The Voices
Scripture Explained
Every reflection in Scripture Explained leans on a real person from history: preachers, missionaries, orphanage founders, and revivalists whose own lives were shaped by these words long before they were quoted here. Some spent decades in a single London pulpit; others buried a spouse on the mission field, or gave up ever going home. Here is who they were, and how each one spent a life following Christ.
Charles Spurgeon
1834–1892 · Baptist pastor · London, England
Spurgeon began preaching as a teenager and by his early twenties was filling London's Metropolitan Tabernacle to its 5,000-seat capacity most Sundays, making him the best-known preacher in the English-speaking world of his day. His sermons were transcribed and sold by the millions, and are still the most translated set of writings by any Christian author besides Scripture itself.
Beyond the pulpit, he founded a college to train pastors for ordinary churches, an orphanage, and dozens of other charitable ventures, all while writing prolifically through years of chronic illness and depression. His preaching combined deep doctrine with plain, vivid language aimed at ordinary people rather than scholars.
Matthew Henry
1662–1714 · Nonconformist minister · Chester, England
Matthew Henry pastored a dissenting congregation in Chester for a quarter of a century, at a time when nonconformist ministers in England faced real legal and social pressure for preaching outside the established church. Alongside his pastoral work, he began writing a verse-by-verse commentary on the whole Bible, aimed not at scholars but at ordinary readers and families.
He completed commentary through the New Testament book of Acts before his death; other ministers finished the remainder from his notes after he died. The result, Matthew Henry's Exposition of the Old and New Testament, has stayed in print for over three hundred years and shaped generations of preachers, including George Whitefield and Charles Spurgeon, who both credited it as essential reading.
Hannah Whitall Smith
1832–1911 · Quaker author · Philadelphia, USA
Hannah Whitall Smith grew up in a Quaker family in Philadelphia and, after years of personal spiritual struggle, wrote The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life (1875), a book on resting in God's faithfulness rather than in one's own effort. It became one of the most widely read devotional books of the nineteenth century and helped shape the transatlantic Higher Life and Keswick holiness movements.
Alongside her writing and speaking, she was active in the temperance and women's suffrage movements, and raised a large family through considerable personal hardship, including the deaths of three of her children.
Amy Carmichael
1867–1951 · Missionary · Dohnavur, South India
Amy Carmichael left Ireland for India in 1895 and never returned home again, even for a visit, in the fifty-five years that followed. She became known for rescuing children, mostly girls, from being dedicated into temple prostitution, and founded the Dohnavur Fellowship as a permanent home and community for them.
After a serious fall left her largely bedridden for the last twenty years of her life, she continued to write, producing more than thirty-five books of devotional reflection drawn directly from her decades of costly, hidden service.
L.B. Cowman
1870–1960 · Missionary and author · Japan and China
Lettie Cowman and her husband Charles co-founded what became OMS International, serving as missionaries in Japan and China in the early 1900s. When Charles's health broke down and he spent his final six years as a bedridden invalid before his death in 1924, Lettie cared for him while compiling the daily readings that steadied her own faith through that long grief.
Those readings, drawn from Scripture, hymns, and other writers alongside her own reflections, became Streams in the Desert (1925), a devotional that has never gone out of print and has comforted readers through hardship for a century.
Andrew Murray
1828–1917 · Dutch Reformed pastor · South Africa
Andrew Murray pastored Dutch Reformed congregations across South Africa for over five decades and became one of the most widely read devotional writers in the world, authoring more than two hundred books on prayer, holiness, and the inner life, including Abide in Christ and With Christ in the School of Prayer.
He was also deeply involved in South African revival movements and missions, helping found a missionary training institute, and continued preaching and writing into his eighties despite a lifelong stammer that had nearly kept him from the pulpit as a young man.
Leonard Ravenhill
1907–1994 · Evangelist and author · England and USA
Leonard Ravenhill preached across Britain during and after the Second World War before settling in the United States, where he became known for blunt, urgent preaching against complacency in the modern church. His best-known book, Why Revival Tarries (1959), argued that genuine revival begins with individual repentance and desperate prayer, not programs.
Though never a widely famous figure in his own right, he became a mentor to a generation of younger evangelists and musicians, including Keith Green, who credited Ravenhill's challenge to “pray until you pray” as reshaping his own faith.
Billy Graham
1918–2018 · Evangelist · Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
Billy Graham held evangelistic “crusades” on every inhabited continent over a career spanning six decades, and is estimated to have preached the gospel in person to more people than anyone else in history, with millions more reached through radio, television, and film. He founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to support that work.
Despite his global fame and friendships with US presidents of both parties, he was known for a simple, consistent message centered on personal faith in Christ, and for refusing to let scandal, money, or politics compromise his ministry's integrity.
William Booth
1829–1912 · Founder of The Salvation Army · London, England
William Booth began as a Methodist minister but grew frustrated that traditional churches weren't reaching London's poorest residents, so in 1865 he and his wife Catherine founded what became The Salvation Army, pairing open-air evangelism with direct, practical relief for the hungry, homeless, and addicted.
His 1890 book 'In Darkest England' and 'the Way Out' laid out a detailed plan for combating urban poverty that influenced social reform well beyond his own movement. By the time of his death, The Salvation Army was operating in fifty-eight countries.
A.W. Tozer
1897–1963 · Pastor and author · Chicago, USA
A.W. Tozer had no formal theological training, coming to faith as a teenager after overhearing a street preacher, but became a pastor in the Christian and Missionary Alliance and one of the twentieth century's most influential devotional writers. His best-known book, The Pursuit of God (1948), was written in a single sitting during a long train journey.
Tozer's writing consistently warned against a faith that was doctrinally correct but spiritually shallow, calling readers back to an experienced, felt knowledge of God rather than mere correct belief about Him.
George Müller
1805–1898 · Orphanage founder · Bristol, England
George Müller was born in Prussia and had a wayward, even criminal, youth before his conversion as a young man. He settled in Bristol, England, and over more than sixty years founded and ran orphanages that cared for over ten thousand children in total, all without ever making a public appeal for funds.
Müller kept detailed journals recording specific prayers and the provision that followed, from money for that day's food to more orphanage buildings, and published them as a public testimony to God's faithfulness. His example became a touchstone for the later “faith mission” movement in missions funding.
Hudson Taylor
1832–1905 · Missionary · Inland China
James Hudson Taylor sailed for China in 1853 and, unusually for missionaries of his era, adopted Chinese dress and customs so he could live and travel among the people he served rather than staying within foreign settlements. In 1865 he founded the China Inland Mission, which by the time of his death had brought hundreds of missionaries into China's interior provinces that had previously had no Christian presence at all.
Taylor's own letters describe repeated financial crises met, in his account, only through prayer, a pattern that became foundational to how later missions were funded and organized.
Phoebe Palmer
1807–1874 · Methodist evangelist and writer · New York, USA
Phoebe Palmer became one of the most influential figures in the nineteenth-century American holiness movement, teaching what she called the “shorter way” to entire sanctification, a definite, decisive act of laying one's whole life on the altar of consecration to God. For over three decades she hosted the “Tuesday Meetings for the Promotion of Holiness” in her New York home, drawing clergy and laypeople from across denominations.
She and her husband also traveled widely as evangelists in North America and Britain, and her book The Way of Holiness (1843) became a foundational text for the holiness movement that later shaped Wesleyan and Pentecostal denominations alike.
Maria Woodworth-Etter
1844–1924 · Evangelist · United States
Maria Woodworth-Etter began holding tent revival meetings across the American Midwest and South in the 1880s, at a time when women preachers were rare and often actively opposed. Her meetings, marked by claims of healing and dramatic physical responses among those attending, drew crowds in the thousands well before the Pentecostal movement had a name.
By the time the modern Pentecostal movement emerged in the early 1900s, she was already an established evangelist, and she continued holding large campaign meetings into her seventies, leading many historians to credit her as one of the movement's founding figures.
More voices will be added here as the Scripture Explained collection grows.