Hard to Believe

When I was not yet twenty years old I remember John MacArthur speaking for a week at Moody. It was as if he opened the Bible and answered the deepest questions of my young heart. He spoke on “Glorifying God” and “God’s Will is not Lost.” Since then I have always tried to read John MacArthur. He is a modern “Worthy.” This month his new book The Truth War is available. I’m sure I will read it soon. The following quote came from Hard to Believe:

Theodore Roosevelt once said, “there has never yet been a man who led a life of ease, whose name is worth remembering.” Certainly when the Lord calls us to be His disciples, He does not call us to a life of ease.

After a long, difficult life of Christian service in India, (Henry Martyn) announced he was going to Persia (Modern Iran), because God had laid it upon his heart to translate the New Testament and the Psalms into the Persian language. By then he was an old man. People told him that if he stayed in India he would die because from the heat and Persia was hotter than India. But he went nonetheless. There he studied the Persian language and then translated the entire New Testament and Psalms in nine months. Then he learned that he couldn’t print or circulate them until he received the Shah’s permission. He traveled six hundred miles to Tehran; there he was denied permission to see the Shah. He turned around and made a four-hundred-mile trip to find the British ambassador, who gave him the proper letters of introduction and sent him the four hundred miles back to Tehran. This was in 1812, and Martyn made the whole trip on the back of a mule, traveling at night resting by day, protected from the sweltering desert sun by nothing but a strip of canvas.

He finally arrived back in Tehran, was received by the Shah, and secured permission for the Scriptures to be printed and circulated in Persia. Ten days later he died. But shortly before his death, he had written this statement in his diary: “I sat in the orchard, and thought, with sweet comfort and peace, of my God ‘ in solitude my Company, my Friend, and Comforter.”