By Cheri Bunch
Our son walked in the front door and began to walk into the kitchen when I heard the Lord speak. I said to him, “What is that book under your shirt?”
My husband looked up from eating his lunch with a puzzled look on his face. Josh, our son, had on a loose-fitting shirt with a jacket over it. The book hidden beneath was not visible outwardly, but I knew that it was there.
Josh pulled the book from underneath his shirt and handed it to me. “I want to read it, Mom. I knew you wouldn’t like it, so I hid it from you.”
The Lord wanted Josh to know that He can see the hidden things and He can disclose our secrets to others.
The Lord was also teaching me . . . teaching me to trust Him.
It is so easy to slip from discernment into suspicion. Many times I have been suspicious of what the kids were doing, what my husband’s intentions were or even about what my friends were thinking. My suspicious mind can conjure up just about anything!
I have found that it is so much better for everyone that I walk in discernment rather than in suspicion. (It’s also much more peaceful for me and those around me!) I have learned to ask the Lord for discernment and I am learning to trust Him to give it to me.
Discernment is an act of faith. Suspicion is a fruit of fear. Which one have you chosen to walk in?
Take it to prayer, friend. The Lord will equip you for every good work, including the work of discernment.
Ecclesiastes 8:5b “ . . . for a wise heart knows the proper time and procedure” (NASV).
Monday, November 23, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Burdened to Pray
By Cheri Bunch
Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to China, grew up in a strong Christian home. As a child he was very determined to be a missionary and take the gospel into China, but he began to stray from the faith in his teen years. I would like to share a bit of his testimony taken from a book entitled Hudson Taylor and Maria: A Match Made in Heaven by John Pollock (Christian Focus, 1996). I love the way the Lord used Hudson’s mother illustrated in the excerpt below:
“A year later, in June 1849, his mother was away. One warm afternoon Amelia [his sister] was out and Hudson had nothing to do on a half-holiday. He looked idly over his father’s books and rummaged in a basket of popular ‘Gospel tracts.’ He picked one out, intending to read the story and skip the moral. He went into the barn behind the house and shop, curled up comfortably and began ‘in utterly unconcerned state of mind, with a distinct intention to put away the tract as soon as it should seem prosy.’
As he read, one sentence gripped him. Suddenly he realized that he approached religion from the wrong angle. He believed Christianity to be a dreary struggle to pay off bad deeds by good. He had long abandoned this struggle. He owed too much. He had gone into spiritual bankruptcy, paying a small dividend to his Divine Creditor in the shape of chapel attendance and of prayers rattled off at night, but with no hope of discharge; like most bankrupts he had sought to have a good time.
One sentence in the tract broke open his mind to a sudden certainty that Christ by His death upon the cross had already discharged this debt of sins. ‘And with this dawned the joyful conviction, as light was flashed into my soul by the Holy Spirit, that there was nothing in the world to be done but to fall down on one’s knees and accepting this Savior and His Salvation, to praise Him forevermore.’
No Luther, Bunyan or Wesley had a more complete sense of the rolling away of his burden, of light dismissing darkness, of rebirth and the close friendship of Christ, than Hudson Taylor on that June afternoon of 1849 at the age of seventeen.
Several days passed before he shyly told Amelia under seal of secrecy. At the return of his mother ten days afterwards he ran to the door ‘to tell her I had such glad news to give’. She replied as she hugged him, ‘I know, my boy. I have been rejoicing for a fortnight in the glad tidings you have to tell me.’ Hudson was amazed. Had Amelia blabbed? His mother denied it. She said that eighty miles away, on the very day of the incident in the barn, she had felt such an overwhelming desire to pray for Hudson that she spent hours on her knees, and had arisen with the unshakeable conviction that her prayers were answered. ‘It was perhaps natural,’ Hudson wrote years later, ‘that from the commencement of my Christian life I was led to feel that prayer was in sober matter of fact transacting business with God.’ ”
What a testimony! I hope it encourages you as it has me!
Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to China, grew up in a strong Christian home. As a child he was very determined to be a missionary and take the gospel into China, but he began to stray from the faith in his teen years. I would like to share a bit of his testimony taken from a book entitled Hudson Taylor and Maria: A Match Made in Heaven by John Pollock (Christian Focus, 1996). I love the way the Lord used Hudson’s mother illustrated in the excerpt below:
“A year later, in June 1849, his mother was away. One warm afternoon Amelia [his sister] was out and Hudson had nothing to do on a half-holiday. He looked idly over his father’s books and rummaged in a basket of popular ‘Gospel tracts.’ He picked one out, intending to read the story and skip the moral. He went into the barn behind the house and shop, curled up comfortably and began ‘in utterly unconcerned state of mind, with a distinct intention to put away the tract as soon as it should seem prosy.’
As he read, one sentence gripped him. Suddenly he realized that he approached religion from the wrong angle. He believed Christianity to be a dreary struggle to pay off bad deeds by good. He had long abandoned this struggle. He owed too much. He had gone into spiritual bankruptcy, paying a small dividend to his Divine Creditor in the shape of chapel attendance and of prayers rattled off at night, but with no hope of discharge; like most bankrupts he had sought to have a good time.
One sentence in the tract broke open his mind to a sudden certainty that Christ by His death upon the cross had already discharged this debt of sins. ‘And with this dawned the joyful conviction, as light was flashed into my soul by the Holy Spirit, that there was nothing in the world to be done but to fall down on one’s knees and accepting this Savior and His Salvation, to praise Him forevermore.’
No Luther, Bunyan or Wesley had a more complete sense of the rolling away of his burden, of light dismissing darkness, of rebirth and the close friendship of Christ, than Hudson Taylor on that June afternoon of 1849 at the age of seventeen.
Several days passed before he shyly told Amelia under seal of secrecy. At the return of his mother ten days afterwards he ran to the door ‘to tell her I had such glad news to give’. She replied as she hugged him, ‘I know, my boy. I have been rejoicing for a fortnight in the glad tidings you have to tell me.’ Hudson was amazed. Had Amelia blabbed? His mother denied it. She said that eighty miles away, on the very day of the incident in the barn, she had felt such an overwhelming desire to pray for Hudson that she spent hours on her knees, and had arisen with the unshakeable conviction that her prayers were answered. ‘It was perhaps natural,’ Hudson wrote years later, ‘that from the commencement of my Christian life I was led to feel that prayer was in sober matter of fact transacting business with God.’ ”
What a testimony! I hope it encourages you as it has me!
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