The Rear Guard Preachers - Sam Jones
Old Paths Bible Ministries © 2007 Richard St.James
Sam Jones
"Sam Jones was a drunken ex-lawyer and ex-school teacher who got
converted at the age of 24 and, went on to become the greatest
Methodist evangelist since the Wesley's, and one of the greatest
gospel preachers of all time.
Samuel Porter Jones was born in 1847 in Oak Bowery, Alabama; his
family moved to Cartersville, Georgia, when he was nine. Showing
promise as a young man, Jones studied law after graduation and was
admitted to the Georgia bar in 1868. However, he began to drink
heavily and almost destroyed his career and his marriage. When his
father pled with Sam on his deathbed to become a Christian, Jones
quit drinking and was converted.
He set out to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ in 1872. And
what a preacher he became! God made but one Same Jones; no other
American evangelist ever used his methods or language. Troubadour to
plain folks, he came out of the South with a vernacular that
startled audiences everywhere and shocked them into salvation. He
was called "the South's greatest spokesman for God."
No man ever yawned under his preaching. He had a devastating wit and
humor, a pet hate in liquor, and an undismayed love for God and man.
He blasted the hypocrite mercilessly; he made the sinner -- be he
prince, drunkard, or any careless Christian -- see himself as God
sees him, and change his ways.
He often turned his homiletic guns on church folk and even on
preachers, and they were better Christians for it. Blunt and frank
as Billy Sunday, he had the humility of his small town Georgia and
the impact of a consecrated cyclone; no town was ever the same once
he had passed though.
Will this earth ever hear again the voice or throb of another like
him? When Sam Jones died of heart failure on a train at Perry,
Arkansas, October 15, 1906, America lost a prince among
evangelists."
Above copied from WONDERFUL WORD BIBLE MINISTRIES
http://www.gospelguardian.org/