Author: Fred Sanders

Today in 1850, Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) heard the voice of God calling him in the words of Isaiah 45:22, through the sermon of a Primitive Methodist preacher: “Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” Spurgeon looked and was saved at age 15, and went on to become one…

Robert Morrison (1782-1834) was the first Protestant missionary to China, and it was through his work that China was opened up to the Christian message in the nineteenth century. Morrison was an evangelical Presbyterian who devoted himself to a monumental task of study and translation. A handful of people in China converted to Christianity and…

Archbishop James Ussher, Bishop of Armagh, is remembered these days chiefly for his chronology: Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti (“Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world”), which he published in 1650. What was his chronology? The short version is that he added together all the begats…

E. Stanley Jones was born on January 3, 1884. He was an important Methodist Missionary with a big vision for world evangelism. Already as a college study as Asbury College in central Kentucky, the hand of God was on Jones: he was one of four participants in a prayer meeting (in a men’s dorm during a…

Today in 1873 Thérèse of Lisieux was born. Some Catholics call her The Little Flower, but DOCTOR Little Flower might be more appropriate. Born Marie-Francoise-Thérèse Martin as the ninth child of devout parents, she became a Carmelite nun at the unusually early age of 15. She only had about a decade of life as a…

Today in 1484, Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli was born, about 40 days after Martin Luther. Zwingli was a well-trained scholar (Universities of Vienna and Basel) and had the early reputation of being the best Greek student north of the Alps. But he was essentially a man of action, and when he began his preaching ministry…