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
Jonathan MasterThe Lord has gifted him to write and speak about Christians of the past in a way that is clear, relevant and pointed, and I think you'll experience that this morning. He is president and professor of theology at Union School of Theology in Wales. Please give your attention to our friend Dr. Michael Reeves.
“Is it not passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis? … A god is not so glorious as a king. I think the pleasure they enjoy in heaven cannot compare with kingly joys in earth: to wear a crown enchased with pearl and gold, whose virtues carry with it life and death; to ask and have, command and be obeyed.”
So wrote the sixteenth-century English playwright Christopher Marlowe in Tamburlaine the Great, a play set in and around Persepolis, the ancient city of the kings of Persia. It is a play all about the allure of the glory of man. Some two hundred years later, Henry Martyn visited Persepolis himself. He knew those lines well, and they were probably running through his mind as he walked through the ruins. But this, in contrast, is what Martyn wrote:
“Here Alexander and his Greeks passed and repassed; here they sat and sang and revelled; now all is silence. Generation after generation lie mingled with the dust of their mouldering edifices. Twenty-one centuries have passed since they lived. How short in comparison must be the remainder of my days! What a momentary duration is the life of man! … The more I see of the works of men, the more I am ashamed of them. Coarseness and clumsiness mar all the works of man. I am sick when I look at man and his wisdom and his doings, and am relieved only by reflecting that we have a city whose builder and maker is God. The least of his works is refreshing to look at.”
What a difference between Marlowe's “Is it not passing brave to be a king?” and Martyn's humility. Yet Martyn was not naturally immune to the glory of man. As a young man, he said, proud self-confidence was almost the defining mark of his character. But the glory of God so transformed him that he became ashamed of his own works and found it refreshing to look on God and his works. The glory of God outshone the glory of man and became his true satisfaction and the guiding light of his life and mission. That is exactly why I think Henry Martyn shows our comfortable but dissatisfied, people-pleasing, man-fearing generation a better way.
A comet, brief and brilliant
Martyn was born in 1781 in Cornwall, at the south-western tip of England. He went up to Cambridge, where he excelled, especially in mathematics and Latin, and where he was converted. He attended Holy Trinity Church, where the Puritans Richard Sibbes and Thomas Goodwin had once ministered, and he was soon mentored by its vicar, the great evangelical preacher Charles Simeon.
Simeon was vicar of Holy Trinity for fifty-four years, but don't imagine his rootedness in one place meant he cared little for global mission. He cared deeply. He helped found two missionary societies and won generations of Cambridge graduates to missionary work. Bengal alone received five of the ablest Cambridge scholars at Simeon's prompting, and one of them was Henry Martyn.
Martyn lived only to thirty-one. Yet, as his friend David Brown said, he burned “with the intenseness and rapid blaze of heated phosphorus.” In less than six years of missionary service, first in India and then in Persia, now Iran, he preached, evangelized, and saw to the translation of the New Testament into Urdu, Persian and Arabic. But his legacy was more than his evangelism and translation. He blazed with a zeal for the glory of God that would inspire generations to come and to go.
When I was at university, in the room where we Christian students met to pray every Saturday, a portrait of Henry Martyn commissioned by Charles Simeon hung above the fireplace. Simeon once said of it, “See that blessed man! No one looks at me as he does. He never takes his eyes off me, and seems always to be saying, ‘Be serious, be earnest; don't trifle, don't trifle.’” And so he seemed to say to generations of Cambridge students. Martyn roused whole regiments to overseas missions. C. T. Studd and the Cambridge Seven prayed under that portrait. The Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide was founded in that room.
Henry Martyn was a comet, brief and brilliant, and his brightness was the glory of God. So I want to see what the glory of God meant to him, how it brightened and shaped him, so that we might be shaped like him.
Glorying in God
“To behold God in his glory,” Martyn wrote, “to worship him for who he is in himself, is, I believe, the very bliss of heaven.” There is no dead orthodoxy here. God is to be beheld and worshiped, and that is bliss to the worshiper. If you hear echoes of Jonathan Edwards, you're not wrong; Edwards was a particular favorite of Martyn's.
Martyn was absolutely sold out to what he called “experimental religion,” religion experienced in the heart. Judging by his diary, what troubled him most as a Christian was his habitual loss of relish for God. One entry reads: “My mind much as usual; not tried by any violent assault of sin or Satan, but the daily cause of grief and shame, indeed the root of all sin: forgetfulness of God.” Yet at other times he could write:
“Christ is nearer to me than father or mother or sister, a nearer relation, a more affectionate friend, and I rejoice to follow him and to love him. Blessed Jesus, thou art all I want, a forerunner to me in all I shall ever go through as a Christian, a minister or a missionary… How sweet was it to pray to him! I hardly knew how to contemplate with praise enough his adorable excellencies… I can conceive it to be a theme long enough for eternity. I want no other happiness, no other heaven.”
Importantly, Martyn did not think such relish for God was merely a personal proclivity of his. He saw it as an essential mark of regeneration. Asked once how he could be confident that he had received the Holy Spirit, he answered: “Because, notwithstanding all my sins, the bent of my heart is to God in a way it never was before; and according to my present feelings, I could not be happy if God were not glorified, and if I had not the enjoyment of his presence.”
One episode shows how seriously he meant that, how visceral was his sense that he could not be happy if God were not glorified. Late in his ministry, after he had moved from India to Persia, a Muslim friend told him that the Crown Prince of Persia, in his war with the Russians, had killed so many Christians that Christ, from the fourth heaven, had taken hold of Muhammad's skirt to beg him to stop. Martyn wrote:
“I was cut to the soul at this blasphemy. In prayer I could think of nothing but that great day when the Son of God shall come in the clouds of heaven, convincing men of all their hard speeches which they have spoken against him… [My friend] perceived that I was considerably disordered, and was sorry for having repeated the verse, but asked what it was that was so offensive. I told him that I could not endure existence if Jesus was not glorified; it would be hell to me if he were to be always thus dishonoured. He was astonished, and again asked why. ‘If anyone pluck out your eyes,’ I replied, ‘there is no saying why you feel pain. It is feeling. It is because I am one with Christ that I am thus dreadfully wounded.’”
When the head or heart is struck, every member feels it. You can see how this aching longing for Jesus to be glorified will fuel his mission. But let's not run ahead too quickly, or we'll miss something vital. For Martyn, the glory of Christ is not some high-minded ideal Christians can pursue regardless of their own spiritual health. His constant concern for his own integrity, his relish for God, makes that plain.
Cut him anywhere and Henry Martyn bleeds this truth: you cannot glorify Christ in an un-Christlike way.
You cannot charge into mission with a God-forgetful coldness of heart and imagine you are glorifying Christ. Martyn makes us ask, Whose glory do I really love? “I could not be happy if God were not glorified, and if I had not the enjoyment of his presence.” That delight in God was the life-giving fountain from which his life and mission flowed, and you cannot leap to mission without it. If God is not glorious to you, you won't glorify him. We must first glory in Jesus if we are to glorify Jesus. So we need to press in and see how Martyn perceived the glory of God, so that we might be affected as he was, and glory in Christ as he did.
God's glory in creation
First, Martyn believed, God's glory is revealed in creation. The Creator is goodness itself, and in creating he became the author of everything good. Every good and beautiful thing we enjoy is his brainchild, an echo and reflection of his glory. So, for all his spiritual zeal, Martyn was no body-hating Gnostic. Good created things testify to the kindness of our God; they preach to us. And for a Christian, created things actually become more pleasurable, because they are not only pleasures in themselves; their very pleasurableness feeds our worship of the One who thought of them. Martyn wrote:
“Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them; for religion has refined my mind, and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. Oh, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God!”
But because he saw created goods as reflections of God's uncreated glory, he knew they could never ultimately satisfy. He discovered that early at Cambridge. He was awarded the highest academic honor, Senior Wrangler (the English educational system is full of nonsenses like that; forgive me). He had dreamed of it and worked night and day for it. And when he got it, he said, “I obtained my highest wishes, but was surprised to find that I had grasped a shadow.”
God's glory is wonderfully revealed in creation, but nothing in creation can give the bliss of enjoying the Author of it all. He is the essence of beauty, and nothing in heaven or earth, including all the gods of human religion, can by definition have his beauty, or, in Martyn's preferred word, his excellency. That is where Martyn's conversion and growth lay. Growing up in late eighteenth-century England, he had been a nominal Christian; he had always acknowledged God's existence and would have told you God is great. What changed at his conversion was not a cerebral acknowledgment that something might be true. He came to enjoy and adore God, and his growth in Christ meant a deepening relish for God. “The soul that has truly experienced the love of God,” he wrote, “will not meanly inquire, ‘How much must I do?’ and so limit its service, but will be earnestly seeking him more and more.”
God's glory in the face of Christ crucified
The heavens declare the glory of God, but, Martyn was clear, we see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God directly in the face of Jesus Christ, for he is the radiance of his Father's glory. More than that: just as Isaiah saw the Lord's glory when he saw him high and lifted up, so Christ's glory shines brightest when he is lifted up in the hour of his glorification on the cross. There we see most brightly the glory of Jesus Christ in redeeming grace; there Christ is seen most clearly for who he is, as the centurion cried, “Truly this was the Son of God!”
So Martyn held that Christ would be most glorified in his own life “by curing the diseases of my soul,” that is, by redeeming him and separating him from sin. And Christ would be glorified in the world “by the ingathering of multitudes to himself”: the dying Savior seeing the travail of his soul and being satisfied. He is glorified in the salvation of sinners through the blood he shed on the cross. If God is to be glorified in all the earth, Martyn was emphatic, Jesus Christ crucified must be lifted up, so that, beholding his glory, we might be transformed into his image, and so that he, lifted up from the earth, might draw all peoples to himself.
This shows that the glory of God in the face of Christ is a particular, unique glory. Glorifying God in mission is not simply about acquiring more fame for Christ in some heavenly celebrity contest. Martyn encountered hundreds of gods in India and Persia whose only aim was that. But Christ's glory is beautifully, qualitatively, utterly different from the glory of Allah or Krishna. They would never be glorified in a cross. It is precisely in his redeeming compassion that Christ distinguishes himself from all the gods, and there we feel most deeply the true splendor and beauty of his nature.
That is why Martyn believed false teaching is opposed to the glory of God just as unbelief and idolatry are. False teaching may trumpet the name of Jesus while smothering his true glory. In India he was surrounded not only by Muslims and Hindus but by Roman Catholics and nominal Protestants, and he wrote, “I feel my spirit roused to preach against popery with all the zeal of Luther. How small and unimportant are the hair-splitting disputes of the blessed people at home compared with the formidable agents of the devil with whom we have to combat here! There are four castes of people in India: the heathen, the Muhammadans, the papists and the infidels.”
What was he saying? Roman Catholicism named the name of Christ, but by presenting Jesus as an insufficient Savior whose work must be topped up by ours, a less gracious Savior, it obscured his glory. “When shall this beautiful country be delivered from idolatry and spurious Christianity?” Martyn lamented. “Crosses there are in abundance, but when shall the doctrine of the cross be held up?” He could not forget that theme as, day after day, he spoke with unbelievers, and again and again his diary confesses how evidently the cross was folly to them. Yet he would preach no other message, because he saw in Jesus Christ and him crucified, in the hour of his glorification, the power of God and the wisdom of God: the glorification of the One who is the glory of God.
“Woe is me”
What effect did this cross-centered delight in God's glory have on Martyn? First, the same effect we see on Isaiah in Isaiah 6. Isaiah saw the Lord in his glory, and his first cry was, “Woe is me!” So it was with Martyn. A friend remarked that his humility was what was most remarkable about him: “This might be considered as the warp of which the entire texture of his piety was composed.”
That was no accident. Martyn held that a growing appreciation of God's glory, especially as it is seen in the cross, must go hand in hand with deepening humility. He must increase; I must decrease. Remember, this was a man for whom proud self-confidence had been almost a defining trait: very capable, and he knew it. But he came to see that the love of man's glory is exactly what blinds us to God's glory. “That which I now see I was lamentably deficient in,” he wrote, “was a humble and contrite spirit, through which I should have perceived more clearly the excellency of Christ.”
It is the humble who perceive the excellency of Christ. The proud cannot, because their own supposed glory blinds them.
“In my thoughts of God and his dealings with me,” Martyn wrote, “I ought to be constantly wrapped up in astonishment.” In fact, he would argue, a love of glory without humility is a love of false glory. One entry reads: “How utterly forgetful have I been this day of the need of Christ's grace, of my own poverty and vileness! Let me remember that all apparent joy in God without humility is a mere delusion of Satan.” The glory of God is bliss to the believer, but it is a humbling bliss.
And this humbling was a liberation from his old self-confidence. Martyn was a driven, extremely busy man, and his diaries overflow with failed evangelistic conversations. It would have been easy to despair or burn out. But his sight of Christ's excellencies moved him to rely on God, not himself. Writing about the global advance of the gospel, he said: “How easy for God to do it! And it shall be done in good time. And even if I should never see a native converted, God may design by my patience and continuance in the work to encourage future missionaries.”
“How glorious the privilege, that we exist in him! Without him I lose the principle of life; I am left to the power of native corruption, a rotten branch, a dead thing that none can make use of. This mass of corruption, when it meets the Lord, changes its nature, lives, and is regarded by God as a member of Christ's body… This is my bliss, that Christ is all… Upheld by him, I smile at death. It is no longer a question about my own worthiness. I glory in God through Jesus Christ my Lord.”
You can hear it: he has been taken out of himself to glory in Christ. That turned a shy, melancholy, self-dependent man into one who was resiliently happy and hopeful. He looked to the Lord and was radiant. One British army officer's wife in India wrote of him in her autobiography: “His features were not regular” (a polite way of putting it), “but the expression was so luminous, so intellectual, so affectionate, so beaming with divine charity, that no one could have looked at his features and thought of their shape or form; the out-beaming of his soul would absorb the attention of every observer.”
“Here am I; send me”
The second effect of delighting in Christ's excellencies was also the same as on Isaiah. Having cried “Woe is me!” and received atonement for his guilt, Isaiah's next words were, “Here I am! Send me.” Just so, delight in the glory of God experienced through the atoning work of Christ became the passion that fueled Martyn's whole mission: that the Jesus he delighted in might be glorified in all the earth, and that the nations might acknowledge his sway, his beauty and his goodness.
Without an appreciation of Christ's bright splendor, the darkness of the lost human condition might be acknowledged intellectually but never felt. Here is Martyn soon after arriving in India, encountering its spiritual blindness and idolatry: “I felt a solemn sort of melancholy at the sight of such multitudes of idolaters. I am willing, I trust, through grace, to pass my days among them, if by any means these poor people may be brought to God… The sight of the men, women and children, all idolaters, makes me shudder, as if in the dominions of the prince of darkness. I fancy the frown of God is visible; there is something peculiarly awful… Oh, how gross is the darkness here! The veil of the covering cast over all nations seems thicker here; the fiends of darkness seem to sit in solemn repose on this land.”
Yet the very glory that unmasked that darkness and showed its horror also gave Martyn hope against it. It filled him with an exquisite delight in God that fueled his labors toward the day when the glory of the Lord will fill the whole earth. His thoughts on first sighting Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, capture that hope of Christ's glory spreading from pole to pole. His early biographer records that on the nineteenth of April Ceylon came into view, a long range of hills running north and south, broken in a picturesque manner, with low lands covered in trees between the hills and the sea. “While breezes from the island regaled his senses with their soothing and refreshing fragrance, his mind was filled with a train of delightful anticipations,” as he thought of the time “when the name of Jesus should be as ointment poured forth” in temples raised by the Sinhalese amid their cinnamon groves, and when prayers would rise there “like clouds of incense, through the merits of the Redeemer.”
A few years later those words were read by Reginald Heber, who wrote the hymn we just sang, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Deeply affected, Heber committed the rest of his life to service in India, and Martyn's words seem to have shaped Heber's once-famous missionary hymn, “From Greenland's Icy Mountains,” which captures Martyn's spirit as it was meant to:
What though the spicy breezes blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle; though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile? In vain with lavish kindness the gifts of God are strown; the heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone. Can we, whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on high, can we to men benighted the lamp of life deny? Salvation! O salvation! The joyful sound proclaim, till each remotest nation has learned Messiah's name. Waft, waft, ye winds, his story, and you, ye waters, roll, till, like a sea of glory, it spreads from pole to pole: till o'er our ransomed nature the Lamb for sinners slain, Redeemer, King, Creator, in bliss returns to reign. Amen.