MY JOURNEY TO GOD

INTRODUCTION

Charlotte and I are preparing for a move later this week. We will be moving to an apartment across your parking lot at Village Place.

So we’ve been busy. We have been fixing up the house and packing things and been distracted by all the things to do.

So I haven’t had time to prepare a proper message for you. Besides my books are packed. Always before I prepare a message I look in my books to see what others have to teach me about the text I have chosen.

Today, rather than a Bible message, I have chosen to tell you about my faith journey.

For me, it is an interesting story. Just as your faith journey is an interesting story for you.

But just as I would enjoy hearing you tell about how you came to Jesus and have followed him through the years, I hope that my testimony will interest you.

I. I was born in 1930 in a very Christian family.

A. One of my earliest memories is of my father and I kneeling beside my bed; he was teaching me my bedtime prayer.

Dad wasn’t into short prayers like

“Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray thee Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.”

No, my bedtime prayer was much more substantial. It went like this:

“Jesus, tender shepherd hear me;

bless thy little lamb tonight.

Through the darkness be thou near me;

Keep me safe till morning light.

Through the day thy hand hath led me,

and I thank thee for thy care.

Thou hast warmed me, clothed me, fed me,

listen to my evening prayer.

Let my sins be all forgiven;

bless the friends I love so well.

Take me when I die to heaven,

happy there with thee to dwell.”

I remember that night so well because I kept making mistakes, and Dad kept correcting me. As he became more and more impatient, I became more and more upset. I was crying and making more and more mistakes, and all the while Daddy was getting madder and madder.

My father meant well, but he was not a patient man.

Eventually I learned the prayer, and said it every night—although it wasn’t Dad who came to my bedside each night to hear me say it. It was Mother.

B. Our family went to church faithfully.

The churches of my youth didn’t have nurseries, so—although I can’t remember that far back—I am quite sure that from the age of three of four weeks old I was with my mother, father, older brother, and later my younger sister in church for two services every Sunday morning, a gospel meeting on Sunday night, and Wednesday night prayer meeting.

We also went as a family to two-day Bible conferences, where listened to preachers, one after another.

C. And we read the Bible every day at home. After supper, we either listened to Dad read, or, as soon as we were old enough to read we read around the table, each family member taking a verse until the chapter was read.

II. At the earliest age I can remember, I was a “believer.”

A. I believed everything I was told about Jesus, God, the Bible, and the way of salvation.

I was a good kid. In our family there was not a choice.

You behaved yourself or paid the consequences.

At church we heard mostly about “being saved.”

If you were saved, when you died you would go to heaven.

If you weren’t saved, you would go to hell.

This was, as it should be, a huge deal.

B. But for years throughout my childhood I worried about whether I really “believed.”

Was I really “saved”? How could I tell?

In those days our churches used to have tract racks near the entrance of the church.

I used to take home those tracts about the way of salvation and read them with care trying to determine whether I believed—whether I really believed—whether I was really “saved.”

Salvation was always taught as a matter of believing in Jesus—or trusting Jesus—or of receiving Jesus, or of being “born again.”

But I couldn’t remember being “born again.”

C. One day, when I was about 14, I summoned up courage to ask Dad what it meant to believe in Jesus.

He explained that to believe in Jesus is to have confidence in Jesus. The war was on then and he used an example from the war.

He said that just as the British people had confidence in Prime Minister Churchill, so we are to have confidence in Jesus.

That made sense and I decided that I did have confidence in Jesus—so I must be “saved”—even though I didn’t have a conversation story—as so many in our circles did.

D. In my junior high and high school years I tried to read the Bible—because I had been taught that the Bible was the food for the spiritual life.

But the Bible seemed a dull book. I had been to church so much and had heard the Bible read so much at home that everything I read there seemed to be the same old story.

E. Through my childhood and as an adolescent I was a very unhappy youngster.

I wasn’t athletic—or a good student—or popular.

The only things I was good at were art crafts and playing the trombone.

I didn’t have dates. I was afraid of girls.

I was small for my age and undeveloped.

My young years were so unhappy for me that when I left high school I threw away all my school yearbooks.

I didn’t want anything to remind me of my childhood and youth.

III. But something stupendous happened during my freshman year at the University of Kansas.

A. I began going to a campus organization called InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

I felt at home with these young people who believed as I did about what was important.

During the Christmas vacation of my freshman year the organization chartered a bus to go to the InterVarsity Missions Convention at the University of Illinois, at Urbana.

During that convention something happened within me that I still don’t understand.

I met God in a way that I had never experienced him before.

It suddenly became clear that being a Christian didn’t mean just believing the Bible…or believing about Jesus…

I realized that being a Christian meant simply belonging to Jesus—trusting him as Savior and obeying him as Lord.

I remember a text that stood out to me from 1 Corinthians: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.”

I realized that the necessary thing was to belong to God…to obey him…to live for him…to have Jesus not only as my Savior but as the Lord of my life.

All my life I had heard these verses quoted in sermons: “By grace are ye saved by faith, and that not of yourself, it is the gift of God, not of works, that anyone should boast.”

But it seems that the preachers that preached from that passage neglected to emphasize what comes next: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

In other words, salvation is not merely a gift to be received but a path to walk—a life to live. And that made all the difference.

The Bible became exciting. I could understand why people called it food for the soul.

I began to carry my New Testament with me all day—to all my classes. And I took time out several times a day to read it.

I remember my hand trembling as I turned to the next page to see what I would find there. I was constantly surprised by the things I discovered in the Bible.

B. I found things I could do to put my faith to work.

I began teaching a Sunday school class of children.

I helped clean the church.

I participated in and led Bible studies on campus.

I began to talk to other people about my faith.

IV. I’ve spent all this time telling you about those early years—more than 60 years ago—because they were so important to me. So I’ll try bring you up to date in just a few words.

A. After college I was drafted and sent to Korea, where the war was still going on.

But God was with me in the war. I am thankful that I came back whole.

B. After the army I went back to college to finish preparation to teach school and began teaching fifth grade in my hometown.

C. A couple of years later I reconnected with an old friend from childhood, named Charlotte.

Charlotte was the most beautiful and the most godly and the prettiest girl I knew—and, miracle of miracles—she had turned down two suitors and was still single.

She was living in Kansas City working as a nurse at the University Hospital.

So I did the bravest and most scary thing I have ever done in my life: I phoned Charlotte and asked her out.

I asked he to go with me to hear a Norwegian boy’s choir.

She consented and even asked me to come for dinner.

That was February. In April I asked her to marry me.

She left me in suspense for a couple of weeks because she said she needed to pray about it.

But evidently she became convinced that God approved; she said “yes,” and two months later we were married.

D. We began our married life in Japan where I had been hired to teach in an Army dependents’ school.

We connected with missionaries right away and went to a Japanese church.

I taught a Bible study in a Japanese high school.

Charlotte taught English to some nurses at a hospital.

John and Susan were born.

E. After three years in Japan we returned to the United States.

Our last child Peter was born in my home town of Lawrence.

CONCLUSION

Life hasn’t always been smooth.

Charlotte had a terrible experience with illness in 1972 when I—and also the doctors—thought she was going to die.

This was the most difficult experience of my life.

I found it hard to keep believing.

I leaned on the faith of our church friends who never stopped praying and showered us with love and care.

Since then I have been, for a time, out of work.

I have had two kinds of cancer.

And now we are old and getting feebler by the day.

But we look back with no regrets for having chosen to follow Jesus.

We’re getting near our homecoming—as some of you are—and knowing that it won’t be long now.

When I was in college my English teacher assigned us to write an essay: “What Success Means to Me.”

I based my essay on a statement St. Paul, in his last letter, written just before his execution: “I have fought the good fight. I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not to me only but also to all who have longed for his appearing.”

Now near the end of my life, I hope I can also say those words. I hope you can too.

Why God Keeps It Simple

Matthew 11:25-26

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever wondered why it is that the smartest people, and the best-educated people, and the most prominent and gifted people so seldom are serious Christians? I have.

I am thankful that there are brilliant people who are Christian believers—scientists, and philosophers, and literary people.

These people help me to make sense of my faith and often answer troubling questions for me.

But the fact remains that most highly intellectual people are not believers.

Many of the brightest people are even atheists; Some even use their brilliance and their literary talents to seek to destroy the faith of people who believe.

When I have thought about this. I have wondered whether it isn’t that the more intelligence one has, the more reasons one can think of not to believe.

Another reason may be that people who are so bright and successful don’t need God as much as we ordinary people do. They are satisfied with their accomplishments and the praise they receive from others.

Jesus said something about this subject in Matthew 11:25-26:

It was a time when many of the leading people were turning against Jesus. He was discouraged by their unbelief.

It was at that time that Jesus prayed to the Father, saying these words: “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was thy gracious will.”

When Jesus says that God has revealed his truth to “babes,” he doesn’t mean literal infants. The Bible often speaks of simple, unlearned, powerless people as “infants,” or “little children,” or as “little ones.”

I suspect that none of us in this room are of the “great” of this world—neither in power or in intellect or in popularity.

It is you and me Jesus is speaking of when he says, “I thank you…that you have revealed these things to infants.”

The Greeks, of the ancient world, were noted for their philosophers and thinkers. Their pride in their  intellect made it hard for them to believe.

St. Paul, in writing to the believers in the Greek city of Corinth put it this way:

      “Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

I. Let’s talk about those simple, ordinary people to whom God has revealed his truth.

A. Vern, a fellow church member of my church, is, to me, one of my best examples of Christian devotedness.

Vern is no great Bible scholar. He participates in group Bible studies. He reads his Bible and is nourished by its truth. He knows no Greek or Hebrew. He doesn’t read commentaries, and he doesn’t share great spiritual insights. But he lives the truth of God. He is a model for me.

When there is work to be done in the church, Vern is always there.

He has a cheerful spirit. He has love for everyone.

He is always ready to help anyone in need—even when, as sometimes happens, the people he helps take advantage of him.

Jesus didn’t say, “Blessed are those who understand the deep things in the Bible,” but “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” (Luke 11:28).

Those are the ones who know—not only the Bible—but also the God of the Bible.

Jesus is looking for lovers, not scholars.

B. Haven’t you sometimes been blessed by the godliness of someone of very limited intelligence?

I remember a young man in our church in Kansas, though he could be considered very slow mentally overflowed with love and faith.

We used to have a resident here named Hazel. Hazel was a regular at our services and at the Bible study we had several years ago. She and her husband had had only one child, a son, Johnny, who was retarded.

Their son was a constant concern. Her husband, a pastor, several times took groups of people on tours of the Holy Land. But Hazel always had to stay home because of Johnny.

In our conversations Hazel often mentioned Johnny…and whenever she did, she always added: “Johnny was such a blessing.”

I didn’t ever ask Hazel in what ways Johnny was such a blessing. I suspect that it was because of his loving and trusting nature.

I recently read a book of letters of a famous English pastor named John Newton. Writing to a nobleman in a letter of July 1774, Newton wrote:

“I have a poor girl near me who looks like an idiot and her natural capacity is indeed very small; but the Lord has been pleased to make her acquainted alternately with great temptations and proportionably great discoveries of His love and truth. Sometimes when her heart is enlarged I listen to her with astonishment. I think no books or ministers I ever met with have given me such an impression and understanding of what the apostle styles “the deep things of God” as I have upon some occasions received from her conversation.”

II. God is a gracious God. His gift of grace is available to all.

A. Many of the best things in the world are available only to the fortunate.

In this world, many of the best things in life are reserved for the well born, the intelligent, the well-connected, the beautiful, the gifted.

For us ordinary people, there are some things we would like to do, but we can’t.

I would like to write books that other people will read.

I would like to speak before crowds and hold them spellbound.

I would like to have that personal magnetism that makes me a natural leader.

Probably there things you would like to do—but you just don’t have the talent.

Aren’t you glad that God makes his gospel available to ordinary people, who are average--or even below—but actually gives us an advantage when it comes to knowing him, being useful in the world, and enjoying his blessings?

B. So let’s not bemoan the things we can’t do or envy those who are our superiors in these ways, but let’s use the opportunities we have.

I am thankful for the gifted people. Those who have great knowledge or gifts of communication have enriched my life in many ways. I have known Christians who had such wonderful personalities that I was drawn to them and been blessed.

But God uses mostly mediocre people.

And we untalented people even have some advantages. We aren’t so likely to be tempted by pride. We know our limitations. We can understand people like us. We can do the jobs that other people don’t want to do.

And when we get old, we can still be useful in the ways we have always been useful—by praying for others and helping when we can, by being encouraging, by a grateful spirit, and by showing our faith by our cheerfulness.

We can bear our troubles with grace.

We can express our hope for the future.

We can bless the lives of those around us.

We can enjoy all the important blessings God offers.

And we will have the honored place in glory that God will give to his faithful ones.

CONCLUSION

It is good to be one of the God’s children.

We have the joy of knowing that we are important to God.

Our Father loves you as much as if you were the only person on earth.

Jesus gave his life for you.

He called you to himself.

You are precious to him.

He will be your friend through all eternity.

In Isaiah 43 we read these words. God is speaking:

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;

I have called you by name, you are mine…

You are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you” (vv1 & 4).