I'm going to begin this morning by reading a passage of scripture. Let's turn to Matthew 28. Familiar verses at the end of the chapter there, Matthew 28 verse 16, Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had appointed for them. When they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. teaching them to observe all the things that I have commanded you and lo, I am with you always even to the end of the age. Amen. The summer of last year we did a Sunday school class on the life of Hudson Taylor and in preparation for that I found reading about the life of that man was very inspirational, becoming more familiar with some of his accomplishments. And so I thought what we would do this morning is look at the life of another great missionary a man who's sometimes known as the father of modern missions, that is William Carey. Now, I know, of course, for many of you he's a man who's very familiar, but for some of you the name may not be so familiar, perhaps you're not aware of some of his accomplishments, which were, of course, very great. He really broke so much ground in terms of the modern missionary movement, and he was a man who was a great inspiration, even for the likes of Hudson Taylor. the hymn writer John Newton once said about William Carey, he is more to me than a bishop or an archbishop, he is an apostle. In another place Newton said, Newton himself was a cessationist, he didn't believe in the extraordinary gifts that are still present with us today, he said this, I do not look for miracles but if God were to work one in our day I should not wonder if it were in favor of Dr. Carey. So Carey then is a man who commanded tremendous respect amongst missionaries and ministers of his own day and ever since. There have been many, many biographies written about William Carey. I think it must be in the region of 60 or 70. And of course there are churches named after him. We have one in England, Carey Baptist Church. There are missionary buildings named after him. There's a university in this country, I believe, William Carey University. So this is a man whose life obviously deserves some study. He himself was a very humble man. He said of himself that his greatest gift was that he could plod. That was his humility. At the end of his life, on his tombstone, the epithet he asked to have etched on the stone was the words of an Isaac Watts hymn, a wretched, poor, helpless worm on thy kind arms I fall." So this is the humility of this man. His life is really worthy of some study. So that's what I hope to do this morning, to begin that. I say begin, I'd like to do this over two classes. The life of William Carey actually quite nicely breaks down into two sections. You've got the first part of his life, 1761 to 1793, known as the English period, and then 1793 to the end of his life, 1834, we could call that the Indian period. That was outwardly the more fruitful time in his life, and hopefully we'll come to that another time, but this morning I thought we would look at that first part of his life, the English period. It's also very fascinating in terms of preparation. the spiritual preparation that God was doing in his life. He was brought to faith, he then grows very rapidly in grace, and in the providence of God, God begins to gather around him a cluster of men, men who are going to be very supportive of him and helpful in the years to come. So, that's what we hope to do then this morning, look at the first part of William Carey's life. Now, I'm leaning here upon some notes from a couple of lectures given by my seminary professor, Michael Haken. He studied the life of William Carey for many years. I'm going to be drawing upon that and also this book you can see up there, John Appleby's book, I Can Plod. Now Appleby himself spent some time in India. It says on the blurb here, John Appleby looks at Kerry through his own distinctive spectacles. John lived in South India, serving the Lord there for many years. He knows the land, the people, which is so important. the problems generated by the all-embracing British Raj in Kerry's time, and by the vanishing British Raj in the mid-20th century. So, John Appleby's man has got some insights into India, so that will be particularly helpful for us, God willing, when we come to the second part. Let's then begin at the beginning. Back in England, the middle of the 18th century, That's when William Carey was born, August 17, 1761. His parents were Edmonds and Elizabeth Carey. Now financially they were quite a poor couple. They lived in a sleepy village called Paul's Pewry in Northamptonshire. I couldn't get a detailed map, but that's where it is geographically in England, kind of in the centre there. It looks all radioactive by that map, doesn't it? I think it's a nuclear power plant there. It's not too far from London, maybe an hour, hour and a half drive. And, as we say, his father, Edmund, he was a weaver by trade, but he was an intelligent man and eventually he got a job as a schoolmaster. And so, with that change of vocation, they came with a change of location as well, and they moved from their home to a much larger home, a schoolhouse, in a better part of the village. And it was here in this schoolhouse that Cary was really introduced to the whole world of books, and he develops this real voracious appetite for reading. Austin Walker over in England recently, he gave a paper purely on the subject of William Carey and his books. It's a fascinating subject in itself, the appetite and the love this man had for reading. Now, one of the great influences on his life at this time was not so much his father, but actually his uncle, his uncle Peter. Peter had been a military man. He had served in the British forces in the French-Indian War. He had travelled to distant lands. Uncle Peter had many fascinating stories to tell. So, when he eventually came back to England, he moved back to the village where the Careys were and he took a job as a gardener. And in the evenings, he would come round to the Carey home and the family would gather around the fireside and Uncle Peter would tell them the stories of his adventures fighting battles in distant lands and sailing the high seas and fighting with the French. Every English boy loves to hear about battles with the French. So, here it is that he really inspires the imagination of young William Carey. Also, he makes him aware that there's a big world out there beyond the bounds of little Paul's puree. in Northamptonshire. And so seeds then were being planted in the mind of young William which were going to bud to the glory of God in years to come. Now his relationship with Uncle Peter also develops in him a love for gardening as well. Young Carey has a passion for nature and insects and plant life. I'll just read to you a little section from Appleby's book. Mary, this is, Kerry has two sisters, Mary and Anne. Mary seems to have been his favourite sister, often accompanying her brother on his walks in the country for nature study and happily caring for the specimens of plants, insects and caged birds which he kept in his room. The Northamptonshire countryside provided William with a rich store of study material and brought to birth the future naturalist. Mary wrote, he often took me over the dirtiest roads to get at plants or insects. Though I was but a child, I well remember his pursuits. He never walked out, I think, when quite a boy, without observation of the hedges as he passed. He always seemed in earnest in his recreations as well as in school. So he has this love for gardening and for nature. And years later, when he was in India, he would be continually asking his friends if they would send him shrubs and shoots and plants. In Serampore, where eventually he will come to establish his base, he actually has five acres of garden that he was cultivating. And this was a hobby in which he took great delight and it was therapeutic and relaxing for him after the strains of ministry. Such was his love for gardening that originally that was his desire, his vocational desire, that one day he would become a gardener. But as a young boy, about the age of six or seven, he develops this very virulent skin disease and it's aggravated by any time spent out in the sun. And so he began to reconsider. He realised that wasn't something that would be a suitable vocation for him. It's interesting though, when he gets to India, this condition leaves him completely. You think that going out there being under the hot Indian sun is going to aggravate terribly this condition, but it leaves him, never returns. So there you have a mark of God's blessing on that missionary call of his. Anyhow, as a young man, he has this condition, so he cannot realise his dream to be a gardener. He couldn't spend time in the sun for very long. So, his parents, they realise he would have to consider other options. So, they eventually contact a shoemaker in a nearby village called Pithington. This is a man by the name of Clark Nichols. And it was here that Carey learns he begins an apprenticeship to train to be a cobbler. You know the difference between a shoemaker and a cobbler? Anyone want to have a guess? The shoemaker makes shoes and the cobbler, he repairs the shoes. So that's what Cary was trained to be, a cobbler. And there it was that he meets another apprentice, a man who's going to change his life forever, a man called John Waugh. Now, it's only recent, or last century, that we actually came across the name of John Waugh. For years prior to that, he was one of the great unknowns. You know, we talked last week when we studied Nehemiah about how so many of God's faithful servants are just anonymous. They're not celebrities, like the man who preached to Spurgeon. We never knew his name. He was John Wall for many years. He was like that. Nobody actually knew who this person was. It was only when, I think it was around World War I, the Baptist Missionary Society, this is the organization that sent Carey to India, they were cleaning out one of their offices and they came across an old safe and they opened up this safe and in the safe was a sheaf of papers and one of them was a letter written by William Carey. And in it he identifies this man, John Waugh, as the man who really led him to Christ. And so this is the fellow, John Waugh. He had himself been converted while going to a dissenting meeting house. The dissenters were that group of believers who broke away from the Church of England. They didn't want to be subject to the Book of Common Prayer and the vestments and things like that, so there was a group non-conformist called the Dissenters. And so, War is converted at a dissenting meeting house. He's filled with zeal, he's absolutely on fire for the Lord. He wants to tell Cary about his newfound faith and share with him as much as he knows about the Lord. And Carey, at this time, his response to this, he confesses to have been rather unresponsive. He was unmoved, really. He did have a church-going background. His father, Edmund, was the parish clerk. And it was the job of the parish clerk to go around the village on Sunday and to bring people into the church. So obviously Carey was there on the Lord's Day for church, but his spiritual condition wasn't very healthy. He describes it in this way, addicted to swearing, lying, and unchaste conversation, which was heightened by the company of ringers, football players, the society of the blacksmith shop, And then he says, of real experimental religion I scarcely heard anything till I was 14 years of age. 14 years of age. So where was he then? This is when he's beginning his apprenticeship with John Wall in the cobbler's shop. And so this is the time when Cary begins to become conscious of a spiritual struggle that's going on within him. There was an interesting story when he's working as an apprentice. This is 1777. He's 16 years of age at the time. At Christmastime, it was the custom of the tradesmen in those days to send out their apprentices to collect the debts from the local tradesmen. And what they would do is they would get the apprentice at Christmastime, they would get a gift from one of these men that they went to visit. And so William Carey is sent out. It's the day before Christmas to go and collect the money. And he comes to the shop of the ironmonger. And the ironmonger sees that Kerry's a young boy and decides he's going to play a trick on him. And he gives him a counterfeit coin. And so he thinks, well, I'll tell him about it after Christmas. But Kerry takes the coin and he's on his way back to the shop and he looks at the coin and he begins to figure out that it's a counterfeit. And so, obviously he doesn't want to lose out. He begins to think what he can do. He decides what he'll do is he'll swap that coin with some of the other coins in the bag and his master, Clark Nichols, he'll never know who it was who gave that particular coin. But when he got there, Nichols began to look through the money and he picked up this counterfeit coin and realised what it was. Then he went to the ironmonger a few days later and the ironmonger said to him, ah, did young William appreciate my joke with the counterfeit coin? And then immediately Clark Nichols realized that his apprentice had cheated on him. And the whole village knew that he had cheated on Clark Nichols. There was a small community in those days. That kind of thing happened. It traveled fast around the whole community. And so Carey said that the shame of his deed was unbearable and that he could hardly bring himself to go out of his home. He said, it was also the cause of me seeing more of myself than I'd ever seen before. So he begins to realise something of his desperate need for deliverance. This opens him up more and more to the things which John Waugh is sharing with him about the Gospel, the books that he's giving to him. You know, Kerry has this appetite for books. He's also got this tremendous gift for languages. And there's one particular book that John Waugh gives him. It's in Dutch. So Carey, what he did, he went and got a book of Dutch grammar and in two weeks he taught himself enough Dutch so he could read the book that John Waugh had given him. So he's got this amazing ability with languages. Now, it was through this witness then, this influence of John Waugh, that eventually young Gary comes to faith. He's spiritually brought to life by this young man's witnessing. So is born, spiritually, the man who would become the father of modern missions. Through the witnessing of that unknown fellow, a teenager, speaking to him there in the cobbler's shop. Let me just pause at that point and see if anyone has any thoughts or comments, questions, reflections. The Lord uses the smallest detail of life to prepare a missionary for the end of the year, but a little more than that. That shame and thought he comes about. It's one of those little details, you know, the skin disease, and how his parents decided to change course and send him to a shoemaker's. Kent. I find it interesting how early that people started their careers. Thank them. It was 1779. I think that's the date of his conversion, yeah. I was just thinking about the encouragement of this young fellow, witnessing to Carey every day and the fruit that came from that. He himself never became a great name in his own time, but Carey goes on to become one of the great men of Christian history. There's a pastor in England, his name's Mike Mellor. Before his conversion, he was a real wild man. He worked in a band on a cruise ship. He came back to England and he got a job as a journalist. He was really a bit of an alcoholic. He was out playing with his band and then he would come back to the newspaper office the next day. He was in a terrible state sometimes. Sitting across him, across the desk there, was an apprentice, a young man doing a trial there with the newspaper. And he could see the condition this man was coming into work every day. And one day he just, he saw him, you know, this man's life was in a mess, his marriage was breaking down, he just looked at him and said, Mike, Mike, you need to ask Jesus Christ to come into your life. And those words just, they hit him like a thunderbolt. He got up from his desk, he went into the men's room, closed it all, he got down on his knees, and there and then he asked Christ to come into his life. And he was saved. And now he works for Open Air Mission in England. He goes all around the country preaching the gospel. So that's the effect. So we need to think about the people that we're working with and rubbing shoulders with every day. What might the Lord be doing in their lives through our witness? Okay, let's move on. That was Carey's conversion, and it wasn't long after that that he himself joined a dissenting church. His father, as we say, he was clerk in a Church of England congregation, but perhaps it was through the influence of John Waugh that Carey himself felt more drawn towards the non-conformists, not the actual congregational church that Waugh went to, Carey, he made a real study of the whole issue of baptism and he came to a conviction from the scriptures that infant baptism wasn't something that could be justified from the Word of God and so as a result he began to seek out a leading Baptist minister so that he could apply for baptism and he found a man called John Ryland Sr. Now, he then passed him on to his son, John Ryland Jr., and eventually, this is 5th of October, 1783, William Carey was baptized. John Ryland Jr. said this, on the 5th of October, I baptized a poor journeyman shoemaker, little thinking that before nine years elapsed, he would prove to be the first instrument for the formation of a society for sending missionaries from England to the heathen world. and that he would become a professor of languages in an oriental college and the translator of the scriptures into 11 different languages. Well, it wasn't long after that that Carey then begins to himself feel the burden for ministry. In 1785, he preaches his first sermon. It wasn't the greatest sermon. He describes himself as as crude and weak as anything which could be, is called, or has ever been called a sermon. So you can see some of his humility again coming out. Then he has an examination before the elders of the church in Olney. He fails that the first time. He goes out again. He continues preaching for another year or so. He comes back and he's unanimously accepted. He's then called to pastor a small church in Malton in Northamptonshire. I've got a photo of this. You can still go there today and visit this cottage. That's the plaque outside. You can see there on the bottom the famous words of Kerry, expect great things from God, attempt great things for God. So this is the cottage. Now, it was only a small church there in Malton, and Christian ministry wasn't very well remunerated in those days, and so it's necessary for Carey at this time to take on extra work. He's serving as a pastor. He's also carrying on as a cobbler, and he takes on a role as a tutor as well, a private tutor, teaching students who would come to his home. And so this is the kind of thing that's going on there in his workshop in Malton. He's got his room where he's mending the shoes. He's also studying the scriptures and as well as that he's teaching the students who are coming in for lessons. And it's here in this context that he really begins to think more and more about the wider world. As we say, he's got this appetite for reading. He devours anything that he can get his hands on, especially things overseas. missionary reports, tales of missionary endeavours, the accounts of the Moravians and the German pietists when they went out onto the mission field. He just lapsed up anything like that. Particularly, did he read the journals of Captain James Cook. He was the great British explorer who sailed off to the South Seas and discovered places like Australia and New Zealand for the British and Tahiti and Hawaii and these kind of places. And around the 1760s these journals of Captain Cook are being published over in England and they become very popular. Many homes have a copy of Captain Cook's journals. And so Carey, with his love for all things overseas, he devours these books, especially the information that they contained about the countries and the size and the population and the religion of these kind of countries. He's fascinated by this kind of thing. He's also challenged by it as well. James Cook, in one of his books, after he'd been to Tahiti, he posed the question to his English readership, would the British ever send out a missionary to Tahiti? And he answered the question himself, probably not, he said. You know, in those days, Tahiti, it wasn't the lush, palm-fringed, tropical beach resort that we think of today. To the British people in those days, when they thought about Tahiti, they thought about cannibals. It was a dangerous place. Whoever would want to go to Tahiti? Besides, travel wasn't really a luxury afforded to many people in those days. You didn't really travel in those days. If you did, it was on horseback or horse and carriage. The roads were terrible, even worse than Michigan roads in winter. The potholes in England were enormous. So what happened in those days, you lived in your village, you worked in your village, you grew up in your village, you probably didn't very often even go out of your village. And so, you know, for most people, actually, let me just give you a quote here. Michael Haken, he says that, you know, if you were to stand, this is today, if you were to stand on a platform, a Union Station in New York, for one hour, on a Monday morning, you'd see more people in that hour than most British people in those days saw in their whole life. And so that just kind of gives you the background. Most people never even thought of going to somewhere like Tahiti. It's completely out of their mind. Apart from Cary. Cary's fascinated by this. He's intrigued. He's challenged by this. These are the kind of places he wanted to go to bring the Gospel. And these are the kind of people perishing in darkness who needed the Gospel. So, this is 1780s, this Burden is developing more and more, he's keeping a journal, he's also writing tables and stats and facts and figures all about these countries, how big they are, how many people, the religions, and as he becomes more and more familiar with all this information, he begins to realize the scale of the task. In those days, this 18th century, Christianity, its strength was really in Northern Europe and North America. the rest of the world really in gospel terms is relatively untouched. And so this thought begins to grip him and he gets this huge map, he puts it up on the wall of his cobbler's shop and he's putting the facts up on the wall and people would come in and he would talk to them about these countries and say, you know, these places are pagan, these people don't know and he would be getting very enthusiastic and burdened for this and particularly he would give himself to pray. Let me just read another section from Appleby's book. At least the task of shoemaking was an opportunity for him to study a book poised on his workbench. Journeys taken to purchase leather and for the sale of boots provided opportunity for mental revision of what had been learnt and for thinking about how to meet the need of millions of heathen overseas to hear about Jesus Christ. His sister Mary once wrote, He was always, from his first, being thoughtful, remarkably impressed about heathen lands and the slave trade. I never remember his engaging in prayer, in family or in public, without praying for those poor creatures. The first time I ever recollected my feeling for the heathen world was from a discourse I heard my brother preach at Moulton. It was a day to be remembered by me." So this is something of a burden that he's developing, a burden for souls and a burden for mission. Any comments or thoughts, questions anyone wants to make at this point? I think the time that he lived in Walden was unusual in Europe and the rest of the world. It was an industrial revolution. So everybody's jobs, the way people lived changed dramatically. You can see the providence of God in all of these things, isn't it? Shaping Cary, making him the man that he's going to be. We did mention Carey's, well we need to mention Carey's ordination. That took place in 1787. At that ordination there were three pastors there who were going to become critically important in his life. John Ryland Junior, John Sutcliffe, Sutcliffe was a man who he was really something of a mentor to Carey in the early years. He taught him theology and he introduced him to Greek and to Hebrew and started him off on those. And also a man by the name of Andrew Fuller. He was the great Baptist theologian of the day. And the contribution of these men and the theology of these men is really central to understanding the drive that's working inside Cary. We need to say a little bit about this. Since the 17th century, the Baptists were divided into two groups. You had the general Baptists on the one hand, they were Arminian, and at that stage, or towards the end of the 18th century, they're being swept away on a tide of rationalism. They're starting to lose the doctrines of the deity of Christ, and the doctrine of the resurrection, and eventually most of them end up becoming Unitarian. So you've got them on the one hand, on the other hand you've got another group of Baptists known as the Calvinistic Baptists and this is a group who adhere to, as we do, the London Baptist Confession of Faith. They subscribe to the Doctrines of Grace and this is the group to which William Carey himself, he joins himself to. Now, around that time, there's another branch of theology developing within the Calvinistic Baptists, a branch of theology which is really moving away from the kind of strongly Calvinistic position that Fuller and the others held, a view that we today know as Hyper-Calvinism, a teaching that really questioned the propriety of calling the sinner to repent. If the sinner has got no ability to respond or to repent, the argument goes, because of total depravity, then they say, we have no business in calling them to it, calling them to do something they cannot do. It's very simple terms, that's basically what it means. Spurgeon said of this kind of theology, it was one that chilled our churches to the very soul. Well, Fuller, he was influenced largely by the teachings of Jonathan Edwards, particularly his writings on the freedom of the will. he fought back and he argued that there's no contradiction between the universal responsibility of all men to repent and believe and the sovereign decision of God to save those whom he chooses. And this was a view that Fuller set forth in a book, a well-known book at the time called The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. It was a book that was designed to really refute the position of hyper-Calvinism. In terms of William Carey, this is a book which really solidifies his own convictions, particularly with regards to mission and to evangelism, because the implications for him were obvious. If sinners were themselves obliged to repent and believe the gospel, as the scripture says, then were not Christians themselves under an obligation to go and to present the gospel to them? How are they going to hear, unless they have a preacher? So this was the conclusion that Carey thought that all should naturally come to. So you've got quite a potent combination here. You've got the Calvinism of Andrew Fuller married up to this activist zeal of William Carey. It's a dynamic combination. It's really the engine behind the missionary enterprise that you have developing towards the end of that century. And it all comes to a head at what has now become a famous meeting, a minister's meeting in Northampton in 1786. The meeting was presided over by John Ryland Senior, and towards the end of the meeting, he asked the ministers if they've got any subject which they would like to discuss. These ministers all gathered together, give me a subject that we can discuss together. Let me just read from Appleby's book once more. After a period of silence, Carey spoke up. Whether the command given to the apostles to teach all nations was not obligatory on all succeeding ministers to the end of the world, seeing the accompanying promise was of equal extent. Then he goes on. What happened next is variously reported. It was clearly a dramatic moment. George Smith records that John Ryland Sr. shouted the rebuke. You are a miserable enthusiast for asking such a question. Certainly nothing can be done before another Pentecost when an infusion of miraculous gifts, including the gift of tongues, will give effect to the commission of Christ as at first. What, sir, can you preach in Arabic, in Persian, in Hindustani, in Bengali, that you think it your duty to preach the gospel to the heathen? In another book, John Clark Marshman records Carey telling him in India that Ryland Senior sprang to his feet and denounced Carey's proposal with these words, Young man, sit down. When God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine. So, what was said? We don't know. Maybe both of those things were said. But clearly the sentiment of Ryle and Senior there was something that was shared by many people in those days. The people who kind of drifted away from solid Calvinism, they questioned whether Matthew 28 was really binding on the Church anymore. It was something that had been fulfilled by the Apostles and so the Church today doesn't need to worry about it. That was the reaction of many in those days. But such a response as that did nothing to dampen Carey's own zeal. In fact, it really just served to inflame it all the more. And after that, he and his colleagues, Ryland Jr., Sutcliffe, and Fuller, they gave themselves to concerted prayer. Carey himself then writes a book. He didn't really feel himself to be a writer. He tried to encourage one of the other men. He saw them as the theologian. He tried to encourage them to write the book, but they declined. So, in the end, Cary himself decides he's going to write a book on the subject, and he does. It's entitled, An Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen. Knew how to write titles in those days, didn't they? Snappy little one, that. The book had five sections. The book had five sections. First dealt with that text, Matthew chapter 28, in which he takes on that position that argued that there was no need for evangelism or missions. The second section was really a history of missionary activity from the days of the apostles right up to that present time. The third section, he described the state of the world as he then knew it. This is a tour de force of all the information he's been collecting over the previous seven years. The fourth section he deals with objections to sending missionaries, that they'll be killed, they'll be eaten alive by the cannibals, he takes on all of those. And then the final section he gives practical steps the church could take to be involved in the work of mission that was going on. So this is how Carey sets himself to tackle the inertia, the apathy that there is in those days. Prayer, writing and preaching as well. Preaching. There's one very famous sermon that William Carey preaches. May 1972. It's the annual meeting of the Baptist Association. Carey himself is due to give the final address of the day. And his text was Isaiah 54, verses 2 through 3. We've got time, why don't we read that passage together? Perhaps someone could find that for me. Isaiah, chapter 54. Let's just read, we could read the whole section, 1 through 8. Isaiah, chapter 54, 1 through 8. Has anyone found that? Yeah, Joe. For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your descendants will possess nations and will resettle in the desolate cities. Fear not, for you will not be put to shame. And do not feel humiliated, for you will not be disgraced, but you will forget the shame of your youth. and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. For your husband is your maker, whose name is the Lord of hosts, and your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel, who is called the God of all the earth. For the Lord has called you, like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, even like a wife of one's youth when she is rejected, says your God. For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In an outburst of anger I hid my face from you for a moment, but with everlasting loving kindness I will have compassion on you, says the Lord your Redeemer. So, this is a tremendous passage. This is an exhortation from God. It's the picture here of a woman who's bereft of her husband. Her husband has been one of those taken away off into Babylon. And now here she is, she's with her children, she's left alone, she's got no one to care for her. and she's sitting by the gates of Jerusalem in dust and ashes. And then God says to her, sing, O barren woman, sing and shout for joy. The Lord is going to do something for you. Enlarge the place of your tent. Strengthen the stakes. Move on. Move out. Lay hold of this blessing. The Lord is going to do something tremendous for you. You need to lay hold of it. And this is where Carey says his well-known statements. Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God. How can she do that? She's on her own. She doesn't even have a tent. She's bereft. Then comes the word of the Lord. Verse 5. For your maker is your husband. The Lord Almighty is his name. The Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer. Zechariah's point was it's the Lord who's calling you to do these things. He is your husband, your maker. He's the God of the whole earth, not just the God of Northamptonship, the God of the whole earth. And so move up, move out, lay hold of these blessings, attempt to do great things for God. And it was a very powerful sermon. I don't think I've done justice to it there, but it had quite an effect upon the people who heard it. Let me just quote from Appleby's book again. He says, It's not hard to realize that the years of frustration Cary had endured, the increasing burden of awareness that the churches were neglecting to obey the Lord's command to go, and the undeniable need for the pagan world to know of Christ, all combined to pour into his words a convincing sense of godly authority. John Ryland Jr. later remarked that he should not have been surprised if the audience had lifted up their voice and wept. So it had a powerful effect upon them at the time. But then what happened afterwards was, well, not really very much. There was a few amens and preach it brother and that kind of thing and people worked up, but then they all prepared to go away and nothing was going to be done. And Kerry was in great anguish, a great distress of soul, it says, an agony of distress. And he laid hold of Fuller's arm and he said, is nothing again to be done, sir? I say to you, is nothing again to be done? and they realised that something had to be done. So, they decided they would set up a committee. It's often the way, isn't it? The way to get things done, set up a committee. Well, look at it. But again, over the coming weeks and months with Carey's reasonings and pleadings, eventually, October 2, 1792, they set up the particular Baptist Society for the propagation of the Gospel among the heathen. And the following year, January 1793, William Carey himself resolved that he would be the first to go. He was planning originally to go to Tahiti, but then he decided he would go with Dr. John Thomas on a ship to the Bay of Bengal in India. His farewell sermon, he preached on Romans 12, therefore I urge you brothers, in the view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice unto God, which is your reasonable service. They closed the meeting by singing Benjamin Beddohm's hymn, and must I part with all I have, Jesus my Lord for thee? This is my joy, since thou hast done much more than this for me. Yes, let it go. One look from thee will more than make amends for all the losses I sustain of credit, riches, friends." And that's what Cary was prepared to do, to leave the credit, the riches, and the friends. Many of his family and ministers thought he was crazy to go. Even his own wife thought that they were crazy to go. But because of his love for the Lord and his zeal for the lost, that's what Cary did. I think that's the real challenge from this first part of his life, the zeal that Cary has for the lost and for the Lord. You know, just as we finished, do we have that same kind of zeal today? I was listening to Austin Walker, he did a lecture on Cary, I listened to that this week and he pointed out that in England today in Leicester, which is one of the areas where Cary ministered, if you go to Leicester today you'll find thousands and thousands of Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and there's a building in Leicester that used to be known as Cary Hall but now it's been bought by the Hindus, it's been turned into a place of worship for them. So He's saying we don't need to go to India anymore to minister to these people. Many people from these backgrounds are here with us today and it's the same for us. Maybe not to the same extent, but there are those here. So do we have the same zeal to go and to minister, to witness as Carey did? Or are we like those people at the meeting there? Amen brother, preach it. We hear the message, we're full of zeal, but then we go out and we forget all about it. We need to pray, don't we, that the Lord would stir up in us the zeal that he did in William Carey to take this message and to go out and to preach it to the lost. Yes, Seth. I was just wondering if you could have an idea of why the Church at the time had so little interest in missions. You know, they went through a period of Reformation. There's a great deal of missionary activity during the period of Reformation. You have the Puritans coming after that, a good deal of missionary activity during that period of time. But after that Puritan period, it seems to have just cooled off. And you've got this theology, you've got this optimism. But I'm going to guess a lot of that theology came as a bit of a justification for their coldness and not the total reason for their coldness, for example. What was going on, if you have any idea, that took the time that it cost them to be so uninterested in missions? Yeah, that's a good question. From my reading this week, the main answer to that, I think maybe just the things I've said, just the how impossible it seemed to most people to even contemplate going on a mission. I think that was quite a hindrance to many people. and the spread of the theology that we just mentioned. Besides that, I'm not very sure. I'd have to do some more reading on that. Does anyone else have any ideas about that one? It's a good question. Yeah, Brian. I'm just speculating and wondering if it's somewhat of a sort of phenomenon we see with the second generation not being as convicted of the things that the first generations were. And the reformers obviously paid very heavily for their break with Roman Catholicism. cured and paid heavily for their break with the Church of England. But by the time you get to the 1700s, nonconformism is kind of a normal thing, in a sense. And there's that second generation that didn't cost them anything to become Calvinistic and convicted of those things. They were just kind of brought up with it. I don't know, speculation. Yeah, I could well be in a dimension and say I'm in the second generation. What's the test? It was striking in our day with the world being made flat and the Google migration generation, how we can, within a half hour's drive, in some cases within five minutes' drive, be in a foreign culture. And for us not merely to lament how we can't get across the Atlantic or the Pacific, but we can go across the country, or even across the strait in some cases, that actually impact people from foreign cultures. That's right, yeah. It's the world of mission I'd all say today. Okay, well that's the end there for this particular session. Hopefully we'll be able to come back to this another time and conclude the second half of Carey's life. Sir Ken, could you close in prayer for us?