Pastor’s Blog
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August 2023
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Dear Friends,
I have recently been reading Iain Murray’s biography of J.C. Ryle. It is an excellent book and I strongly recommend it to you. It contains many rich spiritual lessons. One such lesson is the truth that God’s ways with us, while sometimes hard and perplexing, are always good and right.
Ryle was born into a wealthy family in rural Cheshire. His childhood was spent growing up in a mansion. He was educated at Eton and Oxford. He excelled academically and was very good at sport, especially cricket. Ryle had everything going for him. His future looked very bright.
But then everything changed in June 1841. As Ryle would later put it: “We got up one summer’s morning, with all the world before us as usual, and went to bed that same evening completely and entirely ruined.” The bank owned by Ryle’s father, the Macclesfield and Cheshire Bank, had collapsed, essentially because of a number of bad debts that it held (i.e. loans that it would never get repaid).
The impact on Ryle’s family was catastrophic. Their property was taken over by creditors, their Qinances were ruined and, perhaps worst of all, this very respectable and highlyregarded family had to face the shame of bankruptcy. In one sense, Ryle had lost everything. But, as he would later come to see, he ended up gaining far more than he lost.
Reflecting on this painful providence several years later, Ryle wrote the following:
“I have not the least doubt it was all for the best. If my father’s affairs had prospered, and I had never been ruined, my life of course would have been a very different one. I should have probably gone into Parliament very soon, and it is impossible to say what the effect of this might have been upon my soul.”
Ryle saw, with the eyes of faith, that God had used the trial of Qinancial ruin for the good of his soul. What is more, although he would not have been aware of this at the time, God also used Ryle’s personal hardship for the spiritual blessing of many millions of others. For, as Ryle also said in reflection upon the calamity wrought by the collapse of his father’s bank, “If my father’s affairs had prospered, and I had never been ruined...I should never have been a clergyman, never have preached a sermon, written a tract, or a book.”
If Ryle had not experienced the humiliation of economic ruin, you would not now be able to read such spiritual classics as Holiness, Practical Religion or, my own personal favourite, his Expository Thoughts on the Gospels. There can be no doubt that Ryle was correct: the loss he suffered, while very painful, was “all for the best” - and not just for his own but, I would say, for ours and the church’s too.
I hope that Ryle’s testimony encourages you. Although your particular experience will be different from his, perhaps you know what it is to suffer loss; perhaps you know what it is to experience the dreadful pain of grievous loss. If so, you can yet know by faith (even if you don’t feel it) that God is working such loss and pain for your ultimate good (Rom. 8:28). You can know by faith that your heavenly Father wisely and sovereignly - and from a heart of love - sometimes ordains all-but-impossible-to-bear providences for your life in order that he might make you more like his Son (Rom. 8:29).
You might not be able to echo Ryle’s words when you are in the thick of the storm. But later on you will. Later, when you see all of God’s sons perfectly conformed to Christ and brought to glory, you will say, in unison with your brothers and sisters, “We have not the least doubt it was all for the best.”
Yours in Christ,
Doug
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