On this broadcast, we will tell the remarkable story of a plague-ridden Scottish town in 1647. At the leadership of a pastor, in response to the plague, there were waves of corporate confessions of sin.

The plague sparked widespread repentance, which unleashed many blessings. Times of refreshing came upon for the hearts of the people, holiness increased in the churches and, commercial prosperity rose significantly in the town.

Join me and Gavin Beers to look into this particular moment in the history of plagues converging on the church. The year was 1647 in the Scottish town of Ayr, Scotland.

My guest, Gavin Beers, is one of the pastors in the NCFIC church network. He was a pastor in Ayr for twelve years (now pastoring in Mebane, North Carolina).

On this broadcast, we will consider the plague in Ayr, and bring the Word of God to bear on the matter of repentance in the church.

Welcome to this session on a remarkable event that took place in Ayr, Scotland in 1647. I have Gavin Beers with me who lived there, who pastored in that town for 12 years. So it really is a rich blessing to have Gavin with us. Hello, Gavin. Thanks for joining us.

Hey, Scott. Thank you for inviting me to speak about the subject. Now, Gavin told me about this story a while back and I was so taken by it and well what I'll just give you a brief sketch and then we'll just talk about it. In 1647 plague broke out in air. It was a another iteration of the bubonic plague.

It had happened in 1644. It had happened, there were breakouts in England and Scotland during, you know, probably a 40-year period at least since the bubonic plague in 1351. But so the plagues kept coming back, they were fearful occasions, the churches did different things, but something happened in Ayr that is so remarkable the way that it happened. There's a pastor there, William Adair, preached a sermon on Zechariah 1212 and a wave of confession and repentance and really transformation in the community took place. And what was so remarkable about this confession that took place is that it involved many different types of tradesmen and each group of tradesmen would come together and confess their sins.

And there were many groups of tradesmen and you know you had the hammermen, they were the metal workers, you had the Coopers who were the barrel makers, you had the weavers and the glovers and the square men. The square men were the masons. And they broke into individual groups and confessed their sins publicly. And they filled the church for a period of a week from morning until about five o'clock at night to confess specific sins and they confessed all kinds of things from drinking, from neglecting the worship of God, from neglecting their family responsibilities, family worship, half-hearted hearing of sermons, not keeping the covenant that they took in 1643. This was the time of the solemn league and covenants and many took this politico-spiritual covenant to walk with God and so these different groups, these different tradesmen came together and they confessed of lying.

The sailors apparently had the worst sins to confess and they, early the most serious, biblically serious sins of immorality and lying and carrying on when they were at sea and you know some were repenting of their falling back into Roman Catholic rituals. Some of the sailors even confessed of selling children to American slave merchants as indentured servants. So they were very serious times, but what was so remarkable about it was the public nature, but even more than that, Gavin, what really amazed me was the careful documentation of the sins and the pastor William Adair reading a log of those sins to the church in this mass repentance. Now it started with the ministers repenting. That was the very first thing that happened.

I think that's very significant. But the ministers repented first and then Adair called the church to repentance. So Gavin, what an amazing story. Thank you for bringing it to me. Tell us more.

What are some of the things that we should recognize here? Well, to introduce air to many people who've been listening that they'll probably not really know where it is. It's in the southwest of Scotland, about 35 miles south of Glasgow. And, you know, prior to 1647, it had a long pedigree of Reformation influence and history. In fact, even going back before the Reformation, some of the earliest movements in Scotland were among a people that became known as the Lollards of Kyle.

And Kyle is the district where air is found. And so these would have been followers of John Wycliffe. Then at the period of the Reformation, one of the first Protestant celebrations of the Lord's Supper was held outside the town of Eyre in a large estate house on the river Ayr. Knox had come back for a secret visit from Geneva, and he observed the Lord's Supper in the Protestant manor just outside Ayr. So then moving into the 17th century, probably the most famous minister was a man by the name of John Welsh.

And John Welsh was married to John Knox's daughter. And he was minister in the first decade of the 17th century. He was banished because he refused to submit the king's order that the General Assembly of the Church not meet. He was banished to France. He had a son called Josias Welsh, who was instrumental in planting the reformed faith in Northern Ireland.

He had a son called John Welsh, who was a later covenanting minister, a field preacher in the Killing Time period. So you've got this long pedigree from Knox, three generations, and a lot of it is linked to and through the town of Aire. So when you hit the 1640s, this is a town that has very much aligned itself with Presbyterianism over against the Anglican state church and all of her liturgies. As you mentioned, they've a very conscious awareness of their covenanted nature before God. 16, well, the First Covenant was 1581, King's Covenant, then 1638, and then 1643.

So when this plague is ravaging Scotland, you mentioned It's been going around for a considerable period of time. 1645, it hits Edinburgh very hard. And then this outbreak in 1647, they see it coming. It's making its way over toward Ayr. And it's at that point that Adair preaches his sermon, 13th of September, 1647.

And what strikes me is that he, along with many others at that time, You go back to 1645 in Edinburgh, there's a minister Alexander Skelby. He was blind and he preached a sermon warning the people that the pestilence was coming and that the greatest need and the greatest response that the town could offer against it was true repentance toward God. So this kind of thing is a pedigree and Adair preaches Zechariah 12 verse 12, and the land shall mourn every family apart, the family of the house of David apart, and their wives apart, the family of the house of Nathan apart, and their wives apart. I think the first thing that strikes us with that was we're stepping into a different world. This was a world where God was at the center of their worldview.

It doesn't mean to say they were all godly. The repentance that they offered and the sins that they listed show us that they weren't godly, necessarily. But nevertheless, it was a culture in which you couldn't escape God. God was sovereign. Circumstances were under his control.

When afflictions came, people asked questions about why. Is this the judgment of God? But they were also very encouraged that if it was the judgment of God that they could go on to Him because He was merciful. And so you've got these two strains and two vital strains of truth that pour into repentance. One is a humbling of ourselves for our sins before God.

The shorter catechism however tells us that an apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ Jesus is essential to repentance. Otherwise, we've no hope. No one would ever repent if there wasn't the hope that the Lord received sinners. And you see this worldview where the minister has status in the society as the messenger of God, where he brings God's word and the people here, where he interprets providence in the light of God's Word and the first thing that he does is say, we need to repent. So That strikes me as a very different world.

And it's difficult for us at various levels to make the transition from our 21st century, secular, religious, pluralistic age to step back into 1647 and imagine what that would have been like. Right, you know, you've got this Reformation legacy. Martin Luther, the very first of his theses, of the 95 theses, stated that repentance is the primary characteristic of a Christian. So he begins with that and of course these brothers had that same understanding. It's very interesting if you look in Scripture you do find different kinds of people repenting, different instances of people repenting.

You have Balaam, you have David, you have a king, Ahab, You have a son, a prodigal son. You have Job, who's a businessman. You have all these different categories of life, strata, if you might want to call it that. What do you make of the way that this repentance took place? It was all, it was really by trade.

Yeah. Well, what are we to learn about that? Well, you see it begins with a call from the church. In that day and generation, there's such a cooperative relationship between the church and the town council. And then subsequently, the whole infrastructure of the town.

The church is at the center of it all and God's word is speaking to the state, God's word is speaking to the family, God's word is speaking to all of these trades. And so there's a practical response that reflects that where the ministers take the lead, with the 14 elders, 14 deacons, and they search their own hearts, confess their sins before God, but then as an example they stand up before the whole of the town. It was a parish system and everybody would have been connected to the church more or less And they confess their sins publicly before God. And then they turn as the prophetic voice to the civil government and they say, now you need to repent. And they meet in their council and they humble themselves before God and they put in their minutes and the records that they have not governed the the city in the way that they should have.

And then it goes to that wall, the guilds and these men would have been very closely associated due to the fact that they work together and they would have had associations within their trades. And it seems to me that there was a recognition that Sin is a problem throughout, however, distinct classes, distinct groups are going to have their specific sins. And so Adair is not content with some kind of lip service to sin in general. You know, we have sinned. He recognizes the true repentance is concerned with not just sin in general, but specific sins and that sins need to be confessed before God identified by us.

And so you have this wave of men in their place, in their position, confessing their particular sins and repenting of those before the Lord. And there's a significant history, there's a significant history of that with respect to the sins of the ministry. But I'll let you, you were gonna say something there and I'll come back to that in a moment. Yeah, what you're saying reminds me of the Baptist Confession. I'm assuming the Westminster Confession speaks the same way about repentance and that is that sins should, particular sins, should be repented of particularly.

Yes, It's a beautiful picture of that understanding that these are my sins and we're not just talking about broad sin. Yes, we are all sinners and Who cannot say that? But to repent of particular sins particularly. And it just made me think of the particular sins of ministers, the particular sins of fathers, particular sins of wives, particular sins of children, well and then even broken down to these various trades. You know the sailors had tremendous temptations of being away and I thought of you know the men who travel in the churches, All of us have men who travel in our churches.

You have men, but men and women have particular vulnerabilities to sin and that's why it's critical that we confess our particular sins particularly. Yeah, absolutely. But to do that requires spiritual work. So, you know, you preach a sermon on repentance And I've challenged our people on a number of occasions, do you even know what your sins are? You know, I say to you, you're a sinner and everyone will say, amen, you know, they're not going to deny that.

I'm a sinner. Okay, do you know what your sins are? You get to the end of the day and you know get down on your knees, pray before you go to sleep at night and you confess sin because you know you should. How long do you have to sit there and think, what are my particular sins? And if we're there for like, you know, five, 10 minutes really wondering, well, you know, what are my sins?

And there's a problem, you know, that we're not aware of our sins, we're not aware of what God requires of us. And then with regard to these different groups of people, you've got sins of people in their station. And, you know, going back to the catechism, are all sins equal? You know, are some sins more heinous in the sight of God than others? The answer is yes And one of the things that makes our sin more heinous is the position we occupy.

So my sins as a minister are more grievous to God than the sin of a member because I'm supposed to be the example, I'm supposed to be the leader. The sins of the father are more heinous before God because of the fact that he holds authority and he has responsibility and the consequence of his sins and the impact that it has on others. And there's an awareness of this kind of thing going on in this broken down, but yet corporate repentance. And that's why I think it's so significant that it began with the confession of the sins of the ministry. You go back to 1596 in Scotland and, you know, the Reformation is taking shape and we look back with kind of rose-tinted glasses at it, but there's a lot of chaos.

There's a lot of men who've accepted the Reformation outwardly because the church has changed from being Catholic to Protestant. And John Erskine of Dunne gets up in the General Assembly and preaches a sermon. I believe it was on the false shepherds, Nabi and Ezekiel. And he preaches a sermon to the General Assembly on that. And the Lord blesses it.

And the records say that the place turned into a veritable bokeem, you know, from the book of Judges, which means the place of weeping or weepers. And these men were humbled before God for the sins of their ministry and they repent. You move into the 1640s, this was happening again. There's an excellent work that's recently been republished. 1651, a humble acknowledgement of the sins of the ministry.

And there are hundreds of just points listed of the particular sins of ministers. And that was produced by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, where they came together and corporately confessed specific sins before God. And I find that immensely challenging, you know, in my own personal life, you know, that... It's like I don't have the awareness that these men seem to have over the greatness of their sins, the number of their sins, the impact of their sins upon others. And it's something we need to learn again.

Amen. And that was very striking about this, was the specificity. And it really convicted me personally. Yeah. And because I see that great lack, I feel so blind.

Yeah. I feel so blind and that's very difficult. By the way, if you have questions out there, if you're listening, feel free to submit questions. We'll try to answer some of them if we can. So Gavin, you were there in that town for 12 years.

So is the church still there? Are there monuments to that? Is there a memory? Is there an effect here all these years later? There are monuments.

You can go down into the area which is called the Citadel. It's called the Citadel because it's walled. And it was walled because in the 1650s Cromwell, he was fighting against the Scots because the Scots didn't agree with him killing a king. And one of the towns he garrisoned was Aire. And in the middle of that garrisoned area is what was the church of St.

John the Baptist, which was where John Welsh was minister. Apparently his wife was buried there. And Welsh was famous for a number of things, his faithfulness to the Lord. He took sick in France, he wanted to return. His wife went, they went through London and his wife went before the king and requested King James, who Welsh knew because he had been, of course, King James the sixth of Scotland.

And she asked could he return to Scotland to die and he said only if he submitted to the bishops and His wife held out her apron and said to the king, I'd sooner catch his head in this. So he was renowned for his boldness as was his wife, but he was renowned for his prayer life. He would pray through the night and his wife would come. He would have a blanket over him in the cold, and she would say, John, you need to come to bed, and he would say, how can I go to bed when I have the souls of this town upon my heart before God? And I often thought when I was in there, we had a tiny church.

You know, when I went there were 14 people. I think that the most that we had when I was there was maybe 36 people. There was a free Church of Scotland there, too, quite a small congregation. There was one solid Baptist church as well, but on the whole, the churches had gone liberal. And this is now a town of 50, 000 people.

But I used to think, why are we still here? Because other surrounding towns didn't even have what we had. You could go south and there was just a scarcity of biblical churches for miles and miles and miles, right across the whole south of Scotland. It's a spiritual wasteland. And I used to think, was it because of the prayers of that man that we were still there?

But you would drive around and you would see Cavananter monuments, you would go to the old Kirk where Adair's monument is there, you go outside the bank on the main street and it says this was the house of John Welsh of Ayr and nobody has any idea whatsoever who these people were. You ask the average person in the time have they ever heard of the Covenanters? They will never, they won't have heard of the Covenanters. You guys in America I think know more about the Covenanters than the people who live an heir do. It's absolutely tragic.

So one of the reasons I wanted to have this session is it seems to me that in the season we're in, whether it's a plague or whether it's not a plague There's a plague It's at least a plague of fear. Yeah. Yeah, but whatever the whatever the plague is This is a time of at least some kind of plague. Yeah, And what concerns me is that what I keep hearing, not just from my own heart, but from others, is can't we just get back to normal? Can't we just snap back and be meeting again and singing again and eating together again as a church.

Can't we just get these businesses going? I live on a street where some of the businesses are really struggling. Can't we just get back to normal? Well I sympathize. I have those feelings, but I think my fear is that we'll miss the moment as a church, that I'll miss the moment, that my local church will miss the moment, And the moment has been given to us by God to repent.

If you look at the history of plagues in the Bible, if all you had was the Bible, what would you think about plagues? God starts them. He always stops, starts them to chastise his people. And he ends them when they repent. So there's this American spirit that says let's just get back to business and it's a true I think it's a trap.

I think the American Church is in a bigger trap than we think we're in. I agree. And it's the trap of just give me my prosperity back, give me my church back, give me my sweet fellowship meetings again. Yeah. But we miss the moment, we miss the reason for the season.

Yeah. So I'm concerned about that. And what I have thought is that the central, most indispensable, most critical, most important thing about this moment is not what we think about the moment, but it's our repentance. Yeah. What are your thoughts about that?

Well, going back to the world they lived in, it was instinctive for them to realize that this was God speaking to them in providence. Our nation doesn't think like that anymore, our churches don't think like that anymore for a variety of reasons. You know, one being the law is not preached and sin is not understood. There's a false gospel actually that's going around where, and it's closer to us than we think, where you've got such an emphasis on the grace of God and it sounds good but we're not actually understanding the grace of God because we haven't first reckoned with His judgment. And I think that affects how we respond to a situation like this because you even have many people in the church saying, well, you know, this is just a natural thing.

It's providence. We can't say that God's angry with us. We can't say that God's judging us. These people in 1647 would have looked at you as if you were crazy if you had said that. You know, their worldview was totally different.

You know, So I mentioned that guy Alexander Skeldy, the best preservative against plague is true dependence toward God. It was obvious to him. In the end of the 16th century, you have- Hey, wait, wait, just one second, just one second. I read about Alexander Skelle, these sermons that he was preaching during that time, and I have failed to find any of them anywhere. Okay.

It's just notes about what he had said, particularly on this matter of repentance. Yeah. So if you run across him, Yeah. I wouldn't mind reading one of his sermons if he has them. I could try to locate, I know someone who might know, pardon?

He was in Edinburgh, right? He was, he was blind. And so he didn't have a congregation, but he was recognized as a preacher. The end of the 16th century in Germany, you had a man, Johann von Ewick, who was actually a doctor, and he wrote a book, The Duty of a Faithful and Wise Magistrate in Preserving and Delivering the Commonwealth through Infection in the Time of Plagues. First chapter, the care in charge of the Commonwealth belongs to the magistrate.

Second chapter, the magistrate before all things, before all things proclaim a public repentance. That was the first thing. Whereas you say it's like What about the economy? How many people are going to die? How long is it going to last for?

What are the politics involved in the rights of the church? You know, does the governor have the authority to do what he's doing? When's it, as we had that discussion, when is it proper to disobey the magistrate? And we can talk about all of those things and yet the first thing these men recognized was God has a controversy with us and we need to humble ourselves in the dust, examine our hearts and repent before God. But that has become alien to us.

You know, I was thinking about this this morning. How can you have national repentance in a nation that doesn't even know who its God is? You know if our leaders were to call us to national repentance the first question would be Well who are we praying to? But it was very different in the 17th century when you know the council is repenting before God, it's the true and living God, it's the God of the Bible. And so national repentance is a really, I think it's an impossible thing in this nation, just for the governor or somebody to say, let's all repent.

Well, who to? You know, who's our God? But then when you bring that into the church, we've got an approach to things in the church where we don't understand the seriousness of sin, personal repentance. We don't even understand what's required of us there, but we've so individualized and privatized our Christian life that we're not understanding the corporate nature of repentance. And so in so many churches you come and somebody will pray and it will be a very shallow prayer.

I refer to it as the Lord, we just wanna kinda pray, prayer. You hear it, so we just wanna praise you. We just wanna say this, we just wanna do this. And there's no confession of sin in the church. That's very different.

When you go back and read the liturgies of the churches in the past, you had specific prayers that were devoted to confession of sin. And then you've got this lack of awareness of the corporate nature of repentance where ministers will get up and they will pray as if they're the only one praying in the building and so it'll be I just want to pray this and Lord I ask this and I and there's a group of people and they're maybe standing or sitting and it's like well we're waiting for the minister to pray. But the whole idea is he's the mouth that's leading all the hearts to God and they are engaged. And as he confesses the sins of the people, they are saying, Amen within their hearts, this is true. And that's what characterizes the prayers of biblical repentance.

You know, think of Ezra chapter nine, we and our fathers, Daniel chapter nine, We have sinned, we have done wickedly. It's corporate, the Book of Lamentations as well. You've got five funeral dirges really that are sung over the destruction of Jerusalem. And it's not Babylon who's done it, it's God. That's the shocking thing to the Jew.

It's God who's done it. God sacked the city. God's destroyed his temple. God's killed his people. And they humble themselves in the dust and they say, we, we, we, we are guilty.

And I don't know that the church knows how to do that anymore right Let's talk about the aftermath of this. There were really remarkable things that happened as a result. So let's just detail some of the things that happened as a result of it. Well, the minister had to go away for a time, not because he was running away, but there was a controversy, as there often was in the church in Scotland. It was to do with the engagement and by that I mentioned that the Scots and the English started to fall out and there was an issue there about the status of the succession to the throne.

And so he's away. The plague continues for about eight to ten weeks to the end of the year, but when he comes back in springtime, they have a service of thanksgiving that the Lord had heard their cries. And in that they noted that only 34 people had died in the town. Now you might say, well, maybe it wasn't that serious a disease. And certainly If you go back to 1606, 2, 000 people in the area apparently died from the plague that came then.

But when you look at the figures of the plagues that were hitting in the 1640s, there were still up to a fifth of the population of towns were dying. And so in the service of thanksgiving, Adair acknowledged that, that only 34 people had died. He also acknowledged, as did the people, that since that period with the reformation of life and repentance of all the various guilds that the Lord had actually prospered their commerce far more than they were enjoying previously when they were engaging in all their sins. One of the groups, I can't remember which one, but they formed a society where they would have a meeting every Wednesday or every second week on a Wednesday, where they would continue this having a like a prayer meeting, I suppose, and they would keep account of each other, they would continue to confess their sins and seek the Lord in that regard as well. And they notified the Synod of Glasgow and Eyre what they were doing in the October of the year.

And the synod wrote back to them, encouraging the repentance and telling them that they would be observing what the Lord would do through that whole period. So You have change for the good. How long did it last? We can't say, but there was certainly evidence of change for the good that lasted into the next year where they could see the hand of the Lord. And if you remember, this is really a crucial period because 1647, you've got 12 years later, the beginning of the 1660s, the Presbyterian Church in Scotland is just going to be thrown into persecution for the next 25 years.

People are going to die because they won't allow the magistrate to dominate the affairs of the church. In Ayr, seven people will be murdered. Outside Ayr, many more. I could take you to monuments littering the countryside around Ayrshire where people were killed. Ministers, sometimes just farming people were killed for their fears.

Frozen, both are frozen. Wow. Yeah and you know you had this time of spiritual prosperity. I even read that the fishing industry improved. Yeah.

So there really was remarkable effects across the board in that repentance. So I wanted us to just raise the question particularly for pastors and people who might listen for all of us to consider our sins before without moving on so quickly and to recognize that repentance is the fundamental characteristic of a true Christian. And I want that for my own life and I desire that for our church and for the churches that we know. Gavin, any final comments you'd like to make about this? Just what ways you want to encourage or exhort all of us in this?

Well I think there is a challenge through the practice. It seems strange to us that they would all stand up and confess their sins in the way they did. You know, the Bible does tell us that we are to confess our sins one to another and pray for one another. It Doesn't mean to say we go to a confessional box and confess them to a priest, but we do recognize our sins before God, and we do recognize our sins to each other, and that can help other people to repent, it can help other people be honest about their own sins and the struggles that they have with their own sins. So maybe one way that we could address it is, You know, I'm obviously in a Presbyterian church, we have a session.

I think your church you function like with co-elders and you've got deacons. You know, maybe we should have a meeting off like the session or your pastoral board and say, okay, let's just list our sins. You might not have to go to the point we then go before the congregation and tell them, but it would be a good thing for elders to do collectively. And then to try and identify the sins of the church and maybe you could go to the church and say we your elders you know are expressing our shame for our lack of faithfulness and so on And here are some of the sins that we think that we as a church have fallen into. And ask your people to go home and confess those sins through the week.

Publicly pray in the Lord's day service. Surely this example challenges us to something, you know, not just nostalgia, you know, building tombs to the prophets and then not doing what they did. And It should motivate us to the practical response as individuals and churches to repent before the Lord. Amen. So you know everybody wants to get back to normal.

I passed some people carrying a sign today that said reopen now. And I sympathize with it. I want that. But in one way I wanted to say not so fast. Let's pause and consider the moment and don't miss the message God has for each of us individually to repent and return to the Lord and to live holy in Christ Jesus and to set aside our worldliness, to set aside our lusts, set aside the things that distract us, set aside the things that numb our minds to the holiness of God and the things that pull us away from filling our minds with up with the knowledge of his will.

We live in a world with such entertainments, such distractions, so many things and the news is just absolutely bombing us with information. A lot of it's very discouraging, so what are we filling our minds with? And we ought to fill our minds up with the Word of God and turn to Him and examine ourselves. We're examining the governments we should examine ourselves with the same kind of scrutiny. So that's that's my prayer for myself and all of us here.

But Gavin, thank you so much. I really appreciate the conversation. What a remarkable moment in history. May we have it again in our times. Yeah, pleasure.

Thanks Scott. Okay, God bless you. Goodbye. Bye for now.