Henry Drummond (1851-1897) was walking with a Glasgow businessman down the street one day. He saw a merchant throw a stock of round strawberry boxes into a gutter. Instantly a group of boys swooped down upon the boxes and put them on their heads as a cap. Then they lined up in military formation and marched away. “There is an idea for you,” Drummond told his friend, and out of that ‘coincidence’ grew the Boys Brigade program that God still uses to win boys to Christ.
D.L. Moody speaks of Drummond as a man who lived nearer to the Master and who sought to do His will more fully. Due to his walk, he was able to see in common events an uncommon path in fulfilling the great commission.
Our service for our fellow humans does not come from strained efforts on our part to live for them but rather from seeing Jesus doing so, and then simply making ourselves available to Him. We do so that we may be channels of His grace and power to them. This is the way in which He walked in His relationship with the Father, and it is the way in which we must walk in our relationship with Him.
Jesus said, “The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do, for what things soever He doeth, those also doeth the Son likewise (John 5:19). We, too, can do nothing but what we see the Lord Jesus doing until we see that we are helpless, and our service is nothing more than self-initiated striving. It is not ours to originate anything but simply to yield ourselves to Him to be the channel of what He initiates and carries through and to trust Him to do so through us.
In the words of Roy and Revel Hession, The Lord Jesus is for others, just as the Vine does not bear the grapes for its own refreshment but for the refreshment of others…The Lord Jesus is not alone in this. He draws redeemed men into cooperation with Himself in the outworking of His glorious purposes, and they become His branches on which His fruit is borne. Just as apart from Him the branches can do nothing of themselves, so it is that apart from them the Vine does not bear fruit. The branches cannot, however, produce or initiate the fruit; that is altogether His work! They simply bear what He produces as He lives His life again in them (1958, 132).
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The Christian Walk: Reflection 1
The Human Soul:
The value of the Human Soul was brought to our attention by Christ Himself in the parable of the rich farmer (Luke 12:16-31). In it Christ pointed out how precious the human soul is in the sight of God. If we could see how precious the human soul is as Christ sees it, our ministry could approach the effectiveness of Christ, says Phillips Brooks in his selected sermons (1835-1893).
May the souls of men always be more precious to us as we come nearer to Christ and see them more perfectly as He does. No one can ask any better blessing on any ministry that that. The ministry of D. L. Moody was effective and forceful as an evangelist and soul winner due largely to his love for Christ and proper view of the human soul. He had a tremendous burden for the lost and a willingness to do whatever God asked him. This is the point at which a person sees the true value of the human soul just as Christ sees it.
Then comes the true words of Henry Varley quoted often by D. L. Moody thus: “The world has yet to see what God can do with and for and through and in a man who is fully and wholly consecrated.”
Preaching:
One of the definitions of preaching is that it is the communication of divine truth through human personality. The divine truth never changes, but human personality does. This explains why two preachers can take the same text and develop two different sermons, and why the same preacher can preach often from the same scripture passage and always discover something fresh. It must come through his character, his affections, his whole intellectual and mental being. This means, of course, that the preparation for ministry is nothing less than the making of the man.
The preacher of truth, therefore, must be a man open to truth, all truth, no matter where it is found because truth comes only from God. It involves delivering a message which we cannot transmit until it has entered into our own experience, and we can give our own testimony of its spiritual power.
When we preach over people’s heads, it is not the fault of the character of the communication, it is the fault of the aim that makes the missing shots. Remember, in ministering to people, every message fortifies each other. Therefore, no one message should be considered alone as completing the task before us. The harvest time is not at the end of the message. We must learn to leave the results in God’s hand.
The value of the Human Soul was brought to our attention by Christ Himself in the parable of the rich farmer (Luke 12:16-31). In it Christ pointed out how precious the human soul is in the sight of God. If we could see how precious the human soul is as Christ sees it, our ministry could approach the effectiveness of Christ, says Phillips Brooks in his selected sermons (1835-1893).
May the souls of men always be more precious to us as we come nearer to Christ and see them more perfectly as He does. No one can ask any better blessing on any ministry that that. The ministry of D. L. Moody was effective and forceful as an evangelist and soul winner due largely to his love for Christ and proper view of the human soul. He had a tremendous burden for the lost and a willingness to do whatever God asked him. This is the point at which a person sees the true value of the human soul just as Christ sees it.
Then comes the true words of Henry Varley quoted often by D. L. Moody thus: “The world has yet to see what God can do with and for and through and in a man who is fully and wholly consecrated.”
Preaching:
One of the definitions of preaching is that it is the communication of divine truth through human personality. The divine truth never changes, but human personality does. This explains why two preachers can take the same text and develop two different sermons, and why the same preacher can preach often from the same scripture passage and always discover something fresh. It must come through his character, his affections, his whole intellectual and mental being. This means, of course, that the preparation for ministry is nothing less than the making of the man.
The preacher of truth, therefore, must be a man open to truth, all truth, no matter where it is found because truth comes only from God. It involves delivering a message which we cannot transmit until it has entered into our own experience, and we can give our own testimony of its spiritual power.
When we preach over people’s heads, it is not the fault of the character of the communication, it is the fault of the aim that makes the missing shots. Remember, in ministering to people, every message fortifies each other. Therefore, no one message should be considered alone as completing the task before us. The harvest time is not at the end of the message. We must learn to leave the results in God’s hand.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Wedding Message
(We recommend turning your volume
up to the highest possible as the audio is hard to hear at the beginning.)
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