Sunday, May 14, 2006

heroes

Who are our heroes? Who is my hero? I have a new one. It is the New Testament scholar, the late William Barclay. Recently I went on the net and acquired most of his books. He is a New Testament scholar but his knowledge of the Old Testament is so vast, he may as well be an Old Testament scholar. He is easy to read. One colleague wrote of him, that Barclay was already typing at 7 in the morning when this colleague came into work and the sound of typing from Barclay's office went on well past midnight. He loved the Lord and the word of God so much that he spent his whole life expounding on it. I have a vast collection of works by scholars like him. Modern scholars lack the depth and dedication that these older scholars have. Modern writing is at best pithy. Our lives would vastly improve if we would avail ourselves to these scholars whose dedication is beyond ours. Right now I'm reading Barclay's "The promise of the spirit". And I quote from it, "The christian is a Spirit-anointed, Spirit-dipped, Spirit-saturated, Spirit-dominated man. And the drabness of life, and the inadequacy of life, and the futility of life, and the earthboundness of life, which characterize so many of us, all come from the failure to that baptism of the Spirit which Christ alone can give".

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