Adapted from the talk as a book chapter, in the speaker's voice. It keeps the argument, stories and wording where possible, but it is an edited retelling, not a transcript. Tap a time in the margin to hear that moment.
Before the talk
HostIt is my great privilege to introduce my very good friend, the president of the Paton Society, which exists to help Presbyterian and Reformed churches send people to the unreached ends of the earth. He has served for many years as a Presbyterian minister and still teaches at Greenville Seminary and at Westminster Seminary UK. But maybe the most important thing to say about him is that he is loved by Christ and loves Christ. Ian Hamilton.
This is a story about a professor of moral philosophy at the oldest university in Scotland, St Andrews, a place known in his day for its anti-evangelical ethos and its cold rationalism. It is the story of that man and of the young men whose lives were so gripped by his life, and by the truths he taught them, that they gave up their small ambitions and went east with the gospel of Christ.
Let me begin with a question. What makes you what you are? What determines the shape and the style of who you are and what you do? What sets the direction of your life?
“For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.” (2 Corinthians 5:14–15)
The love of Christ controls us. It constrains us; it has us in its grasp and grip. Paul is not speaking principally of his love for Christ but of Christ's love for his people. That love controls, shapes, directs and determines who we are and what we do with our lives.
Alongside that text, set the words of our Lord in Luke 14: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
“As all the world knows”
I suspect most of you have never heard of Thomas Chalmers, or, if you have, that you know very little about him. In 1908 a Scotsman named William Beveridge wrote a book called Makers of the Scottish Church, and he opened his chapter on Chalmers with the words, “As all the world knows, Thomas Chalmers was born in Anstruther in the year 1780.” As all the world knows! Today hardly anyone knows anything about him. But in his own day Thomas Carlyle, perhaps the greatest literary figure of nineteenth-century Scotland, considered him the greatest Scotsman of his age. Karl Marx, in Das Kapital, called him the arch-parson: Marx was out to demolish institutional Christianity, and he saw in Chalmers the perfect embodiment of the Christianity he wanted to destroy. Chalmers was known far and wide, throughout Scotland, throughout the United Kingdom, and across the Atlantic at Princeton.
Let me sketch his life for you briefly, and as I do, I hope you will begin to see why such a man made such an impact on six young men, so much so that they turned their backs on fame, fortune and prestige and devoted themselves to the work of the kingdom of God in India.
As a young man Chalmers was ambitious for worldly acclaim. His great loves were mathematics, physics and political economy. He had little place in his heart for religion. He went into the ministry believing that if you gave a day or so a week to your ministerial labors, you could spend the rest of the week doing whatever you liked, and that is exactly what he did. He spent five days a week studying and teaching mathematics as an assistant at St Andrews.
He had no time for evangelical Christianity. He would warn his congregation against reading men like John Newton: avoid him like the plague. He had been infected by the theological Moderatism that blighted the cause of the gospel in Scotland through the latter half of the eighteenth century. He was an archetypal Moderate, indifferent to the grace of God and to the supernatural heart of the Christian faith.
Twenty or so years later, in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, an opponent reminded Chalmers of those early days, when he had given so little attention to the kingdom of God and the truths of the gospel. Chalmers stood with bowed head, acknowledged it, and said, “But then, sir, I thought not of two magnitudes: the littleness of time and the vastness of eternity.”
Then he was gloriously converted to the Lord Jesus Christ. God used sore providences in his family: a sister died, a brother died, and he himself was struck down by an illness that for a time seemed fatal. In those dark providences God began to melt his heart, transform his mind and win his affections. He set aside his mathematics, physics and political economy and began to read the Bible voraciously. He read the Puritans, John Owen in particular. He committed himself to memorizing the Westminster Confession of Faith. He began to commend the very writers he had once warned against. And he began to visit his parish assiduously, convinced that he was called not only to preach Christ from the pulpit but to commend Christ from home to home to home.
His little parish of Kilmany, some thirty-five miles north of Edinburgh, was transformed. People were gripped by his preaching, and his name became known far beyond Kilmany. In 1815 he was called to a great city, my home city, Glasgow: the growing, poverty-stricken industrial heart of the United Kingdom. Chalmers believed God had called him there not only to preach the gospel but to see it take root in lives transformed to the glory of God, lives that would infect society with Christian virtue and grace.
In that year he preached what was probably the greatest sermon we know of in nineteenth-century Scotland, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” Most people remember 1815 because the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. Something greater happened that year: a sermon was preached that would affect multitudes for the glory of God. We will come back to it.
Then, to everyone's astonishment, in 1823 he accepted a chair of moral philosophy at the University of St Andrews. St Andrews, founded in 1413, was the heartbeat of Moderatism; the cold, dead hand of doctrinal indifference rested upon it. People were bewildered. Why would Chalmers leave a sphere God had so magnificently blessed? In Glasgow thousands had come to saving faith in Jesus Christ, forty-seven Christian schools had been established, and multitudes of families had been lifted out of poverty into virtuous, God-fearing lives. And now off he went to the very headquarters of theological indifference.
A one-thing-I-do man
But this is where our story really begins, and it has its roots in the life of one man. Chalmers was, like the apostle Paul, a one-thing-I-do man: “One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14). If I leave you with anything about Thomas Chalmers, let it be this: he was a one-thing-I-do man because the love of Christ drove him. He was not his own. It was not for him to decide what he would do and where he would go. The love of Christ drove him.
So he became a professor of moral philosophy, but now a Reformed, evangelical professor of moral philosophy, and his teaching was electric. His classes overflowed and had to be moved into the largest lecture theatres in the university. Students were gripped by the passion with which he taught, because he taught as a man in Christ, a one-thing-I-do man who believed in his God.
The six
Who were the six? Their story is told in The St Andrews Seven, published by the Banner of Truth; it is short and an easy read, and if you haven't read it, you should. Their names were John Urquhart, Alexander Duff, John Adam, David Ewart, William Sinclair Mackay and Robert Nesbit.
It is hard to find language that properly explains why these young men were so taken with Chalmers. I think they were transfixed because they saw a man wholly devoted to Jesus Christ, whose teaching flowed out of his union with Christ. Even as he taught them moral philosophy, his teaching carried the aroma of Christ.
In 1824 four of them founded the St Andrews University Missionary Association. That was a signal moment in the life of the Scottish universities. In 1796 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland had voted down a proposal to send missionaries; it was not appropriate, they said, because the nations needed to be civilized before they could be evangelized. That same year, inspired by William Carey and the London Missionary Society, the Glasgow and Edinburgh Missionary Societies were formed. So these students were starting a missionary association in a nation whose dominant church had set its face resolutely against missions.
The leading spirit among them was John Urquhart, who died at just eighteen; his minister wrote a two-volume biography of him. He was a brilliant scholar, and in fact all six were men of remarkable ability. Without exception they won prize after prize in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and much else. These were not young men of little capacity. Humanly speaking, a prosperous future lay before every one of them.
Chalmers and his wife began inviting students to their home on Sunday afternoons, and there Chalmers would talk with them about the things of God. It is one thing to be taught in a classroom by a professor whose life breathes the aroma of Jesus Christ. It is something else to sit in his home and realize that what he is in the classroom is exactly what he is at home, that the classroom is simply the overflow of the life he lives with his wife and children.
Duty, and something deeper
Why did these young men go to India? Five of them went, and together they gave about 141 years of service. None of them gave up. Two died quite early; the other three came home only occasionally and briefly, on what we would call furlough. Having put their hand to the plow, they did not turn back.
There was, first, a secondary or proximate reason: duty. Chalmers was big on duty. The Lord Jesus Christ has given his church a command to go and make disciples, and as Chalmers pressed that command upon them, it weighed more and more on their minds and hearts.
Alongside it were the words of Luke 14. Jesus looked at the large crowds following him (most of us would love a large crowd sitting under the ministry of the word) and he turned and said, in effect, “If anyone would come after me, you need to know this: compared with your love for me, you must hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters. Unless you take up your cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciple.” They understood that belonging to Jesus Christ means devoting all that you are and all that you have to him. That is not something especially for missionaries. It is the sine qua non of every Christian. It is all or nothing. Imagine someone comes to you and says, “You're a follower of Christ. Could you help me? What do I need to know to belong to Jesus?” I wonder whether we would ever have the courage to say, “You need to know this: compared with your love for him, you must hate father and mother, wife and children, and take up your cross and follow him. If you don't, you cannot be his disciple.”
So the proximate reason was duty. But there was a primary reason, and Chalmers pressed it on them above all: the love of Christ. The love of Christ controls us. Why are you the way you are? The love of Christ. Why do you do what you do? The love of Christ: not first my love for him, though that is involved, but his love for me.
That is the central thrust of Chalmers's remarkable sermon, and I encourage you to read it; you can find it on the internet. His argument in “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection” is that love for this world is so embedded in us, so native and natural to us, that nothing will expel it except the love of something, of someone, greater than the world. We love him because he first loved us. He loved us first, so that by his grace we might begin to love him.
The great need of missions is to lift high the grace and glory of Jesus.
The great challenge of missions, I believe, is not first to highlight the need and the duty, vital as that is and important as its place is. It is to lift high the grace and glory of Jesus. That is what gripped these young men: that Jesus Christ was such a Savior, that he loved them and gave himself for them. That is what controlled their lives, and that is what sent them to India.
When people struggle with obedience, perhaps obedience to the Great Commission, the temptation is to dig further and further into the command. That is not how the Bible does it. Think of Ephesians. In the first three chapters there is one imperative, in 2:11. In the last three there are forty-one. The Christian life is about obeying the Lord, but that obedience rests on, and flows out of, the grace of God in Jesus Christ. For three chapters Paul says: see how great your Savior is; see how gloriously God has blessed you in him with every spiritual blessing. You lack nothing. God has nothing more to give you than what he has given you in his Son. Eternity will be an exploration of what you already have. And then, in 4:1, comes “therefore”: this is how you will live.
That is what gripped these young men about Thomas Chalmers. He was so Christ-centered as he set the need for missions before them. One of them, John Urquhart, died; five went. All six were outstanding students, and no doubt they could have had lives of significance had they stayed in Scotland. But the love of Christ controlled them, constrained them. It is a very difficult Greek verb to translate; you could almost say the love of Christ had them in its inexorable grasp. That is why, if you had asked William Carey, Adoniram Judson, John G. Paton, William Chalmers Burns or Henry Martyn why they went (I am surmising, but I am fairly sure I am right), they would not have begun by saying, “Because God commanded the church to go.” They would have got there. But they would have begun with this: “The love of Christ constrained me.”
What shaped them
Let me draw this together by highlighting some of the emphases of Chalmers's example and teaching that so powerfully shaped these young men.
First, the littleness of time and the vastness of eternity. There was a time when Chalmers thought little of eternity. Then the Lord brought him to its edge, and he saw his lostness: a man without hope and without God in the world. Then the gospel of the grace of God in Jesus Christ came to him, and he became a new man in Christ. That is why, when his opponent reminded him of his early indifference, he answered as he did. And he asked those young men: how are you using the littleness of your time on this earth for the glory of God?
I can hardly believe that more than seventy years of my life have passed, until I look in the mirror. I can hardly believe it is over fifty years since the Lord was pleased to save me. The time has flown by. It seems inane to say so, it is so simple, but it is true. A friend of mine, now in heaven, Matt Peyton, laboured with his wife, Margaret, for over sixty years planting churches across the Massif Central and northern France; they even started a Bible study in Noyon, the little town where John Calvin was born. He came once to our midweek prayer meeting in the church I served in Scotland. He hadn't read deep theology, but godliness oozed out of his life, and he quoted lines I have never forgotten. They are not great poetry, but they are great theology:
“Only one life, ’twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.”
Second, Chalmers was a one-thing-I-do man. When I first read that of him, it reminded me of William Tyndale. The Bishop of London sent an agent to persuade Tyndale to abandon his translation and return to England. Tyndale steadfastly refused, and the agent reported back, “He is always singing one song”: the Scriptures in the language of the people. The same was said of John G. Paton: he was a man of one idea, to go to the lost, win the unreached, and see congregations of Jesus Christ established among them.
As a young divinity student in Edinburgh I had the great privilege of sitting under the ministry of James Philip for six years. He was reserved, quite shy, very able, a gifted musician, gifted in languages; he almost never raised his voice, yet passion throbbed out of his life. I remember one Sunday evening sitting in the gallery while he preached on Philippians 3. He leaned over the pulpit, as though he were looking straight at me (surely he wasn't, though perhaps he was), and said, “Are you a one-thing-I-do man? Are you a one-thing-I-do man?” I decided not to take the bus home. I walked the three miles to my lodgings, and as I walked I prayed, “Lord, if you ever call me to preach, I want to preach like that man.” Not his shyness, nor the throaty cough that could be a little off-putting; I didn't want to imitate him. But I wanted his one-thing-I-do-ness. That is what so marked these young men.
Third, the expulsive power of a new affection. What is it? It is so beholding the glory of Jesus Christ that the things of this earth grow strangely dim. It was Sinclair Ferguson who first put me on to John Owen, some fifty-six years ago. In volume one of his works, pages 460 to 461 if you are interested, there is a paragraph I have read fifty, sixty, seventy times; I know it by heart. How do you help people who are struggling with obedience, who are facing pressing temptations? You preach the glory of Christ, says Owen. Owen is not known for rhythmic, beautiful prose (though he is not as difficult as some make out), but this passage is almost poetic: preach the glory of Christ, and virtue will proceed from him to cure your defects and deficiencies.
Fourth, a passion for the lost. These students saw in Chalmers a man with compassion for the lost. At the end of Matthew 9, when Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them. The word is hard to translate; it speaks of a deep inward turmoil of affection and pity that leads to action. My problem is that I see the multitudes and I am not filled with compassion. I often think, “Could you please make way?”
Missions, the chief end of the church
Let me give the last word to Alexander Duff, by far the best known of the six. In 1867, in Edinburgh, he became the first professor of missions in a theological seminary anywhere in the world. Long before that, in 1830, he went to India as the first missionary sent out by the Church of Scotland. That church had been reformed, by God's grace, in 1560; this was 1830. I don't think they had been doing nothing, and there were good reasons and some not-so-good reasons why the church had not sent missionaries. But Duff was the first.
In 1839, back in Edinburgh for a short time, he was invited to preach at the ordination of a young man heading for India. These were the days, as Brooks mentioned earlier, when perhaps three in ten of Scotland's theological graduates went overseas. Duff titled his sermon “Missions the Chief End of the Christian Church.” If you are a Presbyterian, as I am, you may think, really? Doesn't the Shorter Catechism tell us that man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever? But how are people going to glorify God and enjoy him forever if they are not converted to Christ, and how will they be converted unless someone goes and tells them that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son? Missions is the chief end of the church so that the church may become what it is called to be: a worshiping, God-saturated, Christ-rejoicing people.
So one man's life and gospel passion shaped six young men and led them to give up their small ambitions, go east, and preach the gospel of Christ. The love of Christ controls us: it shapes the style and substance of all that I am and all that I do.
Lord, you are the God who has given us everything. In response to your great and gracious giving to us, may we give everything for you. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.