Podcast appearances and mentions of selina hastings

Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote: “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions like why Thomas De Quincey is more widely read, why D.H. Lawrence's best books aren't his novels, Frances's conversion to spookiness, what she thinks about a whole range of modern biographers, literature and parasocial relationships, Elizabeth Bowen, George Meredith, and plenty about Muriel Spark.Here are two brief extracts. There is a full transcript below.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?And.Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking to Frances Wilson. Frances is a biographer. Her latest book, Electric Spark, is a biography of the novelist Muriel Spark, but she has also written about Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, DH Lawrence and others. Frances, welcome.Frances Wilson: Thank you so much for having me on.Henry: Why don't more people read Thomas De Quincey's work?Frances: [laughs] Oh, God. We're going right into the deep end.[laughter]Frances: I think because there's too much of it. When I chose to write about Thomas De Quincey, I just followed one thread in his writing because Thomas De Quincey was an addict. One of the things he was addicted to was writing. He wrote far, far, far too much. He was a professional hack. He was a transcendental hack, if you like, because all of his writing he did while on opium, which made the sentences too long and too high and very, very hard to read.When I wrote about him, I just followed his interest in murder. He was fascinated by murder as a fine art. The title of one of his best essays is On Murder as One of the Fine Arts. I was also interested in his relationship with Wordsworth. I twinned those together, which meant cutting out about 97% of the rest of his work. I think people do read his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I think that's a cult text. It was the memoir, if you want to call it a memoir, that kick-started the whole pharmaceutical memoir business on drugs.It was also the first addict's memoir and the first recovery memoir, and I'd say also the first misery memoir. He's very much at the root of English literary culture. We're all De Quincey-an without knowing it, is my argument.Henry: Oh, no, I fully agree. That's what surprises me, that they don't read him more often.Frances: I know it's a shame, isn't it? Of all the Romantic Circle, he's the one who's the most exciting to read. Also, Lamb is wonderfully exciting to read as well, but Lamb's a tiny little bit more grounded than De Quincey, who was literally not grounded. He's floating in an opium haze above you.[laughter]Henry: What I liked about your book was the way you emphasized the book addiction, not just the opium addiction. It is shocking the way he piled up chests full of books and notebooks, and couldn't get into the room because there were too many books in there. He was [crosstalk].Frances: Yes. He had this in common with Muriel Spark. He was a hoarder, but in a much more chaotic way than Spark, because, as you say, he piled up rooms with papers and books until he couldn't get into the room, and so just rented another room. He was someone who had no money at all. The no money he had went on paying rent for rooms, storing what we would be giving to Oxfam, or putting in the recycling bin. Then he'd forget that he was paying rent on all these rooms filled with his mountains of paper. The man was chaos.Henry: What is D.H. Lawrence's best book?Frances: Oh, my argument about Lawrence is that we've gone very badly wrong in our reading of him, in seeing him primarily as a novelist and only secondarily as an essayist and critic and short story writer, and poet. This is because of F.R. Leavis writing that celebration of him called D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, because novels are not the best of Lawrence. I think the best of his novels is absolutely, without doubt, Sons and Lovers. I think we should put the novels in the margins and put in the centre, the poems, travel writing.Absolutely at the centre of the centre should be his studies in classic American literature. His criticism was- We still haven't come to terms with it. It was so good. We haven't heard all of Lawrence's various voices yet. When Lawrence was writing, contemporaries didn't think of Lawrence as a novelist at all. It was anyone's guess what he was going to come out with next. Sometimes it was a novel [laughs] and it was usually a rant about-- sometimes it was a prophecy. Posterity has not treated Lawrence well in any way, but I think where we've been most savage to him is in marginalizing his best writing.Henry: The short fiction is truly extraordinary.Frances: Isn't it?Henry: I always thought Lawrence was someone I didn't want to read, and then I read the short fiction, and I was just obsessed.Frances: It's because in the short fiction, he doesn't have time to go wrong. I think brevity was his perfect length. Give him too much space, and you know he's going to get on his soapbox and start ranting, start mansplaining. He was a terrible mansplainer. Mansplaining his versions of what had gone wrong in the world. It is like a drunk at the end of a too-long dinner party, and you really want to just bundle him out. Give him only a tiny bit of space, and he comes out with the perfection that is his writing.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?Frances: I think that the way I approach biography is that there is a code to crack, but I'm not necessarily concerned with whether I crack it or not. I think it's just recognizing that there's a hell of a lot going on in the writing and that, in certain cases and not in every case at all, the best way of exploring the psyche of the writer and the complexity of the life is through the writing, which is a argument for psycho biography, which isn't something I necessarily would argue for, because it can be very, very crude.I think with the writers I choose, there is no option. Muriel Spark argued for this as well. She said in her own work as a biographer, which was really very, very strong. She was a biographer before she became a novelist. She thought hard about biography and absolutely in advance of anyone else who thought about biography, she said, "Of course, the only way we can approach the minds of writers is through their work, and the writer's life is encoded in the concerns of their work."When I was writing about Muriel Spark, I followed, as much as I could, to the letter, her own theories of biography, believing that that was part of the code that she left. She said very, very strong and very definitive things about what biography was about and how to write a biography. I tried to follow those rules.Henry: Can we play a little game where I say the names of some biographers and you tell me what you think of them?Frances: Oh my goodness. Okay.Henry: We're not trying to get you into trouble. We just want some quick opinions. A.N. Wilson.Frances: I think he's wonderful as a biographer. I think he's unzipped and he's enthusiastic and he's unpredictable and he's often off the rails. I think his Goethe biography-- Have you read the Goethe biography?Henry: Yes, I thought that was great.Frances: It's just great, isn't it? It's so exciting. I like the way that when he writes about someone, it's almost as if he's memorized the whole of their work.Henry: Yes.Frances: You don't imagine him sitting at a desk piled with books and having to score through his marginalia. It sits in his head, and he just pours it down on a page. I'm always excited by an A.N. Wilson biography. He is one of the few biographers who I would read regardless of who the subject was.Henry: Yes.Frances: I just want to read him.Henry: He does have good range.Frances: He absolutely does have good range.Henry: Selina Hastings.Frances: I was thinking about Selina Hastings this morning, funnily enough, because I had been talking to people over the weekend about her Sybil Bedford biography and why that hadn't lifted. She wrote a very excitingly good life of Nancy Mitford and then a very unexcitingly not good life of Sybil Bedford. I was interested in why the Sybil Bedford simply hadn't worked. I met people this weekend who were saying the same thing, that she was a very good biographer who had just failed [laughs] to give us anything about Sybil Bedford.I think what went wrong in that biography was that she just could not give us her opinions. It's as if she just withdrew from her subject as if she was writing a Wikipedia entry. There were no opinions at all. What the friends I was talking to said was that she just fell out with her subject during the book. That's what happened. She stopped being interested in her. She fell out with her and therefore couldn't be bothered. That's what went wrong.Henry: Interesting. I think her Evelyn Waugh biography is superb.Frances: Yes, I absolutely agree. She was on fire until this last one.Henry: That's one of the best books on Waugh, I think.Frances: Yes.Henry: Absolutely magical.Frances: I also remember, it's a very rare thing, of reading a review of it by Hilary Mantel saying that she had not read a biography that had been as good, ever, as Selina Hastings' on Evelyn Waugh. My goodness, that's high praise, isn't it?Henry: Yes, it is. It is. I'm always trying to push that book on people. Richard Holmes.Frances: He's my favourite. He's the reason that I'm a biographer at all. I think his Coleridge, especially the first volume of the two-volume Coleridge, is one of the great books. It left me breathless when I read it. It was devastating. I also think that his Johnson and Savage book is one of the great books. I love Footsteps as well, his account of the books he didn't write in Footsteps. I think he has a strange magic. When Muriel Spark talked about certain writers and critics having a sixth literary sense, which meant that they tuned into language and thought in a way that the rest of us don't, I think that Richard Holmes does have that. I think he absolutely has it in relation to Coleridge. I'm longing for his Tennyson to come out.Henry: Oh, I know. I know.Frances: Oh, I just can't wait. I'm holding off on reading Tennyson until I've got Holmes to help me read him. Yes, he is quite extraordinary.Henry: I would have given my finger to write the Johnson and Savage book.Frances: Yes, I know. I agree. How often do you return to it?Henry: Oh, all the time. All the time.Frances: Me too.Henry: Michael Holroyd.Frances: Oh, that's interesting, Michael Holroyd, because I think he's one of the great unreads. I think he's in this strange position of being known as a greatest living biographer, but nobody's read him on Augustus John. [laughs] I haven't read his biographies cover to cover because they're too long and it's not in my subject area, but I do look in them, and they're novelistic in their wit and complexity. His sentences are very, very, very entertaining, and there's a lot of freight in each paragraph. I hope that he keeps selling.I love his essays as well, and also, I think that he has been a wonderful ambassador for biography. He's very, very supportive of younger biographers, which not every biographer is, but I know he's been very supportive of younger biographers and is incredibly approachable.Henry: Let's do a few Muriel Spark questions. Why was the Book of Job so important to Muriel Spark?Frances: I think she liked it because it was rogue, because it was the only book of the Bible that wasn't based on any evidence, it wasn't based on any truth. It was a fictional book, and she liked fiction sitting in the middle of fact. That was one of her main things, as all Spark lovers know. She liked the fact that there was this work of pure imagination and extraordinarily powerful imagination sitting in the middle of the Old Testament, and also, she thought it was an absolutely magnificent poem.She saw herself primarily as a poet, and she responded to it as a poem, which, of course, it is. Also, she liked God in it. She described Him as the Incredible Hulk [laughs] and she liked His boastfulness. She enjoyed, as I do, difficult personalities, and she liked the fact that God had such an incredibly difficult personality. She liked the fact that God boasted and boasted and boasted, "I made this and I made that," to Job, but also I think she liked the fact that you hear God's voice.She was much more interested in voices than she was in faces. The fact that God's voice comes out of the burning bush, I think it was an image for her of early radio, this voice speaking, and she liked the fact that what the voice said was tricksy and touchy and impossibly arrogant. He gives Moses all these instructions to lead the Israelites, and Moses says, "But who shall I say sent me? Who are you?" He says, "I am who I am." [laughs] She thought that was completely wonderful. She quotes that all the time about herself. She says, "I know it's a bit large quoting God, but I am who I am." [laughs]Henry: That disembodied voice is very important to her fiction.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's the telephone in Memento Mori.Frances: Yes.Henry: Also, to some extent, tell me what you think of this, the narrator often acts like that.Frances: Like this disembodied voice?Henry: Yes, like you're supposed to feel like you're not quite sure who's telling you this or where you're being told it from. That's why it gets, like in The Ballad of Peckham Rye or something, very weird.Frances: Yes. I'm waiting for the PhD on Muriel Sparks' narrators. Maybe it's being done as we speak, but she's very, very interested in narrators and the difference between first-person and third-person. She was very keen on not having warm narrators, to put it mildly. She makes a strong argument throughout her work for the absence of the seductive narrative. Her narratives are, as we know, unbelievably seductive, but not because we are being flattered as readers and not because the narrator makes herself or himself pretty. The narrator says what they feel like saying, withholds most of what you would like them to say, plays with us, like in a Spark expression, describing her ideal narrator like a cat with a bird [laughs].Henry: I like that. Could she have been a novelist if she had not become a Catholic?Frances: No, she couldn't. The two things happened at the same time. I wonder, actually, whether she became a Catholic in order to become a novelist. It wasn't that becoming a novelist was an accidental effect of being a Catholic. The conversion was, I think, from being a biographer to a novelist rather than from being an Anglican to a Catholic. What happened is a tremendous interest. I think it's the most interesting moment in any life that I've ever written about is the moment of Sparks' conversion because it did break her life in two.She converted when she was in her mid-30s, and several things happened at once. She converted to Catholicism, she became a Catholic, she became a novelist, but she also had this breakdown. The breakdown was very much part of that conversion package. The breakdown was brought on, she says, by taking Dexys. There was slimming pills, amphetamines. She wanted to lose weight. She put on weight very easily, and her weight went up and down throughout her life.She wanted to take these diet pills, but I think she was also taking the pills because she needed to do all-nighters, because she never, ever, ever stopped working. She was addicted to writing, but also she was impoverished and she had to sell her work, and she worked all night. She was in a rush to get her writing done because she'd wasted so much of her life in her early 20s, in a bad marriage trapped in Africa. She needed to buy herself time. She was on these pills, which have terrible side effects, one of which is hallucinations.I think there were other reasons for her breakdown as well. She was very, very sensitive and I think psychologically fragile. Her mother lived in a state of mental fragility, too. She had a crash when she finished her book. She became depressed. Of course, a breakdown isn't the same as depression, but what happened to her in her breakdown was a paranoid attack rather than a breakdown. She didn't crack into nothing and then have to rebuild herself. She just became very paranoid. That paranoia was always there.Again, it's what's exciting about her writing. She was drawn to paranoia in other writers. She liked Cardinal Newman's paranoia. She liked Charlotte Brontë's paranoia, and she had paranoia. During her paranoid attack, she felt very, very interestingly, because nothing that happened in her life was not interesting, that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages. He was encoding these messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, in the program notes to the play, but also in the blurbs he wrote for Faber and Faber, where he was an editor. These messages were very malign and they were encoded in anagrams.The word lived, for example, became devil. I wonder whether one of the things that happened during her breakdown wasn't that she discovered God, but that she met the devil. I don't think that that's unusual as a conversion experience. In fact, the only conversion experience she ever describes, you'll remember, is in The Girls of Slender Means, when she's describing Nicholas Farrington's conversion. That's the only conversion experience she ever describes. She says that his conversion is when he sees one of the girls leaving the burning building, holding a Schiaparelli dress. Suddenly, he's converted because he's seen a vision of evil.She says, "Conversion can be as a result of a recognition of evil, rather than a recognition of good." I think that what might have happened in this big cocktail of things that happened to her during her breakdown/conversion, is that a writer whom she had idolized, T.S. Eliot, who taught her everything that she needed to know about the impersonality of art. Her narrative coldness comes from Eliot, who thought that emotions had no place in art because they were messy, and art should be clean.I think a writer whom she had idolized, she suddenly felt was her enemy because she was converting from his church, because he was an Anglo-Catholic. He was a high Anglican, and she was leaving Anglo-Catholicism to go through the Rubicon, to cross the Rubicon into Catholicism. She felt very strongly that that is something he would not have approved of.Henry: She's also leaving poetry to become a prose writer.Frances: She was leaving his world of poetry. That's absolutely right.Henry: This is a very curious parallel because the same thing exactly happens to De Quincey with his worship of Wordsworth.Frances: You're right.Henry: They have the same obsessive mania. Then this, as you say, not quite a breakdown, but a kind of explosive mania in the break. De Quincey goes out and destroys that mossy hut or whatever it is in the orchard, doesn't he?Frances: Yes, that disgusting hut in the orchard. Yes, you're completely right. What fascinated me about De Quincey, and this was at the heart of the De Quincey book, was how he had been guided his whole life by Wordsworth. He discovered Wordsworth as a boy when he read We Are Seven, that very creepy poem about a little girl sitting on her sibling's grave, describing the sibling as still alive. For De Quincey, who had lost his very adored sister, he felt that Wordsworth had seen into his soul and that Wordsworth was his mentor and his lodestar.He worshipped Wordsworth as someone who understood him and stalked Wordsworth, pursued and stalked him. When he met him, what he discovered was a man without any redeeming qualities at all. He thought he was a dry monster, but it didn't stop him loving the work. In fact, he loved the work more and more. What threw De Quincey completely was that there was such a difference between Wordsworth, the man who had no genius, and Wordsworth, the poet who had nothing but.Eliot described it, the difference between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. What De Quincey was trying to deal with was the fact that he adulated the work, but was absolutely appalled by the man. Yes, you're right, this same experience happened to spark when she began to feel that T.S. Eliot, whom she had never met, was a malign person, but the work was still not only of immense importance to her, but the work had formed her.Henry: You see the Wasteland all over her own work and the shared Dante obsession.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's remarkably strong. She got to the point of thinking that T.S. Eliot was breaking into her house.Frances: Yes. As I said, she had this paranoid imagination, but also what fired her imagination and what repeated itself again and again in the imaginative scenarios that recur in her fiction and nonfiction is the idea of the intruder. It was the image of someone rifling around in cupboards, drawers, looking at manuscripts. This image, you first find it in a piece she wrote about finding herself completely coincidentally, staying the night during the war in the poet Louis MacNeice's house. She didn't know it was Louis MacNeice's house, but he was a poet who was very, very important to her.Spark's coming back from visiting her parents in Edinburgh in 1944. She gets talking to an au pair on the train. By the time they pull into Houston, there's an air raid, and the au pair says, "Come and spend the night at mine. My employers are away and they live nearby in St. John's Wood." Spark goes to this house and sees it's packed with books and papers, and she's fascinated by the quality of the material she finds there.She looks in all the books. She goes into the attic, and she looks at all the papers, and she asks the au pair whose house it is, and the au pair said, "Oh, he's a professor called Professor Louis MacNeice." Spark had just been reading Whitney. He's one of her favourite poets. She retells this story four times in four different forms, as non-fiction, as fiction, as a broadcast, as reflections, but the image that keeps coming back, what she can't get rid of, is the idea of herself as snooping around in this poet's study.She describes herself, in one of the versions, as trying to draw from his papers his power as a writer. She says she sniffs his pens, she puts her hands over his papers, telling herself, "I must become a writer. I must become a writer." Then she makes this weird anonymous phone call. She loved the phone because it was the most strange form of electrical device. She makes a weird anonymous phone call to an agent, saying, "I'm ringing from Louis MacNeice's house, would you like to see my manuscript?" She doesn't give her name, and the agent says yes.Now I don't believe this phone call took place. I think it's part of Sparks' imagination. This idea of someone snooping around in someone else's room was very, very powerful to her. Then she transposed it in her paranoid attack about T.S. Eliot. She transposed the image that Eliot was now in her house, but not going through her papers, but going through her food cupboards. [laughs] In her food cupboards, all she actually had was baked beans because she was a terrible cook. Part of her unwellness at that point was malnutrition. No, she thought that T.S. Eliot was spying on her. She was obsessed with spies. Spies, snoopers, blackmailers.Henry: T.S. Eliot is Stealing My Baked Beans would have been a very good title for a memoir.Frances: It actually would, wouldn't it?Henry: Yes, it'd be great.[laughter]Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now. Anything can happen. This is one of the reasons Spark was attracted to Catholicism because anything can happen, because it legitimizes the supernatural. I felt so strongly that the supernatural experiences that Spark had were real, that what Spark was describing as the spookiness of our own life were things that actually happened.One of the things I found very, very unsettling about her was that everything that happened to her, she had written about first. She didn't describe her experiences in retrospect. She described them as in foresight. For example, her first single authored published book, because she wrote for a while in collaboration with her lover, Derek Stanford, but her first single authored book was a biography of Mary Shelley.Henry: Great book.Frances: An absolutely wonderful book, which really should be better than any of the other Mary Shelley biographies. She completely got to Mary Shelley. Everything she described in Mary Shelley's life would then happen to Spark. For example, she described Mary Shelley as having her love letters sold. Her lover sold Mary Shelley's love letters, and Mary Shelley was then blackmailed by the person who bought them. This happened to Spark. She described Mary Shelley's closest friends all becoming incredibly jealous of her literary talent. This happened to Spark. She described trusting people who betrayed her. This happened to Spark.Spark was the first person to write about Frankenstein seriously, to treat Frankenstein as a masterpiece rather than as a one-off weird novel that is actually just the screenplay for a Hammer Horror film. This was 1951, remember. Everything she described in Frankenstein as its power is a hybrid text, described the powerful hybrid text that she would later write about. What fascinated her in Frankenstein was the relationship between the creator and the monster, and which one was the monster. This is exactly the story of her own life. I think where she is. She was really interested in art monsters and in the fact that the only powerful writers out there, the only writers who make a dent, are monsters.If you're not a monster, you're just not competing. I think Spark has always spoken about as having a monster-like quality. She says at the end of one of her short stories, Bang-bang You're Dead, "Am I an intellectual woman, or am I a monster?" It's the question that is frequently asked of Spark. I think she worked so hard to monsterize herself. Again, she learnt this from Elliot. She learnt her coldness from Elliot. She learnt indifference from Elliot. There's a very good letter where she's writing to a friend, Shirley Hazzard, in New York.It's after she discovers that her lover, Derek Stanford, has sold her love letters, 70 love letters, which describe two very, very painfully raw, very tender love letters. She describes to Shirley Hazzard this terrible betrayal. She says, "But, I'm over it. I'm over it now. Now I'm just going to be indifferent." She's telling herself to just be indifferent about this. You watch her tutoring herself into the indifference that she needed in order to become the artist that she knew she was.Henry: Is this why she's attracted to mediocrities, because she can possess them and monsterize them, and they're good feeding for her artistic programme?Frances: Her attraction to mediocrities is completely baffling, and it makes writing her biography, a comedy, because the men she was surrounded by were so speck-like. Saw themselves as so important, but were, in fact, so speck-like that you have to laugh, and it was one after another after another. I'd never come across, in my life, so many men I'd never heard of. This was the literary world that she was surrounded by. It's odd, I don't know whether, at the time, she knew how mediocre these mediocrities were.She certainly recognised it in her novels where they're all put together into one corporate personality called the pisseur de copie in A Far Cry from Kensington, where every single literary mediocrity is in that critic who she describes as pissing and vomiting out copy. With Derek Stanford, who was obviously no one's ever heard of now, because he wrote nothing that was memorable, he was her partner from the end of the 40s until-- They ceased their sexual relationship when she started to be interested in becoming a Catholic in 1953, but she was devoted to him up until 1958. She seemed to be completely incapable of recognising that she had the genius and he had none.Her letters to him deferred to him, all the time, as having literary powers that she hadn't got, as having insights that she hadn't got, he's better read than she was. She was such an amazingly good critic. Why could she not see when she looked at his baggy, bad prose that it wasn't good enough? She rated him so highly. When she was co-authoring books with him, which was how she started her literary career, they would occasionally write alternative sentences. Some of her sentences are always absolutely-- they're sharp, lean, sparkling, and witty, and his are way too long and really baggy and they don't say anything. Obviously, you can see that she's irritated by it.She still doesn't say, "Look, I'm going now." It was only when she became a novelist that she said, "I want my mind to myself." She puts, "I want my mind to myself." She didn't want to be in a double act with him. Doubles were important to her. She didn't want to be in a double act with him anymore. He obviously had bought into her adulation of him and hadn't recognised that she had this terrifying power as a writer. It was now his turn to have the breakdown. Spark had the mental breakdown in 1950, '45. When her first novel came out in 1957, it was Stanford who had the breakdown because he couldn't take on board who she was as a novelist.What he didn't know about her as a novelist was her comic sense, how that would fuel the fiction, but also, he didn't recognize because he reviewed her books badly. He didn't recognise that the woman who had been so tender, vulnerable, and loving with him could be this novelist who had nothing to say about tenderness or love. In his reviews, he says, "Why are her characters so cold?" because he thought that she should be writing from the core of her as a human being rather than the core of her as an intellect.Henry: What are her best novels?Frances: Every one I read, I think this has to be the best.[laughter]This is particularly the case in the early novels, where I'm dazzled by The Comforters and think there cannot have been a better first novel of the 20th century or even the 21st century so far. The Comforters. Then read Robinson, her second novel, and think, "Oh God, no, that is her best novel. Then Memento Mori, I think, "Actually, that must be the best novel of the 20th century." [laughs] Then you move on to The Ballad of Peckham Rye, I think, "No, that's even better."The novels landed. It's one of the strange things about her; it took her so long to become a novelist. When she had become one, the novels just landed. Once in one year, two novels landed. In 1959, she had, it was The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, both just completely extraordinary. The novels had been the storing up, and then they just fell on the page. They're different, but samey. They're samey in as much as they're very, very, very clever. They're clever about Catholicism, and they have the same narrative wit. My God, do the plots work in different ways. She was wonderful at plots. She was a great plotter. She liked plots in both senses of the world.She liked the idea of plotting against someone, also laying a plot. She was, at the same time, absolutely horrified by being caught inside someone's plot. That's what The Comforters is about, a young writer called Caroline Rose, who has a breakdown, it's a dramatisation of Sparks' own breakdown, who has a breakdown, and believes that she is caught inside someone else's story. She is a typewriter repeating all of her thoughts. Typewriter and a chorus repeating all of her thoughts.What people say about The Comforters is that Caroline Rose thought she is a heroine of a novel who finds herself trapped in a novel. Actually, if you read what Caroline Rose says in the novel, she doesn't think she's trapped in a novel; she thinks she's trapped in a biography. "There is a typewriter typing the story of our lives," she says to her boyfriend. "Of our lives." Muriel Sparks' first book was about being trapped in a biography, which is, of course, what she brought on herself when she decided to trap herself in a biography. [laughs]Henry: I think I would vote for Loitering with Intent, The Girls of Slender Means as my favourites. I can see that Memento Mori is a good book, but I don't love it, actually.Frances: Really? Interesting. Okay. I completely agree with you about-- I think Loitering with Intent is my overall favourite. Don't you find every time you read it, it's a different book? There are about 12 books I've discovered so far in that book. She loved books inside books, but every time I read it, I think, "Oh my God, it's changed shape again. It's a shape-shifting novel."Henry: We all now need the Frances Wilson essay about the 12 books inside Loitering with Intent.Frances: I know.[laughter]Henry: A few more general questions to close. Did Thomas De Quincey waste his talents?Frances: I wouldn't have said so. I think that's because every single day of his life, he was on opium.Henry: I think the argument is a combination of too much opium and also too much magazine work and not enough "real serious" philosophy, big poems, whatever.Frances: I think the best of his work went into Blackwood's, so the magazine work. When he was taken on by Blackwood's, the razor-sharp Edinburgh magazine, then the best of his work took place. I think that had he only written the murder essays, that would have been enough for me, On Murder as a Fine Art.That was enough. I don't need any more of De Quincey. I think Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is also enough in as much as it's the great memoir of addiction. We don't need any more memoirs of addiction, just read that. It's not just a memoir of being addicted to opium. It's about being addicted to what's what. It's about being a super fan and addicted to writing. He was addicted to everything. If he was in AA now, they'd say, apparently, there are 12 addictions, he had all of them. [laughs]Henry: Yes. People talk a lot about parasocial relationships online, where you read someone online or you follow them, and you have this strange idea in your head that you know them in some way, even though they're just this disembodied online person. You sometimes see people say, "Oh, we should understand this more." I think, "Well, read the history of literature, parasocial relationships everywhere."Frances: That's completely true. I hadn't heard that term before. The history of literature, a parasocial relationship. That's your next book.Henry: There we go. I think what I want from De Quincey is more about Shakespeare, because I think the Macbeth essay is superb.Frances: Absolutely brilliant. On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.Henry: Yes, and then you think, "Wait, where's the rest of this book? There should be an essay about every play."Frances: That's an absolutely brilliant example of microhistory, isn't it? Just taking a moment in a play, just the knocking at the gate, the morning after the murders, and blowing that moment up, so it becomes the whole play. Oh, my God, it's good. You're right.Henry: It's so good. What is, I think, "important about it", is that in the 20th century, critics started saying or scholars started saying a lot, "We can't just look at the words on the page. We've got to think about the dramaturgy. We've got to really, really think about how it plays out." De Quincey was an absolute master of that. It's really brilliant.Frances: Yes.Henry: What's your favourite modern novel or novelist?Frances: Oh, Hilary Mantel, without doubt, I think. I think we were lucky enough to live alongside a great, great, great novelist. I think the Wolf Hall trilogy is absolutely the greatest piece of narrative fiction that's come out of the 21st century. I also love her. I love her work as an essayist. I love her. She's spooky like Spark. She was inspired.Henry: Yes, she is. Yes.Frances: She learnt a lot of her cunning from Spark, I think. She's written a very spooky memoir. In fact, the only women novelists who acknowledge Spark as their influencer are Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel, although you can see Spark in William Boyd all the time. I think we're pretty lucky to live alongside William Boyd as well. Looking for real, real greatness, I think there's no one to compare with Mantel. Do you agree?Henry: I don't like the third volume of the trilogy.Frances: Okay. Right.Henry: Yes, in general, I do agree. Yes. I think some people don't like historical fiction for a variety of reasons. It may take some time for her to get it. I think she's acknowledged as being really good. I don't know that she's yet acknowledged at the level that you're saying.Frances: Yes.Henry: I think that will take a little bit longer. Maybe as and when there's a biography that will help with that, which I'm sure there will be a biography.Frances: I think they need to wait. I do think it's important to wait for a reputation to settle before starting the biography. Her biography will be very interesting because she married the same man twice. Her growth as a novelist was so extraordinary. Spark, she spent time in Africa. She had this terrible, terrible illness. She knew something. I think what I love about Mantel is, as with Spark, she knew something. She knew something, and she didn't quite know what it was that she knew. She had to write because of this knowledge. When you read her, you know that she's on a different level of understanding.Henry: You specialise in slightly neglected figures of English literature. Who else among the canonical writers deserves a bit more attention?Frances: Oh, that's interesting. I love minor characters. I think Spark was very witty about describing herself as a minor novelist or a writer of minor novels when she was evidently major. She always saw the comedy in being a minor. All the minor writers interest me. Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. No, they have heard Elizabeth Bowen has been treated well by Hermione Lee and Henry Green has been treated well by Jeremy Treglown.Why are they not up there yet? They're so much better than most of their contemporaries. I am mystified and fascinated by why it is that the most powerful writers tend to be kicked into the long grass. It's dazzling. When you read a Henry Green novel, you think, "But this is what it's all about. He's understood everything about what the novel can do. Why has no one heard of him?"Henry: I think Elizabeth Bowen's problem is that she's so concise, dense, and well-structured, and everything really plays its part in the pattern of the whole that it's not breezy reading.Frances: No, it's absolutely not.Henry: I think that probably holds her back in some way, even though when I have pushed it on people, most of the time they've said, "Gosh, she's a genius."Frances: Yes.Henry: It's not an easy genius. Whereas Dickens, the pages sort of fly along, something like that.Frances: Yes. One of the really interesting things about Spark is that she really, really is easy reading. At the same time, there's so much freight in those books. There's so much intellectual weight and so many games being played. There's so many books inside the books. Yet you can just read them for the pleasure. You can just read them for the plot. You can read one in an afternoon and think that you've been lost inside a book for 10 years. You don't get that from Elizabeth Bowen. That's true. The novels, you feel the weight, don't you?Henry: Yes.Frances: She's Jamesian. She's more Jamesian, I think, than Spark is.Henry: Something like A World of Love, it requires quite a lot of you.Frances: Yes, it does. Yes, it's not bedtime reading.Henry: No, exactly.Frances: Sitting up in a library.Henry: Yes. Now, you mentioned James. You're a Henry James expert.Frances: I did my PhD on Henry James.Henry: Yes. Will you ever write about him?Frances: I have, actually. Just a little plug. I've just done a selection of James's short stories, three volumes, which are coming out, I think, later this year for Riverrun with a separate introduction for each volume. I think that's all the writing I'm going to do on James. When I was an academic, I did some academic essays on him for collections and things. No, I've never felt, ever, ready to write on James because he's too complicated. I can only take tiny, tiny bits of James and home in on them.Henry: He's a great one for trying to crack the code.Frances: He really is. In fact, I was struck all the way through writing Electric Spark by James's understanding of the comedy of biography, which is described in the figure in the carpet. Remember that wonderful story where there's a writer called Verica who explains to a young critic that none of the critics have understood what his work's about. Everything that's written about him, it's fine, but it's absolutely missed his main point, his beautiful point. He said that in order to understand what the work's about, you have to look for The Figure in the Carpet. It's The Figure in the CarpetIt's the string on which my pearls are strung. A couple of critics become completely obsessed with looking for this Figure in the Carpet. Of course, Spark loved James's short stories. You feel James's short stories playing inside her own short stories. I think that one of the games she left for her biographers was the idea of The Figure in the Carpet. Go on, find it then. Find it. [laughs] The string on which my pearls are strung.Henry: Why did you leave academia? We should say that you did this before it became the thing that everyone's doing.Frances: Is everyone leaving now?Henry: A lot of people are leaving now.Frances: Oh, I didn't know. I was ahead of the curve. I left 20 years ago because I wasn't able to write the books I wanted to write. I left when I'd written two books as an academic. My first was Literary Seductions, and my second was a biography of a blackmailing courtesan called Harriet Wilson, and the book was called The Courtesan's Revenge. My department was sniffy about the books because they were published by Faber and not by OUP, and suggested that somehow I was lowering the tone of the department.This is what things were like 20 years ago. Then I got a contract to write The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, my third book, again with Faber. I didn't want to write the book with my head of department in the back of my mind saying, "Make this into an academic tome and put footnotes in." I decided then that I would leave, and I left very suddenly. Now, I said I'm leaving sort of now, and I've got books to write, and felt completely liberated. Then for The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, I decided not to have footnotes. It's the only book I've ever written without footnotes, simply as a celebration of no longer being in academia.Then the things I loved about being in academia, I loved teaching, and I loved being immersed in literature, but I really couldn't be around colleagues and couldn't be around the ridiculous rules of what was seen as okay. In fact, the university I left, then asked me to come back on a 0.5 basis when they realised that it was now fashionable to have someone who was a trade author. They asked me to come back, which I did not want to do. I wanted to spend days where I didn't see people rather than days where I had to talk to colleagues all the time. I think that academia is very unhappy. The department I was in was incredibly unhappy.Since then, I took up a job very briefly in another English department where I taught creative writing part-time. That was also incredibly unhappy. I don't know whether other French departments or engineering departments are happier places than English departments, but English departments are the most unhappy places I think I've ever seen.[laughter]Henry: What do you admire about the work of George Meredith?Frances: Oh, I love George Meredith. [laughs] Yes. I think Modern Love, his first novel, Modern Love, in a strange sonnet form, where it's not 14 lines, but 16 lines. By the time you get to the bottom two lines, the novel, the sonnet has become hysterical. Modern Love hasn't been properly recognised. It's an account of the breakdown of his marriage. His wife, who was the daughter of the romantic, minor novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. His wife had an affair with the artist who painted the famous Death of Chatterton. Meredith was the model for Chatterton, the dead poet in his purple silks, with his hand falling on the ground. There's a lot of mythology around Meredith.I think, as with Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, he's difficult. He's difficult. The other week, I tried to reread Diana of the Crossways, which was a really important novel, and I still love it. I really recognise that it's not an easy read. He doesn't try, in any way, to seduce his readers. They absolutely have to crawl inside each book to sit inside his mind and see the world as he's seeing it.Henry: Can you tell us what you will do next?Frances: At the moment, I'm testing some ideas out. I feel, at the end of every biography, you need a writer. You need to cleanse your palate. Otherwise, there's a danger of writing the same book again. I need this time, I think, to write about, to move century and move genders. I want to go back, I think, to the 19th century. I want to write about a male writer for a moment, and possibly not a novelist as well, because after being immersed in Muriel Sparks' novels, no other novel is going to seem good enough. I'm testing 19th-century men who didn't write novels, and it will probably be a minor character.Henry: Whatever it is, I look forward to reading it. Frances Wilson, thank you very much.Frances: Thank you so much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

12 Then the detachment of troops and the captain and the officers of the Jews arrested Jesus and bound Him. The commander (Gr. chiliarchos, cf. Acts 22:24, 26, 27, 28; 23:17, 19, 22) in view was the officer in charge of the Roman soldiers. He was evidently the person with the most official authority on the scene. However the Jewish officers (i.e., temple police) also played a part in Jesus' arrest. Perhaps John noted that they bound Jesus in view of Isaiah's prophecy that Messiah's enemies would lead Him as a lamb to the slaughter (Isa. 53:7). Jesus' disciples abandoned Him when His enemies took him into custody (cf. Matt. 26:56; Mark 14:50). So begins 6 illegal trials – See Chuck Swindoll's graph 3 Jewish Trials and then 3 Roman Trials  13 And they led Him away to Annas first, for he was the father-in-law of Caiaphas who was high priest that year. Mt 26:57; Lu 3:2 The words, They … brought Him first to Annas, provide information not given in the other Gospels.[i] In the OT the high priesthood was for life and stayed in the lineage of Aaron. However, the Romans had turned this office into a political plumb, purchased by a Levitical family. The high priest controlled and operated the merchandising in the Court of the Women. Jesus' cleansing of the Temple angered this family.[ii] Both high priests evidently occupied the same building. One was Annas, the former high priest whom the Jews still regarded as the legitimate high priest since the high priesthood under the Mosaic Law was for life. He served as the official high priest from A.D. 6 to 15 when the Roman procurator Valerius Gratus deposed him. Five of Annas' sons plus his son- in-law, Caiaphas, succeeded him in this office. Consequently it was natural that the Jews regarded Annas as the patriarch and the true high priest and that he continued to exert considerable influence throughout his lifetime. The other high priest was Caiaphas, Annas' son-in-law whom the Romans had placed in the office in A.D. 18 where he remained until A.D.36. Annas was the first of the two men to interview Jesus.  14 Now it was Caiaphas who advised the Jews that it was expedient that one man should die for the people. John 11:50 John doubtless identified Caiaphas as he did here to remind his readers of the prediction of Jesus' substitute sacrifice (11:50), not just to identify Caiaphas. This identification also makes unnecessary a full recording of the  deliberations  that  led  to  the  Sanhedrin's  verdict.  That  record  was already available in the Synoptics and was therefore unnecessary in John's Gospel.  15 And Simon Peter followed Jesus, and so did another disciple. Now that disciple was known to the high priest, and went with Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest. Mt 26:58; Mr. 14:54; Lu 22:54 This is a very strong term for “acquaintance” and seems to mean a “close friend” (cf. Luke 2:44 and 23:49). [iii] There has been much discussion as to the identity of this other disciple: (1) the traditional theory has been that it is the Apostle John because of a similar phrase used of him in 20:2, 3, 4, and 8. Also, another possible connection is with John 19:25, which names John's mother, who could possibly be a sister of Mary, which means he may have been a Levite and therefore a priest (cf. Polycarp's testimony). (2) this may have been a local unnamed follower like Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea because of their association with the high priest and his family (cf. vv. 15–16). As the other evangelists, John alternated his account of the events surrounding Jesus' religious trial. He described what was happening in the courtyard (vv. 15-18), then what was happening inside (vv. 19-24), then what happened outside again (vv. 25-27). This literary technique contrasts Jesus with Peter.  16 But Peter stood at the door outside. Then the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out and spoke to her who kept the door, and brought Peter in. Mt 26:69; Mr. 14:66; Lu 22:54  17 Then the servant girl who kept the door said to Peter, "You are not also one of this Man's disciples, are you?" He said, "I am not." She asked Peter if he was one too, expecting a negative reply, as the Greek text makes clear. Her question reflected some disdain for Jesus. Peter succumbed to the pressure of the moment and denied his association with Jesus (13:37). Perhaps what he had done to Malchus made him more eager to blend into his surroundings.  18 Now the servants and officers who had made a fire of coals stood there, for it was cold, and they warmed themselves. And Peter stood with them and warmed himself. Peter's denial before the servant girl was a striking contradiction to his earlier boast to lay down his life for Jesus (13:37), and his show of offense in cutting off Malchus' ear (18:10). Evidently the other disciple was also in danger (perhaps greater) but he did not deny Jesus. Peter stood by the fire … warming himself in the cold spring evening, Jerusalem being about 2,500 feet above sea level. This little detail about the cold evening is another indication that the author of this book was an eyewitness. Peter not only denied Jesus, but He also stood with Jesus' enemies as they warmed themselves in the courtyard of the high priest's large residence. Matthew 26:41 Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”   19 The high priest then asked Jesus about His disciples and His doctrine. John's version of Peter's denial is quite similar to those of the other Gospel writers, but His revelation of Jesus' interrogation by Annas is unique. None of the other evangelists mentioned it. He probably asked Jesus about His disciples to ascertain the size of His following since one of the religious leaders' chief concerns was the power of Jesus' popularity. Annas' interest in His teachings undoubtedly revolved around who Jesus claimed to be (cf. 7:12,47; 19:4). Both subjects were significant since many of the Jews suspected Jesus of being a political insurrectionist. From our Lord's answer it would seem that “His disciples” were understood to be some secret party. [iv] 20 Jesus answered him, "I spoke openly to the world. I always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where the Jews always meet, and in secret I have said nothing. Mt 26:55; Lu 4:15; John 7:14,26,28; 8:2 He ignores the first question so as to protect his disciples, takes the attention off the disciples and puts it on Himself He was assuring Annas that His teachings were not subversive. He did not have two types of teaching, a harmless one for the multitudes and a revolutionary one for his disciples. He invited Annas to question His hearers, not just His disciples,  to  determine  if  He  had  indeed  taught  anything  for  which someone might accuse Him of being disloyal. The testimony of witnesses was an indispensable part of any serious trial in Judaism. De 17:6 "Whoever is deserving of death shall be put to death on the testimony of two or three witnesses; he shall not be put to death on the testimony of one witness.  21 "Why do you ask Me? Ask those who have heard Me what I said to them. Indeed they know what I said." This seems to imply that He saw the attempt to draw Him into self-incrimination, and resented it by falling back upon the right of every accused party to have some charge laid against Him by competent witnesses. [v] He indicts them by showing they don't care about justice by asking for witnesses which they don't produce.  22 And when He had said these things, one of the officers who stood by struck Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying, "Do You answer the high priest like that?" The Greek word rhapisma translated "blow" (NASB) means a sharp blow with the palm of the hand. Jesus' response to this attack was logical rather than emotional or physical. He simply appealed for a fair trial (cf. Acts 23:2-5). The man who stuck Him was not treating Him fairly. This was a case of police brutality. Jesus had shown no disrespect for Annas.  Jer 20:2; Ac 23:2 Isaiah 50:6 I gave My back to those who struck Me, And lMy cheeks to those who plucked out the beard; I did not hide My face from shame and spitting.   23 Jesus answered him, "If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; but if well, why do you strike Me?" This shows that Mt 5:39 is not to be taken to the letter, but He did by going all the way to the cross. It was easier to evade the truth or to silence the One who spoke the truth than to attempt to answer the truth. Truth has a self-evident power of persuasion and those who oppose it find it difficult to deny. Jesus pressed this point and exposed their hypocrisy. They knew the truth but loved error. They saw the light but loved darkness  24 Then Annas sent Him bound to Caiaphas the high priest. Mt 26:57 Annas  could  not  produce  anything  for  which  the  Sanhedrin  could condemn or even charge Jesus. Therefore he sent Jesus to Caiaphas. The descriptions of Jesus' hearings in the Gospels alternate between Jesus' interrogations and Peter's denials. It seems clear therefore that Annas and Caiaphas lived and interviewed Jesus in different parts of the same large residence or palace. Caiaphas had to interview Jesus to bring charges against Him before the Sanhedrin since Caiaphas was the current official high priest. John noted that Jesus remained bound as a criminal even though He had done nothing to warrant physical restraint. John did not record what happened when Jesus appeared before Caiaphas and, later, before the Sanhedrin (cf. Matt. 26:57-68; Mark 14:53-65; Luke 22:66-71). Perhaps he omitted these aspects of Jesus' religious trial because the earlier Synoptic Gospels contained adequate accounts of them. Maybe John considered the meeting of the Sanhedrin that he described in 11:47-53 as Jesus' official condemnation.  25 Now Simon Peter stood and warmed himself. Therefore they said to him, "You are not also one of His disciples, are you?" He denied it and said, "I am not!" Mt 26:69, 71; Mr. 14:69; Lu 22:58; 24:53 Psalm 1:1 Blessed is the man Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, Nor stands in the path of sinners, Nor sits in the seat of the scornful; 2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD, And in His law he meditates day and night. 26 One of the servants of the high priest, a relative of him whose ear Peter cut off, said, "Did I not see you in the garden with Him?" Peter should not have followed at all since Jesus had gotten them out of trouble at the garden. There is some discrepancy among the four Gospels as to who asked the questions of Peter: (1) in Mark, it is a maid who asked the first question (cf. Mark 14:69); (2) in Matthew it is another servant girl (cf. Matt. 26:71); and (3) in Luke 22:58 it is a man. It is obvious from the historical setting that one person asked the question around the fire and the others joined in (cf. v. 18).[vi] Unlike the first two questions in vv. 17 and 25, this grammatical form expects a “yes” answer.  27 Peter then denied again; and immediately a rooster crowed. Mt 26:74; Mr. 14:72; Lu 22:60; John 13:38 Matthew 26:41 Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”  If you live too close to the world, you will get burned by the   He should have followed Jesus counsel and left.  He goes and denies Jesus 3 times, open to temptation Luke records Peter sits down at the fire with the wicked Lu 22:55 Now when they had kindled a fire in the midst of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat among them. No one is immune to failure, Even the mighty fall 1Co 10:12 Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. This section Shows the Glory of God and the sinfulness of man Robert Robinson was just a small boy when his dad died. In 18th century England, there was little in the way of a social welfare system and this meant that he had to go to work while still very young. Without a father to guide and steady him, he fell in with bad companions. One day his gang of rowdies harassed a drunken gypsy. Pouring liquor into her, they demanded she tell their fortunes for free. Pointing her finger at Robert she told him he would live to see his children and grandchildren. This struck a tender spot in his heart. "If I'm going to live to see my children and grandchildren," he thought, "I'll have to change my way of living. I can't keep on like I'm going now." He decided to go hear the Methodist preacher George Whitefield. To cover his "weak" urge, he suggested that the boys go with him and heckle the gathering. Whitefield preached on the text: "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" (Matthew 3:7). Robert left in dread, under a deep sense of sin that lasted for three years. Finally, at the age of twenty, he made peace with God and immediately set out to become a Methodist preacher himself. Two years later, in 1757, he wrote a hymn which expressed his joy in his new faith: Come, Thou Fount of every blessing, Tune my heart to sing Thy grace Streams of mercy, never ceasing, Call for songs of loudest praise. Teach me some melodious sonnet, Sung by flaming tongues above. Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it, Mount of Thy redeeming love. This was printed the next year. At first people thought that Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, a strong Methodist had written this. Eventually it was learned that Robert was the writer. In the last stanza, Robert had written: Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, Prone to leave the God I love Take my heart, O take and seal it Seal it for thy courts above. Prone to wander Robert was. He left the Methodists and became a Baptist. Later on, having become a close friend of Joseph Priestly, he was accused of becoming a Unitarian. Priestly and other Unitarians denied the full divinity of Christ. However, in a sermon he preached after he supposedly became a Unitarian, Robinson clearly declared that Jesus was God, and added, "Christ in Himself is a person infinitely lovely as both God and man." Robert died on this day, June 9, 1790. Had he left the God he loved? A widely-told, but unverifiable, story says that one day as he was riding in a stagecoach a lady asked him what he thought of the hymn she was humming. He responded, "Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then."     Mark 8:36 "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?              John 14:6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. Have you trusted Him as your Savior? He can Save you if You ask Him based on His death, burial, and resurrection for your sins. Believe in Him for forgiveness of your sins today.               “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”  -John 8:32             Our mission is to spread the gospel and to go to the least of these with the life-changing message of Jesus Christ; We reach out to those the World has forgotten.              hisloveministries.podbean.com #HLMSocial hisloveministries.net https://www.instagram.com/hisloveministries1/?hl=en His Love Ministries on Itunes Don't go for all the gusto you can get, go for all the God (Jesus Christ) you can get. The gusto will get you, Jesus can save you. https://www.facebook.com/His-Love-Ministries-246606668725869/?tn-str=k*F             The world is trying to solve earthly problems that can only be solved with heavenly solutions [i] Walvoord, J. F., Zuck, R. B., & Dallas Theological Seminary. (1985). The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures (Jn 18:12–14). Wheaton, IL: Victor Books. [ii] Utley, R. J. (1999). Vol. Volume 4: The Beloved Disciple's Memoirs and Letters: The Gospel of John, I, II, and III John. Study Guide Commentary Series (162). Marshall, Texas: Bible Lessons International. [iii] Utley, R. J. (1999). Vol. Volume 4: The Beloved Disciple's Memoirs and Letters: The Gospel of John, I, II, and III John. Study Guide Commentary Series (163). Marshall, Texas: Bible Lessons International. [iv] Jamieson, R., Fausset, A. R., & Brown, D. (1997). Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (Jn 18:19). Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc. [v] Jamieson, R., Fausset, A. R., & Brown, D. (1997). Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (Jn 18:21). Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc. [vi] Utley, R. J. (1999). Vol. Volume 4: The Beloved Disciple's Memoirs and Letters: The Gospel of John, I, II, and III John. Study Guide Commentary Series (164). Marshall, Texas: Bible Lessons International.

Una mujer que pertenecía a una de las familias más ricas e influyentes de su época, y que llevó el evangelio a los aristócratas ingleses. SÍGUENOS Sitio web: http://biteproject.com​​​ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@biteproject Twitter: https://twitter.com/biteproject​​​ Podcast: https://anchor.fm/biteproject TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@biteproject Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/biteproject/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/biteproject/​​​ Música: Envato Elements.

Lady Selina Hastings (1707-1791): We finish today with the powerful testimony of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, a woman who was instrumental in furthering the Gospel through the Methodist movement in the 18th century. In fact, it is safe to say that Selina was the glue that held the movement together and enabled it to propagate throughout Britain and beyond! Her love for Jesus and surrender to His will for her life is at once convicting and inspiring! We close our episode with a testimony from one of our listeners in Australia, C.J. Manan, who shared with us about the life and ministry of her sister, Gail. It's a lovely story of God's faithfulness and we know you will be blessed to hear it! Women of Awakenings by Louis & Betty Drummond The Bold Evangelist: The Life & Ministry of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon by Priscilla Wong 

Lady Selina Hastings (1707-1791): The great 18th century Methodist Revival brought vast numbers to Christ and produced many remarkable, godly leaders. One of the most significant of these was Lady Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon and the “Patroness of Methodism.” A member of the English aristocracy and descendant of royalty, Selina was also a devout member of the Anglican Church. However, when she recognized her need for a relationship with Jesus beyond mere religious formality, her life was transformed! She found like-minded fellowship in the fledgling Methodist movement with the Wesley brothers and George Whitefield, and teamed up with them to bring the Gospel throughout the British Isles, American Colonies and beyond. Because of her wide social and political influence, financial support, and unique ability to foster Christian unity, Selina made an incalculable impact on her nation and the world for the cause of Christ! Women of Awakenings by Louis & Betty Drummond The Bold Evangelist: The Life & Ministry of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon by Priscilla Wong 

How do we explain the death and resurrection of Christ to children? This month we invited Ann Garrido into conversation about the spiritual lives of children. Ann is is Associate Professor of Homiletics and Director of Spiritual Formation for the at Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis and a formation leader with the U.S. National Association of Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. You can read Ann's article on reading the Resurrection narratives to children at http://cctheo.org/news/resurrection-narratives/ Ann referenced the Children's Illustrated Bible by Selina Hastings and Eric Thomas. Learn more about Ann's work and books at anngarrido.com.

Women We Should Know and Honor: Selina Hastings, Countess of HuntingdonSeries: Women We Should Know and Honor - Portraits from the Family Album of our Spiritual Heritage Speaker: Jon HinksonChristian EducationDate: 5th September 2021

‘I wondered for a time who this brilliant “Mrs Bedford” could be,' wrote Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford on reading Sybille Bedford's first novel, A Legacy. The twentieth-century European writer Sybille Bedford could be many things: traveller, gourmand, oenophile, court reporter, Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist. In this month's literary podcast the Slightly Foxed team discover the pleasures and landscapes of Bedford's life, loves and writing with her biographer, Selina Hastings. The daughter of a German Baron, from childhood Bedford travelled endlessly, living in Germany, Italy, France, Portugal and Britain. Claiming to suffer from sloth and love of life, she deified her friend Aldous Huxley, had assets frozen by the Nazi regime, was funded by Martha Gellhorn and was known for her many lovers, all while experiencing the ‘tearing, crushing, defeating agony' of writing. From a delicious account of a visit to Don Otavio in Mexico and vivid reportage of the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial to the autobiographical novel Jigsaw, we see the world through Bedford's observant eye and voracious appetite. And we continue our travels with a trip to the Heath Robinson Museum in London, exploring the cartoonist's imagination through electric egg poachers, Christmas cracker-pulling machines and other curious contraptions, before sharing reading recommendations for Italo Calvino's short stories that follow the cycle of the seasons, and an enlightening experiment with fiction from Francis Spufford. (Episode duration: 43 minutes; 56 seconds)  Books Mentioned We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information. Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life, Selina Hastings A Visit to Don Otavio, Sybille Bedford (12:00) A Legacy, Sybille Bedford (17:41) The Best We Can Do, Sybille Bedford is out of print (21:23) The Trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Sybille Bedford (21:33) Jigsaw, Sybille Bedford (28:51) Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Sybille Bedford is out of print (29:40) Very Heath Robinson, Adam Hart-Davis (38:34) Marcovaldo, Italo Calvino (39:10) Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford (41:02) Other available books by Sybille Bedford A Favourite of the Gods A Compass Error Pleasures and Landscapes Related Slightly Foxed Articles Bruised, Shocked, but Elated, Selina Hastings on Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio, Issue 69 (12:00) A Bath with a View, Caroline Chapman on Sybille Bedford, A Legacy, Issue 38 (17:41) Other Links Listen to Selina Hastings on Episode 18 of the Slightly Foxed Podcast: The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh (0:54) Sybille Bedford on Desert Island Discs, recorded in 1998 (9.09) Heath Robinson Museum (36:20) Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

Priscilla Wong (MTS, Toronto Baptist Seminary) is an independent scholar and the author of Anne Steele and Her Spiritual Vision: Seeing God in the Peaks, Valleys, and Plateaus of Life and The Bold Evangelist: The Life and Ministry of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. 

Priscilla Wong (MTS, Toronto Baptist Seminary) is an independent scholar and the author of Anne Steele and Her Spiritual Vision: Seeing God in the Peaks, Valleys, and Plateaus of Life and The Bold Evangelist: The Life and Ministry of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. 

Today on the Almanac, we remember Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon known as “Lady Bountiful” on account of her support of Evangelical revival. #OTD #1517 #churchhistory — SHOW NOTES are available: https://www.1517.org/podcasts/the-christian-history-almanac GIVE BACK: Support the work of 1517 today CONTACT: CHA@1517.org SUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts Spotify Stitcher Overcast Google Play FOLLOW US: Facebook Twitter Audio production by Christopher Gillespie (gillespie.media).

0-00 - Introduction-1-58 - 2 Kings 4-9-46 - 2 Kings 8-14-45 - 1 - Praise her discernment.-19-19 - 2 - Praise her hospitality and use of her wealth.-25-10 - 3 - Praise her right motivation for her acts of good.-27-03 - 4 - Praise her submissiveness to her husband.-30-06 - 5 - Praise her level of contentment.-31-42 - 6 - Praise her for the response of faith and persistent prayer she had during the trial of the death of her son.-42-37 - 7 - Praise her obedience to God's word.-43-53 - Summary of her.-45-28 - What does this passage tell us about the Lord--51-26 - Selina Hastings - a woman who used her wealth for God's glory.-52-06 - Lavinia Bartlett - a woman who in her latter years was used of God to see many brought ot Christ.

The first biography of this much loved author, bonne vivante, European, and John Sandoe customer, mentored by Aldous Huxley. Hastings’ earlier biographical subjects include Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Rosamond Lehmann. Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Horn Concerto No. 3 in E Flat major

The great prose stylist of the 20th century, monster, performer? Biographer and literary journalist Selina Hastings and writer and critic Alexander Waugh reveal the many reputations of Evelyn Waugh with the Slightly Foxed editors. From a pathological fear of boredom, hallucinations provoked by doses of bromide and cheques bouncing at the Ritz to his relationships conducted through letters, his genius for sharp satire and love of gossip, the conversation brings to light the darkness and humour of Waugh’s works. And we visit The Loved One’s Whispering Glades in this month’s reading from the magazine’s archives. Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 45 minutes; 21 seconds) Books Mentioned Please note that while many titles by other publishers are available to buy from the Slightly Foxed shop, we will not be able to order them from our distributor and send them out to readers until the office reopens. We may be able to find second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch (mailto:anna@foxedquarterly.com) with Anna for more information. Books by Evelyn Waugh - The Sword of Honour (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/evelyn-waugh-sword-honour/) trilogy: Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender (3:14) - Put out More Flags is out of print (3:53) - Decline and Fall (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/evelyn-waugh-decline-fall/) (11:48) - Scoop (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/evelyn-waugh-scoop/) (18:44) - A Handful of Dust (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/evelyn-waugh-a-handful-of-dust/) (21:50) - Brideshead Revisited (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/evelyn-waugh-brideshead-revisited/) (22:58) - The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is out of print (27:09) - The Loved One (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/evelyn-waugh-the-loved-one/) (32:35) Other Books - The Carey Novels (https://foxedquarterly.com/products/the-carey-novels-by-ronald-welch/) by Ronald Welch, Slightly Foxed Cubs editions (1:46) - Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, Selina Hastings is out of print (2:40) - Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, Alexander Waugh is out of print (2:47) - A Russian Journal (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/john-steinbeck-a-russian-journal/) , John Steinbeck with photographs by Robert Capa (40:37) - The Singapore Grip (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/j-g-farrell-the-singapore-grip/) , J. G. Farrell (41:40) - Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, Diana Price is out of print (42:27) - Zoo Station, David Downing is out of print (44:02) Related Slightly Foxed Articles - The Tortoise of Total War (https://foxedquarterly.com/evelyn-waugh-the-sword-of-honour-trilogy-literary-review/) , Anthony Gardner on the Sword of Honour trilogy in Issue 36 (3:14) - Race of Ghosts (https://foxedquarterly.com/evelyn-waugh-put-out-more-flags-literary-review/) , Patrick Denman Flanery on Put out More Flags in Issue 9 (3:53) - Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age (https://foxedquarterly.com/evelyn-waugh-the-ordeal-of-gilbert-pinfold-literary-review/) , William Palmer on The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold in Issue 65 (27:09) - Waugh on the Warpath (https://foxedquarterly.com/ranjit-bolt-evelyn-waugh-literary-review/) , Ranjit Bolt on The Loved One in Issue 46 (32:35) Other Links & Information - Sign up to the free Slightly Foxed email newsletter here (http://eepurl.com/dmxw1T) to receive articles from the quarterly, extracts from books, latest releases, event invitations, news from behind the scenes at Foxed HQ and other bookish content several times a month. - The winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2019 (https://foxedquarterly.com/jonathan-phillips-wins-for-the-life-and-legend-of-the-sultan-saladin/) : Jonathan Phillips for The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/jonathan-phillips-the-life-and-legend-of-the-sultan-saladin/) (1:23) - Alexander Waugh is the general editor of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (43 volumes planned), bringing together all of the extant writings and graphic art: novels, biographies, travel writing, short fiction, essays, articles, reportage, reviews, poems, juvenilia, drawings and designs. Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable (https://www.podcastable.co.uk/)

As we turn the page to a new decade, we’ve made some New Year resolutions. John Mitchinson and Andy Miller of Backlisted Podcast join the Slightly Foxed Editors to bring new life to old books, leading us off the beaten track with wide-ranging reading recommendations. From Frank O’Connor’s letters, Selina Hastings’s lives and Barbara Tuchman’s histories to the poetry of John Berryman, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, they journey through genres to revive literary curiosity. And in this month’s reading from the magazine’s archives, Richard Platt makes a convincing case for The Quincunx by Charles Palliser, falling under its curse of sleepless nights.    Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 38 minutes; 49 seconds)  Books Mentioned We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch (mailto:anna@foxedquarterly.com) with Anna in the Slightly Foxed office for more information. - To War with Whitaker (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/to-war-with-whitaker-hermione-countess-of-ranfurly/) , Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly. Slightly Foxed Edition No. 50, published 1 March 2020 (1:21) - The Year of Reading Dangerously (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/andy-miller-the-year-of-reading-dangerously) , Andy Miller (3:32) - A Distant Mirror (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/barbara-tuchman-a-distant-mirror/) , Barbara Tuchman (6:05) - Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982 (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/dominic-sandbrook-who-dares-wins/) and The Great British Dream Factory (https://foxedquarterly.com/dominic-sandbrook-the-great-british-dream-factory) , Dominic Sandbrook (8:08) - Corregidora (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/gayl-jones-corregidora/) , Gayl Jones (9:33) - Independence Day (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/richard-ford-independence-day/) , Richard Ford (12:28) - The Happiness of Getting it Down Right: Letters of Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell is out of print (14:12) - A Tale of Love and Darkness (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/amos-oz-a-take-of-love-and-darkness/) , Amos Oz (16:34) - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/jeanette-winterson-why-be-happy-when-you-could-be-normal) and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/jeanette-winterson-oranges-are-not-the-only-fruit) , Jeanette Winterson (18:45) - Selina Hastings has written biographies of Somerset Maugham, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Rosamond Lehmann (22:43) - 77 Dream Songs, John Berryman is out of print (25:32) - Diving into the Wreck (https://wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393346015-diving-into-the-wreck) , Adrienne Rich (27:45) - The Quincunx (https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/charles-palliser-quincunx/) , Charles Palliser (32:08) Related Slightly Foxed Articles - A World of Words (https://foxedquarterly.com/amos-oz-a-tale-of-love-and-darkness-literary-review/) , Annabel Walker on Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness in Issue 37 (16:34) - Grave Expectations (https://foxedquarterly.com/the-quincunx-charles-palliser-literary-review/) , Richard Platt on Charles Palliser, The Quincunx in Issue 60 (32:08) Other Links - The Slightly Foxed mug (now sold out) displayed the quote: ‘Charles Lamb once told Coleridge he was especially fond of books containing traces of buttered muffins.’ Please do get in touch with suggestions for a quote (up to 20 words) for a forthcoming mug design: office@foxedquarterly.com (mailto:office@foxedquarterly.com) (2:21) - Backlisted (https://www.backlisted.fm/) , the literary podcast giving new life to old books, presented by John Mitchinson and Andy Miller (3:22) Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach Reading music: Songs Without Words - No.12 in F Sharp Minor, Op.30 (https://musopen.org/music/348-songs-without-words-op-30/) by Felix Mendelssohn The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable (https://www.podcastable.co.uk/)

On today’s episode of the Journeywomen podcast, I’m chatting with Dr. Michael Haykin about church history! Dr. Haykin is the chair and professor of Church History at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY and Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies.   DR.HAYKIN’S RESOURCES The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754-1757 Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More by Karen Swallow Prior Susie: The Life and Legacy of Susannah Spurgeon by Ray Rhodes Reformation Women: Sixteenth-Century Figures Who Shaped Christianity's Rebirth by Rebecca VanDoodewaard Eight Women of Faith by Dr. Michael Haykin No Other Foundation: The Church Through Twenty Centuries by Jeremy C. Jackson Reformation Heritage Books for Children by Simonetta Carr Empowered: How God Shaped 11 Women's Lives by Catherine Parks   DR.HAYKIN’S SIMPLE JOYS History, libraries, book stores Spending time with his wife Spending time with his adult children     WOMEN TO LEARN ABOUT Esther Edwards Burr (1732-1758) Perpetua (Died 203) Monica mother of Augustine (332-387) Macrina (330-379) Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) Idelette Stordeur de Bure Calvin (1509-1549) Brilliana Harley (1598-1643) Anne Dutton (1692–1765) Anne Steele (1717–1778) Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) Selina Hastings (1707-1791) Josephine Butler (1828-1906) Amy Carmichael (1867-1951) Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) Henrietta Mears (1890-1963)   DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Why is it important to value church history? What is something you learned regarding church history? Identify an area of life where learning about history changed your view of the present? How is your view of the gospel strengthened by history? How has your view of the church been challenged by this episode? What are you going to do or implement as a result of what you’ve learned this week?   SPONSORSHIP DETAILS Marriage After God is led by Aaron and Jennifer Smith who have a new book out called Marriage After God. In their book they transparently share their journey from a marriage in crisis to a marriage built on Christ’s redemptive love. For 15% off your purchase at shop.marriageaftergod.com use the code JOURNEYWOMEN at checkout. Prep Dish is a healthy subscription-based meal planning service. All you need to do is sign up, and you’ll receive an email every week with a grocery list and instructions for prepping meals ahead of time. For a free 2-week trial, go to PrepDish.com/journey. Crossway's new book called Competing Spectacles by Tony Reinke helps us stop and consider what consequences the world's never-ending stream of digital images has on our minds. Reinke is the author of 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You. Learn more about Competing Spectacles and find other resources at Crossway.org/Journeywomen2.   FOR MORE EPISODES OF JOURNEYWOMEN:   SUBSCRIBE Subscribe on iOS, go to the iTunes page and subscribe to the Journeywomen Podcast. On Android, click this podcast RSS feed link and select your podcast app. You may need to copy the link into your favorite podcast app (like Overcast or Stitcher).   WRITE A REVIEW Writing a review on iTunes will help other women on their journeys to glorify God find and utilize the podcast as a resource.   FOLLOW JOURNEYWOMEN Like/follow Journeywomen on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter for the latest updates.   *Affiliate links used are used where appropriate. Thank you for supporting the products that support Journeywomen!

The Wealthy “Movers and Shakers” of this World So turn in your Bibles to the text that you just heard or read, 1 Corinthians Chapter 1. we're looking this morning at the end of this marvelous chapter, verses 26-31. A number of years ago I watched an episode of a program that was popular at that time, called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and I actually feel like I'm confessing sin to you that I watched the show. I'm not saying how many episodes I watched, but I did watch at least one. And the show was set up to take the viewers into the mansions and the daily lives of the beautiful people, the jet set, the elite, the creme de la creme of our generations. You could see their lavish provisions, their stunning Real Estate, scenic vistas, overpowering architecture of their mansions of the wealthiest people in the world. And like voyeurs, you could stand on the outside looking in, and just basically covet, I guess. The show eventually morphed into a spinoff on VH1 called The Fabulous life of ... So that was the same thing. Jay-Z and Beyoncé. I don't know how you pronounce that. Sorry. (I'm going to become smaller and smaller in your estimation, that's part of the goal of the whole sermon). But whoever they are… And I'm not pronouncing any more famous names. Just looking at their lavish lives, their VIP treatment. Everywhere they go, they're treated like royalty. And my wife I just recently and were in England, we went to the outskirts of Buckingham Palace. The British do that with the Royal Family. They're interesting over here too, Royal weddings are incredibly fascinating to Americans and British people alike, the movers and shakers. Every generation has had those people, the ones that everyone wants to know and be seen with. When they walk by, everyone pulls out at this point, their smart phones and takes photos. And these are people whose decisions are shaping the age and the era in which we live, and their patterns of consumption soar far beyond anything that we could ever achieve in our lives. We've had our own royalty, not just the royal family, but we've had our wealthy folks. I've been to the mansions in Newport, where the robber barons of the late nineteenth century had their summer cottages, so they called them, and were able to sail their yachts there, in Rhode Island. Many of you I'm sure I've been to the Biltmore Estate of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and seen... I don't know, the golden bathtubs or whatever it is, that are in Biltmore. Well they... Those people existed in Paul's day, as well. The noble classes, the ruling elites, the overwhelmingly rich, the famous, the scholars, the philosophers who are world renowned, and people had come from all of the world to sit at the feet of the Greek philosophers and learn wisdom from them. Now, in this section of Scripture, Paul makes it plain that God purposely did not choose many of such people for his church. Now, this runs directly contrary to the wisdom of the world, the world's wisdom is seen in trusting human capability, human power. So human personality, human wealth human ingenuity human politics human military force, human power to build human empires, is the story of the world, the history of the world. The Corinthian church, though, converted to Christ by the gospel, was still thinking in a worldly way, about all these things. And this is seen in their divisions and factions. They were breaking into subgroups one saying, "I follow Paul", another "I follow Apollos" another, "I follow Peter." And their whole way of thinking about great leaders, and sitting at their feet was very worldly. They were thinking, as the phrases in the text today, according to the flesh. They had a mind according to the flesh. We're going to talk about that phrase, it's worldly thinking. And Paul has to correct them, as a shepherd of their souls, he has to correct this whole faulty way of thinking and he has to correct ours as well, he has to show them that God's whole way of dealing with sinful humanity and redemptive history is to slaughter our pride, everything he has done, literally from before the foundation of the world, until the end of the world will be to slaughter human pride. It's devilish, this pride of ours, this arrogance, it's devilish. And He, in order to save us, must make us lowly and meek and submissive to His infinite greatness, so that we will not continue to imitate the devil in his arrogance, who was so filled with self love, he was so impressed by what he was, that he thought to raise himself up higher and higher and topple God from His heavenly throne. And when he was thrown down to the Earth, He then recruited the human race to join him in a similar arrogant upswing to, topple God from His throne. It's the nature of our rebellion. So 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, Paul is showing how God saves sinners in ways that seem foolish and weak and shameful. And he does this in three steps, and we're looking this morning at the second of the three steps, the first is to look at Christ, and him crucified. Foolishness to the Greeks. A stumbling block to the Jews, initially offensive, it levels human pride. The second step in his progressive argument to show how God is about slaying human pride and doing things that make no sense to us and our fleshly thinking. Is the church itself, the Corinthian church. It's made up of unimpressive people, who are not the best and the brightest. They were not the Movers and Shakers, they were not the beautiful people, they did not live the lifestyles of the rich and famous, instead, they were those generally despised by people like that. Paul's overall goal here, is to teach Corinthians to think about God and themselves according to true divine heavenly wisdom, and not according to the fleshly wisdom they've been thinking. The third step, we'll see next time I preach in 1 Corinthians, and chapter 2 is to look at himself, the preacher. And he's just not impressive. And his presentation wasn't impressive. He was with them in weakness and fear much trembling, and he didn't use wise and persuasive words, he just preached the gospel. And so that's going to be the third of the three humbling steps. I. God’s Wisdom in Calling Not Many “Movers and Shakers” (verse 26) So let's look this morning at verse 26, God's wisdom in calling not many movers and shakers. Paul asked the Corinthians to consider their own condition. Verse 26: "Brothers, think of what you were when you were called, not many of you were wise by human standards, not many influential, not many of noble birth." Actually, in the Greek, the verse 26 begins with the command "See." So he wants them to see themselves. John Calvin said at the beginning of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, "Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consist in two parts: The knowledge of God and of ourselves." Faith is the eyesight of the soul, by which we can rightly see both. We can see the greatness and majesty of God and you can finally rightly look at yourself. And so that's what he's calling them do in verse 26. Now turn your gaze on yourself for just a moment, look at yourself. But it's a humbling gaze. Faith humbles us about ourselves. He wants them to think of themselves with sober judgment, he's not trying to humiliate them. And God's strategy was not to choose the best and the brightest from every generation. That phrase, "the best and the brightest", came into the American vocabulary during the presidency of John F. Kennedy. He was filling his cabinet posts and his administration positions with young experts in every fields, and that phrase came in, "the best and the brightest." They were the Whiz Kids of policy. And president Eisenhower been an older previous generation, JFK represented new young leaders, and so they were the best and the brightest. And so, he is assembling his team of geniuses to help run the country. Paul wants the Corinthians to look honestly at themselves and to realize that they were not that. They were commoners. Perhaps even below average in life achievement, in intelligence and in human influence, political influence. So look at yourselves when you were called. Now, this word "called", we mentioned it last time, very significant theologically, it has to do with the sovereign drawing, the calling of God, of sinners, out of darkness into light. The sovereign activity of Almighty God, King on his throne, and saving sinners like us, he calls us. Romans 8:29-30, he speaks of this sovereign calling of God and salvation. It says there "For those whom God for new, He predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom He predestined, He also called. And those whom He called, He also justified, and those whom He justified, He also glorified." So step by step, he works in the elect to bring them from darkness to eternal glory, and the calling is part of His sovereign plan. Now, the calling on in the life of an elect person begins the moment they're born. Everything they hear, every experience that they have is divinely orchestrated eventually to bring that individual to faith in Christ, God is very wise in this, and he's preparing them to come to faith in Christ. But here, Paul, I think, is meaning, especially that last step, when they heard the Gospel preached, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God, who is crucified for sinners like you and me, and He was buried on the third day, He was raised to life. That Gospel…They heard it, and then, the secret sovereign power the of Holy Spirit of God, reached within their souls, and transformed them, took out the heart of stone, gave them a heart of flesh. He changed their entire perspective by sovereign grace. They were called. The God, as it says in Romans 4, "who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were." The sovereign calling. What Was Your Life Circumstance When You Were Called? So think of what you were at that moment, what was your life circumstance? That last decisive step. Did God call you because you were so awesome? Did God call because you were so spectacular? So bright and shiny? Not at all. Actually, He specifically chose you in part, it seems Corinthians, because you are not all that. He actually wanted his church made up for the most part of people who were despised in the world. That's what the text is saying. Now, many of you have had the experience on the playground of being chosen or maybe not chosen for the kickball team. Alright? Usually what happened when I was going to school is you would have the two best kickball players stand as Team, A Team B and then they would alternate and pick on down until every spot was filled. You know exactly… Some of you are already cringing, because you know where I'm going, the one thing you don't want is to be the last person chosen on the kickball team. Because it meant that you stunk at kickball. And so that's humiliating. But here, God seems to be choosing his church the exact opposite way from the way we would do it. He's not looking at capabilities. He's not looking at life achievement. He's actually putting his church together very differently than the way we would do it. He was not choosing the powers that be, but those things that are not, the text says. And so look... He goes through a list of what God didn't choose. He says "Not many of you are wise by human standards." or literally, the Greek is "according to the flesh." It's a very important phrase theologically. The flesh here, means "according to that worldly perspective," that worldly way of thinking, that he's fighting against in this whole chapter. That human perspective, the Corinthians were not wise according to human standards. No one was traveling from all over Greece to come and sit at their feet and listen to their wisdom. No one is writing down the pearls that came from their mouths. They just weren't all that. They were just average people leading average intellectual lives. Paul also had some other phrases. Not many were powerful, not many of noble birds. So the powerful here might refer to physical strength. As Jeremiah 9, that we'll get to in a moment, says, "Let not the strong man boast of his strength." So it could be that, but probably more likely, just influence in the community, like political strength, power, power. The Corinthians were not the policy shapers of their age, they didn't set the policies, there in Corinth. Their opinions carried very little weight, no one was asking them to weigh in on the hottest issues of the day. They were not the Movers and Shakers, they were the moved and the shaken. When Gallio, the proconsul there in Corinth, made his policies, they followed and submitted or they were deemed criminals. So they were not the policy makers. Neither were they of noble birth. That referred to their status in society. No one was writing down their heritage, their coat of arms, their great great grandfather was so and so and their great grandfather was so and so, and on down to their father, etcetera. No one cared about their genealogy. No one cared about their ancestors or how influential they were. They were not the moneyed class, they didn't have buying power to bribe officials or startup capital for companies or employment so that they could employ all kinds of poor people. They weren't those kind of people. Not at all, they were the poor, uninfluential people. Commoners. The Difference Between “Not Many” and “Not Any” Now, there's an eternity of difference. Just one letter in the English, but an eternity of difference between not many and not any. It is not true that there are not any wise influential, wealthy, noble birth, believers in Christ, that is not true. Even there in Corinth, Crispus the synagogue ruler believed in his household as part of the church. Stephanus and Gaius had households. And that was pretty significant, and so there were some wealthy people there, in the church. Worldwide, and throughout church history, there have always been some that were among the great geniuses of their age, that were also genuine believers in Christ. I think about Augustine, whose writings would take a lifetime to study, the depth of his thinking is almost incalculable. John Calvin was training to be a lawyer when he was converted, brilliant mind. Apostle Paul himself, he was recognized as a very brilliant individual, so much so that at one point, one of his judges said, "Your great learning is driving you insane." So clearly an educated individual. Think about Blaze Pascal, the 17th Century French philosopher, mathematician, brilliant, lover of Jesus Christ. We were talking this morning, one church member and I, about Isaac Newton. Big question mark on him, brilliant guy, one of the greatest scientists of all time. He believed in the deity of Christ, but didn't believe in the Trinity. So interesting. Don't know about him. But Isaac Newton was one of the best and the brightest of his generation. You've got some Kings like Charlemagne, perhaps, or Good King Wenceslas who were genuinely believers, it seems, and used their positions of power to serve Christ. But there are not many. Heads of states like Abraham Kuyper, who is, I think, a Dutch prime minister and a strong believer in Christ and used his position for the glory of God. Wealthy people, some like RG Le Tourneu gave a reverse tithe, he kept 10% of what he made and gave 90% away to the Christian causes. A very wealthy individual. Selina Hastings known as the countess of Huntington, used her money and her influence in British society to do countless good works. Evangelical works. Was a patron, and friend of George Whitfield. Then there's William Wilberforce, who as a member of Parliament, but also a member of the ruling aristocratic class who used his power and his influence to end the British slave trade. So we're not going to say "Not any," just "Not many." And so those that actually were among the best and the brightest of their generation, even they were slain, their pride was slaughtered by the gospel, and they recognized that everything they had they got from God. And it still, their own intellect is as nothing like a candle to the sun of the intellect of God. They're humbled by it. So percentage-wise, worldwide, not many. And so I would say, overall, in the entire world population, there are not many Christians. Jesus said, "Enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it, but small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." So already, genuine Christians, are not many population-wise, but even of those, a very small percentage are the movers and shakers, the best and the brightest, the brilliant, not many at all. II. God’s Actions in Electing the “Foolish Things” (verse 27) Now, why? Why? Well, it's because this was God's intention. God did this on purpose. It was God's action in electing the foolish things. Look at verse 27, "God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong." This is a strong statement of sovereign election. The end of 1 Corinthians 1 is one of the strongest passages on the of doctrine of sovereign election, for salvation, you'll find in the Bible. God chose those who would be saved. He assembles His church as He sees fit. He's going to say it straight out in verse 30. Look down at verse 30 and there's a strong statement there. Don't miss it. Verse 30, "It is because of Him," referring to God, "It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus." That's about as clear as you'll ever get it said. If you are a Christian today, it's because of God, God's sovereign election that is working in your life, so it's not an accident. This makeup of not many is not an accident. And your salvation is not an accident. It's not by your unaided free will, like one day you up and decided to become a Christian. Jesus said to His apostles, "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear much fruit." Now, I do believe we choose Christ. I just think we choose Him after He has chosen us, and as a consequence of Him choosing us. Just like it says in 1 John, "We love because He first loved us." So also we choose Christ because He first chose us. That's what this is teaching. Even more amazing, that the Scripture teaches us that God made this choice before the foundation of the world. In Ephesians 1:4-6, it says, "For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love, He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ." So before the foundation of the world, by sovereign election, He chose us. He did not choose based on any foreseen righteousness on our part, like God saw... It’s not like he looked down through the corridors of time, and saw that someday you would believe in Him, or someday you would be righteous, and on that basis, He chose. The Scripture teaches exactly the opposite. As a matter of fact, it says that he chose before you were born, so that you couldn't boast. He teaches us in Romans 9:11-12, speaking about Jacob and Esau, "Yet before the twins were born or had done anything, good or bad, in order that God's purpose in election might stand..." What is God's purpose? "Not by works, but by Him who calls." That's God's purpose, so that when we get to Heaven, we'll realize it was not by works, but by Him, God, who calls. So that's God's purpose in choosing us before the foundation of the world. Not “Unconditional Election” but Sovereign Election Now, I would here say that it's not good to speak of "unconditional election." I think that's not a good phrase. I told you that I would offend every one of you at some point in these sermons in Corinthians, so now I get to offend the five-point Calvinists who love the TULIP acronym, and the U stands for unconditional election. I think it is not a good term. It implies that God, willy-nilly, for no reason at all, just chooses. I don't think that's true. God is a very rational being. He has His reasons for everything. I would prefer, instead, "sovereign election," that God chooses based on His own reasons. I think there's at least two indications this is true. God wants some people around the throne from every tribe, language, people, and nation, so says Revelation Seven. So the fact that you are from this tribe, or this language, or nation matters, because none of those are going to slip through the cracks, and, "Oh, I guess there weren't any representatives from that tribe or that language." So God sovereignly elected some from every tribe, every language, every people. And here in this text, it seems that God intentionally chooses, for the most part, those that are rejected by the world. It's not an accident. God's ways are not our ways, friends. As Isaiah 55 says very plainly, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, says the Lord. As the Heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts." Or again, as it says at the end of Romans 11, "Oh, the depths of the riches, and the wisdom, and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable His judgments and His paths, beyond tracing out. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has been His counselor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? For from Him and through Him…" and I like to say, "Back to Him" "are all things. To Him, be the glory forever." So I think that's what it is. God's ways are not... You can't track Him. You think about, like in the Old West, there would be somebody that was a really good expert tracker. They could track even horses hoofs on hard rock. They knew how to follow. They could trace out where someone had gone, skillful trackers. What he's saying is, that the most skillful human tracker can't trace God's paths. We don't know where He's been and we can't tell where He's going, except that He tells us directly, in big picture. And so we wouldn't have done it this way. And I think He's doing all this, so that we realize all of our achievements, and all of our capabilities, our intelligence, our wealth, all of it came from Him. What do you have that you didn't receive? And if you did receive it, why would you ever boast as though you did not? You got to realize everything you have is someday going to go back to Him, because He gave it, and so there's this humbling work. And we should not think that God, if He had only tweaked the message, if He could have fixed the message, it'd be more popular among the wealthy, and more popular among the movers and shakers. It’s not like He needs to fix the message. See, now you're starting to meddle in the things of God. You know, we tend to think that way on campus. "If the star quarterback could come to Christ, think what influence he would have." Or the president of the student body, "If she would come to Christ, what influence she could have." Or the Nobel Prize winners, "If one of them would just be converted, what influence they could have." We want to give God advice, "Would you just convert a lot of these people, God?" And then everybody would follow after. But that's exactly the kind of thinking that God, through Paul, is trying to slay here. The Gospel is for the humble and lowly, little children, poor outcasts. Do you remember in John 7, Jesus' brothers want to give Him some advice on being Messiah? The arrogance, it's amazing. Jesus wasn't going up to the feast in John Seven. His brothers are surprised, so they go to Jesus in John 7:3-5 to give Him some advice. I picture one of them putting his arm around Jesus, say, "Can I just give you some advice here? I mean, you're really good at this whole miracle thing. I don't know how you do it. It's amazing. But no one who does miracles like this stays hidden. Jesus, this makes no sense. Go up to Jerusalem, where everyone is, and put on a show." John 7:5, "For even His brothers did not believe in Him." It's a display of unbelief to try to give God that kind of advice. You don't put an arm around God and give Him some advice on how He could manage His affairs better. "If only He could win the best and the brightest, then everyone would follow along." God knows what He's doing. There's a clear example of this in Judges chapter 7. Do you remember the story of Gideon? When the Midianites were ravaging the land, God raised up Gideon, who was not an impressive individual. And it was time for Gideon to raise an army, and then God comes to Gideon. Do you remember what He tells him? "Gideon, you have too many men" here. I mean, that's got to be a first in military history. "Gideon, your army's too big. Send some of them home." But He says, specifically, in Judges 7, why? In order that the Israelites might not boast against me that their military power won this battle. Send them home. Two thirds of them went home, 22000 who trembled and were afraid of battle. So they went home, leaving a smaller number. But then God came a second time to Gideon and said, "You still have too many men, so we're going to divide them up in an interesting way. We're going to watch how they drink water. And the ones that lap water like a dog, we'll hold on to them." 300 of them. Now, don't think they're like the 300 Spartans, the mightiest warriors. No, they are 300 guys who lapped water like a dog. And what was their job going to be in the battle? They're going to not hold a sword in their hand. They're going to hold a torch, and a lantern, and a trumpet, and they're going to break the torch, and shout, and blow a trumpet, and then the Midianites will kill themselves. So you could go to these heroes after the battle and say, "What did you do? First of all, how did you get chosen?" "I lapped water like a dog." "Really?" "But I was the best dog lapper of all the 300. I was number one." "Really? Well, what did you do after that in the battle?" "I smashed a jar, and held a torch, and blew a trumpet." "Well, but how about how many Midianites did you kill?" "None." That whole thing is a picture, as in the day of Midian's defeat. Isaiah 9 says, "You have broken the yoke that burdens and the bar across our shoulders, for unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given." Isaiah 9 says that our salvation, just like that Midianite victory. What did we do? And we got humbled. So in verse 27-29 God shames and nullifies the arrogance of man. God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things, the things that are not, to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before Him. This was done purposely. He doesn't need to improve the message, so it plays better in the halls of power. It's exactly what He wanted to do. III. God Shames and Nullifies the Arrogance of Man (verses 27-29) And the negative message here, is He wants to shame and nullify. That's His goal. He wants to shame human pride and nullify it, so that in the end, no one will boast before Him. Why? What does that mean? First and foremost, that we will realize, even if we were pure as light and didn't need an atoning sacrifice, we are still just creatures and He is the Creator. And so just as the holy angels, who have never sinned, cover their faces and their feet, and tremble before Him, because they're creatures and He is infinitely above them as Creator, so will we be humbled, but even more. We weren't pure. We rebelled. We were rebels. We sinned against this Holy God, and we have been redeemed by the blood of His Son, and so we should be doubly humble in His presence. So God, in order to achieve that, shows the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. He rejects the ruminations of Plato, and Aristotle, and Socrates. He's not going that direction. He's going to choose you, Corinthians. He's going to choose us. And in this way, He's going to shame them, if they will not repent. Now, again, it's not "not any." There could be some of those great philosophers that could be won to Christ, so Paul did go to Mars Hill and some of them were interested. But in general, He's trying to shame them and they will... Their shaming is incomplete now. They're not ashamed. They're proud, and they're doing well, and they're succeeding, but they will be shamed in the end on Judgment Day, when millions, hundreds of millions of what they would have called nobodies, (God wouldn't call them that, but they would have called them nobodies), are going into glory, and they themselves are excluded, because of their sins. So God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. He chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth." The meek are those that are humble and lowly. They're not the fighting warrior types. They're the types that the Nazi tyrants loved, those that just kneeled down before the tyrant's sword and they get decapitated. Tyrants like the Nazis love those types. The Vikings, when they used to go up and down the coastlines marauding, they loved the monasteries, a lot of gold, not a lot of warriors. Special breed of man that was clad in linen garments and died very easily. In Japan, the Shoguns absolutely despised the Christians. They thought nothing of them, because they were a warrior class and the Christians just died like nothing. They just wilted and died. They did not respect... The Nazis, the Vikings, the Shoguns did not respect this kind of thing, but God is going to give to those meek Christians, the Earth, when all is said and done. And those mighty, godless empire builders will be shamed on Judgment Day, when they end up with nothing. IV. God’s Sovereignty in Assembling the Church of Christ (verse 30) So God assembles the Church of Christ as He sees fit. Look again in Verse 30, "It is because of Him, [because of God], that you are in Christ Jesus." This is the basis of all of your praise. When you've come together on Sunday morning, we worship. When you praise Him on Monday morning, tomorrow morning, when you praise Him, you can say, "God, I am a Christian because of you. It is because of you that I believe in Jesus." As he says in Romans 6:17, "Thanks be to God that you obey the Gospel. Thank God you obey. Thank God you believe. Thank God you repented. Thank God He chose you. " "It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus." That's what it's teaching here. Now, God does that by the sovereign power of the Holy Spirit. Look again at 1 Corinthians 2:14. I'm going to probably have you look at that verse just about every week. But there it says, "The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him and he cannot accept them, because they're spiritually discerned." But if you're a Christian, that whole thing is turned around. You are a person with the Spirit. The Holy Spirit has come into your life, and therefore, you do indeed accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. They are no longer foolishness to you, but they have been revealed as wisdom and power to you. That's how you see the cross. And you can understand them, because you've been healed from your mental confusion, the darkness of the mind and heart that was the essence of our sin. You've been healed from all that by the sovereign power of the Spirit, and now you have the mind of Christ, and you can see the cross properly. Thanks be to God. V. God’s Ultimate Purpose: Humble Worship from Redeemed Sinners (verses 30-31) Now, God's ultimate purpose in all this has to do with eternity. Look at Verse 30-31, "It is because of Him that you were in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God, that is our righteousness, holiness, and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, let him who boasts boast in the Lord." Now, the Holy Spirit sovereignly works in our hearts, and changes us, and draws us by the hearing of the Gospel, by the hearing of the Word, like you're hearing it right now, draws us into the Kingdom. It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus. And the Spirit makes you think about Christ differently, so you then realize who Jesus is to you, and Jesus has become for you, your righteousness. That's the Gospel. That's justification. Jesus is your righteousness, not your own obedience to the law or any of your good works. Jesus' obedience to the law is your righteousness. Jesus' achievement of perfect righteousness before the Father has become yours. Jesus has become for you righteousness. Not only that, He has become for you sanctification. He is your holiness, not just your positional standing of righteousness, but your progressive growth into holiness is Jesus. To God be the glory. And He also has become your redemption, not just the beginning redemption that you have stepped into, but the final vindication on Judgment Day, of all your sins redeemed. Now, He does all this, as it is written, "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord." Putting it simply and very humanly, God doesn't want to spend eternity listening to you or me boast about ourselves. "I'm not listening to that. I'm going to save you in such a way that you will be completely humbled when all is said and done." And God's very wise about this. And he quotes... Paul reaches for the quote in Jeremiah 9:23-24. "Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom, let not the strong man boast of his strength, let not the rich man boast of his wealth, but let him who boasts, boast in this, that he knows and understands Me, that I'm a God who forgives sins. I am merciful, let him who boasts, boast in Me, in that I show him mercy." God does all of this for the praise of His glorious grace, so that we'll boast in Him. Now, what does this mean to boast? God has given your mind the ability to analyze from lesser to greater, from things that are low to things that are exalted. And we have a hierarchy of greatness, of excellence, and we speak, when something hits a trigger level, we speak and we start to praise that thing, we start to boast in it. Our problem is fundamentally we think very highly of ourselves, we think we are excellent, and so we boast in ourselves, or we'll boast similarly another humans and their achievements. God wants us to boast, and He wants us to speak words of praise and greatness of God. A number of months ago I preached at Southern Seminary, and I was preaching a message. Afterwards I went out to eat with Dr. Mohler, President of Southern Seminary, and Greg Willis, a good friend of mine who's a professor of Church History there. And we went to a restaurant, ate lunch, and then after that went to a popsicle boutique, one of these high-end popsicle places, and we got gourmet popsicles. And then oddly drove to a cemetery to eat them. But Dr. Mohler has a sense of history and he just loves Cave Hill Cemetery, and we went there, and there is the grave of one of the founders of Southern Seminary, James P. Boyce. So we stood there eating popsicles and talking. And I don't know, maybe there's just an interesting wisdom there to realize some day we're all going to die. And it's especially poignant in that just diagonally across from there is Mohammad Ali's cemetery with the words, "Our service to others is the rent we pay for our room in heaven." Pure works righteousness. And I thought Ali was the quintessential self-boasting athlete, he actually led the way in saying, "I am the greatest." And so many athletes have followed. I think before that there was at least an effort at false humility. But after that, all the gloves are off with many, not all, but many just, "I am the greatest. I'm the greatest." But here's the thing, death just has the power to humble us all, and everything, every attribute we have is temporary, all of it, all of our intelligence, all of our skill, all of our money, all of our physical strength, is going to go away and we are all going to die someday. And so, someday if I know that I'm dying, and I'm on my death bed, I'm lying there and my days or my hours are coming to an end and I'm aware of it, not always the case, most people actually don't die aware that they're about to die. But if I am on my death bed, and maybe my family's with me, at that point I will not be thinking about anything except this, Christ is my righteousness, by faith, not by works, Christ is my righteousness. I will not be thinking about sanctification, I'll not be thinking about infinite journeys anymore, I'll be thinking about this, I was forgiven by faith, I was justified by faith in Christ, that's it. And anything that I achieved, any good works, it's only by the grace of God, but it really will not be on my mind at that point, I'll be trusting in Christ's death and resurrection alone for my forgiveness. VI. Applications Applications. First, just meditate on this whole thing and just ask yourself the question, "Why does God hate human boasting so much?" There's something sick about human boasting, something twisted. Imagine a vain movie star who goes to some spectacular scenery, like the Grand Canyons of the Alps, and hires somebody to hold a big mirror in front of him or her, and they spend the whole time looking at themselves. Or somebody who takes a selfie facing the wrong direction, the Grand Canyon's that way, but so enamored with what their own face looks like. Something's off there. I've been thinking about all these illustrations at this very point, I tried some out on my kids this morning, their needle didn't move much, but I'm going to give it a shot. Imagine an art expert who works as a curator of a museum, and has for a weekend a Rembrandt to put a new frame on and all that, invites all his friends over and one of them is a new painter who's taking painting lessons at the local library, and has brought his newest oil painting of a nice pastoral scene with a couple of cows, and a wooden fence. And so, there side by side is a Rembrandt and this oil painting, and the entire group spends the entire time praising the little oil painting that was done by the art student. You're like, "Something is off in your estimation." You are surrounded every moment by infinite greatness, the display of God's greatness in creation, and then as we read in Scripture, the even greater display of His greatness and redemption, so you ought to boast in God and not in anything else. So I tend to think the best way to look at this is therapy. God is healing us from a twisted perspective so that we will spend eternity boasting in God. God's not weak, He's not insecure, He doesn't need an ego trip, it's that we're sick and He wants to heal us. And He heals us, as John Piper once said, not by making much of us, but by enabling us to make much of Him for all eternity. So when you think about that, just think about how God has humbled you in salvation by choosing you before you were born, from before the foundation of the world, not based on anything He saw in you, positively. And how He saved you before you were born, two centuries before, or two millennia before you were born, by having Jesus die for your sins, and He did all of the work for you. And then you were justified by simply believing and not by any work so that no one can boast, just by grace, and that this faith that you have is not of yourselves, it's a gift of God. Ephesians 2:9, so that no one can boast, and then you begin, you roll up your sleeves and start trying to live the Christian life. Friends, how's it going? How are you doing? "Oh Pastor, we're doing great. I had a phenomenal week, I was perfect this week." Can you imagine someone saying that? So now we're in the sanctification thing, and oh, how humbling it is. And for decades we battled indwelling sin and don't do very well, and God keeps forgiving, and forgiving, and covering, and forgiving, and covering. And then finally we die, and in an instant He glorifies you and makes you just like Jesus. And you're like, "Lord, why didn't you do that when I was converted? I would have had such an awesome life." Don't give advice to God. He knows exactly what He's doing, He's humbling, humbling, humbling, humbling, and humbling you, so that you'll spend eternity boasting in the Lord. So practically, whenever you're tempted to boast in yourself or some other human achievement, stop. Boast in the Lord. Say something great about Jesus. Say something great. Next time you're in a conflict with your spouse, not that you ever have them or that I ever have them ever, but if that should ever happen, realize how much of it is based on your arrogance and your pride, and just boast in the Lord at that point, don't be prideful, don't be angry and prideful. And in terms of the gospel, let me just say something to you who are on the outside, you came in here and you are not yet converted, this gospel is for you. Yes, it's meant to humble you, but boy, it's also meant to exalt you and to bring you to Heaven and make you glorious. So I'm just appealing to you, while there's time turn away from yourself, turn away from your good works, turn away from everything you're clinging to, and trust in Christ and you will be forgiven of all of your sins. And for you evangelists, which should be all of you who are converted, as you share the gospel, do it as a form of worship. Just worship Jesus in front of some unbelievers this week, just talk about how great He is, and see what God will do. Close with me in prayer. Father, we are mindful of how arrogant we are. We are very, very proud people. And we need that pride to be leveled. I pray that You would the use Word of God to level our pride, just level it, God. Forgive us for continuing to build these towers of Babel about how great we are. Forgive us. Because it says in Isaiah 2, "Every lofty thing will be leveled, and the pride of man brought low, the Lord alone will be exalted in that day." Oh God, help the Lord alone be exalted now in our hearts. Oh God, I pray for lost people that you have brought here sovereignly, that they would turn away from their own achievements and their trusting in their money, and then their intelligence, that they would turn away and that they would trust in Christ and Him crucified as their only hope. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

True Faith Wk5: Selina Hastings by Emmanuel

Libby Purves meets hula hoop virtuoso Marawa Ibrahim; biographer Selina Hastings; horse whisperer Gary Witheford and early music specialist, Dr David Skinner. Marawa Ibrahim, otherwise known as Marawa the Amazing, is a virtuoso of the hula hoop. She has performed and taught hula hooping all over the world from Nepal to New York. She now runs workshops in London and coaches her hula troupe, the Majorettes. She will appear in the 2015 Guinness Book of records in the category for 'the longest time hooping with three hoops in high-heeled roller skates.' Writer Selina Hastings has written biographies of Nancy Mitford; Evelyn Waugh and Somerset Maugham. For her new book she turns her attention to her father Jack Hastings, the 16th Earl of Huntingdon. He eloped to Australia where he worked as a jackaroo and to the US and Mexico where he studied with Diego Rivera before becoming an artist. The Red Earl - The Extraordinary Life of the 16th Earl of Huntingdon is published by Bloomsbury. Gary Witheford is a 'horse whisperer'. After a troubled childhood, he found sanctuary in the world of horses, adapting his skills from the work of Monty Roberts and other practitioners from the US. He has helped many top racehorses such as Derby winner Sea The Stars and Brujo who he rescued from a Spanish abattoir. His book, If Horses Could Talk, is published by Racing Post Books (with Brough Scott). Dr David Skinner is the Osborn director of music at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. Director of Alamire choir, he has produced The Spy's Choirbook originally devised and assembled by Petrus Alamire, a composer, music scribe and spy for Henry VIII. The Spy's Choirbook - Petrus Alamire & the Court of Henry VIII is released by Obsidian Records. A concert will be performed at The British Library where the choirbook is kept. Producer: Annette Wells.

Terence Stamp chooses The Razor's Edge as his favourite work. Based on Somerset Maugham's novel, the Oscar nominated film stars Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power as an American World War One pilot searching for meaning in life. Presented by John Wilson. The interview is followed by selected highlights from the BBC archive: Somerset Maugham reflecting on his success; Kingsley Amis on Maugham and Selina Hastings on the secret life of Somerset Maugham. Full archive details are available on the Front Row website

Selina Hastings played a significant role in the 18th century Evangelical Awakening, believing all should be dedicated to the service and glory of Jesus. Henry Venn called her "a star of the first magnitude in the firmament of the church".