JUNE 27 2012

Today is my 75^th birthday. I think I ought to be able to say something about reaching such a milestone, but I find it difficult to do so. Clearly, I am very grateful for much in the past, for my parents, wife and family, and to the Lord who is over all my ways. I have to say that there is much that depresses me: the spiritual, moral and intellectual state of our country; the gospel churches with, too often, their disunity, their adaptation to the spirit of the age, their pettiness, the lack of true worship and spiritual power; and then there is myself, but that is between me and the Lord. I would love to think I had learned valuable lessons over the years to pass on to others but they are all on the pages of the Bible anyway. I see the danger of relying on past blessings and of being too self-satisfied. I know, with another Paul, that life must be lived ‘by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’. There is no other satisfactory way to approach the end of one’s days, whenever that may be.