We have a very special program for you today on Truth for Life. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Alistair Begg and spend time talking about his life growing up in Scotland, and today we're going to share this conversation with you. As you listen, you'll get a chance to find out more about Alistair personally, about some of the people and events that influenced his faith, and to hear about his call to pastoral ministry. The spiritual legacy in the Begg family goes back a long way? Well, on my father's side, yes, it goes back up into the Highlands and up then into Scottish Presbyterianism, which was not my background in growing up. But the legacy of it lingers, you know, those statements that find themselves embedded as with every family. Like my father would say, what's for you will not go by you.
Well, that's not just your average sentiment. So yeah, the beneficiary of that. And I've heard you describe the church environment in which you grew up as being pretty proper, pretty strict.
Well, it was a combo actually. It depends on who I was talking to and exactly what era they were referencing when I'm answering that question. Because an interesting thing happened that when my grandparents moved from the Highlands down to Glasgow, as I've said, a man who was a Highland Scot as well, and I don't know the details of it, but he came to become the superintendent of a mission that was established by Moody and Sankey at the turn of the century. And it was there that my father was converted as a 13-year-old boy.
So that was one piece of the puzzle. Then school would be at the local Church of Scotland church and in various other forms introduced to sort of all manners of evangelicalism. So St. George's Tron Parish Church, that is probably the environment that people have reflected on because I've described sitting in there as a boy and watching the Beatle come up and open the door and open the Bible and then go down the stairs again. I mean, that riveted me.
That was drama. And it created this great sense of expectation, very different from the sort of low-level average beginning of some of our contemporary efforts. So you had exposure to the tent hall and to the high church simultaneously. So now you've got the Highland Scots, you've got the Presbyterian church, and now you've got the Baptist church as well. And when we went to England, in the small town that we lived in, we went to the Baptist church there. And the minister there was a kindly man, but he was pretty hopeless.
And so my life then, as I came alive spiritually, went in search of good material. And as soon as I got my driver's license at 17, which is when you get it in the UK, the man that was highly influential at that time was a fellow called David Watson, who was an Anglican cleric in York. But I would load up a few of my friends in the car and we would drive to York on Sunday evenings in order that we could listen to this fellow preach. Well, I'm fascinated that at 17 you get your driver's license and you're loading up friends to drive 40 miles on a Sunday to hear somebody preach.
There aren't many 17-year-olds then or now who are doing that. How did that happen? Well, we could mix a little Billy Graham into it as well. At 16, Billy Graham was back in Britain in the Earl's Court in London. That material was then relayed to centers throughout the country.
And one of the centers was Leeds, which is about 20 miles roughly from Ilkley where I lived. So I took my friends to hear Billy Graham. I don't know what happened to them, but I know what happened to me. The analogy that he used was, some of you, your lives are like a radio that you're actually tuned into the signal, but your volume control is way down low. And the reason it's down low is because of the state of your own spiritual pilgrimage and I want to encourage you tonight to resolve to be done with that. And so in the midst of all of that and in great embarrassment to my friends, you know, I'm the guy that goes – I go up to the front and so I get a counselor who only knows how to deal with the sort of regular … Yeah, right. So the first person they said, you know, well, you do this and you admit and stuff. I said, no, no, no, no, I've done all that. I said, that's not why I'm here. I can't remember who the person was, but they went away to get like a supervisor.
It's like, hey, we got a tough one here. So I can't remember how it finished, but I went home and my father was up. I don't think my mother was up, but he said, how was it? I said, well, I don't know what happened down there.
I told him what happened. He said, well – because my father had led me to the Lord as a young boy. He said, well, I think what has happened is simply this, that somebody like you in a Christian environment like this has to get to a point where you make this all your own and where without the divine – the spiritual afflatus of your parents or whoever else it is, you've got to decide.
Are you in or are you out? He said, it sounds to me like tonight has been at least a point on that journey, which in point of fact it was. So it was catalytic. I mean, I've never tied the two things together until now that you mentioned them to me, but there was created in me then a genuine interest in and hunger for the Bible and new heroes became people who love the Bible, love Jesus and were really good at teaching it. As you look back on your Billy Graham experience and try to put a theological grid over that, is this a second work of grace? Was this your actual conversion?
What do you think? You know, I think it was just a step on the journey, definitely not a second work of grace and it wasn't because I was clear when the counselor tried to secure my conversion. I said, no, no, no, I got that part. But it wasn't the Jesus is Lord thing either. It wasn't moving from Campus Crusade's yellow book to the blue book. Actually, I then got into a whole Campus Crusade thing after that that we could add to the mixture. But no, I think it was that what he said made sense, that you're not really – yeah, you might have brought a few of your friends to the thing, but you're a walking contradiction, you know.
You're partly truth and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on your lonely way back home. Yeah, I think – just like I say to people, there are lots of those steps along the way I think that – I don't know who said it, you know, that the Christian life is a series of new beginnings. Yeah. What was the spiritual environment in your home other than church-going? Was the Bible read? Was there a family time?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, my dad was a very disciplined man. He had been in the army and if you found his Bible, he read his Bible and the marker was in the place.
So you could pretty well set your clock by it. He soldiered on, you know, and he used to use the daily light from Richard W. DeHaan or whatever it was just for those times. So it was very brief and you had the little thing. Then a word of prayer and then we're on our way. Our home was also populated by other Christian people. My parents were given to hospitality if someone was a visiting preacher or something. They would be in the home and so I can remember listening upstairs sometimes of an evening. The discussions about points of biblical theology were – began to be debated and so it was actually – it was a very happy environment that was then broken in upon, of course, by the premature death of my mother.
If we hadn't had a framework, we would really have had nowhere to go and nothing to say, nothing to turn to. Tell me about your mother's faith. Yeah, my mother's faith was genuine, simple, quiet. My mother would never have intruded in a conversation, in any kind of conversation, except invite it. Therefore, it would have been strange for me to hear her pray in that kind of public environment.
But it wasn't because she couldn't or didn't because I do have recollections of hearing both my parents praying for us as children when they thought I was asleep. My mom was a very funny lady. She loved laughing. I mean she found humor in some of the strangest places, much to the chagrin of my father.
I mean when we would go on vacation, we would almost inevitably find ourselves, quote, in the funniest church you've ever been in in your life. My mother is supposed to be keeping us under control and getting some of the dirtiest looks from my dad. She was a doer. She was kindly.
She was very good at the domestic duties of motherhood and wifedom. I really got the great benefit of that when for a period of my life, for one year, I was at home. It turned out to be the last year of my mother's life which neither of us knew. By that time, I was probably 19. You've moved into that realm where you started to become friends with your parents. I would have said that I would have picked her out as a really good friend in that context.
Even though my dad didn't get half the jokes, that was his problem. To see genuine faith in the life of your parents and know there's not a disconnect. They're not just church-going people.
These are people. This is real for them. A lot of people who have some spiritual awakening in their late teens also have a lapse in their early 20s. Did you go through a rebellion period? Did you ever have a – do I really believe this kind of check out for a while?
No, I think the biggest challenge for me was at the age of 20 to lose my mother and to stand at an open graveside for actually the first time in my life because she preceded the death of her own parents. For me then to say, okay, do I really believe in the resurrection? Do I really believe that the promises of Jesus will be fulfilled? And the goodness of God as I struggled through that, I said, yes, I do believe. I will believe, you know. No, as you know, I'm a pretty simple soul and I trust that the Bible is the Bible. I trust what the Bible says about itself. If you cut me open, I believe this.
This is the grace of God. The circumstances of your mother's death? Dramatic heart attack out of nowhere, just sitting in our house and dying. Were you with her? No, my sisters were. I was gone.
How did you get the news? I was a student at LBC and gloriously known as the London School of Divinity and I roomed with a boy from Rhodesia who had been a geography teacher older than me and early in the morning of November the second, early in the morning, somebody came knocking on the door and it was the principal, the Reverend Gilbert Kirby. And he said, I just need to come in and talk to Alistair. I thought, golly, I've only been here three months and I'm out. And especially because he said to Peter, he said, Peter, could you just leave us for a moment? I had no idea what was coming. And he sat down on the edge of my bed because I was still in my bed and he said, Alistair, I can only tell you this one way, last night your mother died. And it was just unbelievable. I mean, it was, nothing could prepare you for it. And that was it.
That was it. Gilbert was a key part of my journey from that point on. I mean, I ended up with Derek Prime in Edinburgh as a result of a letter written by Gilbert Kirby to Derek Prime to say, you ought to consider this boy. I hadn't seen him in a long time and I was speaking at the Keswick Convention, which is kind of like, you know, was then in those days, the Super Bowl, you know, you get to play. And there was a minister's house party that Gilbert Kirby now is a man probably deep into his seventies was, he was caring for those ministers.
I was staying in the speaker's house party, which was a separate hotel. But I remember as I came up the hill, he came out of this property and he saw me, you know, and he just came towards me and he just enveloped me. And I don't think we hardly said anything. We didn't need to say anything. It was just that bonding that happens and we've seen it in pastoral ministry where we deal with people at the extremities of their lives.
We may not say much, but we're privileged to be there. That privilege was given to him and there couldn't have been a better person to have essentially had that responsibility than Gilbert. He was a wonderful man. How did your father do after your mom passed? Well, actually my dad was very good at stuff. My dad, because of his involvement in the Second World War as a Batman to a general, knew how to cook. But what he did, he had to do. He had two children at school. He would come home and I was gone, you see.
I was then at college and then from college I was in Edinburgh. He did really, really well, but he lasted for seven years and then remarried. To my shame, it never really occurred to me to think about what it meant for my father because my mother was only 46. So I think my dad was probably 48. When your dad remarried, was that a challenge for you and your sisters? I think a big challenge for my sisters, a challenge for me only in absentia. Ironically, he married my best friend's mother. My best friend's father had died some years previously and although there was no relationship between the families, despite the fact that we as children were friends and school chums and so on, I guess in the sense of shared loss, they found comfort and affection in one another and so we're married. Your call to pastoral ministry? That happened in your teen years?
No, I wouldn't say so. I wanted to do law. I thought I could be Perry Mason. I didn't realize that nobody can be Perry Mason. There's no such thing as Perry Mason. You have to write a script for that to happen, yeah.
But I love those shows. I think they were in black and white when I was watching them, but yeah, without delving into all of that, when I stepped away from where I was and took this year out to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up, I came to another one of these points along the race where I had a strong conviction that although I had written the script for my life, which was I was going to get a law degree, a BMW 2002, and I was going to marry this American girl called Susan Jones if I could just manage to keep her on the wire for long enough as I was writing letters across the ocean. I faxed that to God, as one would say, and asked for his signature. He sent it back just with a blank sheet. He said, if you sign the bottom of the blank sheet, I'll fill in the stuff for you.
It's a metaphor, of course, but I came to a strong conviction that I had my thing upside down, that I was simply asking God to bless my plan. I had had all these things. I'm taking my school chums to the thing.
I'm loading the car up. We had a singing group. In the singing group, in the coffee bars of the 60s, I was the one that did the talk, not because I was any good, but because the other two guys wouldn't do it.
All of that is in there. Also, I remember I told you that the ministers used to come and stay in our house when they were the visiting preachers. They would say things to me like, maybe you'll be a minister one day, Sonny.
Nothing could be farther from my mind than that. Now, remember I told you about the Campus Crusade? I had been introduced to all these crazy American Campus Crusade people who had come to London to try and advance the cause. Those people are, hey, sign up, let's go. I wasn't ready to do that, but I was fascinated by these young, intelligent, often athletic, zealous people. I thought, I admire that.
They haven't adopted this because they've got nothing else to do. So then I said, well, what I'll do is I'll go somewhere that I can do a theology degree and prepare myself for whatever God has for me. But the one thing I know he hasn't for me is pastoral ministry.
I will not do that because I could never tell my friends because there's nothing cool about that. I could tell them I'm involved with Christians in sport. I could tell them that I'm involved in a student ministry or I could tell them I'm involved in a music ministry, but I couldn't tell them that I'm a pastor of a church.
I mean, that cannot happen. And so the definitive moment that just took the rug out from underneath me was in the spring of 75, and I was doing things with an English evangelist at the time for sort of work exposure. And we would go and do youth weekends, and we would meet the people and sing to them and do whatever we're doing and try and encourage them, lead them to faith. And so one Monday, I have returned from one of these ventures down in the south coast of England, and I'm sitting at lunch with some of my friends at college and a couple of the faculty members.
One of them, the Reverend John Balchin. And so, you know, nobody's saying much. So I said, you know, I don't like these things anymore. What things? These weekends. Why don't you like the weekends? What? You don't like? I said, no, no, I can tell you why I don't like them.
Because the end. So what do you mean? He said, well, I go down there on a Friday night and I'm introduced to a whole group of people that I've never met before. And come Sunday night, I get in the car and I drive away and I'll never see them again. I don't like that.
Balchin leeches forward, squeezes his eyes together. And he says, and I can tell you why that is. He said, that is because God has given you a pastor's heart. If you were an evangelist, you could come and go.
As a pastor, you can't. And I remember, even as I tell it to you now, I remember it was like the death now and the opening up of the future. I remember I went back to my room and I wept.
I wept because I said, no, this is ridiculous. And plus I'm 23 years old. How do you become a pastor? What does Balchin know? He didn't know anything.
You know, I never go through all of this. Then you get Gilbert Kirby. A notice comes in from Derek Prime. It's put up on the board and it says, Derek Prime, dear Gilbert, my assistant is moving to take a church on his own. I wonder if you have anybody down there that you may care to recommend. Gilbert writes a letter to him.
I go meet him at the King's Cross railway station coffee bar. You know, the rest is history. I've never applied for a job in ministry. It was the call of God. When I was ordained and I wore a clerical garb, I think you've heard me say this before, I might just as well have stood up with no clothes on in front of the congregation.
That's how vulnerable and just, I don't know. I said, if I'm going to do that, I'll never quit on this. I'll never quit on this. And so that was it. And then when I was ordained and I trusted the elders, they said, yeah, we believe that your subjective sense of being drawn to this reluctantly is a realistic sense. And so I trusted them. Well, we've been listening to a recent conversation with Alistair Begg, hearing about how God worked providentially in his life. Be sure to listen for the second half of this interview tomorrow. Now the year 2021 is quickly winding down and we've been hearing from people from around the world who have gotten in touch with us to express to us their gratitude for this daily program. And if you have donated to Truth for Life this year, you have helped make that possible. I want to pass their gratitude along to you. Your giving is what makes Alistair's messages available to a global audience. If you haven't given yet, there's still time.
You can make a year-end donation right now, right up until midnight on Friday, online at truthforlife.org slash donate or call us right now at 888-588-7884. When you do, make sure to request your copy of the book we're recommending today. It's called Piercing Heaven, Prayers of the Puritans. This is a collection of more than 200 Puritan prayers, and it's our way of saying thank you for your partnership with us. Request the book when you make a one-time donation at truthforlife.org slash donate, but please do it today because tomorrow's the last day we're offering Piercing Heaven. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening. Tomorrow we'll hear about how Alistair met his wife Susan, a courtship that spans seven years and thousands of miles, a love story that has endured for decades. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-07-03 12:01:50 / 2023-07-03 12:10:51 / 9