Billy Bray

Every now and again, there springs up in the Church of Christ a character whose overflowing joy in the God of his salvation lays the stern hand of censure upon our coldness and upon our formality. Such a one was Billy Bray – "The King's Son."

Billy was born in the Cornish town of Twelveheads in the year 1794; his father was a Godly man and reared up his children in the ways of truth. In 1811, however, when Billy Bray left his native hearth to work in the county of Devon, he also left all the influence that his Godly father had surrounded him with. He became a blaspheming drunkard, and remained so, until the Lord placed the claims of an eternal hell before him through the reading of John Bunyan's "Visions of Heaven and Hell."

For the first time in his married life, Billy Bray came home to his wife with his wages intact and a clear eye to look on her with. "How is that you have come home so early tonight?" she asked him. "You will never see me drunk again," said Billy; "and", he could say in later years, "she never has."

These, however, were merely the first-fruits of an awakened spirit, and Billy Bray – although dreading the flames of hell with all his heart, stillwithall, had, as yet, no real assurance that his soul was saved. This same assurance was only to come through many days and many nights of heart-searching and biter crying before the Lord. But, when the day of his salvation finally broke in upon Billy Bray, bringing with it the joy of sins forgiven before his God in heaven, that joy of the Lord was to remain almost entirely unbroken in the life of this new "King's son," and was to serve, as we've said, as a censure upon many of us who spend a great deal of our Christian lives locked up in Doubting Castle.

"I think it was in November 1823," he tells us, "but what day of the month I do not know. I remember this," he goes on, "that everything looked new to me … I was like a man in a new world. I spent the greater part of my time praising the Lord …" And here was the story of Billy Bray – "I spent the greater part of my time praising the Lord …" "I was born in the fire," he used to say, "and I could not live in the smoke." "He could no more help speaking of Christ and His salvation," says his biographer of him, "than the sun can help shining." "His religion," says another, "was not a safety lamp, laid by till he should be going down into the dark valley – nor like the chapel gaslight, that burned only on Sundays and at the week-night meetings." "I spent the greater part of my time praising the Lord …"

Of course, it goes without saying, that Billy Bray had his trials and temptations like all the Lord's people. "The devil knows where I live," he could say with an ironic smile. But it was his behaviour in these trails that set him so much apart from so many believers in his day and in our own day. At a meeting one evening where one believer after was relating the most recent trial of the Christian life, Billy Bray brought the meeting to an abrupt halt when he rose to his feet, clapping his hands, and told those about him; "Well friends, I've been taking vinegar and honey, too; but praise the Lord, I've had the vinegar with a spoon, and the honey with a ladle!" Times were hard and employment scarce in those days, but "If Billy gets work," he used to say, "he praises the Lord; when he gets none, he sings all the same. Do 'ee think that He'll starve Billy? No, no; for there's sure to be a bit of flour at the bottom of the barrel for Billy. I can trust in Jesus and while I trust Him, He'd as soon starve Michael the Archangel as starve Billy!"

This short account could never tell of the work accomplished through this very earthen vessel that God took up for His use. Of the souls saved, and the backsliders restored, and the chapels built, and the promises claimed. And all because – "I spent the grater part of my time praising the Lord."

Even at the hour of death Billy's theme song hadn't lost one note or stanza: "Haven't you any fear of death, or being lost?" he was asked on his death-bed. "What! Me fear death! Me lost!" he cried out; "Why, my Saviour conquered death. If I were to go down to hell, I would shout glory! To my blessed Jesus, until I made the bottomless pit ring again, and the miserable old Satan would say, 'Billy, Billy, this is no place for thee; get thee back:' Then up to heaven I should go, shouting glory! Glory! Praise the Lord." Then, indeed, the greater part of his time would be spent "praising the Lord."