Yet Will I Trust Him

This is where I begin to get myself into trouble, but stick with me on this one as I start to tell my story.

I have to go back to 1977. It was January and I had just stepped out of my homeland to go into missions. I was on a large team in Austria, just out of my teens, and I was shocked! So many from the United States on our very own team who came from broken families. Believing broken families. And they thought it was a normal problem. At that time I had never heard of Christians divorcing and I had never met any in my homeland. I hardly knew of any divorced people even among non-Christians at the time. I was appalled. And suddenly in absolute grief as to the state of the Church.

Now as a missionary I have an advantage. It’s this. I notice changes in my culture every time I come ‘home’ to the U.K. Changes that those who live here all the time do not necessarily notice. (Maybe those from the U.K. are shocked reading what I wrote about divorce in the previous paragraph. Yes, we too have changed).

One of the people I just loved listening to—whether or not I always believed (or remembered!) all that he was saying—was a man named Malcolm Muggeridge. I could listen to that voice and articulate speech all day speaking about the inside of a ping pong ball! A number of years ago, while discussing the decline in moral standards generally, undreamed of in the past, Muggeridge famously likened the cultural shifts and decline to “a hideous experiment involving frogs, who were put in a pan of cold water, gradually heated to the boiling point. The frogs died, but so gradual was the increasing heat applied that it never occurred to them to try to get out. And we are those frogs."

Example. In the 70s we used to talk about “living in sin”, but then we took the word ‘fornication’ out of our Bibles and replaced it in newer translations with ‘sexual immorality’—what is that, I mean we certainly aren’t that, are we? And so now it is unpopular and you will be ‘cancelled’ if you preach about this sin. And we frogs never noticed that in a couple of decades we have fornication rampant in our churches. “It’s just the way it is now”, I have heard said three times since coming home a year ago.

No, I am not talking about “good old days”, but look at what is happening in the Church. Do we need revival? Does this nation need an awakening? A move of God? I would say, “Yes, more than ever!”

Many of us look around at the Church and hear the repeated bad news of the latest scandal, and many are disillusioned (inside and outside the Church) that there is no apparent difference between the ways of the world and the ways of the Church. And then there’s sickness. Why are so many in Church battling this and that condition?

Let me quickly say, I am not going to harangue believers and non-believers about sin. This is no holier-than-thou post nor legalism. It is part of my journey though. The “world” in the Church has caused my heart to seek for something more. This was not what I was seeing in the Bible as promised to the believer.

Jesus has given us a Gospel, which means “good news” (derived from the Anglo Saxon ‘god-spell’, meaning ‘good story’). Yes, we know where we fail. But Jesus has given us a ‘good story’ to tell and it is about His grace that gives us the power to conquer sin and bondage in our lives.

But sometimes God has to speak us out of our religious confines and traditions, when we are faced with the un-kosher, as He says, “Rise Peter, kill and eat!” (Acts 10 story).  When we follow Him He often leads us into a (still biblical) new dimension of trusting Him. Is it scary? Yes. Abnormal? Sometimes. But, I don’t know about you, I signed up to follow this Guide to my death. I will leave the way and road He takes me down in His hands. “Though none go with me, still I will follow” With Job I say, “Even though He slay me, yet will I trust Him!”

And He’s not going to slay me. He has promised to “satisfy me with long life”. I’m just getting started. My youth is being renewed like the eagle’s. I will not die, but live and declare the works of the Lord. I’m so convinced about this that I told my daughters that If they hear of my demise, that they should not believe it but come and declare over my body that it is not time to go, that I have still a work to do and must rise.

Now I know you think I am crazy, but I’m in good company: “For whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we be sober, it is for your cause.” (2 Cor. 5:13).

I’m going to trust Him all the way home. Anyone else want to join me?

Is there something more to this life, to Church, to following Jesus? Well, it’s time for some good news. That is where our story takes us next and it means hope for this hopeless generation where the Living God is at work and it is just plainly exciting!