If the World Hated Him, Yet God Would Love Him

Sinclair B. Ferguson, "Puritans - Ministers of the World," in The Westminster Directory of Public Worship Discussed by Mark Dever & Sinclair Ferguson, pp. 37-38:

...Puritan ministers were tremendously conscious of the privilege of the high calling they had received.

One such was Herbert Palmer (1601-47), the gifted upper-class bachelor who became one of the Assessors of the Westminster Assembly. He was widely believed to be its best catechist.

Palmer himself knew what it was to be catechized. Asked when he was only a five year old what he wanted to be he replied that he hoped to be a minister. When others tried to dissuade him by telling him that ministers were 'hated, despised, and accounted as the off scouring of the world', little Palmer nobly replied 'It was no matter for that; for if the world hated him, yet God would love him.'22

Perhaps more than anything else, this was the heartbeat of Puritan ministry at its best.

The love of Christ constrained them to be ambassadors. That constraint invested their preaching with impassioned appeal.

The fact that their ministry was that of an ambassador drove them to the study of their Sovereign's message.

The knowledge that their Master was the Sovereign Lord gave them confidence that their mission would not, indeed could not, in the last analysis, fail.

This was the spirit that had gripped little Palmer from his earliest days.

Well might we pray today, 'Lord, will you not raise up Herbert Palmers in our day too?'

22. Samuel Clarke, The Lives of Thirty-Two English Divines, London, 1677, 3rd. ed., p. 184.