For Those Seeking the Truth & Dynamic Living "Christ is Victor" July/August, 2025, Volume 38, No. 04 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
“Get Right with God” “O depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” Romans 11:33 Without any doubt, we are living in a superficial and artificial age. It is all tinsel, veneer and glittering chrome. In the event of any disaster or accident, all that remains are only bits and pieces and an unrecognizable mass of twisted steel. But most people stake everything on the short-lived glow and glitter of their earthly possessions. Unfortunately, this shallow veneer has overtaken many churches too. Most of the preachers and churches today preach a conversion which requires no repentance. It hurts to dig deep, to uncover the wicked motives that rule one’s life and confess hidden sins. It is something which human nature revolts. We hate to be exposed, to be searched to the depths of our hearts. But this is what the Lord Jesus does. Exposure and diagnosis are essential for treatment. You never try to mislead your doctor by stating symptoms which do not exist. You want to be as exact as possible in narrating the symptoms in order to help the doctor to locate the problem. St Paul cries, Oh! The depths of the riches both of wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out! Yes, there are depths in Christ, depths in purity, power and perfection. It only reveals our shallow desire when we look around and see the state of affairs of Christians today. The early disciples were men who could face any situation with deep assurance that their risen Lord would deliver them through and through. Jesus was more than adequate for them. Such was their faith and they were more than conquerors in the midst of an idolatrous and immoral society. Christ is adequate even today. His promises are enough for you. As you get deeper into the Word of God and the riches in Christ, your heart is thrilled with a new vision and hope. You are right there in the mine shaft and the cable car plunges you deeper and deeper into the solid veins of gold in the quartz around you. It is all yours. He is your wisdom. He is your salvation. He is your sanctification. In Jesus Christ you have all these riches. He gave Himself for us holding nothing back. My father was a man of great spiritual depth and he sought depth in others. In his life time he was enabled by God to bring literally thousands into the deep experience of conversion. Nearly all of them learned to pray and cultivated the habit of getting alone for prayer every day. No wonder, they were mightily used of God in healing the sick and in casting out the demons. The Word of God prevailed over all the works of darkness. On the other hand, the shallow Christians are always characterized by the lighthearted way in which they speak of deep men of God. The very son of God was not spared from criticism. They called Him as a wine-bibber, friend of sinners and Beelzebub. They belittled Him as the son of the carpenter. But Jesus steadfastly set His face towards Jerusalem, where He must suffer and die on the cross. Now, tear off the old paper and scrape away the thin veneer with which you disguised your true nature. Come to the cross with true brokenness. Call upon the Lord Jesus for a new life. There are depths of His love and riches which are still unexplored. —Joshua Daniel
“You Are Not Your Own” For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. Luke 9:24 Jesus Christ is speaking a great truth here. The maxims of the Bible are contrary to the maxims of the world. If anyone wants to be exalted, he must humble himself. If anyone wants to be filled with grace and power, he must first die. If anyone wants to be wise, he must first become a fool. The Sermon on the Mount is the natural outcome of a regenerative life, developed fully. It is simply wonderful how Jesus states things that are going to be your experience. Unfortunately, we do not take God at His Word. Hence, we do not see the fruit. If people do not believe in humbling themselves and confessing their sins, how can they see such fruit? But if we are truly born of the Spirit, we will find that all that are God’s are ours and all ours are God’s. God will be in you and you in God. How happy you will feel when all your children belong to God! Why do people hesitate to give their children to God? They do not accept the fact that their children belong to God anyway and not to themselves and they have no claim on them more than God. “What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” (I Cor.6:19) We are not our own. Do you know that your body is not yours? Then you will know how to adorn it, when you go to worship God. Your face is not yours. Is your face acceptable before God? When you wash your heart with the Word of God, heavenly beauty will come into your face. I saw a woman whose face was shining because her heart was changed. You are not your own. It is a great step in spiritual life to know you are not your own. If you have not come to that level you must weep. Many mothers are to blame for the illness and the sufferings of their children. It is because they do not come to the place of knowing that they are not their own. The time is coming when you are going to throw away your body and your clothes. You are not your own. You think that house is yours. No it is not. To the extent you use it for God’s glory it is yours. You have built a house, but you will not occupy it for long because you think it is your own. Saul thought the throne was his own. He lost it. “Now, therefore, let it please thee to bless the house of thy servant, LORD, and it shall be blessed forever.” (I Chronicles17:27) David wanted God to bless Solomon. He asked Solomon not to depend on anything except seeking God with a perfect heart. Hence, the kingdom was retained by David. He that loses his life, he that loses his property, he that loses his bigness shall gain them. Your wife is not your own. She is the gift of God. Do you keep her so and treat her so? If not, you are losing the riches of His glory referred to in John17:10, “And all mine are thine, and thine are mine: and I am glorified in them” and in John 17:21, “That they all may be one; as thou Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” How glorious it is when we give up our all to God! What a great confidence you will have in God when you feel all those that are in your house and all the things in your house belong to God! I know a man who prayed for his son who was dying. God gave him back his son. That father is now bringing him up for the world. Ungrateful man! Abraham gave his son to God and God gave him back to Abraham. He brought up Isaac for God. Isaac then became a blessing to the whole world. —N. Daniel “Reality Check” For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait on the Lord, they shall inherit the earth - (Psalm 37:9) “God into the heart” “God is willing to enter into the heart, as light is willing to flood a room that is opened to its brightness”(Amy Carmichael). Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch Christian public speaker who had suffered in a Nazi concentration camp, once called on a woman in a London mental institution. She had opened her heart to hatred after the death of her husband, a death caused by a Jewish bomb on her home in Palestine. Corrie prayed for wisdom and love. “I know exactly what you’re going to tell me. I must pray,” the woman began, “But I cannot pray.” “I know exactly what you are going to say next; I must banish the hatred from my heart, because only then can I pray again.” “Who has told you?” “The chaplain.” “No doubt the chaplain is still a very young man, and he does not yet know how powerful the demon of hatred is. You and I know. Once I was with my sister in a concentration camp. When they treated me cruelly I could stand it, but when I saw that they intended to beat my sister because she was too weak to shovel sand, then hatred tried to enter my heart. And then I experienced a miracle. Jesus had planted His love in my heart, and there was no room left for hatred. The only thing you can do is to open your heart to that love. That love is a reality. If it is dark in a room while the sun is shining outside, do I have to sweep the darkness out? Of course not. I merely have to draw the curtains aside, and as soon as the sunlight floods the room, the darkness vanishes.” Corrie knelt down with the woman, and prayed, “Lord, here we are, weak, much weaker than the demon of hatred. But Thou art stronger than the demon of hatred, and now we open our hearts to Thee, and we give thanks to Thee that Thou art willing to enter into our hearts, as the sun is willing to flood a room that is opened to its brightness.” One week later the woman was discharged from the mental institution. Her heart was full of the love of God.
—See Corrie Ten Boom, Amazing Love: True Stories of the Power of Forgiveness “The Man that Died for Me” In the Californian mining country stood a one-room mud cabin where a rough, hardened man lay dying. When Mrs. Barney went over the hills and visited him for the first time, her attempt to speak of Jesus and His death was met with oaths. “That’s all a lie,” the miner said, “Nobody ever died for others.” Her following visits were treated with less gratitude than a dog would have shown. One night, convicted that she had not really cared for the dying miner, Mrs. Barney prayed, “Oh, Christ, give me a little glimpse of the worth of a human soul.” She stayed on her knees for hours as Calvary—where Christ died—became a reality to her. “The Lord is going to save him,” she told her husband. The next morning, Mrs. Barney was accompanied by a neighbour with her little girl, Mamie. When the dying man heard the little girl’s beautiful laugh, he earnestly desired to see her. “I had a little girl once, and she died. Her name was Mamie. She cared for me. Nobody else did. Guess I’d been different if she’d lived. I’ve hated everybody since she died.” This affection strongly contrasted with the bitterness he felt towards his wife and mother. “The dear Lord didn’t want her to be like them. He loved her better than you did. So He took her away,” said Mrs. Barney. “Don’t you want to see her again?” she asked. She told him of Jesus’ death on the cross, and soon Mamie prayed for the dying miner: “Dear Jesus, this man is sick. He has lost his ‘ittle girl, and he feels bad about it. I’s so sorry for him, and he’s so sorry too. Won’t You help him, and show him where to find his ‘ittle girl? Do please. Amen.” The old man kept saying, “Tell Him more ‘bout it, tell Him everything,” and poured out such a torrent of confession! On the third day, he turned from everything to “the man who died for me”. Sometime after, a meeting was held in the cabin with boys from the mills and mines. “Boys,” declared the dying miner, “You know how the water runs down the sluice boxes and carries off the dirt and leaves the gold behind. Well the Blood of that Man [Jesus],” he continued, “went right over me just like that; it carried off ‘bout everything. But it left enough for me to see Mamie, and to see the Man that died for me. Oh, boys, can’t you love Him?”. When Mrs. Barney was leaving the miner some days later, she saw that the end had come. “What shall I say tonight, Jack?” “Just good night,” he said. “What will you say to me when we meet again?” “I’ll say ‘good morning', up there.” That night the miner died—but his last words were: “Tell her I’m going to see the Man that died for me.” -Selected
“Jesus Christ in the Place of Suffering” Mimosa had turned from Hinduism to God the Loving One while growing up in India. For many years, during which she married and had children, Mimosa received little teaching by man of His ways—yet God’s Spirit taught her. Mimosa longed for her sons to be able to choose the worship of the living, true, and holy God. Yet how? She gave herself to prayer, to prayer streaming through the busy day, flowing far into the night. Her prayers were not always in words, for the longing that consumed her could not wait for words. “I am a prayer” might have described her. Her educated brother taunted her: “Thou thinkest that thou canst pray! From whom hast thou learned? Thou who canst not read, thou the ignorant who canst not even read the first letter (and he named it), thou thinkest that thou canst pray!” Mimosa, humble, in poverty, was deeply pierced; what if her concept was a mistake? The prophet Jeremiah once addressed God in his sorrow: “Wilt Thou be indeed to me as waters that fail?” Yet Christ drew near, the Christ who told His disciple Peter, “I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.” “Have I been a wilderness unto thee?” (God speaks, Jeremiah 2:31). A glow of joy came to her; Mimosa knew what He had been to her all through the bitter years. “You know Him by learning,” she later told her Christian sister, “but I know Him by suffering.” It was not that her sister had not suffered—yet she had a Bible and many books, and Mimosa, ignorant of the first letter of the Tamil alphabet, had learned Him through suffering. Who but Christ, the crucified, risen Redeemer, is enough in the place of the fellowship of His suffering? “I have in my study pictures of Millet, Goethe, Tolstoy, Beethoven, and Jesus Christ in the garden of Gethsemane,” wrote a Chinese student, not yet a Christian, to his friend in Paris. “After seeing a beautiful picture, reading some wonderful poetry, or hearing some exquisite music, my spirit goes out, not to Jesus, but to the pictures of the other famous men. But when my heart is in trouble, these can no longer charm: only my contemplation of Jesus in His agony in the garden seems able to bring me peace.” “No picture reconciles us to God—but Jesus Christ does. “Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:4-6). —See Amy Carmichael, Mimosa: A True Story “Put your name in it” Ruth Bell Graham vividly remembers September 2, 1933. She was thirteen. Her father, a missionary surgeon in China, and her mother were sending her to boarding school in what is now Pyongyang, North Korea. For Ruth, it was a brutal parting, and she earnestly prayed she would die before morning. But dawn came, leaving her prayers unanswered, and she gripped her bags and trudged toward the riverfront. She was leaving all that was loved and familiar: her Chinese friends, the missionaries, her parents, her home, her memories. The Nagasaki Maru carried her slowly down the Whangpoo River into the Yangtze River and onto the East China Sea. A week later she was settling into her spartan dormitory. Waves of homesickness pounded her like a churning surf. Ruth kept busy by day, but evenings were harder. She would bury her head in her pillow and cry herself to sleep, night after night, week after week. She fell ill, and in the infirmary she read through the Psalms, finding comfort in Psalm 27:10: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.” The hurt and fear and doubt persisted. Finally, in desperation, she went to her sister Rosa, also enrolled in Pyongyang. “I don’t know what to tell you to do,” Rosa replied matter-of-factly, “unless you take some verse and put your own name in it. See if that helps?” Ruth picked up her Bible and turned to a favorite chapter, Isaiah 53, and put her name in it: “But He was wounded for Ruth’s transgressions; by His stripes Ruth is healed.” Her heart leaped, and the healing began. —Selected 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.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Laymen's Evangelical Fellowship International 46200 West Ten Mile Road, Novi, MI
48374 |