When Too Much is Never Enough

No doubt readers of New Life are well aware of my love for the work of the Banner Of Truth Trust. There is a good reason for this. As a student for the ministry I was one of the many victims of a broad, liberal ‘theological education’. I didn’t exactly fall for it ‘hook, line and sinker,’ but came under its influence to some degree.

About six months into my ministry I received a visit from the local Jehovah’s Witnesses. At the end of that visit I came to realise that essentially I was not very different to Jehovah’s Witnesses, who I came to realise were basically theological liberals on steroids.

The Lord in His mysterious providence used this visit to begin drawing me back to a full‐orbed Biblical faith. I began to acquire and devour Banner Of Truth books. Banner gave me my theological education. J. G. Machen, E. J. Young, John Owen, C. H. Spurgeon, Richard Baxter et al became my teachers, not to mention the biographer par excellence, Iain H. Murray, whose lives of the saints are geared towards showing the Lord’s gracious works in the lives of believers.

In time I came to the realisation that perhaps worse than what the theological liberals teach, is what they don’t teach. As a result, liberalism is not even a pale shadow of full‐orbed, Biblical Christianity, which proclaims our Lord Jesus Christ in all His glory, in all His saving, sealing and sanctifying power. Yet liberalism vaunts itself as being academically superior to what is clearly its own superior in both the quality and quantity of what it believes and teaches. Anyone whose faith has been destroyed by liberalism (or any other of the ‘isms’ that we wish were ‘wasms’) should read J. G. Machen’s Christianity And Liberalism, which remains the simplest and most direct exposé of that ‘gospel which is no Gospel.’

For both my own personal faith and my responsibility to share that faith and to apply it to the felt needs of my people there was a lot of catching up to do. So the Banner’s publications were a great help, along with the monthly magazine, the ministers’ conferences, fellowship with those of ‘like precious faith’ and more recently the Banner of Truth website. There are, of course, other worthy Christian publishing houses and conferences from which we gain much. We praise God for all of them and pray for their ongoing usefulness too.

Well, most recently, ministers gathered from all over the United Kingdom, indeed all over the world, at the 2018 Banner Ministers’ Conference, hungering and thirsting for the Living Bread; not just for our own edification, but that through building us up in our own faith, the Lord might use us more gainfully in the building up of His saints in His Kingdom.

To that end, too much can never be enough, as you might gather from the report which you can find here.

This article first appeared in the May 2018 edition of the New Life magazine and has been reproduced with permission.