John Gill was born on November 23, 1697, at Kettering, Northamptonshire. Early in life, he displayed a keen mind, and before he was eleven years old, he was reading Latin and Greek. He was so thirsty for knowledge that the owner of the local book store permitted him to sit in a corner of the shop and read to his heart’s content.
At the age of twelve, his father’s pastor, preached a message from the words, “And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?” It made a solemn impression on John’s mind, and he began to worry about his lost condition. Eventually the Holy Spirit convinced him that the wounds of Christ sufficiently paid the penalty for his sins, and by God’s grace he was enabled to trust the Saviour as his personal Redeemer. On November 1, 1716, he was baptized in a nearby river and was received into the fellowship of the church at Kettering. Four years later, on this day in 1720, he was ordained as the pastor of the church at Horsley-down, Southward, London, where Benjamin Keach had previously ministered. God blessed the leadership of Gill at Horsely-down with multitudes of conversions and great growth. He remained there for more than fifty years.
A short time before he died, according to the historian Joseph Ivimy, John Gill gave this public testimony: “I depend wholly and alone upon the free, sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love of God, the firm and everlasting covenant of grace, and my interest in the Persons of the Trinity for my whole salvation, and not upon any righteousness of my own, nor on anything in me, nor done by me under the influence of the Holy Spirit. Not upon any services of mine, which I have assisted to perform for the good of the church, do I depend, but upon my interests in the Persons of the Trinity, the free grace of God, and the blessings of grace streaming to me through the blood and righteousness of Christ, as the ground of my hope. These are no new things to me, but what I have been long acquainted with, – what I can live and die by.”
Source – “One Hundred Testimonies” by K. David Oldfield