NOT A NEEDLE – A NAIL
“But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities. . .” Isaiah 53:5
God, being love, was bound by his very nature to create man and to create him free. Some then argue, ’God by making man free, must also accept the responsibility for man’s sin.’ Well he did. He accepted that responsibility and discharged it upon the cross.
An Italian painter has painted a picture of the cross in which the nails go through the wood into the hands of God, who stands behind it in the shadows. Every time I look at this picture I feel a tremendous sense of awe. An elderly Chinese scholar, hearing for the first time the story of a redeeming God, ran his fingers through his hair, turned to his neighbours, and said, ‘Didn’t I tell you there ought to be a God like that?’
Amy Carmichael was a well-known missionary to India who in 1901 began rescuing children, many of them forced into prostitution. Eventually she cared for over 1000 children. One girl, who resisted the spirit of the home founded at Dohnavur in southern India, caused Amy Carmichael great concern, and she did everything she could to persuade the girl to change. One day, she took the girl aside, bared her own arm, took a needle and said, ‘This is what your rebelliousness is doing to me.’ Then she plunged the needle into her arm so that the blood spurted out. As the girl saw the blood, she threw her arms around Amy’s neck and wept as if her heart would break. ‘I didn’t know you loved me like that’, she cried, and from that moment she was completely changed.
Deep down on the inside we all know that our sin has hurt God, but we did not see it clearly until we saw it at the cross. And it was not a needle that our sin drove into God’s heart. It was a nail.
O Father, now I see what my sin cost you. It cost a cross. As I gaze again at the cross, my heart responds as did that girl’s in India many years ago, and I cry out, ‘I didn’t know that you loved me like that.’ Thank you, Father. AMEN.
- Selwyn Hughes
MORE THOUGHT PROVOKERS:
To be glad instruments of God's love
in this imperfect world
is the service to which men are called,
and it forms a preparatory stage to this bliss
that awaits them in the perfected world,
the Kingdom of God.
- Albert Schweitzer
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It is far from easy to be a missioner. One has to live in a different culture, speak a different language, and get used to a different climate, all at great distances from those patterns of life which fit most comfortably. It is not surprising that, for many missioners, life is full of tension, frustration, confusion, anxiety, alienation, and loneliness.
Why do people become missioners? Why do they leave what is familiar and known to live in a milieu that is unfamiliar and unknown? This question has no simple answer. A desire to serve Christ unconditionally, an urge to help the poor, an intellectual interest in another culture, the attraction of adventure, a need to break away from family, a critical insight into the predicament of one's own country, a search for self-affirmation—all these and many other motives can be part of the making of a missioner. Long and arduous formation offers the opportunity for re-alignment and purification of these motives. A sincere desire to work in the service of Jesus Christ and his kingdom should become increasingly central in the mind and heart of a future missioner, although nobody can be expected to be totally altruistic.... The issue is not to have perfectly motivated missioners, but missioners who are willing to be purified again and again as they struggle to find their true vocation in life.
- Henri J. M. Nouwen
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Why all this apparatus of temples and meeting-houses
to save men from perdition in a world which is to come,
while never a helping hand stretched out
to save them from the inferno of their present life?
- William Booth
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Christianity for the first time made charity a rudimentary virtue....
It effected a complete revolution in this sphere,
by regarding the poor as the special representatives of the Christian Founder
and thus making the love of Christ
rather than the love of man the principle of charity.
- W.E.H. Lecky
