Sinclair Ferguson

because it reared young people who weren't able to out-think their peers and who thought, if I can use the same verb, that thinking was no part of the Christian life.

You know, I remember the late John Stott saying, you know, that he thought he lived in a generation where evangelicals thought that when you come to church, you take your head off.

And the big thing is how you feel and what you like.

And you can see how that way of thinking

And people who didn't think that thinking was important were thinking to think that all the time reared a generation of Christians for whom what I like and how I experience is the big thing and not what God likes and what God says.

And into that generation, I think it was a pretty hard sell to say, you know,

I think you are saying catechisms don't work because we've never tried them.

And so I think many, many Christians in my generation probably only discovered catechisms later in life.

And then they discovered that when it's embedded in your mind, that what I am actually for is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.

That really makes a difference to the way you live.

It actually makes a huge difference to the way you feel about God, because it tells you you're meant to enjoy God.

And that's a different thing from what that generation that had such an influence in the Christian church was saying, what I'm for is to enjoy myself.

which in essence was to mean that you were cutting the source of real joy out of your life.

So the impact of that one statement

on people's psyches, their emotional life was colossal.

You know, to me, one of the greatest stories that ever been told about the Shorter Catechism is in an essay that the American theologian B.B.

Warfield tells in a little tiny essay he wrote, I think it's called, Is the Shorter Catechism Worthwhile?

And he tells this story that I think may come from the Civil War period, or depending on where you live from the war between the states.

And he tells this story about a man who was in a Midwestern city, which Warfield says was in a state of unrest.

And he's just walking down the street and there's a man coming towards him that he describes as, the way I would put it is, clearly this man had presence.