THINKING PINK

Thinking Pink , Anne Adams

A Father’s Day Tribute

Arthur Pink’s father was very instrumental in bringing him into a saving knowledge of our Lord. Little is known of Thomas Clement Pink who was thirty-eight years of age when Arthur was born. The birth certificate gives the father’s profession as a corn dealer or corn miller. That he worked hard, and prospered can be judged from the fact that when Arthur was five, the family moved to a more commodious home. Arthur said, “The father of the writer was so busy that for over thirty years he never had more than three consecutive days’ holidays. He was a corn merchant, and after returning from market attended to much of the clerical work in person, so that for years he did not cease til 1150 Saturday night. Yet he did not lie in bed Sabbath mornings, but took his children to hear God’s Word preached. He did not send them to Sunday school while he took a nap in the afternoon, but gathered us around him and spent a couple of hours in reading Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, etc. Every day he conducted family worship and when we were too little to sit up for the evening our godly mother took us around her knee and prayed with us. Other memories of Sundays were of how the day began by our father reading to us God’s Word and also of how time was spent in the singing of hymns.”

Thomas Pink had a strong Christian commitment. In later years, A. W. Pink recalled, "We had a daily delivery of mail, including Sunday, which often contained important business letters, but none were opened on the Lord’s Day. No Sunday newspapers ever entered our home—not even when the war was on. When we were little all our toys were put away on Saturday night and pictorial editions of Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”, etc were brought out. Of course, such practices were accompanied by the warmth of devotion to Christ. “As a boy,” writes Pink, “I several times asked my father why he spent so much pain in shining his shoes, and each time he answered, “I am polishing them as though the Lord Jesus was going to wear them.”

In spite of all the Godly influence Arthur had in his home, what is clear is that as he and his younger brother and sister grew up, their early training in the Scriptures showed no signs of bearing fruit and slowly all three children drifted into lives of unbelief. To the added grief of his parents, Pink’s unbelief took a religious form. From Christianity, Arthur turned to theosophy, a cult which claimed a special knowledge preserved from generation to generation. Its best-known publication, the magazine called Lucifer, indicated clearly its anti-Christian nature and revealed the “wisdom” of Eastern religions including belief in reincarnation. Once interested, he soon became thoroughly committed and in his early twenties he was frequently found addressing cult meetings.

Meanwhile Thomas Pink was not silent. He always waited up until his son returned from meetings late in the evening and, to Arthur’s annoyance, often accompanied his “Good-night” with some brief but telling word of Scripture. One such evening, in the year 1908, as Pink hurriedly passed his father and dashed upstairs to his room, the text which he received was, “There is a way which seems right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14:12). As he shut the bedroom door, intending to do some work on a speech for an important annual conclave of theosophists, the text remained with him and so disturbed his concentration that work was impossible; all he could see mentally was “There is a way that seems right, etc.” Arthur said he could no longer reject the God of the Bible and began to cry unto the Lord in prayer, convicted by the Holy Spirit and his power to bring a soul to see his lost condition and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior. For almost three days he did not leave his room to join the family, but his father and mother prayed, and in the late afternoon on the third day, Arthur made his appearance and his father said, “Praise God, my son has been delivered.”

Arthur’s last address among the theosophists was, in fact, a gospel sermon on the true God and Jesus Christ, his Son, in whom alone there is full salvation. That same night Pink resigned his membership of the Society and was called “insane” by its members. God had used a father’s influence and prayers to save his son's soul.

(source: “The Life of Arthur W. Pink” [1886-1952]by Iain H. Murray)