiness, you've got to understand sin.

You've got to understand the sinfulness of sin. And I think as you start to understand how sinful sin is, you start to understand then how amazing

God's holiness is and then His graciousness to us that He would even deal with us.

And then the more you understand of God's grace, then I think the more you understand of our sinfulness.

And it just like builds. The more you understand of us, you know, how sinful sin is, the more you understand God's work.

That's right. And it's one of those things like a bimetallurgic system. How much is gold worth?

This much silver. You have to understand one to understand something of the other. Yeah, that's right.

And I think the more you understand of each one, the more you understand of the other. You know, it kind of builds as you go.

And Ryle is just tremendously helpful on this whole subject of holiness and living a holy life. Now, again, you know, we've just released a new book by Sinclair Ferguson.

I think you've got a whole podcast on maturity. And, you know, there are overlapping themes there.

Holiness, maturity, there's a lot of overlap in those sorts of things. And it's another example of, you know, you have

Ryle who was alive in the 1800s. And then you've got Sinclair who's alive today.

But, you know, they're talking the same language. They're talking the same things. They're describing the same things.

You know, it's underpinned by the scriptures. That's right. And in our business, so to speak, in Christianity, innovation is not good.

We're not coming up with something new every generation. We're trying to expound the old truths.

Yes. Yeah. No, I think that's very true. And it's one of the dangers is that I think we get affected by the world around us.

The world around us is always looking for the next new thing. You know, what's the next big new thing? And we jump onto that.

And I think we can be affected by that as Christians. You know, we somehow feel we need to find a new thing instead of saying, well, hey, we've got the scriptures.

You know, we've had them for how long? Well, a long time. They've stood the test of time. And sure, there are new applications to the scriptures.

And life is different today to what it was when I was a child, even. And if you go back 100 years, it's very different to what it was then.

But the truths of the scriptures are still the same. And the application may be a bit different.

So, you know, we talk about smartphones now. Well, we haven't had them very long.

And there are some issues to do with smartphones that the scriptures would speak to, particularly in the realm of holiness, for instance.

So there's new applications, but the truth is the same. Well, John, thanks for taking a few minutes.

Thank you for the work that you've done for the last 20 years. I know it probably hasn't felt like work all the time, but it is getting up and going to work and being faithful in the task that the

Lord has put in front of you. And I think we see the blessing of that in the way that the ministry has continued to grow and put out books that these pastors are able to gobble up and be helped by.

So I really do appreciate your friendship. I appreciate the relationship that we've had, you know, between our two ministries.

And I'm just very grateful to be able to commend wholeheartedly to the people who listen, who have been helped by the

Medi Gratia projects to say, you can now go and wander through this great garden of the banner of truth and stop anywhere you want to stop and pick one of these flowers and spend some time with it.

That means a lot. So thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you for your time and your friendship. Great.

Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Behold Your God podcast. All the scripture passages and resources we mentioned in the podcast are available in this week's show notes at mediagratia .org

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