He Has Laid Down the Gold of His Heart

I wonder if people feel reserved about spending time with those who have given their very all for the sake of the gospel going out to the ends of the earth.  It always seems to me that gatherings around missionary couples/singles/families should be a time of special fellowship.  Each time we’ve had someone in our home we have been blessed infinitely more than we blessed them with hospitality, for the Spirit flows freely in those who’ve offered up the ultimate sacrifice to Him.

Our children and I will never forget the Kenyan who got up from the breakfast table to dance in our living room to He Reigns – we Americans couldn’t quite get the groove.  He trains up hundreds in their young culture to go out and proclaim Christ, to be leaders, to strive for purity.  He hid on a rooftop in town for several  days in order to escape with his life while his town was burned and pillaged and many men murdered.

It’s the song of the redeemed
Rising from the African plain
It’s the song of the forgiven
Drowning out the Amazon rain
The song of Asian believers
Filled with God’s holy fire
It’s every tribe, every tongue, every nation
A love song born of a grateful choir

It’s all God’s children singing
Glory, glory, hallelujah
He reigns, He reigns...
Let it rise about the four winds

Caught up in the heavenly sound
Let praises echo from the towers of cathedrals
To the faithful gathered underground
Of all the songs sung from the dawn of creation
Some were meant to persist
Of all the bells rung from a thousand steeples
None rings truer than this

And all the powers of darkness
Tremble at what they’ve just heard
‘Cause all the powers of darkness
Can’t drown out a single word

When all God’s children sing out
Glory, glory, hallelujah
He reigns, He reigns...

 --Newsboys

Last week we had the privilege of hearing some current stories about more of such people; Samson, who has several university degrees, but travels to remote villages over dozens of uncomfortable hours by bus, boat, motorcycle, to set up literacy training facilities so that lowest caste India families can learn to read the Bible.  Old and young alike, large numbers in the towns participate; fifty percent generally become true believers and are discipled.  The least of these my brothers…

And there is the man who spent thirteen years in prison: “Even in prison, I knew that God was with me and I knew what He had done for me on the cross.  It is greater than what I had been through in prison.  Than you to my brothers and sisters in America and many other countries for your faithful prayers.  [are they?!] I know that I am still alive today because of your faithful prayer.  I am now sharing my testimony because of your powerful prayers.  Please pray for my country, Laos.  Pray that everyone accepts Jesus Christ, because I know that nothing is worthy in this life except becoming a Christian and following Jesus Christ.  I know how hard life is, but I want to encourage believers in America to be strong in their faith…”   He hasn’t been in our home, but Christ went two thousand years ago to prepare a home for him in the same eternal city we will inhabit, just some short hours from now.

Let us not think for a moment that our prayers, feeling so obscure for sufferers around the world, do not matter, or can be foregone because we can’t quite get to it.  Remembering them when we sit down to thank the Lord for a full plate of food puts our abundance in perspective.  And next time there is an opportunity to be with one of these, or with one who is telling about them, run to the chance.  It changes the lives of our children; and as adults, crystalizes a clearer perspective.

“What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?  For ye are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”  1 Corinthians  6:19-20

“The Christian who truly enters into these two verses has solved some of the deepest problems of life  Those who recognize God’s absolute proprietorship of their bodies are not long in doubt as to where they should go, or what they should do.  Consecration is simply a matter of letting God have what He has paid for, or returning stolen property.

“Ye are bought with a price.”  It was an infinite price that God paid.  It was something more than silver and gold—the precious Blood of His only begotten Son.  God emphasizes the tremendous cost of redemption as an appeal to the heart of the redeemed.  The price He has paid measures His estimate of us.  He does not give a life so dear to Him for a soul that is worth nothing to Him.  He has laid down the gold of His heart – even Jesus Christ.  If we would go and stand on Calvary’s hill, and consider what it has cost heaven to purchase our salvation, we could not long withhold from Him what He rightfully owns—the full service of spirit, soul and body.  Yet how many are satisfied to say, “Jesus is mine,” who never go on to say, “I am his.”  One who takes this higher ground is bound to be careful what he does with property which belongs to another.

“When the thought of His proprietorship becomes uppermost, then we will simultaneously recognize the fact that being His, we are temples of the Holy Spirit.  Conscious of God’s ownership, and thoughtful of our Divine guest—the Holy Spirit—it is only natural that we should glorify God in our bodies and in our spirits which are His.  To glorify Him thus, is simply to exhibit the power and character of God in that which is His.

The Christian’s greatest joy is found in letting God possess His own property.”

--Mrs. Charles Cowman

Silver Wedding Anniversary

We skipped the morning bike ride and breakfast together for our anniversary because duty called; we’ll have a few days together soon.  So we sat wound together out on the deck with morning coffee and tea and Gospel Intimacy to spend the first few minutes of our 25^th anniversary enjoying just being home, quiet, enjoying the morning air.  Out pops one of our people to say good morning and have a chat and, well, we didn’t want to chase him away but finally he left us to our romantic reverie.  For all of 1.5 minutes before another head pops around the corner and she settles in with us on the lounge chair as if she’s going to stay, until number three reminds her it’s our anniversary and we are trying to have some romantic moments.  Finally the guilt trip prevails and she pulls herself away.  Somehow, before half a page was read, all three of them are standing around us conversing about this and that and generally socializing for the rest of our available few moments.  When at last they left, in time for us to get up and on with our day, I said “Well, it will be soon enough that they won’t be here to interrupt us on our anniversary morning”, and indeed, we didn’t mind in the least. 

Today I echo the words Elisabeth Prentiss wrote on her silver wedding anniversary, 1870:

“My thoughts have been busy the past week with reviewing the years through which I have travelled, hand in hand, with my dear husband; years full of sin, full of suffering, full of joy; brimful of the lovingkindness and tender mercy that smote often and smote surely.  Your last letter confirms what I already knew, but am never tired of hearing, repeated, the faithfulness of God to those whom He afflicts…magnify Him who took such pains with me, and is carrying on just such work in thousands of hearts and lives…there is nothing like the influence of one living soul on another. Then why should we not naturally speak to everybody who will listen, of what fills our thoughts: our Saviour, his beauty, His goodness, his faithfulness, His wisdom!  I don’t believe a full heart can help running over!” –More Love to Thee

Praising God this day for His faithful gifts, His working all things to good, and His making all things beautiful in His time. 

Here's to celebrating 50 together!  or 60? Will this be us in 40 years?

Gospel Power in Marriage

Tomorrow my man and I celebrate 25 years of marriage.  God has been merciful and very kind: “…through many dangers, toils and snares we have already come…’tis grace has brought us safe this far, and grace will lead us home”.  We are still learning much about Love, about Grace – God’s magnificent love to us, and our love for one another.  He’s blessed us in walking with us, teaching us; we celebrate this milestone with hearts full of joy and gratitude, knowing how little we deserve His lavish grace.

The amazing children-gifts He’s lent to us for these brief years threw a !stunning !best-ever! surprise 25^th anniversary dinner for us on Saturday evening, blessing beyond description, moment in time through which God’s blessings flowed unbounded.

culmination of days and days of creative labors and hard work, dearest daughters!

these musicians are amazing! (and helped serve, also, thus the apron)

delighted, overwhelmed: joyful evening

dear parents and lifelong friends

 bouquets done beautifully by our younger daughter

Surely we all are aware of how deeply marriage is under attack from every aspect of the matrix of our global culture.  We are reading aloud Gospel Intimacy by Alan Dunn (highly recommend) and I cannot help but quote at length.  It’s a bit of effort to dig below familiar or theologically loaded words and climb inside the Wonder of what is being said, but when we realize the Gospel Power that is ours to preserve marriage, to overcome difficulty and conflict, and to experience the unity of spirit to which we are called, that effort is well rewarded.  Ultimately, shall we subdue our determined hearts and seek first the glory of God and His righteousness?  Yes, then all these things shall be added unto you…

“John defines love theologically:  God is Love.  Here we have the light of our first guiding star shining on the subject.  God shows love by sending His Son as the propitiation for our sins, as the sacrifice which appeased divine wrath and averted divine judgment.  In the sacrificial death of Jesus we have atonement for our sin.  He assumed the punishment which we rightly deserve.  By His obedient self-sacrifice, He paid the penalty for our sin.  By His death, He defeated death by satisfying the demands of God’s justice.  By His resurrection He triumphs in new life, the life of eternity, the life of love.  Here then is love.  Love works to promote life.  Love seeks to solve the problem of death caused by sin.  Love mends sin’s separations.  Love brings life and unity.  Sin brings death.  Only gospel love can overcome sin and bring life to what would otherwise die.  This is the love we are to give one another in marriage.  We are to love each other with the love that God has for us in Christ.  John holds God’s gospel love before us and appeals to us to love each other in the same manner as god loves us.  Love each other with a love that addresses sin, that overcomes death, and that unifies what sin would otherwise separate.  Take the love that God has given to you in the gospel of Jesus Christ and give that same love to each other.

“Gospel love…is a love that originates in God and is expressed and defined by the gospel.  Gospel love is received from the Father in Christ Jesus by a living faith engendered within us by the Holy Spirit.  We receive gospel love from God and then give His love, gospel love, to our spouse.  We sometimes wonder whether we are capable of loving.  Are we not limited by our sin, determined by our genes, conditioned by our parents, habituated by our past?  If any man is in Christ, He is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold new things have come.  (2 Corinthians 5:17)  We are born of the Spirit and are new men [and women] in Christ.  He has liberated us in love that we might live in love.”  

--Alan Dunn

Meditating on this, this past week, I would add Philippians 3:13,16: “…one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Jesus Christ…let us walk by the same rule, let us be of the same mind…”

The call of the hour is to begin living in the reality that is ours: we are one with Christ, sons and daughters of the King Eternal, and we have access to all His storerooms of power and blessing.

If He Will Bless It

The Olympics are captivating our household, usually later at night when it is time to head on to bed.  But as a pattern for a mindset of pursuing  victory, I thought the following was a better reminder than the stories of success and defeat we are seeing played out during these epic Games:

“[In feeding the five thousand, Jesus could have] simply swept His hand over the horizon, turned all the stones into loaves of bread, and sent everyone out with instructions to pick one up for himself.  But the Lord obviously wanted to feed this hungry assembly by using His disciples to do it.  He wanted to begin with what they had, or could find, and then make much more of that.  That is how He intended to bless the ministry and the lives of His disciples.

“All of us at one point or another feel He asks us to do more than we can do.  But He is not asking us to do anything by ourselves, by our own devices, or in our own strength.  In giving us commands, He is telling us what He will do with the little we have…

“Many times a day you and I do not do what the Lord calls us to do because it does not occur to us to think that we can.  He asks too much; we have too little, whatever it is we have too little of: courage, brains, faith, love, self-control, money, gifts—whatever it is we have too little of it with which to do what the Lord has asked of us.  We can’t love our enemy with the five loaves and two fishes worth of humility and tenderness and sympathy and Christlikeness that we have.  We can’t conquer lust, or put to death a sinful desire with the five loaves’ worth of hatred of sin, love of holiness, zeal or he Lord’s name, and self control that we have.

“But he Lord never intended his disciples to feed the multitude with only five loaves and two fish.  He took that amount – which was all they had—and made much of it, much more, sufficient to do the job and then some.  And so it will be with every disciple who answers the Lord’s summons in the confidence that the Lord is able and willing to provide what we do not have.

“He did not simply have the disciples break the loaves and the fish and send the food around.  He took what they had from them, gave thanks, and then broke it.  Then and only then did He give it to His disciples for them to distribute…

“We all have some measure of power and ability.  And we find it very easy to think that whether it is in succeeding at work or in raising our children, in making friends or in winning others to Christ, or in doing some other difficult work or Christian service we have accomplished it with what is ours: our talent, our fortitude, our perseverance, our good sense, even our faith.  But Jesus told His disciples and then showed them that, in everything that really matters, “without Me you can do nothing”…at every point when they forgot it, they foundered and He had to teach it to them again…

“The Lord will use what we have but He must bless it; His blessing is the key…whether your work is teaching or parenting or putting on godliness or bearing witness to an unbeliever or loving others: what you have is enough if only Christ will bless it and use it.  No matter your limitations, if Christ blesses your efforts you can accomplish great things…

“Jesus “gave the bread to the disciples to set before the crowd”: the tense of the verb gave is actually the imperfect, the past tense of continuous action—“He kept giving them to the disciples to set before the crowd”—the impression of the grammar, very clearly, is that every time the disciples came back to the Lord for more, there was more to give them, but not until then…however it multiplied it did so over time as the disciples came back empty ready for more.

“What a perfect picture of the manner in which we are called to serve the Lord in our lives…we struggle against the notion that every time we find ourselves in need we have to return to the Lord once again for more, to get what, once again, isn’t there until we receive it from His hand.

“We would prefer to learn all our lessons at once, to resolve all our problems at once, and then need nothing more.  Our constant need is an offense to our pride, our self-sufficiency, and our internal fortitude.  But it is not our Savior’s way and surely He knows best what suits our holiness and the world’s salvation.”   
--Rev. R. Rayburn

Satisfy Thy Soul in Drought

Recently I’ve been thinking about how many of us as women aspire to the goal of being an oasis for others: for our husbands, our children, our friends and those whose lives we touch—“the garden which it has created around its base”, yes?  Are we always seeking to be encouraged, or is it a desire that drives us, to be an encouragement to others along their path?  This picture came timely:

“Travelers are enthusiastic over a species of palm tree which grows in South America.  They call it the rain tree.   This tree has a remarkable power of attracting, in a wondrous degree, atmospheric moisture, which it and drops on the earth in refreshing dew.  It grows straight up in the parched and arid desert and daily distributes its refreshing showers, with the result that around it an oasis of luxuriant vegetation soon springs up.  The floodgates of heaven refuse to open, the fountains cease to flow, the rivers evaporate—all true, but the rain tree getting its moisture from above, renews the garden which it has created around its base, and gives the weary traveler shade and fruit, a new life and a delightful rest!

God would have us to be like the rain tree growing along side the desert highways of the world—sources of new spiritual life.  God HIMSELF is our atmosphere, and we carry our atmosphere with us wherever we go.  This atmosphere is proof against all infection, and to breathe it is constant health.

Christ’s power was in His separateness.  He did not withdraw Himself from the world, but lived in the very midst of it.  No man ever came into such close external contact with the devil.  Jesus was not a recluse.  He was social—mingling with men; yet He kept intact His separateness from the world.  He was Jesus!  Men felt this!  This was His power!

In the secret of Christ’s power we see the secret of our power.  If we are to have any power in the world we must become partakers of His holiness; we must be separated with Him; and be kept separated and set apart to the same great life.”   --Lettie Cowman

The Lord shall…satisfy thy soul in drought…and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.  Isaiah 58:11

Looking Up From Our Knees

A guest post from our daughter today...


It struck me as I was on my picking raspberries. 
Who knew that on one’s knees was the best way to pick that luscious red fruit? And isn’t all of life like this?

Because only when I knelt down in the grass could I see all the berries. It was like a whole different angle—a whole different lens. All the berries hang under the leaves, and who sees the berries unless they kneel? And maybe it isn’t just a different or a better lens, maybe it’s the only right one. 


Because from above only the very obvious berries are seen, but from below they all are. Situations seem unfair, or perilous, or barren, or hopeless, till we kneel. That’s when the hope is seen. 


Because only from the Giver of all hope can we hope to see light, to see change. So when we kneel, all those barren branches are seen to be heavy with fruit, to be weighted down with the glory. Only as we give thanks and speak with God, come into His presence, plead before the throne, can we see the grace all around us. 

Everlasting Pillars

Twenty-four years ago, just under a year married, we explored these wild roads and trails of Vancouver Island.  Twenty-four years of living and forgiving,  growing and slowing, learning and returning; but up on the island, the 800-year-old trees don’t notice much about that breath of time, they just keep on reaching toward the heavens.  Now three more eternal souls surround us as we walk in awe among –aptly named—Cathedral Forest.  Some of these giants were 300 years old when Columbus landed on North American shores.  Some of them came down in a 1997 storm, still lying where they fell, monuments decaying.


Will we lie where and when we fall to the earth, gone when we return to dust?  Not our souls, certainly—they rise to Light (or descend to eternal darkness if we are not found in Christ).  But the monument that lives on is that which upholds the corners of our generations; it does not need to lie fallow and quickly forgotten.  Will our generations that bear our name remember a godly, righteous walk—the parents, grandparents, great-grandparents- that led them along Lighted paths to the foot of the Cross?

“What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.”  John 13:7

"We have only a partial view here of God’s dealings, His half-completed, half-developed plan; but all will stand out in fair and graceful proportions in the great finished Temple of Eternity!  Go, in the reign of Israel’s greatest king, to the heights of Lebanon.  See that noble cedar, the pride of its compeers, an old wrestler with northern blasts!  Summer loves to smile upon it, night spangles its feathery foliage with dewdrops, the birds nestle on its branches, the weary pilgrim or wandering shepherd reposes under its shadows from the midday heat or from the furious storm; but all at once it is marked out to fall; the aged denizen of the forest is doomed to succumb to the woodman’s stroke!

As we see the axe making its first gash on its gnarled trunk, then the noble limbs stripped of their branches, and at last the “Tree of God”, as was its distinctive epithet, coming with a crash to the ground, we exclaim against the wanton destruction, the demolition of this proud pillar in the temple of nature.  We are tempted to cry with the prophet, as if inviting the sympathy of every lowlier stem—invoking inanimate things to resent the affront—“Howl, fir tree; for the cedar has fallen!” (Zechariah 11:2)

But wait a little.  Follow that gigantic tree as the workmen of Hiram launch it down the mountainside; thence conveyed in rafts along the blue waters of the Mediterranean; and last of all behold it set a glorious polished beam in the Temple of God.  As you see its destination, placed in the very Holy of Holies, in the diadem of the Great King—say, can you grudge that “the crown of Lebanon” was despoiled, in order that this jewel might have s noble a setting?

That cedar stood as a stately prop in nature’s sanctuary, but “the glory of the latter house was greater than the glory of the former!”

How many of our souls are like these cedars of old!  God’s axes of trial have stripped and bared them.  We see no reason for dealings so dark and mysterious, but He has a noble end and object in view; to set them as everlasting pillars and rafters in His Heavenly Zion; to make them a “crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of our God.”  --Macduff