Class & Crass

“Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking smell: so does a little folly in him that is in reputation for wisdom and honor.”
- Ecclesiastes 10:1

“Let you speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer every man.” – Colossians 4:6

After the Japanese attacked British holdings in the Far East at the start of WWII, Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote the Japanese Ambassador to Britain saying, “…His Majesty’s Ambassador at Tokyo has been instructed to inform the Imperial Japanese Government in the name of His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom that a state of war exists between our two countries” Having so written, Churchill signed off, “I have the honor to be, with high consideration, Sir, Your obedient servant, Winston S. Churchill.” This old-world formality was too much for many who criticized Churchill for his flowery language. In his personal memoirs describing the war years, Winston Churchill commented about this letter, “Some people did not like this ceremonial style. But after all when you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.”

I think it was about 1975 when I realized Churchill’s England was no longer the land of civility. I had been invited to meetings about proprietary technology with the British Gas Council in London. While walking down a city street, I was made painfully and unpleasantly aware that targeted, crude and offensive behavior toward foreign visitors was replacing the former public good manners of England.

Nowadays, it’s not just in distant public places we see occasional crass and classless behavior; it has become standard fare on public broadcasts as panel members interrupt and shout each other down. Rush Limbaugh has furnished us with the latest example. I agree with Mr. Limbaugh that three thousand dollars per year of individual contraceptive care funded out of the public pocket is a questionable proposition. However, that can be said without referring to a young female law student as a slut and prostitute or suggesting she provide pictures of her sexual activity in return for funding. These comments cost Limbaugh sponsors and credibility. It wasn’t humorous – it was crude, crass and tasteless.

“Shock-jock” humor like that of Don Imus and Howard Stern has a finite life span. Eventually, it wears extremely thin. I noticed this year’s Academy Awards resorted to the classier style of Billy Crystal in place of the nasty verbal punch-in-the-gut-before-I-hand-you-the-mike stance of other emcees they considered.

Many years ago there was a man in the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Association with a reputation for the “gift of wisdom.” As this man was entering the crowded lobby of a convention center with entourage in tow, he deliberately engaged a young preacher in a conversation that he knew held some extreme doctrines. The man of wisdom decided to “de-horse” the youngster while demonstrating his wisdom and authority in public. The young man stayed calm and stuck quietly to his position. The “man of wisdom” became flustered, finally lost it and made a public spectacle of himself. When all was said and done, the young minister went on his way unruffled while the great man of wisdom started his descent into obscurity.

Being the smartest and/or most abrasive guy in the room can carry a very pricey cost. The press calls it a “Don Imus moment.”

Avoid the crass style so common in this day and age. Instead, remember how Jesus instructed us to conduct ourselves before all men: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

By John G. Cathcart
www.wme.org

One

“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, does not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost until he find it?  And when he hath found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And …comes home…”  Luke 15:4-6

“…I being in the way, the Lord led me …”   Genesis 24:27

Most of us want to know where we are going before we go. I personally think the thing that keeps many people from visiting the mission field is not knowing where they are going, or how to go about going or what they may find when they get there. Secular business schools teach us to define our goals and plot our critical path, which is the “mind of Greece” but not the “mind of Zion.”

God’s promise is the steps of a righteous man will be ordered of the Lord. Abraham went out not knowing where he was going. His servant Eleazar did not know how to go about looking for a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac, but “being in the way, the Lord met him.”

Because, like the TV commercial, we want to know before we go, we oftentimes don’t go. Rich Stearns of World Vision said that Christians have a huge hole in their lives, an emptiness that comes from ignoring the plight of the poor. How about you? Would you like to fill the void in your heart?

I have found in missions work that you have to be willing to go and look and learn before you really know what the real issues are and what the answers are to the underprivileged, struggling peoples of the world. Recently, I visited Kenya; when I returned, I put together a report on the great needs we confront there and a staged plan for dealing with them. One individual that I talked with said the issue was overwhelming and too much. However, as I was taught in the engineering world about mega-projects, there is only one way to eat an elephant – One mouthful at a time.     

Let me tell you about a major need in Kenya: It is the need to give a high school education to young people who graduate from state-supported elementary schools and then are otherwise stuck unless they have funds to pay for high school. Strangely, it costs $1,000 US dollars or less for tuition, room, and board for one child per year. The way I think of it is I can send a child through one year of high school for less than the difference between a coach and business class ticket on a one-way trip from the US to Kenya. It’s impossible to sit in a business class seat knowing that a little bit of physical comfort is at the expense of some child’s future. 

It seems the Lord is increasingly sending me young men and women who need help to get through high school, and I have several such requests. I know the Lord is speaking to me about this, but I need your help just like Abraham needed Eleazar. I also know if we start, WME will soon have its own high school.  

If something in this little inspirational touches your heart, would you consider taking one of these little lambs of God on your spiritual and financial shoulders and carrying that child to the sheepfold of the Lord Jesus Christ? If you are moved of the Lord to do this, we will see that you are directed through WME to a young person who desperately needs your help and support. It’s a four year commitment now- it’s an eternal reward hereafter.  

By John G. Cathcart
www.wme.org

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

A Christmas Twist

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart; and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths. Don’t be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and depart from evil.  It will be health to your navel, and marrow to your bones.”  Proverbs 3:5-8

Once again, we have come to the time of year when political correctness and social sensitivity reach a fever pitch lest someone do something in a public place that looks even remotely religious and offends some small but vocal group. The positions and directives issued by public schools about how to “properly” celebrate Christmas approach the truly ludicrous and make you wonder if these people have any sense of humor on one hand or an appropriate sense of embarrassment on the other. The founding principles of our nation such as not establishing a state religion have been twisted into removing all religion from public life – something the founding fathers never intended.

As I reflect on my past sixty-plus Christmas seasons in the United States, today I see a general public whose mind has been slowly but surely twisted about observing and practicing Christianity. Social engineers and special interest groups have been the architects of this shift. If nothing else, it should make us understand a little more how some good people of pre-WWII Germany could be so deceived and misled.

Now you might say that you could never be deceived or confused by twisted propaganda. Think not? Want to take a little test? Take a strip of paper about twelve to eighteen inches long and about two inches wide. Make a circle of the strip and count the number of edges and sides. You should count two each. Now, give one of the ends of the paper strip a twist and then join the two ends by gluing them together. After the glue dries, answer this question: How many edges and sides do you have? If you say two, you are wrong. Want to prove it?

Take a black marker and start drawing a line at any point in the middle of the strip and keep going until you are done. Now how many “sides” do you have? Mark the edge of the paper in the same way. How many edges do you have? It’s hard to acknowledge, but you can see now there is only one edge and one side.

Now, take a pair of scissors and start cutting the twisted strip down the middle into two parts. What you now have is a strip that is more “strung out.” Let’s see how good your “natural” understanding is. Make another twisted strip. What do you think you’ll get by cutting the strip into two parts when you instead start about one-third of the distance from one edge? You’ll see that one of your convoluted worlds just became “paranoid” and much smaller than the other. Could you see that coming before you did it? Want to try and put it back together?

The “thing” you just created is called a Mobius Strip by mathematicians. There is no inside or outside. There is no left or right. Most people confronting this phenomenon are totally confused by a little piece of blank paper.

What you have seen physically illustrates what happens in the moral and spiritual world when our frame of reference is given a little twist. There are no sides. There is no more inside or outside the “camp.” There is no left or right. There is no right or wrong. You’re OK, and I’m OK. Our worlds become twisted and intertwined systems.

So, if you don’t want your personal world to become complex and confused, don’t trust in your own understanding. Trust the Lord.  

By John G. Cathcart
www.wme.org

Identity

“I’m an A.S.S.B.G. – a sinner saved by grace.
And the Lord has gone to prepare for me a place.
John 3:16 is my knowledge, and the Bible is my college.
I’m an A.S.S.B.G. – a sinner saved by grace.”

- Elim Chorus Sheet, circa 1930′s

One of our WME board members was telling a story in chapel about an experience he had some years back while waiting for a flight leaving Washington, D.C., for New York City. The weather on the East Coast was not good, and his connecting flight was delayed. People began getting irritated. Other people began to get verbal, and still others got abusive. Finally, a man walked up to an airline agent standing behind the desk at their gate, and in a loud authoritative voice demanded, “Do you know who I am?” The agent looked at him and said, “Wait just a minute.” Then she quickly picked up the public address phone and said to the crowd, “There’s a man at the gate who doesn’t know who he is. Can anybody here help him?” Well, as you might guess, the people in chapel that heard this story just burst out laughing.

However, it’s not so funny when you meet grown adults with families who know their names and occupations, but don’t know who they are. I remember some years ago when I was a department head interviewing applicants for engineering positions at a company. One articulate, well-dressed man in his forties was talking to me about himself, his work history and his life. The impression he created was that of a professional who had his act together. Then, he became a little self-aware, and he told me he had reached the place in life when he was finally getting to know himself – who and what he was. It’s sad when a grown man in the middle of life is just beginning to find himself and develop a sense of identity.

There’s an old expression about being “middle-aged crazy” and the more clinical-type expression about someone having “a mid-life crisis.” I think many people live a life-pattern presented to them at some early point while they were growing up that they have followed without question. They may go to college, graduate, get a job, marry and have children; then one day, they wake up to find an empty nest, look at their partner and decide they don’t have much in common any more. As one personnel director in his fifties said to me, “We realized we had just grown apart.”

A few years ago I was invited to present a paper about early Pentecostalism to a mixed audience of Protestant ministers and Catholic priests at the Vatican. I referred to, and sang aloud, the little chorus above as an example of the simple and unsophisticated faith of Pentecostal believers in the early twentieth century. Those early Pentecostals knew who they were and what they were not. They may have had crippling sin problems from which they had been delivered, but those Pentecostals certainly had no identity problem. Psychologically, they were as solid as an anvil. 

It is commonly recognized that girls get their sense of worth and identity from their fathers. Girl or boy, man or woman, you can and should get your identity from your Father in Heaven. Then you’ll know who and what you are. Moreover, spiritual grown-ups tend to stay together when they truly share the Lord in common and continue to grow into Him together.

By John G. Cathcart
www.wme.org

Get Real!

“…for thy love is better than wine….draw me, we will run after you…we will be glad and rejoice in you, we will remember your love more than wine.” Song of Solomon 1:2&4

 The congregation was alive and singing with great enthusiasm. The atmosphere was electric. It was a Sunday morning. Everybody seemed to be up. This was a pastor’s, a song-leader’s and a musician’s dream; and I was leading the congregation in the song. Wow! It was GREAT! And I remember singing the chorus,

“I will rejoice in Thee and be glad.
I will extol Thy love more than wine.
Draw me after Thee and let us run together.
I will rejoice in Thee and be glad.”

I had just come back to the Lord after a long time away from the Lord’s service in the commercial and industrial world. I had been Vice President of Business Development with the second oldest engineering company in the United States with its headquarters at Manhattan Avenue in New York City. Our company had a prominent position in petroleum refining along with the conventions and celebrations that accompanied that world.

I had always loved the Lord even though I had strayed. I loved and studied the Word. I loved the church of Jesus Christ. I loved praising the Lord. And now I was back in the Lord’s ministry, singing His praises with these dear people.

And then it hit me. The people in the congregation didn’t have a clue as to what they were singing about. As they were singing I realized they had never indulged in wine. They wouldn’t have known a red from a white, a Chardonnay from a Cabernet. So what were they really singing that Sunday morning? “I will rejoice in You and be glad, I will extol your love more than something I have never indulged in, don’t like, and probably never will try or like?” And then it hit me. I told the congregation to sing the chorus again and this time put in a word in place of “wine” that really meant something to them. To my utter astonishment when we sang the chorus once more, the one word that I heard coming from the congregation above all others – “Chocolate.”

We all have issues and need deliverance from one thing or another. The good news is that Jesus Christ can deliver us so completely that no one ever knows we had a problem. I remember attending a Christian “retreat” in Acapulco, Mexico. I was in a group of men in the foyer and partially overhead something that laughing older businessmen said to each other. I asked what it was they had said and one of them said to me, “You wouldn’t understand; it’s too sophisticated for you.” I simply said to the Lord in my heart, “Thank You Lord for so delivering and purging me from the world that these men don’t even recognize the place I came from or and state I was in.” Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable grace and utter deliverance in my life. And based by own experience, I can tell you with certainty that you can be delivered also.

By John G. Cathcart
www.wme.org

Causes & Seasons

“…and [his eldest brother] Eliab’s anger was kindled against David, and he said, ‘Why did you come down here? And with whom have you left those few sheep in the wilderness?…’ And David said, ‘What have I now done? Is there not a cause?’”  – I Samuel 17:28-29 

“And as he [Paul] reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, Felix trembled, and answered, ‘Go your way for this time; when I have a convenient season, I will call for you.’” - Acts 24:25   

“Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.”  
 - “The Present Crisis” by James R. Lowell, protesting war with Mexico in 1845   

These words of Paul either were written when he was in prison in Palestine awaiting extradition to Rome during the time of the Procurator Felix or were written in prison in Rome before his execution. If written in Palestine, Paul was in a first-class detention. If written in Rome, Paul was probably chained over an open sewer in the company of rats. That is an extreme range of accommodations. Could Paul still affirm his claim that he had learned whatever state he was in therewith to be content?

It’s easy when reading Paul’s words to think in a one-sided fashion. The human brain is an interesting member of the physical body. Memory is very unreliable, and nothing is more unreliable than an eye witness. There is a story that one Scotland Yard detective said after interviewing witnesses, “As I see it, our suspect should be easy to find because he is a tall-short, white-black, heavy-thin person.” 

Memory has the ability to alter facts and to emphasize or de-emphasize either the good or the bad. As a pastor, I was impressed with the vastly different account of matters given by family members of varying ages concerning the same event. I remember one case involving a divorce where the older siblings brushed it off as part of life, while for the younger ones, it was a life-altering tragedy they could not seem to get over.

The problem with life is that if you want to go into what God has for you in the new, you have to dispense with the old. I think most people are ready to let go of the bad and the negative of the past and instead embrace the good ahead; but letting go of the good that is past is another issue. Good or bad, you cannot take hold on the new of the future if your memory life is stuck in the good or bad of the old.

Now if we could have been at Paul’s side with knowledge of the beheading that lay ahead for him, would we have encouraged him to embrace his future? Paul could let the good of the past go because the good of the future was better. As Paul put it, “Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.”

My father was a man who had remarkable success as a pioneering apostle in Australia and New Zealand. When the time came for his mandatory retirement, he left his organization and accepted the call of the Lord to the field of the world. He left the adulation and respect of the past to instead embrace the uncertainty and insecurity of the future. He left the good, knowing he couldn’t keep it, to go into a Canada and a United States that didn’t know him. He determined to leave everything to follow the Lord.

We have to realize that it is the high calling of God we are after, and not the recognition of men. So forget all the past and embrace the unknown when your opportunity comes, putting your trust in Him who alone is worthy.

By John G. Cathcart
http://www.wme.org

The Enemy of Revival

“But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.” Matthew 23:13  

“The enemy of the next revival is the last revival.” Pentecostal maxim

“By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,

Toiling up new Calv’ries ever with the cross that turns not back;

New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,

They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.”

– excerpt from the Christian hymn Once to Every Man and Nation

William P. Nicholson was called the Vulgar Evangelist. His is the name associated with the Great Irish Revival that possibly averted a civil war. Nicholson did things differently in ways that shocked people. Nicholson said:

“With some men it would seem, if they could control God’s operations and manipulate His actions they might tolerate a revival; but to allow God a free hand, fills them with righteous indignation and horror. If only God would consent to become an ‘ecclesiastic’ and respect their dignity and decorum and beautiful order of service and ways of running the Church, they might condescend to have a revival.”

When God moves in a fresh wave, He moves in a new way, and that new way is often offensive to us. When God’s word comes to us, we must often swallow hard because it defies our logic and mindsets. The crowd was offended when Jesus told them, “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you have no life in you.” They said, “This is a hard saying, and who can receive it?” Right then and there they either had to say, “Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief,” or they had to go with their logic.

Many years ago I heard a great sermon on Revelation 20:4 about the souls of those who were beheaded for Christ and had not the worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads. The evangelist didn’t approach this from the idea of physical martyrdom but from the viewpoint of men and women giving up their minds for the mind of Christ. It has been remarked that one of the recommendations in favor of certain formal denominationalism is that it doesn’t require you to check your head at the door. Maybe not, but if you come to the Lord He will change your way of thinking and doing things — You can rest assured your mental world will get shaken up big time. I remember as a boy some people who said they were willing to receive the Holy Spirit but not to speak in tongues. Many of them got a dose of tongues that lasted several days during which they couldn’t speak English.

It’s best not to tell God what is acceptable to you. If you want healing and deliverance, you have to be prepared for highly visible “dust and spittle” and a trip to wash it off; on the other hand, it beats being blind. Funeral homes are orderly and terminal; nurseries are messy but lively. Pick one!   

By John Cathcart
www.wme.org