Paul the Pastor Looks Back - and Looks on

Paul the Pastor Looks Back – and Looks On
Acts 20.13-27

‘To know George’, said the speaker at his funeral, ‘you had to hear him preach.’

And immediately I felt a strong stab of regret. George Caird had been my teacher throughout my graduate years. I had attended his lectures and come away spellbound. I had spent many hours with him, one to one, wrestling with texts, theology, interpretation, drafts of my dissertation, all the things that go to make up the excitement of academic life. But he was an extremely busy man, running a college, taking part in university politics, writing books, spending time with his lively family. We hardly ever met socially. And on Sundays I was normally busy elsewhere. I heard him preach only once, at a rather over-formal, stylized university occasion. I remember once reading one of his sermons where, expounding Galatians 2.20, he spoke of ‘a debt of love, which only love can repay’. But I never actually heard him speak like that, with all the focused passion of his life’s work laid at the feet of his Master. At one level I knew him very well; at another, hardly at all...

Taken from Acts for Everyone Part 2 by Tom Wright