Celebrating 50 Years of God’s Faithfulness

We have hundreds of testimonies of how God is using the Reformation Study Bible in Latin America to bless and build His Church. And we are grateful to our ministry partners for all the support, for helping us take all these resources literally to the ends of the world. Celebrating 50 years of God's faithfulness, next on Renewing Your Mind. Hello, and welcome to this special edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Lee Webb. Some of you listening today are tuning into this program perhaps for the very first time. We welcome you. And there may be a handful of you who go all the way back to the very founding of this ministry there in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania.

It was 1971 when R.C. and Vesta Sproul founded the Ligonier Valley Study Center. So this year has been an important milestone for us here at Ligonier Ministries. I'm pleased to be joined by our president and CEO, Chris Larson. And Chris, what are your thoughts as we approach years in and as you reflect on the last 50 years? Lee, we are praising God for what He has done and is presently doing. We are deeply encouraged by the ministry impact that Ligonier has continued to have. And I would even say has multiplied its impact even in the few years since Dr. Sproul went home to be with the Lord. We planned and prayed for this season prior to his death. And I know that the fruit that we have seen over the past several years, particularly in the international expansion, is something that would greatly encourage him as we have sought to simply remain true to our founding principles and our founding focus, not drifting, as so many seem to be doing in these days. We give thanks to God for His faithfulness in preserving us and keeping us and blessing the teaching that comes through renewing our mind and all of our other outreaches.

Chris, how do you account for this growing interest? It's the blessing of God, Lee. I believe God's people are seeking truth and they are seeking trusted teaching. And as I just mentioned, this is a day of great defection from the truth. And so for a ministry like Ligonier, we have stayed focused on teaching the Word of God and nothing else.

No opinions of ours are sufficient. Instead, it is God's opinion that matters. And there are shifting sands today everywhere we look in society. And Christians are looking and returning, I believe, to those foundational principles of the Word of God. And so we bring doctrine which provides Christians confidence, clarity, and courage so that they can hold fast the confession of their hope without wavering, just as the author of Hebrews writes. As I mentioned at the beginning, there may be those listening right now who are tuning in for the very first time or are relatively new to the ministry.

If you will, take us back to 1971. And I know this is a question many people ask you. What is a Ligonier? That is a good question, Lee.

What is a Ligonier? To answer that, I want to take us back to when Dr. Sproul was a college professor. In fact, it was just a few weeks ago that Dr. Stephen Nichols sat down here in the studio with Vesta Sproul, Dr. Sproul's wife, and he found a syllabus from those early days when he was a college professor. Listen to this clip.

You know, I found something, Vesta, actually you sent it to me. It was an old syllabus from his contemporary theology course taught fall term 1967 by Professor Robert Sproul. And he adds something in its final note, classroom procedures. And he says, I enjoy a casual and informal atmosphere in the classroom.

Freewheeling debate and questioning is welcomed. He must have just so enjoyed interacting with students about that material to make sure they were really getting it. Oh, exactly.

So much so. Well, he adds one more thing here. He says, also, I would like to personally invite any student who so wishes to make arrangements to visit me in my home. And then he gives his home telephone number in the syllabus, and then he gives his address. So I'm assuming these Gordon students came over for cookies and. They did, but also at the college campus and Gordon Seminary were on the same campus.

And those people had cars and so on. So we had a lot of interaction with college students. Same thing, prayer meetings, question and answers, cookies, all that kind of thing. Recurring themes.

Yes. You know, as I'm listening to you talk, it sounds like this is actually the beginnings of the Ligonier Valley Study Center. It's funny you say that because I was just thinking about the people that came to our house at Gordon and at Westminster were students who were serious students and all that. And so we thought when we started the study center, oh, that we loved it so much.

This would be no problem to have people coming into our homes and all that to do the study center. Lee, I hope that our listeners get a sense of Mrs. Sproul's enthusiasm for the ongoing work of Ligonier and just that simple idea of helping Christians to have a place that they can turn to, to find trusted biblical and theological answers and giving them encouragement for how they are to live and walk before the Lord. Chris, in your role as president, I know that you met with R.C.

and Vesta every week. And I know you used that opportunity to ask R.C. questions, but there was always one question that he would ask you. What is that question?

That's exactly right, Lee. He would ask usually after we would finish some significant ministry milestone and with thanks to God, things had gone well, and I'd give him a report on that. And we would talk about it for maybe three or four minutes, and then he would just kind of stop and say, okay, what's next? He was always wanting to move forward. He knew that any ministry, any organization that was not focused on growing in its service was really just being idle and stationary and resting on past accomplishments. And so while this year we have been giving thanks for 50 years of ministry, it's really thinking about what's happened this year, the lives that have been impacted now as we seek to think about how we are going to serve in the next 50 years. So we draw strength from the past, but we don't stay there.

There's not some golden age that we look back to. Instead, we are always pressing forward, and I loved how R.C. just turned our eyes towards the horizon. And there are so many new vistas of ministry opportunity that are opening to us, and I wish we had enough time to talk about all of those. Yeah, I know you've used this expression before, but you're quick to say we are not a museum ministry.

While we cherish the past and what God has done, we're always looking ahead. And you all produced a graph that is truly astonishing that shows just how many people we have reached over the last year and projections looking ahead. That's right, Lee. Just slipping into the studio as our vice president of ministry engagement, I think it'd be better for Nathan Bingham to give our listeners just a sense of the growth of the ministry as well as the ways that their support has been used over the past year.

That's right. It really is encouraging. If we think back to 2020, I want to set some context for our listeners. Last year, we reached a new high-water mark for the ministry, reaching just over 25 million people.

And that's thanks to your generous support of the ministry. Well, already in 2021, Ligonier Ministries has reached over 50 million people. So thanks to your gifts, that's more than double the reach of 2020. As we look at these trends, it appears that we will reach more people in the next five years than in the past 50 years combined.

Now, when you say reach, what does that look like? What does that mean? Lee, honestly, it's a conservative number, but it is the number of people we can confidently say that teaching material from Ligonier Ministries has been put in front of. This reminds me, Nathan, of a conversation I had with Dr. Sproul. I think this was in 2012, and I was trying to draw out of him his vision for the future of Ligonier Ministries. And I asked him, you know, 25 years from now, where do you want to see Ligonier Ministries?

Let's play this clip from Dr. Sproul. The vast majority of people overestimate what they can accomplish in one year, when they have their one-year plan and all that, and at the same time, vastly underestimate what can be accomplished in five years. And so the trajectory that Ligonier is on, if the Lord tarries, 25 years from now, if Ligonier is faithful to its foundations, and I believe it will be, that we should have ourselves in the middle of a worldwide renewal of the Reformed faith that we can't even begin to anticipate from this perspective today. And that growth, dear listeners, that you just heard from Nathan is happening. And it really is your prayerful support for Ligonier Ministries and all of our many outreaches that the Lord is using to reach more people, millions of people, each month. Nathan, I know there's other ways that our listeners' support is being used.

That's right, Chris. And it's not just in English. When we think about international outreach and we look at 2021, and because of the increase in support from our listeners and other ministry friends around the world, I'm pleased to report that our international outreach team this year will have translated more than 7.3 million words of Bible teaching in 26 languages.

And just so you understand, that's 143% increase over 2020. Amazing. And I know many of you joined us back in spring for our national conference, and that was a wonderful weekend of fellowship and teaching together. But the live stream of our national conference, thanks to your support, was able to reach over 200,000 people around the world. Now, I'm also particularly encouraged by our Ask Ligonier chat service. You're supporting a team of agents that stand by 24 hours a day, six days a week, to answer biblical and theological questions from Christians and unbelievers alike around the world. And this year, that team will have answered over 75,000 questions.

And these are live chats that take 10 minutes to complete. And you're fueling that through your generosity. We've launched two new dedicated language websites, one in Hindi, another in Portuguese, making Ligonier's teaching material available to even more people. I'm sure many of you heard recently we move the goalposts for our Study Bibles for Africa campaign, now seeking to distribute 100,000 Reformation Study Bibles to pastors and church leaders throughout Africa by 2028. And what I know you'll be so encouraged by is the Lord's work through our Always Ready Youth Conference.

This year, we hosted two of those events. So just imagine this, hundreds of teenagers gathered together early on a Saturday morning so that they can hear God's Word faithfully taught and be equipped to be able to defend their faith. And then they go out from this one-day event back to their middle school and high school campuses as they're even preparing to go to college with just a greater boldness to give an answer for the hope that's within them.

I've seen video of the last conference we had. It's so encouraging to see these young people sitting in that audience, taking notes for eight hours on a Saturday. That matches Dr. Sproul's vision to flood the culture with knowledgeable and articulate Christians. And that is so needed today so that Christians can stand with conviction upon the truth of God's Word.

Thank you, Nathan, so much for those updates. Lee, I don't know about you, but I hope for our listeners that this just puts wind in all of our sails as we strive to continue to serve the Lord. Yes, we hear from so many folks who phone in, they write to us, we engage with them face to face at our conferences. Listen to what Josiah, a young student from Missouri, had to say. He said, God used Dr. Sproul in my life to bring me to the foundational truths of Scripture, as well as the ocean of Reformed theology.

By the way, Josiah is pursuing pastoral ministry, and he goes on to say, I listen to Dr. Sproul in my earbuds nearly every day. Another ministry metric that just came across my desk the other day was how many inmates were being able to serve. We've distributed over 10,000 resources to prisoners. We heard from Reuben, who's an inmate, and he wrote to thank our ministry supporters for the Ligonier resources that they enabled to be sent to his correctional facility. He said, I turned back as a leper prepared to give praise to God for using your ministry. And we're hearing those types of testimonies in the hundreds every month. And so we are continuing to invest in prison outreach. God is doing a work, we believe, in these correctional facilities.

Ligonier can help. Then there's Arsham from Iran expressing his gratitude. Arsham wrote this, I'm so blessed that now I can learn from the best Reformed teachers of God's Word and share these with my friends and family. Now keep in mind, this is coming from a man in Iran. He said, these resources can prepare the next generation of Farsi-speaking ministers.

We are dubbing Dr. Sproul's teaching series and many of our other teachers into Farsi and so many other languages and then broadcasting that through satellite television, as well as distributing them through the internet. Some missiologists estimate that the church in Iran is the fastest growing evangelical church in the world. And so there is another example of an awakening that we believe is underway and Ligonier can help. We can become discouraged in the state of the church when we look around the corner or when we look in our own city. But I do want to help our listeners to just lift up their eyes and recognize that the fields are white under harvest. And we can pray that the Lord would raise up laborers to go into these fields. And through a beautiful partnership with you, our listeners, we are there to serve God's people, these brothers and sisters in Christ who are serving in very difficult areas where they are persecuted and to be able to name the name of Jesus Christ and hold forth the true gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ will sometimes cost them their life.

And they are willing to pay that cost. We want to be there to encourage them, to serve them and help them to go the next mile. And that's where you, our listeners, come in. If you've been listening to us and are encouraged by what you're hearing, would you consider a year-end gift to Ligonier Ministries so that we can continue this growing outreach, not just here in the US, but around the world? You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343. But you can also find us online to give your gift at renewingyourmind.org. Lee, I'll go ahead and say this even more clearly for our listeners. Your gift of support for this ministry enables us to reach millions more people.

I've been serving at Ligonier since 2004. And there was a time that I would have hesitated to make such a bold statement of outreach. But we know this outreach is happening this month, and Lord willing, will happen next month. And so that's why I said earlier, we're not just focused on the past. We are focused on the future. And if the Lord tarries, can you just imagine the impact of getting reformed theological instruction to God's people around the world?

Ligonier is a supply line for Christians who are serving on the front lines. And we can be there to help. And so I would ask you to give generously and to pray. Do not cease in praying for the word as it goes forth from this ministry. You know, I've had the privilege of being here at Ligonier Ministries for the past eight years.

I had spent my entire professional career prior to that in television journalism. But I can say that the greatest professional and personal reward for me has been to be the host of this radio program. The four years that I had to sit across this table from Dr. Sproul was a kindness of the Lord that I will never be able to fully understand. And so to hear from you, our listeners, the impact that this program has had on you, as Chris said earlier, really put wind in our sails. Let's listen to a few of our listeners. I just want to thank you very much and appreciate the ministry, and we pray for you best. Thank you. Ligonier Ministries has really helped me dealing with some of the more difficult questions and helping me to better understand the mystery of God and God's plan, His purpose, and His ways. Hi, my name is Andrew. I'm 86 years old, and I listened to R.C.

's Pro for about 10 years. I first started listening to Renewing Your Mind in 1996, and it made a big impact on our lives. And we were in a church where we were being taught that He wasn't holy and He was your best friend. And we lose hope a lot, but every time I listen to Renewing Your Mind, the Lord brings me back to reminding me that He's sovereign and cares for my family. I started listening to Renewing Your Mind when I was in high school, shortly after my conversion on a local Christian radio station. And for the last 20 years, I have been enjoying immensely the teaching of Dr. R.C.

Stroll and others. And I've been deeply moved and edified by the abundance of outstanding teaching that has come from Renewing Your Mind year in and year out. Hello, my name is April, and I've been listening to Renewing Your Mind for at least 12 years. And I can't thank your ministry enough for the hundreds of sermons and teachings I've listened to. And I just love your ministry and thank you so much.

My name is Dave. I've been listening to Renewing Your Mind with R.C. Stroll since late 2017.

It was actually the day Dr. Stroll went home to be with the Lord. One of the things that I appreciate about this ministry is that it gave me a better understanding of the doctrines of grace. I struggle with high-functioning autism, and I have difficulty with reading comprehension at times. This program has actually been an incredible help for me in the midst of all that. God bless you, and thank you for standing for truth.

Well, that is such an encouragement to us. And recently, one of my colleagues here at Ligonier Ministries, Emmanuel Betances, stopped by the studio to give us an update on what's going on with our outreach to the Spanish-speaking world. The other day, a pastor called me from Colombia, and he said, Manny, 25 years ago, a friend of mine recommended the holiness of God to me. And I was in seminary, and I thought that I didn't need that. And now, because of the pandemic, I went back to it, and I studied it.

I saw the videos that you guys have. I studied with the study guide. And now, I repent for not paying attention to my friend 25 years ago. What would have been of my ministry if I would have paid attention back then? And the pastor was crying.

So, I hear those testimonies all the time. There's a hunger in Latin America for God and His Word. People need and are desperately looking for sound doctrine resources.

That's why I love the work that we, by the grace of God and the support of our ministry partners, we get to do here at Ligonier. Last year, for example, in September, we released the Spanish edition of the Reformational Study Bible, La Vibula Estudio de la Reforma. And so far, we have distributed over 40,000 Bibles across Latin America and Europe. And we have hundreds of testimonies of how God is using the Reformational Study Bible in Latin America to bless and build His church. And we are grateful to our ministry partners for all the support, for helping us take all these resources literally to the ends of the world.

Again, that's Emmanuel Betances, who is involved in our outreach to the Spanish-speaking world. And Chris, we are so encouraged by these reports that we've just heard, and we're amazed at what God is doing through Ligonier, Chris. We are, Lee, and hearing you say the ministry name again reminds me that I didn't actually answer your question earlier about what's a Ligonier. Well, the simple answer is, it's the name of a town in western Pennsylvania near where the Ligonier Valley Study Center began. But obviously, it's much more than that.

What started there in 1971 did not stay there. And so what's a Ligonier? The answer is profound because you look at why we exist. Why do we exist? We exist to proclaim, teach, and defend the holiness of God, and to do that to as many people as possible.

That has been an unchanged, fixed focus for this ministry for decades. And it's given us staying power when the culture is going crazy, and the church in many ways is entertaining liberal notions and eroding its own confidence in the word of God. And so we believe that it is essential for anyone you meet to know who God is. Now, anyone could be people on the street or people in the church because Dr. Sproul believed that that is the most essential thing that we can know as humans, is to know who God is and who we are. Dr. Sproul would teach from Isaiah 6, showing us that the Lord reveals Himself to Isaiah.

And I hope our listeners recall, as R.C. would teach it, that for the very first time in Isaiah's life, Isaiah knows who Isaiah is. And then there's an amazing turn in that passage. Isaiah is then called to proclaim the great and awesome name of God Most High to his generation. And we recognize as God's people that we are not redeemed so that we hoard the truth and bury our treasure. Rather, we are saved to spend our lives for the sake of God and His righteous purposes in this world.

Once we bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ and we repent and we flee to Him as our only righteousness, we then are propelled back into the world, back to proclaim His holiness to as many people as possible. And our greatest encouragement is when we meet people our Lord has reached with His truth and hear how it is being put into practice in their lives. And that is why the mission of Ligonier endures, because just as the fundamental problem of the sinfulness of humanity remains, God's Word remains, and it is relevant, and it is piercing to the root of our deepest need. So our continued prayer is that Ligonier, through its many outreaches, would be used by the Holy Spirit to equip you, dear listeners, and generations to come, to know the God of the Bible, and by His grace, that they would be used to change the world.

And that's precisely why we call this such a great reciprocity, because you, our listeners, are with us as we seek to proclaim and teach and defend the holiness of God to as many people as possible. So as we approach years in, would you consider a generous financial gift to Ligonier Ministries? Let me give you our phone number once again. It's 800-435-4343. If you prefer to give your gift online, you can go to renewingyourmind.org.

Again, that's 800-435-4343, the web address, renewingyourmind.org. Chris, thank you for being with us today. Nathan, we appreciate your being with us as well. We thank you for joining us today, and we hope to see you right back here next time for Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.