Tag: Theology

–March of 2000

Radical Faith

When Martin Wells Knapp walked into the Hamilton County Courthouse in the summer of 1900 to record the deed to the newly-purchased property at 1810 Young Street, he told the clerk to record the deed in the name of “God the Father.”  Thus began the story of radical faith on the campus of God’s Bible School.

Radical isn’t a word that most conservative Christians are comfortable with.  Religiously, it conjures up images of wild-eyed fanatics flirting with the spiritual ragged edge.  Politically, it is connected to tree-hugging environmentalists, pro-abortionists, and other people who embrace far-left social issues.

At the turn of the century, it was a label given to differentiate between those who accepted the status quo of the mainline church and those who embraced a total dependence on God to meet all of their needs spiritually, financially, and physically while they gave themselves to the promotion of revival and world evangelism.  The term was dropped, about a half century later, as these groups started their descent into mainline respectability.  Interestingly enough, though, the term radical faith is surfacing again at the turn of this century by youth organizations and prominent evangelicals such as Chuck Colson.  It has been revived once again to distinguish between what God really wants and the status quo faith found in the average church.

Knapp and those associated with GBS in the first several decades defined Biblical faith as something radically different from what they saw in the mainline churches.  Knapp’s personal view of faith was affected by several different influences.  First, his strong conviction of what New Testament faith really required left him with the belief that most Christians have strayed too far from a New Testament or primitive faith (thus the school’s motto, “Back to the Bible”).  Secondly, he was influenced by the writings of Madame Guyon and George Mueller.  Third, he believed in a personal experience of physical healing.  Fourth, he rejoiced in a tremendous move of God among the revivalist groups of which he was a part.

Though Knapp lived only a year after he started GBS, his emphasis on total abandonment and complete trust in God affected decades of graduates.  In 1901, the Cowmans were led to go to Japan the “New Testament way,” that is with no promise of support.  G.C. Bevington came here as a student in 1902.  His colorful ministry later was compiled in the book, Remarkable Incidents and Modern Miracles through Prayer and Faith.  This same radical faith sent John F. Simpson to the Philippines, Lula Schmelzenbach to South Africa, Lillian Trasher to Egypt, Everett Phillippe to the Caribbeans, Wesley Duewel to India, and thousands of others to conquer impossible situations for God at home and abroad armed only with an unflinching faith in God, backed up by total commitment to His cause.

Oswald Chambers, who was here in the first decade, described the institution in these words: “It is a work run primarily on the faith line.”  Chambers was so impressed by this life of faith that he chose to start a school like it in England.

The modern ear doesn’t like the sound of radical faith.  The modern mind just can’t accept it.  We have developed such an impoverished view of God that our minds are no longer conditioned to expect God’s mighty intervention on our behalf.  We have put God in a box and become at ease with explaining why we shouldn’t step out on naked faith.  Those who choose to do so anyway are often stereotyped as simpletons and woefully ignorant of true spirituality.  I would readily acknowledge that there is a fine line between radical faith and foolishness, but I would also have to admit that there is a fine line between so called sensible faith and a faith so weakened by carnality that it can’t let go of self and trust God with everything.  The latter is so influenced by self that it rebels against the kind of interference God would need to make in our lives to see radical faith really operative.

Nevertheless, God is looking for men with radical faith.  When God needed a family through which to bring the Messiah, He chose a pagan from the region of Iraq; He revealed Himself to Abram, and called him to leave behind everything he knew and go to a place that he knew nothing about.  God promised to give him this new land and populate it with his descendants who would be as numerous as the stars in the sky.  Yet, for the next 25 years Abraham had to share that promise with a barren wife, moving about as a pilgrim on land in which he never owned more than a gravesite.  Despite the circumstances, Abraham believed God; and God responded to Abraham’s faith and brought every word of His promise to pass.

Job is another example of God’s interest in faith.  Job represents the ultimate in righteous living.  He was God’s first choice to prove to Satan that a man’s faith can be genuine and selfless, not dependent on health or wealth.  Job had to replay the original test of the Garden of Eden with the bar raised a good deal higher.  This man from Uz came through with flying colors and proved that radical faith can see God’s trustworthiness even in the dark.

I see evidences that the faith of our fathers is resurfacing boldly in a new generation—a generation much like the one a century ago that felt the need to live out a faith more daring than that of the average Christian around them.  Though we may not like the term, may God bless this generation with the works that flow from a life of radical faith.

–September of 1999

Job’s Real Pain

I’ve been pondering over the pages of Job lately.  The portrait that is painted of Job in the first five verses of chapter one is of rare beauty.  Job’s faith is expressed as perfect and complete.  His family was the envy of every parent.  His fortune was the largest in the East, and his fame was world renowned.  Job’s life is portrayed on a canvas of perfect tranquility.

In the course of time, Satan was allowed to paint his own gruesome scene into Job’s life.  In successive strokes of calamity, Job’s peaceful world was turned into utter chaos.  The first blow to fall was the loss of his financial empire.  It was the second blow, however, that took away his greatest treasure—ten wonderful children.  Job was staggered by these vicious blows, but he was still able to hold his head up and declare his faith in God.  All Job had to say was “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Satan was given permission to test Job further, but this time he could touch him physically.  Job was smitten with a type of leprosy known as elephantiasis.  Massive ulcerous sores covered his body.  His limbs were so swollen he became disfigured and unrecognizable.  He was forced to sit as an outcast on the rubbish heap.  His wife counseled him to curse God and die, while his friends could only sit and watch in stunned silence.

In the beginning of his affliction, Job defended God by acknowledging that we must accept the bad as well as the good from His hand.  In contemporary expression, Job understood that trouble eventually knocks at everyone’s door.  As days turned to weeks and months, Job began to feel that trouble had not only knocked, but literally had banged the door down and rushed in with violent disregard.  The loss of all in one swift stroke left him reeling under the intolerable burden of sorrow and suffering.  The constant itching and pain of his sores, and the nausea and other side effects of his illness finally began to take its emotional and spiritual toll on Job.  He sank beneath the billows of despair and depression.  He cursed the day of his birth.  He felt that God was unfair and had “shot him through with arrows.”  Job became so weary and bewildered by his suffering that he finally began to feel that God had only blessed him with so much in order that He could “take it away and harm him.”

As the story progresses, you see that Job’s real pain was far more than physical or emotional.  It was the pain of failing to understand why God was letting this happen to a man who was indeed “blameless.”  Job had been living right, and he knew it.  So why was God letting all this suffering fall on him?

As I thought of Job, I thought about the many people who will read the words that I have written and will identify with the story.  Moms and dads, church leaders and pastors, young couples and senior saints, lonely singles and lively teenagers from all walks of life have an affinity with Job’s “real pain.”  I thought of a precious young couple with whom I went to school whose fifteen-year-old son recently died mysteriously in his sleep.  I thought of a missionary friend whose wife walked out on him and left him with five children to raise.  I thought of a pastor who was carelessly voted out of his church and left to pick up the pieces of his shattered future and heal the wounds of his embittered children.  I thought of a senior saint forced into a lonely nursing home.  I thought of a faithful administrator suffering the terrible pains of burnout and deep depression from having given all to advance God’s kingdom.  I thought of a young wife left alone with two small children after the tragic death of her husband.  I thought of a young teenage girl trying hard to live for God in a godless environment, who brutally lost her virginity to a wicked stepfather’s incestuous behavior.

Like Job, each of these people have journeyed down the treacherous path of pain and to the dark places of sorrow and suffering and can’t understand why.  Perhaps each of us can identify with Job.  None of us are strangers to discouragement and despair.  We, too, battle with the painful question: Why?  The real question is not why, but how do we respond?  Do we just give up and quit?  Do we become bitter and turn our backs on both God and man?  The answer, of course, is a resounding NO!  The great lesson learned from the book of Job is that we have a heavenly Father who can and does bring triumph out of trial and blessing out of brokenness.  Job teaches us that God has a way of using suffering in our lives to make us better.  Someone has said that it is doubtful that God can use any man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.  Suffering has a way of seasoning and sanctifying the soul like nothing else we will ever experience in life.  The tragic marriage and personal suffering of Hannah Whitehall Smith became the seedbed out of which grew unbelievably rich and blessed devotional writings.  J.B. Phillips, who is well known for his beautiful translation of the New Testament, lived in a constant struggle against depression.  His biographers wrote of him, “He knew anxiety and depression from which there was only temporary release.  For a period of fifty years he had to cope with psychological disturbance and dark depression.  And while he never lost his faith in God, he never ceased to struggle against mental pain.”  William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, came to a point more than once in his ministry that he was so drained and dried out that he wanted to quit and get some respectable job that would keep him and his wife Catherine going.  William Booth, however, is remembered by the Salvationists as a tower of strength, a man of abounding energy and unrelenting in his warfare against sin.  Behind the scenes, though, we see a glimpse of his humanity and his being subject, as we all are, to depression in the face of exhaustion and hardship.

The secret to all of these people’s successful lives and the secret to your success is simply in “going on” when life is difficult.  They kept their faith in Him who knows what’s best.

Are you under great stress and facing deep suffering?  Are you under great pressure beyond your ability to endure?  Are you discouraged?  Are you asking questions that seem to have no good answer?  You are in good company.  The great saints who have gone before you did too.

Life will afflict all of us with trouble and pain.  We will all be tempted to turn and run or to give up and quit.  Life will tumble in someday for all of us; but when it does, just keep holding on and keep going on.  Victory and unspeakable blessing will be yours in the end.

–Winter of 1998

Sun-Lit Certainty or Shadowed Insecurity?

Thanks to my friends, I’ve been on a reading binge lately. My list includes: Latimer: The Apostle to the English (thanks to Dr. Kinlaw); Anatomy of a Conversion: The Messages and Mission of John and Charles Wesley (thanks to Dr. Brown); and Lives of Eminent Methodist Ministers (thanks to Uncle Bob). Reading about the English Reformation, the birth of Methodism, and the colorful men who moved forward with its message renewed my love for and commitment to our historic holiness message.

Interestingly, though, I found a common doctrinal thread running through all of these books. The Reformers were burned at the stake for it, the Wesleys were banned from many Anglican pulpits because of it, and the Methodist preachers placed it at the very heart of the Wesleyan message. It was the doctrine of assurance – the simple fact that man can know that he is saved.

The Reformers contended that a man can know that he is justified by grace through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ. Samuel Wesley’s dying words to his sons John and Charles were “the witness, son, the witness; that is the proof of Christianity.” Wesley’s own heartwarming experience at Aldersgate convinced him that a man can have a clear knowledge of the salvation experience. In his sermon, “The Witness of the Spirit,” Wesley defines the testimony of the Sprit as “an inward impression on the soul, whereby the Spirit of God directly witnesses to my spirit that I am a child of God, that Jesus Christ hath loved me and given himself for me, and that all my sins are blotted out and I, even I, am reconciled to God.” Wesley, later in life, after many years of developing thought on the subject, made it clear that the objective witness of God’s Word is and must be our sure anchor. He also realized that the conscious witness of the Spirit may dim or fade in relation to a person’s mood, emotions or physical condition. However, he contended to the very end that a man can know that he is saved, and that justifying faith will bring a sweet calm to the heart, enabling the believer to rest in the arms of Jesus. Hence, historic Methodism still has at its heart the truth that “all men can know they are saved.”

On one occasion, when Wesley was visiting Bristol, the bishop of Bristol, Joseph Butler, endeavored to stop Wesley from preaching. Their dispute centered around the doctrine of assurance. The bishop contended such a doctrine was not true to the Scripture or the teachings of the church. This happened sometime in the late 1730’s. Thirteen years later, as the bishop lay dying, he approached his death without the assurance of salvation. He called for his chaplain and told him that he was afraid to die. The chaplain encouraged him with the thought that Christ is our Saviour, but the bishop plaintively asked, “How can I know that Christ is my Savior?” Some forty years later as Wesley lay dying, the words that fell from his lips were these, “The best of all is, God is with us.”

Bishop Kern notes the startling contrast between these two dying men. There is the “sun-lit certainty of Wesley’s experience and the shadowed insecurity of a bishop’s soul.” The bishop “could prove the existence of God by analogies from nature but did not know Him in the peace of an inward mystical and redeeming fellowship.”

I’m so grateful that I can sing with Wesley, “My God is reconciled; His pardoning voice I hear, He owns me for His child, I can no longer fear; With confidence I now draw nigh, and, ‘Father, Abba, Father,’ cry.” Can you sing that verse with me?