The Bookbinder's Apprentice

Today's Scripture

Psalm 113:5-8 — "Who is like the LORD our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth? He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people."

1 Corinthians 1:26-27 — "For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong."

The Big Idea

Michael Faraday — a blacksmith's son with no schooling — discovered the principles behind every electric motor and power station on earth. He also turned down nearly every honor his century tried to give him, because he had already decided where his treasure was. His life asks us a blunt question: what would you stop chasing if you really believed God's opinion of you was the only one that mattered?

Reflection

Books he was paid to sew

Michael Faraday was born in 1791 near London, the son of a blacksmith who was often too sick to work. The family sometimes had barely enough to eat; the boy's schooling amounted to little more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. By the world's sorting system, Faraday's life was settled at birth: poor, uneducated, invisible.

At fourteen he was apprenticed to a bookbinder. And there, God hid a door. Faraday did not just bind the books that came through the shop — he read them. An article on electricity in an encyclopedia he was rebinding lit something in him. A popular chemistry book taught him to experiment with what little he could afford. When a customer gave him tickets to hear Sir Humphry Davy, the most famous chemist in England, lecture at the Royal Institution, Faraday took careful notes, bound them beautifully — the one craft he had — and sent them to Davy with a job request. In 1813, Davy hired him as a laboratory assistant.

The Bible has a category for this trajectory. Psalm 113:5-8 — the God "who looks far down" nevertheless "raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes." And Proverbs saw the mechanism long ago: Proverbs 22:29 — "Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men." Faraday would, quite literally, lecture before princes. But he never forgot — and never hid — that he had been lifted from the ash heap. He remained, all his life, a tradesman's son who knew exactly whom to thank.

The greatest experimenter

What Faraday did next still surrounds you, right now, on every side. In 1821 he made a wire carrying electric current rotate around a magnet — the first electric motor. In 1831 he discovered electromagnetic induction: moving a magnet near a coil of wire creates electric current. That principle is the beating heart of every generator in every power station on the planet. Flip a light switch today and you are collecting on Faraday's 1831 experiment. He went on to establish the laws of electrolysis, and to propose the daring idea of the field — invisible lines of force filling space — which became the foundation of modern physics. Many call him the greatest experimental scientist who ever lived. He did it all with almost no mathematics, because no one had ever taught him any.

Here is the wonderful irony: the man who unveiled invisible forces believed, on biblical grounds, that invisible things are exactly what creation is designed to show. In a rare public comment linking his science and his convictions, Faraday told an audience in 1854:

"Even in earthly matters I believe that 'the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.'" — Michael Faraday, 'Observations on Mental Education'

He is quoting Romans 1:20 from his King James Bible. Faraday was generally quiet about mixing faith and physics — he thought each had its own kind of evidence — but he never doubted whose world he was probing. And his story itself preaches 1 Corinthians 1:26-29: "not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise... so that no human being might boast in the presence of God." The century's aristocratic scientists were schooled at Oxford and Cambridge. God handed the deepest secrets of electricity to a bookbinder's apprentice.

The church that knew him as brother

All his life, Faraday belonged to the Sandemanians — a tiny, plain denomination committed to simple New Testament Christianity. He attended faithfully, served for decades as a deacon and then an elder, preached sermons that were mostly strings of memorized Scripture, visited the sick, and married a fellow member, Sarah Barnard, in a wedding deliberately stripped of show. The most celebrated scientist in Britain spent his Sundays in a congregation of a few dozen tradespeople who called him, simply, Brother Faraday.

And then there are the refusals. Faraday declined a knighthood — he preferred, he said, to remain plain Mr. Faraday. He twice declined the presidency of the Royal Society, the highest seat in world science. Offered burial in Westminster Abbey near Newton, he declined that too, choosing a simple headstone. When the government asked him to help develop poison gas for the Crimean War, he refused outright.

Was this false modesty? No — it was arithmetic. Faraday had done the math of Matthew 6:19-21 — "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" — and concluded that titles are moth-food. Jesus once asked a question that could be carved over every awards ceremony: John 5:44 — "How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?" Faraday's refusals were not him being shy. They were him answering that question with his whole life. C.S. Lewis maps the territory Faraday was guarding:

"If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Faraday knew ambition from the inside — he was driven, meticulous, fiercely competitive about priority in discovery, and by his own account had a temper to govern. His humility was not the absence of pride; it was a lifelong experiment in starving it. Martin Luther described the strange double freedom Faraday seemed to live in:

"A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." — Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian

Free of the honors system — and therefore free to serve everyone, from royal lecture halls to the children who packed his beloved Christmas lectures, which he founded and which continue to this day.

Resting on certainties

Faraday's last years brought the trial he could not experiment his way out of: his memory failed. The mind that had mapped the invisible slowly lost its own pathways. He bore it with a strange peace, living quietly in a house provided by the Queen until his death in 1867. We do not have to rely on legend to know how he faced the decline, because his own letters survive. In 1861 he wrote to his old friend, the Swiss scientist Auguste de la Rive:

"I bow before Him who is Lord of all, and hope to be kept waiting patiently for His time and mode of releasing me according to His Divine Word and the great and precious promises whereby His people are made partakers of the Divine nature." — Michael Faraday, letter to Auguste de la Rive, 1861

No panic, no bargaining — a man with his affairs settled, waiting for a faithful Lord the way he once waited for an experiment to resolve.

From those final years, his Victorian biographers passed down an account that has become the most famous thing he never published. Asked — as the story is told — about his speculations concerning what lay beyond death, the old man is said to have answered:

"Speculations? I have none. I am resting on certainties. 'I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.'" — Michael Faraday, as recorded by his Victorian biographers

We should be honest: this comes to us secondhand, polished by an age that loved a good deathbed scene. But notice that the words he reaches for are not his own — they are Paul's, from 2 Timothy 1:12: "I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me." Whom, not what. After a lifetime of hypotheses tested and revised, Faraday's confidence rested not on a theory but on a person who had hold of him.

And that person had walked Faraday's road first — downward, on purpose. Philippians 2:5-9 — Christ Jesus, "though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant... he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him." The blacksmith's son could refuse the world's honors because his Lord had refused infinitely greater ones — and because the gospel had already settled the verdict Faraday's heart needed. Tim Keller states it plainly:

"The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

A man who believes that has nothing left to win. Dietrich Bonhoeffer compressed the cost and the freedom into one sentence:

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Faraday died to the honors list — and lived, freer than the knights and presidents around him, until he fell asleep resting on certainties.

Going Deeper

Make a Faraday list. Write down the three honors you most want — be specific and unspiritual about it (the promotion, the award, the blue checkmark, the invitation). Beside each one, write what Jesus already says is true of you: known, chosen, kept. Then pick one small "refusal" this week — one chance to skip credit, decline a spotlight, or let someone else be celebrated — and take it, quietly, as an experiment in treasure.