Don't Heal Too Lightly

How hard it is not to heal the wounds of those you love and are trying to minister to? Yet often those wounds are the first-fruits of grace. To see a soul in the first fears of the Lord and the first desperate pleadings for God’s help is a wonderful thing. Why do we then—after working so hard and lovingly—cut down the fruit when first we see it? Let grace have its work, strive not against it.

Jeremiah 6:14

14 They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
saying, ‘Peace, peace,’
when there is no peace.

Jeremiah 4:10

10 Then I said, “Ah, Lord God, surely you have utterly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, ‘It shall be well with you,’ whereas the sword has reached their very life.”

Jeremiah 5:12

12 They have spoken falsely of the Lord
and have said, ‘He will do nothing;
no disaster will come upon us,
nor shall we see sword or famine.

Jeremiah 23:17

17 They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord, ‘It shall be well with you’; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, ‘No disaster shall come upon you.’”

Ezekiel 13:10

10 Precisely because they have misled my people, saying, ‘Peace,’ when there is no peace, and because, when the people build a wall, these prophets smear it with whitewash, (ESV)

Communion Journal

Why does my soul rail against my God’s will? No Matter how much we perceive the church might be mistreating us—we can never be so mistreated by it as he was. I think myself better than my master when I think I deserve better treatment than he received.

Lay Pastors: Uneducated Implements of God

I have a theory that God delights to use uneducated men as shepherds in situations where we turn the pursuit of God into the empty traditions of religion. Here are some examples of such men:

1. A.W. Tozer
   • Highest education: a few weeks of high school
2. John Bunyan
   • Learned only to read and write – no formal higher education of any kind
   • Never learned Greek or Hebrew
   • “The Pilgrim’s Progress – ‘next to the Bible, perhaps the world’s best-selling book . . . translated into over 200 languages.’” -Piper
3. Dwight Moody
   • without higher education, founded three schools;
   • without theological training, reshaped Victorian Christianity;
   • without radio or television reached 100 million people.
4. Charles Spurgeon
   • Little formal education (some college)
   • Began preaching at 16
5. William Carey
   • No formal education – self taught
6. Andrew Fuller
   • Farm raised
   • “He had no formal theological training but became the leading theological spokesman for the Particular Baptists in his day.” -Piper
7. Hudson Taylor
   • No theological education
   • Some medical education
   • Gathered missionaries which other mission societies rejected as too uneducated
8. John Newton
   • 2 years of boarding school, after which he went to sea with his father
   • Self educated in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew
9. David Brainerd
   • Expelled from seminary in his third year
10. Leonard Ravenhill
    • Educated at Cliff College in England
    • Said it was advantageous for pastors to not attend Bible school
    • Yet taught himself for a time at Bethany College of Missions

John Owen (who not only attended but taught seminary) believed that the first and main purpose of all of a student’s studies and meditations is to cultivate communion with God. He says that the study of scriptures, “should always be conducted in order to learn from them our duty and, understanding that, let it proceed to practice holy communion with God as we experience to the depths of our souls the power of the Spirit mightily manifesting in us His grace and light.” Without this, he says, “our studies are useless.”

If there were seminaries which taught God-besottedness (such as Owen desired of all theological learning), I wonder if Christ’s Church would so often stand in need of uneducated lay-ministers. Regardless of my speculations, we can be confident of this: that if seminaries will not produce such men, then God will supply his Church with them out of his own stores. As Richard Baxter puts it;

As to supply of pastors, Christ will take care of that. … He who himself undertook the work of our redemption, and bore our transgressions, and hath been faithful as the chief Shepherd of the Church, will not lose all his labor and suffering for want of instruments to carry on his work … he will provide men to be his servants and ushers in his school, who shall willingly take the labor on them, and rejoice to be so emplyed, and account that the happiest life in the world which you account so great a toil, and would not exchange it for all your ease and carnal pleasure; but for the saving of souls, and the propagating of the gospel of Christ, will be content to bear the burden and heat of the day; and to fill up the measure of the sufferings of Christ in their bodies; and to work while it is day; and to do what they do with all their might; and to be the servants of all, and not to please themselves, but others, for their edification; and to become all things to all men, that they may save some; and to endure all things for the elect’s sake; and to spend and be spent for their fellow-creatures; though the more they love, the less they should be beloved, and should be accounted their enemies for telling them the truth. Such pastors will Christ provide his people, after his own heart.

Or if you prefer, consider John’s teaching to the religious teachers of his day;

And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

Perhaps best of all is the teaching of Jeremiah:

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” declares the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people: “You have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for your evil deeds, declares the Lord. Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, declares the Lord.

God promises to raise up the men he needs in order for his church to succeed. Sometimes he raised them through seminaries, sometimes he doesn’t. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

A.W. Tozer on The Pursuit of God

In this hour of all-but-universal darkness one cheering gleam appears: within the fold of conservative Christianity there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for spiritual realities and will not be put off with words, nor will they be content with correct “interpretations” of truth. They are athirst for God, and they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of Living Water.

This is the only real harbinger of revival which I have been able to detect anywhere on the religious horizon. It may be the cloud the size of a man’s hand for which a few saints here and there have been looking. It can result in a resurrection of life for many souls and a recapture of that radiant wonder which should accompany faith in Christ, that wonder which has all but fled the Church of God in our day.

But this hunger must be recognized by our religious leaders. Current evangelicalism has (to change the figure) laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seems satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of lofty Carmel. But God be thanked that there are a few who care. They are those who, while they love the altar and delight in the sacrifice, are yet unable to reconcile themselves to the continued absence of fire. They desire God above all. They are athirst to taste for themselves the “piercing sweetness” of the love of Christ about Whom all the holy prophets did write and the psalmists did sing.

There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy.

I trust I speak in charity, but the lack in our pulpits is real. Milton’s terrible sentence applies to our day as accurately as it did to his: “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.” It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually seated at the Father’s table. The truth of Wesley’s words is established before our eyes: “Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.”

Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold “right opinions,” probably more than ever before in the history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the “program.” This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.

Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.

This book is a modest attempt to aid God’s hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.

Communion Journal

Have approached God often lately with the attitude of, “I’ve done my part, now you do yours.” What arrogance. Do I not know that it is God who works in me to will and to do (Php 2:12) Does any mother run to her child faster than God does to his little ones who cry out for help (Isa 49:15)?

Communion Journal

Feel like the last couple of weeks I have been praying to try to get something out of God. I think, by God’s grace I have seen my folly and given up on my own will. I throw my plight upon God. May he do what seems good to him. I trust him more than my own ways and means. What a harsh slavery selfishness is. How much lighter to follow after God. Walking with God is not so much getting God to help us with our needs, but to make Christ our all and trusting God to remove all obstacles to that great goal.

Communion Journal

It has been a hard day. The feeling of it is something like this:

Everyone believes their religious beliefs are the exclusively correct ones and have a series of supposed proofs as to why they are right and everyone else is wrong. If they would but look honestly though, they would see that all their supposed proofs take no more power than what nature can afford. With very few exceptions, I have seen very little of what God alone can do. The scriptures are replete with stories of when man trusts in God, God acts strongly for man in a way that demonstrates his power. If there was no God, the last couple of years is pretty much what we would expect. Of course a few people are excited by what we are doing. We are extreme and extremism excites. If I tattooed a butterfly on my forehead, a few people would be excited by it. Of course my affections have been moved. Again, the extremism can answer for that. Yet where is the work that God alone can do?

I know how many would answer this quandary. That I must be content with little and not look for signs and wonders. I may be in sin (actually I’m sure I am), but my sin is not to be found in expecting great things from God. He is God. He performs wonders and acts powerfully to save those he loves.

I have been able to lift my soul to worship several times today by use of various means. Yet I soon slide back into an apathetic disposition. I look to God. He alone can lift my spirits from such a melancholy.

Communion Journal

Yesterday, after the mission I hiked Bishop’s and attempted to tell people about Christ. I could not open my mouth. Not one time did I say a word about him. When I came home my faith felt weak, I felt far from God, and I had a heavy heart. I was expecting to have the same heart when I woke up, yet my heart is much lighter and I can glory in the things of God much easier than I expected. How wonderfully gracious.

Communion Journal

Today is the second day that I played worship songs at the mission. Lord, bless it. I was more nervous and cold-hearted toward God today than yesterday. Yet through his grace I’ve received much comfort and strength and I hope to receive much more. Oh that I might commune with God while declaring his greatness for all to hear. I pray that God would bring people to hear who need to be ministered to—either in song, word, or prayer.

Communion Journal

Worshipfulness was a struggle yesterday. I was enabled to pray for a few minutes in desperate plea. This morning I’m feeling dry and devoid of spiritual vigor. How can my heart be so far from my God when he is so good to me?