Gospel Basics – A Review by Wilfrid Weale

This book consists, as the Preface tells us, ‘of a collection of pieces written at different times and generally with a view to special circumstances’. It begins with a piece by D. M. McIntyre on ‘Andrew Bonar as a Preacher’ in which we are told that

the unrestrained offer of Christ to sinners of mankind was one notable mark of Dr Bonar’s preaching. ‘Be done looking at your faith. Look at the object of your faith, and your rest has begun.’ ‘We stand at Calvary and hear Christ say, “It is finished!” We say, “Amen”, and lift the cup of life to our lips.’

There then follow two most solemn addresses to the unconverted entitled ‘Dreams Gone; Desolations Come’ and ‘The Cup of Wrath’. After these there is an address on ‘Coming to Christ’. Here, as in the former two, the author warmly commends Christ and exhorts them to close in with him without delay. The majority of messages that follow deal with subjects that frequently occupy the minds of believers: ‘The Holy Spirit’, ‘What Gives Assurance’, ‘Greater Holiness’, ‘Victory over Sin’ and ‘Prayer and Fasting’, to name but a few.

Many precious quotations could be given from all of these but we may confine ourselves to one from the chapter on ‘Prayer and Fasting’, a lecture on Daniel 10. There Bonar comments:

The sight of the Lord Jesus . . . strips a man of all self-righteousness and self-complacency, and leaves him overwhelmed with the feeling of utter vileness and nothingness. The nearer you get to the Saviour, you will, by comparison, see the more of your own loathsomeness, and will abhor yourself the more. By looking into yourself, and dwelling on the evils of your own heart, you may find out something of the sin within you; but, while you may go a long way in finding out the corruption within you, you may, at the same time, come to be very self-complacent over your own clearness of vision in the matter, and may feed your corruption on your corruption. On the other hand, come near Christ, and in the twinkling of an eye you are emptied of all self-complacency, and are down in the dust of self-abhorrence, and a sense of your own nothingness. Of all ways the most thorough, to make a man humble and self-abased, is for him to see in the light of Christ what he is in himself.

In reading these addresses, which are so full of Christ and so faithful to both law and gospel, one cannot but mourn over how bereft the pulpits of our land are of such preaching today. This book is highly commended.