Christ is Victor - May/June 2016 - Translation/printing

“God's mercy and truth at the cross”

“Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne: mercy and truth shall go before thy face. Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound: they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of thy countenance. In thy name shall they rejoice all the day: and in thy righteousness shall they be exalted” (Psalm 89:14-16).

One of the attributes of God which we seem to neglect and not take into account is that the Lord is just. He does not in any sense reward us with any kind of harshness or vengefulness or vindictiveness. He is just; He is obliged to be just.

“Justice and judgment are the habitation of your throne”. So God clearly demarcates between evil and good, righteousness and unrighteousness, and those who are His children do likewise. They do not compromise with evil, they have a true sense of justice. They do not want injustice and oppression to be perpetuated, and today we see many people just turn and look away when they are confronted with evil or injustice or greed or graft or corruption. No, God obviously visits those who have no regard for moral values in judgment. That is why we dare not have an inanimate God. We dare not have a God of our own making. We dare not make an image and call it God.

God is God. His holiness is so basic that when you come with people who do not even know that God is holy, you simply cannot fathom such people. They do not have a true sense of direction, they cannot have it. Their compass is false. They are totally misdirected in their ways because God is not in their hearts. When the Lord Jesus Christ comes into our hearts, we love to see justice in our courts of law, in our judges, in our magistrates, on our streets and in our offices. We do not want to gain any undue advantage over some weak person. We don’t want to see the poor oppressed. We don’t want to turn away or look the other way when someone is doing harm to another.

Today we are confronted with a situation where people do not want to get involved. On the other hand, a Christian is involved. He is involved with these issues of Righteousness, of Judgment, of Love, and of Mercy. The Bible tells us that Mercy and Truth shall go before His face. So if God is with you and God is directing you, the same will happen to you.

Mercy, oh, how marvellous! Mercy for a sinner! Mercy for the man who has grieved God and broken His heart! Mercy for the one who has been responsible for breaking the heart of God. Your sin and my sin are responsible for Calvary. Your sin and my sin came upon the sinless body of the Lord Jesus Christ and therefore, through His death and resurrection, there is mercy offered for us. Truth says, “Now this man has fallen short, this man can never enter the Kingdom of Heaven, this man has gone contrary to My law, the truth. This man has trampled down the truth, so there can be no place for this man in Heaven.”

Now Mercy says, “Yes, because this man has acknowledged that in the Cross of Jesus Christ his sin has been dealt with, because this man has confessed the truth about himself that he is a sinner and has come short of the glory of God, there is mercy for him.” What a wonderful God we have! Mercy for the sinner. Mercy for you and me.

Therefore we rejoice in God our Saviour. You remember the song of Mary, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:46-47).

What is the cause of our rejoicing today? You know the excitements pass over so quickly and leave an aftermath of pain and sorrow, a sense of guilt and shame. Most of the joys of this world are evanescent, ephemeral; they pass away and leave a bitter taste behind. But a man who rejoices in the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, his is an enduring joy. You know it is to be experienced, it cannot be explained. So you had better take hold of Jesus and experience this joy—the joys which are for evermore, the pleasures which are at God’s right hand. You know today’s religion seems to be getting pleasure as quickly as possible, and at any price and at the cost of anybody. You want to tread over bodies, tread over lives, walk over virginity, but obtain pleasure.

Now that kind of pleasure, that selfish pleasure does not satisfy. It can only bring guilt and sorrow and a backwash of disease and misery and death. Here we are told, “In your righteousness shall they be exalted.” For those who love God’s righteousness, for those who are willing to pay the price to establish, and to work our righteousness, there is a price to be paid. “You will be hated,” the Lord Jesus Christ told us. “And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved” (Matthew 10:22).

Now there is a price to be paid for righteousness. People may hate you, slander you, and look askance at you, but “in your righteousness you shall be exalted.” As we are full of Jesus, He sets us apart as the sons of God. We are clothed upon by His righteousness. I do not mean, my friend, that this is a theoretical righteousness, but this is a practical righteousness which I am referring to. When the Lord Jesus was touched by that woman who had an issue of blood for twelve years, virtue went out of Him. You know power went out of Him, and she was healed. His righteousness is a healing righteousness, it is not a condemning righteousness; it is not a Pharisaic righteousness; it is a river of blessing—a river that brings righteousness.

—Joshua Daniel

“Jesus' salvation and the love of God”

“He is able also to save them to the uttermost” (Hebrews 7:25).

When I listened to Sunder Singh’s preaching, I found he expressed very clearly certain basic truths in spiritual life. He said, “Salvation is not just forgiveness of sins, but deliverance from sin.” We are here to worship God. We must not allow slavery to sin in the slightest measure anywhere in our life. We must aim at complete deliverance, because Jesus died to give this to us. When a man begins to live a life led by the Spirit, he is freed from sin. When he is born again, he no longer gravitates towards sin. When Jesus comes into our life, heavenly joy and divine love come into our lives. We are spontaneously drawn towards heavenly things.

Nature and everything on this earth around us is meant to be subject to us. Jesus commanded the winds and the waves of the sea and they obeyed Him. Joshua commanded the sun and it stood still till the battle was done. We become masters over nature by becoming servants to God. When seeking God and His righteousness first becomes the rule of our life, we find that we rule over nature. The transforming nature of Christ will flow out of you.

When you are filled with the love of God, the earth around you will become heaven. You need not do anything great. Just get filled with the love of God. You will then radiate the power of God. People will be drawn to you and cannot disengage themselves from that power. “Ten men shall take hold ... of the skirt of him ... saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you” (Zechariah 8:23). We fail because we lack the love of God. Seek the highest things. Receive these […] and go home enriched. The richest man on earth is he that is filled with the love of Jesus.

Madam Guyon, that French saint, was filled with the love of God. Once her carriage had to pass through dark woods. It was the haunt of thieves. Seeing a carriage and a woman travelling alone, violent and evil men came to attack her. They were armed. When they came near, they saw God’s love flash out of her eyes. They fell back. They had never seen such a woman. Instead of killing her, they began to reverence and love her. Such transforming power is in the love of God.

Possess it and you will be a great blessing in this world. The other name for a Christian is “Blessing.” God told Abraham, “I will bless thee, and thou shalt be a blessing!” What a beautiful pronouncement of a marvellous promise! And God did make Abraham a blessing, and that forever! We should ask ourselves, “Am I a blessing? A blessing even to my enemy?” May God help us.

—N. Daniel

“A vision of the Lord”

A vision of the Lord turned the life of Taher* upside down. This is his story.

Taher was a well respected Muslim haji, a man who had made the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. His wife had done the same. When his daughter came to Christ, therefore, Taher was very angry—and when his wife came to Christ too, he became even angrier. Then when his son turned away from Islam and accepted Christ, he was outraged.

Taher tried to force his family back into Islam in every way that he could: he quoted the Koran, forbade them to visit the church, beat them up and said he would warn the secret police. He even threatened to kill them with his own bare hands. Yet this had no effect. His family didn’t leave Christ; instead, they left Taher and fled abroad.

After his initial anger at the family leaving him, Taher started to feel lonely. In his despair he memorized Koran verses and focused on Allah, the god he served so passionately that he scared away his own family: “Please show me your face,” he begged. The subsequent silence made him doubt; maybe this god he was serving didn’t exist after all and his family was right. He didn’t know if he had to believe Allah or Jesus, the Bible or the Koran. Finally he said: “I will believe in the God who reveals Himself to me.”

Taher’s prayers were answered by a dream. In his dream he saw a Man riding a donkey. The Man came towards him. He had never seen the Man before, but the Man hugged him and said: “I will clean you from all your sins, you are free: I will give you rest. Believe in me.” Taher asked: “But what will happen if I sin again?” The Man on the donkey replied with the same words: “I will clean all your sins.” Then the Man on the donkey left, leaving Taher astonished. Another man approached him in his dream: “Do you know the man on the donkey?” The man asked. “No, I don’t,” Taher replied. “He is Jesus Christ,” the man said, “He cleans your sins.”

Taher woke up and thought about the dream. When he fell asleep again, he had the same dream. Waking up again, he became afraid. He had served Allah for 45 years, and he was a haji… how could he leave Islam? But when he fell asleep again, he received the same dream for the third time. Waking up, he knew that Jesus Christ was the only true God.

Taher had found the true God, but was doubtful as to what he should do next. Everyone in the church knew what he had done. But he realized that he had to go to the church he had forbidden his family to go to, the only place he knew that could tell him more about this Man on the donkey. Shyly, he entered the church premises. The Christians present were astonished and at the same time afraid: wasn’t he the man who had threatened to kill his own wife, son and daughter because they accepted Christ?

“How can I help you?” asked one of the church leaders. The answer was unexpected: “I want to pray, go to church, and give my life to Christ,” Taher said, “but I don’t know how.” The leader was amazed and still not sure if he could trust Taher; he could be a spy of the government, not an uncommon thing in Iran. “I saw Jesus in a dream, I saw his face!” Taher explained.

Little by little the church leaders started trusting him. Taher was like a baby, so eager to learn more about Christ. After being discipled, he soon got involved in ministry work, risking his life for Jesus. When his family abroad—who had been praying for him ever since they left—heard of the change in Taher’s life, they praised God for answering their prayers and happily accepted Taher back into the family. A vision of the Lord had transformed Taher’s life!

—*Name changed. See “A modern day Paul in Iran,” www.opendoorsusa.org.

“Reality Check”

Jesus answered and said unto [the woman] … “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” …

The woman saith unto Him, “I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when He is come, He will tell us all things.” Jesus saith unto her, “I that speak unto thee am He” (John 4:13-14, 25-26).

“Being forgiven and forgiving”

In 1947, Corrie Ten Boom, who had been imprisoned for helping Jews during Germany’s occupation of Holland in World War Two, went to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives. It was the truth they needed most to hear, she felt, in that bitter, bombed-out land, and she gave them her favourite mental picture. “When we confess our sins,” she said, “God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. … I believe God then places a sign out there that says, No Fishing Allowed.”

Then one day after a talk, Corrie spotted him, a man coming towards her. He was familiar, one she had seen before in a blue uniform and cap with skull and crossbones, once a guard, one of the cruellest at Ravensbruck. Ravensbruck was the concentration camp in northern Germany where she had been imprisoned with her sister Betsie, Betsie who had died.

The man now stood before her, hand thrust out: “A fine message, Fraulein [unmarried woman]! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!”

He would not remember her, one among thousands of women. Yet she had spoken of forgiveness, and mentioned Ravensbruck in her talk. “I was a guard there,” he said, “But since that time,” he continued, “I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fraulein,” he held out his hand, “will you forgive me?”

Corrie, so often forgiven, now wrestled with forgiving. She knew that she had to forgive. “If you do not forgive men their trespasses,” says Jesus, “neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.” She also knew victims of Nazi brutality, and those who forgave were able to rebuild their lives and return to the outside world; those who did not forgive remained invalids.

A coldness clutched Corrie’s heart. Yet she knew that forgiveness was not an emotion; it was an act of the will, a will that can work however cold or warm the heart. “Jesus, help me!” she silently prayed. “I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.”

And so she thrust her hand into the one stretched out to her, mechanically, woodenly. And as she did so, a current began in her shoulders, raced down her arm, sprang into their joined hands. And then a healing warmth seemed to flood her whole being, bringing tears to her eyes.

“I forgive you, brother!” she cried, “With all my heart.”

For a long moment, the former guard and former prisoner grasped hands. Corrie had never known God’s love so intensely as she then did. Yet she realized it was not her love. She had tried, and had not the power. It was the power of the Holy Spirit as recorded in Romans 5:5, “because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.”

—See Corrie Ten Boom, Tramp for the Lord

“By searching”

“God, if there be a God”—the whisper was raised, hands held heavenward in the dark of night—“if You will prove to me that You are, and if You will give me peace, I will give You my whole life.” Prayer and promise were breathed out to Him who could not be seen: “I’ll do anything You ask me to do, go where you send me, obey You all my days.” Then Isobel Miller climbed into bed and lay down.

The unsettling

Isobel’s descent on to the “Misty Flats” from the High Way—where man’s face is lifted Godward and he is called upward—had begun after a professor’s remarks. No one believed in the “myths of Genesis” anymore, he had said; anyone who believed in a Heaven, Hell, and the story of Genesis was to raise their hand. Only Isobel and one other student had done so. The Professor had smiled: “Oh, you just believe that because your papa and your mama told you so.”

That day Isobel decided to accept no more theories of life without having personally proved them. Although having seen answers to prayer as a child, she considered herself an agnostic now. And yet the name of Jesus was still as “ointment poured forth” to her, “like a perfume”, she later wrote, “which haunts and calls so that one stops, lifts one’s head and drinks it in wistfully. His name was the sweetest melody I knew and never failed to stir my heart, even though I had ceased to seek Him. His purity and holiness made me hate besmirching things.”

Student, actor, and lover of dance, Isobel’s path wound downwards after her engagement to a young man named Ben. As the prophet Jeremiah wrote, “Wherefore their way shall be unto them as slippery ways in the darkness: they shall be driven on, and fall therein: for I will bring evil upon them, even the year of their visitation, saith the Lord” (Jeremiah 23:12).

When Isobel learned that Ben was not loyal and would remain unfaithful, she had whispered “Then we part”. His were the standards of the “Misty Flats”. Yet she had known the Christ and could not be satisfied with less than the ideals He had set her. She was in the “slippery ways of darkness” and sleep departed.

The climax came just before Christmas 1921. In her sleepless desperation, the Tempter came with thoughts of suicide, and she would face the darkest moment of her life. How much heartache she might have been saved if told that God had already laid His Hand on a man to be her husband, one with the same ideals and passion for God’s highest purposes. “But it was necessary,” she later wrote, “that first I drink to the dregs the emptiness of the promises held out by the Misty Flats: only then could I be freed from their lure and subtle call.”

And then a strange thing happened. That day she had read a quote by Dante: In la sua volontade è nostra pace. Isobel had guessed the meaning: In His will is our peace. That sentence wrote itself across the dark of her bedroom. What if there was a God? She had not been in His will. Was that why she had no peace? Then the idea struck her, the prayer and promise to God…

The seeking

Sunshine was pouring into Isobel’s window when she awoke; such deep relaxed peace had not touched her pillow for many days. Peace had come. She had a made a bargain, God had kept His part. Her part was to yield her whole life if He proved Himself. And in the meantime, she could seek Him.

Seek God where? Can a man by searching find out God? Zophar had questioned Job, not believing it possible. Yet there was an outstanding memory in Isobel’s mind of a young man she had once heard say: “I found God through reading His Word.”

So Isobel, knowing the Gospels were accepted as largely authentic records of Christ’s teachings, decided to search for God through Jesus Christ, who is the ordained road to God, read the Gospels only, try to do what Jesus said to do, and pray again.

For about three months after the “bargain”, Isobel did not experience anything extraordinary. Yet one day, at an hour of feeling undone, of wounded pride, of shaking, she prayed: “Oh God, if You are, please give me p—”, and something like an electric current shot through her. It came from above and outside her, and convinced her that there was a force above and beyond her, trying to get in touch. She never prayed if Thou art again.

Yet Isobel’s prayers were still all selfish. God answered them, thus teaching her a lesson that she never forgot: the triumphs of pride and gratified vanity, which He allowed, could never bring peace or happiness. This kind of life would never satisfy her. And that was what God wanted, as if to say: “If this is what you think you want, dear, have some more.” “And He stuffed,” wrote Isobel later, “the froth of life down me.”

Then when Isobel began to attend a Bible class, she came face to face with another professor, one whom she knew instinctively had a personal experience with God. There she met a friend of her father: “Isobel,” he said, “I’m glad to see you here. I’ve been praying for you for some seven years.” His eyes flooded with tears. Isobel was stunned. It was about seven years since she had decided to go in for worldly things. The “yearning in Christ” that lit up the gentleman’s face stirred her to the depths, for her soul still knew periods of agony.

Satisfied and serving

Isobel was fed in the truth of God’s Word. Her feet were once more planted on the High Way, prepared to climb, her face turned Godwards. In the coming years, God would teach Isobel the awareness of His presence, bless her with the counsel of godly Christians, reveal His plans, and extinguish the tapers of the world that still held her. He changed the whole course of Isobel’s life, satisfied her and called her into His service.

—See Isobel Kuhn, By Searching

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