He caused consternation of many who did not want to send him to India due to his less-than-noble humble beginnings-no high school or college equivalent educations and no one to commend him, to advocate for him-yet Carey finally found a way to India. He’d learned Latin at 12-clearly a gifted boy. But at the same time, he also taught himself Greek in the shop.

He made his living repairing shoes and it provided a meager income. He was eking out a living as an apprentice in a shoemakers’ shop. And Carey prayed that he would have the opportunity to be sent to India to evangelize. This was at a time when the English were colonizing different parts of the world, including India. He prayed constantly from a very young age that God would send him to evangelize the heathen in India. William Carey is known as the father of modern missions.

When someone speaks to you in a less than complimentary way, how do you handle that? What’s your immediate impulse? “Well, thank you for that insult it’s better than I deserve.” When someone is disrespectful of you, when they’re dismissive of your opinion because you’re a Christian specifically, when they look down upon you as foolish and weak-minded, when they malign your intellect for believing an old book “full of contradictions,” when someone despises you-do you call to mind that you are being treated better than you deserve? Do you agree with them and say, “You know you’re right. At the end of the day, we are redeemed by God’s mercy, but we are far from perfect.īut I wonder how many of us truly believe what we freely and opening profess at times when others actually treat us according to that statement. And while those ways of referring to ourselves are maybe confusing to the uninitiated-“wretched,” “totally depraved”-they are really reminders-in our speech, in discourse we have amongst ourselves- that we are indeed sinners. We even use words like “wretched” and “totally depraved.” Some Christians, when asked how they are doing on a given day, might respond to you by saying, “Better than I deserve,” right? And they are acknowledging in a statement like that that they know they deserve judgment, so they are getting better than they deserve by the fact that God has given them grace.

We refer to ourselves as “unworthy sinners,” talk among ourselves like that.

Do you know what I’m saying by that? Christian jargon. For those who profess Christ-if we have been attending church for very long, we become accustomed to using Christianese.

In this moment natural born sinner mp3