Imitating the Truth

Now, by the method by which Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, thus these also are withstanding the truth, men of a depraved mind, disqualified as to the faith (II Timothy 3:8).

Be careful of those who imitate the Truth, as Jannes and Jambres did. The promotion of “Free Will” and “Open Theism” is nothing but idolatry when the fluff that tickles the ears is removed.

As glorious as the truth is that God will eventually save all mankind, God’s sovereignty is more fundamental and important. Idolatry and the worship of the true God is a theme that runs throughout Scripture. It’s one thing to know there is a God, it’s another thing to actually worship Him as such (Romans chapter 1) – that is to say, as the One Who gives life, breath and all to all men, and the One in Whom we live and move and have our being, and the One Who open eyes and blinds them, Who gives faith and repentance, etc. Man, in his pride and self-worship, tends to exalt and thank himself and his free-from-god-will for his own accomplishments, achievements, etc., and that is idolatry.

“Oneness” theology steals from the believer their expectation of being like our Lord and being conformed into His image. We are not only saved from sin and death, but saved to be like our Lord. That important fact gets obscured and muddied by doctrines like “Trinitarianism” or “Oneness theology” when a false relationship between Jesus Christ and His God and Father gets presented.

Charles Rutsch

Happiness Is a Journey

We convince ourselves that life will be better after we get married, have a baby, then another. Then, we are frustrated that the kids aren’t old enough and we’ll be more content when they are. After that we’re frustrated that we have teenagers to deal with. We will certainly be happy when they are out of that stage. We tell ourselves that our life will be complete when our spouse gets his or her act together, when we get a nicer car, are able to go on a nice vacation, when we retire. The truth is, there’s no better time to be happy than right now. If not now, when?

Your life will always be filled with challenges. It’s best to admit this to yourself and decide to be happy anyway. One of my favorite quotes comes from Alfred D Souza. He said,

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – REAL LIFE. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then, life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.

This perspective has helped me to see that there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.

So, treasure every moment that you have. And treasure it more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to spend your time with … and remember that time waits for no one.

Stop waiting until – until you finish school, until you go back to school, until you lose ten pounds, until you gain ten pounds, until you have kids, until your kids leave the house, until you start work, until you retire, until you get married, until you get divorced, until Friday night, until Sunday morning, until you get a new car or home, until your car or home is paid off, until spring, until summer, until fall, until winter, until you are off welfare, until the first or fifteenth, until your song comes on, until you’ve had a drink, until you’ve sobered up, until you die – to decide that there is no better time than right now to be happy.

Happiness is a journey, not a destination.

John W. Herdman
Encouraging News
Volume 1: June, 1999

All Things Work Together

We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28).

My dear friend,

Certainly, if my ability was equal to my inclination – I would remove your tumor with a word or a touch – I would exempt you instantly and constantly from every inconvenience and pain! But you are in the hands of One who could do all this and more, and who loves you infinitely better than I can do – and yet He is pleased to permit you to suffer! What is the plain lesson? Certainly, that at the present juncture, He, to whom all events and their consequences are present in one view – sees it better for you to have this tumor than to be without it! There is a cause, a need-be for it!

The promise is express, and literally true – that all things, universally and without exception, shall work together for good to those who love God. But they work together! The smallest as well as the greatest events have their place and use – like the movement of a watch, where, though some pieces have a greater comparative importance than others – yet the smallest pieces have their place and use, and are so far equally important, that the whole design of the machine would be obstructed for lack of them.

Some workings and turns of Divine Providence have a more visible, sensible, and determining influence upon the whole tenor of our lives. But the more ordinary occurrences of every day are adjusted, timed and suited with equal accuracy – by the hand of the same great Artist who planned and executes the whole! We are sometimes surprised to see how much more depends and turns upon these minor events, than we were aware of. Then we admire His skill, and say, “He does all things well!”

Such thoughts as these, when I am enabled to realize them, in some measure reconcile me to whatever He allots for myself or my friends; and convinces me of the propriety of that verse, which speaks the language of love, as well as authority, “Be still – and know that I am God!”

John Newton (1725-1807)
Author of the Hymn, Amazing Grace
John Newton’s Letters
September 28, 1774

The Heavenly Builder

For we are laborers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building (I Corinthians 3:9).

The work of grace is compared to a building; the carrying forward is gradual. If it is large, there is much to be done in preparing and laying the foundation, before the walls appear above ground; much is doing within, when the work does not seem perhaps to advance without; and when it is considerably forward – yet, being encumbered with scaffolds and rubbish – a bystander sees it at a great disadvantage, and can form but an imperfect judgment of it.

But all this while the architect himself, even from the laying of the first stone, conceives of it according to the plan and design he has formed; he prepares and adjusts the materials, disposing each in its proper time and place – and views it, in idea, as already finished. In due season it is completed – but not in a day. The top-stone is fixed, and then, the scaffolds and rubbish being removed – it appears to others as he intended it should be.

Men, indeed, often plan what, for want of skill or ability, or from unforeseen disappointments, they are unable to execute. But nothing can disappoint the Heavenly Builder; nor will He ever be reproached with forsaking the work of His Own hands, or beginning that which He could not or would not accomplish.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6).

Let us therefore be thankful for beginnings, and patiently wait the outcome.

John Newton (1725-1807)
Author of the Hymn, Amazing Grace
John Newton’s Letters
November 11, 1775

Only Tenants

The richest landowner is but a tenant, for every inch of this planet belongs to the Lord.

The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof (Psalm 24:1).

Man may temporarily possess control and improve it, but when his spirit goes to God which gave it, and his body back to dust, another tenant will hold it until death loosens his grip.

Therefore God says,

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also (Matthew 6:19-21).

Surely the Christian’s treasure and treasurer is the Lord Jesus Christ, Who is now at God’s right hand in heaven, and that is where his heart should be.

J.C. O’Hair (1876-1958)
Bible Study for Bereans
January, 1937

What Prayer Is Not

I do not claim to understand the techniques of the “great men of prayer,” as they have been called, or even to know for sure what was meant by that “awe-filled” designation. What I am rather certain about is this: as we do with such efficient alacrity in matters of faith, we have turned the tables, snarled the guidelines, and switched the priorities. We’ve promoted “prayer” as a self-serving jiffy gadget for twisting God’s arm, a soul-sided Aladdin’s lamp – or, equally blasphemous, as a stern Christian duty that may not be much fun but is somewhere piling up Brownie points to our account.

What a joyless faith that regards prayer as a life sentence, the onerous pride of admission to the club! And what a faithless faith that thinks of prayer as negotiable special privilege (“I thank Thee, that I am not as other men are”).

There are some other things that prayer is not:

Prayer is not a way to lobby the halls of heaven.

Prayer is not a let-God-do-it means of evading responsibilities which are rightfully our own.

Prayer is not a means by which we can persuade God to do what He does not very much want to do.

Prayer is not even a means by which God can be urged to do what is His nature to do.

Prayer is not a lever which we may use to bend God’s will to our will.

Prayer is not a bulletin by which we must inform God of current news, and without which He is uninformed. (There was a seminary professor who opened his class with prayer, invariably prefaced by, “O God, as Thou didst see in the New York Times this morning …”)

We have profaned prayer, I think, by trying to organize it, program it, formalize it, and ritualize it. We try to get whole churches or cities or nations praying at the same time and preferably for the same thing, as if we were setting up a picket line to bring our grievances to God’s attention or waging a cosmic protest …

Is God any more likely to be impressed with wholesale prayer than retail, or with round-the-clock prayer marathons than with unpremeditated moments when His presence evokes an impulsive, “Thank you”? …

When we give the impression that God may be suitably addressed only in a certain kind of language, we are, I think, guilty of introducing a crippling degree of self-consciousness into our praying. Inability to pray certainly doesn’t stem from having nothing to say. Often it does stem from thinking you have to say it in what amounts to a foreign tongue. Traditional prayer-talk is unlike anything else that one will encounter outside the King James Version of the Bible and perhaps an old hymnbook. While we have been always exhorted to translate our faith into everyday concerns and deeds, and when the Bible has been translated into numerous modern versions, we have not yet been adequately encouraged to translate our prayers …

Prayer is and ought to be the most natural thing in the world … The reassurance that one word is no holier than another may provide liberation that will make prayer not only meaningful but indispensable. We don’t have to force ourselves into somebody else’s mold. If we could just grasp that one idea!

Kenneth L. Wilson (1916-?)
Editor of The Christian Herald
Have Faith Without Fear (1970), pages 53-58

Dead Earnest

The “dead” in “dead earnest” is more than a semantic coincidence. No one is fully alive who has a closed mind, and it has to be closed, solidified, ossified, petrified (as by fear) for terminal earnestness to set in. The paradox is that when in this connection we use the word “dead” we should unwittingly be so accurate …

The thing that disturbs me most about people who think they have all the answers is that this turns into closed corporations … It would be vexing, I should think, to live with omniscience. It is even more vexing to love with presumed omniscience, as any number of wives and husbands (and children and parents) can testify. One of the facts of life is the unanswered questions, the apparent bafflements and contradictions. Something there is in us that doesn’t love a loose end, and we seize all sorts of justifications for tying them up. Quoting chapter and verse, or creedal statement, or the faith of our fathers and grandfathers, we go about frantically applying tourniquets that not only stop the bleeding but threaten the flow of life itself. Ultimate earnestness, focused to a searing, blinding light, is completely ruthless. Conviction, concern, sincerity, earnestness are meant to warm the beholder, not to incinerate him.

The only way, I submit, to keep earnestness in the asset column is to mix it with humor. Unfortunately, humor has not yet been fully accepted into the Christian cannon … Perhaps this is because it is such an instant solvent for pomp and pretense. It has a way of cutting presumption down to size …

It is more than mixing earnestness with humor. It’s not so much a mixture of two components as a compound that is something more than the sum of the parts. Humor at best is of the essence of earnestness and of life. It is a way of looking at everything through eyes that have laugh crinkles at the corners. It is the knack of seeing humor in what we do and what we are, not using it for any purpose, however good. “Humorous” is not an adjective but an attitude. It’s not something you say, but a posture of mind. Humor, essentially, is humility, and perhaps that is why it is so unpopular in religious circles, where humility does not come easily.

I’m not talking, you understand, about jokes … Real humor doesn’t have to make a point. It’s just there, bubbling up like a spring that flows whether anybody comes for water or not. One may not even necessarily get very many belly laughs out of the person who does that kind of bubbling. All you may sense is that here is somebody who does not think of himself more highly than he ought to think and that you are more open, more genuine when you are with him.

One of the reasons we’ve been so wary of humor is that we were handed down a pretty grim, unsmiling sort of faith. Even the word “Protestant” – one who protests – is an unsmiling word; its defenses are up and its breathing hard before anybody had said anything.

Another part of the reason for locking humor out of our faith probably goes back to the Bible. Look up the word “laugh” or “laughter” in a concordance, and you get the notion that mirth is not one of the spiritual gifts most to be sought after … But I think we’ve been looking under the wrong word for our biblical cues on humor. A much better word than “laughter” would be “joy,” and the Bible has a great deal – all of it good – to say about that. Joy, for my money, shatters arrogance and pride, it bubbles, is never heavy-handed, and is simply another name for the best kind of humor.

Kenneth L. Wilson (1916-?)
Editor of The Christian Herald
Have Faith Without Fear (1970), pages 62-65

“What Can I Do?”

“What can I do?” may be the phony question. There are, I will readily concede, times and places in which the question is a real and useful one … But there is something about this question that deserves a second listen …

In many instances I think that “What can I do?” isn’t the basic question at all. The basic question is, “What can I be?”

Being takes a lot more than doing, for you’re never finished with it. And when you start out with the premise of being something the doing naturally follows, with considerably more perception and considerably less grumbling and foot-dragging. Because then, doing is the logical follow-through. If you’re committed to love, your love will make itself known in all sorts of ways that an unloving person couldn’t imagine and certainly couldn’t program. If you are committed to compassion, you recognize opportunities to use it that you would never have seen if you had simply gone out looking for something to “do.”

It’s my growing conviction that some stupid, clumsy things are being done in this world simply because people have the compulsion to “do” something and yet are not deeply enough committed to “be” something …

When we ask, “What can I do?” do we really want to know? I am sure that some of us really do. God can use even our inadvertence, our inadequacies and our stumbling steps to get us to where we should go.

But the more probing, revealing, responsive question is “What can I be?”

Kenneth L. Wilson (1916-?)
Editor of The Christian Herald
Have Faith Without Fear (1970), pages 66-70

But in the Meantime

Redeeming the time, because the days are evil (Ephesians 5:16).

Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time (Colossians 4:5).

More problems could be solved by a meantime-theology than this world dreams of. Nothing is more with us than meantime. Yet it generally gets not much more than an afterthought. When we’re finished making our grand plans for the future, we quit talking, as if there is nothing else to talk about or we throw in as a last-minute concession, “But in the meantime …”

Yet, the meantime is where life is lived, where decisions are made, where pain is suffered, where we are lonely and glad, where we laugh and cry. There is the joy of anticipation. But in the meantime …?

Why should not the meantime reflect what we know is surely going to happen or what we believe should happen? Why must the meantime so consistently obstruct the inevitable or the desirable?

We act so often as if there is all the future in the world and no meantime. Actually, we’ve got more meantime than most of us have the courage to use. We just let it sit there …

It is easier, for example, to project our unfinished business upon God than to get on with it ourselves … For every person who is frustrated because of what he has tried to do and can’t do, there are probably hundreds who haven’t begun to do what they could do. Nobody has any right to feel frustrated about anything until he has personally used his meantime right up to the limit …

Not only by default or through indifference or through procrastination do we fail to live in the only place where living can be done – the present – but sometimes the very prospect of being alive terrifies us or seems immensely impractical … We deny so regularly with our meantimes what we affirm with our eternities. And we don’t even realize we are doing it.

The difficulty with waiting around for something to start is that when it does, it’s hard to put your finger on it and say, “Now! It’s starting!” … Of course, you have long-range goals. You’re looking forward to the day when the children will be grown, or the Democrats or Republicans are in or out, or the streets are safe, or life is less bewildering.

But in the meantime …?

Kenneth L. Wilson (1916-?)
Editor of The Christian Herald
Have Faith Without Fear (1970), pages 44-47

Holiness of Work

The usual target of pulpit wrath is body, flesh, the measurable world of the seeable, touchable and spendable. The pulpit name for it is secularism.

Secularism certainly sounds like something that should be contended against, to the last earnest drop of secular blood … When you put “secular” against another word with which it is often contrasted – “sacred” – it gets second billing every time …

For jobs, we have of course developed a whole scale of “holiness.” Preachers, bishops and such are presumed to be somewhere at or near the top of the list … But sacredness is not so much something we find in our vocation, as it is something that we bring to them … As for the Christian, his job – whatever it is – must be Christian, for that is where he is, that is what he does. That is his channel and therefore his job becomes God’s channel. And if it is God’s also, it is not profane, not secular, but a holy place, and possibly even the holy of holies. Work is not something you get out of the way so that you can begin to live, begin to be holy, begin to seek the sacred. It is where God is as much as He is anywhere else.

Kenneth L. Wilson (1916-?)
Editor of The Christian Herald
Have Faith Without Fear (1970), pages 36-39