Sermon Tone Analysis

! Brothers, We Must Not Mind a Little Suffering

Meditations on the Life of Charles Simeon

1989 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors

Listen

----

By John Piper April 15, 1989

 

----

!!!! Introduction

In April, 1831, Charles Simeon was 71 years old.

He had been the pastor of Trinity Church, Cambridge, England, for 49 years.

He was asked one afternoon by his friend, Joseph Gurney, how he had surmounted persecution and outlasted all the great prejudice against him in his 49-year ministry.

He said to Gurney, "My dear brother, we must not mind a little suffering for Christ's sake.

When I am getting through a hedge, if my head and shoulders are safely through, I can bear the pricking of my legs.

Let us rejoice in the remembrance that our holy Head has surmounted all His suffering and triumphed over death.

Let us follow Him patiently; we shall soon be partakers of His victory" (H.C.G.

Moule, Charles Simeon, London: InterVarsity, 1948, 155f.).

So I have entitled this message, "Brothers, We Must Not Mind a Little Suffering."

I have a very definite Biblical aim in choosing this theme and this man for our meditation.

I want to encourage you all to obey Romans 12:12: "Be patient in tribulation."

I want you to see persecution and opposition and slander and misunderstanding and disappointment and self-recrimination and weakness and danger as the normal portion of faithful pastoral ministry.

But I want you to see this in the life of a man who was a sinner like you and me, who was a pastor, and who, year after year, in his trials, "grew downward" in humility and upward in his adoration of Christ, and who did not yield to bitterness or to the temptation to leave his charge – for 54 years.

What I have found – and this is what I want to be true for you as well – is that in my pastoral disappointments and discouragements there is a great power for perseverance in keeping before me the life of a man who surmounted great obstacles in obedience to God's call by the power of God's grace.

I need very much this inspiration from another age, because I know that I am, in great measure, a child of my times.

And one of the pervasive marks of our times is emotional fragility.

I feel it as though it hung in the air we breathe.

We are easily hurt.

We pout and mope easily.

We break easily.

Our marriages break easily.

Our faith breaks easily.

Our happiness breaks easily.

And our commitment to the church breaks easily.

We are easily disheartened, and it seems we have little capacity for surviving and thriving in the face of criticism and opposition.

A typical emotional response to trouble in the church is to think, "If that's the way they feel about me, then they can find themselves another pastor."

We see very few models today whose lives spell out in flesh and blood the rugged words, "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you fall into various trials" (James 1:3).

When historians list the character traits of the last third of twentieth century America, commitment, constancy, tenacity, endurance, patience, resolve and perseverance will not be on the list.

The list will begin with an all-consuming interest in self-esteem.

It will be followed by the subheadings of self-assertiveness, and self-enhancement, and self-realization.

And if you think that you are not at all a child of your times just test yourself to see how you respond in the ministry when people reject your ideas.

We need help here.

When you are surrounded by a society of emotionally fragile quitters, and when you see a good bit of this ethos in yourself, you need to spend time with people – whether dead of alive – whose lives prove there is another way to live.

Scripture says, "Be imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises" (Hebrews 6:12).

So I want to hold up for you the faith and the patience of Charles Simeon for your inspiration and imitation.

!!!! His Life and Times and Theological Commitment

Let me orient you with some facts about his life and times.

When Simeon was born in 1759, Jonathan Edwards had just died the year before.

The Wesleys and Whitefield were still alive, and so the Methodist awakening was in full swing.

Simeon would live for 77 years, from 1758 to 1836.

So he lived through the American Revolution, the French Revolution and not quite into the decade of the telegraph and the railroad.

His father was a wealthy attorney, but no believer.

We know nothing of his mother.

She probably died early, so that he never knew her.

At seven, he went to England's premier boarding school, The Royal College of Eton.

He was there for 12 years, and was known as a homely, fancy-dressing, athletic show off.

The atmosphere was irreligious and degenerate in many ways.

Looking back late in life, he said that he would be tempted to take the life of his son than to let him see the vice he had seen at Eton.

He said later he only knew one religious book besides the Bible in those 12 years, namely The Whole Duty of Man, a devotional book of the 17th century.

Whitefield thought that book was so bad that once, when he caught an orphan with a copy of it in Georgia, he made him throw it in the fire.

William Cowper said it was a "repository of self-righteous and pharisaical lumber."

That, in fact, would be a good description of Simeon's life to that point.

At 19 he went to Cambridge.

And in the first four months God brought him from darkness to light.

The amazing thing about this is that God did it against the remarkable odds of having no other Christian around.

Cambridge was so destitute of evangelical faith that, even after he was converted, Simeon did not meet one other believer on campus for almost three years.

His conversion happened like this.

Three days after he arrived at Cambridge on January 29, 1779, the Provost, William Cooke, announced that Simeon had to attend the Lord's Supper.

And Simeon was terrified.

We can see, in retrospect, that this was the work of God in his life.

He knew enough to know that it was very dangerous to eat the Lord's Supper unworthily.

So he began desperately to read and to try to repent and make himself better.

He began with The Whole Duty of Man but got no help.

He passed through that first communion unchanged.

But knew it wasn't the last.

He turned to a book by a Bishop Wilson on the Lord's Supper.

As Easter Sunday approached a wonderful thing happened.

Keep in mind that this young man had almost no preparation of the kind we count so important.

He had no mother to nurture him.

His father was an unbeliever.

His boarding school was a godless and corrupt place.

And his university was destitute of other evangelical believers, as far as he knew.

He is nineteen years old, sitting in his dormitory room as Passion Week begins at the end of March, 1779.

Here is his own account of what happened.

In Passion Week, as I was reading Bishop Wilson on the Lord's Supper, I met with an expression to this effect – "That the Jews knew what they did, when they transferred their sin to the head of their offering."

The thought came into my mind, What, may I transfer all my guilt to another?

Has God provided an Offering for me, that I may lay my sins on His head?

Then, God willing, I will not bear them on my own soul one moment longer.

Accordingly I sought to lay my sins upon the sacred head of Jesus; and on the Wednesday began to have a hope of mercy; on the Thursday that hope increased; on the Friday and Saturday it became more strong; and on the Sunday morning, Easter-day, April 4, I awoke early with those words upon my heart and lips, 'Jesus Christ is risen to-day!

Hallelujah!

Hallelujah!' From that hour peace flowed in rich abundance into my soul; and at the Lord's Table in our Chapel I had the sweetest access to God through my blessed Saviour.

(Moule, 25f)

The effect was immediate and dramatic.

His well-known extravagance gave way to a life of simplicity.

All the rest of his life he lived in simple rooms on the university campus, moving only once to larger quarters so that he could have more students for his conversation gatherings.

When his brother left him a fortune, he turned it down and channeled all his extra income to religious and charitable goals.

He began at once to teach his college servant girl his new Biblical faith.

When he went home for holidays he called the family together for devotions.

His father never came, but his two brothers were both eventually converted.

And in his private life he began to practice what in those days was known as "methodism" – strict discipline in prayer and meditation.

You can catch a glimpse of his zeal from this anecdote about his early rising for Bible study and prayer.

Early rising did not appeal to his natural tendency to self-indulgence, however, especially on dark winter mornings. . . .

On several occasions he overslept, to his considerable chagrin.

So he determined that if ever he did it again, he would pay a fine of half a crown to his "bedmaker" (college servant).