“He is the Saviour indeed”

“Where are you?”

“And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, where art thou?” (Genesis 3:9).

Where art thou? That’s the question God is asking us today. Adam tried to answer that question in an evasive way. God wants straight answers from us. Oh, man, where art thou? Your answer is going to mean damnation or salvation. Are you proceeding in the right direction or in the wrong?

You cannot walk in two paths at the same time. You cannot have two minds and two different answers to a straight question like this. Some Christians dillydally with Christ. They miss the way and finally blame God. “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8). A friend asked me a serious question: “Daniel, is your eye single?” Ah! I examined myself carefully if I had in any way come to serve God with a double motive. How many precious souls are ruined by not being single-eyed! My heart is bleeding for them. If you always think in positive terms, that is faith. Jesus Christ was never double-minded. He is always single-eyed. “Lazarus come out”—that is positive. “Talitha cumi [Little girl, I say to you, arise!]”—that is positive! “I will abide in your house today!”—everything here is positive. If you really mean business with God, God will mean business with you. Can you put your whole trust in Him? Then you will see the glory of God.

My great longing is that we should be like the first-century Christians. What Christ will give us is a single eye. He will teach you and lead you to God. When I was first converted, God taught me and directed me. How well He led me! When I obeyed Him, I found success all around. Not even a stone would strike against my foot without God’s will. Once when I was going to a certain place a stone struck my foot. I asked the Lord the reason. He said, “Turn back.” There was another road which parted from this road which I had taken and I went along that road. Then I came by a hospital where I was told that a certain friend of mine was very sick there. I went to him and prayed for him and God healed him. See the dealings of the Lord! Four thousand years ago when Abraham talked with Him and walked with him, God was so concerned about him to commune with him about everything that concerned him. Do mean business with God. If your heart is after the world and the pleasures of the world, the path of Christ is quite difficult for you.

Are you entirely on Christ’s side? When I was a student, my mother fell and broke her ribs. There was no hope of her recovery because she had to be taken by boat over a river to reach a hospital and moving her ever so slightly caused excruciating pain. But I whole-heartedly looked to Christ and said, “From the Cross you said, ‘Take care of my mother’. Now my mother is suffering. Please undertake for my mother.” I simply cried out with all my heart. I heard later that there was a sound of bone touching bone and she just got up and began to walk. Overnight God had united those bones!

Where are you? Are you single-eyed? Will you be His out and out? So many families are miserable. You have the privilege of college education. You can be used of God to help them. But where are you today? In what direction are you moving? Go along the way of life which Christ will show you. You will be a cistern of water for thirsty people to drink from. People will see that. Are you willing? Which direction are you taking? Follow Christ and allow Him to be your Master. Are you going in the positive direction of love, faith, holiness, humility and righteousness? Then you will not fail. I wanted to follow Him and choose to be single. But God told me many things that were in His plan and warned me of things not in His plan and I did just what He said. God said, “Marry the girl I show you.” I simply obeyed. By His grace, all these years have been years of victorious life in the family. It is Christ who is the Way.

—N. Daniel

“Reality Check”

“‘Surely I come quickly.’ Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus! The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen” (Revelation 22:20-21).

“A great trial”

George Müller (1805-1898) was a man of prayer and strong faith who depended wholly on God through all the storms and trials of life. Here is an account of  “the greatest trial” he had yet experienced in July 1853:

“My beloved daughter and only child, and a believer since the commencement of the year 1846, was taken ill on June 20.

“This illness, at first a low fever, turned to typhus. On July 3 there seemed no hope of her recovery. Now was the trial of faith. But faith triumphed. My beloved wife and I were enabled to give her up into the hands of the Lord. He sustained us both exceedingly. But I will only speak about myself. Though my only and beloved child was brought near the grave, yet was my soul in perfect peace, satisfied with the will of my Heavenly Father, being assured that He would only do that for her and her parents, which in the end would be the best. She continued very ill till about July 20, when restoration began.

“On Aug. 18 she was so far restored that she could be removed to Clevedon for change of air, though exceedingly weak. … Parents know what an only child, a beloved child, is, and what to believing parents an only child, a believing child, must be. Well, the Father in Heaven said, as it were, by this his dispensation, ‘Art thou willing to give up this child to me?’ My heart responded, ‘As it seems good to Thee, my Heavenly Father. Thy will be done.’

“But as our hearts were made willing to give back our beloved child to Him who had given her to us, so He was ready to leave her to us, and she lived. ‘Delight thyself also in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart’ (Psalm 37:4). The desires of my heart were to retain the beloved daughter if it were the will of God; the means to retain her were to be satisfied with the will of the Lord.

“Of all the trials of faith that as yet I have had to pass through, this was the greatest; and by God’s abundant mercy, I own it to His praise, I was enabled to delight myself in the will of God; for I felt perfectly sure that, if the Lord took this beloved daughter, it would be best for her parents, best for herself, and more for the glory of God than if she lived: this better part I was satisfied with; and thus my heart had peace, perfect peace, and I had not a moment’s anxiety. Thus would it be under all circumstances, however painful, were the believer exercising faith.”

“Building on the foundation of Jesus Christ”

Staking eternity on Jesus

Amy Carmichael had often felt the love of the Lord Jesus as a child, but she only gave herself to Him when a teenage pupil in Harrogate.

After hearing a Christian address, the speaker told the pupils to sing, “Jesus loves me, this I know,” and then to be quiet. “During those quiet few minutes,” Amy would recall, “in His great mercy the Good Shepherd answered the prayers of my mother and father and many other loving ones, and drew me, even me, into His fold.”

Later she found words that satisfied her:

Upon a life I did not live,

Upon a death I did not die,

Another’s life, Another’s death,

I stake my whole eternity.

Working for eternity

Amy first met the living Lord on the streets of Belfast. She was just a teenage girl then and the meeting with her Saviour was sudden, startling, and unexpected. This encounter was life-changing:

“It was a dull Sunday morning,” she recalled, “in Belfast. My brothers and sisters and I were returning with our mother from church. We met a poor, pathetic old woman who was carrying a heavy bundle. … [M]oved by sudden pity, my brothers and I turned with her, relieved her of the bundle, took her by her arms as though they had been handles, and helped her along. This meant facing all the respectable people who were, like ourselves, on their way home. It was a horrid moment. … But just as we passed a fountain, recently built near the kerbstone, this mighty phrase was suddenly flashed as it were through the grey drizzle:

‘“Gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble—every person's work shall be made manifest; for the day shall declare it, because it shall be declared by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide—’
“If any man’s work abide: I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. The fountain, the muddy street, the people with their politely surprised faces, all this I saw, but saw nothing else. The blinding flash had come and gone; the ordinary was all about us. We went on. I said nothing to anyone, but I knew that something had happened that had changed life’s values. Nothing could ever matter again but the things that were eternal.”

That afternoon, Amy shut herself in her room. She talked to God and settled once and for all the pattern of her future life.

Being kept from falling

Amy’s “good works” entailed teaching and praying with youngsters and mill girls in Belfast and encouraging the reading of the Bible. Yet if these works were to be fruitful for eternity, Amy needed to know God more intimately and to rest more securely upon the everlasting Arms.

In September 1886, eighteen-year-old Amy was invited to Scotland where she attended a Christian convention. “I had been longing for months, perhaps years, to know how one could live a holy life, and a life that would help others. I came to that meeting half hoping, half fearing. Would there be anything for me? ... My soul was in a fog. Then the chairman rose for the last prayer. Perhaps the previous address had been about Peter walking on the water, and perhaps it had closed with the words of Jude 24, for the one who prayed began like this: ‘O Lord, we know Thou art able to keep us from falling.’ Those words found me. It was as if they were alight, and they shone for me.”

Building with gold, silver, precious stones

The work for the mill girls grew until a hall was needed to seat 500 for Christian meetings. It would cost £500 to put up an iron hall but Amy decided to ask her Heavenly Father only for money for His work. He provided through the generosity of a Christian lady. Printed by hand in large letters and hung in a long strip at the front, these words could be clearly read during the Dedication Service of the hall: ‘That in all things He [Christ] may have the preeminence.’

The power of God was present in the mission that opened the work of “The Welcome”, the name of that new hall. Yet then in one meeting, there was nothing, no power. Why had the Power left? Amy later recounted this troubling experience: “Lord, is it I? And then, as I prayed that prayer, I remembered something, a rollicking hour when we reached home after the meeting and, as usual, it was my fault. There was nothing wrong in the fun, but it was not the time for it. I have never forgotten the shock of that discovery. Grieve not the Spirit—that was the word then. In His mercy He forgave; and the work went on again.”

When Amy needed financial supplies, she looked to the Lord alone. And when workers were required for the work of “The Welcome”, only the Lord’s people could be permitted to help, those who were one with Amy in her desire for the salvation of the mill girls. “It is the word of 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 again,” she would write. “Do we want to build in substance that will abide the test of fire? Then let us see to it that the builders are those whose hearts are set on building in gold, silver, precious stones.”

Many years later, after Amy had been told by God, “Go ye,” and gone—gone to Japan, where she heard Him say, “None of them that trust in Me shall be desolate,” gone to China, returned to England, and then gone to India in 1895—the principle still held. Amy wanted God’s house, His work, to be built with His means and people.

Of stars and jewels

One day in India, while sitting under a wide-spreading tree, Amy became conscious of the “unfolding sense of a Presence”, a “Listener.” It seemed to her that Jesus Christ was looking for someone to listen with Him, to listen to the voice of one’s brother’s blood crying to Him from the ground. That day on the hillside influenced Amy's coming years and gave depth to them all.

Amy moved to Tinnevelly District in south India and began to itinerate with Indian women in a band formed in 1898, spreading the good news of Jesus Christ, a band dubbed the “Starry Cluster” by the Indians. They were ready to work without a salary: “A new love had been kindled in those hearts—they glowed. Thereafter it was never, ‘How much can I get?’ but always, ‘How much can I give? How much can I do without, that I may have more to give?’ … Can you imagine with what joy we worshipped the Lord together?” Some obeyed the Voice that spoke to them, their spirits “tender of the glory of God.”

Amy and her Christian co-workers were to help many Indian children live for Jesus Christ. In one village a young girl who had become a secret believer was given a Bible by a Christian lady. She lay down to sleep beside her mother one night and in the early morning was wakened (as it seemed) by the light touch of a hand, and a voice in her heart said, “Go!” She escaped for refuge to the house where Amy and another couple were staying and was given the name “Jewel of Victory”. Within six months another girl escaped, named “Jewel of Life” when she was baptised.

Later, Amy was used by Jesus to rescue girls from the Hindu temples (the first one reached her in 1901), and then boys in danger. Few missionaries or Indian Christians were in sympathy with her at first. Of this she wrote: “Sometimes it was as if I saw the Lord Jesus Christ kneeling alone … as He knelt long ago under the olive trees. The trees were tamarind now, the tamarinds that I see as I look up from this writing. And the only thing that one who cared could do, was to go softly and kneel down beside Him, so that He would not be alone in His sorrow over the little children.”

By the time Amy died in Dohnavur in 1951 in her Room of Peace, of physical suffering, at an orphanage that had been established, she had become Amma (mother) to many children for His sake. “I wonder what your biggest temptation is. Is it to be suddenly angry?”, she wrote to one. “I used to feel something like a fire suddenly burning up in my heart. If you feel like that, ask the Lord Jesus to pour His cool, kind, gentle love into your heart instead. Never go on being angry with anyone; be Jesus’ little peacemaker.” “What can you give, you little lovers,” she noted on another occasion, “to the One who gives you everything, and, more than that, gave His life to make you good and happy? You can give Him a grateful heart. If anything has gone wrong, you can give Him what the Psalm calls a humble and contrite heart. You can refuse to cover wrong things as if they didn’t matter much; you can confess them, and like David accept the fruit of your doings … and humbly and lovingly begin again. You can give your Lord Jesus all you have to give. Then your word will be, ‘I give! I give! I give!’ and He will hear and He will be pleased with His little lovers.”

“If you hold fast to the resolve that in all things Christ as Lord shall have the pre-eminence,” Amy once noted, “ … if you keep His will, His glory, and His pleasure high above everything …, and if you continue in His love, loving one another as He has loved you, then all will be well, eternally well.”

—See Frank L. Houghton, Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur

About Us

This newsletter is produced six times per year by the Laymen’s Evangelical Fellowship International. It is printed and distributed in the US, UK, Germany, Singapore, Canada, and Australia and is supported by unsolicited sacrificial gifts of young people. For a free subscription or for other enquiries, please contact any of the addresses below.

This Fellowship is an inter-denominational missionary and prayer group working for revival in churches and amongst students in several countries. We invite every layperson to become God’s ally in changing his or her corner of the world. We train people in evangelistic work and to be self-supporting missionaries.

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