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Major W. Ian Thomas
Major W. Ian Thomas (1914–2007) was a British preacher, evangelist, and Bible teacher whose ministry emphasized the indwelling life of Christ as the key to victorious Christian living. Born on September 13, 1914, in London, England, to Albert and Jennie Thomas, he was raised in a middle-class family. Converted at age 12 during a Crusaders Union camp, he committed his life to Christ’s service at 15, preaching on Hampstead Heath and engaging in evangelistic efforts. Educated at Merchant Taylor’s School, he studied medicine at London University for two years with aspirations of becoming a missionary doctor in Africa but left to pursue full-time ministry after experiencing spiritual burnout at 19, a turning point marked by a midnight prayer in 1933 that revealed Christ as his life source. Thomas’s preaching career spanned decades and continents, beginning with open-air evangelism in the UK and expanding globally after serving in World War II with the Royal Fusiliers, including the Dunkirk evacuation, earning him the Distinguished Service Order for gallantry. In 1946, he and his wife Joan founded the Capernwray Missionary Fellowship of Torchbearers at Capernwray Hall in England, a ministry that grew into Torchbearers International, with 25 Bible schools worldwide by his death. He pastored no single church but preached itinerantly, authored influential books like The Saving Life of Christ and The Mystery of Godliness, and moved to Estes Park, Colorado, in the late 1980s. Married to Joan, with whom he had four sons—Chris, Mark, Peter, and Andy—he died on August 1, 2007, leaving a legacy as a preacher who transformed lives through his focus on Christ’s sufficiency.
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Major W. Ian Thomas preaches about Jesus Christ being the ultimate revelation of truth, encompassing all we need to know about God and man. Jesus, while fully God, also became fully man, embodying the perfect relationship between man and God. Through His obedience and humility, Jesus demonstrated what it means to be truly available to God, allowing us to access the unlimited resources of deity through Him.
Inexhaustible Supply of Deity
Jesus Christ Himself is the final exegesis of all truth. He is all that we need to know about God, and He is all that we need to know about man. The Lord Jesus knew that the Father had given all things into His hands that as a Man, all the illimitable resources of deity had been vested in His person. That is the first thing I would like you to notice, for although He was in the beginning with God, and was God, and is God and although as the Creative Word, all things were made by Him when He came to this earth, in the very fullest sense of the term, He became Man; but He became Man as God intended man to be, and behaved as God intended man to behave, walking day by day in that relationship to the Father which God had always intended should exist between man and Himself. Who, although being essentially one with God and in the form of God (possessing the fulness of the attributes which make God God), did not think this equality with God was a thing to be eagerly grasped or retained; but stripped Himself (of all privileges and rightful dignity) so as to assume the guise of a servant (slave), in that He became like men and was born a human being. And after He had appeared in human form He abased and humbled Himself (still further) and carried His obedience to the extreme of death, even the death of (the) cross! (Philippians 2:6-8 Amplified New Testament). In all His activities, in all His reactions, in every step He took and in every word He said, in every decision He made, He did so as man, even though He was God. He knew that in His perfection as man, the Father had vested in Him all that God intended to vest in man all things! In other words, man in perfection has an unlimited call upon the inexhaustible supplies of deity. To put it another way, all the inexhaustible supplies of God are available to the man who is available to all the inexhaustible supplies of God; and Jesus Christ was that Man! He was Man in perfection - - totally, unrelentingly, unquestioningly available and that is why there was available to Him all that to which he was available all things!
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Major W. Ian Thomas (1914–2007) was a British preacher, evangelist, and Bible teacher whose ministry emphasized the indwelling life of Christ as the key to victorious Christian living. Born on September 13, 1914, in London, England, to Albert and Jennie Thomas, he was raised in a middle-class family. Converted at age 12 during a Crusaders Union camp, he committed his life to Christ’s service at 15, preaching on Hampstead Heath and engaging in evangelistic efforts. Educated at Merchant Taylor’s School, he studied medicine at London University for two years with aspirations of becoming a missionary doctor in Africa but left to pursue full-time ministry after experiencing spiritual burnout at 19, a turning point marked by a midnight prayer in 1933 that revealed Christ as his life source. Thomas’s preaching career spanned decades and continents, beginning with open-air evangelism in the UK and expanding globally after serving in World War II with the Royal Fusiliers, including the Dunkirk evacuation, earning him the Distinguished Service Order for gallantry. In 1946, he and his wife Joan founded the Capernwray Missionary Fellowship of Torchbearers at Capernwray Hall in England, a ministry that grew into Torchbearers International, with 25 Bible schools worldwide by his death. He pastored no single church but preached itinerantly, authored influential books like The Saving Life of Christ and The Mystery of Godliness, and moved to Estes Park, Colorado, in the late 1980s. Married to Joan, with whom he had four sons—Chris, Mark, Peter, and Andy—he died on August 1, 2007, leaving a legacy as a preacher who transformed lives through his focus on Christ’s sufficiency.