Let me exhort you to thank God if he has put you in that river of living grace. There is no greater privilege than to be a pastor-preacher. In the para-church there is extraordinary fascination and vitality (but also there can be self-promotion), and you may well be drawn into some of its ministries, but consider the rich diversity and satisfaction of the work of the local minister.

Editor’s Note: At the 82nd graduation ceremonies of Westminsiter Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, held on May 26th, three men received honorary Doctor of Divinity Degrees. Wayne Grudem, A. Donlad MacLeod, and Geoff Thomas. Macleod led a seminar in the morning entitled The Joys and Frustrations of a Christian Biographer.

At the commencement service held at 2:00 p.m. that afternoon, Geoffrey Thomas, Minister of Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales, gave the Commencement Address. A transcript of that address was published by Banner of Truth, which is entitled River of Grace.

If you are familiar with Geoff’s work, you’ll certainly want to read this (it’s a bit long). But if you are not familiar, we encourage you to do so also. Especially if you are serving as the pastor of a local church.

I am honoured to be given this Doctor of Divinity degree along with my old room-mate A. Donald MacLeod and Wayne Grudem. Some preachers have been disdainful of the D.D. degree. You recall the rhyme

An old Baptist preacher called Fiddle
Once rejected this honoured degree;
‘It’s bad enough being called “Fiddle”,
Without being Fiddle D.D.’

I arrived here as a student fifty years ago, in 1961. When I was a boy, fifty years seemed a virtually endless period of time. I want to tell you that it’s a moment. It speeds by like a weaver’s shuttle. I praise the mercy that’s prolonged my days. The great truths I believed before I first arrived, I believe yet. Here I was given tools – methodological, academic, theological, homiletic but also affectionate tools – as well as directives and inspiration to tackle the calling which, by 1964, I knew was to be mine: to be the pastor-preacher of a church somewhere back home in the Principality of Wales.

In coming to an assurance of that vocation, Ed Clowney’s counsels were particularly helpful. I returned home two days after graduation pausing to look round the New York World Fair. ‘Sail on the Queen Mary,’ John Murray had exhorted me, but the boat was all booked up and I sailed from those famous moorings on the Hudson river, past the Statue of Liberty and into the Atlantic on the liner the United States travelling east 3000 miles to Wales.

Within six weeks I had married the girl who was waiting for me and who is with me today, and the following year I was called by the church I still serve to become its minister. Last Sunday I preached there in the morning on Luke 15 and in the night on Genesis 40, as I systematically expound those books, and in ten days I will preach there again, God willing.

My conviction is that all Christians need to hear every part of the Bible expounded and applied to them throughout their lifetimes, because that is why God has given us the Scripture. I have preached on almost very part of the Bible, but I will never finish this calling. That will be the task of another and then he will have all the remainder of revelation before him. I have yet to preach on half the Psalms, the entire book of Proverbs and the second half of the books of the Exodus and Isaiah.

But I am now preaching on the most crucial books for the second time. I also pause when I come to the great texts and we taste all they declare; ‘Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest . . . For we know that all things work together for good to them that love God . . . What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? . . . I know that my redeemer liveth . . .’ It would be a tragedy not to stop and expound such verses intensely. I deplore the fact that much evangelical preaching has turned into glorified Bible studies.

Aberystwyth is a small town of 18,000 people, 9,000 of whom are students; a university town divided into town and gown, further divided into two languages, Welsh and English – what has been dubbed the cultural capital of Wales. There I have built two churches, our own, and the one everyone goes to. You understand that there were lines that I couldn’t cross, ethical lines, theological lines, ecumenical lines, liturgical lines.

Others were happy, indeed zealous to cross them, but for me there were issues through which a salvation all of grace in its conception, continuance and consummation would have been compromised if I had crossed those lines, as would have been a worship which must be characterized by reverence and godly fear, for our God . . . our God . . . is a consuming fire. How could I ignore the Holy Spirit, and grieve him, when his presence and work in the church was totally indispensable? Without him I can do nothing . . . and nothing means nothing.

The possibility of a mega church at the cost of modifying a free grace gospel was not a difficult option to reject. You wouldn’t want the reputation of becoming a ‘communicator’ whilst not communicating God’s sovereign work of redemption would you? That’s not a name to be savoured is it? You wouldn’t have asked me to speak here today if you were looking for such a ‘communicator’ would you? In the words of your most famous lyricist, ‘That’s not me babe, oh no, no, it’s not me babe. I’m not the one you’re looking for.’

My life had been taken up by the river of redeeming grace. Otherwise I would have been part of the flotsam of our lost generation, ignorant of its origin and destiny, carried along with the flow, tossed to and fro, ever seeking and never coming to a knowledge of the truth. I had begun to be borne along by grace early on as a child, principally through my mother. Her own mother’s brother, Mam’s Uncle Oliver, had been converted in the 1904 revival in Wales and served the Lord with zeal for the next fifty years, a shrewd antiques dealer by profession, but a servant of God by choice, a street preacher, a text carrier, an organiser of children’s meetings, the writer of hymns.

During some Friday night children’s meetings that he initiated, my mother and her sister ‘gave their hearts to the Lord.’ That was during the First World War, and so I was raised in the atmosphere of keeping the Lord’s Day, attending church twice a Sunday and going to Sunday School in the afternoons – none of which was grievous to me. And there was always the background of my mother’s hymn singing; unconsciously and quietly she sang all day to accompany every household chore, hymns like ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds in a believer’s ear.’

I had suckled my mother’s milk to her singing. As she cooked and cleaned and ironed and washed she sang. Of course I thought, ‘Every mother does this.’ It was the security of a happy theocentric home, and so the river was carrying me along even before I knew what this joy was focused upon. Like Van Til I was being conditioned to trust in God, just as unbelievers are conditioned to distrust him.

The river would be taking me on in surprising places, for example, the super grammar school for boys where I spent seven years I could feel it. In the morning assembly we heard Scripture read each day; we sang a psalm and a hymn, and though the poor Students’ Hymnal had been bled of much of the authority, and the blood, and delight in God, it simply could not expunge it all from the selected hymnology, and so I would find myself singing words like these:

To him shall endless prayer be made,
and praises throng to crown his head;
His name like sweet perfume shall rise
with every morning sacrifice.

Ah yes. That is my Jesus! The words are from ‘Jesus shall reign where’r the sun,’ and then, at the end of every term, 600 of us teenage boys would sing, ‘Lord dismiss us with Thy blessing’ and there would be these words:

Thanks we give and adoration
for the gospel’s joyful sound;
May the fruit of Thy salvation
in our hearts and lives abound.
May we ever, may we ever,
evermore with Thee be found.

That had become my longing. By the end of my schooling I had made my public profession of my own life to count for Christ, no longer being a speck drifting along, but actively moving with that current. That profession had occurred in March 1954 as I sat in our little church. During those winter months of ’53 and ‘54 I would be walking along the road to the Sunday services thinking, ‘I wonder if God would call me to himself today?’ longing that he might, but nervous, and yet certain that he must perform the work in me of making me a disciple.

I didn’t know if I had him, but I knew that if I had him I’d be safe. So I’d become a Christian, but that one night in March, under the preaching, assurance of my interest in the Saviour’s blood was given to me, and that assurance has never left me for a day ever since, even when behaving as abominably as a child of God can behave. I knew on those occasions that it was as a Christian I was saying and doing those mean and fleshly things. I was going against the current of the river of grace.

Then I heard the students who were camp officers talking about a man they called the ‘Doctor,’ Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. They spoke quietly of him with gentle smiles and I wanted to know the reason for this respect and admiration from a characteristically iconoclastic group. Providentially in 1958 I saw a notice in a newspaper announcing that he was to be preaching and I went to hear him, and I understood. The intellectual and spiritual power; the God-centredness; the distinctive voice; the passion.

Soon I was reading as a university student Dr Lloyd-Jones’ Studies in the Sermon on the Mount. I saw the beauty of a righteous life and not only wanted to preach like that but to live like that too. When he retired from Westminster Chapel and I was sent a copy of his letter of resignation, I wrote to Ed Clowney immediately, that very day I believe, and told President Clowney that Dr. Lloyd-Jones had ended his ministry at the Chapel and was ready to lecture on preaching. So Dr Clowney wrote and invited the Doctor to come here to give those 20 lectures that now have sold in their tens of thousands, entitled Preaching and Preacher. In that production I feel I had a tiny part.