Introducing Gospel PatronsSample

Introducing Gospel Patrons

Sometimes we need to read history so that we don’t repeat it. Other times we need to read it so that we do. Gospel Patrons was founded because we believe our generation’s greatest need is for history to be repeated.

Five hundred years ago a mighty reformation shook Europe, and subsequently, the world.

Two hundred and fifty years ago a powerful evangelical revival awakened millions in the colonies that would become the United States of America.

Today, in the twenty-first century, we pray God will again touch down and give the masses a fresh sense that He’s real and true.

We dream of seeing churches overflow with crowds of people who are hungry to learn the Bible. We envision businessmen strategizing together about how to advance the gospel because their greatest passion is Jesus. We imagine college students gathering to talk about our great salvation and how they can spend their lives extending it to others. We picture Christians being marked by radical generosity and risk-taking action to see more lives changed, more souls saved, and more people sent around the world to reach the unreached. We envision more preachers proclaiming the great doctrines of the Bible with unstoppable courage, while God draws many to the Savior. We dream of thousands of people discovering their calling in God’s eternal kingdom and then running hard to play their part well.

How would our world be different if we lived like the real business of life was to love God and help as many people as possible learn to love Him too? What if we recaptured a sense of urgency to live for eternity?

We desire this. We long to see God revive our generation. This is why we wrote the Gospel Patrons book and launched the Gospel Patrons ministry.

The conviction driving us is that God works through people to change the world — and He’s not done yet. We believe our world can be different, and we believe God wants to work through us to make it different. We aim to ask and answer two very important questions: First, How has God worked through people to change the world? And second, How do we become those kind of people?

In the 1500s an Englishman named William Tyndale wanted to translate the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew into English. For 1,000 years the Bible had been locked in Latin, but most Englishmen couldn’t read Latin and therefore did not know the Bible. Tyndale wanted to change that. He wanted his countrymen to meet the God of the Bible, a God they had heard about but never known. The problem was Bible translation was illegal; you could be killed for it. But God intervened through a godly businessman named Humphrey Monmouth.

Monmouth protected Tyndale, he provided for him, and he even used his merchant ships to smuggle the first English New Testaments throughout England. Very few people have ever heard of Monmouth, but his partnership with Tyndale changed the world. Humphrey Monmouth called Tyndale off the bench and put him in the game.

What drove people like that? What made them so different from the average churchgoers of their day and ours? They weren’t content to be spectators; instead, they engaged.

The pattern we see in the Bible is that success in life often leads to spiritual failure. For example, Noah successfully believed God, built the ark and survived the storm, but then when life was comfortable he drank too much wine and became drunk. Abraham heard God’s call to leave his homeland, and he successfully obeyed in faith, but afterward got scared and lied about Sarah, saying she was his sister. By faith, Gideon won an impossible battle with only 300 men, but after his success he made a golden ephod that he, his family, and his country worshiped instead of God. David was a man after God’s own heart, and the Lord gave him victory wherever he went. But comfortable in his success David stayed home when he ought to have gone out to battle with his men, and he ended up committing adultery with Bathsheba and ordering the murder of her husband.

We experience success, become comfortable, then forgetful of God, and finally disobedient to Him. Like the Israelites (Ezekiel 28), we eat and are full; we build good houses and live in them; our possessions multiply and our wealth increases, and then we “forget the LORD our God.” Success inflates our pride and quietly derails our focus on God (Deuteronomy 8:11–14).

As Gospel Patrons, we look to the Bible and church history to reclaim beautiful examples of people who learned to worship and serve God while experiencing prosperity and success. We need the stories of men and women who walked the balance beam of blessing without falling off into self-indulgence or self-righteousness.

We need to see how they found the narrow way that leads to life so we can find it too.

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Let us pray:

God, just as You raised up people like Humphrey Monmouth and William Tyndale to advance Your kingdom, would You show me how to play my part today? Where are You calling me to step off the sidelines and engage? Amen.