Our afternoon session day two of the conference was Geoff Thomas on A W Pink and that was a very good session, showing Pink to have been a fine evangelsitic Calvinist if not a good model on remaining in church fellowship.
Geoff's conclusions drawn from Iain Murray were as follows
His writings, his teaching, was self-consciously written with the authority of a man called by God to teach his word. His business was to speak, and exhort, and rebuke with all authority (Titus 2:15).
The clarity of his method of teaching was focussed on one great aim of bringing people to definite conclusions concerning the truth. The presentation of the message was always aimed at instructing people in what was true.
His teaching was not ended in the clear explanation of the meaning of a passage. The principles learned needed to be applied to our daily walk in order to convict and stimulate, comfort and strengthen (op cit Murray, pp.285&286).
Iain concludes splendidly thus: “It is on the practical and devotional side that Pink really comes into his own, and that he is almost uniformly uplifting, stimulating and often inspiring. Here he needs to lean on none. He speaks what he has ‘seen and heard’ when he takes up such subjects as prayer and self-denial, communion with Christ and growth in grace. His grasp of the ways of God in conversion and in spiritual experience is masterly and reveals a gift which has been exceedingly rare among preachers and writers of our times. He has sound counsel for the spiritual infant and for the mature Christian. As a spiritual physician who knows the heart in all its multiplicity of need he talks like one of the Puritans. He is able to walk, and to assist others to walk through that Valley, which says Bunyan, ‘is as dark as pitch’, where there is ‘on the right hand a very deep ditch’ and on the left ‘a very dangerous quag, into which, if ever a good man falls, he finds no bottom for his foot to stand on.’ This pastoral ability and discernment is surely Pink’s foremost strength as a teacher”
(Murray, p 296).
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