“Converted and as little children”

“Jesus Christ the Saviour”

“And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call His name JESUS” (Luke 1:31).

Someone said, “Christmas has to be celebrated every day.” I don’t know if it is just an annual event to some of you. Don’t treat it like a heathen festival. What is the point of turning Christmas into just a commercial thing? As a matter of fact, there is such simplicity in the Christmas happening. The angel of God said to Mary: “Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call His name JESUS” (Luke 1:31). Here is Joseph to whom the angel said: “Fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 1:20). He gladly took her under his wings and he knew her not until Jesus was born.

My dear friends, this blows our minds. How can the Maker of Heaven and Earth put on Himself the form of a servant and come down to this earth for wretched sinners like us? What a Saviour! When men sinned and departed from the presence of God, God in His great wisdom planned this happening, saying: “I will send my own Son into the world to die for sinners, to rescue and redeem them from their sin.”

Many just go through the religious jargon and formality and nothing seems to come out of it. What is the use of following some ancient slokas? Life is full of problems. If you ask the little boys at school, you will find that some of them are already thinking of suicide. Oh, it is so sad! Or else, they try to find comfort in their computer games. With those games they shut themselves off even from their families. So often a mother is not able to talk to her little son. Modern life with all its pressures seems to separate us from our own family members. When the wife comes back from work, the husband goes off for night duty. Then comes a cleavage and conflict in the family and soon they run to a divorce court.

When you talk about Christmas, it is “unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” He is our Lord and Saviour. He does not give a little ticket to heaven. He becomes a Saviour. When do you need a Saviour? When you are drowning and you cry, “Will no one come and save me?” Of course, we don’t cry like that. We like to hide our sins and feel we are right on top. But the fact of the matter is that the richest men are very insecure. We need the Saviour, who says, “Lo, I am with you always.” I need this Saviour. Whoever you may be, you need this Saviour. We need to be saved from our troubled and divided heart.

In the first chapter of the New Testament, we read: “Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us” (Matthew 1:23). Yes, the Saviour came for you and me. Now that is Christmas, not for just a bunch of cakes and stuff. Alright, if you have them, eat them. God is not against you being happy with some cakes and other foodstuff. But of course to overeat and die is not the right thing. Emmanuel means, “God with us.” You can do without the nominal Christianity and you can do without this, that, or the other. But you cannot build a home, a peaceful family, without Jesus. Around the world I have not seen one rich man, or big man, building a happy, harmonious home without Jesus Christ.

Emmanuel—God with us! That is Christmas. Everything else is just a bunch of human celebration. In all the other celebrations, when the lights are off, and everything is finished, people would feel empty in their souls. But Jesus will never leave you empty. He will give you a cup that “runneth over”. He is love. Draw near to Him at this Christmas time and ask Him to forgive you. He will forgive you and give you a heart of love.

—Joshua Daniel

“Reality Check”

“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon His shoulder: and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6).

“Only a rose”

One day, a train pulled out of a city station with a tall, burly fellow handcuffed to a sheriff. He was of powerful build and tall, broad-shouldered and hard-visaged, well past his prime. The lines and scars of his iniquities were stamped on his soul and countenance. As the train came to a division point, the sheriff suggested that they step out on the platform and they paced back and forth.

Over on the other side of the platform, a little girl from a fine home in the community was walking with her mother. She was just a slip of a girl, protected, cherished, and tenderly raised.

The sight of the prisoner, pacing up and down that platform chained, touched her. He appeared to be unloved of a single soul in the wilderness of a cruel, cold world. In the impulse of an urge, born of a love as sweet as a rose, she plucked a flower from the bouquet in her mother’s corsage, crossed the space between them, and stood by the prisoner’s side. “If you please, Mister, I love you!—and God loves you too.” And she raced back to her mother’s side.

In the moment of vexation, the mother shook the little girl, but the glory in the child’s soul flushed her face and surged through her heart.

***

“Hard-boiled.” That was what the chaplain had heard about the penitentiary’s new prisoner when he found him in his cell. He found him, sitting on the edge of his bank with an open book in his hand. He was crying. The chaplain looked in and saw that the book was a Bible. Soon the lock was turned, the door opened for him, and he could enter the cell. He sat on the prisoner’s bedside.

“Friend, what are you reading?” he asked.

“Nothin’, chaplain, I ain’t readin’ nothin’. I was just lookin’.”

“What are you looking at?”

He opened the book, and there were the petals of a red rose, crushed between the leaves of the Bible. He said: “Chaplain, the little kid on the platform—just a little girl—she came runnin’ over, and she gave me that, and she says, ‘I loves yeh; and God loves yeh, too!’—and nobody ever talked to me like that before.”

A red rose, and the chaplain said it was the easiest thing in the world to lead that man to the foot of the Cross. Jesus came into him, and His body became the temple of the Holy Ghost.

***

Some time after this event, a visitor preached a sermon in the penitentiary. After dinner, he was invited to attend the Christian Endeavour meeting at the prison.

When the leader—the converted prisoner—came to the platform, the chaplain said: “I’m going to tell you that man’s history!” The leader appeared to measure every inch of six feet of regenerated manhood! Somehow, his appearance was outstanding! He stepped forward on the platform, looked the crowd in the eyes, and said “Glory to God!” in a tone as clear as a bell. Some few voices responded, “Amen.”

“Now we will sing … ‘Jesus Lover of my Soul’,” and the prison band struck up till you could hear the strains throughout the whole penitentiary. The jubilant song sounded out:

                Thou, O Christ, art all I want;
                More than all in Thee I find;
                Raise the fallen, cheer the faint,
                Heal the sick, and lead the blind.

The leader bowed his head in prayer, opened his Bible, and brought a message of salvation. After the service was over, the chaplain told the visitor his story. “That man,” he said, “has won more souls to Jesus than any chaplain we ever have had. He’s a power for God in this place.”

***

Can’t you see it now, the way of the world and the way of Christ? The same man (and yet not the same, because he became a new creation) was laid on the shelf while leading a criminal life but then radiated Christ’s glory in the prison. The man to whom Christ had spoken peace was rejoicing in His power to save—yes, to save to the uttermost!

“A Christmas miracle in China”

One day, it was the greatest miracle that ever happened to Brother Duan, and he would not have experienced it had his bus not broken down.

En route from a northern to a southern province of China in December, he happened to be passing through Henan province when the engine of the bus expired in its futile battle with the cold.

On a whim, Duan trudged off through the fields, leaving the other passengers huddled inside the bus. He was a house church leader in northern China. Now 77 years of age, he still had no home to call his own.

Truth is, he was deeply depressed. He was on his way to mediate a dispute among some leaders and was weary of all the infighting that seemed to be harming the house churches. And he was lonely.

As he crossed the frozen field, Duan thought longingly of his beloved wife, who died long ago. He wished she were alive to listen to him and give her sweet counsel. And then the thought came into his tired mind of his little son, and an even darker cloud settled over his heart.

He found a village and knocked on a door. A little cross was notched on the doorpost.

“Is there anyone here who loves the Lord?” he asked. “I would love some fellowship tonight.”

The door was opened by a man in his fifties, and Duan was warmly welcomed. His feet were washed in a basin—the custom of welcoming a stranger among the house church movement— and was fed hot congee and steaming vegetables.

He noticed that the people were all excited. It turned out that they would be travelling to a neighbouring town to hear a dynamic Bible teacher from one of the bigger cities.

“What’s his name?” asked Duan.

“Brother Wang.”

Life of giving

As they made their way to the meeting, they told him some of the stories about this mysterious Brother Wang. It was clear they loved him dearly, and one of the men explained why.

“We were once holding a training seminar here and heard the police were coming. Brother Wang got everyone out, except our main pastor. When the police arrived, Wang dared to bargain with them. He would go to jail if our pastor— whose wife was eight months pregnant—could go free. The policeman accepted his terms, and Brother Wang spent three years in prison.”

“How old is Brother Wang?” Duan asked. When told he was in his early 40s, Duan’s face showed great pain.

“What’s the matter?” he was asked. “Are you ill from the cart trip?”

“No, I'm not ill,” he replied, “just very sad. I once had a son, whom I knew for just two months. He’s dead now, but if alive he would have been 42 today.

“My wife called him the ‘Christmas Child’, since he was born at Christmas time. I called him ‘Isaac’, because we had despaired for so long of having a child.”

There was silence as they rode in the open cart under the stars. Brother Duan told the incredible story of how he and his wife had been evangelists in the 1950s. They refused to join the Three Self church [the church connected to the Communist government], and Wu, an old school bully, kept accusing them of political and criminal offenses. It was only a matter of time before they were jailed or killed, but what would happen to their boy?

One night, Duan’s wife heard a strong voice in a vision, saying, “Give your son to your enemy.” Knowing nothing about this, Duan read Genesis 22:2 the following morning: “Go get Isaac, your only son, the one you dearly love and sacrifice him to me.”

Sharing their impressions, the couple decided on a course of action that caused Duan to wince in pain every day since. They gave their boy to Wu and his wife— who were childless—even as Wu arranged for the couple’s arrest.

It wasn’t until 1978, when Duan was released from jail, that he learned what happened to his wife and son. She had died in the terrible famine of 1958, and his son had disappeared along with the Wu family under the rubble of a devastating earthquake in 1975. Said Duan sadly as the little cart approached the meeting place, “God judged me for being so irresponsible with my little son.”

“The God of the impossible”

“Behold I am the Lord ...: is there anything too hard for me?” (Jeremiah 32:27)
“Ah Lord God! … there is nothing too wonderful for thee” (Jeremiah 32:17).

The following story was written by Rosalind Goforth as one of the striking instances of how God, in His own wonderful way, can work out the seemingly impossible. She was a missionary in China who travelled with her family to different places helping to spread God’s Word.

“Returning home to our station from an unusually strenuous autumn’s touring, I planned as usual to give the month of December to the children’s sewing, so as to leave January largely free for a Bible women’s training class. But my health broke down, and I could make scarcely any headway with the thirty-five or forty garments which had to be made or fixed over, before the children returned to their school in Chefoo. By December 18 we decided to cancel the class on account of my ill-health; and to all the women, except one whom I entirely forgot, I sent word not to come.

“As the days passed, the burden of the almost untouched sewing became very great. At last I cried to the Lord to undertake for me. And how wonderfully He did! On December 28, when I was conducting the Chinese women's prayer meeting, I noticed in the audience Mrs. Lu, the very woman to whom I had forgotten to send word. She had come a long distance, with her little child, over rough mountain roads, so I felt very sorry for my thoughtlessness. Mrs. Lu accompanied me home, and I gave her money for a barrow on which to return the next day. I then sat down to the sewing machine. The woman stood beside me for a little, and then said:

“‘You are looking very tired, Mrs. Goforth; let me run the machine for you.”

“‘You!” I exclaimed, astonished. “Why, you don't know how.”

“‘Yes, I do,” she replied.

“She was so insistent that at last, in fear and trembling, I ventured to let her try—for I had only one needle. It took but a few moments to convince me she was a real expert at the machine. When I urged her to stay and help me, she replied that since the class was given up she would return home on the morrow.

“That night I was puzzled. Why should the Lord lead this woman to me—the only one, so far as we knew, who could do the machine work—and then permit her to leave? I could only lay the whole matter before the Lord, and trust Him to undertake. And again He answered. That night a fierce storm came on, lasting several days and making the roads quite impassable for a whole month, during which time I did not once need to sit down at the machine.”

***

“Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me” (Psalm 50:15).

Mrs. Goforth had to learn to trust the Lord. The following story relates to a time on furlough.

“[S]o weak was my faith that for months I never left home for a few days without dreading lest something should happen to the children during my absence. … But as the days and weeks and months passed, and all went well, I learned to trust.

“Be still; be strong today.”
But, Lord, tomorrow?
What of tomorrow, Lord?
Shall there be rest from toil,
Be truce from sorrow?
“Did I not die for thee?
Do not I live for thee?
Leave Me tomorrow.”

***

Mrs. Goforth had learned that the safest place was in the path of duty. Had she lived a life of ease or self-indulgence, she could not have been justified in expecting God to undertake for her in many matters—but she had stepped out into a life that meant trusting for everything, and He proved abundantly faithful.

—Rosalind Goforth, How I know God answers prayer

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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