Words of Light and Hope from Jane McLarty LLM

Words of Light and Hope Jane McLarty  

Yesterday, Saturday 19 th October, was the festival of Henry Martyn (1781-1812), translator of the Scriptures and missionary. Henry left England in 1805 to go to   Calcutta as a chaplain to the East India company. He was    expected to minister only to the British expat community; but he set about learning the local languages, and then supervised the translation of the New Testament first into Hindi and then into Persian and Arabic.

One of the early scholars to understand the importance of being able to read or hear the Bible in our native language was William Tyndale (1494 – 1596), who is said to have told one cleric ‘If God spare my life, ere many years pass, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.’

This is what the Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834 – 1892) said about living on God’s word – an immersion in the Bible possible only because of the work of those who went before him:

I was sitting, one day, in the New Forest, under a beech tree. I like to look at the beech and study it, as I do many other trees, for every tree has its own peculiarities and habits, its special ways of twisting its boughs and growing its bark, and opening its leaves and so forth. As I looked up at that beech and admired the wisdom of God in making it, I saw a squirrel running round and round the trunk and up the   branches, and I thought to myself, “Ah, this beech tree is a great deal more to you than it is to me, for it is your home, your living, your all.” Its big branches were the main streets of his city and its little boughs were the lanes. Somewhere in that tree he had his house and the beech mast was his daily food—he lived on it. Well now, the way to deal with God’s Word is not merely to contemplate it, or to study it, as a student does, but to live on it as that squirrel lives on his beech tree! Let it be to you, spiritually, your house, your home, your food, your medicine, your  clothing—the one essential element of your soul’s life and growth.