William Carey

So that coming volume It starts with Martin Luther and it ends with Billy Graham.

There's lots of good Brits in that second volume, Spurgeon, William Carey, Bunyan, lots of, Tolkien.

So the approach that I took in teaching and then putting this book together is I wanted to do something that regular people coming to church, now how regular are they that they'll sit for an hour and 10 minute lecture, but special regular people for an adult Sunday school class would be interested in.

There's a lot of different ways to do church history.

Listen to this.

The Baptist missionary to India, William Carey, in a 1792 sermon, made the famous phrase, "'Expect great things, attempt great things.'" These words became the bedrock of the modern missionary movement in the 19th century.

Carey's words today have worked their way into modern-day evangelicalism, appearing on Christian t-shirts, home decor, and bookmarks.

Growing up, he writes, I often heard this phrase in my mainline liberal tradition.

And as I entered into that conversation, I realized just how influential he was.

So most Baptists know the name William Carey, who famously went off to India with the Baptist Missionary Society.

But it was Andrew Fuller who was the original person to, so to speak, hold the rope for Kerry.

And so he was the fundraiser for Kerry.

So he was influential in terms of his apologetics ministries.

But most people know him for a book called The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, and it's his polemical work against what's known now often as hyper-Calvinism or what he at times called false Calvinism.

And it was his attack on what he called false Calvinism that gave the theological justification necessary to engage in the missionary enterprise through people like William Carey.

And so even if he had never written his apologetic literature or helped support Carey in significant ways, just the fact that he wrote gospel worthy of all acceptation meant that he profoundly changed Baptist history and Baptist thought and moved the particular Baptist from being in a place of decline and stagnation, in a place of being cut off from the larger evangelical revival and brought them into evangelical activity and changed the tone and flavor and even the theological makeup of particular Baptists in the 18th century.

We're not going to be okay with all of these sorts of policies that violate the moral law of God and being okay with that type of boldness.

So having the heart of a missionary while being faithful in the civic realm i also want to see missionaries with the heart of an activist i want to see more missionaries that are like william carey the father of modern missions who yes he goes to west bengal to preach the gospel plant churches translate scripture but he's also doing so while engaged in public advocacy there and he's advocating to overturn sati the practice of widow burning which eventually was banned and is banned in modern india he's bringing social change not as a replacement for the gospel, not a social gospel agenda, but as he's preaching the gospel, he's also not only bringing the grace and gospel of God to bear, but the law of God to bear on society in such a way that can disciple people towards a greater recognition of the God that gave those standards and offers them salvation in Christ.

So I think we need people in both of those different spheres thinking through what are the specific duties that God has called me to in this sphere, and then what are the duties that I have as a church member, as a member of the voting public, as a father or as a mother in my household.

And going from there, that's where the order of love really helps us to think through our obligations faithfully.

But the reality is that the religious liberty that Baptists historically emphasized was not the sort of religious liberty that said, hey, take a Christian nation or a Christianly influenced culture and allow in all sorts of polytheistic influences into that and expect there to be no consequences, because after all, this world isn't our home, we're just passing through, and Jesus said his kingdom is not of this world.

That's a very retreatist, anabaptistic type of theology that I would be opposed to.

The Baptists that I read, John Gill and others, even Andrew Fuller, who's the sending pastor for William Carey and his Serampore missionary group, a great Baptist theologian who's pushing against the hyper-Calvinists of his day, who's advocating for the importance of the use of means to accomplish the Great Commission, the means of preaching, of sending missionaries.

So this great missionary theologian Andrew Fuller is also able to preach something like his sermon on Christian patriotism on the eve of what looked like Napoleon's movement against England and this fear of invasion that was happening.

Just amazing.

And then, as I've already said, we then see other practitioners, people like Hudson Taylor, William Carey, all these astonishing women and men stepping out in faith because of the focus of this one individual.

So what does this mean to you today? Where is the Lord calling you to be focused? Where is the Lord calling you to be intentional? And let's try and be as specific as we can.

Can you name people that you just know the Lord is wanting you to help to find Jesus? And very lastly, as we do this, we've got the absolute promise that Jesus is with you.

It was William Burton who brought the gospel from Britain to Black Africa.

It was William Carey who brought the gospel of Jesus to India.

Britain was a gospel-based, missionary-sending country.

I'm not talking necessarily about the Church of England.