Who Was George Herbert?
00:00:00.000 | Pastor John, I know you're gearing up for the Desiring Guide conference for
00:00:07.920 | pastors here in a few weeks in Minneapolis, and you're planning to
00:00:10.360 | deliver a biographical sketch this year of poet George Herbert. Is there anything
00:00:15.440 | from Herbert's life that you can share with us? Any teasers from your research?
00:00:19.160 | I'm very excited about Herbert. I don't know exactly what I'm going to say yet,
00:00:24.440 | but I am immersed in him these days as I move toward the pastors conference.
00:00:29.360 | Herbert lived, he was born in 1593, and he didn't live to be 40 years old. He died
00:00:36.640 | just short of his 40th year, so he's another one of those saints who didn't live
00:00:42.560 | long but had a huge effect. He was born of a wealthy family and went to
00:00:49.360 | Cambridge, became the orator at Cambridge, and thus wrote and spoke before King
00:00:57.960 | James, who is responsible for the King James Bible, and battled all of his young
00:01:07.440 | life with whether he should yield to the ministry, the call of a pastorate, or
00:01:15.840 | whether he should aim at a role in the royal court. And that's where a lot of
00:01:22.360 | his poems come from, is the soul conflict with honor and pleasure and power on the
00:01:30.800 | one hand, and a life utterly devoted to Jesus on the other hand. And that's, I
00:01:36.360 | think, why some of his poems are so effective. There were about 184
00:01:42.360 | poems, and what's remarkable is that when he was 17, he wrote two sonnets for his
00:01:48.840 | mother, who he loved very much, and in those sonnets he pledged himself to
00:01:54.120 | write only for the glory of God. So in spite of all this battle with his public
00:02:00.280 | life in the years just after Cambridge, he held to that promise. There are
00:02:05.600 | no poems from the pen of George Herbert that we know of that don't deal with God
00:02:10.480 | or with the soul in relation to God. He's not like John Donne, who half his life or
00:02:17.000 | more was spent writing poems of a more secular, natural kind. All of his poems
00:02:24.120 | were devoted to God, and so he assembled them in a book that he never
00:02:29.160 | published during his lifetime, but was given away. So what I'm going to try to
00:02:33.920 | do, that book was given to Nicholas Farrar right after he died, and it was
00:02:42.200 | published within seven months after he died, and it went through a lot of
00:02:45.720 | editions. What I'm going to try to do is show how God won that victory, and
00:02:52.960 | Herbert gave himself over to God and over to the ministry and was a little
00:02:58.000 | country pastor in a tiny church called Bremerton for the last three years of
00:03:03.000 | his life, and then he died of tuberculosis just short of his 40th birthday, and how
00:03:07.560 | his poetry captures that conflict and how poetry figures into this whole issue
00:03:18.880 | of brothers, we are still not professionals. That's what I'm constantly
00:03:23.400 | looking at when I read him, is how does Herbert represent for us in his
00:03:29.800 | conflicts, in his soul, in his finally yielding to God, in his final years of
00:03:34.880 | pastoral ministry, how does he represent for us what I'm trying to say by
00:03:38.480 | brothers, we are still not professionals. So I'm really eager to take his poetry,
00:03:45.200 | his life, his ministry, weave them together into a kind of challenge to the
00:03:50.120 | pastors along with the others to not be the kind of professional we're talking
00:03:55.360 | about. Excellent. Well I'm looking forward to it. February 4, 5, and 6 in
00:04:01.640 | Minneapolis, the 2013 Conference for Pastors titled "Brothers, We Are Still Not
00:04:07.440 | Professionals." Hope to see you there. Thank you for joining us for this
00:04:10.880 | podcast. If you have a question for Pastor John, please email those to us at
00:04:14.040 | AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. Please include your first name and your
00:04:19.240 | hometown. You can find thousands of other resources from Pastor John online at
00:04:23.440 | DesiringGod.org. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
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