Conclusion

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord. 1 CORINTHIANS 15:58

Eighteen chapters can suggest that Richard Baxter taught a great many things. In one sense he did — he wrote around a hundred and forty books and had opinions on everything. But the working principle underneath is single, and it is stated in the verse above. It is this: eternity is real; therefore work. That is the whole man. The two halves of his reputation — the theologian of heaven and the model of pastoral diligence — are not two interests that happened to coexist in one person. They are cause and effect. He catechised illiterate weavers two days a week because he believed each of them would exist for ever. He wrote about the saints’ rest and then behaved as though there were no time to rest at all, and there is no contradiction in that whatever. Take away the eternity and the labour becomes fanaticism. Take away the labour and the eternity becomes sentiment. Baxter held them together, and everything else in this book follows: the urgency of his evangelism, the weight he placed on personal instruction, the seriousness about time, the household as a mission field, the refusal to divide over secondary things when the primary thing was so enormous.

The danger of this book

If you have read this far, there is a particular hazard, and it is the opposite of the one attending the other volumes in this series. Baxter is exhausting. His standard is extremely high, his tone is urgent, and he was capable of a diligence that almost nobody can match — and did not always recognise that. A conscientious reader can finish him convinced that he has never done anything properly in his life, and be paralysed rather than moved. That would be a misuse. Baxter wrote to rouse the complacent, not to crush the willing, and his own theology gives the corrective. A believer’s acceptance rests on Christ and not on his productivity. The man who spent his life urging others to labour finished his own by observing, from bed, that he was almost well — not that he had done enough.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. PSALM 103:14

So take one thing. Not the whole programme — one thing. Fix a family worship time, or begin meeting with one person, or set twenty minutes for meditation on what is coming. Baxter’s method was never grandeur; it was a modest practice sustained for years.

Two things to carry

First, the eternal weight of ordinary people. If Baxter has one gift for the modern church it is this. He looked at a weaving town of two thousand unimpressive people and saw two thousand immortal souls, and it reorganised his diary. That vision, more than any technique, is what produced the ministry everyone has admired ever since. Second, the shortness of the list. Baxter spent forty years arguing and concluded that the things necessary to be believed are fewer and plainer than controversialists suppose, that the difference between godly Christians is smaller than we think, and that the difference between the godly and the ungodly is larger. Every generation needs to hear it and none has ever much wanted to.

A last word about the man

We have been honest about his failures. His doctrine of justification was judged by most of his own tradition to compromise the freeness of the gospel, and chapter six sets out why the objection has force. He was contentious, and the greatest English writer on Christian peace quarrelled with almost everybody. He wrote far too much and admitted it. He drove a sick body past what it could bear and called it faithfulness. His political judgment was, by his own account, repeatedly wrong. None of that is raised to diminish him. It is raised because he raised it about himself, at length, in an autobiography which contains one of the most honest pieces of self-assessment in the language — a man in old age listing the ways his mind had changed, and finding himself less certain, less impressed by cleverness, and slower to condemn than he had been at thirty. That is worth more than most people’s virtues. A teacher who has learned something from his own mistakes is more useful than one who never made any.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7

Kidderminster remembered him for generations. The manual he dashed off for a county association of ministers is still set for theological students three and a half centuries later. The book he wrote on what he assumed was his deathbed at thirty-one has been consoling the dying ever since. He expected none of it. He expected to be dead by the spring.

A PRAYER

Lord, I believe in eternity and it has changed almost nothing about my week.

Give me Baxter’s sight — to look at the ordinary people around me and see souls that will outlast the stars, and to let that reorder what I do with my hours.

Keep me from being crushed by what I cannot do. Let me take one thing and be faithful in it for years.

And shorten my list. Let me hold the great things firmly, the small things loosely, and every brother charitably.

I am almost well, and nearly home. Keep me at my post until then. Amen.