23/09/2021
MEN OF KNOWLEDGE IN CONTEMPORARY TIMES (PART 1)
These are too numerous to mention, but let us consider a few of these men of high intellectual status that shook the continents, through their concerted devotion to the study of their Bibles.
¶ John Bois: He would rise at 4.00 am daily and study till 8.00 pm -a good 16 hours. This was an advantage that qualified him to be on the team of translators' appointed by King James. And he was a family man.
¶ Finish Dake: He was studying about seven and a half hours daily for 43 years consistently. The result is the Dake Annotated Bible. This account is reported in the Preface to the Dake Annotated Bible. Rev. Dake was married and had three children.
¶ Tertullian : He studies the Bible so much so that he could recite nearly the entire Bible from Matthew to Revelation with the punctuations. He graduated from the University at age of 13. He was one of the Church Fathers, an apologist and a defender of the faith.
¶ George Mueller: He read the Bible 400 times, half of the time he read it on his knees. Some other authority claimed it was "only" 200 times. This saint took care of 10,023 people in his orphanage without requesting for money from any human being. His motto was to look up to God only and for Him to move men. When he was ninety years of age, he was still still able to travel around the world to preach. Outside of bible characters, Mueller was accredited the greatest man of faith of all the time.
¶ John Sung: This Chinese brother completed Bachelor's degree in 2 years with a First Class top of the Class, Master's degree in 6 months, top of the class, Ph.D in 9 months. He attended a Bible college and completed nearly the 3-year course within 9 months with all distinctions in the courses he sat for. He was so ablaze for Christ that the authorities felt that he had gone mad, and so confined him in an asylum for 190 days . He said that while he was there in under 7 months, he read the Bible through 40 times, each time using different Bible study method. He did a spectacular thing. He was initially lecturing in an American University for some years. He resolved to visit his family in China. Some distance to the Chinese port he went on top of the ship. And, except for his doctorate testimonials with which to convince his father that he actually attained the Ph.D, he threw all his other certitifications and medals into the Atlantic ocean. He declared that God had called him no more to be a lecturer, but to preach the gospel.
¶ Charles H. Spurgeon: He was converted at age 15 and at 20 he was already a preacher with the largest congregation in the whole world. His church, London Metropolitan Tabernacle used to be jam-packed with congregants sitting on the window sills, along the aisle, doors and on the roofing of adjacent buildings. He would be pleading to them not to come to the church the following Sunday so as to give room for those large numbers outside. When he read the Bible the 100th time, he marked in with a banquet. Hear him : "It is blessed to eat into the very soul of the Bible until at last, you come to talk in scriptural language and your spirit is flavoured with the words of the Lord, so that your blood is bibline and the very essence of the Bible flows from you". He was called the prince of preachers and wrote about 400 books -more than any man dead or alive since Adam, except probably Witness Lee. When he died, the testimony of his wife was that her husband died labouring to make sermons.- TO BE CONTINUED
Rev. Olatokunbo Odunuga
