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A faithful presence of love in the absences of our city.

O' Doyles Rule!

Believe &Perceive

This weeks sermon was a twofold scourge upon my conscience: in the first, we were shown how the Revelation of John for things to come points to a people so engrossed in their self-sufficiency that the thunder of heaven cannot turn their unrepentant hearts - how much like that are we? How much like that am I? 

I think of my son when his eyes alight upon something that he knows he should not touch, but the temptation is just too alluring. He begins excitedly running, and I warn him with an “Emerson…” He will pause, and look at me, then look at that temptation, ponder, then run again right at it. Again, “Emerson…” This time, the pause is less, and again he is running towards it and then at last touching it, grabbing the object of his desire. And then I am there quickly removing that object from his grasp, and reprimanding him, and I think, “how foolish?!” How much more foolish am I, as I thunder off the cliff of oblivion, clinging to my pride and the objects of my desire, shouting “O’Doyles rule!”

And if I am found wanting in my lack of repentance, how much more convicting is the second part of the sermon, wherein we are shown how the church will function as the witnesses against this callus unrepentance, finally bringing some to turn; but the witness is the witness of one who suffers and is martyred - a Paul, a Peter, an Adoniram Judson - a witness who suffers many little deaths in their own life such that the life of Christ might be more apparent. Am I willing to suffer for the sake of Christ, and for the witness of the church? Even a little?

Perhaps most poignant of all were the words from Ann Judson, the first of Adoniram’s wives, upon the death of her second child: “Our hearts were bound up with this child; we felt he was our earthly all, our only source of innocent recreation in this heathen land. But God saw it was necessary to remind us of our error, and to strip us of our only little all. O, may it not be vain that he has done it. May we so improve it that he will stay his hand and say ‘It is enough’.”

The power of these words is at once astoundingly inconceivable and simply right; it is almost as if she takes Paul’s words as true when he writes, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24). There is a world of difference between the Judsons’ view of witnessing and my own life, where every little inconvenience, or annoyance, or discomfort is a travesty and must be ameliorated immediately. 

Therefore, if this conviction is true, if we are driven to action because of the weight of these words upon our hearts, we must believe that the words are true. We must believe that the depth of sin and depravity of our hearts is far greater than we believe or perceive; we must believe that only by the sovereign and immense measure of God’s grace through the work of Christ’s death and resurrection and by the ongoing working upon our hearts by the Holy Spirit, we are indeed free from the chains of our own sinful self-imprisonment; and we must believe and perceive these truths so deeply and so vividly that we cannot help but to be moved to be the witnesses of these truths to the O’Doyles around us each and every day.

 

~ Josh Spare 

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