If we get above our Bibles and cease making the written Word of God the sole authority of our faith and practice, we will soon be open to all manner of delusion, and be in great danger of making shipwreck of faith and a good conscience. Our blessed Lord, though He had the Spirit of God without measure, was always governed by “it is written.” – George Whitefield

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you can. – John Wesley

I want the presence of God Himself or I do not want anything at all to do with religion; I want all that God has or I do not want anything. – A. W. Tozer

That which lasts forever is reality and unless it lasts forever, God says it is not real. – Darrel Chaplin

Most Americans worship their work, work at their play, and play at their worship. – Al Whittinghill

Revival will come only to a desperate church, not to a contented one. He is ever the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him, not the casual inquirer. – Al Whittinghill

We want Him as long as He doesn’t change what we like. But any person not open to change is not open to revival. – Al Whittinghill

First of all I will confess quite simply – I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions and that we need only to ask repeatedly and a little humbly, in order to receive this answer. One cannot simply read the Bible like other books. One must be prepared really to enquire of it. Only thus will it reveal itself. Only if we expect from it the ultimate answer, shall we receive it. That is because in the Bible, God speaks to us. And one cannot simply think about God in one’s own strength, one has to enquire of him. Only if we seek him will he answer us.

Of course it is also possible to read the Bible like any other book — that is to say from the point of view of textual criticism, etc., there is nothing to be said against that. Only that that is not the method which will reveal to us the heart of the Bible, but only the surface, just as we do not grasp the words of someone we love by taking them to bits, but by simply receiving them, so that for days they go on lingering in our minds simply because they are the words of a person we love; and just as these words reveal more and more of the person who said them as we go on, like Mary, “pondering them in our heart,” so it will be with the words of the Bible. Only if we will venture to enter into the words of the Bible — as though in them this God were speaking to us who loves us and does not will to leave us along with our questions — only then shall we learn to rejoice in the Bible.

If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands. This is not according to our nature at all; it is entirely contrary to it. But this is the message of the Bible, not only in the New but also in the Old Testament.

And I would like to tell you now quite personally that since I have learnt to read the Bible in this way – and this has not been for so very long – it becomes every day more wonderful to me. I read it in the morning and the evening, often during the day as well, and every day I consider a text which I have chosen for the whole week, and try to sink deeply into it, so as really to hear what it is saying. I know that without this, I could not live properly any longer.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, written in 1936

But you never see any “fight” about their religion! Of spiritual strife, exertion, conflict, self-denial, watching and warring–they know literally nothing at all. Such Christianity may satisfy man, and those who say anything against it may be thought very hard and uncharitable; but it certainly is not the Christianity of the Bible. It is not the religion which the Lord Jesus founded, and that His apostles preached. It is not the religion which produces real holiness. True Christianity is “a fight!”

The principal fight of the Christian is with . . .
the world,
the flesh, and
the devil.

These are his never-dying foes! These are the three chief enemies against whom he must wage war. With a corrupt heart, a busy devil and an ensnaring world–he must either “fight” or be lost!

To be at peace with the world, the flesh and the devil is to be at enmity with God and in the broad way that leads to destruction! We have no choice or option.We must either fight–or be lost!

It is a fight of universal necessity. No rank or class or age can plead exemption, or escape the battle–all alike must carry arms and go to war.

All have by nature a heart full of pride, unbelief, sloth, worldliness and sin!
All are living in a world filled with snares, traps and pitfalls for the soul.
All have near them a busy, restless, malicious devil.
All, from the queen in her palace down to the pauper in the workhouse–all must fight, if they would be saved.

We may take comfort about our souls, if we know anything of an inward fight and conflict. It is the invariable companion of genuine Christian holiness.

The saddest symptom about many so-called Christians, is the utter absence of anything like conflict and fight in their Christianity. They eat, they drink, they dress, they work, they amuse themselves, they get money, they spend money, they go through a scanty round of formal religious services once or twice every week. But of the great spiritual warfare–its watchings and strugglings, its agonies and anxieties, its battles and contests–they appear to know nothing at all.

- J. C. Ryle

What does it cost to be a Christian?

I grant freely that it costs little to be a mere outward Christian. A man has only got to attend a place of worship twice on Sunday, and to be tolerably moral during the week–and he has gone as far as thousands around him ever go in religion. All this is cheap and easy work–it entails no self-denial or self-sacrifice. If this is saving Christianity and will take us to Heaven when we die–we must alter the description of the way of life, and write, “Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to Heaven!”

But it does cost something to be a real Christian, according to the standard of the Bible. There are . . .
enemies to be overcome,
battles to be fought,
sacrifices to be made,
an Egypt to be forsaken,
a wilderness to be passed through,
a cross to be carried,
a race to be run.

Conversion is not putting a man in a soft armchair, and taking him pleasantly to Heaven. It is the beginning of a mighty conflict, in which it costs much to win the victory. Hence arises the unspeakable importance of “counting the cost.”

True Christianity will cost a man . . .
his self-righteousness,
his sins,
his love of ease, and
the favor of the world.

A religion which costs nothing–is worth nothing!

A cheap, easy Christianity, without a cross–will prove in the end a useless Christianity, without a crown!

- J. C. Ryle

Some of the details of Lewis coming to a theistic position and then subsequently to faith in Jesus Christ as a true Christian, are as follows.

Usually his discussions with Tolkien took place on Monday mornings, when they would talk for an hour or two and then conclude with a visit to the Eastgate, a nearby pub. But on Saturday, September 19, 1931, they met in the evening. Lewis had invited Tolkien to dinner at Magdalen College, and another guest joined them, Hugo Dyson, whom Tolkien had first known at Exeter College in 1919. Dyson was now Lecturer in English Literature at Reading University, and paid frequent visits to Oxford. He was a Christian and a man of keen wit.

After dinner, the three of them took a walk outside. Lewis, who had now come to the place of believing there was a God, could not yet understand the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection. He declared that he had to understand the purpose of these events. As he later expressed to a friend in a letter—“how the life and death of Someone Else two thousand years ago could help us here and now.”

The three men talked in Lewis’s room until 3:00 am, when Tolkien went home. But Lewis and Dyson continued their talk, walking up and down the street until the sky grew light with the new morning.

Twelve days later, Lewis wrote to his friend, Arthur Greeves: “I have just passed from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a great deal to do with it.”

Tolkien had a very creative mind, and saw humor in many things that would then become a part of his poetry and books. He told his sons nightly stories at bedtime about the villain he named Bill Stickers, a huge hulk of a man who always got away with everything. What the boys did not know was the villain’s name was taken from a notice on an Oxford gate that read: “BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED”, and a similar source provided the name of the righteous person who was always in pursuit of Stickers—Major Road Ahead. Major Road Ahead was always after Bill Stickers in Tolkien’s evening stories at home.

In 1968, the Tolkiens moved to the village of Poole, adjacent to the town of Bournemouth, and three years later, Edith died in November, at age eighty-two.

Tolkien then returned to Oxford, moving into a small apartment in Merton Street. He was then awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University. While on a holiday visit to friends back in Bournemouth, he became ill and died in a nursing home in the early hours of Sunday, September 2, 1973, at age eighty-one.

- Mack Tomlinson

The characters in Tolkien’s different books developed in his mind from various people he met and knew in real life situations, as well as from his mythological poetry he began to write in the 1920’s. The first of this development of characters was in 1911, while traveling in Switzerland during his summer vacation. He bought some postcards for family and friends. One was the reproduction of a painting by a German artist, showing an old man sitting on a rock under a pine tree, with rocky mountains in the distance behind him. He has a white beard, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a cloak. He is talking gently to a young deer, which is nuzzling his hand, as the man looks at the fawn with a pleasant and compassionate expression. Tolkien preserved this postcard carefully and years later wrote on the cover paper that had preserved it: “Origin of Gandalf.”

His next experience of this kind came three years later, in 1914, during World War I, while in France. He got to know and appreciate some of his comrades in his battalion, whom he saw as good and faithful men. Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s biographer, says: “Discussing one of the main characters in The Lord of the Rings, he wrote many years later: ‘My Sam Gangee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the war during 1914, and recognized as being far superior to myself.’”

In the summer of 1922, Tolkien began writing some poetry, much of which dealt with mythologies of various kinds. Some of the poetry was published in the Leeds University magazine, The Gryphon, in a local series of poetry contributions called Yorkshire Poetry. Tolkien then began a series of poems he called Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay. One of the poems, The Dragon’s Visit, described the ravages of a dragon that arrives at Bimble Bay and encounters a ‘Miss Baggins’. A third poem, entitled Glip, tells of a strange and slimy creature that lives beneath the floor of a cave and has pale, shining eyes. All of these were glimpses of things to come that would later be seen in The Lord of the Rings.

After Tolkien was elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, he and his wife lived a quiet and simple life in a conventional Oxford suburb. Carpenter says, “It was an ordinary unremarkable life, the same kind that was led by countless other academic scholars, a life of academic brilliance, but only in a very narrow professional field that was really of little interest to laymen.”

That being the case, it was during those quiet years, that Tolkien would be in his study late at night writing two books that became worldwide best sellers, books that captured the imagination and influenced millions of readers. It shows the power and influence of literature, whether for good or ill. Tolkien quietly wrote, week in and week out, as the work of an obscure Oxford professor and lived an ordinary suburban life, loving his wife, raising his children, and tending to his garden.

Tolkien and C. S. Lewis

Tolkien and Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends as Jack, first met on May 11, 1926, in a faculty meeting at Oxford, when Lewis arrived for the first time as the Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, one of the colleges of Oxford.

At first, the two were not close friends, but only colleagues, with Lewis in his diary describing Tolkien as “a smooth, pale, fluent little chap.” Soon Lewis came to have a firm affection for the long-faced, keen-eyed Tolkien, who liked good talk and laughter. In response, Tolkien warmed up to Lewis’s quick mind and generous spirit. By May, 1927, Tolkien had enrolled Lewis in the group known as the Coalbiters, a fraternity of professors and academics who gathered weekly at a pub to socialize and share readings of Icelandic sagas and other writings. With this beginning, a long, deep and complex friendship began between Tolkien and Lewis.

Tolkien, was a devout Catholic, while Lewis, the son of a Belfast solicitor, had been brought up as an Ulster Protestant. When Lewis later came to faith, he joined the Anglican Church, which was a deep disappointment to Tolkien. Tolkien bitterly disliked Anglicanism and had hoped that Lewis would become a Catholic, but it is apparent that it was never an option Lewis considered for himself. Thus, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia became a life-long member of the Church of England.

- to be continued

- Mack Tomlinson

While in Syracuse, NY this month, I had the privilege of being with Pastor Jon Speed and the saints at Christ is King Baptist Church, along with the students who are at the Log College program for theological and ministry preparation.

During the week, I was able to read the majority of the authorized biography of J. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), author of The Lord of the Rings series.

Though The Lord of the Rings has been very popular in recent years, very little is known of Tolkien himself by those who have read his books or seen the recent movies.

Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on January 3, 1892, the same month of C.H. Spurgeon’s death. While on a visit with his mother back to England, the homeland of his parents, his father died suddenly while still in South Africa, so Mabel Tolkien and their two sons, Ronald and Hilary, remained permanently in England, never to return to South Africa again.

Tolkien’s mother then joined the Catholic church, and thus he embraced a deep and devoted loyalty to Catholicism the rest of his life.

Ronald, as he came to be called, married his teenager sweetheart, Edith, who was three years older than him, when he was twenty-four and she twenty-seven years old.

During the beginning of World War I, he completes his degree at Oxford in English literature and philogy, taking first place honors on his final exam.

After a brief period serving in WWI, he was discharged due to severe sickness while serving in France. With his military work over, he would have an academic career the rest of his life. He began work as a free-lance tutor, and also worked as an editor of the Oxford New English Dictionary in 1918.

He is finally appointed a staff reader and lecturer at Leeds University in the English department, as he and Edith live in Leeds from 1919 until 1925, when he is chosen to be the Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon language at Oxford University. The Tolkiens returned to Oxford in 1925, where Tolkien soon becomes friends with another teacher and writer at Oxford—C. S. Lewis, a friendship that would last the rest of Lewis’s life, as Lewis died ten years before Tolkien himself.

For the next thirty-four years, Tolkien and Edith lived in Oxford, her as a home-maker and mother, while Ronald quietly passed his days and years as professor of English language at Oxford, lecturing, writing, and doing advanced language studies, specializing in philogy, which is the study of language in written historical sources, being a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics. Tolkien’s language studies and the and writing dealt with many languages, including Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Gothic, Greek, Icelandic, Middle English, Norse, Old English, Russian, Swedish, Welsh, and other lesser-known and lost languages. He became one of the greatest linguists and philologists of all time.

His published books, in order of their publication, include:

1925 – Sir Gawain published
1937 – The Hobbit published
1937 – At the suggestion of his publisher, Tolkien begins to write a sequel to The Hobbit, which later was given the title The Lord of the Rings.
1949 – The Lord of the Rings completed
1949 – Farmer Giles of Ham published
1954 – The Lord of the Rings, books 1 & 2 published
1955 – The Lord of the Rings, book 3, published
1962 – Adventures of Tom Bombadil
1964 – Tree and Leaf published
1967 – Smith of Wooiion Major published

- to be continued

- Mack Tomlinson

Our faith must be tested. God builds no ships but what He sends to sea. – D.L. Moody

Holiness is an impossibility without the HOLY Spirit. – Anonymous

God always visits his people when they reach the point of desperation. – Stephen Olford

This generation of Christians is responsible for this generation of
souls on the earth! – Keith Green

Do not pray for easy lives–pray to be better men and women. Do not
pray for tasks equal to your strength–pray for strength equal to your
tasks. – Phillips Brooks

If God sends us on strong paths, we are provided strong shoes. – Corrie ten Boom

You will never please everybody. Some men will say you have gone too
far. Other men will say you haven’t gone far enough. I just compromise
and say I won’t please anybody. – A.W. Tozer

Mack

2012 Fellowship Conference (Apr 5-8) Denton, T.X. REGISTRATION & Trailer Video (3 min)

http://youtu.be/aiv8Jl7Cnno
http://illbehonest.com/fellowship/

This years FELLOWSHIP CONFERENCE is due to be held at Denton T.X. on Thur 5-Sun 8 April.
For More info, to watch last years sermons & to register go to: http://illbehonest.com/fellowship/
For More Info & To REGISTER HERE: You can watch last years sermons HERE.

http://www.puritanfellowship.com/2012/01/2012-fellowship-conference-apr-5-8.html
–

Kevin and Zoe Williams
www.PuritanFellowship.com