Our Father, we are profoundly grateful that we could gather together this Lord's Day to worship you in spirit and in truth. We are thankful for the Christian Sabbath, the one day in seven whereby we could set ourselves apart from the things and cares and concerns of this world and to focus our minds wholly upon yourself. We're so grateful, O God, for this day where you have promised to meet with your people in a special way. And we're asking, O God, that you would do that very thing. We pray, O God, that we as your people would call the Sabbath a delight. that according to your old covenant promise, O God, you would fulfill it in these new covenant days, that you would bless us on this day, O God, that you would feed us with the heritage of Jacob and cause us to ride upon the high hills of the earth. O God, that you would sanctify us this day and make us more and more like our lovely and living Lord Jesus Christ. Father, we look to you this morning for fresh help from on high. We ask for our brother, Ian Hamilton, that you would continue to be his portion at this time. We're thankful for his labors during this time of conference. But Lord, we are looking to you afresh this morning for a fresh infilling of the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. To come upon him, O God, that he might communicate your workings in his life and the things of the gospel that we'll consider later, O God, that he would be your man for this day to us. O God, we pray that you would use him in a mighty way among us. Lord, we are thankful. for each of your servants. And mostly we're thankful for the Lord Jesus Christ, the servant of the Lord, who came into the world sinners to save. And how grateful we are that he has saved many of us in this room. We're thankful that he has redeemed us and has incorporated us into the people of God. Oh, Father, we bless your name. Thank you for making us who were once not a people to now be the very people of God. Come then we pray and tabernacle among us by the Holy Spirit throughout this day. Show us the Lord Jesus Christ in fresh ways from Holy Scripture. We ask and pray these things in his glorious name. Amen. So as our typical pattern is, when we have our conference, we ask our speaker to give his testimony. And it's a wonderful time to hear about all the things that God has done in the life of a hell-deserving individual. And so again, it is our privilege to have Dr. Ian Hamilton with us. We're so grateful that he has ministered God's word to us. God through him has fed us the finest wheat of his word. We have been caught up with the glories of the Lord Jesus Christ in a very special way. And so Ian, we're very thankful for your labors on our behalf. So brother, I ask that you would come now and share your testimony. Tell us about the things that God has done for you. I feel very far removed from you. I would much prefer to be down there, but I'm up here. Well, it is a privilege for me to share something of the Lord's dealings with me. Let me preface remarks about myself by saying this. If you were to ask any of the magisterial reformers, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger, Euclid Padius, John Knox, if you were to ask any of the great reformers, when were you converted? They would probably look at you and say one of two things. Number one, I don't know. Or number two, it doesn't matter. John Calvin wrote 59 volumes of theological treatises and biblical expositions. And in those 59 volumes, he makes two passing references to his conversion. Three lines in the preface to his Latin commentary on the Psalms, 1546. and a couple of lines in a treatise you wrote against Cardinal Sadaletto in 1539. I make that point simply to impress this upon you. The great issue is not when were you converted, how were you converted. The great issue is are you converted? Does your life show that you have been born from above? Does your life reveal that you are not your own, but that you belong to the Lord Jesus Christ? My background is very, very different from my wife's background. I had no Christian background whatsoever. My mother was a Roman Catholic. My father was nothing. They were good parents. They never attended a place of worship, either Roman or Protestant. As a little boy, for a short time, I was sent to the local Presbyterian Sunday school. That's what everyone did. But at a precocious age, I said to my parents, well, you don't go, so it can't be important. So I'm not going. I had no Christian influence on my life. My mother's family were devout Roman Catholics. And whenever we visited them, I was always struck by how nice they were, how kind they were. They were very poor. Their background was in Ireland. And my father's family were rascals. My mother's family were poor and devout Roman Catholics. I didn't know anyone who attended a place of worship. I didn't know anyone who owned a house. I was brought up in what you would call social housing in the east end of Glasgow. In the Lord's kindness, I was enabled to go to a better school. My parents couldn't afford to send me to a private school. I was a bright little boy. I suppose I was top in my class at primary school. And my primary school teacher was an interesting man. I don't know if he was a Christian. I'm not sure at all. But he had a high view of education. And here he was in the east end of Glasgow in social housing area, public school. And at the age of 11, he began teaching his class a little Latin, a little German, and a little Scots Gaelic. And I thought this was wonderful. I don't know what the other 41 children in the class thought. But anyway, through him, I got to a grammar school near the university across the city. I traveled right across the city each day for six years. My Sundays were spent either playing soccer or going to dance clubs. Saturdays and Sundays were clubbing nights, disco nights. That's what everyone I knew, that's what they did, that's what I did. And it was fine. I remember around the age of 15, I think, lying in bed and thinking, is this all there is to life? You work at school Monday through Friday and you wait eagerly for the weekend and then the weekend passes and you're back on the treadmill again. I remember just lying in bed thinking, is this life? There was a boy at school who was older than I and He later told me he would regularly speak to me about Jesus. I've got no memory of that. I have no memory of him ever speaking to me about the gospel. But I do remember the impact his life had on me. He was very different from me. I was into sport, he wasn't. I was into girls, he wasn't too fussed. I was in the academic stream, he wasn't. But there was something about his life. He just was different. He was happy. People liked him, but he was odd because he didn't do what everyone else did. I didn't know why. One Saturday night, I had been out on the town with a friend. I was almost 17. And we bumped into Albert in the middle of one of the big thoroughfares in Glasgow, which is the main city of Scotland. And Albert had been at a gospel concert. And he said, why don't you come to the Bible class tomorrow afternoon? Well, my friend and I, probably to Albert's surprise, said, yeah, we'll come. We came. I traveled across the city. It was a wet Sunday afternoon in November. And I remember going into this mid-afternoon Bible class. There was about 25 young people aged between 16 and 25. And I remember still my first thought. I looked around wondering if there were any good-looking girls in this group. And the man who was leading the Bible class had been told there are two unconverted boys who have come this afternoon. So he scrapped his talk. and he preached on John 3.16. For God so loved the world. I had never heard John 3.16. I didn't possess a Bible, but I did know David's lament over Saul on Mount Gilboa. Because my primary school teacher, this interesting man who taught us a little Latin, German, and Scots Gaelic, he said, this is lovely literature. And so he had the class, or some of us at least, memorize Tell it Not in Gath, Publish it Not in the Streets of Ascalon, How are the Mighty Fallen. So I knew David's lament over Saul and Mount Gilboa, but I had no idea about John 3.16. And so the man began to speak. And I was immediately gripped by what he was saying. And I remember there were two things in particular. I first of all began to ask, why would God love me? I didn't love him. I didn't doubt there was a God. That never crossed my mind. But loving God, God loving me, surely you only love that which is good or that which loves you. I couldn't quite understand why God would love me. It never crossed my mind to question the truth of it, interestingly. But as he spoke, the second thing that captured me was why would God give his son to die for me? to take the punishment my sin against God deserved. That puzzled me. You know, I was a bright little boy. I could think, but I couldn't make sense of it. I could feel the power of it, but I couldn't make sense of it. And I sat there Trying not to cry, you know when you're almost 17 and there are girls around you, you just don't do that. You don't show your humanity like that. And I just sat there a little bemused, perplexed, but captivated. The meeting ended, and I was a polite little boy. taught me to be polite, so I thought, I need to thank the gentleman. I'd never met him before. So I said, thank you very much for your talk. And he could see that I was distressed well, perhaps. And he said to me, would you like me to explain more? And I said, I would. And he took me into a little room and he just explained very simply the good news of Jesus Christ. And he said to me, do you want to be a Christian? I said, I do. He said, well, you pray. I thought, pray? In front of someone? I've never done that in my life. I don't remember what I prayed. I think I said something like, thank you, God, that you love me. Thank you that you sent your son to take the punishment my sins deserved. It was as simple as that. I had no theological understanding. I had no biblical language. But I knew immediately that I was different. And I remember not quite skipping through the streets of Glasgow heading for the bus to take me home, but with a light heart thinking, I want to tell people everywhere about Jesus. And I'm often asked, when did God call you into the Christian ministry? And there are different answers, actually. But I actually think he called me into the Christian ministry the day I trusted Jesus Christ. I could think of nothing else that I would want to do. There were lots of things I could do, but there was only one thing I wanted to do. My mother was a little perplexed, being a Roman Catholic, she said, well, but you were baptized. And I remember thinking, but I don't think water can wash away your sin. And my parents thought it really odd that I started to go to church. I would go on a Sunday morning, travel all the way across Glasgow and I would wait for the Bible class in the afternoon and go home. They began to cope with that. I was the only boy, the only person in both families who had ever stayed at school beyond the age of 15. No one had ever graduated from high school but me. No one had ever gone to university. I was about to go to university. That was a huge thing in my area. Almost no one went to college. And my parents kind of coped with that. And then I started to go to the evening service. And they thought that was unnatural. You should be out enjoying yourself. Well, I had been on Sunday evenings for four or five years enjoying myself. And now I discovered I had a new appetite for different things. I had a growing distaste for what this world had to offer me. And I had a growing appetite for the things of God. And then the church that I had started going to met for prayer and Bible study on a Saturday evening. Now, if you're working-class Glasgow on a Saturday evening, you're either out drinking, going to the cinema, or dancing. And here was this teenage boy, and I'm going to a Bible study and prayer meeting. and my parents thought there was something really wrong with me. And that's how the Lord mercifully brought me to himself. I lost every friend I had. Now, in God's kindness, he quickly replaced the friends I had with new Christian friends. I didn't want to lose the friends I had, but I didn't want to do what they were doing. I didn't want to go where they were going. And they didn't like me talking to them about Jesus. And in the Lord's mercy, I soon went to university. and immediately was involved in intervarsity. God gave me good, godly Christian friends, people who loved the Lord and loved His Word. I was very struck by how well they knew their Bibles. I had I was so ignorant that when I went to this Bible class after I had become a Christian, they had what was called sword drill. You know what sword drill is? You know, they would say 1 Samuel 15, 22, and you would look it up, and somebody would put their hand up first to get there. And I remember thinking, oh, this is good. And then someone said, Hezekiah 19, 4. I knew there were lots of ayahs in the Bible. The folk began to laugh, and I began to laugh. It didn't bother me. They were not making fun of me. They were just having fun. And I smiled, and I thought to myself, that will never happen again. And it didn't happen again. So I began to read God's Word every day, morning, noon, night. That was the beginning of everything. As I said, I believe, I could be wrong, that God put it into my heart the day he justified me, saved me, brought me to Christ. That was the day that my sights were set not on being a CPA as I thought I would be, but being a gospel preacher. Went to university for four years. Will I just go on a wee bit? Yeah? Yeah? Oh, well, ask me questions. I spent four years studying at university in Glasgow, a degree in economic history. I did very little economic history and a lot of evangelism. I feel, looking back, I mean, I did fine, but I think I should have got a degree in open air evangelism, started preaching in the open air. The four years at university clarified increasingly the desire I had to be a gospel preacher. And I'd started going to a Presbyterian church. The church where this Bible class was, was a, Dispensational Baptist Church. Well, that didn't mean anything to me. You're either a Protestant or a Catholic. I had no other ideas or notions or names in my head. Baptist, Methodist, that didn't mean anything to me. So when I was converted and the fellow at the Bible class started going through the book of Revelation, I just thought every Christian believed in seven dispensations, secret rapture, public rapture, tribe of Dan, little toes. And I had a chart up in my wall. And I would witness to people on buses and whatever about the thousand year millennial reign and all that. But as I read the Bible, I thought, you know, I don't think I find this in the Bible. So eventually I ended up in a Presbyterian church, confessional, conservative, expository preaching. I just loved that. I finished my first degree to the surprise of my professors. Everyone in the class, economic history, was doing theses and dissertations on transatlantic trade in the 18th century. the rise of monetarism and it came to me and my thesis title was John Calvin and the struggle for reformed orthodoxy in Geneva with special attention to the doctrines of the church and predestination 1541 to 1555 and the professor just looked at me but I got on well with this professor, and he knew that I was going to study theology. And he just smiled and said, OK. So I had read a couple of biographies of Calvin, and that just gripped me. And Calvin became my theological companion for the rest of my life. I've been shaped by three Johns. John Calvin, John Owen, English Puritan, and John Murray. Finished university in Glasgow, went to university in Edinburgh, and studied what you call an MDiv. I did that in three years. I then spent a year as an assistant pastor in Aberdeen in the north of Scotland. Loved it. Persuaded me that my heart was in preaching and pastoring and not in teaching theology. Edinburgh University kindly offered me a full scholarship to go back and study, so I went back to Edinburgh for three more years, finished studies on confessional subscription, which were later published, and then went to a parish church. The Church of Scotland is like PCUS, only worse. But there was a growing evangelical movement, conservative evangelical movement within the Church of Scotland. And I went to this congregation, 1,100 members, 42 elders. As I said yesterday to some people, I think 36 didn't know Romans was in the New Testament. 1,100 members. Probably with a judgment of charity, maybe 35 should have been members. Well, maybe 30. But one wants a judgment of charity, so we'll say 35. And then I married Joan. She's the best thing that's ever happened to me in the kindness of God. And for 20 years, we ministered in a little town, semi-depressed mill town south of Glasgow. For the first nine and a half years, we had interesting times. For 200 years, this church had never heard the gospel. They didn't know what the gospel was. Two women were overheard at the bus stop in town talking, and one said to the other, have you heard this new minister? No. He preaches from the Bible every week. Previous minister told stories. But slowly, partly through pastoral visitation, preaching, and people realising that I didn't have horns. Slowly, people were converted. The evening service began to grow. Prayer meeting began to grow. And in the middle of the 10th year, there was a sea change. Everything changed. Not, I mean, overnight, but within about six months, the church became something very, very different. It became coherently reformed, conservative, expository preaching, prayer. We had gone from 42 elders down to 12. 11 were exceptionally fine. One, I hope, but we'll leave that in God's hands. And so for the next 10 years, we loved being where we were. The people loved us. We had hardly a difficulty. Our biggest problem was being part of a mixed denomination that was sliding day by day, not just into liberalism, that would be bad enough, but into moral hedonism. But in 1999, a little congregation in Cambridge in England asked if I'd be willing to come. It had recently begun. Presbyterianism is everywhere in Scotland. There are probably 10 Presbyterian churches to one Baptist church and 50 Presbyterian churches to one Episcopal church. Now in England it's the reverse. There are almost no Presbyterian churches. This little confessional church, church plant, asked if I would come. So we left a church that was founded in 1451 that had 500 members to one that was founded in 1991 with 24 members. It was a hard thing to leave New Mills. We loved being there. Our four children were born there. It was the hardest thing we've ever done. I've never doubted it was the right thing, but it was the hardest thing. We went to Cambridge, a great famous university city. We had 17 years there, loved every minute. It was very, very different. In Scotland, I was a parish minister, so in 20 years, I took 701 funerals. The minister previous to me baptized, on average, 44 people, children. A year, when I came, we went from 44 to 4. looking for a credible Christian profession. So we had difficulties with presbytery, we had television cameras down, we had the national press down. Yeah, there were interesting times. So we go to Cambridge, and I'm not any longer a parish minister, and I can walk through the middle of Cambridge, no one knows who I am, whereas in New Mills, I was the only minister. There was no Baptist church, no Methodist church, no Roman church. There was me. I knocked on all the doors. People just expected the minister to turn up. And they'd say, oh, it's the minister. Never made appointments. You just turned up. Oh, it's the minister. And you would go. But in Cambridge, it was very different. Where we lived in New Mills, the 500 members lived within half a mile of the church. Although some people began to travel long distances for us, 20, 30 miles, because we were the only reformed church, we were the only church with expository preaching, and the only church that had an evening service, and the only church that met for prayer. Well, that's not quite true. There were one or two others, but consistently throughout the year. Cambridge was different, very small, but increasingly the church grew, students would come. So from being a parish minister where I would visit old Jenny who's got a sore knee or Auntie Maggie who's in hospital, she had a fall. I loved that. That to me, I'm in my element like that. But in Cambridge, students would say, could I meet with you to talk about Thomas Aquinas or John Chrysostom? And I loved that. I mean, I suppose I had been educated for that reason. I miss the ordinariness of my parish. Cambridge was wonderful, we loved it, but they were all, you know, if you didn't have a PhD, you were kind of unusual. Everyone had degrees, multiple degrees, whereas in Scotland, I was the best educated of anyone at the presbytery, but in Cambridge, you know, everyone was like that. We had a multinational congregation, which I loved. We had 14 or 15 nationalities, all colors, cultures, backgrounds. It was very diverse, except they were all very bright. So educationally, it was kind of mono-educational, if not mono-cultural and mono-anything else. We were there till 2016. And we had been thinking. When will be the time to move back to Scotland and to use whatever years the Lord gives to us in theological training?