Thanks be to God for the many thousands of lives of flawed saints who have gone before us.
God intends for us to peer into the past at saints who lived
before us to learn lessons, receive encouragement and be strengthened, through
their imperfect lives and ministries.
Hebrews 13:7 tells us
“Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you.
Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.”
Whether through the great hymns and the stories behind them,
writings about soldiers of the faith or most certainly through the Holy
Scriptures, God is using what has been written to empower what is to be done.
Psalm 102:18 says
“Let this be written for a future generation, that a people
not yet created may praise the LORD”
And further in Romans 15:4
“For everything that was written in the past was written to
teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we
might have hope.”
People we hear and read about can inspire us in two ways – they were
flawed like me, and like you, but those flaws give us great hope that God may
just use someone like us in spite of who we think we are and what we have done.
And UNLIKE me, they were great, or better said, they did
great things for the Lord. And, perhaps,
their greatness may encourage me and you, by His Spirit and for His Glory, to do
greater things than we may ever think possible!
I know you read the Scriptures – do you ever meditate on
what some of the flawed yet great characters were like? It is fascinating – they were ordinary, ill
prepared and often unwilling vessels until God really got hold of them - Abraham,
Moses, David or Paul are all great examples of this.
Or, do you ever read biographies of pillars of our faith, these saints from days of old,
people like William Tyndale, Andrew Fuller, William Carey, John Newton or
William Wilberforce?
Perhaps God is using this short lesson together to
urge us, to encourage us, to CHALLENGE us to learn from and then grow through
the life of a saint from days gone by, and in so doing, bring Himself glory and
us great riches!
Take for example, this short excerpt from John Piper's "Life as a Vapor" on the life of David
Brainerd who was a
"Missionary
to the American Indians in New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania. Born in Connecticut in 1718, he died of
tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine in 1747. Jonathan Edwards preached the
funeral sermon and published the diary which David had kept."
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By almost every standard known
to modern missionary boards, David Brainerd would have been rejected as a
missionary candidate. He was tubercular — died of that disease at twenty-nine
— and from his youth was frail and sickly. He never finished college, being
expelled from Yale for criticizing a professor and for his interest and
attendance in meetings of the "New Lights," a religious
organization. He was prone to be melancholy and despondent.
Yet this young man, who would
have been considered a real risk by any present-day mission board, became a
missionary to the American Indians and, in the most real sense, "the
pioneer of modern missionary work." Brainerd began his ministry with the
Indians in April, 1743, at Kannameek, New York, then ministered in Crossweeksung and
Cranberry (near Newark), New Jersey. These were the areas of his
greatest successes.
Brainerd's first journey to the
Forks of the Delaware
to reach that ferocious tribe resulted in a miracle of God that preserved his
life and revered him among the Indians as a "Prophet of God."
Encamped at the outskirts of the Indian settlement, Brainerd planned to enter
the Indian community the next morning to preach to them the Gospel of Christ.
Unknown to him, his every move was being watched by warriors who had been
sent out to kill him. F.W. Boreham recorded the incident:
But when the braves drew closer
to Brainerd's tent, they saw the paleface on his knees. And as he prayed,
suddenly a rattlesnake slipped to his side, lifted up its ugly head to
strike, flicked its forked tongue almost in his face, and then without any
apparent reason, glided swiftly away into the brushwood. "The Great
Spirit is with the paleface!" the Indians said; and thus they accorded
him a prophet's welcome.
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Now, once in awhile motivated, perhaps you do have
aspirations of doing great things for God.
But, then doubt creeps in and you lose strength. If that has happened to you, maybe you can
relate to this - sometimes, when I dare to think or even dream of ways to serve
my God – ways that are so big and great and awesome that it makes me tremble - that’s
when practical thinking takes over – sometimes through a well intentioned
brother or sister - a little voice of doubt telling me all the reasons why I
can not do something significant for God.
Yet, if we will just submit to Him and not to our own
strength, call on Him and not some wavering human courage, trust HIM and not
ourselves, then just may be He will answer as He did to this great servant of
the Lord.
John Paton felt this tug by God to step out of his comfort
zone and do something great for Him. By
the Holy Spirit, he was given the yearning and the passion and the courage to go
to un-reached tribes of the South Sea Islands
in 1856. For him, his “little voice”
was in fact another Christian brother who tried to discourage him from going. He found out important information about this
people group and felt compelled to tell his friend. And so with a sincere intention, he proceeded
to inform John Paton that the people group to whom he was going were cannibals,
and he said “you will be eaten by these cannibals!”
To this very sensible, practical warning, John Paton, filled
by the Spirit, trusting in the Lord and not in himself, realizing his life was
God’s life and not his own, responded by saying –
“Friend, your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave,
there to be eaten by worms; I confess to
you, that if I can but live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it
will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by cannibals or by worms; and in the Great Day my resurrection body
will arise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer.”
If stories of this type of holy abandon inspire you and you
want to continue to see how God has worked in the lives of past saints, may I
suggest checking out the internet (Amazon is a great source!) or a bookstore, or just search online under
Christian Biographies. You can also find resources at www.desiringgod.org
if you search on biographies.
And then, moved to action by the inspirational example of those who have gone before us, let us together
pray to live dangerous lives – lives that will drastically change the landscape
– lives that will do immeasurably more than we can even ask or imagine – so that
our great God may receive glory for what He has done and what He is still yet
to do in us!
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