Thomas Charles I: The Root of Pride | Behold Your God Podcast

The Evangelical Revival in Wales and Thomas Charles

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Mediagratiae, and I'm here again this week with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and author and host of the Behold Your God study series for Mediagratiae.

John, it's good to be here with you.

Yeah, good to be back.

As always. We're looking at a multiple-part series where we'll deal with the subject of pride. This is kind of the Paul Washer of podcasts. It's already sort of beat me up just looking through it. We're getting some help from a fellow called Thomas Charles, who was a late 18th century, early 19th century Welsh Calvinistic Methodist.

Now probably more people in our demographic who would be listening to this podcast have heard of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist than usual, but most folks probably in American evangelicalism have not so much as heard that there be any Welsh Calvinistic Methodist.

So why don't you tell us who is Thomas Charles and who is this group that he's identified with?

Thomas Charles became the leader of the second great kind of wave of the evangelical revival in Wales. So you had the 18th century, 1735 to about 1791. That's when the kind of the stars of enormous magnitude, Daniel Rowland, Hal Harris, William Williams, Pantykellen, and even George Whitefield, as he worked so closely with the Welshman.

That's when they ministered. And 1790 and 1791, Rowland and Pantykellen die, and so that's the end of that era. But the Lord continued that glorious work on into the 19th century, and it was largely guided in its theology and its practice through the life of a man named Thomas Charles.

And we're going to talk more about him in our Supporter Appreciation episode, and we're going to look at some of his, a book of his letters that we're going to be talking about in a minute. But the Calvinistic Methodist, as strange as that might sound to us, Methodist in the 18th century was not a denomination.

It wasn't even particularly linked with John Wesley, but it was it was a slur. They didn't name themselves Methodist. They would have preferred to be called Christians, you know, but like Puritan was a slur.

Oh, so you think you're pure. One you're a purist. You're a Puritan. When the Methodist, especially those young men in Oxford, Wesley and Whitfield and others, they lived by a method. They kept journals.

They were very methodical and particular about their obedience, and so that carried through, and people began to be called Methodist. John Newton was not a Methodist, so to speak, but he was a leader in the Evangelical Revival, and so he got labeled a Methodist.

Thomas Charles was a Methodist in that sense. Now the Welsh, the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist, they're called Calvinistic Methodist to distinguish them from the Wesleyan side. Wales was so thoroughly impacted by the Evangelical Revival that John Wesley kind of made an agreement with his Calvinistic brothers, who differed from him in some things, and the agreement was this.

You have Wales under control. You have enough preachers there. You're laboring there, and you're doing a great job, and even though we disagree on some of these areas, I'm not going to send men to Wales, and so for decades, the Wesleyan Methodists sent no preachers to Wales.

They left that with the Calvinistic wing. Later, toward the end of his life and after his death, then they did send some over. So under the influence of George Whitefield, Hal Harris, and Daniel Rowland, the reformed doctrines were emphasized in Wales in this period of revival, and I think what we see there is one of the more healthy expressions of an extraordinary awakening and restoration of the church, but before we go on, I do want to say that John Wesley's assessment of Calvinistic Methodism in Wales, as much as he disliked some of the Calvinistic tenants, Wesley's description of the Welsh Revival people, the converts during that period, was that they were the closest thing to the New Testament church that he had ever seen, and really even today, you can see kind of an afterglow of that in some of the Welsh.

Evangelical works. It was a wonderful time. Yeah, and if you want to research that, if you want to read about that, we could highly recommend, there's a two-volume work that the Banner of Truth publishes called the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Fathers or the Calvinistic Methodist Fathers of Wales.

Type all that in into the Banner of Truth website. You'll find it. That's a great two-volume work if you really want to dig into it, and as I said earlier, this podcast is going to deal with sections of a 25-page letter from Thomas Charles that can be read in this banner title, Thomas Charles Spiritual Councils by Edward Morgan, and there'll also be a copy of the letter on our blog at Mediagratia .org, so be sure to go and take a look at that.

The Root of Pride in Genesis 3

Dealing with the subject of pride, Thomas Charles goes all the way back to the beginning. He goes back to the garden in Genesis 3, to the temptation that was lay before our first parents in the garden.

You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. Charles describes man before and after the fall using the following words. Before the fall, man knew nothing as to good but the will of his Creator, and it was enough for him implicitly to follow that.

But since that direful event, he has become independent of God and chooses for himself. He has become like one of us, says God, to know good and evil. Instead of being a child provided for by his father under his care and protection, he has become his own master and his own physician, choosing good and rejecting evil according to his own inclination.

Thus he set up, as it were, for himself. A spirit of independence had taken possession of his soul. This is the spirit which constitutes essentially the character of Satan himself. So Thomas Charles there makes the parallel between man and his fallen state, taking on the very essential character of Satan.

He goes on to talk about the fundamental result there. It's not really what we'd expect. He says this shows itself in the fact that every one of us, we like to live to ourselves and do what we please as independently of God as if there were no such being.

He says this is the distinguishing mark of Satan and this is the distinguishing mark of a proud man. And he goes on to say we are practical atheists. Yeah, now we've talked a lot about that term.

Practical atheism. We talk about it a lot in the First Behold Your God study, but for those listeners who may not be familiar with that term practical atheist, what do we mean by that? Define practical atheism.

The author Stephen.

Sharnock in his book, The Existence and Attributes of God, very big book, worth all the effort it will take to read through it. Sharnock is a Puritan and that's probably the Puritan book on the attributes of God.

He gives a large section at the beginning of the book to this whole issue of practical atheism. But if we were to boil it down to just two things, this is what it is. It is living or practicing life, living as if God doesn't really exist.

So not theoretical atheism, not saying God doesn't exist, not a philosophical approach, just look, I'm okay with God existing, but if you followed me around through the week, you would probably think that I lived as if He didn't exist.

But he says there's also another aspect of practical atheism. It's living as if God might exist, but He exists in a way other than He describes Himself to be. So no, I believe in God, but you know today in our language we hear it like this.

We'd say, well to me God is, and so that is a practical atheism. We are feeling free to refashion God, and since there really isn't a God that's like the one I just imagined, then the God I'm worshiping doesn't exist, so I'm like an atheist in practice.

And so practical atheism tends to produce in the center a false sense of self-sufficiency where we intend to live upon ourselves, to find all of our sustenance, our sustaining strength, and our comfort from us.

Yeah. It's so amazing how pervasive that worldly wisdom is. I mean, it's the moral of every cartoon, and it's the moral of every self-help book, even filling up the Christianity and spirituality section of so many bookstores.

Look within yourself to find what you need to get through, and it's really the wisdom of Satan. It's the message of Satan. Thomas Charles warns in this letter, while this self-sufficiency influences the heart, there is an utter impossibility of any reconciliation between us and God.

God resists the proud, and hence our Savior says, unless you are converted and become like little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. We must be converted and become what man was at his creation as little children, that is, dependent on God, submissive to His will, seeking all our happiness in Him alone, being contented that He should forever be the source of all our happiness, and that He should communicate it in the time, way, and degree that He pleases.

Yeah, that's quite an amazing description. You know, when you read that, you just think, do I know anything about humility? Charles says that because that is the case, the work of God in a soul must begin with removing this addiction to pride, you know, to bringing us to willingly humble ourselves.

He says the entire scheme of the gospel, the way that God has crafted our redemption, the way He brings us out of a prison cell, out of a grave, you know, into the light and freedom of Jesus Christ, every aspect of it is custom-designed to remove pride from our souls.

And not only that, he says, but every way that God deals with us, the providence of God, the, you know, all the circumstances of life that have been filtered through the hands of God before it reaches us, these two, in these we see, they are directly calculated, he says, to hide pride from or to remove pride from man.

The Humbling Work of the Gospel and Providence

So how do we see that work itself out?

I think, you know, simply put, we would say that the gospel's descriptions of humanity are pretty humbling. You know, there's not much flattery in Romans chapters 1, 2 or 3. And wherever you find yourself in that wide picture of humanity, whether you're very religious or very irreligious or just a very good moral person, Paul's great categories there.

When you find yourself there and then you read the description, you're not going to like the family photograph that he hands to you, you know. When God describes the kind of people He saves and the only kind of people He saves, it is so humiliating to proud man.

Come unto me all who are weary. I'm not tired. I got it. Heavy laden? No, I can carry it. The dirty, the thirsty, the lame, the blind, the naked, the poor, the helpless, the enemy. So in those, even if we just look at the invitations, the commands of Scripture, come to the Savior, it's humbling.

But then, of course, there's the humbling aspect of the description of the cross and of the work of Christ on our behalf. Just take things like this. God has offered us an unconditional love, but we don't naturally really want an unconditional love.

We think we do until someone explains it. And so, you know, I mean, in a very simple illustration, Matt, if your wife Megan came to you and said, Matt, there's a lot about you that's not really easy to love.

In fact, I've kind of spent some time thinking about the topic and I don't think there's anything about you that's really worth the kind of love you would want. So I'm going to just decide to give it to you unconditionally.

You know, we would rage. Have you been talking with Megan? Yeah. And so you'd say, oh, there's something about me. You know, come on, there's something. Sure. When we talk about unconditional love in a sentimental way, oh, it's so heartwarming.

And then you think, wait, stop and think about it. There is nothing in you that attracted God's love. Everything in you cried out against that love. And yet he has overcome every obstacle to bring you that love.

That's humbling. Now, if you humble yourself, it's the most beautiful good news ever. But if you're proud, you say, actually, I don't need that. Or think about the doctrine of regeneration, the new birth.

We are so far gone. It wouldn't be enough for God to say, I'm here to help you. No, I don't need help. I'm so far gone. I need to be born all over again. No, we'll just do better tomorrow. No, I can't do better tomorrow.

I must be born all over again. When we think of the cross, propitiation, you know, the payment of a debt, it is clearly presented to us in such a way that there is nothing left for you to pay. Good news to the humble, but not to the proud.

No proud man wants you to give him a handout. You know, if we go to a rich man and say, let me give you a few dollars, it looks like he could use the help. It would offend the rich man. If you go to a poor man who's about to die and you offer him some money for food, he's happy.

We cannot come to Christ and say, I want to add a little to what you did on the cross. And so if we are proud, that's pretty offensive. So whether we look at the descriptions of humanity or the descriptions of the gospel in the working of our.

Salvation, God aims to remove pride from us. Yeah. And when we think about how really at the center of the gospel message, this removal of pride, this humility and humbling is, clearly when we think about sharing the gospel, doing evangelism, we have to think about how much it has to affect the way that we do evangelism.

Now, we've talked a lot about this in our Path of Evangelism series, which if you're listening, you can go back and find on our website. But just the fact that God empties before he fills, Matthew 5, verses 3 to 6.

Right. Blessed are those who are poor. Well, nobody's poor until God begins to strip away this false sense of self-sufficiency. And then blessed are those who mourn. They break their heart when God has shown them how really poverty stricken they are.

Blessed are those who are gentle or meek or humble. And they begin to act differently toward other people when they realize, you know what? I'm not what I thought I was. I'm actually quite a poor man.

And then blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they'll be filled. Well, who hungers and thirst? Well, the man that's been emptied by God. So, as we talked about in those many segments on evangelism, we don't want to put a Band-Aid on a man who doesn't even know he has a disease.

He will not appreciate our efforts. And so much of our evangelism is like chasing people around with Band-Aids. And, you know, if you have little kids, you go to the store and you go to the Band-Aid aisle and they are no longer boring and they're no longer painful, you know, so pain-free Band-Aids and Band-Aids with Spider-Man and Hulk and every, you know, and I mean, you walk down the aisle and you think, man, when I was a kid, my Band-Aid was kind of boring, but it's kind of like what the church has done.

The gospel, here is a pain-free gospel. We don't want you to feel bad about yourself. And look, it's also really cool now. And we run around, we're sticking Band-Aids on people as they run from us saying, I don't want your Jesus.

We go, Oh yes, you do smack. And we hit him with the Band-Aid and we say another convert. And, but that it's a very dangerous thing to do evangelism.

Differently than God does it. Well, this is all still just the introduction, but Thomas Charles goes on to point out in his letter, he says, yet so deeply rooted is this spirit of independence and self-sufficiency in our hearts that nothing but the effectual operations of the Holy Spirit can bring us to possess the humility of creatures and the contrition of sinners.

Creatures there, he means to emphasize as created beings, emphasizing the distance between the uncreated God and all of creation, including us. As creatures, we would possess all sufficiency for happiness in ourselves.

And as sinners, we would be even our own saviors, sufficient to rescue ourselves from sin and guilt, from destruction and misery. Nothing therefore, but a sinner's renouncing his own wisdom and strength and submitting wholly to God and embracing the way that he is pleased to provide can save him from the threatened ruin.

He turned himself from God to seek his comfort and happiness in the creature, but behold, the whole earth and all the things in it are cursed for man's sake and its productions were to be thorns and thistles.

So, in this introductory section to the treatise, which actually is a 25-page treatise on Pride, he sums up where did it come from and what does it look like? And now what we find in the bulk of the letter or the treatise, we find six very particular descriptions of the way that Pride can be expressed in a lost person and in many of these, in a Christian.

And so he's going to be very precise. What we said up to this point is just kind of a general picture. And now he's.

Pride Expressed in Worldliness and Self-Sufficiency

Going to go back and kind of show that in a more careful way. Yeah. So the first expression of Pride or the first way that Pride expresses itself, Thomas Charles points out here, We see the great body of mankind with their faces universally set toward the world and their vigor exerted in a universal race after the things of the world.

Everyone seems as if he would have the whole world to himself. And were the whole in his possession, it would be too little to satisfy his insatiable desires. To what purpose is this bustle and striving?

Why all these contentions and jarrings? Is it not because man would have something to depend on and to support himself by independently of God? He would be as God, able to supply himself with means of comfort and happiness.

He will not depend on God. Why it is that we desire so earnestly to have our comforts and safely in our own hands? Is it not because we think them not so sure or so satisfactorily placed as we wish they should be in the hands of God?

So that's old language. But what is he saying there? Yeah, it's not really.

What I think what we would usually start our definition of Pride with. I mean, when I think if someone says to me, man, that guy is so proud. I have an idea of a proud person. You know, he's on top of the world.

Yeah, he's he's swag. He's wealthy. He's harsh with other people, you know, at work. Oh, he's a monster. But he starts off in such a he starts off in a place that we've all been or are. We look to creation to satisfy us, something created.

And we are we feel that our happiness would be much safer in our hands than in God's. And so we are constantly upset with him. And he he goes on to say that this leads to a constant disappointment and that corrodes the soul.

It corrodes the heart of humanity. You know, and you look at us and it's true. We are constantly it's like an acid is eating away at our heart and soul because our mad pursuit of self-sufficiency and satisfying ourself from whatever we can get our hands on.

And being in control, it's not working. He goes on to write, we would be as gods, possessing all fullness and sufficiency in ourselves. And when we cannot be what we would, not so rich, not so great, not such gods as we wish and attempt to be, then our pride bursts forth in impatience, discontent, rage and misery.

Again, a very penetrating statement. None of us would say, you know what? I'm not as rich and as great. I'm not as much of a god as I had intended to be. That's why I'm so angry all the time. We don't talk that way, but it's true.

And he says God deals with us kindly and we may not even recognize that it's kindness because the way he deals with us is he allows the good things, the common graces of life to become embittered to us so that we don't look to them, even the.

Good things for our happiness. Yeah. Even the common graces that come into our life. So what we mean by that, the rain falls on the just and the unjust, the good and the bad. Well, what do we mean by common graces that we can even put our hope in?

Yeah, the common love of God,.

The common kindness of God, the pity of God, even for his enemies, that even those that hate the idea that God exists wake up and all around them there are expressions of God's constant care and his kindness.

It is a common kindness that all creation enjoys, distinguished from that extraordinary grace, that family love that the believer alone enjoys.

Yeah. So we can take good things that all men enjoy, like good food, families, even, you know, not all men, but some of us have been blessed with families and children. And those are not blessings that are just reserved for God's own people.

But we can attempt, and often we do attempt to find our joy and our satisfaction in them and they make terrible gods. Yeah. So Thomas Charles goes on to write in short, he will be our God and will act in everything as such towards us and will bring us to live upon him and to him and not upon the creature and to ourselves.

And when we become possessed of the humble frame and temper of dependent creatures, then murmurings and complaints, impatience and disquietude will all be banished. And we shall receive all good and evil things with holy submission and humble thankfulness, being abundantly satisfied that the Lord is our God.

Pride in Young Converts and Complaining Against Providence

Now, sadly, that's not the end of Pride's expression in our life. The second main heading that he brings up is this. The same spirit that exerts itself in opposition to God's providential dispensations as to our state and circumstances in this world is found quarreling also with God's gracious dealings with our souls,.

Especially in young converts. Now here again is a very unexpected statement from our preacher today. He immediately goes to a young believer and he says pride is there too and that's going to have to be dealt with.

And here's one way it might look. You embrace Christ and the new life has begun and you have certain expectations and if those aren't met and you're not careful to humble yourself when you realize those aren't being met, maybe they're wrong expectations or maybe they're not, they're good expectations, but they're not being met in the way and in the time that you want, then you will be tempted to give in to pride.

And that shows itself by this complaining spirit with God. Why has my life, why isn't my life different? I expected this and instead you've allowed this or kind of a sullen murmuring heart. I expected to be a super Christian by now.

You know, I've been a Christian for a year and I thought I was going to be the the Hudson Taylor of my day, the Robert Murray McShane, the Amy Carmichael, you know, and here I am. I'm still applauding along.

I thought I would be flying. And instead of humbly trusting and submitting and.

Walking with God, there's this expression of sulky pride. Yeah. He writes, and with these peevish and violent workings of pride, the devil joins at the same time with all his force, setting forth everything in the most discouraging light and insinuating that there is little or no prospect.

Of things getting any better. Yeah. And all of us have been there and not just once, you know, and I wish that Thomas Charles would say to me, don't worry, John, this only happens in the first year, you know, but what about I've been a Christian for 30 years?

What about year 30? Why is it that I'm so ready to listen to the one person who has lied to me every time when he comes to me and says, oh, it's terrible, isn't it? Actually, it's worse than you imagine.

And I think it's going to get any easier, you know, and so the proud man listens to that and the humble.

Man chooses not to. Charles writes, in such inward workings of our minds, there is more of pride and an unhumbled spirit dissatisfied with the sovereign pleasure of God respecting our condition than we are apt to imagine.

Being in such a spirit, do we not seek and as it were, demand peace and comfort as if they were our right rather than the free and undeserved gifts of God? If not, why are we fretful and uneasy under delays?

If we narrowly examine our deceitful hearts, I doubt not, but that we shall find unhumbled pride at the bottom of all of this.

Impatience. He goes on to argue that in that condition of unhumbled pride, the young believer finds himself or herself incapable of really enjoying the constant flow of gospel blessings that's coming.

You know, they just, they don't enjoy them and they don't recognize the flow of God's love, especially if they're in the midst of hard circumstances. But he says, on the other hand, when we are effectively humbled, we are easily satisfied with his dealings with us.

Then every mercy bestowed appears as it really is great and undeserved. And the language of our soul is, I deserve less than the least of all your mercies. One of the things that we love about.

Going to conferences is being able to interact with people who have gone through the studies that we produce or seen the films that we make and hearing feedback from them about how those projects have impacted their families, their small groups, and their churches.

Eventually, we started asking them if we could record their stories so that we could share those with you. Nolan and Melissa are from Mississippi and their church went through Behold Your God,.

Rethinking God Biblically. I mean, we took, we were fortunate enough to take some families through it with us along that journey. And like we had talked about earlier, it is an investment of time and it was a 12-week study.

But to watch not only other families, how it just transformed other families and watched out, watched how God, through the Spirit, through His Spirit, just transformed and knocked down these idols that they had built up in their life.

And the God that they thought worshipped of the Bible was different once they came out of this study. They found themselves worshipping the one true God. And just the theology and the doctrine and watching it change these people's lives was something I don't think we'll ever forget.

Then to see them use it with their children and then them loan it out to other people and how it multiplied people being blessed through it was just amazing.

The Gospel’s Design to Crush Pride

Well, those are the first two points of this 25-page treatise or letter that Thomas Charles wrote on the issue of pride. And we're going to continue this in this series in our next podcast. But in the interim time between now and the rest, don't listen to the enemy.

As we just went over that point, this has been very searching. And I'm sure it is for you, Christian. Thank God for His kindness in allowing you to be sensitive to these things and not to just brush them off like, well, that must be for somebody else.

I can think of five people that need to listen to this podcast. But don't let the enemy come and tell you that there's no hope for you because we'll spoil the ending. It is the design of God to crush this pride in your life, and He will be successful in doing so little by little, if not before you die, certainly after.

So thanks for listening this week, and we'll be back again next week. 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 slash podcast.

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