090. At This Time I Sat Under The Ministry Of Holy Mr. Gifford, Whose Doctrine, By Gods Grace, W...

XC ‘At This Time I Sat Under The Ministry Of Holy Mr. Gifford, Whose Doctrine, By God’s Grace, Was Much For My Stability.’

I MUST first tell you something about holy Mr. Gifford himself. Well, John Gifford was the very minister for John Bunyan; for in everything but literary genius John Gifford had been a John Bunyan himself, only unspeakably worse. John Gifford had at one time been a Royalist officer in the great Civil War; and like so many officers and men on that bad side he was a man of a very bad life. In the course of the conflict he fell into the hands of his enemies, and for some transgression of the laws of war he was condemned to death. But by the devotion and the determination of his sister he managed to outwit his jailor and to escape from his prison. After some hairbreadth escapes Gifford was enabled somehow to set up as a doctor in the town of Bedford, where he continued his old life of debauchery and was notorious far and near for his hatred and ill-usage of the Puritan people. But one night after losing all his money at cards — ‘as God would have it,’ as Bunyan was wont to say — Gifford was led to open a book of the famous Puritan Robert Bolton, when something that he read in that book took such a hold of him that he lay in agony of conscience for several weeks afterwards. ‘At last,’ as his old kirk-session record still extant has it,

‘God did so plentifully discover to him the forgiveness of his sins for the sake of Christ that all his life after he lost not the light of God’s countenance, save only about two days before he died.’ No sooner did John Gifford become a changed man than, like Saul of Tarsus, he openly joined himself to those whom he had hitherto persecuted, and ultimately he became their beloved pastor. The three or four poor women whom Bunyan one day saw sitting at a door in the sun and talking about the things of God were all members of John Gifford’s Free Church congregation. And in long after days John Bunyan immortalised John Gifford as his Evangelist in the Pilgrim’s Progress. Such then was holy Mr. Gifford, whose doctrine, by God’s grace, was so much for John Bunyan’s stability. The first thing that John Bunyan tells us about John Gifford was the way he conducted his young communicants’ class. Not that young Bunyan was actually an enrolled member of that class as yet. But Mr. Gifford did as your ministers sometimes do in imitation of him. He invited all the young people of his congregation to attend his class for young communicants, even though they were not intending to sit down at the approaching table. You hear your ministers making that same intimation and giving that same invitation before every communion, and there are always some wise and foreseeing parents and guardians who send their young people to such great opportunities. I cannot tell you to a certainty how Mr. Gifford succeeded with his other young people, but his success with young Bunyan was almost too terrible. Either Gifford must have been a terrible teacher, or else his tinker-student must have made terrible conscience of all that he heard in the class, as well as of all that went on in his own heart during those pre-communion days and nights; for he tells his experience of those days and nights in a narrative far too terrible for me to repeat to you to-night. You will find it for yourselves, if you are interested in such things, in paragraphs 77 to 88 of his Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. In a conversation he once held with me about his ministry, Dr. Moody Stuart said to me that if he had ever had any success to speak of in his long pastorate, it had mostly been with young communicants, and with fathers when they came to speak to him about baptism for their children. Dr. Moody Stuart was the most pungent man I ever knew, but I doubt if any even of his young communicants ever came through those eleven paragraphs in Grace Abounding. It takes two to make an experience like that. It takes a Gifford or a Moody Stuart and it takes a young John Bunyan. Are our young communicants’ classes conducted nowadays with anything of the labour and the earnestness of John Gifford’s classes and Dr. Moody Stuart’s? If there were a young John Bunyan in our classes would he put our names into his autobiography with anything of the love and the honour and the everlasting gratitude that John Bunyan puts John Gifford into his Grace Abounding? And yet the most faithful of ministers may do their very best in their classes, and with too little lasting result. A minister may be a very Gifford in his class, and yet he may have to weep over crowds of his young communicants in after days. I suppose after John Bunyan succeeded John Gifford as pastor of that little Puritan congregation he was not one whit behind Gifford himself in his fidelity to the souls of his young communicants. And yet I find him making this sad entry in his Grace Abounding toward the end of his life.

‘If any of those who were awakened by my ministry did after fall back, as sometimes too many did, I can truly say their loss hath been more to me than if one of my own children, begotten of my body, had been going to its grave. I think, verily, I may speak it without an offence to my Lord, nothing hath gone so near me as that, unless it was the fear of the loss of my own soul. I have counted as if I had goodly buildings and lordships in those places where my spiritual children were born. My heart hath been so wrapped up in the glory of this excellent work that I counted myself more blessed and honoured of God than if He had made me Emperor of the Christian world, or the Lord of all the glory of the earth.’

John Gifford’s pulpit was quite as much blessed to young Bunyan as was his communicants’ class. And Bunyan long afterwards went back upon and signalised these four features of John Gifford’s pulpit-work — its Scriptural character, its doctrinal character, its experimental character, and its evangelical character. I was not bold enough to give you the terrible paragraphs in which John Bunyan tells the terrible results that John Gifford’s classes had upon him. But I have no hesitation in reading his hundred and twentieth paragraph to you, in which he tells us in his own inimitable way how his minister taught him to read his New Testament; and, especially, how he taught him to employ his eyes upon Jesus Christ in his New Testament. Both in his class and in his pulpit John Gifford was very happy to have such a great hand in the opening of John Bunyan’s splendid eyes. We do not all have eyes like John Bunyan’s eyes. But we all have our own eyes for our employment of which on our New Testament and on Jesus Christ and on everything else we shall all one day have to give an account. And we are happy in having a specimen of John Bunyan’s account in his hundred and twentieth paragraph.

‘Under the ministry of holy Mr. Gifford, O how my soul was led on from truth to truth! Even from the birth and cradle of the Son of God, to His ascension and second coming from heaven to judge the world. There was not one part of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus but I was orderly led into it. Methought I was as if I had seen Him born, as if I had seen Him grow up, as if I had seen Him walk through this world from His cradle to His cross; to which also, when He came, I saw how gently He gave Himself to be hanged and nailed upon it for my sins and my wicked doings. Also, as I mused on this His progress, that Scripture dropped on my spirit, He was ordained for the slaughter.’

What a contrast to the time when young Bunyan could not away with the Scriptures. And when he said,

‘What is the Bible? Give me a ballad, a newsbook, George on horsebackor Bevis of Southampton. Give me some book that teaches curious arts, or that tells old fables; but for the Holy Scriptures I cared not,’ what a happy service John Gifford did to John Bunyan, and to us, and to all the world! What a happy class, and what a happy pulpit!

And, then, all his after days, John Bunyan — tinker, preacher, great writer, and great saint of God — went back upon John Gifford’s doctrinal preaching with an ever-increasing gratitude. A great preacher and a great writer of the last generation has this in his famous autobiography:

‘When I was fifteen, a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured.’

Now, John Bunyan, our great preacher and great writer, had the very same experience in his early days.

‘At this time, also, I sat under the ministry of holy Mr. Gifford, whose doctrine, by God’s grace, was much for my stability. His doctrine was as seasonable to my soul as the former and the latter rain in their season. Wherefore I found my soul, through grace, very apt to drink in his doctrine.’

Both John Gifford’s day and John Bunyan’s day were the greatest days of doctrinal preaching the Church of Christ has seen since Paul’s day. Whereas your day and mine is the weakest in doctrine that the Church of Christ has ever had to come through. But the day of sound and deep doctrine in religion must come back again. All real knowledge takes the form of doctrine. A doctrine is a truth that is so sure that it can be taught and can be trusted to. Every branch of human knowledge, to be called knowledge, takes the form and takes the name of doctrine. Take any branch of human knowledge you choose: medicine, law, commerce, statesmanship, war; all the great sciences, and all the great arts, have their stability deep down in their respective doctrines. And our statesmen, and our business men, and our scientific men, and our artistic men are all trusted and are all honoured and are all rewarded just in the measure that they master the foundation doctrines of their several professions and services, and then go on to put those doctrines into practice. And it cannot surely continue to be, that the one thing needful for all men to know should be left to stand without a foundation in men’s understandings, as well as without a hold over their hearts and their lives. The real truth is that the doctrines of the evangelical pulpit are the only sure and stable and unchangeable and everlasting doctrines on which the mind and the heart and the conscience of mortal man can ever rest. All other doctrines, whether of philosophy, or of science, or of art, have been the slow and the gradual discovery of human observation and experiment. But the doctrines of grace are of another kind, and they come from another world. Unless they are the greatest delusion and the greatest snare the doctrines of grace are the very wisdom of God, and the very power of God, to the salvation of sinful and suffering men. And in the Word of God those doctrines stand revealed from heaven in all their fullness and in all their assurance of grace and truth, and in a fullness to which no man is ever to add or is ever to take away. When the Son of God finished His redeeming work on earth, and when God the Father so revealed His Son in Paul as to enable the greatest of the Apostles to cast Christ and His life and His work into evangelical doctrine, that canon of divine truth was closed for all time. And thus it was that the men of the first century, the Romans, and the Corinthians, and the Galatians, and the Ephesians, and the Colossians had as developed and as rich and as sure a word of doctrine as we have. And we have just what they had and we need no more. We, like them, are complete in Christ. So much so that, as a matter of indisputable fact, every real reformation of the Christian religion, all down the centuries, as well as every individual conversion and sanctification, has come about, not by any new discovery of doctrine, but by a believing return and an entire surrender to the doctrines and the precepts and the counsels and the comforts of the New Testament. Paul was the greatest of Christian preachers and he was also the humblest of men, and this is how he writes to the Galatians and to us about his doctrine of Christ:

‘I marvel that you are so soon removed from Him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel: which is not another. [He means that there is nothing else on the face of the earth for one moment to be called a gospel.] For I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which is preached by me is not after men. For I neither received it of men, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.’

‘Progress in Christianity,’ says Bishop Gore, ‘is always reversion to an original and a perfect type.’ So it is. And Paul is that original and perfect type in doctrine, just as Jesus Christ is that perfect and original type in life, and in character, and in walk, and in conversation.