How to Do the Job You Don’t Really Want To Do

Posted on June 5, 2014 by Barbara Harper

I was sorting through and organizing some quotes I have from Elisabeth Elliot this afternoon, and this one jumped out at me, so I thought I’d share it with you. This is from her book A Lamp For My Feet, but I think I originally saw it when her e-mail devotionals were sent out by Back to the Bible.

How to Do the Job You Don’t Really Want To Do

Certain aspects of the job the Lord has given me to do are very easy to postpone. I make excuses, find other things that take precedence, and, when I finally get down to business to do it, it is not always with much grace. A new perspective has helped me recently:

The job has been given to me to do.
Therefore it is a gift.
Therefore it is a privilege.
Therefore it is an offering I may make to God.
Therefore it is to be done gladly, if it is done for Him.
Therefore it is the route to sanctity.

Here, not somewhere else, I may learn God’s way. In this job, not in some other, God looks for faithfulness. The discipline of this job is, in fact, the chisel God has chosen to shape me with–into the image of Christ.

Thank you, Lord, for the work You have assigned me. I take it as your gift; I offer it back to you. With your help I will do it gladly, faithfully, and I will trust You to make me holy.

Book Review: Mere Christianity

Posted on May 26, 2014 by Barbara Harper

I first read Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis some seven or so years ago and tried to write a review, but ended up mainly just listing quotes, which is not a review. It wasn’t hard to read or to follow — for the most part Lewis’s thinking was actually pretty easy to track, and he writes in a logical, almost conversational style rather than like a theology textbook. It was more a matter of there being too much to take in and process and too many goods things to share to reduce it to anything like a review. I read a quote by Elisabeth Elliot (which I neglected to keep track of) something to the effect that she could understand Lewis by reading him through the first time, but needed to read him again to be able reconstruct his arguments. I feel the same way. I’m thankful The Cloud of Witnesses Challenge sponsored by Becky at Operation Actually Read Bible spurred me to pick this up again. I feel I got much more from it this time, maybe just because of a second reading, maybe because of several years of (hopefully) maturing in the meantime, maybe because our church has been talking about “Coffee Shop Apologetics” on Wednesday nights using some of Lewis’s material here and there.

It is interesting to read how Lewis came from an atheistic background and what the Lord used to convince him that Christianity was the truth. Although this book is not his “testimony” per se, he does touch on his own personal journey to faith.

The book is divided into four sections: “Right and Wrong as a Clue to Meaning in the Universe,” in which he argues for Christianity and why it is the best solution to universal moral and logical dilemmas, then “What Christians Believe,” “Christian Behavior,” and “Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity.” Originally the various segments were radio talks in the 1940s which were then tweaked to better fit written form.

I have many more places marked than I can possibly share here. Goodreads has a list of several quotes from the book, some you’ll recognize as classic Lewis. One of my favorite quotes about love comes from this book. Here are a few others hat stood out to me:

From the chapter “We Have Cause to Be Uneasy”:

For the trouble is that one part of you is on His side and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behaviour, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we must need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger -according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way.

From the chapter “The Practical Conclusion”:

[The Christian] does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us.

From the chapter “Social Morality”:

I may repeat “Do as you would be done by” till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself until I learn to love God.

From the chapter “Sexual Morality”:

We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity-like perfect charity-will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God’s help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.

From the chapter “The Great Sin”:

Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says, “Well done,” are all pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, “I have pleased him; all is well,” to thinking, “What a fine person I must be to have done it.”

That was immensely helpful to me. I don’t know if anyone else experiences this, but sometimes when you receive a compliment, then you feel a rush of pleasure, that feel guilty for that pleasure and feel you need to redirect the attention to the Lord, and in trying to do so sound awkward and overly pious. For that reason, when someone, say, sings a solo in church that I enjoyed, I try to tell them it blessed my heart rather than just “I enjoyed your song this morning.” Though I mean the same thing by both sentences, the second one makes people feel awkward and self-conscious. This thought did help me to understand it’s not wrong to feel pleasure in pleasing someone else or accepting a compliment.

From the same chapter:

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call “humble” nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is a nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who tool a real interest in what you said to him….He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

From the chapter “Charity”:

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act to-day is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or, anger to-day is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

From the same chapter:

Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.

From the chapter “Hope”:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.

From the chapter “Faith”:

But supposing a man’s reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for [Christianity]. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments when a mere mood rises up against it.

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off,’ you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

From a second chapter titles “Faith”:

And, in yet another sense, handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you (emphasis mine).

From the chapter “Nice People or New Men”:

But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world – and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man…

If what you want is an argument against Christianity (and I well remember how eagerly I looked for such arguments when I began to be afraid it was true) you can easily find some stupid and unsatisfactory Christian and say, ‘So there’s your boasted new man I Give me the old kind.’ But if once you have begun to see that Christianity is on other grounds probable, you will know in your heart that this is only evading the issue. What can you ever really know of other people’s souls-of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books. What will all that chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anaesthetic fog which we call ‘nature’ or `the real world’ fades away and the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?

There were a very few places I disagreed with him. In “The Perfect Penitent” he thinks the theory “about our being let off because Christ had volunteered to bear a punishment instead of us” is a silly one and says he doesn’t understand the point of punishing an innocent person for a guilty one, though he says he can understand it better in terms of paying a debt. I’m not sure how he could have missed the teaching that God’s just letting us off the hook would be a violation of His justice and righteousness, and Christ’s innocent death satisfied that justice (Romans 3:24-26). In “The Practical Conclusion” he says “a Christian can lose the Christ-life which has been put into him, and he has to make efforts to keep it,” which I would disagree with very much. When we’re saved we are born again: we don’t get unborn. Our spiritual life may get weak and sickly with neglect, and we do need to nurture that life and mature in it, but we don’t lose it. Then in “Counting the Cost” he says that God said in the Bible that we are “gods” and “He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creature…which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness)”. I’m not quite sure how to take him there. Both Psalm 82:6-7 and John 10:34-36 have the term “You are gods,” and, frankly, I am not quite sure what is meant in those cases, either. The Bible talks about us becoming one with the Father and Son and becoming partakers of the divine nature, but we don’t become Deity like Christ is. I don’t think Lewis is saying that we do – I am just not sure what he is saying. If you’ve read his Space Trilogy, you know he portrays the mythical gods and goddesses as some kind of created being more powerful than humans but not like angels, either. Perhaps all he is talking about it what we’ll be like in glory: perfected yet still less than God the Father and Jesus Christ. And in “The Practical Conclusion,” he says that three things that spread the “Christ-life” to us are baptism, belief, and communion (the Lord’s Supper). I would say only faith does: the others are matters of obedience and blessing, but they are symbolic and not life-giving in themselves (see the outline for “Why We Know Baptism Does Not Save.”)

Much more could be discussed, on these points or others in the book. Despite those few caveats mentioned, I feel this is a valuable book and one of those Christian classics that everyone should read at least once, probably several times over.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Book Review: Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal

Posted on May 22, 2014 by Barbara Harper

When Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal by Michael Kelley showed up on a list of Kindle books on sale at the time, the sub-title caught my eye: A Boy, Cancer, and God. Although I’ve wrestled with the truth of God’s allowing suffering many times and come to some kind of peace with it, I still have to go through those truths some times, especially concerning the suffering of a child. Even though I knew this book would be heart-rending and gut-wrenching, I wanted to hear the story and hear how the author dealt with it. I think I am so often drawn to books like this because I know the truths the author has learned are not going to be just armchair theology: they’ve been tested in the extremities of real life, life that isn’t going the way one would have expected or hoped.

The story begins with a visit to the doctor to treat a rash on two and a half year old Joshua, the author’s son. A blood test showed that Joshua had leukemia, with 82% of his blood cells affected. Immediately questions flooded Michael’s stunned mind: the physical (Are you sure? He looks fine! How do we treat this? Is Joshua going to die?) as well as the spiritual (Why, God? Did we do something wrong?).

Michael then tells about Joshua’s three year chemotherapy regimen, the effects of not only the chemotherapy but also the massive amounts of steroids, time in the hospital, the strain of not being able to play with other kids or even go on a fast food playground due his immune system, hair loss, etc. The title comes from the fact that Wednesdays were the day before Joshua’s regular cancer treatments, so he was feeling his best and those days were more normal than the rest.

But most of the book is spent on how the author dealt with his son’s illness and its effects spiritually. Having grown up with his basic needs being met and without any really major problems, he “realized faith had never been hard. It had never been work. But it surely was now.”

“This was a moment when we couldn’t just have faith; we had to choose faith. It had to be as conscious as any other decision….If my family was really going to choose faith, then we would have to come to grips with the fact that there are parts of God and His plan that at best we don’t understand; at worst we don’t even like. We could no longer pick and choose certain parts of our belief system; we had to embrace it all.”

“There is nothing quite like pain to force long-held ideals and beliefs from the comfort of intellectualism into the discomfort of reality and trying to square with them there.”

“Coming to the knowledge that you thought you knew something inside and out and then figuring out you really don’t know it at all is a strange feeling.”

There are some ramifications of cancer in the family that you would expect: pain, financial considerations, hospital time, weariness of working long days and spending long nights with a child who is not feeling well, etc. But the author deals with some that I probably would not have thought of otherwise. One was his own loss of identity. He’d left his job as a pastor to fulfill a dream of writing and speaking while his wife worked full time, but when this happened, she needed to stay with Joshua, so Michael has to find a regular 9-5 office job that he disliked. “I missed my old life. Everything that had made me feel important and significant was gone, and I was facing a crisis of self-identification. I felt poor, not just in the wallet but in my sense of self. Poor is more than a description of a financial state. It’s a state of being. And according to Jesus, being poor is being blessed.” He found comfort in the story of the rich young ruler. “People defined him the same way we define him today – as rich, as young, and as a ruler. Jesus wanted more for him. He wanted to get to this man’s core, to his real self. Selling his possessions would strip this man of his marks of identity. Only by stripping those things away, in that moment of crisis, could he define himself the way Jesus wanted – by his faith.”

One of the concepts that spoke the most to me was the idea of being “between.” When Joshua went into remission, the chemotherapy and everything involved still had to continue, and his father felt like his life was paused, stuck between “the good old days” when everything was normal and the future when everything would hopefully be normal again. A couple of instances in the Bible of God’s ministering to people similarly “stuck” in a “between” time helped, like Paul’s thorn in the flesh and God’s promised grace in II Corinthians 12:9-10 and Jeremiah’s prophesy to Israelites who were going to have to remain in captivity for a number of years (Jeremiah 29, especially verse 11).

“The good parts of living “in between” are many. Such a life makes you realize more and more that this earth is not your home, and you consequently begin to long for heaven. A life between develops perseverance and character that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. And a life between forces you to a dependence on Jesus that you might not have chosen except for the pain.”

“This was going to be a long journey. A journey of years. There was to be no immediate relief for the pain, but as Paul discovered, that didn’t mean the Lord was absent.”

“The days when we were at the end of our rope were also the days when the sustaining grace and strength of God were to be most visible. He did not promise us that the pain would go away; but he did promise that in the midst of it, His grace would be all that we needed. We were left with the hard choice of believing that to be true. We had to choose to trust not in our own ability to be patient with a child on steroids, or even to get out of bed in the morning, but in the One who promised He would be strong in our stead. But the great news of the gospel is that the power to sustain us comes from Jesus, who knows even better than we do what it is like to have one foot in heaven and one foot on earth. Sustaining grace for life between comes from One who knows both the glory and the pain.”

“[Jesus] was more than capable of eradicating cancer from my little boy’s body. But He didn’t. And maybe that’s because, in His wisdom, He knew that doing so immediately and publicly would be, in some way, short-changing the ultimate healing He wanted to accomplish. Living in the meantime has brought to light diseases I didn’t know I had. It’s brought to light my shallowness…my idealistic view of faith…my dependence on circumstances [and more]. Had Jesus chosen to heal Joshua immediately and pluck us from the grip of the meantime, these diseases would have remained firmly implanted in my heart and soul…From that perspective, Jesus’ refusal to heal immediately is really His commitment to longer, better, more complete healing.”

“Hope is the confidence that even during the meantime God is still busy.”

“It’s not that I thought God was using my son as some sort of object lesson to me: that wasn’t it at all. It was more the sense that, whether we knew it or not, the Lord was using cancer to break up unplowed ground in my heart.”

“I didn’t have the luxury of a passive faith any more…Real faith is active. And it’s hard. Faith is something you have to fight for. It’s something you have to choose. And you have to fight and choose in the face of evidence rather than with the evidence on your side.”

I have a multitude more quotes marked, but I probably should not reprint that much of the book. 🙂

There were a couple of places I didn’t quite agree with the author’s interpretation of a passage, but I don’t feel the need to delineate those here.

I didn’t realize, when I chose this as one of my books for the TBR challenge, or when I started reading it some time back, that I’d be smack in the middle of it when my son and daughter-in-law’s child arrived 11 weeks early. Though the health situations for a preemie and a cancer patient are very different, parts of the book especially ministered to me at this time, especially the sections about life being “on hold” in a “between” phase of a long medical situation.

Overall I would highly recommend this book not only to those with children who are ill in some way, but to anyone who wrestles with why God allows suffering.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Book Review: The Great Divorce

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Barbara Harper

I first picked up The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis some years ago when I found it on sale in a bookstore. I wasn’t sure what kind of divorce the title was talking about, and the description on the front about a bus ride from hell to heaven seemed really weird, but it was Lewis and it was on sale, so I got it. But it sat around for all these years unopened. The TBR challenge of reading things that have been unread on our shelves spurred me to work this book in this year.

Lewis explains in the preface that the title and concept came in response to William Blake’s book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Lewis explains that there can be no such marriage.

“We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks in two, and each of those into two again, and at each road you must make a decision. Even on a biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but also from other good.”

“Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it.”

To illustrate some of those fork-in-the-road choices as well as the opposite directions of heaven and hell, Lewis developed this fantasy of a group of people on a bus ride from hell to visit heaven. When they arrive, they are surprised to find that they are transparent and that contact with solid objects is painful (“It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.”) They are called ghosts, whereas the inhabitants who come to meet them are called Solid People or Spirits. Most of the people decide not to stay for various reasons, despite the Spirits encouraging them to put away whatever is holding them back and enter into joy.

The cleric who does not believe in absolutes refuses to believe in them still: “For me there is no such thing as a final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow through the mind, must it not? ‘Prove all things’…to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.” The Spirit speaking with him, a friend he knew in life, responds, “If that were true…how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for.” The artist prefers his painting to reality. “Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to the love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.” The overbearing wife wants to continue “managing” her husband. The mother who has developed motherly love into idolatry would rather take her son from heaven back to hell with her than lessen her focus from him to love God. “Mother love…is the highest and holiest feeling in human nature,” she says, and is told, “No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.” The man who lives for manipulating people with his self-pity is told, “Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenseless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed?”

But a few are willing to have their besetting sins taken and killed, and they grow more “solid.”

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened. ”

“Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.”

Lewis, or the narrator, finds George MacDonald, someone he has greatly looked up to and learned from, who then becomes a guide and teacher for him, similar to Dante and Virgil in The Divine Comedy.

Lewis assures in the preface that he is not writing to propose anything about what heaven might be like: he is simply using this scenario as a vehicle to discuss truths.

There are a few similar themes as are found in The Last Battle, the last book in the Narnia series written about 10-11 years later: the idea of moving “further up and further in” and the effusive joy of heaven.

I don’t know if Lewis believed in a purgatory or if he was just using the idea of the dead getting “second chances” to illustrate that many of them would not take it. The Bible says in Hebrews 9:27 that “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment,” so I would have a problem with this book promoting the idea of purgatory, but I think the whole second chance scenario is just part of the plot device.

One character in the book says, “Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.” Again, I don’t know if the idea of hell being just a state of mind was part of Lewis’s own philosophy or if it was just the nature of it in this as a fantasy, but the Bible does speak of hell with literal terminology.

Overall this was quite a fascinating and thought-provoking read.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Book Review: Crowded to Christ

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Barbara Harper

The first I remembering hearing of Crowded to Christ was in an online sermon from a former pastor that I think I listened to while home sick one Sunday. He must have mentioned it before, but this time he recommended finding a copy and reading it. It was first published in 1950 and is apparently out of print now, but I found an inexpensive used copy online.

Its author, L. E. Maxwell, was a co-founder, principal, and eventually president of Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta, Canada, which I don’t know much about except that Elisabeth Elliot attended there for a time and Don Richardson (author of Peace Child and other books) graduated from there.

Maxwell’s main theme is that God uses a variety of measures – the law of God as well as pain, pressure, and other means – to draw or to “crowd” people to Christ in the sense of realizing He is the only answer.

For instance, “In his determination to be humble, to love His enemies,… to be more than conqueror – in other words, to be like Christ – the Christian may come sooner or later to a sense of crushing failure and defeat.” He realizes he can’t possibly do this on his own. Some go on half-heartedly, thinking full victory will just never be possible, while others, “not having made Paul’s deep discovery, ‘I know in me (that is, in my flesh), dwelleth no good thing,’ they redouble their efforts…They think that if they are only more watchful, more prayerful, more diligent, they will yet be able to attain. They strive and struggle; they fight and fast; they yearn and pray.” He quotes Hudson Taylor as saying, “I felt I was a child of God: His Spirit in my heart would cry: ‘Abba, Father’; but to rise to my privileges as a child I was utterly powerless.” Maxwell continues, “Not until they had come to an end of all self-righteousness and satisfaction in themselves, not until all their peace and joy and strength of will and resolution and purpose had been ‘slain by the law,’ could faith stretch forth her hands for victory. Only when they sensed the tragedy, the futility, the folly and failure of every human attempt to overcome the law of sin and death, were they shut up to Him who not only ‘justifies the ungodly’ but also ‘quickens the dead'” (pp 17-18).

He describes how God sometimes puts us in extenuating circumstances that result in a crisis of faith that drive us to Him as our only way through, like Jacob on his way home finding out Esau was coming to meet him, or Israel’s being caught between Pharaoh’s army and the Red Sea, or Israel when called to enter into Canaan but looked at the obstacles instead of God and failed.

I have far too many quotes marked to share, but here are a few that stood out to me:

“Have you ever had God lay hold of you in the wee hours and reduce you until you had ‘Nothing left to do but fling/Care aside and simply cling?'” (p. 29).

“God must secure our confidence, and…He tries us in order to make us trust where we cannot trace. Without faith it is impossible to please Him. ‘Thy way is in the sea.’ While, therefore, He has no pleasure in our agony and perplexity, He knows that it is in the trackless and traceless sea of trouble that we come to trust” (p. 38).

“To be self-centered is to be self-destroyed…The preservation of self is the surest path to self-destruction” (p. 128).

“When the Lord Jesus dealt with souls, His method was adapted to the need of the individual. However, it is remarkable that almost invariably He brought souls face to face with some one thing which in their own strength they could not do, and there demanded an act of obedience…In order to create a sense of sin and a need of divine strength Jesus gave command just where men were inclined to wander or argue or excuse themselves” (p. 150).

“If only the Saviour had asked me to do something else! But that something else would not have reached your heart. You could have done that other thing without faith and without grace; yes, without even being right with God. So, in asking you to do the one impossible thing, Christ crosses your will through your withered limb” (p. 178).

“Grace is no mere favour conferred upon the ungodly, but it is to be experienced as a ruling force and sufficiency, reigning in our hearts as the new, living ‘law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,’ and enabling us to prove the no-more dominion of sin. Grace abounding is to lead at once to grace reigning” (p. 219).

In ways simple and inscrutable and fiery God must drain away the dregs of self-confidence. He must let the flesh fail…when all those remaining are convinced that God alone is their rescue and remedy…” (p. 256).

The New Testament is enfolded in the Old, and the Old Testament is unfolded in the New” (p. 272).

“Love and righteousness are not contrary principles” (p. 299).

He spends a good deal of space in the book talking about the law of God. Though Christ has fulfilled the law and we never could, and in this day of grace are not required to, still, God has uses for the law, which the Bible describes as “good” and “spiritual.” “By the law is the knowledge of sin.” His appendices on “The Old and New Testaments Compared” and “The Purpose of the Law” are some of the best parts of the book, especially on this point.

Overall I enjoyed, benefited from, and saw myself in the pages of this book. I wasn’t quite so interested in arguments about dispensationalism and ultra-dispensationalism or Calvinism vs. Armenianism: those seemed to make the book drag a bit, but I understand their necessity, especially with Maxwell coming from an academic background where students have debated these things back and forth for ages.

I think the only places where I disagreed with him were some such as when he described a man who did not want to go into a grove and pray as the folks in that place and time did when they wanted to meet with God after a service. He acknowledged that there is nothing in the Bible about doing such a thing and that one can get right with God without that action, but this man had no peace until he finally did so. I guess perhaps I could see that if it was just a matter of pride or something, but I’d still have trouble saying he should have done that when it is not a Biblical issue.

This book often brought to mind a quote from Hudson Taylor, though the quote itself is not in the book: “It doesn’t really matter how great the pressure is. What matters is where the pressure lies, whether it comes between me and God or whether it presses me nearer His heart.” As Maxwell says in the second quote listed above, God takes “no pleasure in our agony and perplexity.” He is not dreaming up ways to torture us, but He knows best what we most need in our inmost hearts to grow in our faith and relationship with Him.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Trusting God in the Dark

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Barbara Harper

I often post hymns texts on Sundays, but I don’t have much time at the computer on Sunday itself, so if I don’t have a post ready beforehand I’m not usually able to get to it then. That dilemma was compounded yesterday when I had two different songs on my heart and couldn’t decide which one to share. 🙂

I’ve been rediscovering a CD that I’ve had for a while but somehow got buried in my little basket I keep on the kitchen counter for CDs: Beyond All Praising by the BJU Singers and Orchestra. One of the songs that stands out to me from this CD is “In Your Silence,” words by Eileen Berry and music by Molly IJames, on the theme of trusting God even when He seems silent and distant.

In Your word I find the echoes of the questions in my mind;
Have I fallen from Your favor, is Your ear to me inclined?
When Your silence is unbroken, though my prayer ascends each day,
Father, keep my faith from failing in the face of long delay.

While You wait in gracious wisdom and my doubts begin to rise,
I recall Your loving kindness, and lift my hopeful eyes.
While Your hand withholds the answer, I will not withhold my heart.
I will love you in Your silence, I will trust You in the dark.

When the troubled thoughts within me hold me wakeful in the night,
And the shadows that surround me seem to hide me from Your sight.
Father, bring to my remembrance mercies shown in days gone by.
Help me rest upon Your promise: You will not neglect my cry!

It is performed beautifully here:

I think many Christians go through times like this. Biblically Job and the psalmists share similar thoughts, and this song echoes some of the Psalms: the second stanza brings to mind Psalm 63. The last two lines of the chorus particularly resonate with me: “While Your hand withholds the answer, I will not withhold my heart. I will love you in Your silence, I will trust You in the dark.”

This song also brings to mind a section in Evidence Not Seen by Darlene Deibler Rose (linked to my review). The following occurred while she was in a Japanese prison camp, having been captured while a missionary to the New Guinea during WWII.

I knew that without God, without that consciousness of His Presence in every troubled hour, I could never have made it…Quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I felt enveloped in a spiritual vacuum. “Lord, where have You gone? What have I said or done to grieve You? Why have You withdrawn Your Presence from me? Oh Father—” In a panic I jumped to my feet, my heart frantically searching for a hidden sin, for a careless thought, for any reason why my Lord should have withdrawn His Presence from me. My prayers, my expressions of worship, seemed to go no higher than the ceiling; there seemed to be no sounding board. I prayed for forgiveness, for the Holy Spirit to search my heart. To none of my petitions was there any apparent response.

I sank to the floor and quietly and purposefully began to search the Scriptures hidden in my heart…

“Lord, I believe all that the Bible says. I do walk by faith and not by sight. I do not need to feel You near, because Your Word says You will never leave me nor forsake me. Lord, I confirm my faith; I believe.” The words of Hebrews 11:1 welled up, unbeckoned, to fill my mind: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The evidence of things not seen. Evidence not seen — that was what I put my trust in — not in feelings or moments of ecstasy, but in the unchanging Person of Jesus Christ. Suddenly I realized that I was singing:

When darkness veils His lovely face,
I rest on His unchanging grace.
In every high and stormy gale,
My anchor holds within the veil.

On Christ the solid Rock I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand.

I was assured that my faith rested not on feelings, not on moments of ecstasy, but on the Person of my matchless, changeless Savior, in Whom is no shadow caused by turning. In a measure I felt I understood what Job meant when he declared, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him” (13:35). Job knew that he could trust God, because Job knew the character of the One in Whom he had put his trust. It was faith stripped of feelings, faith without trappings. More than ever before, I knew that I could ever and always put my trust, my faith, in my glorious Lord. I encouraged myself in the Lord and His Word.

We don’t always know why God seems distant. Sometimes it is sin: though He is with us always, that fellowship can be broken when we’re sinning against Him. Sometimes, as in Darlene’s case, He is teaching us to trust in Him and His Word and not in our feelings. Sometimes, like for Daniel, answers are delayed due to spiritual opposition. There may be other reasons as well, but the answer is the same: reminding ourselves of and resting on His Word.

Though this is not a “dark” time for me, it is for a few friends, so I hope this encourages them, and I can shore these truths up for myself for when those times might come around in the future.

Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God. Isaiah 50:10

Book Review: Walking From East to West: God in the Shadows

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Barbara Harper

Walking From East to West: God in the Shadows by Ravi Zacharias first came to my attention when Sherry recommended it to me. I had heard Ravi speak on the radio several times and appreciated his ministry and his way of thinking, and I generally like biographies and memoirs, so I was glad to pick this up.

The book came about when his publishers asked him to write his memoirs “in the simplest terms, with your heart on your sleeve.” In the beginning of the book, Ravi shares these lines from James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis“:

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

Ravi shapes his story by pointing out God “in the shadows,” God at work throughout his life even when he did not perceive Him.

Ravi’s story begins in the East, in Chennai (formerly Madras) in India. His earliest religious associations were bound by fear but also by the rich heritage of the cultural stories, myths, and celebrations. His mother was spiritual but also superstitious. They even had an astrologist do readings of the family once, revealing a “cultural mix of religion, superstition, and ‘cover all bases’ mentality with regard to the supernatural.” A couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses were allowed to teach the children to read, especially the Bible, and the children were awed until they got to their teaching that only 144,000 were going to make it to Paradise. When Ravi realized that there were more than 144,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide, so that not even all of their people were going to make it, much less the people they were teaching, he rejected their study as well as Christianity. He didn’t know then that there were differences between different sects, and between sects and cults.

His father had a powerful position in the government, and his siblings all seemed to have leadership personalities. Being successful professionally and influentially was one of the highest values of his culture. For various reasons, Ravi’s father did not seem to have the same esteem for him that he did his other children. He had names of endearment for the others, but not for Ravi, and Ravi was “consistently on the receiving end of his rather violent temper.” This, of course, made him even more hesitant around his father than he already was naturally, and made his father react against him further. His father told Ravi he was a failure and repeatedly told him in so many words that he would never amount to anything. Ravi felt the same way: even the astrologer mentioned gave him a disappointing reading. He felt an intense loneliness and inferiority even with friends, because they were all “either rich or brilliant, and I was neither. While they were always at the top of the class, I never did well in studies.” They always had money to spend, and he didn’t: he could only participate in what they did if they paid his way. No one “bared their heartaches or inner struggles” in his culture, so he kept it all inside.

He found something of an escape in sports, where he did excel, especially in cricket, though his father never came to any of his matches. He thought about playing professionally, but even the professional cricket players could not make a living at it and worked at other jobs. Ravi had been so poor at his studies that by his teens, when he was supposed to be finding his way in life, he had no idea what to do, and his father’s consistent belittling and his increasing sense of loneliness were all coming to a head.

About this time his sister started attending Youth For Christ rallies and invited him along. He was bored at first but came again when his sister was singing with a group that night. Then he heard a message on John 3:16 that spoke to his heart, and he responded to the invitation and prayed to receive Christ. Things were still vague and fuzzy for him for a long while.

Ravi went on to college but fell into his old habits of not studying and began to fail. His lack of purpose and sense of shame and failure finally led him to attempt to take his own life. As he recovered in the hospital over several days, a Youth For Christ leader brought his mother a Bible with a passage marked for Ravi. This leader had not known of the suicide attempt (no one did), but the passage he marked was John 14:19: “Because I live, you will also live.” When Ravi was well enough to receive it, “the words hit [him] like a ton of bricks.” He grasped at the hope in it and prayed that if God would get him well, he “would leave no stone unturned in [his] pursuit of truth.”

God continued to work in his heart, and he began to attend Youth For Christ functions more often. He had never been a reader, but now he began to devour Christian biographies and Bible commentaries. “For the first time, I felt my mind being stretched – and I loved it. I realized that thinking could be fun, and with that simple realization I was sent headlong into the lifelong discipline of reading.”

A friend of his father’s was a hotel manager and great chef, and Ravi admired him and decided he wanted to follow in his footsteps. His father pulled some strings to get him into the Institute of Hotel Management. He excelled and now felt he had a purpose, both life and in a profession.

As he continued to grow spiritually, reading, attending Youth For Christ and a new church, eventually he went with a team to a Youth Congress, part of which was a preaching contest. His friend who was designated to preach could not due to a conflict, so Ravi was asked to fill in with only three hours notice. Some of the men in that assembly recognized God’s hand on him and encouraged him. He still didn’t think that was what God was calling him to do, but he went on more preaching ministries and teams with Youth For Christ.

His family moved to Canada after his father’s retirement, and God continued to lead Ravi to people, churches, and organizations that helped him grow, and where he met his future wife. He continued studying and working in hotel management, but began to sense that “[his] priorities and [his] ‘heartbeat’ were changing toward other things.”

One thing that stood out to me was the encouragement from older Christians that God used in his life. He writes, “I don’t think older Christians can ever fully know what an important role they play in the affirmation of younger believers. When you’re just a youth, it means so much to have someone who’s farther along the road say to you, ‘I see something in you, and I want you to be encouraged in it.'”
As he continued preaching as opportunities came, many people told him they felt he was gifted with evangelism. He was encouraged but didn’t know the difference then between being an evangelist and “just preaching.” But he knew that “a special sensation rose up in me as I preached. I had an intense urge to persuade….I knew I wanted to preach to people who were on a quest, people whose minds were challenging what they saw around them, who were hurting on the inside, and who needed someone to speak to those issues.”

Eventually God led him to become a full-time preacher, to overseas opportunities to preach, and eventually into apologetics. Of the last, he said that people talk about truth having to get from the head to the heart for one to be converted, and that was true, but after he was converted, the truth traveled from his heart back to his head again, and he developed a “hunger to know the great depths of truth behind my faith.” He wanted to understand all the whys and wherefores of the faith, and his reading and study helped him find answers. “Most of the preaching in evangelism was geared to the ‘unhappy pagan.’ What about the ‘happy pagan, I thought, ‘the one who has no qualms about his life?’ Life was about to change for me in my heartfelt desire to preach to the skeptic” and intellectuals.

Eventually God led him (and provided in a miraculous way!) to form “a ministry that would communicate the gospel effectively within the context of the prevailing skepticism. It would seek to reach the thinker and to clear all obstacles in his path so that he or she could see the cross, clearly and unhindered…I wanted to address those struggling people – the Thomases of the world – who saw life as not making sense. If the church didn’t place a value on a person’s questioning, then we were effectively absolving ourselves of any responsibility to that person. At the same time, if the skeptic’s questions weren’t honest, we had to address them in ways that exposed his or her dishonesty. Apologetics had to be about much more than answering questions – it had to focus on questioning the questions and clarifying truth claims.” “It is up to the thinking Christian to train the mind, take seriously the questioner, and respond with intelligence and relevance.”

I know some people demean apologetics, since it’s not the gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16), but I’ve always agreed with Ravi’s thought here that it can help prepare the way for the gospel plus it can help clarify truth for the believer as well.

The ministry borne out of all this was Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Ravi had another name in mind, but the others involved felt the ministry should have his name and “stand up behind your integrity, or fall with the lack of it,” a scary proposition indeed.

Regarding some of the dangers that came about in his ministry (including death threats), he says, “You have to learn that you cannot claim a path just because it is less intimidating. You must keep in mind that God does have an appointment with you, that there is a cost to serving Him. At the same time, you have to be wise and not careless. To deny the reality that there are some places where you cannot go is to play the fool. More important, if you have not learned to pay the smaller prices of following Christ in your daily life, you will not be prepared to pay the ultimate price in God’s calling.”

A few more quotes that stood out:

“Successes are hollow if you do not know the author of life and His purpose.”

After telling the United Nations that there are four absolutes that we all agree to, love, justice, evil, and forgiveness: “Only on the cross of Jesus do love, justice, evil, and forgiveness converge. Evil, in the heart of man, shown in the crucifixion; love, in the heart of God who gave His Son; forgiveness, because of the grace of Christ; and justice, because of the law of God revealed.”

“There are some wonderful things from your painful past, things with a beauty you may not have realized at the time.”

“Caution laced with wisdom and commitment must always be the key to the onward step.”

“Jesus wasn’t just the best option to me; He was the only option. He provided the skin of reason to the flesh and bones of reality. His answers to life’s questions were both unique and true. No one else answered the deepest questions of the soul the way He did.”

“Sometimes in the shadows of one’s self lie the problems, and in the shadows of one’s shaping lie the answers.”

A lot of the explanation behind the differences in Eastern vs. Western thinking was quite interesting. There is a plethora of fascinating information here, including various testimonies of God at work (including Ravi’s own father’s salvation) and how we led in Ravi’s personal life, family, and ministry.

I know some of my readers would wonder, so I’ll have to say here that, no, I wouldn’t endorse every single person and ministry mentioned in the book, but there is no denying the hand of God in the life and ministry of Ravi Zacharias. I loved reading this book and highly recommend it to you.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Strong Women

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Barbara Harper

Several days ago I was discussing with a friend the two half-sisters in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Marian Halcombe is gracious, smart, strong, and capable, but ugly. Laura Fairlie is pretty and sweet, but somewhat weak and fragile. You can guess which one gets the guy. 🙂

That led to a discussion about the Victorian ideal woman and “damsel in distress” literature. I am not a feminist by any means, but I do like to see a female protagonist who does have some umph to her, who adds more to the story than a pretty face.

Being strong is not an unfeminine trait. In fact, Proverbs 31 says of the virtuous woman, “She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms,” and “Strength and honour are her clothing.”

She is strong in character: excellent, or virtuous in some versions (verse 10), trustworthy (verse 11), does her husband good (verse 12), kind and compassionate (verses 20, 26), characterized by honor (or dignity in some versions) (verse 25), praiseworthy (28-31).

She is strong in industriousness and initiative: She “works with willing hands” (verse 13), she gets up early to start work and serve others (verse 15) – she’s not still in bed late in the morning waiting on someone to serve her (except maybe on special occasions 🙂 ), she weaves and knows her products are good (verse 18-19), she works into the evening (verse 18), she makes nice clothing (verse 21-22, 24), she makes products to sell (verse 24), she looks well to the ways of her household and is not idle (verse 27).

She is strong physically (verses 17, 25): she plants (verse 16),

She is strong mentally and intellectually: she seeks good products and prices (verses 13, 14, 16), she plans ahead for bad weather (verse 21), she is wise (verse 26).

She is strong spiritually: she fears the Lord (verse 30).

We can sometimes get discouraged looking at her, but as I like to say, she didn’t do all of that in a single day. 🙂 And I don’t think we have to take up weaving, plant a vineyard, or have a home business to become virtuous women. But taken as a whole, the tenor of her life is that of strength, industry, and honor. She is definitely not a “damsel in distress,” but she doesn’t need to assert her strength by challenging her husband or stepping into his role.

Admittedly there will be times of weakness, when she is sick, pregnant, or just tired and weary. And there is nothing wrong with a husband helping and serving his wife: if he loves as Christ loves the church, Christ helps and serves us in many ways. And admittedly there are times she needs “rescue.” I’ve so appreciated the times my husband has come to my rescue when I’ve gotten stuck or over my head in a project, behind in getting ready for company, overwhelmed with a ministry activity, etc. As a family we all pitch in and help wherever needed rather than standing back and saying, “That’s your responsibility, not mine.” But I did have to struggle in early marriage with wanting my husband to help me in every little thing and having to remember that I am supposed to be a help meet for him. We are supposed to depend on our husbands in many ways, but he needs us to be able to stand strong in the Lord’s strength in many ways as well.

Back to literary examples, I think of Dora, the first love of David Copperfield. She was pretty, sweet, and charming, but childish and totally inept as a household manager. She even told him to think of her as a “child wife.” Her husband had to just accept and love her as she was. But Agnes, his friend whom he later came to love, was steady, capable, strong, and mature, and they could support and help each other. Lucie Manette from A Tale of Two Cities came up in the aforementioned discussion as a weak Victorian ideal, but I disagreed: I think she had to be very strong to take in a father she thought had been dead and nurse him back to health in the mental state he was in after so many years locked up unjustly in the Bastille and then to go to France at the height of the French Revolution to find out what had happened to her husband when she feared he was in danger. Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility is another strong literary woman. She was steady, had to manage the household frugally even when the rest of the family complained, had to reign in her emotions to do the honorable thing, as opposed to her sister, Marianne, who gave free reign to her emotions and whims. Ma Ingalls is another: I honestly don’t know how she dealt with the sheer hard work of her life as well as the loneliness of being away from other people so much.

Besides literary examples, we have a plethora of strong women in the Bible. How could Mary, the mother of Jesus, endure all she did without His strength? There is Deborah, a judge who went to battle; Hannah, in grief over her barrenness, yet knowing to whom to turn; Priscilla, who helped her husband in business and in discipling; Mary and Martha, strong in different ways; Joanna and the other women who ministered to Jesus’s needs, and so many more.

We don’t usually step up to the brink of adulthood or marriage strong in all the ways we need to be. Strength of character has to be developed just as physical strength does. When you first start exercising physically, the first thing you notice is how weak and out of shape you really are, but starting to exercise even in weakness is the first step to developing strength. Often God develops strength in us by putting us in situations where we are totally weak. I could not have endured my husband’s many travels without learning to lean on the Lord for strength, but I was pretty much a basket case at first. I can remember the dismay of realizing as a young mother that I couldn’t just take to my bed when I was sick when I had little ones to take care of. I was probably overly dependent on my husband at first, but had to learn how to make decisions and take care of things while he was at work and out of reach.

In Climbing, Rosalind Goforth wrote:

It was while I had a large family of little children about me and mission work was pressing heavily upon me, while feeling burdened and that strength was insufficient, I sought to find in God’s Word whether there were any conditions to be fulfilled for the receiving of divine strength. The result of this study was a surprise and joy to me, and later a blessing and help to many to whom I passed it on, for every condition the weakest could fulfill!

Conditions of receiving strength

1. Weaknesses. II Cor. 12:9-10
2. No might. Isa. 40:29
3. Sitting still. Isa. 30:7
4. Waiting on God. Isa. 40:31
5. Quietness. Isa. 30:15
6. Confidence. Isa. 30:15
7. Joy in the Lord. Neh. 8:10
8. Poor. Isa. 25:4
9. Needy. Isa. 25:4
10 Dependence on Christ. Phil. 4:13

The key is in Hebrew 11:32-34: “And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets: Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”

Jesus said, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (II Cor. 12:9-10).

The song “I Could Not Do Without Thee” by Francis Ridley Havergal says it well:

I could not do without Thee,
I cannot stand alone,
I have no strength or goodness,
No wisdom of my own;
But Thou, beloved Savior,
Art all in all to me,
And weakness will be power
If leaning hard on Thee.

May you “be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might” (Ephesians 6:10) today.

Can We Let God Down?

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Barbara Harper

I was listening to a video yesterday when one of the speakers mentioned a fear of “letting God down” by failing in the endeavor being discussed. The other speaker, a pastor, said, “You can’t let God down. You weren’t holding Him up in the first place.”

And I thought…..seriously? You’re going to use a cutesy catchy comeback to answer someone’s wrestling over whether they can be victorious in a path they’re walking before the Lord? Although what he said was true, it just seemed a flippant response that didn’t really address the person’s concern.

According to Dictionary.com, the verb phrase “let down” can mean “to disappoint; fail; to betray.”

Can we disappoint, fail, and betray God?

Of COURSE we can. And it is no surprise to Him: “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame;he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:13-14).

What should we do if that happens?

If it involves sin, we can confess it to God. I John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

We can ask for wisdom to know what to do and to learn from our mistakes. James 1:5 says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.”

We can let it be a reminder of our weakness and our need for God’s strength. II Corinthians 12:9-10 say, “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

We can “come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” Hebrews 4:16.

Romans 8:1 tells us “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Our faults and failures will never affect our standing with Christ or His love for us. When we become God’s children by repentance and believing on Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, He will never cast us out or disown us or disinherit us or remove us from the family. Our standing with Him is based on Christ’s righteousness, not our own, and that will never fail. We can rest secure in His love.

But there will be times when we fail, and He has to bring chastening as any loving parent would. This isn’t punishment but rather discipline which leads to holiness.

Should we let a fear of failure choke any endeavors for God? No.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It’s OK. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing.-H. Stanley Judd

God does tell us to “walk circumspectly” (carefully) and to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” but that doesn’t mean He wants us cowering in a corner, afraid to take any step lest it be a wrong one or lest we fail somewhere along the way. He promises “grace to help in time of need.” Without Him we can do nothing, but through Him we can do all things.

Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. Joshua 1:9

Jesus, I Am Resting

Posted on March 2, 2014 by Barbara Harper

This hymn has been on my mind for a couple of weeks. We used to sing it in church quite a bit but I haven’t heard it in years. I was going to post it last week, but then went with another one instead.

Now this hymn is especially poignant to me today as a young wife and mother in our church passed away suddenly and unexpectedly Saturday morning from heart failure in response to a catastrophic reaction to some kind of medication. We’re all stunned and saddened, I just ache for the husband and two young children left behind. I just can’t fathom how he was able to tell their children that Mommy is gone and the many ways this will affect them all in the days ahead. Only by God’s grace, which I am asking Him for them.

But I’m also comforted by the words to this song. We rest in Him by faith: now she is doing so by sight. I can only imagine what that is like.

Jesus, I am resting, resting,
In the joy of what Thou art;
I am finding out the greatness
Of Thy loving heart.
Thou hast bid me gaze upon Thee,
And Thy beauty fills my soul,
For by Thy transforming power,
Thou hast made me whole.

O, how great Thy loving kindness,
Vaster, broader than the sea!
O, how marvelous Thy goodness,
Lavished all on me!
Yes, I rest in Thee, Belovèd,
Know what wealth of grace is Thine,
Know Thy certainty of promise,
And have made it mine.

Simply trusting Thee, Lord Jesus,
I behold Thee as Thou art,
And Thy love, so pure, so changeless,
Satisfies my heart;
Satisfies its deepest longings,
Meets, supplies its every need,
Compasseth me round with blessings:
Thine is love indeed!

Ever lift Thy face upon me
As I work and wait for Thee;
Resting ’neath Thy smile, Lord Jesus,
Earth’s dark shadows flee.
Brightness of my Father’s glory,
Sunshine of my Father’s face,
Keep me ever trusting, resting,
Fill me with Thy grace.

~ Jean S. Pigott, 1876.

Though I have always liked the old tune, I really like this new version as sung by the Steve Pettit Evangelistic Team on their CD, If Eyes Could See.