“For Your name’s sake, O LORD, pardon my iniquity, for it is great” (Psalm 25:11).
Dear Praying Friends:
David once again begs for forgiveness, as he had in verse 7 and as he will again in verse 18.
This time, he says that his iniquity (perversity, sin) is great. Why? For several reasons. When we violate God’s commands and fail to do his will:
We disobey the orders of a great God, our sovereign Lord and King. The greater the person whom we offend, the greater the guilt.
We spurn the one whose love toward us is infinitely great.
We dishonor the name of YAHWEH, the covenant-keeping Savior.
We provoke the anger of our holy Judge.
We have added to the burden of sin and guilt that his Son, our Lord Jesus, had to bear on the cross for our sake, and therefore, in retrospect...
We have vastly increased the torment that Jesus had to endure.
And more.
But thanks be to God that “in Him [Christ] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses” (Ephesians 1:7).
Thank you for praying last week. After coming upon additional information about Absalom Sydenstricker, the father of Nobel prize-winning author Pearl Buck, I realized that I must read more to try to understand why she later published a scathing biography about him, rejected all that he stood for, and campaigned vigorously against the whole missionary enterprise. Stay tuned.
So, I will instead try to finish the review of The Missionary Kaleidoscope: Portraits of Six China Missionaries, which contains a mostly critical chapter on Sydenstricker, whom the Chinese warmly appreciated.
Why do I write book reviews? That’s a good question.
About twenty years ago, while I was visiting China, a leading scholar of Chinese Christianity said to me: “It is difficult for us to locate and acquire materials on this topic; we are very busy teaching the usual required History courses; and English is not our mother tongue. It would really help us if you would find and review the most important publications for us.”
So that is what I’ve tried to do. You can view the results so far in two online collections: https://www.reachingchineseworldwide.org/chinese-christianity-literature and https://www.reachingchineseworldwide.org/missionary-movement-literature. These reviews form the core content of our Global China Center website, which receives about a thousand unique visits a month.
“But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more” (Romans 5:20).
Yours in his great grace,
Wright