Chaff and Wheat
“The prophet that has a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that has my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord. Is not my word like a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?”
– Jeremiah 23:28-29
“So shall my word be that goes forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” – Isaiah 55:11
Last week I received an email from our national director in India:
Dear Pastor Cathcart,
Your visit to Hilgi Farm brought a presence of Our Lord in that area. Your talk touched many hearts, and now there is a regular Sunday worship service. A lot of villagers come for healing prayers .We have three pastors who take care of that area. We will be able to plant many churches in that area. This particular area was neglected by all major Christian churches. Instead, every one goes around to the main city and visits the members of other churches to promote joining their own particular church. Our aim is to reach where no one has reached.
John
Hilgi is a northern rural village which is ninety percent Hindu and ten percent Muslim. It is the place where John and Hilda Augustine have chosen to put a crop and fish farm. My daughter Victoria and I visited the farm during a trip to India in August 2011. After we inspected the crops, the storage sheds, the fish tanks and the water well with pump house, we sat down to listen to a rural Indian band and then to address a Hindu-Moslem audience complete with local officials. I had no idea that this was on the agenda or that I would be asked to speak. Speaking to this group of whom none were Christians was a challenge.
So what do you say? In situations like this, I simply look to the Lord for the quickening of the Holy Spirit. The scripture that came to me was the words of Paul in Acts 17:26. Paul was in Athens, Greece, on Mars Hill where Athenian philosophers and foreign visitors loved to hear or tell something new. The Epicurean and Stoic philosophers had already dismissed Paul as a babbler. So Paul started talking to them about the God they did not know. The specific words from this speech that came to me and on which I spoke were:
“And (God) hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation…”
Paul’s speech has commonly been judged a failure by generations of preachers because many Greeks mocked Paul and his speech, but some believed including one philosopher and a woman named Demaris.
The Holy Spirit is the preacher, not us.
I had a friend who invited an acquaintance to come to church and to hear a highly-recognized preacher. When the service was over, he asked the visitor what he thought of the sermon. The answer was it was “interesting, entertaining and informative.” However, the man was unchanged.
Contrast that account with a country-lady storekeeper in rural Scotland who told her pastor how much his sermon the previous Sunday had affected her. The minister thought she was not being truly sincere. To test her he said, “And just what was it I said that impressed you?” The lady responded, “I dinna ken (don’t know) the words, but I went home and took the false bottom out of my peck measure.”
The lesson here is it is not how well organized or impressive our words are, it is whether we are functioning as a human vehicle for the message and passion of the Holy Spirit.
By John G. Cathcart
www.wme.org
Constancy
“The only constant is change.” – Heraclitus of Ephesus
“Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art…”
from the poem “Bright Star” by John Keats
“Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw near, when you shall say, I have no pleasure in them… Or ever the silver cord is loosed, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.” – Ecclesiastes 12:1 & 6
I read an editorial in the newspaper recently that started out talking about Kodak filing for bankruptcy. I then thought about how Art Linkletter asked for the film concessions at Disneyland as payment for a favor he did Disney, and he said it was the most profitable little enterprise he had ever undertaken. I remembered when I heard a patent attorney discuss how the tradename “Kodak” was actually meaningless, but it had been pumped full of meaning by the filmmaker. Besides “Coke,” at one time Kodak was probably the most recognized name in the mind of the general public.
George Eastman revolutionized picture taking by his invention of the Box Brownie – I used to have one, and I loved that camera. Eastman did away with glass plates, emulsions and that whole mess, reducing the complexity of taking photos, and Kodak became king of the photo game for one hundred years. Years before Kodak’s invention, my grandfather would bring out his big wooden box camera mounted on an ornate, impressive looking wooden tripod, and he would cover his head with a large fabric cloth to look at an image on a plate before taking a time-lapse picture of our family yelling, “Hold that pose!”
This newspaper editorial on Kodak was strangely timely for me because I had been doing some spring-cleaning and had come upon a camera I had not used in years. Thinking back, I realized I bought it about thirty years ago. It came with a book called “The ABC’s of Picture Taking Ease.” They should have dropped the word “ease” and changed the title to “The Elements of Picture Taking” or better yet to “An Introduction to the Complexities of Photography.” The camera came in a beautiful but bulky carrying bag complete with flash attachment, telescopic lens and a miscellany of additional attachments, devices and batteries. The whole thing was remarkably heavy. What hurt me now was the fact it was a magnificent dinosaur that I did not want to part with. It used a 36-shot roll of Kodak film with little plastic containers to eliminate light. Armed with this magnificent device, I considered how I could take pictures in the field and bring them back to be developed, but how I could not monitor what picture I was taking or manipulate those pictures; and I realized, heartbreak of heartbreaks, the photos wouldn’t have the quality needed to use in our WME publications. Woe, woe, woe!
My shiny, impressive looking camera was a mute sermon on display. First, it testified that nothing lasts very long, let alone forever. The world is changing around us, and our personal world is changing day by day. Second, it says that one day things that are personally important, precious, valuable and modern will be insignificant, nostalgic, antique and outdated. Time tends to do that.
There are only two things in life that are constant. The first is change, and change makes our worlds irrelevant in due time. The second is Jesus who is the same yesterday, today and forever, and He makes us eternal treasures to God and others. As the saying goes, “Only one life, ’twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.”
By John G. Cathcart
www.wme.org
Homecoming 2012
“The burden of Dumah. He called to me out of Seir, ‘Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?’ The watchman said, ‘The morning cometh, and also the night: if you will inquire, then inquire: return, come.’” Isaiah 21:11-12
Dumah was the sixth son of Ishmael, and he founded an Arab community whose descendants gave their name to the capital of a district halfway across North Arabia betweenPalestineand South Babylonia (part of modernIraq). The name Dumah is also used figuratively for that nearer semi-desertlandofEdom. Seir is a mountain inEdomwhere Esau went to live.
The ancient prophecy of Isaiah quoted above is eerily relevant to our own day and time. The descendants of Isaac and Ishmael are still bitter enemies.PalestineandIraqare much in the news. Arabs and Jews are still at loggerheads; and indeed, so much so that their conflict threatens modern global peace and world stability. So if we are watching world news and American involvement within world events, the burden of Dumah is calling for our attention. And the location name of Seir emphasizes the historic fact that the root of this issue is a religious and spiritual one.
The words of the watchman that “the morning is coming, and also the night” remind us that things proceed in cycles with periods of light and periods of darkness in military, political and social affairs. Just as we pull out ofIraq, ancientPersiathreatens us in the Gulf.Pakistan, a former ally of sorts, is suddenly cold and alien. Morning is dawning, but night is approaching.
Recently, I have received emails from old friends in other countries which have made me realize how very worried and uncertain people are about their future in general and the year 2012 in particular. Even overseas, retirements have evaporated and employment is hard to find. To use some famous words, “The United States sneezes and the world catches a cold.”
But Isaiah’s words also remind us of the fact that the Lord’s ears are open to us if we truly want to seek Him, which in turn will lead us to understand what is taking place and where things are going. So Isaiah directs us, “If you want to make inquiry, then do so.” The Lord’s ear is not heavy so that it cannot hear, nor His arm shortened so that He cannot save.
However, it is not just a matter of looking for mental and factual understanding from the Lord; it is a matter of returning to the Lord and coming unto the only one who can say, “I will give you rest.” Politicians cannot give you rest, and the present Congress has proved it. World leaders cannot give you rest, and theMiddle Easttestifies to it. Bankers and money cannot give you security, and thousands of defunct IRA’s show it. Only Jesus can say, “Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.”
This year of 2012 can be your time to participate in the greatest of all “homecomings” – the homecoming to Him whom to know is life eternal.
By John G. Cathcart
www.wme.org
