Archives November 2012

From the very earliest days of my own journey following Jesus I have been strengthened and encouraged by the biographies of those who have gone before and done great exploits for God. I often wonder how any Christian today can hope to know God, understand the Bible, and have a chance at a solidly biblical worldview without an excellent working knowledge of church history and observing the patterns that God has followed again and again down through the centuries with His people.

One of these luminaries that my mind often goes to is John Bunyan. But before we talk about Bunyan I must introduce you to three poor women sitting in the sun and knitting. The place was Bedford, England and the year was 1652. One of the women was Mary Fenne, another was called Norton, and the name of the last we don’t know. This day they were talking about their great love for Jesus and the unspeakable joy they shared in knowing Him and of His great love for them. As it happened in the providence of God a young tinker (repairer of pots and pans) was passing by and was arrested by their conversation. As he listened his heart was opened and a great hunger came over him to know this new birth that they spoke of. To him it seemed that they had the answer that for so long his heart had longed and he was so eager to hear more that they invited him to come the next day and speak with their pastor Dr. Gifford. That he did and thus began an incredible ripple in the kingdom of God. That young tinker of course was John Bunyan. Those precious daughters of God couldn’t have known what the Holy Spirit would do with their joyous sharing of their love for Jesus with a passing poor and uneducated tinker.

John Bunyan was discipled by Dr. Gifford and in a few years became known all over the counties surrounding his home for his powerful preaching. Soon however the government changed and his preaching was outlawed. He continued preaching anyhow and eventually was arrested and spent 12 years in prison. His first wife dead, he had recently remarried and his new wife was left to care for his four children. They suffered terribly and had to depend on the other poor Christian’s charity in their community. It was a terribly lonely time for Bunyan who once remarked, “I have but one Friend, but He is all sufficient.” Bunyan’s oldest daughter Mary was blind and when they would come to the prison to visit he said it was like “tearing the flesh from his bones” when he had to tell her goodbye each time. Bunyan could have been released at any time if he would only promise not to preach but he would reply, “If you let me out to-day I will preach again to-morrow, by the help of God,” he declared. In the eyes of the world a great tragedy had descended upon the Bunyan family and indeed it was tragic but they couldn’t have known what God was going to do with that tragedy for His kingdom.

While in the prison Bunyan wrote an allegory about the Christian life entitled The Pilgrim’s Progress. The book swept the world like wild fire. Outside of the Bible it is the most printed and the most translated English work in the history of the world. It has been translated to date in over 200 languages. It has been translated in over 80 African languages alone. The Pilgrim’s Progress was such a powerful tool for evangelization that missionary ships going to new lands would be loaded down with thousands of Bibles in the language of that land and an equal number of The Pilgrim’s Progress in that language.

When Alexis de Tocqueville, French nobel and author of the famous Democracy in America, toured America in 1831 he was astounded to find a 98% literacy rate because nearly every home had a copy of the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Only heaven knows the impact of that little discussion those three poor women had that day with that poor tinker but we do know the world was never the same after. We can’t know what God is up to in even the smallest efforts we are making for His kingdom. But He does… and who knows what future generations will look back upon as a result of our mustard seed faith and simple obedience?

Matt Bullen

In my last blog I was meditating on the image of Christ as my bridegroom. “My lover is mine, and I am His” Song of Solomon 2:16.

Another of my beloved images of Jesus is that He is my Father. Romans 8:15, “So you have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God’s Spirit when he adopted you as His own children. Now we call Him, “Abba, Father.”

For me to understand what it means to have a father –daughter relationship with my sweet Jesus, I look at my own relationship with my earthly father. I have a beautiful relationship with my earthly father, full of love and trust. I know I can come to him if I have a problem or need advice.  I love laying my head on his chest and crying to my heart’s content when life has not gone my way. One of my greatest desires is for my dad to be proud of me.

Now I know for many of you reading this, you don’t have a great or even good relationship with your earthly father. In fact you have a bad relationship with him or you don’t know whom your dad is. You might say to me, “yeah, it is easy for you to see Jesus as your Father, but what about me?” Well think about who you wanted your father to be. Every one of us has an image, a dream of what you need in a father.

When I started to see and expect from Jesus what I need in my father I found He is so much more than I could ever imagine. I can trust in Him completely, I can come to Him with my deepest and darkest fears with out Him being disappointed in me. I never have to worry about my Heavenly Father being too busy to have time for my problems or cares.

My favorite time with my earthly father is when we are sitting on the couch and I am able to lay my head on His chest. During my prayer and worship times in order to cultivate my Father/Daughter relationship with my heavenly Father, I have started picturing myself sitting by Jesus in heaven, sometimes just sitting enjoying His presence and sometimes pouring my heart out to Him. When my heart is broken I sit on His lap and bury my face in His chest and give Him all my pain. When I need forgiveness I sit at His feet and beg for Him to forgive me. When I am thankful I see myself running around His throne, praising His name.

Last night at church, during our worship service, as I was lifting my hands in worship, an image came to me that portrays this so beautifully. I have always enjoyed lifting my hands in worship but never quite understood why I enjoyed it. Yesterday I spent all day with my nine-month-old nephew who is the happiest when He is being held. If I lay him on the floor and sit on the couch, he will crawl over to the couch and work his way up to a standing position and lift his hands to me, so I will pick him up. As I was standing in the service with my hands lifted, I could see myself just like that, wanting nothing more than to be picked up by my Daddy. Is that not what worship is all about? To sit on our heavenly Father’s lap and be happy just to be with Him.

I am really enjoying this series and since I am meditating on it stories seem to pop up everywhere. The Lord has encouraged me over and over with it. Here are a few more examples that I’ve “stumbled” across recently.

One day a teenager in Akron, Ohio was on his way home from work at a tire company and overheard a street preacher say: “If you don’t know how to be saved… just call on God.” Upon returning home, he climbed into the attic and heeded the preacher’s advice. We don’t even know the street preacher’s name and he couldn’t have known the incredible harvest that God was going to give him from that sermon because that teenager was A.W. Tozer. Tozer was a pastor in the first half of the twentieth century and is one of the best loved Christian writers of all time. He wrote over 40 books including the Christian classics: The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy. He is oft quoted and one of the most quotable authors ever. In the vein of this series, one of my favorite of his quotes is this: “We can be in our day what the heroes of faith were in their day – but remember at the time they didn’t know they were heroes.” Untold thousands have been blessed by Tozer’s ministry. It’s certain that the street preacher never knew the impact of his message until he arrived in Heaven. He couldn’t have known. He simply obeyed the Spirit and preached, amazing. We never know fully what God is up to in our lives.

On October 5, 1783, a pastor by the name of Dr. Ryland baptized a young man. That evening the pastor entered in his diary, “This day baptized a poor journeyman shoemaker.” Of course Dr. Ryland couldn’t have known when he lowered young William Carey into the water that Carey would go on to become “The Father Of Modern Missions” and bring the gospel to India. There is no way that Dr. Ryland could have known that this young cobbler would be a genius of Bible translation and would translate and distribute “more than 213,000 volumes of the Divine Word, in forty different languages.” and many other things. His life and ministry inspired thousands to give themselves to God in missionary service and his impact on India and the world is still felt today. Dr. Ryland couldn’t have known what God was up to and neither can we.

In January of 1850 a 15 year old boy was trying to get to church in a snowstorm. The blizzard was so great that he couldn’t make it to his church so he turned down a lane and ducked into a small Primitive Methodist Chapel. The pastor was snowed in and couldn’t be there so a poor tradesman in the congregation stood up to attempt to preach instead. Years later the 15 year old boy wrote about that morning. Here is what he wrote.

[quote]”He was obliged to stick to his text, for the simple reason that he had nothing else to say. The text was, ‘Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.’ He did not even pronounce the words rightly, but that did not matter. There was, I thought, a glimpse of hope for me in the text. He began thus: ‘My dear friends, this is a very simple text indeed. It says, “Look.” Now that does not take a deal of effort. It ain’t lifting your foot or your finger; it is just “look.” Well, a man need not go to college to learn to look. You may be the biggest fool, and yet you can look. A man need not be worth a thousand a year to look. Anyone can look; a child can look. But this is what the text says. Then it says, “Look unto Me.” ‘Ay,’ said he, in broad Essex, ‘many of ye are looking to yourselves. No use looking there. You’ll never find comfort in yourselves.’ Then the good man followed up his text in this way: ‘Look unto Me: I am sweating great drops of blood. Look unto Me; I am hanging on the Cross. Look: I am dead and buried. Look unto Me; I rise again. Look unto Me; I ascend; I am sitting at the Father’s right hand. O, look to Me! Look to Me!’ When he had got about that length, and managed to spin out ten minutes, he was at the length of his tether. “Then he looked at me under the gallery, and I daresay, with so few present, he knew me to be a stranger. He then said, ‘Young man, you look very miserable.’ Well, I did; but I had not been accustomed to have remarks made on my personal appearance from the pulpit before. However, it was a good blow struck. He continued: ‘And you will always be miserable — miserable in life and miserable in death — if you do not obey my text. But if you obey now, this moment, you will be saved.’ “Then he shouted, as only a Primitive Methodist can, ‘Young man, look to Jesus Christ.’ There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun; and I could have risen that moment and sung with the most enthusiastic of them of the Precious Blood of Christ.”[/quote]

We don’t know the poor tradesman’s name that “preached” that day but the whole Christian world knows the name of that 15 year old boy who came to Christ that day. The tradesman couldn’t have known that the teenager he spoke those anointed words to would go on to become C.H. Spurgeon “The Prince of Preachers.” The next year at the age of 16 Spurgeon would preach his first sermon and by the age of 21 he was preaching every Sunday to crowds of 5 to 6 thousand people and continued for over 30 years. I’ve included below a newspaper artist’s sketch of a Sunday morning at Spurgeon’s church, The Metropolitan Tabernacle. Millions of his sermons have been printed and distributed around the world. The expanse and impact of his ministry only heaven knows. They couldn’t have known dear friends and neither can we. How do we know what God is doing and will do with the young people around us that we are ministering to everyday? We can’t. We must simply sow every seed God puts in our hand and trust Him with the results.

Matt Bullen

When I am plodding along in pain, sickness, and difficulty attempting to live out the indescribable passion that God has placed in my heart for His kingdom, I often disarm the enemy of my soul as he is attempting to lure me into a comparison of my current accomplishments with my much larger vision and desire, by remembering the stories of men and women whom God used mightily to impact the kingdom but who at the time could’ve had no idea what God was up to. David Brainerd is such a man.

David Brainerd became a missionary to the indians of New England on April 1, 1743. In his wildest imaginations he could not have foreseen how God would use him and especially the WAY God would use him. As it turns out he would work as a missionary for less than 4 years and all the while suffering horribly with his health and many other trials and yet God would use him mightily in those 4 years and Brainerd’s story would go on to change the world after his death in October of 1747 at the age of 29. He couldn’t have known.

Another person that couldn’t have known what God was up to was Jonathan Edwards. Pastor Edwards took into his home the dying Brainerd for the last months of his life. During this time, he was nursed by Jerusha Edwards, Jonathan’s seventeen-year-old daughter. The friendship that grew between them was of a kind that has led some to suggest they were romantically attached. He died from tuberculosis on October 9, 1747, at the age of 29. Jerusha died a few months later as a result of contracting tuberculosis from nursing Brainerd and was buried next to him in New Hampton.

What appears to be a senseless tragedy for the young missionary and the sweet family that nursed him turns out to be, in God’s grand design, an amazing epoch of kingdom shaking proportions for you see the next year Jonathan Edwards published a biography of Brainerd with a compilation of his journals and that story went around the world.

Brainerd’s influence grew remarkably within the transatlantic evangelical community through The Life of David Brainerd, Edwards’s most frequently reprinted and widely read book. It was the first American biography to reach a large European audience. It became the best-selling religious book in nineteenth-century America (with more than thirty different editions) and remains in print to the present day.

John Wesley read it and urged: ‘Let every preacher read carefully over the Life of David Brainerd. Let us be followers of him, as he was of Christ, in absolute self-devotion, in total deadness to the world, and in fervent love to God and man.’

The story of his life influenced William Carey, Samuel Marsden and Henry Martyn to become missionaries. Through these, David Brainerd spoke to India, to New Zealand and to Persia. Other missionaries who have asserted the influence of Jonathan Edwards’s biography of Brainerd on their lives include Henry Martyn, Jim Elliot, and Adoniram Judson.

In 1769 John Newton (writer of Amazing Grace) wrote: “Next to the Word of God, I like those books best which give an account of the lives and experiences of His people… No book of this kind has been more welcome to me than the life of Mr. Brainerd of New England.”

Brainerd’s missionary career spanned less than five years, but Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd revealed a missionary hero whose impact was astounding. The little book made a significant contribution to the new era of missions that sent British and American Christians to many parts of the world.

Archibald Alexander said that a missionary spirit was enkindled in the New Side Presbyterian Church as a result of the publication of Brainerd’s diary.

As William Carey prepared to go to India, Brainerd’s Life was “almost a second Bible.” When Carey, Ward, and Marshman signed the historic agreement that laid down the principles of their missionary work at Serampore, they agreed to “often look at Brainerd in the woods of America, pouring out his very soul before God for the perishing heathen without whose salvation nothing could make him happy.”

Robert Murray McCheyne was deeply moved when he first read Brainerd’s Life in 1832. He remarked that as a result of Brainerd’s example he was “more set upon missionary enterprise than ever.” A few years later McCheyne wrote in a letter: “O to have Brainerd’s heart for perfect holiness.”

Oswald J. Smith, founding pastor of the People’s Church in Toronto, paid tribute to Brainerd with these words:

‘So greatly was I influenced by the life of David Brainerd in the early years of my ministry that I named my youngest son after him. When I was but eighteen years of age, I found myself 3,000 miles from home, a missionary to the Indians. No wonder I love Brainerd! Brainerd it was who taught me to fast and pray. I learned that greater things could be wrought by daily contact with God than by preaching. When I feel myself growing cold I turn to Brainerd and he always warms my heart. No man ever had a greater passion for souls. To live wholly for God was his one great aim and ambition.’

David Brainerd couldn’t have known… Jonathan Edwards couldn’t have known… You and I can’t possibly know what God is doing in us and through us and for us. We must keep on keeping on.

Matt Bullen