As I snatched a few moments to read My Utmost for His Highest, I kept reflecting on today's date, November 13th. What on earth was happening today? Do you ever get like that, just sure that there's a happening coming on a certain date, but having no idea what it is?! Maddening! So I read the selection from my favorite devotional writer Oswald Chambers, beautifully stern as always about our Christian walk. Quite honestly, I stood convicted of unbelief on so many fronts, whether large, medium, small, or miniscule!
We can never experience Jesus Christ, nor ever hold Him within the compass of our own hearts, but our faith must be built in strong emphatic confidence in Him.
It is along this line that we see the rugged impatience of the Holy Ghost against unbelief. All our fears are wicked, and we fear because we will not nourish ourselves in our faith. How can anyone who is identified with Jesus Christ suffer from doubt or fear! It ought to be an absolute paean of perfectly irrepressible, triumphant belief.
Just a few minutes ago, I was panicked about finding a stamp to mail a check for DMV registration, praying we'd have the funds in a few days, when in response to prayer, God showed me where a stamp was! Better yet, when I checked the bank account, expectantly dreading a bad answer from the computer voice, there was more than enough to cover that and other major needs. I was definitely the ye in "O ye of little faith" (Luke 12:28)!
Back to the date, November 13, it finally dawned on me that K.P. Yohannon, president and founder of Gospel for Asia, would be speaking at our church today. The ministry had already given us all free copies of No Longer a Slumdog to read before his visit. I read it with agony for the children in the slums of India, especially, doomed by the caste system to live, play and die in the sewers, whose bodies are scooped up each morning by workers in large cities like Bombay. Their life expectancy is so short, if it were not for the intervention of Jesus Christ, who loves them as much as He loves our beloved and cared-for children. Gospel for Asia has sent out 15,000 missionaries and workers into 13 Asian countries, starting schools and leading these lost children, many parentless, to Jesus Christ. Brother Yohannon's scripture was Jesus' warning in Matthew 18:10:
Take heed that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that in heaven their angels always see the face of My Father who is in heaven.
K.P. Yohannon said, "That means that these children's angels give a report to God the Father regarding these little ones." Our challenge was to pray for the children, their parents, and the churches that are springing up in multitudes of villages with native teachers and pastors; furthermore, we should each consider sponsoring a child for $28 a month, even as many children as the natural ones we've brought into the world. With five kids and two grandsons, soon to be three, to my credit...you're talking real money now!
What kind of faith will I exercise in a child's behalf, that they might come to know Jesus, be fed, clothed, and educated? Our own personal trial at home is devastating, but not so much financially, thanks to the Lord's leading to make preparation a decade ago. When permanent disability strikes a family breadwinner, there is great loss, undeniably. But God has brought us through every step of the way! I like what Oswald Chambers says today:
How can we talk of making a sacrifice for the Son of God! Our salvation is from hell and perdition, and then we talk about making a sacrifice!
I'll leave it at that.
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