Windows on My Work: “The Man in the Gap”

One of the delightful things about my work is that I am able to preview as well as oversee items for publication that reach my desk. This is a project that I was long concerned to get into print. Friends in the UK and USA as well as in South Africa have had a strong interest to see this book written, edited, and printed. Rex and Esta Jefferies were close to Martin Holdt in his latter years, so when Rex and Esta and I started a conversation a few years ago, I needed no extra encouragement to help them in the writing and editing process.

Dr. Joel Beeke writes of this publication that it is a MUST-READ book.

I love good biographies of godly men. They are so stimulating, convicting, edifying, moving, challenging, and alluring. This is one of those biographies. It is a “must read” book—one that is so true to a godly pastor who lived, by God’s grace, wholly for Christ and out of love for the souls of people.
Martin Holdt was one of the very best friends in Christ Jesus that I have ever had. He was also one of the most godly people I have ever known. When he died so suddenly in the last week of 2011, I grieved as if I had lost a brother—because I did. He was like an older brother to me.

Roger Ellsworth, author of over fifty books, says this of The Man in the Gap:

We have here the wonderful biography of a wonderful man. I give it five “I’s”— interesting, informative, instructive, insightful, and inspiring. It will do good for all who read it. Pastors will find it particularly helpful as they read the story of a man who was what all pastors should be—diligent in prayer, mighty in the Scriptures, devoted to the Christ-centered preaching of God’s Word, hardworking, compassionate, and wise. I found the author’s emphasis on Holdt’s prayer life to be especially enlightening— and convicting! May God be pleased to use this book in such a way as to raise up many more Martin Holdts. Today’s church sorely needs them!

Chapter 1, reproduced with permission from Shepherd Press.

Childhood and Youth

However, for this reason I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show all longsuffering, as a pattern to those who are going to believe on Him for everlasting life.
1 Timothy 1:16

Martin Petersen Holdt was the second child of Sofus and Hedwig Holdt, and was born in East London, South Africa. He had an older sister, Gudrun, born on 16 September 1937, and on 14 February 1946 Martin’s younger sister, Linda Heidi, was born. By this time, World War II had come to an end. Martin came to appreciate the fact that his mother had not reasoned as follows: “Well, there is a war on; I don’t want to have another child in circumstances like these. . .”

“Had she thought along such lines,” Martin said, “I would never have been born. I am so glad she didn’t.”

They (my parents) had a lady, Harriet, who was my nurse. She looked after me, and she used to take me to what they called revival meetings. I’ve a vague recollection of people singing happily, and then I would go home, and I would try to sing the little choruses and the little ditties that I’d sung there. My mother used to tell me that, because you know I was still very small, instead of singing “in the sweet by and by when the battles are fought and the victories are won” I would sing “in the feet by and by when the battlies are fought and the victlies are won” and so on.

But, I wonder whether Harriet wasn’t God’s instrument in sowing the first seeds that eventually, well when I was nineteen years old, led to my conversion.

Hedwig’s father, Christoph Sonntag, was a missionary from the Berlin Mission Society whose first mission station was at Blouberg in the then Northern Transvaal. He wrote a book, based on a diary he kept of his journey to South Africa and his experiences there, entitled, My Friend Maleboch. (An uncle, Konrad Sonntag, translated this book from German into English.)

Christoph Sonntag later worked among the Venda people at Tshakuma, also in the Northern Transvaal. Martin remembered visiting his grandfather at Tshakuma.

After his first wife’s death, Sonntag married Magdalene Truempelmann. They had nine children. Martin’s mother, Hedwig, was one of them. Martin had a very special bond with his Oma Sonntag.
In his testimony to his friends in August 2010, Martin made this remark: “You know, Victor Thomas once said to me, (I don’t know why he asked me), ‘Martin, did you have a praying grandmother or grandfather?’ I said to him, ‘Yes I did.’”
Martin told his 2010 audience, “I still have a card with pressed flowers”:

Liebe Martin, diese Blumen sind gepflükt in Jerusalem
wo unse liebe Heiland für uns gestorben ist.

Interpreted, this reads: “Dear Martin, these flowers (pressed flowers on the card) were picked in Jerusalem where our dear Savior died for our sins.” Martin had a faint recollection of Oma Sonntag, but he was overjoyed because, as he said, “We’ll see her in heaven one day. What a joy it will be to see her there!”

Sofus and Hedwig Holdt lived with their young family in a little village, Nxamakwe (now called Nqamakwe), in the Transkei region of the Eastern Cape Province (north of East London, east of Queenstown). Harriet, the woman in their employ, was young Martin’s nurse. It was when Martin was about four years old that she took him along to revival meetings. As Martin’s testimony points out, he reflected that it was possible that Harriet might have been God’s instrument in introducing him to the Lord.

The Holdts’ home language was German. Martin could speak nothing else until he was about five years old. He recalled being teased because he was the slowest of the three children in the family to pick up any other language in the multilingual country of South Africa.
One day Martin’s father, Sofus, took the boy on a visit to a tribal chief. Father and son walked along together. In his left hand, Martin was carrying a gift for this important personage. “In der Regterhand, Martin,” ordered Sofus, for in certain cultures it is not good to give something to another person using the left hand. Early influences such as this no doubt helped Martin later in life to be sensitive to the values and customs of people from different cultures and in different language groups.

Martin, from an early age, had an inherent fear of death. It was as if he knew instinctively that God is the One who gives life and takes it. He later testified, “God spared my life three times.”

I have these vivid recollections. And then I think of Deuteronomy 32:39 where God says, “Now see that I, even I, am He, And there is no God besides Me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; Nor is there any who can deliver from My hand.” Why did I survive my childhood when others did not? And when I say “when others did not” I remember at eight, nine or ten—I don’t recall the exact age—when we were in Flagstaff where my father was the magistrate—reading the Kokstad Advertiser which was the local newspaper of that part of the Transkei, and how terribly upset I was to read about a boy my age who lived in Paddock, near Port Shepstone, who had been bitten by a puff adder and died.

This report upset young Martin very much. When the family later moved to Oshikango, Namibia (then South-West-Africa), where Martin’s father was working as a “Native Commissioner,” Martin had a near-miss encounter with a venomous snake. The children, he remembered, had a kind of playroom.

. . . my mother was once sitting on the stoep (veranda). I don’t know if she was sewing; she was doing something, and just outside there was a small little hut, thatched, where we children used to play—our toys and our little books were there—and she looked up and she saw a very venomous snake slithering through the window, and she alerted me—and I got out.

But that wasn’t the last about snakes. Martin’s second encounter with a snake was back in Flagstaff, where his father the magistrate had been transferred again. One day, Martin was watching his dad at work among the fruit trees. Martin was unaware of a large puff adder at his bare feet. He could have tramped on it, and might have gone the same way as the little boy in Paddock, but the snake slithered off. Martin’s father followed and delivered the coup-de-grace, protecting his son from further possible danger.

Now the Wild Coast where the Holdts lived is regarded as one of the most beautiful parts of South Africa’s coastline. It stretches along the Eastern Cape and Transkei shoreline between Port St Johns and East London, a distance of roughly 250 kilometers. The Wild Coast has wonderful places to visit: Mbotje, Grosvenor, Mkambati, Msikhaba—but boys are always too busy doing things that boys do, rather than enjoying the scenery.

Martin, a typical boy, was more concerned with having fun. One day he and a group of his friends decided to see which of them could jump the furthest into a lagoon. The boys never realized that where they would land “was like a bottomless pit”—and none of them could swim.
Once in the lagoon Martin found himself sinking, and sinking, and sinking. . . . He was struggling to surface when one of the other boys landed on top of him. Getting on Martin’s shoulders the boy was pushing him further under. Once in the depths, Martin felt that the end had come, but with one last effort he somehow managed to rise and clamber out of the water, in a state of shock. God had once more spared him. The question Martin asked afterwards was this: “Why did God spare me from snakes and from this?”

Martin’s mother had given him a Bible while they were still living at Flagstaff, a very small village with no Sunday school and only three churches. He recalled how he

. . . one day opened it and it fell open on Matthew 24, and what I read terrified me: I read about, as I could see it, the end of the world. And having no one to instruct me I began to think that now if it’s going to happen—and I had no information—I’ll fight to survive.

The young Martin already knew that death is to be followed by judgment, but what bothered him more was this question: What then? Then, he thought, “to avoid drowning or perchance another world-inundating flood,” he would try to make a rubber dinghy for himself and so escape the clutches of death. These near misses with death and the terror Martin felt must have heightened the sense of urgency in him. Interestingly, Martin had as yet not heard the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Martin used to walk past a Roman Catholic Church. Through the doorway, he could see the table and its cloth covering and the candles. In his desperation to get peace, he thought he would try this at home; maybe some incantations would ward off the fear which stalked him. He put a small table in his room and covered it with “a nice table cloth.” Then he set out candles on the table, as he had seen in the Roman Catholic Church—but this did not help. Martin didn’t find peace. He knew that he was a hell-bound sinner, and he feared death like the plague.

As he himself admitted, Martin’s chief sin was laziness.

You know the apostle Paul talks in Romans 6:21 of sins of which we are now ashamed. I’ll tell you what one of the paramount sins was. I’m so glad there are children here to hear this: it was laziness. Boy, I tell you, was I lazy!

When he and other primary school children were told to draw “what you want to be when you grow up,” Martin knew exactly what he wanted. He drew himself lolling in an easy chair, with a wife bringing in a tray of snacks and refreshments!

I used to say to my friends: “I don’t know why they have a thing like school. What’s it going to help us when we do History?” I can remember lighting the lamp (there was no electricity) very early in the morning and with a torch, tiptoeing to my mother’s office and opening the drawer to see what she was going to ask for the exams. Of course, I passed.

Therefore dishonesty was, like laziness, also one of his sins.

***

In the second year of Martin’s high school career, his father was transferred to the Pilansberg District in what was then the Western Transvaal, and Martin attended the Rustenburg High School.

But laziness was perpetuated. I tried to do only just enough to pass. I’m sad about it today. My teachers gave up on me.

Martin was not unintelligent; he was just bone idle! When given an option of receiving a hiding from a teacher or from the school principal, Martin chose the latter. He knew that the principal, seeing the familiar face at his door, would say: “Oh, it’s you again—you can go!” Even the principal did not think it worthwhile giving “Lazy Bones” a hiding. In fact, Martin’s mother shed many tears over her boy’s intractability. “I remember my mother in tears after a PTA meeting,” Martin said, “and I’d just shrug it off.”

The boy managed to matriculate in 1958.

His sister, Gudrun, eventually asked him whether he could not pull himself together: “What are you going to do?” she asked. His response was just blank, negative. Yet the very fact that his inherent fear of death still followed him everywhere suggests that Martin knew he was wrong; he knew that his attitude was sinful.

My friends, that was sin—and I want you children and young people to know it. It could have been so much better.

He had not come though, to the point where he would or was ready to confess, in the words of the hymn writer,

I have long withstood his grace,
Long provoked him to his face,
Would not hearken to his calls,
Grieved him by a thousand falls.

The time was not very far off, however, when he would acknowledge the truth of words such as these. Within two years of finishing high school, he would see, by grace, that the God he had been ignoring was hard on his heels. More than fifty years after matriculating from school, the ageing Martin would ask an attentive audience to rise and sing with him, joyfully, the hymn Depth of Mercy.

Depth of mercy! Can there be
Mercy still reserved for me?
Can my God his wrath forbear,
Me, the chief of sinners, spare?

But even through all that, Martin could testify in these words: “I still retained the fear of death: What if I die? What then?”

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First Edition: 2020

ISBN: 978-1-63342-216-2