Those who know a bit about me and my site know that I have a very high regard for the Puritans. And those who follow me closely also know that I have shifted in my theological views somewhat over the years. Not to fear: I still affirm all the basic, core Christian doctrines.
But as I discussed in a recent article, in some areas I have made some changes, including in eschatology, and even in terms of those believers I might have once shunned but am now much more willing to call brothers and sisters in Christ: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2024/11/27/hal-lindsey-rip/
In that piece I discussed the passing of two influential Christians: Hal Lindsey and David Wilkerson. While Hal passed away just this week, David has been gone for a while now, dying at age 79 years (1931-2011). A few years after the famous preacher and author of The Cross & the Switchblade went to glory, his son penned his biography.
When David Wilkerson by Gary Wilkerson (Zondervan, 2014) first appeared, I got it and read it. Various things stood out for me, but two things especially really made an impact on me. The first one had to do with the fact that David often doubted that God really loved him! And sometimes he even doubted his salvation!
Imagine that: this high-profile man of God who was looked up to by millions, and who had such an impact in reaching the lost with the gospel of Jesus Christ. How could this be?! Given that I too often wonder about things like God’s love for me, and my own condition as a believer, it was quite something to read about other much godlier and more influential folks than I also struggling with this. Toward the end of the book Gary writes:
During a trip to Latvia, Dad and I were strolling through a park when we took a brief rest on a bench. “I don’t talk much about this,” Dad said, “but I struggle terribly with something.” He cleared his throat and said, “I wonder whether God loves me.”
That was the first time I had heard my father express this. I was taken aback.
“Most of the time I know he loves me,” he said. “But I still go through droughts. I feel I’m not pleasing God, that I’m not doing enough.”
I brought up what immediately came to mind for me – Dad’s preaching on the new covenant and the Lord’s all-sufficient grace.
‘Yes I preach that,” he answered. “I stand on the gospel of grace. When I still feel like I’m under the works of the law, like I’m trying to earn God’s favour. I catch myself at it.
His vulnerability opened a door, and it led to some surprising conversations. I learned, for instance, that my mother had almost left him once – no wonder, given their many hills and valleys over the years. Dad also confessed to having occasional doubts about his salvation at various times in his life. He talked a bit about his parents and how he wished they could have had more joy in God. And he asked me questions about my marriage, which really took me by surprise. I thought, “Whoa, did I hear right? Did my father seriously just ask me for insights from my marriage?”
Those years of travel were a period of growth for him – baring his soul, reflecting on life, asking hard questions of both himself and God – and it revolutionised my faith…. (pp. 281-282)
I know that there are so many believers who also question their salvation, and also struggle with the idea that God really loves them. So to hear about a man mightily used of God having similar struggles is a real eye-opener. And it is something that should give us all hope.
But the second and related thing that I most loved as I read this biography was how Wilkerson dealt with these questions of God’s love and acceptance. The answer might really surprise you – it did me. You would expect that someone who was so thoroughly Pentecostal would not be open to what I am about to describe, but he was.
This turn-around in his life came through the great revivalist Leonard Ravenhill (perhaps no surprises there), and the writings of the Puritans (that is the surprising bit). Gary explains how all this came about. A number of evangelical ministries and figures – such as Youth with a Mission, Mercy Ships, Agape Force, Winkie Pratney, Leonard Ravenhill, Keith Green and the Second Chapter of Acts had moved to Lindale in rural east Texas.
As an aside, if you want to know why Keith Green was such a hardcore fireball for the Lord, imagine being mentored and discipled by both Wilkerson and Ravenhill! That helps explain how he was so wonderfully used of God for his short time of ministry on earth. Gary picks up the story:
Another figure relocated to Lindale who would serve as a great friend to my dad: Leonard Ravenhill. Since the early days at Teen Challenge, Leonard had made immense contributions to the body of Christ, especially in his study of revival. In the next few years, he would become as close to a mentor as my father would ever have.
Like my dad, Leonard became a respected elder statesman in the community. Young leaders paid him visits, thinking, “What a treasure to get a few minutes with this man.” Three to four hours later, those guys would leave exhausted from the deepest, most intense spiritual challenge they’d ever had. Leonard was loving and respectful, but he could come across as hard. “You needed to have your ducks in a row pretty quickly,” Craig Smith remembers with a grin, “because the sword could come out, and suddenly it’s ‘off with your head!’”
“How much do you pray?” Leonard would ask some young mentee. “Two hours a day,” the guy would answer. “Then you must pray three.” Yet the emphasis was never on something measurable; Leonard was always addressing a person’s passion for Christ. He was a tremendous scholar on the cross and on the sufficiency of Christ, so the things he offered weren’t legalistic; they were reverent. And there was an authority in what he said, because it came from his own passionate devotion. In that sense, he and my dad were cut from the same cloth.
Yet my father revered Leonard for another reason. In his friend, Dad saw what generations of his family had looked for but never found. Leonard embodied the holiness values that my dad’s parents had held dear, only without the legalism. He had a sober seriousness about life in God that attracted my father, but he also laughed and had joy.
My father ended up seeking out Leonard the way young guys sought Dad. “I need to go ask Leonard about this,” he would say, grabbing his car keys, or, “I want to find out what Leonard’s studying.” It was a rare thing for my dad to be the mentee rather than the mentor, but he knew Leonard was a bit farther up the road in some important ways. (pp. 199-200)
David Wilkerson: The Cross, the Switchblade, and the Man Who Believedby Wilkerson, Gary (Author), Sawyer, R. S. B. (Primary Contributor)
But what follows is for me the climax of this all, and something I just greatly treasure. As mentioned, Wilkerson could grow weary and despondent, just like so many of us. Ravenhill was instrumental in helping him out here:
During this time, people noticed a slight shift in my dad’s newsletter messages. One month the message seemed hard, bordering on legalistic, and the next month it focused almost exclusively on grace. “A newsletter would be so hard-core repentance that you’d think, ‘I’m dead, there’s no use going on tomorrow,’ Craig says, then he would share a message on God’s grace that made you wonder if he was hanging out with John Calvin the night before.”
There was a primary influence behind this duality: Leonard Ravenhill.
I was on the bus with the crusade team one day when Dad boarded, his shoulders slumped. As he signalled for the driver to start moving, we all saw Leonard’s car shimmy up the drive. “Lenny,” Dad sighed. “He wants to talk to me about revival again. Or awakening. Oh, Lenny,” he said, forcing a chuckle. It wasn’t like my father to dread seeing his friend. Dad had been down for months, and we all knew it. He was facing yet another trip touring nine cities in twelve days and he felt like he had nothing to say. My father knew he needed something, but whatever that might be, he wasn’t up for a discussion of revival at the moment.
Leonard emerged from his car, hoisting a sack, and Dad met him at the bus door. “David, I have something for you to read,” Leonard intoned. “This is your future. Read it and it will change your life.”
Dad may or may not have thanked Leonard. He may have thought to ask him for prayer. In any case, once Leonard’s car was out of sight, dad turned toward the back of the bus and slung the bag of books with force. It landed with a thud.
Yet during the course of that trip, I saw my dad’s spirits lift. Instead of writing, he read the books Leonard gave him, mostly classics written by Puritan ministers. Dad was barely able to crack one without being struck to his core. “Lord,” he prayed, “I don’t know you the way these men do.”
It dawned on my father there was a reason those books had endured over the centuries. They had spoken to different churches of different cultures with different peoples throughout time. Those writers weren’t just parsing abstract theological subjects. Their works spoke to all of life. When they wrote about the cross they told of its beauty – not in lofty terms but so that common readers could grasp it. The writers weren’t evasive on theological subject; they were very direct, each sentence freighted with meaning and conviction. They cut to the chase, and that appealed to my father….
I could sense the world opening up before my dad through those books. It was a world full of God, and thus one of beauty. He read and read and read, and when he stepped off the bus after that twelve-day trip, he had a new determination in his eyes. Soon everyone in the ministry offices was being handed tomes with ancient sounding titles and told, “This is the best book you ever read.” Every time a volume struck a nerve with him, he bought cases at a time and handed them out.
The eye-opening truths Dad gained from the Puritans involved the breadth, depth, and unfathomable scope of the work of Christ – and that Jesus’ work is all sufficient for us. For a hyperresponsible man like my father, this teaching contained a powerful revelation: true faith means resting in Christ’s finished work. That the effect on my dad was paradoxical: the more he entered into God’s holy rest, the more compelled he was to action. The revelation of rest reignited his passion for souls….
Dad’s reading was no longer just fuel for ministry. He realized he needed something for his own soul – a sense of all at what Christ had done – and the Puritans supplied it. I would peek into a book on my dad’s desk, in almost every sense was underlined with a phrase written in the margins: “This is the key!” The key he was discovering was, “My Father loves me! He accepts me, and I am pleasing to him.”
This was a radically new perspective for dad and caused him to reflect deeply on how he’d lived up to that point. (pp. 233-236)
A bit later Gary writes this:
The implications of covenant grace challenged his very moorings. He saw plainly that his prior notion of grace had been rooted in trying to please the Father by obeying his laws, doing more, occupying himself with responsibilities. My dad had never turned away from a single truth revealed in God’s Word – especially if that truth convicted him – but now he was hesitant. He feared that a headlong dive into pure grace might make him relax, pulling him away from his passion for God.
Yet he knew there was nowhere to go other than forward. So how could he own this biblical doctrine for himself, practice it, and preach it? Just as he had done with the message of repentance, God’s church would be his laboratory for applying covenant grace, and he would have to lead by example.
I was proud of how my dad attacked the subject. I remember seeing a stack of volumes by John Owen on the desk of his study. During that period, I thought of my father as being like the apostle Paul in Arabia, spending years in the desert discerning the ways and doctrines of God before preaching them. For my father, the process had begun with the books Leonard Ravenhill gave him during the crusade days. Ever since then he had immersed himself in a particular theological environment, with shoes that were slowly transforming him in ways he couldn’t have achieved on his own…
What I saw happen with dad was an evolution from the ministry of condemnation to the ministry of reconciliation. He received letters from people whose lives were being changed by his messages on covenant grace. For years they had been shackled by guilt, laboring under performance-driven faith, but now they wrote saying, “Thank you, I’ve been set free!” Other longtime newsletter readers had an opposite reaction, writing, “Are you getting soft? It’s been awhile since you’ve given a correction or a rebuke. What happened to the preacher of ‘no compromise’?”
The changes taking place in my father registered on deeper and deeper levels. At one point he was compelled to call fifteen people he had been estranged from and ask them to forgive him. These were people whose relationships with dad ended badly, some of them his fault and some of them not. Regardless, he owned up to his part in the breach and sought reconciliation in the spirit of love.
Several of the people he called wept. This was something they had hoped for over the years. Now dad was able to catch up on their lives, asking if they were still in ministry, inquiring how he might help them. Doing this gave my father a peace he had never known. (pp. 275-276)
Biblical truth is life-transforming. The deep and refreshing words of the Puritans have helped millions of people over the centuries. They certainly helped David Wilkerson. I love this story. My only concern here is that while I have written about it previously, I have not devoted this much space to it.
Even if you think that someone like Wilkerson was in a much different place theologically than you because of his Pentecostal roots, you will enjoy seeing how Puritan writings so helped to transform the man. Why not grab a copy of Gary’s biography of his dad and read it for yourself? You will be grateful that you did.
