In his recent blog post titled, There Are No Great Men, Tim Challies writes:
I recently finished reading Peggy Noonan’s When Character Was King, a life of Ronald Reagan. Noonan is a former speech writer for Reagan and an unabashed admirer of her former employer. While her account of his life is hardly objective, it is nonetheless fascinating, at least in part because Reagan himself was a fascinating individual who led the world’s most powerful nation during a pivotal period of history.
Noonan, like many others, considers Reagan one of the great men of modern history, yet in a response to one of her questions Reagan said about himself,
I never thought of myself as a great man, just a man committed to great ideas.
I love these words and I love what they convey! The men (and women) of history that we consider great are those who are committed to great ideas, remembered not for who they were in the abstract, but for what they did in pursuing those ideas and the goals beyond them. There are no great men except those who pursue great ideas.
May the same be said of—and said by—the Christian leaders we look up to and admire. May it be said of them that they were great not because of who they were, but because of the ideas they were committed to and, even more so, the Savior who was the end and goal of those ideas.
