Mighty Weakness

Just the right title--The Mighty Weakness of John Knox--in a book that avoids the hagiography of some other titles in this series.

The author, Doug Bond, writes in the opening chapter:

Who has not felt within him that he was too simple a man with too little to contribute to so great a cause as that of Christ and His church? What young woman, wife, mother, grandmother, or aged spinster has not wrung her hands, fearful and weak against the enemies of her soul and the church? Who has not thought that his gifts were too modest, that others could serve far better, and that he was too frail and timid to help advance the gospel of our Lord Jesus? Or who has not felt that hew was being unjustly maligned by critics, assaulted by the mighty, mocked and insulted by the influential?

So it was for Knox, but as he wrote of the Reformation in Scotland, 'God gave his Holy Spirit to simple men in great abundance.' His contemporary Thomas Smeaton said of Knox after his death, 'I know not if God ever placed a more godly and great spirit in a body so little and frail.'

. . . The Almighty is in the business of raising up simple, frail, and little people, and empowering them to be strong in Christ.

--Douglas Bond, The Mighty Weakness of John Knox (Reformation Trust, 2011), xxi-xxii