subtitled 'the life of trust'
introduction
'what is meant by the prayer of faith?
..what is the significance of the passages both in the new testament and the old which refer to it?
what is the limit within which they may be safely received as a ground of practical reliance?
where these promises limited to prophetical or apostolical times;
or have they been left as a legacy to all believers until the end shall come?
somehow or other, these questions are seldom discussed either from the pulpit or the press.
i do not remember to have heard any of them distinctly treated of in a sermon.
i do not know of any work in which this subject is either theoretically explained
or practically enforced.
it really seems as if this portion of revelation
was, by common consent,
ignored in all our public teachings.
do not men believe that God means what He appears plainly to have asserted?
or, if we believe that He mans it, do we fear the charge of fanaticism
if we openly avow that we take Him at His word?
the public silence on this subject does not, however,
prevent a very frequent private inquiry in respect to it.
the thoughtful christian, when in his daily reading of the scriptures
he meets with any of those wonderful promises made to believing prayer,
often pauses to ask himself, what can these words mean?
can it be that God has made such promises as these TO ME
and to such men as i am?
have i really permission to commit all my little affairs to a God of infinite wisdom
believing that he will take charge of them and direct them
according to the promptings of boundless love and absolute omniscience?
is prayer really a power with God,
or is it merely an expedient by which our own piety may be cultivated?
is it not merely a power
(that is, a stated antecedent accompanied by the idea of causation),
but is it a transcendent power, accomplishing what no other power can, overruling all other agencies,
and rendering them subservient to its own wonderful efficiency?
i think there are few devout readers of the bible
to whom these questions are not frequently suggested.
we ask them, but we do not often wait for an answer.
these promises seem to us to be addressed either to a past or to a coming age,
but not to us , at the present day.
yet with such views as these the devout soul is not at all satisfied.
if an invaluable treasure is here reserved for the believer,
he asks, why should i not receive my portion of it?
he cannot doubt that God has in a remarkable manner, at various times,
answered his prayers;
why should He not always answer them?
and why should not the believer always draw near to God in full confidence
that he will do as He has said?
he may remember that the prayer which has been manifestly answered
was the offspring of deep humility, of conscious unworthiness,
of utter self negation and of simple and earnest reliance on the promises of God
through the mediation of Christ.
why should not his prayers be always of the same character?
with the apostles of old he pours out his soul in the petition, 'Lord, increase our faith'.
and yet it can scarcely be denied that the will of God
has been distinctly revealed on this subject.
the promises made to believing prayer are explicit, numerous and diversified.
if we take them in their simple and literal meaning
or if in fact we give to them any reasonable interpretation whatever,
they seem to be easily understood.
our difficulty seems to be this:
the promise is so 'exceeding reat' that we cannot conceive God really to mean
what He clearly appears to have revealed.
the blessing seems too vast for our comprehension;
we 'stagger at the promises, through unbelief',
and thus fail to secure the treasure which was purchased for us by Christ Jesus.
it may be appropriate for us to review some of the passages
which refer most directly to this subject:
'ASK, and it shall be given you;
SEEK, and you shall find;
KNOCK and it shall be opened unto you;
for EVERYONE that asketh receiveth,
and he that seeketh findeth
and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened. matt. 7.7-11
'if ye then, being evil, know haw to give good gifts unto your children,
how much more shall your heavenly Father
give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him. luke 11.13
'i say unto you that if two of you shall agree on earth
as touching anything that they shall ask,
it shall be done for them of My Father which is in heaven.
for where two or three are gathered together in My name,
there am I in the midst of them. matt. 18.19-20
Jesus answered and said unto them,
verily i say unto you,,
if ye have faith and doubt not,
ye shall not only do that which is done to the fig tree,
but also ye shall say to this mountain,
be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea,
and it shall be done. matt. 21. 21-2
the same promise, slightly varied in form, is found in the gospel of mark.
'HAVE FAITH IN GOD.
for verily i say unto you that whosoever shall say to this mountain,
be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea,
and shall not doubt in his heart,
but shall believe that those things which he hath said
shall come to pass,
he shall have whatever he saith.
therefore i say unto you,
whatsoever things ye desire,
when ye pray, believer that ye receive them and
ye shall have them.
now i do not pretend that we are obliged to receive these words literally.
unless, however, we believe the saviour to have spoken repeatedly on the same subject,
at random and with no definite meaning,
we must understand Him to have asserted that things impossible
by the ordinary laws of material causation are possible by faith in God.
i do not perceive, if we allow these words to have any meaning whatever,
that we can ascribe to them any other significance.
'verily I say unto you,
he that believeth in me, the works that i do shall he do also;
and greater works than these shall he do, because i go unto My Father. mark 11.22-4
and whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that I will do,
that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
if ye shall ask anything in my name I will do it. john 14.12-4
'the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man AVAILETH MUCH; james 5.16
that is, it is a real power, a positive energy.
the apostle illustrates what he means by availing prayer by the example of elias,
a man subject to like passions as we are:
'he prayed earnestly that it might not rain
and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months;
and he prayed again and the heavens gave rain
and the earth brought forth her fruit. v17-8
the conditions on which prayer will be heard are in various places specified,
but particularly in john 15.7
'if ye abide in me and My words abide in you,
ye shall ask what ye will
and it shall be done unto you.
that is, if i understand the passage,
prevalence in prayer is conditioned by the conformity of our souls to the will of god;
'if ye abide in me and my words abide in you.
on this condition and on this only,
may we ask what we will, with the assurance that it will be done unto us.
faith, in its most simple meaning,
is that temper of the mind in the creature
which responds to every revealed perfection of the creator.
just according to the degree in which this correspondence exists,
is the promise made that we shall have whatsoever we ask.
it is evident, from the eleventh of hebrews, that the views of the apostle paul concerning the faith
were entirely i harmony with the passages recited above.
he reviews the lives of the most eminent saints,
for the express purpose of showing that the impressive events in their history,
whether physical or moral, were controlled entirely by faith.
he sums up the whole in this remarkable language;
'and what shall i say more?
for the time would fail me to tell of those who THROUGH FAITH
subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness,
obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions,
quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword,
out of weakness were made strong,
waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens;
women received their dead raised to life again;
and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance,
that they might obtain a better resurrection.
we are, i think, taught by this passage that the apostle believed faith
to be a power capable of transcending and modifying every other agency,
by which changes became possible which to every other known power
were impossible.
we see that in this catalogue of the victories of faith he includes
the subjection of almost every form of what we call natural laws.
the whole passage seems an illustration of the meaning of our Lord,
when he says, 'if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed,
ye shall say to this sycamine tree,
be thou removed and planted in the midst of the sea
and it shall obey you.
it seems then apparent that the doctrine of the peculiar and wonderful power of
the prayer of faith
is as clearly revealed in the scriptures as any other doctrine.
it would seem evident, at any rate, from the passages just quoted,
that the apostle paul understood the teachings of our saviour to mean what they say.
form the general tenor of the scriptures i think we may learn two important truths:
first, that there is a certain state of mind in a devout soul to which God has
promised all that it asks, subject, however, as to the manner of the answer,
to the dictates of his infinite wisdom and goodness.
second, that in granting such petitions
He does not always limit His action within the ordinary
or acknowledged laws of matter or of mind.
i do not perceive how we can interpret the passages above cited,
as well as many others,
without giving them a meaning at least as extensive as this.
why is it , then, that this whole range of revealed truth has so generally been
looked upon as an unknown and unexplored region?
why should we limit either the goodness or the power of god
by our own knowledge of what we call the laws of nature?
why should we not admit that 'where are more things in heaven and earth
than are dreamed of in our philosophy'?
in a universe governed by moral law, why should not moral laws take precedence of all others?
why should we deny that there is a power in prayer to which we have not commonly attained?
we are straitened (put into difficulties) in ourselves and suppose that we are straitened in God.
we interpret the gracious promises of our most loving Father in heaven
by the rule of our own imperfect and unbelieving piety.
we ask for light from without, while the light can only come from a more elevated piety within.
we ask for examples of the effects of faith at the present day,
corresponding to those spoken of in the sacred scriptures.
thoughtful men acknowledge that there must be a meaning in these promises,
which they have not yet understood
and they see plainly that the kingdom of god
can never come with power until this prevalence in prayer shall have become
a matter of universal attainment;
and yet they dare hardly believe that god is
as good as He has revealed Himself to be.
there have, nevertheless, from time to time, occurred,
what plainly appear to be,
remarkable instances of answers to prayer.
many of them have faded from recollection,
with the generation in which they occurred;
those which are remembered, however, seem to teach us
the god is a living god now as truly as in times past.
the history of persecutions is always filled with remarkable answers to prayer.
the rescue of peter from the power of the Sanhedrin in one case
and from the power of herod in another,
has been a thousand times repeated in the history of the church of Christ.
the answer to prayer for divine direction
as to the time and manner of performing some christian service,
to which an individual has felt himself specially called,
has frequently been very remarkable.
the biographies of the early and of many of the later Friends
are replete with such instances.
any one who will read the edifying memoirs of
george fox, john woolman, william allen and stephen grellet,
will find what i have alluded to abundantly exemplified.
the well authenticated accounts of the late revivals in this country and in ireland
teach us that most remarkable instances of answers to prayer were of almost daily occurrence.
in the last century a single instance deserves particular remembrance;
it was the founding of franke's orphan house at hale.
it seemed to him to be a christian duty to attempt something for the relief of orphans
and he commenced the undertaking.
from time to time, as the number of applicants increased,
the means for their support was provided, in answer,
as he firmly believed, to fervent and unceasing prayer.
thus an extensive establishment was reared,
which has continued to the present day,
providing education and support for thousands of the poor and destitute,
and it has been for a century and a half one of
the most honored of the charitable institutions of the continent of europe.
the most remarkable instance of the efficacy of prayer with which i am acquainted,
is that recorded in the following pages.
it seems, in act, to be a practical illustration of the meaning
of those passages of scripture which i have already recited.
a young german christian, friendless and unknown,
is conscious of what he believes to be a call from the Lord
to attempt something for the benefit of the poor vagabond children of bristol.
he is at this time preaching the gospel to a small company of believers,
form whom, at his own suggestion, he receives no salary,
being supported day by day by the voluntary offerings of his brethren.
without the promise of aid from any being but God,
he commences his work.
in answer to prayer, funds are received as they are needed
and the attempt succeeds beyond his expectation.
after a few years he is led to believe that God has called him
to establish a house for the maintenance and education of orphans.
he was impelled to this effort,
not only from MOTIVES OF BENEVOLENCE
but from A DESIRE TO CONVINCE MEN THAT GOD IS A LIVING GOD,
as ready now as ever to answer prayer
and that, in the discharge of any duty to which he calls us,
we may implicitly rely upon his all sufficient aid in every emergency.
mr. muller was led to undertake this work in such a manner
that aid could not be expected from any being but god.
he did not of course expect God to create gold and silver
and put them into his hands. he knew, however, that God could
incline the hearts of men
to aid him,
and he believed,
if the thing that he attempted was of him,
that He would so incline them,
in answer to prayer,
as his necessities should require.
most men in making such as attempt would have
spread the case before the public,
employ agents to solicit in its behalf
and undertaken nothing until funds adequate to the success of the enterprise
had been already secured.
but mr. muller, true to his principles,
would do no such thing.
from the first day to the present moment he has
neither directly nor indirectly solicited
either of the public or of an individual a single penny.
as necessities arose he simply
laid his case before God
and asked of Him all that he needed
and the supply has always been seasonable and unfailing.
the conductors of benevolent enterprises generally consider it
important to publish
the names of donors,
appealing thus to what is considered
an innocent desire in man to
let our good deeds be known,
and thus also to stimulate others to do likewise.
ignoring every motive of this kind,
mr muller made it his rule to publish
the name of no contributor.
when the name was known to him, which, however, was not often the case,
he made a private acknowledgment;
while in his printed account he only made known the sum received and the date of its reception.
in this manner, forsaking every other reliance but god
and in childlike simplicity looking to him alone
for the supply of every want,
all that he needed was furnished as punctually as it,
in possessions of millions,
he had drawn from time to time on his banker.
thus has he continued from i think, the year 1834.
by degrees the establishment increased
and it was necessary to leave the hired houses in which the children had thus far been accommodated.
land was purchased and a building was erected in the vicinity of bristol.
this was soon filled to overflowing
and another building was demanded.
this was erected and it also was very soon filled.
these buildings were sufficient to accommodate 700 orphans.
at the present moment, a third building, larger than either,
is in the process of erection and is to be finished...summer..
when this shall be completed, accommodations will have been provided for 1150 orphans.
these expensive buildings have been erected;
the land has been purchased on which they stand;
this multitude of children has been clothed and fed and educated;
support and remuneration have been provided for all the necessary teachers and assistants,
and all this has been done by a man who is not worth a dollar.
he has never asked any one but God
for whatever they needed
and from the beginning they have never wanted a meal
nor have they ever allowed themselves to be in debt.
there seems in this to be something as remarkable
as if mr. muller had commanded a sycamine tree
to be removed and planted in the sea
and it had obeyed him.
but this is not all.
mr muller saw that there was a great demand
for copies of the holy scriptures,
both in great britain and on the continent
and he commenced the work of bible distribution.
this so rapidly extended itself that he was soon obliged to open in bristol a large bible house.
he believed that great good might be done by the circulation of religious tracts
and he has carried on this work extensively.
he was moved to make an attempt to aid and even to support
missionaries among the heathen,
as well as other good men, of various denominations, who,
with very inadequate means of living,
were preaching the gospel to the poor and destitute at home.
he BEGAN TO AID THEM AS their necessities CAME TO HIS KNOWLEDGE,
and now 100 such men are depending on him, wholly or in part, for support.
..he has asked the assistance of not a single individual.
he has asked no one but God,
and all his wants have been regularly supplied.
...the remuneration of all assistants is contingent on
the means received in answer to prayer.
when sacrifices are to be made,
they are all prompt to make them
and they do not expect an answer to prayer until they have contributed,
from their own scanty wages, whatever can be spared after providing for their actual necessities.
...to account for a fact is to refer it to some general law
whose existence is already established.
when it is therefore asked,
how shall these facts be accounted for?
we inquire, to what known law can they be referred?
they cannot certainly be referred to any known law of human action.
how would we decide if a similar case should occur in physics?
suppose a series of experiments should be made daily for twenty five years in chemistry or mechanics,
with the same invariable result,
and this result could be referred to no previously established law,
-to what conclusion should we arrive?
there could be but one conclusion,
in which all men of science would unite.
they would all declare that a new law had been discovered
and would modify their systems accordingly.
..we can refer these facts to no other law tan to that announced by the saviour
in His promise to answer
the prayer of faith.
...what god has done for them
we cannot doubt that,
under the same conditions,
He will do for
every other believing disciple of Christ.
Monday, September 23, 2013
Friday, September 20, 2013
9.20.2013 BOB PIERCE his personal world vision
pierce was the founder of World Vision mission organization. here he tells how that came about.
..'franklin, he began, the official records show that
World Vision was incorporated in 1950.
but in reality my own world vision form God
was sparked on that first trip..
'it was when i had a three day break before my next speaking engagement among university students.
with some other guys i'd taken off in an old battered army C47 war plane on a bumpy dirt field.
that C47 was one of the lousiest planes ever built,but the most reliable for its size and weight.
we always called it 'pregnant annie'.
..we landed in kunming in a desolate spot.
i got off with my camera and my gear and just stood there,
not a living soul in sight except the guys in the plane,
and they were ready to take off.
there was no activity, nothing but rusting pieces of an
aluminum hanger strewing the weed grown airstrip.
then along bounced and old discarded army jeep.
the stock driver had a radiant face.
she drove alongside and asked, 'you bob pierce?
yeah, i said.
i'm beth albert. my work is with lepers.
somebody got a wire that you were coming
and i'm the only one who could get away to meet you.
we don't know each other, but it's sure nice to have you.
i hopped in the jeep and she drove me to the china inland mission home.
we talked a little, and i learned that she, too, was from california.
i hadn't been there five minutes when a little chinese kid with a twisted leg
all bent and curved from malnutrition climbed into my lap and i held her,
thinking, poor little girl; where does she fit in here?
beth albert answered my unasked question.
she's mine.
oh so your married?
no, i just bought her two weeks ago.
you bought her! what d'you mean?
well, a mother came here. she had two other children,
and they were all starving;
so she wanted to sell one of them to save her from dying
and she wanted just two dollars for here.
so, to keep her from being sold to some evil man,
i borrowed two dollars and bought her. i knew then that i had met a very special christian.
it broke my heart to see this child who would have been sold to a sex pervert
if beth had not borrowed the money to save her from that fate.
she was just as committed to her lepers, i found.
the governor of kunming province was a military man
and in order to eliminate leprosy in the city,
he had ordered that his soldiers could shoot on sight
anyone showing the marks of leprosy,
as you would shoot a mad dog.
eight miles or so outside the city
the lepers could sit by the highway and beg,
their only means of survival.
so day after day beth walked that eight miles to a plot of land the authorities had set aside for lepers.
actually it was a graveyard;
the 'scenery' was a stack of coffins.
most of the one hundred twenty there had no shelter.
but resourceful beth scrounged among the debris left by the GI's:
rusting cans, anything she could salvage.
she taught those poor miserable people, many of them without fingers,
to form mud in the cans and then bake it into bricks in the hot sun.
when they had enough, she taught them to make crude little huts
to shelter them from the cold at night and from the hot sun in the daytime.
after a while they had a village of these little shelters
that housed a family or three or four adults.
beth had no help from the outside.
the offbeat mission that had sent her was not keeping faith with her.
until we began to support her, she was dependent on whatever
some kind missionary in the area felt led to give her.
mostly, though, she supported those lepers through sheer hard work and her own ingenuity.
through it all, she maintained the happiest spirits of anyone i ever met.
among those poor victims of the world's worst disease,
she was 'the merry heart that doeth good like a medicine'.
she loved the people and they loved her.
the week beth arrived, the last of the US officials and the US consul were leaving the city.
the consul's wife was so moved that beth was staying on with her lepers
when all the other americans were leaving that she asked
if there was anything she could do to help.
'could you get some chaulmoogra oil and some hypodermic needles? beth requested
and the lady did so
that day i visited i saw beth give 100 lepers their injection of chaulmoogra
(the traditional medication for leprosy until more effective methods of sulphatone
were discovered some years later).
this was the first time these lepers ever had anybody do anything for them.
they were the most radiant bunch and they all became christians
(not because of any theology.)
they asked beth, 'why are you doing this?
nobody ever did anything like this before.
and she said,
because i love Jesus
and He loves you.
He loves you so much He sent me to help you.
you are precious to God
and God knows you are beautiful.
He knows you are valuable,
He sent His Son to earth to die for you
so that you might be saved and
be in heaven with Him and
be in a wonderful place
and have a wonderful body.
He sent me to show you that He loves you
and i love you.
beth prayed with each one and taught them all
to sing hymns to her autoharp which she always carried with her.
i realized that no matter what her mission board did or did not do,
God made something out of beth albert
because SHE NEVER BACKED UP OR FLED from the danger
until the day the communists came and shot to death
the head of the china inland mission
and had given an edict that every missionary had until sundown
to get out of the area..
meantime, she had taught some helpers to give the injections;
she had squirrled away vials of the sulphatone in preparation
against the day she would have to leave her beloved patients,
and she had helped them to beautify their surroundings with flowers
and to grow their own food.
so, franklin, you see the kind of HUNDRED PERCENT MISSIONARY
God used to challenge me to a world vision?..
however, the Lord had other experiences for me!
the next day beth drove me in a borrowed jeep to see some others who were doing an impressive work,
four german sisters caring for 52 little blind kids whose parents,
when they found out their kids were blind,
threw them out to die.
and all through the war years when hitler forbade money
to be sent for missions, they had carried on.
while the GI's were in the country they helped.
somehow they could arrange that some blankets were 'mislaid';
a shipment of food unaccountably missing.
but when they left, these sisters were on their ow.
they had one sewing machine
and with it they made clothes for the coolies,
to eke out some income.
one of them owned a dentist's drill
and dressed in her mission garb,
we would go out on the street and do dental work to get a little money.
they scrubbed and cared for their poor little blind charges.
i prayed with these kids and did my little youth for Christ songs
and though they didn't understand a word of what i sang,
and they could not see what i looked like,
still they were fascinated because i was a kind of new sound to them.
they could neither see nor understand,but something in my voice
must have said to them that somebody else loved them.
you can imagine that after being there about three days and seeing all this,
i'd go to bed at night and say
'God, i am not doing anything for anybody.
here are these little people without any help at all.
they don't have anybody and they don't have anything
and You are helping them and they are doing something and it makes a difference.
these little blind children are being helped and these lonely unlovely lepers.
oh God, here i am JUST MAKING SPEECHES.
i haven't got any money, but they need money.
everybody i've seen here needs money.
beth albert and these others literally burning up their bodies
to take care of these little ones and the suffering ones
and they haven't got anything.
I CAN'T STAND IT.
i can't give them anything and they need everything.
what am i supposed to do, Lord?
and God said to me, 'just shoot your pictures then tell some flok about it.
well, i shot all the film i had.
fortunately, somebody had given andrew gih, my interpreter,
one of the early 16 mm movie cameras,
and he let me use it.
but still, franklin, i couldn't get the picture of these kids and the lepers out of my mind.
beth had nudged me a bit when she asked, 'bob, can you do something for these children?
of course i knew i was powerless to do anything about so many-52 of them!
but why wouldn't the Lord let me have peace?
i went on to my appointment in the city of amoy
where i was booked to speak in their famous university.
and nearby, on an offshore little island,
the dutch reformed church had a school for girls and a hospital.
one of the staff, a homey dutch american missionary from grand rapids,
invited me to speak to their girls,
'we have 400, she explained,
and told me it would take me just 15 minutes in a sampan to get there.
'will you come each morning while you're here? she asked,
and added 'maybe you can lead some of our girls to Jesus.
so for four days, i went out there.
the missionary, tena hoe had heard the simple way in which i taught the university students
and she wanted me to do the same for the children.
in the simplest language i knew i told them who Jesus is and how God loves them;
that there's not many, but just one God.
He took the form of an earthly man, Jesus
and gave His life to bear the punishment for any sins they had ever committed.
i told them of the wonderful place he has gone to prepare for those who love Him.
a place where there will be no tears and
where everything is just and pure and good.
then i gave an invitation to any of them who wanted to know this Jesus and to live for Him.
..well, when i came to the mission school the next morning,
tena met me with a little girl in her arms.
the child's back was bleeding from the caning her father had given here when she went home and announced that she was a christian,
and she was going to live for the one true God.
and tena didn't say as beth had, 'can you do anything for her?
oh, no! she just threw that little girl right into my arms and lashed out at me.
for one thing, she was dutch reformed
and while she was very concerned that her girls hear the gospel,
she wasn't one for open invitations or altar calls.
and worse, i'd gone ahead and done it as if i were home in the states!
and this little kid had not only come forward but she'd gone home and told her father.
who was incensed because that by turning to Christ she had dishonored his ancestors.
tena was breathing fire!
YOU told this poor little girl to do that, she stormed.
now YOU take care of her.
she listened to YOU, she believed what YOU told her and she obeyed God.
now look at what it's costing her!
she stood there like a general wiping out an ignorant private
who had dared to do something without an order.
and don't you dare think you can walk off this island without doing something for her.
me? i've got six other little kinds already sharing my rice bowl.
now here you've given me one more, bob pierce.
if you think you can preach liked you did and teach your message and
then walk off and leave this little girl
-well, you're wrong.
now, tell me, what ARE you going to do about here?
(not 'can you'; she gave me no option, nor did i want one).
i stood there with that child in my arms.
tears were running down her cheeks.
she was scared to death, so insecure she was shaking in my arms.
he was heavy and my arms were getting tired.
i was shaken to the core.
i had never had such an experience.
nobody had ever challenged the practicality of what i preached!
i had never been held accountable for any CONSEQUENCES of my message.
now here i was faced with, 'is what i say TRUE?
is there any responsibility involved?
believe me, you do some thinking at a moment like that.
i looked down at the frightened child in my arms
and i saw tena standing there waiting for my answer.
i gulped and said, 'i'm not about to run away.
but you know that i'm here without any money.
all i've got in my pocket is five dollars.
that's fine, she said, you do have your return ticked?
yeah, i have that, but-
never mind the buts. just let me have that five dollars. that'll be fine.
what d'you MEAN, tena, i gasped, by 'just fine'?
she gave me a penetrating look and almost spat out,
'i mean YOU ARE GOING TO TAKE CARE OF THIS CHILD; that's what i mean.'
okay, okay-but what will a measly five dollars do?
here's what it'll do, she said in a sergeant major voice.
it will buy rice for us all for right now;
it will get cloth so she can have another dress and i can wash that one
-she pointed to the bloodstained dress on the poor little kid,
and it will buy a slate for her for school.
that's just the beginning, bob pierce.
you will send me five dollars every month.
i'll let here sleep in the kitchen like my other six do
and i promise you i'll take care of her,'
and i knew she was the kind of woman who meant every word she said.
i looked tena straight in the eye and said, , 'i will.
then i opened my bible and took out my pen and wrote her name in my bible.
..but there it was, an indelible record that i had made a commitment to God to care for one child.
..'i didn't know it at the time, franklin,
but in the real, practical sense, World Vision WAS BORN THAT DAY.
..it was never in my mind that world vision would be anything other than supportive..
a purely back up relationship between those out on the front
and a means of supplying some of the wherewithal to get the job done.
that and no more was my intent.
the only measurement, franklin, i had in assessing what we should be involved in was
'is this something Jesus would do?
something God would want done?
ultimately it boiled down to something i wrote in my bible on kojedo island:
LET MY HEART BE BROKEN WITH THE THINGS THAT BREAK THE HEART OF GOD.'
83 'one way to guard against slipping from our God Room moorings, franklin,
i by never, verver accepting aid from the government;
no grants from any government.
'who pays the piper, calls the tune', you know...
84... franklin, you can be prepared to have some well meaning folk ask the question,
'if the most important thing in the wold is getting people saved,
why are you so involved in spending time and money
for food and clothing and sick people and orphans?
this always brings to my mind lil dickson, that heroic missionary in taiwan.
lil had two answers for that question.
someone would challenge her, 'if your're here as a missionary,
why are you taking care of orphans and giving clothers to these mountain people?
you should be busy GIVING OUT TRACTS.
lil would reply, 'I MUST FIRST MEET THEIR IMMEDIATE NEEDS,
THEN I CAN MEET THEIR GREATEST NEED.'
..that was her first answer.
her second, and maybe it should be our first, was
that JESUS COMMANDS US to feed the hungry, care for the widow and orphan, heal the sick, cleanse the leper,
prepare a portion for whom nothing has been prepared.
there's no honest way around this, franklin.
i don't want someone tellin' me what the greek says
and expecting me to had out tracts to people who can't read yet
or who are too cold and hungry to care about a tract.
it takes both- showing the compassion Jesus showed and giving them the simple gospel.
i've found that before we can hammer home even the heart of the gospel, john 3.16,
the FACT of God's love has to be driven home by a demonstration of love.
here's something i've proven:
almost all heathen cultures absolutely cannot fathom or comprehend
a total nonrealtive doing something for them
-an act that's wholly unselfish and done to meet their need or alleviate their suffering.
from an interview of bob, near the end of his life, by pat robertson
...'why would you think of going to BHUTAN? my doctor asks.
you know it's loaded with infection.
you can't get pure water to drink-
'why am i going? i said,
i'm going because i don't want to go to heaven from some modern hospital.
iwould rather have three active months serving the Lord
than have two years lying someplace wishing i was someplace else.
you say it's a considered risk.
except, as far as i am concerned, there isn't any risk.
the worst that can happen to me is the BEST- I WOULD GO TO HEAVEN.
161 DR. BOB CONTINUED, 'now here was a man who, on the one hand,
wrote the systematic theology for the korean church (a brain among brains)
and on the other hand just coldn't stand by to see a kid with nothing but a twig to write with.
he just had to get these children indoors, persuade pastors to let the kids sit in the church-
even if they did mess it up a it
-and get an education.
do you know what this makes me think of, franklin, he said,
SO MANY OF US DO NOTHING BECAUSE WE CAN'T DO EVERYTHING.
fran kinsler couldn't give all the children in knorea a grammar school education;
so he did what he could do.
and before he knew it, there were 72,000 children being taught....
171..the afghanistan lamb
there's nothing like being in eastern countries for bringing to life the stories Jesus told.
here dr. bob and dr. christy wilson of afghanistan talk over the story of the lambs.
it was 1961 and there was still a protestant church in kabul, the capital...
b-christy, you've just let me listen on your little tape recorder to an afgahan shepherd calling his sheep.
c afghan sheep are not your ordinary flock, bob.
their skin is prized, for they're a special breed;
the fur is expensive because it's taken from newborn lambs.
the skin is small; therefore, it can take 30 to 40 to make a lady's coat. it's called karakul.
b well, i know it's beautiful, but what a shame that it costs the lives of little lambs..
c i know. i've often thought that myself.
in fact, it was because of the story Jesus told that i went in search of a lamb
and was able to record the shepherd calling his flock.
one of my teachers for the little sunday school that meets in our home asked me if i could possibly get a little lamb so that she could have it to illustrate the lesson.
so i started off and 'way up in the mountains i located a shepherd who had a little lamb in his arms.
he had a large flock and that lamb had just been born that very day.
it was pure white and i thought ,
what a wonderful illustration of isaiah 1.18...though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be a white as snow;
though they be red like crimson, they shall e as wool.
that's the kind of wool the prophet was speaking about.
b sop did you buy this laittle lam , christy?
s when i asked the shepherd, he said, you can't buy the lamb without its mother, so we started bargaining as to the cost.
in the meantime, his main flock had wandered off some three hundred yards.
that's when he made these strange sounds i recorded.
of course, i didn't keep my recorder at the ready so i had to ask him if he'd call his sheep again so i could get the sound on my tape.
he demurred at that.
and he explained, if i call them agin, they'll all crowd around because they were already close from hearing my first call.
it just made the bible live for me, bob; in this country we constantly observe thingss that look as if they are taken right out of the new testament.
these sheep did know that shepherd's voice-
the special sound he made when calling them to him.
i said to him, what if someone else makes those strange sounds, weill your sheep come?
he laughed and answered, 'oh, NO they won't follow anyone else; only me.
i could tell he was speaking the truth, for theree were other shepherds and sheep around;
none of the other sheep made a move when he called.
b do the other shepherds use similar sounds?
c yes, the sounds are similar, yet the sheep know the particular shepherd's voice
-and they won't respond or follow another shepherd.
they'll only go to their own shephered.
b then the tenth chapter of john in really, literally true.
do you suppose that the occasion for Jesus using the lamb illustration was that there were sheep and lambs around at that time?
c i would't doubt it for a minute.
for instance, when john the baptist proclaimed, 'behold the lamb of God',
it was near passover season
and that time the shepherds would be driving their lambs across the fords of jordan to be sold for a sacrifice.
the 'lamb of god who taketh away the sin of the world' was righ in their midst!
b if i remember rightly, don't the muslims still sacrifice lambssas the did in the temple dayhsL c that's right
..'franklin, he began, the official records show that
World Vision was incorporated in 1950.
but in reality my own world vision form God
was sparked on that first trip..
'it was when i had a three day break before my next speaking engagement among university students.
with some other guys i'd taken off in an old battered army C47 war plane on a bumpy dirt field.
that C47 was one of the lousiest planes ever built,but the most reliable for its size and weight.
we always called it 'pregnant annie'.
..we landed in kunming in a desolate spot.
i got off with my camera and my gear and just stood there,
not a living soul in sight except the guys in the plane,
and they were ready to take off.
there was no activity, nothing but rusting pieces of an
aluminum hanger strewing the weed grown airstrip.
then along bounced and old discarded army jeep.
the stock driver had a radiant face.
she drove alongside and asked, 'you bob pierce?
yeah, i said.
i'm beth albert. my work is with lepers.
somebody got a wire that you were coming
and i'm the only one who could get away to meet you.
we don't know each other, but it's sure nice to have you.
i hopped in the jeep and she drove me to the china inland mission home.
we talked a little, and i learned that she, too, was from california.
i hadn't been there five minutes when a little chinese kid with a twisted leg
all bent and curved from malnutrition climbed into my lap and i held her,
thinking, poor little girl; where does she fit in here?
beth albert answered my unasked question.
she's mine.
oh so your married?
no, i just bought her two weeks ago.
you bought her! what d'you mean?
well, a mother came here. she had two other children,
and they were all starving;
so she wanted to sell one of them to save her from dying
and she wanted just two dollars for here.
so, to keep her from being sold to some evil man,
i borrowed two dollars and bought her. i knew then that i had met a very special christian.
it broke my heart to see this child who would have been sold to a sex pervert
if beth had not borrowed the money to save her from that fate.
she was just as committed to her lepers, i found.
the governor of kunming province was a military man
and in order to eliminate leprosy in the city,
he had ordered that his soldiers could shoot on sight
anyone showing the marks of leprosy,
as you would shoot a mad dog.
eight miles or so outside the city
the lepers could sit by the highway and beg,
their only means of survival.
so day after day beth walked that eight miles to a plot of land the authorities had set aside for lepers.
actually it was a graveyard;
the 'scenery' was a stack of coffins.
most of the one hundred twenty there had no shelter.
but resourceful beth scrounged among the debris left by the GI's:
rusting cans, anything she could salvage.
she taught those poor miserable people, many of them without fingers,
to form mud in the cans and then bake it into bricks in the hot sun.
when they had enough, she taught them to make crude little huts
to shelter them from the cold at night and from the hot sun in the daytime.
after a while they had a village of these little shelters
that housed a family or three or four adults.
beth had no help from the outside.
the offbeat mission that had sent her was not keeping faith with her.
until we began to support her, she was dependent on whatever
some kind missionary in the area felt led to give her.
mostly, though, she supported those lepers through sheer hard work and her own ingenuity.
through it all, she maintained the happiest spirits of anyone i ever met.
among those poor victims of the world's worst disease,
she was 'the merry heart that doeth good like a medicine'.
she loved the people and they loved her.
the week beth arrived, the last of the US officials and the US consul were leaving the city.
the consul's wife was so moved that beth was staying on with her lepers
when all the other americans were leaving that she asked
if there was anything she could do to help.
'could you get some chaulmoogra oil and some hypodermic needles? beth requested
and the lady did so
that day i visited i saw beth give 100 lepers their injection of chaulmoogra
(the traditional medication for leprosy until more effective methods of sulphatone
were discovered some years later).
this was the first time these lepers ever had anybody do anything for them.
they were the most radiant bunch and they all became christians
(not because of any theology.)
they asked beth, 'why are you doing this?
nobody ever did anything like this before.
and she said,
because i love Jesus
and He loves you.
He loves you so much He sent me to help you.
you are precious to God
and God knows you are beautiful.
He knows you are valuable,
He sent His Son to earth to die for you
so that you might be saved and
be in heaven with Him and
be in a wonderful place
and have a wonderful body.
He sent me to show you that He loves you
and i love you.
beth prayed with each one and taught them all
to sing hymns to her autoharp which she always carried with her.
i realized that no matter what her mission board did or did not do,
God made something out of beth albert
because SHE NEVER BACKED UP OR FLED from the danger
until the day the communists came and shot to death
the head of the china inland mission
and had given an edict that every missionary had until sundown
to get out of the area..
meantime, she had taught some helpers to give the injections;
she had squirrled away vials of the sulphatone in preparation
against the day she would have to leave her beloved patients,
and she had helped them to beautify their surroundings with flowers
and to grow their own food.
so, franklin, you see the kind of HUNDRED PERCENT MISSIONARY
God used to challenge me to a world vision?..
however, the Lord had other experiences for me!
the next day beth drove me in a borrowed jeep to see some others who were doing an impressive work,
four german sisters caring for 52 little blind kids whose parents,
when they found out their kids were blind,
threw them out to die.
and all through the war years when hitler forbade money
to be sent for missions, they had carried on.
while the GI's were in the country they helped.
somehow they could arrange that some blankets were 'mislaid';
a shipment of food unaccountably missing.
but when they left, these sisters were on their ow.
they had one sewing machine
and with it they made clothes for the coolies,
to eke out some income.
one of them owned a dentist's drill
and dressed in her mission garb,
we would go out on the street and do dental work to get a little money.
they scrubbed and cared for their poor little blind charges.
i prayed with these kids and did my little youth for Christ songs
and though they didn't understand a word of what i sang,
and they could not see what i looked like,
still they were fascinated because i was a kind of new sound to them.
they could neither see nor understand,but something in my voice
must have said to them that somebody else loved them.
you can imagine that after being there about three days and seeing all this,
i'd go to bed at night and say
'God, i am not doing anything for anybody.
here are these little people without any help at all.
they don't have anybody and they don't have anything
and You are helping them and they are doing something and it makes a difference.
these little blind children are being helped and these lonely unlovely lepers.
oh God, here i am JUST MAKING SPEECHES.
i haven't got any money, but they need money.
everybody i've seen here needs money.
beth albert and these others literally burning up their bodies
to take care of these little ones and the suffering ones
and they haven't got anything.
I CAN'T STAND IT.
i can't give them anything and they need everything.
what am i supposed to do, Lord?
and God said to me, 'just shoot your pictures then tell some flok about it.
well, i shot all the film i had.
fortunately, somebody had given andrew gih, my interpreter,
one of the early 16 mm movie cameras,
and he let me use it.
but still, franklin, i couldn't get the picture of these kids and the lepers out of my mind.
beth had nudged me a bit when she asked, 'bob, can you do something for these children?
of course i knew i was powerless to do anything about so many-52 of them!
but why wouldn't the Lord let me have peace?
i went on to my appointment in the city of amoy
where i was booked to speak in their famous university.
and nearby, on an offshore little island,
the dutch reformed church had a school for girls and a hospital.
one of the staff, a homey dutch american missionary from grand rapids,
invited me to speak to their girls,
'we have 400, she explained,
and told me it would take me just 15 minutes in a sampan to get there.
'will you come each morning while you're here? she asked,
and added 'maybe you can lead some of our girls to Jesus.
so for four days, i went out there.
the missionary, tena hoe had heard the simple way in which i taught the university students
and she wanted me to do the same for the children.
in the simplest language i knew i told them who Jesus is and how God loves them;
that there's not many, but just one God.
He took the form of an earthly man, Jesus
and gave His life to bear the punishment for any sins they had ever committed.
i told them of the wonderful place he has gone to prepare for those who love Him.
a place where there will be no tears and
where everything is just and pure and good.
then i gave an invitation to any of them who wanted to know this Jesus and to live for Him.
..well, when i came to the mission school the next morning,
tena met me with a little girl in her arms.
the child's back was bleeding from the caning her father had given here when she went home and announced that she was a christian,
and she was going to live for the one true God.
and tena didn't say as beth had, 'can you do anything for her?
oh, no! she just threw that little girl right into my arms and lashed out at me.
for one thing, she was dutch reformed
and while she was very concerned that her girls hear the gospel,
she wasn't one for open invitations or altar calls.
and worse, i'd gone ahead and done it as if i were home in the states!
and this little kid had not only come forward but she'd gone home and told her father.
who was incensed because that by turning to Christ she had dishonored his ancestors.
tena was breathing fire!
YOU told this poor little girl to do that, she stormed.
now YOU take care of her.
she listened to YOU, she believed what YOU told her and she obeyed God.
now look at what it's costing her!
she stood there like a general wiping out an ignorant private
who had dared to do something without an order.
and don't you dare think you can walk off this island without doing something for her.
me? i've got six other little kinds already sharing my rice bowl.
now here you've given me one more, bob pierce.
if you think you can preach liked you did and teach your message and
then walk off and leave this little girl
-well, you're wrong.
now, tell me, what ARE you going to do about here?
(not 'can you'; she gave me no option, nor did i want one).
i stood there with that child in my arms.
tears were running down her cheeks.
she was scared to death, so insecure she was shaking in my arms.
he was heavy and my arms were getting tired.
i was shaken to the core.
i had never had such an experience.
nobody had ever challenged the practicality of what i preached!
i had never been held accountable for any CONSEQUENCES of my message.
now here i was faced with, 'is what i say TRUE?
is there any responsibility involved?
believe me, you do some thinking at a moment like that.
i looked down at the frightened child in my arms
and i saw tena standing there waiting for my answer.
i gulped and said, 'i'm not about to run away.
but you know that i'm here without any money.
all i've got in my pocket is five dollars.
that's fine, she said, you do have your return ticked?
yeah, i have that, but-
never mind the buts. just let me have that five dollars. that'll be fine.
what d'you MEAN, tena, i gasped, by 'just fine'?
she gave me a penetrating look and almost spat out,
'i mean YOU ARE GOING TO TAKE CARE OF THIS CHILD; that's what i mean.'
okay, okay-but what will a measly five dollars do?
here's what it'll do, she said in a sergeant major voice.
it will buy rice for us all for right now;
it will get cloth so she can have another dress and i can wash that one
-she pointed to the bloodstained dress on the poor little kid,
and it will buy a slate for her for school.
that's just the beginning, bob pierce.
you will send me five dollars every month.
i'll let here sleep in the kitchen like my other six do
and i promise you i'll take care of her,'
and i knew she was the kind of woman who meant every word she said.
i looked tena straight in the eye and said, , 'i will.
then i opened my bible and took out my pen and wrote her name in my bible.
..but there it was, an indelible record that i had made a commitment to God to care for one child.
..'i didn't know it at the time, franklin,
but in the real, practical sense, World Vision WAS BORN THAT DAY.
..it was never in my mind that world vision would be anything other than supportive..
a purely back up relationship between those out on the front
and a means of supplying some of the wherewithal to get the job done.
that and no more was my intent.
the only measurement, franklin, i had in assessing what we should be involved in was
'is this something Jesus would do?
something God would want done?
ultimately it boiled down to something i wrote in my bible on kojedo island:
LET MY HEART BE BROKEN WITH THE THINGS THAT BREAK THE HEART OF GOD.'
83 'one way to guard against slipping from our God Room moorings, franklin,
i by never, verver accepting aid from the government;
no grants from any government.
'who pays the piper, calls the tune', you know...
84... franklin, you can be prepared to have some well meaning folk ask the question,
'if the most important thing in the wold is getting people saved,
why are you so involved in spending time and money
for food and clothing and sick people and orphans?
this always brings to my mind lil dickson, that heroic missionary in taiwan.
lil had two answers for that question.
someone would challenge her, 'if your're here as a missionary,
why are you taking care of orphans and giving clothers to these mountain people?
you should be busy GIVING OUT TRACTS.
lil would reply, 'I MUST FIRST MEET THEIR IMMEDIATE NEEDS,
THEN I CAN MEET THEIR GREATEST NEED.'
..that was her first answer.
her second, and maybe it should be our first, was
that JESUS COMMANDS US to feed the hungry, care for the widow and orphan, heal the sick, cleanse the leper,
prepare a portion for whom nothing has been prepared.
there's no honest way around this, franklin.
i don't want someone tellin' me what the greek says
and expecting me to had out tracts to people who can't read yet
or who are too cold and hungry to care about a tract.
it takes both- showing the compassion Jesus showed and giving them the simple gospel.
i've found that before we can hammer home even the heart of the gospel, john 3.16,
the FACT of God's love has to be driven home by a demonstration of love.
here's something i've proven:
almost all heathen cultures absolutely cannot fathom or comprehend
a total nonrealtive doing something for them
-an act that's wholly unselfish and done to meet their need or alleviate their suffering.
from an interview of bob, near the end of his life, by pat robertson
...'why would you think of going to BHUTAN? my doctor asks.
you know it's loaded with infection.
you can't get pure water to drink-
'why am i going? i said,
i'm going because i don't want to go to heaven from some modern hospital.
iwould rather have three active months serving the Lord
than have two years lying someplace wishing i was someplace else.
you say it's a considered risk.
except, as far as i am concerned, there isn't any risk.
the worst that can happen to me is the BEST- I WOULD GO TO HEAVEN.
161 DR. BOB CONTINUED, 'now here was a man who, on the one hand,
wrote the systematic theology for the korean church (a brain among brains)
and on the other hand just coldn't stand by to see a kid with nothing but a twig to write with.
he just had to get these children indoors, persuade pastors to let the kids sit in the church-
even if they did mess it up a it
-and get an education.
do you know what this makes me think of, franklin, he said,
SO MANY OF US DO NOTHING BECAUSE WE CAN'T DO EVERYTHING.
fran kinsler couldn't give all the children in knorea a grammar school education;
so he did what he could do.
and before he knew it, there were 72,000 children being taught....
171..the afghanistan lamb
there's nothing like being in eastern countries for bringing to life the stories Jesus told.
here dr. bob and dr. christy wilson of afghanistan talk over the story of the lambs.
it was 1961 and there was still a protestant church in kabul, the capital...
b-christy, you've just let me listen on your little tape recorder to an afgahan shepherd calling his sheep.
c afghan sheep are not your ordinary flock, bob.
their skin is prized, for they're a special breed;
the fur is expensive because it's taken from newborn lambs.
the skin is small; therefore, it can take 30 to 40 to make a lady's coat. it's called karakul.
b well, i know it's beautiful, but what a shame that it costs the lives of little lambs..
c i know. i've often thought that myself.
in fact, it was because of the story Jesus told that i went in search of a lamb
and was able to record the shepherd calling his flock.
one of my teachers for the little sunday school that meets in our home asked me if i could possibly get a little lamb so that she could have it to illustrate the lesson.
so i started off and 'way up in the mountains i located a shepherd who had a little lamb in his arms.
he had a large flock and that lamb had just been born that very day.
it was pure white and i thought ,
what a wonderful illustration of isaiah 1.18...though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be a white as snow;
though they be red like crimson, they shall e as wool.
that's the kind of wool the prophet was speaking about.
b sop did you buy this laittle lam , christy?
s when i asked the shepherd, he said, you can't buy the lamb without its mother, so we started bargaining as to the cost.
in the meantime, his main flock had wandered off some three hundred yards.
that's when he made these strange sounds i recorded.
of course, i didn't keep my recorder at the ready so i had to ask him if he'd call his sheep again so i could get the sound on my tape.
he demurred at that.
and he explained, if i call them agin, they'll all crowd around because they were already close from hearing my first call.
it just made the bible live for me, bob; in this country we constantly observe thingss that look as if they are taken right out of the new testament.
these sheep did know that shepherd's voice-
the special sound he made when calling them to him.
i said to him, what if someone else makes those strange sounds, weill your sheep come?
he laughed and answered, 'oh, NO they won't follow anyone else; only me.
i could tell he was speaking the truth, for theree were other shepherds and sheep around;
none of the other sheep made a move when he called.
b do the other shepherds use similar sounds?
c yes, the sounds are similar, yet the sheep know the particular shepherd's voice
-and they won't respond or follow another shepherd.
they'll only go to their own shephered.
b then the tenth chapter of john in really, literally true.
do you suppose that the occasion for Jesus using the lamb illustration was that there were sheep and lambs around at that time?
c i would't doubt it for a minute.
for instance, when john the baptist proclaimed, 'behold the lamb of God',
it was near passover season
and that time the shepherds would be driving their lambs across the fords of jordan to be sold for a sacrifice.
the 'lamb of god who taketh away the sin of the world' was righ in their midst!
b if i remember rightly, don't the muslims still sacrifice lambssas the did in the temple dayhsL c that's right
Thursday, September 19, 2013
9.19.2013 BOB PIERCE by franklin graham with jeanette lockerbie
bob defines faith...'in my personal view, nothing is faith as long as you set your goal only
as high as the most intelligent,
most informed
and most expert human efforts could reach.
58...my first 'crossroad of faith'..
i had been invited to go to china, my first overseas venture...
dr. torrey hohnson had been the one asked to speak at a crusade in shanghai;
then found he couldn't go..
another seemingly hopeful avenue (for raising funds)..
i'd prayed, 'Lord, if You want me to go, You'll have to get me there'....
bill graham was involved..it was a great rally at the hollywood bowl
and some youth for Christ men suggested i get up and talk about this china trip
and they would take an extra offering to help with the expenses.
a feature of that meeting was ..graham..handing me a bible engraved..
to chiang kai shek, president of the republic of china...
and the next morning there it was on the front page of the los angeles newspaper,
a large picture of ..graham presenting me with that bible to give to the president.
that gave me a great feeling, as you can imagine.
but, shortly afterward, the chairman of the rally called to say that,
after everything was settled up,
there wasn't anything left to help with my china trip!
what was God doing?
what was He trying to tell me?
i was to leave the very next morning@
and the only thing i was absolutely sure of
was that the Lord wanted me to go.
i remember deciding i wasn't gonna go to church and face people
who had been in that huge crowd the night before
and had heard the announcement that i was going to china right away
and had seen them give me the bible to take to the president..
and then have them figure out that it was all a balloon full of hot air.
i stayed home all day, sick at heart,
asking God why He was making a fool of me.
of course, human nature being what it is, it wasn't God i was thinking about, nor the call!
it was my self punctured self image:
what would people say?
the next morning there was just one thing to do.
so i did it.
with my wife, our little sharon and my father in law to see me off,
i took my suitcases and headed for the los angeles international airport.
that's where i stood and came to the first crossroad
about WHETHER I WOULD OR WOULD NOT LIVE BY FAITH.
people were beginning to check in.
i turned to my father in law and asked,
'what do you do in a case like this>
here i am and beyond this airport lies the pacific ocean.
i can't swim.
how am i gonna get to shanghai?
He replied, 'at least you can look the Lord in the face and say you came as far as you could.
you had this conviction that
He wanted you to go;
you had this order from torrey johnson..
i was one of their evangelists..
and here you are.
you can look up and say,
'okay, God. what are YOU going to do about it?
then, just as i was asking my wife, lorraine, if she could think of anything i'd left undone,
like a flash i remembered that i had neglected to get someone to take a prayer meeting
i had promised to speak at while the pastor was absent.
now...that God triggered that in my head.
i had to do something to keep my promise to that pastor,
but first it had dawned on me that i could go part way on the money i had
and trust the Lord for the next lap.
so i bought a one way ticket to honolulu, the first stop enroute.
then i dashed to make my phone call.
i called wilbur nelson, chairman of youth for Christ,
and he agreed to take the meeting for me.
then he said, 'how in the world can you make the trip to china?
i know you don't have the money'.
so i told him i had enough to take me to hawaii and $117 left in my pocket.
there was silence.
then-and it's as clear to me as if it just happened..-he said,
'all right, bob.
if you're going like that, trusting the Lord to provide along the way, here's what i'm going to do.
i'm going to call every christian businessman, every YFC committee guy i know,
and if i can get together some money i'll wire it to you at the honolulu airport,' and he hung up.
now i need to back up a bi....about something that had happened while he was holding meetings a few weeks earlier.
at one meeting, a young filipino man had urged him,
it he did go to china, to make a stop in the philippines.
the young man had assured him that an airlines executive, a fine christian man,
would make all the arrangements
and he had given bob the man's name, adding 'just let him know you're coming.
having given that background, boob continued....
'it took 11 hours on that old DC 4 plane from los angeles to hawaii..
and when i got off i didn't stop for anything.
i dashed to find the western union desk
-and hallelujah!
there was a telegram for me.
God bless wilbur nelson and those guys back in los angeles.
they had scared up 500 dollars!
how i had enough to take me to manila.
so i fished out that man's name and rushed back to the telegraph desk
and wired my expected arrival time.
sometimes bob's stories would get so exiting i
(this is franklin graham, billy graham's son, who bob is telling the story to...
he was to take over for bob as head of Samaritan's purse.)
wondered if he didn't make them up as he went along.
but i knew better, and..relaxed to listen to the next part.
bob continued, 'i'm still on a flight whose final destination was shanghai, you know.
the Lord didn't steer me off my route, he informed me with a grin.
'it was a long ride, but we made it and landed in clark field.
i'd learned that we had aboard a provincial governor,
which explained the presence of a bunch of cameramen at the foot of the steps.
i'll avoid all that, i said to myself, so i hung back and got off last, all rumpled,
carrying my old typewriter and whatever else i'd taken aboard.
at the bottom of the steps i was greeted by a little man who said,
'aren't you bob pierce?
but before i could answer, i heard 'that's him! i've seen his picture'
and with that cameras began to click and flash bulbs went off.
(i must have had my mouth open in those pictures!)
then along came a man and introduced himself,
"i'm john sycip. i got your telegram and everything is set up for you....
'well, you got the cameramen here, i chipped in, not knowing what to think of it all.
he explained, 'that's because you're speaking to the chamber of commerce tomorrow in manila
and i want a little publicity for that.
i gasped, 'how in the wold-i mean, i didn't know for sure i'd get here.
how could you know?
(and here is where God taught me that i wasn't the only one praying about that 'impossible' trip.)
this man said, 'i was just praying.
i had a letter from dr...johnson explaining that you might be coming without knowing how you were going to get here.
i just believed that if you trusted God enough He was going to get you here.
he steered me into a old army jeep, threw my stuff in, and started driving off.
but i knew better; didn't i have to go through immigration and all that?
it seems he had taken care of that, too.
he had provide accommodations and was putting a car and driver at my disposal.
but first he had to take me to see his fleet of planes.
his father, a banker, had set him up in the airline business.
hohn now owned the second largest airline in the islands.
i soon leaned, however, that business was not john's first priority.
he was deeply concerned over the souls of his pilots, not one of whom was a believer yet.
so i started off by speaking to the chamber of commerce.
then for 8 days i spoke on a different island each day.
john had arranged that a different pilot fly me each time, so i could witness to each one of them.
it was an unforgettable experience: wonderful crowds...
who came because i was AMERICAN
and our country had given the finest of our men to deliver their islands.
i don't know how many were saved in those meetings, but i had a great time.
the americans had left a PA system wherever they had been,
so i'd stand up on the highest thing (a truck bed sometimes)
and sing my youth for Christ songs.
my biggest hit in those days was 'This little light of mine.
i'd make all the gestures, with my finger as a candle, and they loved it.
i was even invited to speak at a fourth of july celebration.
about 5000 came that day.
and at the end a priest tugged at my sleeve and asked
if i would go with him to talk in private.
i'll never forget him.
he sat down with me and said:
'i really believe what you preached today and i want to be saved....
years later, at a pastors' conference in cebu city,
...a man came out of the crowd and threw his arms around me.
'do you remember me?..you let me to Christ, he said with tears in his eyes...
....it was the last evening. i had to leave for china the next day.
for some reason i hadn't let john (his host) know of my need. ,
that i had no means of getting to shanghai.
he had booked me for that evening in his own chinese church,
a small sanctuary that seated 200,
and for the first time i spoke thorough an interpreter.
john interpreted for me; and to my great joy,
27 young people came forward ...
but i have to admit..i was dismayed that john had taken no offering....
he just pronounced the benediction and, as the people were leaving, i prayed:
'Lord, You brought me this far, and i want to thank You for what You have done..
if i never get any further, this is still farther than in my wildest dreams
i ever expected to get in my whole lifetime.
but how was the Lord going to get me either to china or back home to los Angeles....
well, as we left the church john said,
'let's talk a bit.
you know how anxious i am that these pilots of mine come to know the Lord.
i know you've preached the gospel each night and they've heard.
but there's one-and he's very dear to me-
who because of his tight schedule didn't get to hear you even once.
now i have a request to make.
i hate to ask you,
but would you be willing to give up your comfortable seat on a regular plane?
you see, once a week i send my DC3 cargo plane to hong kong.
it goes tomorrow and this man is piloting it.
would you be willing to sit alongside him in the cockpit
and talk to him about Jesus on that eight hour trip to hong kong?
there was no way he could know i had no 'comfortable seat' and i didn't tell him.
well, i answered, since you put it that way, john.
i'll never know why the Lord had me keep my mouth shut.
it's probably the only time that, when i needed money,
i didn't make the whole world know it!....
..i'd come a long way, literally, and i had a few
crumpled dollar bills and some change jangling in my pocket.
but shanghai was still a far piece to go on that!
the pilot had unloaded me and my stuff 'way out on the tarmac
-you know about these places-
and i'm sighing, oh. Lord, how'm i gonna get myself and this gear into the terminal?
and the sun was baking hot.
right then, the pilot yelled down to me, 'here. catch. i forgot to give this to you.
an envelope fluttered out of his hand
and as i picked it up he shouted, 'wee that yellow limousine?
that car and the driver are yours while you're here.
the driver will take you to your hotel.
i stuffed the envelope in my pocket and headed for the limousine.
my hotel was the luxurious hong kong peninsula, queen of all hotels in that colony;
i wouldn't have been able to afford a cheese sandwich there.
and yet i found myself in a lovely room that john sycip
kept for his frequent business trips.
i got down on my knees and just thanked God for
another proof of His love and care for me.
for some reason, the envelope had been blanked out of my mind till then.
i got up from my knees, opened it,
and three one hundred dollar bills fell out.
shoutin' hallelujah, i dahed for the elevator and through the lobby
to where the china national air corporation had an office
and somewhat out of breath, asked,
'when's the next flight to shanghai and is there a seat left?
that was tuesday. there was nothing going till thursday morning and
thursday evening i was scheduled to speak in shanghai.
i asked the fare.
'three hundred dollars to shanghai, the clerk answered.
i laid down my three hundred dollars.
i didn't get a cent back nor did i have to pay another cent. i got my ticket.
my plane arrived at exactly four in the afternoon
and with the help of an airline fellow who wrote the address in chinese for me,
i headed in a ricksha (no money for a taxi) for the china inland mission headquarters.
there i learned that dave morken, a new missionary whose support i had partially raised
by having him travel with me in my california meetings
was flat on his back with a jaundice that would keep him down for at least a month.
he and i had been slated to work together.
i washed my face,
and some of the CIM folk took me to the moore memorial church
just in time for the first meeting of the crusade.
....that summer in china. when dave recovered,
we went to 17 of the largest universities all over china and i was privileged to speak.
those who kept records tell me that 17,852 men and women not only came forward,
but signed cards and were counseled....
..i had reached china with nothing in my pocket.
but i had a million dollars' worth of experience to prove
that 'faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it (I thess. 5.24)
...what if i had never even gone to the airport that day!..
Friday, September 13, 2013
9.13.2013 TAKING CARE OF BUSYNESS by alissa wilkinson
christianity today, sept. 2013, p77
i suppose there was a time in my life when i would answer that friendly conversation opener
-how are you?-
with something like, 'i'm doing well. how about yourself?'
but i (and, i suspect, at least a few million other americans)
have a new default answer:
'busy'.
i don't have the space to list what i've been up to for the past year,
but let's just say that i have impeccable busyness bona fides.
or have i?
in a blog post on the new york times opinionator last summer
entitled 'The 'busy' trap',
tim kreider pointed out that most people who reply this way
aren't working three shifts to make ends meet.
they're people 'whose lamented busyness is purely self imposed:
work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily,
classes and activities they've 'encouraged' their kids to participate in.
they're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety,
because they're addicted to busyness
and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
for those of us shifting uncomfortably in our chairs now, pastor and author kevin deyoung
has written Crazy busy: a (mercifully) short book about a (really) big problem (crossway).
the book, though informal and friendly,
should prompt readers to take
a long, unsparing look at the things they say and do.
deyoung offers up three dangers that busyness presents:
ruining our joy, robbing our hearts and covering up the rot in our souls.
he then lists 7 diagnoses to help the harried reader
start to discern the root of his busyness.
those diagnoses full of gentleness and truth, can sting a little:
you might be beset by pride
or freaking out too much about your kids,
or too focused on people pleasin
or unwilling to put down your iDevice.
all true, but all easily found in other books and articles in the genre.
what sets Crazy busy apart is its seventh diagnosis:
'you suffer more because you don't expect to suffer at all..
the bible is clear:
tedious labor and sweat are part of the Fall,
but work was there from the beginning and will continue into eternity.
God is renewing creation, even now, and so we have things like washing machines, lawn mowers and cell phones to help relieve some of the labor.
this is great, but it can make us long to
''escape 9-5, live anywhere and join the new rich,'
as timothy ferriss's best selling book, 'the 4-hour workweek,
promises in its subtitle.
and if, despite all today's innovations, we still feel buy and tired, well,
we must be doing something wrong.
in the west, we love to believe that suffering indicates not growth but failure.
however, as deyoung wisely reminds us,
'effective love is rarely efficient.
people take time.
relationships are messy.
if we love others, how can we not be busy and burdened at least some of the time?'
even Jesus got so worn out that he had to paddle a boat out onto the sea of galilee to rest. (when was that?)
deyoung's remedy, then, is not about calendars or systems.
it's not about getting rid of interruptions or paring down your relationships.
instead, it's about ordering our lives properly
-for starters, reading the bible and praying evry day,
thereby reminding yourself that your inbox isn't your first priority.
doing this consistently forms you into the sort of person who instinctively
keeps priorities straight,
knows what to turn down,
and welcoms the suffering that comes from doing the right kind of work.
you may-and probably shoul-still be busy.
but you'll begine to understand why,
and for whom,
you labor.
i suppose there was a time in my life when i would answer that friendly conversation opener
-how are you?-
with something like, 'i'm doing well. how about yourself?'
but i (and, i suspect, at least a few million other americans)
have a new default answer:
'busy'.
i don't have the space to list what i've been up to for the past year,
but let's just say that i have impeccable busyness bona fides.
or have i?
in a blog post on the new york times opinionator last summer
entitled 'The 'busy' trap',
tim kreider pointed out that most people who reply this way
aren't working three shifts to make ends meet.
they're people 'whose lamented busyness is purely self imposed:
work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily,
classes and activities they've 'encouraged' their kids to participate in.
they're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety,
because they're addicted to busyness
and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
for those of us shifting uncomfortably in our chairs now, pastor and author kevin deyoung
has written Crazy busy: a (mercifully) short book about a (really) big problem (crossway).
the book, though informal and friendly,
should prompt readers to take
a long, unsparing look at the things they say and do.
deyoung offers up three dangers that busyness presents:
ruining our joy, robbing our hearts and covering up the rot in our souls.
he then lists 7 diagnoses to help the harried reader
start to discern the root of his busyness.
those diagnoses full of gentleness and truth, can sting a little:
you might be beset by pride
or freaking out too much about your kids,
or too focused on people pleasin
or unwilling to put down your iDevice.
all true, but all easily found in other books and articles in the genre.
what sets Crazy busy apart is its seventh diagnosis:
'you suffer more because you don't expect to suffer at all..
the bible is clear:
tedious labor and sweat are part of the Fall,
but work was there from the beginning and will continue into eternity.
God is renewing creation, even now, and so we have things like washing machines, lawn mowers and cell phones to help relieve some of the labor.
this is great, but it can make us long to
''escape 9-5, live anywhere and join the new rich,'
as timothy ferriss's best selling book, 'the 4-hour workweek,
promises in its subtitle.
and if, despite all today's innovations, we still feel buy and tired, well,
we must be doing something wrong.
in the west, we love to believe that suffering indicates not growth but failure.
however, as deyoung wisely reminds us,
'effective love is rarely efficient.
people take time.
relationships are messy.
if we love others, how can we not be busy and burdened at least some of the time?'
even Jesus got so worn out that he had to paddle a boat out onto the sea of galilee to rest. (when was that?)
deyoung's remedy, then, is not about calendars or systems.
it's not about getting rid of interruptions or paring down your relationships.
instead, it's about ordering our lives properly
-for starters, reading the bible and praying evry day,
thereby reminding yourself that your inbox isn't your first priority.
doing this consistently forms you into the sort of person who instinctively
keeps priorities straight,
knows what to turn down,
and welcoms the suffering that comes from doing the right kind of work.
you may-and probably shoul-still be busy.
but you'll begine to understand why,
and for whom,
you labor.
9.13.2013 WORSHIP CON QUESO by carolyn arends
found in christianity today 9.2013, p69
there is a tex mex restaurant in houston i have visited on three occasions.
each meal has begun with chile con queso.
the cheese at this particular restaurant is the most delicious food i have ever tasted.
with every bit, i have been overcome with gratitude to God
for creating taste buds, cows and human ingenuity.
and that gratitude has led to praise.
some folks understand this.
some think i'm kidding.
and others are skeptical that such a carnal thing
as a tex mex appetizer could provoke genuine worship.
we christians have a long history of mixed and sometimes openly hostile attitudes
toward sensual pleasure.
augustine is the fourth century poster boy for our dilemma,
struggling in book X of his Confessions
to rein in each of his five senses.
he attempts, for example,
to 'take food at mealtimes as though it were medicine'
and to 'fight against the pleasure in order not to be captivated by it'.
i appreciat augustine's caution that pleasure in created things
never replace our desire for the creator.
but lately i've been discovering an emphatically pro pleasure voice
in the writings of another christian guide.
c.s. lewis is known, of course, as a literary scholar, novelist and apologist.
he is also, consistently, a curator of pleasure.
where there is beauty to be received,
music to be heard,
laughter to be welcomed,
and (especially) food to be eaten,
lewis attends, celebrates, scrutinizes, describes and partakes.
in Letters to malcolm: chiefly on prayer,
lewis argues that the pleasures derived from
forest moss and sunlight, bird son, morning air and the comfort of soft slippers
are 'shafts of (God's) glory as it strikes our sensibility'.
our task is not to guard against sensual enjoyment,
but to allow our minds to run 'back up the sunbeam to the sun'
-to see every pleasure as a 'channel of adoration'.
lewis even argues that there is no such thing as a 'bad' pleasure
-only pleasures 'snatched by unlawful acts'.
but he is not blind to the 'concupiscence' (lustfulness) that so haunts augustine.
when our response to pleasure is greed instead of adoration
-when we seek to grasp and possess rather than receive
-our healthy cry of 'this also is Thou'
distorts into 'the fatal word: encore'.
in The four loves, lewis distinguishes 'need-pleasures' from 'pleasures of appreciation'.
the enjoyment we get from a need-pleasure,
such as water to quench thirst or the scratching of an itch,
is intense but short lived.
but with appreciation pleasures
-smells, tastes, and scenes of beauty that awaken us to delight
-the sensation intensifies over time.
greed-the repeated cry of 'encore!' to, say, rich black coffee or extra creamy queso
-may transform a pleasure of appreciation into a pleasure of need,
draining out all the lasting enjoyment.
the answer, lewis contends, is not to avoid pleasure
but to 'have' and 'read' it properly:
to receive it, openhanded, as both a gift and a message.
'we know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand
at which there are pleasures for evermore.
there need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event,
something done afterwards.
to experience the tiny theophany'
-the small sign of God's presence
-'is itself to adore'.
in many respects, augustine and lewis concur.
but there is a major point of divergence.
augustine sees our sensuality as a threat to be managed
until god 'consign(s) both food and belly to destruction'.
lewis views every earthly pleasure as an apprenticeship
in adoration for what will go on forever in heaven.
biblical writers seem irresistibly drawn to an image
-part metaphor, part promise-
of 'the sacred meal with 'God'.
from the table prepared for the psalmist (ps. 23.5),
to Jesus' story of a great banquet (luke 14.15-24),
to the revelation 19 vision of a wedding supper,
the scriptures are filled with the anticipation of
feasting together in the presence of god forever.
the prophet isaiah (25.6-8) takes particular pleasure in this vision:
on this mountain the Lord Almighty
will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine
-the best of meats and the finest of wines.
on this mountain He will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
He will swallow up death forever.
for lewis, earthly meals are chances to practice the gratitude and adoration
that will accompany our everlasting feast with God.
just as trials train us in patience,
pleasure trains us in worship.
every sensual enjoyment (properly received)
is a 'tiny theophany'
-a chance to 'taste and see' that God is good,
and a reminder that there is
a whole lot more where that came from.
i rest my queso.
there is a tex mex restaurant in houston i have visited on three occasions.
each meal has begun with chile con queso.
the cheese at this particular restaurant is the most delicious food i have ever tasted.
with every bit, i have been overcome with gratitude to God
for creating taste buds, cows and human ingenuity.
and that gratitude has led to praise.
some folks understand this.
some think i'm kidding.
and others are skeptical that such a carnal thing
as a tex mex appetizer could provoke genuine worship.
we christians have a long history of mixed and sometimes openly hostile attitudes
toward sensual pleasure.
augustine is the fourth century poster boy for our dilemma,
struggling in book X of his Confessions
to rein in each of his five senses.
he attempts, for example,
to 'take food at mealtimes as though it were medicine'
and to 'fight against the pleasure in order not to be captivated by it'.
i appreciat augustine's caution that pleasure in created things
never replace our desire for the creator.
but lately i've been discovering an emphatically pro pleasure voice
in the writings of another christian guide.
c.s. lewis is known, of course, as a literary scholar, novelist and apologist.
he is also, consistently, a curator of pleasure.
where there is beauty to be received,
music to be heard,
laughter to be welcomed,
and (especially) food to be eaten,
lewis attends, celebrates, scrutinizes, describes and partakes.
in Letters to malcolm: chiefly on prayer,
lewis argues that the pleasures derived from
forest moss and sunlight, bird son, morning air and the comfort of soft slippers
are 'shafts of (God's) glory as it strikes our sensibility'.
our task is not to guard against sensual enjoyment,
but to allow our minds to run 'back up the sunbeam to the sun'
-to see every pleasure as a 'channel of adoration'.
lewis even argues that there is no such thing as a 'bad' pleasure
-only pleasures 'snatched by unlawful acts'.
but he is not blind to the 'concupiscence' (lustfulness) that so haunts augustine.
when our response to pleasure is greed instead of adoration
-when we seek to grasp and possess rather than receive
-our healthy cry of 'this also is Thou'
distorts into 'the fatal word: encore'.
in The four loves, lewis distinguishes 'need-pleasures' from 'pleasures of appreciation'.
the enjoyment we get from a need-pleasure,
such as water to quench thirst or the scratching of an itch,
is intense but short lived.
but with appreciation pleasures
-smells, tastes, and scenes of beauty that awaken us to delight
-the sensation intensifies over time.
greed-the repeated cry of 'encore!' to, say, rich black coffee or extra creamy queso
-may transform a pleasure of appreciation into a pleasure of need,
draining out all the lasting enjoyment.
the answer, lewis contends, is not to avoid pleasure
but to 'have' and 'read' it properly:
to receive it, openhanded, as both a gift and a message.
'we know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand
at which there are pleasures for evermore.
there need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event,
something done afterwards.
to experience the tiny theophany'
-the small sign of God's presence
-'is itself to adore'.
in many respects, augustine and lewis concur.
but there is a major point of divergence.
augustine sees our sensuality as a threat to be managed
until god 'consign(s) both food and belly to destruction'.
lewis views every earthly pleasure as an apprenticeship
in adoration for what will go on forever in heaven.
biblical writers seem irresistibly drawn to an image
-part metaphor, part promise-
of 'the sacred meal with 'God'.
from the table prepared for the psalmist (ps. 23.5),
to Jesus' story of a great banquet (luke 14.15-24),
to the revelation 19 vision of a wedding supper,
the scriptures are filled with the anticipation of
feasting together in the presence of god forever.
the prophet isaiah (25.6-8) takes particular pleasure in this vision:
on this mountain the Lord Almighty
will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine
-the best of meats and the finest of wines.
on this mountain He will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
He will swallow up death forever.
for lewis, earthly meals are chances to practice the gratitude and adoration
that will accompany our everlasting feast with God.
just as trials train us in patience,
pleasure trains us in worship.
every sensual enjoyment (properly received)
is a 'tiny theophany'
-a chance to 'taste and see' that God is good,
and a reminder that there is
a whole lot more where that came from.
i rest my queso.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
9.7.2013 JEWS FOR JESUS by Moishe Rosen
moishe rosen was working as an executive for a jewish christian evangelistic organization in nyc when God began to speak to him about how he was subtly becoming a different person...in a bad sense. after being challenged by a brother in the Lord he began to see this and decided to check out the hippie scene on the west coast.
65 while i was getting initiated into the hippie scene in san francisco,
some unusual things were happening in the backwoods of oregon
that would have a tremendous impact on my ministry.
a middle aged christian, jack dunn, and his wife, liz,
felt called by God to prepare their house.
jack said God told him that he was going to send some people to them
and that the couple should feed and love these visitors.
although jack explained that god spoke to him directly through a voice and a vision,
the exact purpose of his task was not revealed.
but he and liz obeyed by immediately furnishing and repairing their extra rooms.
one of the first groups to arrive after the preparations were completed
were some motorcycle roughnecks.
one of the dunns'
later guests, mark winter, called these people
'bikers, heavy duty greasers'.
they put jack and liz through lot of grief.
they ruined part of a field jack had planted and they got stoned on pills and dope.
jack finally put his foot down.
he said that nobody who stayed there could possess or use any drugs.
needless to say, the christian couple seemed baffled as to why god wanted them
to take care of these hell's angels types,
especially since the bikers didn't seem particularly interested in the gospel.
but soon, this bunch moved on, and a different breed of guest started wandering in.
these were all hippies, and most of them were jewish.
jack's house, which has become known affectionately as 'the ranch',
a retreat with an atmosphere that encouraged serious consideration of the claims of Jesus Christ.
one of the early jewish visitors up there was baruch goldstein,
a stocky, bearded young man from the bronx who eventually joined me in san francisco.
baruch, who laughs and jokes as much as anyone i know,
had led a wild, adventurous life before wandering into the oregon haven.
he was a typical hippie with the 'turn on, tune in, drop out' philosophy.
knowing he would confront the inevitable draft, he joined the army.
he served as a combat soldier in vietnam,
was wounded and began receiving a disability pension on his discharge.
just before he was released from the service, he got involved in drugs in a naval hospital in new york.
that experience encouraged him to by a small bus with his steady veteran's pension
and head toward a life of drugs and sew in the counterculture.
i tried heroin, a lot of grass, and i'd sell anything, he explained.
'i moved out to california and lived in a couple of communes,
traveled around, did anything i wanted.
girls, dope, i enjoyed it all.
but then i heard that my brother, fred, had become a christian
and that he was staying in oregon at a place called 'the ranch'.
i really couldn't believe it.
i always thought people who believed in Jesus were weak,
so i decided i had to talk to him about it.
'i stopped off in a forest on the way up to the ranch to have some lunch and smoke some dope.
but all of a sudden this car came up and a guy jumped out.
he handed me a piece of paper and drove off without a word.
i glanced at the paper and saw that his testimony was written on it:
'i used to be a dope smoking, pill popping hippie until Jesus came into my life and set me free.
i though 'wow! i must be getting into Jesus country.
'when i arrived in the town that was closest to the ranch, i knew i was in trouble.
for all practical purposes, the ranch was inaccessible.
there were only two ways to get out there:
you either hiked about forty miles through the woods and came in from behind,
or you had to find a boat that was hidden in some bushes outside the town
and then row across this huge river.
daniel boone couldn't have located the place even if he had radar.
i had been told to call jack at the ranch
and then either get him or someone else to come over and meet me.
i didn't have his phone number, so i decided to turn left and call the town operator from a small drugstore.
but i couldn't turn left because of a couple of cars coming from the opposite direction,
so i turned right into a gas station.
the operator told me jack had an unlisted number,
and none of the old new york tricks i had up my sleeve would work it out of her.
i said it was an emergency, i had to speak to my brother, but nothing moved her.
baruch was thoroughly frustrated at this point.
'i was tired, hungry and cold, but then i came up with an idea.
it was a small town, only a few thousand people.
i decided if i started asking enough people, somebody was bound to know jack.
so i walked up to this man, a weird looking guy with a gray beard,
who was getting gasoline for his buss.
i said, excuse me, do you know a jack dunn?
'what do you want to find that kook for? he dais.
'i was happy and upset at the same time- upset that this guy seemed so uptight,
but happy that the first person i met knew jack.
the guy said, 'wait right here, and he went to the gas station phone.
a few minutes later, he motioned me over and handed me the receiver.
my brother freddy was on the other end of the line!
but that was only half the surprise.
the guy i'd been talking to, the first person i walked up to in the town-
and at a gas station i hadn't even wanted to turn into- was jack dunn himself!
'wow, what a coincidence! i said.
'coincidence, ha!' jack knowingly replied.
baruch recalled that after he'd been at the ranch for a few days,
he felt there was something different about the place.
'i really sensed a different kind of love there, and that made me question a lot of things.
one of the other hippies suggested that i start reading the new testament to find the answers
to what i was looking for.
i got zapped out by the Holy Spirit somewhere between matthew and revelation.
the sermon on the mount really made an impression.
i could see the adulterous, sinful, lustful life i had been living.
in an effort to find and answer, baruch said,
'i began to pray, at first like the scribes and pharisees.
i asked for a sign or a miracle because i decided i wasn't a fool,
i wasn't going to believe in nothing.
'dear God, i said,, please split a river for me or send down a thunderbolt.
well god showed the miraculous to me, but it wasn't what i thought it would be.
it was a very simple, subtle thing.
i saw the miracle one morning when i awoke and watched the others getting together for breakfast and praying.
it was us, you and me, His creation.
i knew inside of me that there was a god, but i still didn't understand Jesus.
then i continued to read the new testament, and
god showed me Jesus was the Promised One,
the Messiah of the Old Testament.
i fell for it hook, line and sinker.
god went fishing and i got caught.
baruch's life underwent an immediate, radical change.
'i completely gave up drugs.
before i became a christian, i sold anything anybody would buy.
i used to fly from california to new york with a cargo of grass.
in new york, i'd pick up some heroin and bring it back to california.
but after i discovered Jesus, my cargo changed.
now, when i fly, i take thousands of gospel tracts east, distribute them
and return with a tremendous sense of accomplishment and satisfaction
that drugs could never give me.
his faith in Christ also encouraged him to rediscover his identity as a jew.
'when i was into the hippie scene,
i remember writing a letter home saying, dear brother and sister instead of dear mom and dad.
i wanted to tear down all ethnic and social walls and traditions.
i considered myself to be Baruch from the universe, rather than baruch the jew.
but i started seeing the significance of my jewish heritage at the ranch.
we conducted a sabbath service wile i stayed there, and since then
i've started going to synagogue fairly regularly.
i believe God created the situation at the ranch so that young jews could find Christ.
the large majority of hippies who visited there were jewish,
and many of them have contributed to the work of the jews for Jesus.
the ranch doesn't exist anymore-it was flooded after about a year-
and jack and liz have moved on to another town.
but as short lived as their ranch experience was, they were there when God needed them.
their work at the ranch occurred almost simultaneously with the beginning of moishe's san francisco ministry.
some might say the timing was just a coincidence,
but i've seen too many such 'coincidences' to believe god didn't have a hand in it.
another one of the ranch crowd and a close friend of baruch's from new york, jh'an moskowitz,
had an even more startling encounter with god.
'i come from a conservative jewish family, explained jh'an,
a lanky, bearded fellow who would rather argue a philosophical issue than eat.
'my father and mother were in a nazi concentration camp,
and my dad still has the number stamped on his arm.
my people had suffered because of their jewishness,
and i knew from an early age just how serious a thing it was to be a jew.
it was always them and us. them included the nazis and christians.
jh'an's early commitment to his people culminated when he joined a zionist group
and volunteered at the age of seventeen for the israeli army during the 1967 war against egypt.
'i decided i'd rather die in Israel than in vietnam,
but i never was officially admitted into a combat unit.
i stayed in the reserves and lived on a kibbutz,
but then i began to realize that war wasn't where it was at for me.
although i still supported israel, i saw a subtle racism over there.
the arab refugees were treated pretty poorly
and i didn't like that.
so, disillusioned, i started looking for personal truth in the youth subculture.
he graduated from long island university, but the though of an ordinary, middle class career
repulsed him.
so he retreated into drugs and sex and finally decided to head out west.
'baruch and i got together out here in california, and we planned to become psychedelic pirates..
'we met some old friends in the bay area and got into dealing and suing all kinds of dope.
i was really crass toward girls because i only wanted them as sex objects.
we were living in san francisco in a commune called the Freaky Dude Ranch
when a couple of our close friends became christians.
i had read some of the bible, but Jesus didn't seem real to me.
things began to get a little boring and repetitious around the commune-
the same sex, the same drugs, over and over-
so i decided to take a vacation in the caribbean.
jh'an hitchhiked to florida and worked in a warehouse for a couple of weeks to earn enough money for the plane fare to jamaica.
'i was still looking for truth, so i headed for the jamaican hills
and sought out some tribesmen i'd heard about
who were supposed to worship the ethiopian emperor, haile selassie.
l lived in a hut with a guy named joshua
and tried to learn the spiritual truths i thought these people had to offer.
one old wise man used to say to me in a deep voice with a rolling jamaican accent
'king of kings and lord of lords, Conquering Lion from the tribe of judah.
though your skin may be white, if you smoke the herb, the blood of your heart will be black.
so i puffed on his grass and really grooved on everything he said.
many things seem especially profound when you're stoned.
'but i had overstayed my visa, and the authorities came looking for me.
i had overstayed my visa, and the authorities came looking for me.
i had to hightail it out of there and head back to the states.
still, i was no wiser than i had been a month or a year before.
and i got a shock when i received a letter from the commune:
baruch had become a christian.
i really felt bad, like i'd lost a friend.
i could see the others getting on the Jesus kick, but not baruch.
he was a stone cold heathen, a jolly, fun loving guy who hadn't even been looking for anything.
i, at least, had been on a spiritual quest.
i thought, that's really heavy, man.
jh'an returned to san francisco in april, 1971,
and at the request of one of his old hippie buddies, mitch glaser,
who had recently become a christian,
he attended a bible study i was teaching in san francisco.
jh'an's concept of a christian was simply a person who loved other people.
by that definition, he thought he might be a christian himself.
mitch introduced me to jh'an and asked me to rap with him about Jesus.
'do you believed Jesus Christ died for you, jh'an? i asked.
'yeahm man, i go for that, jh'an replied.
'and do you believe he was resurrected from the dead?
sure.
after a few more such questions, i decided that what jh'an said he believed was similar to
what any christian would believe.
but i didn't
t know him too well at that time,
and he told me later that in retrospect he's convinced he wasn't a christian at that point.
'no change had come about in my life when i first talked to moishe,..
'i didn't see why a faith in Christ should affect the way i lived.
if someone offered me dope, i took it without really thinking about it.
in other words, i hadn't really committed myself.
because i was still looking for spiritual knowledge,
i hitch hiked up to the ranch to see what baruch was doing.
it was a heavy experience for me.
after staying there three days, i decided i had to get out.
everybody was talking about God this and God that.
i tried to inject my own ideas i had just dreamed up about Jesus
-the cosmic Jesus.
but my intellectualized Christ had no impact on my daily life,
no relationship to the personal God these people seemed to know.
i wanted to believe, but i couldn't force myself.
i asked God to give me a real experience.
i had to know that He was really, really who the bible said He was.
i couldn't do it on blind faith.
i had to know it was more than a psychological high.
the night before he left the ranch, jh'an said he had a dream:
'some dark haired young lady came up behind me
and put her arms around my shoulders and began to seduce me.
when i woke up, her face was vague in my memory, but i did recall a distinctive was her arms crept around me,
and a peculiar kind of dress she was wearing.
i thought, 'tsk, tsk, God, what a horrible dream.
i had some idea it was from God,
but i also suspected it might have resulted from some kind of psychological suggestion
from the Jesus freaks who were all around me at the ranch.
at any rate, i ignored any special religious significance.
'baruch told me the next morning that he was ready to return to san francisco
and he asked me if i wanted a lift.
i accepted, and on the way down i mentioned my dream in passing
and said that it was really far out because i though God had seduced me.
he thought i was goofing on God, that i'd really never had the dream.
he accused me of being really gross and didn't talk much more to me during the trip.
'baruch dropped me off at about midnight at my commune
and then drove down the street to see mitch glaser at another apartment.
when i walked through my front door, i realized all of a sudden what a dark scene i was into.
the place looked like sodom and gomorrah.
all the speed freaks were there and everyone was stoned, tripped out.
people had painted their faces and were dancing around like maniacs.
remembering the beautiful, peaceful scene in oregon,
i didn't feel like getting involved with them just then.
i decoded this wasn't where things were at.
these people were really blowing themselves out.
i went back to the kitchen and tried to get my head together.
but while i was standing with my hands resting on the sink,
i felt these arms start to slide over my shoulders.
i looked around out of the corner of my eye, and this chill went up my spine.
the girl behind me had the same dress pattern,
the same general physical features of the chick in my dream at the ranch.
i flipped out!
the dream was actually coming true.
i didn't move. it was really heavy.
'i though, is this really happening, man?
maybe God's really real.
maybe He's trying to tell me something.
meanwhile, this chick was really coming on strong.
she said, 'what's going on? let's get it on.
i shrugged and said to myself,
'look jh'an, don't freak her out.
she started running her hands up and down my body, and i got excited and decided God would forgive me this time.
so i turned around and put my arms around her and looked over her shoulder.
suddenly, everything went BOING!
on the window in front of me, the sign of the cross had been traced clearly on the glass.
as it happened, baruch and mitch had been walking outside just at that moment.
mitch, as was his custom, drew that cross on the window,
but neither of them could see me through the glass.
coincidences were one thing, but this was too much.
there was a pattern now that i couldn't deny,
and i knew i wasn't hallucinating on drugs.
i hadn't had any dope for several days
because it was prohibited at the ranch.
i said to myself, 'hey jh'an, enough coincidences!
let's get it together and find out what you've got to do'.
i met mitch and baruch just after they came through the door and said,
'look, fellows, i think God is real.
maybe i'd better get together with Him, maybe He's really there.
let's go have a talk'.
as they walked toward a nearby park, jh'an told baruch,
'hey, man, the dream really came true. what should i do?
maybe you should ask God to come into your life,
give yourself over to Him,' baruch suggested.
'well, if the Guy's real, why should i run away from Him?'
when they reached the park, jh'an got down on his knees
and baruch and mitch laid their hands on his head.
jh'an prayed, 'Father, forgive me for pretending i knew You,
for being the imperfect person i am.
come into my life, take it over, i'm Yours'.
in explaining his commitment, jh'an said,
'coincidences that lead to a spiritual commitment can't happen in an isolated way.
there may be a couple of minor external events that don't seem to remarkable
to an objective observer.
but in my case-and i know for other christians as well-
there's a corresponding internal event,
an insight God provides that ties the coincidences together and produces a divine revelation.
that's what happened to me with that dream incident'.
these fellows gravitated in my direction initially because of a strange experience
that mitch glaser had in sausalito.
he had spent some time at the ranch but was still into the hip scene,
unsure of what direction his life should take.
while sitting near the shore in sausalito, he prayed that God would show him what to do
and almost immediately one of my broadsides,
bearing my name and address, came floating up in the tide.
he hitched over to our house, knocked on the door,
and declared, 'the Lord sent me to you. what should i do?'
'i don't know, i said, somewhat taken aback.
don't ask me, ask Him'.
'i did and He sent me here, mitch replied. what should i do?'
'i don't know, i answered again.
we were at something of an impasse,
but i wouldn't attempt to tell him something i didn't know myself.
that's one thing i won't budge on:
i know an individual should accept Jesus as Lord,
love God, read the bible, lead a christian life and pray.
but as for the specific direction of life's affairs,
he'll have to go to God himself to find the answer.
we talked for a while longer and he rode with me to a nearby shop
to get some bagels and then headed back toward the ranch.
while he was up there, mitch asked jack dunn if he knew me.
jack replied that he didn't, but that God had told him i was okay.
the next time i got together with mitch, he had baruch and jh'an in tow,
and they were all christians.
'i'm hungry, i said when i joined them on that occasion.
'why don't we go have some chinese food?'
they accepted my invitation and we headed toward an inexpensive chinatown restaurant.
we each ordered huge amounts of food,
but when the check came, i found i had left my wallet at home.
baruch had to dig into his pockets and pay with some of his army disability money.
i learned later that baruch was a little disconcerted with me at that point:
'i wondered what kind of guy this was..
he asks you out to eat and then you have to pay for it.'
but he soon forgot about the meal after we walked outside the restaurant.
i began to show them how i conducted my street ministry
by pulling out 500 or so broadsides and handing them out to pedestrians.
baruch was so fascinated that he grabbed them away from me
and started distributing them himself.
he was like a child and kept saying,
'look, people really take them!
look at that guy-he's walking down the street reading it!
hey man, this is really terrific!'
'i really liked handing out those tracts, baruch recalled.
'it was flipping me out that i was standing there on a street corner in downtown san francisco
dealing out gospel literature.
i always had this stereotype of Jesus freaks walking around with their placards warning,
'repent! the wold is doomed!
and there i was doing essentially the same thing myself-and enjoying it.
while baruch was getting high handing out the pamphlets,
mitch was just staring at him in utter fascination.
and jh'an, who will argue about any subject under the sun,
whether he knows anything about it or not,
was interrogating me on some esoteric theological point.
it was almost surrealistic.
but as weird as that tableau must have seemed to any onlookers,
i realize now it marked the beginning of some friendships
that were to be significant for evangelism among the jews in the bay areal.
the Jews for Jesus were gradually drifting together,
feeling their way into a working relationship.
but before i leave the ranch episode, i want to mention something about mark winter,
another graduate of jack dunn's oregon hideaway.
he's an aggressive tract passer and is becoming involved in helping us
in film work and photography, his specialty during graduate school.
but the mark winter of today and the mark of the ranch are two different people,
for he suffered from a severe case of 'ranchitis'.
ranchitis was a spiritual malady characterized by enjoying Jesus
into a state o almost total inactivity.
some would describe it as an immersion in mysticism,
and others would call it grooving on Jesus.
mark explained his condition like this:
'at the ranch i didn't do anything unless i felt the Lord told me to.
jack didn't encourage us to work, only to read the bible
and after i accepted the Lord that's all i felt like doing.
jack would say, 'this is a place to grow tall,
the city is a place to put on the muscle.'
there was nothing to distract me there.
it was just me and God.
there was nobody laying any trips on me,
nobody saying, 'Jesus loves you.'
the only time they'd answer me about God was if i asked them a question.
we could do some work in the fields, but jack didn't push it
all the work he wanted us to do was turn the pages of the bible.
we didn't even have to do that if we didn't want to.
i couldn't have come to God anywhere else because i had a hand up about authority,
as did a lot of people i knew in the counterculture.
i didn't have to worry about any authority up there but God.
'the problem was that i remained in an inactive condition
when i came back to the city.
i lived with n aunt but i wasn't really functioning.
i couldn't see that God wanted me to do any work, so i didn't do any.
some of the guys with moishe would ask,
'do you want to hand out some tracts with us?
i'd just reply, 'if Father wants me to'.
it was really a bad place to be,
not junctioning at all for a couple of months.
then i started slipping out of it,
getting involved in activities with the other Jews for Jesus.
now, my life is almost all action-action for God.
as baruch mentioned, the ranch doesn't exist anymore.
after a flood washed them out, jack and liz dunn began traveling around the country,
doing other work to which God called them.
but despite the short existence of their oregon retreat,
their efforts had and immeasurable impact on our
urban, action oriented ministry in san francisco.
the jews for Jesus, with their demonstrations, confrontations, and exuberant creative expressions,
are in a sense the direct spiritual descendants of the detached, contemplative life of jack dunn's ranch.
75 the tribe
in our society anyone whose religion matters is considered to be too religious.
for most people, a religious faith is like a blood type.
it's just something you put on an identification card,
but it doesn't affect your life very much, except in emergencies.
this observation by stuart dauermann reflects a basic complaint of the group which,
in the fall of 1970, came to be known as the jews for Jesus.
these young people, ranging in age from the late teens to the middle twenties,
were attracted to Jesus not by contemporary, watered down versions of christianity,
but by His call for a total commitment.
they joined a movement, not an organization.
their operational structure, which has many lessons to offer the church as a whole,
can best be described as tribal.
the innate impulse to gather into tribal groups is deeply embedded
in the human personality.
the popular anthropologist, robert ardrey,
has pointed out in his book, the social contract,
that for thousands of years men spent most of their waking hours in
roving, hunting bands of about 11 individuals each.
in those early days, when agriculture and even the bow and arrow were unknown,
humans had to learn to work together to kill game, or they perished.
the jews for Jesus movement represents a return to the tribal relationship within the church.
the sources of our tribal tendencies are twofold.
in the first place, many of our young people came from the hippie subculture,
where communal living and extended family units were a way of life.
in most of the urban communal pads i've visited,
each person has an informal, natural function that satisfies a peculiar need of the group.
some me of the hippies are dealers.
they bring in money for food and other necessities by selling drugs.
others are poets or artists.
they enhance the cultural life of their tribe.
if cleanliness occupies a high priority for another communal hippie,
he might be the first to help with the domestic cleaning chores.
the best cooks will also contribute their skills to the welfare of the whole social organism.
no matter what an individual's particular 'thing' may be,
he contributes to the overall raison d'etre of the group,
which is usually just to 'be beautiful'.
but there's a second, peculiarly jewish tradition that reinforced our tribal instincts.
as i've mentioned, primitive man recognized he
couldn't stand alone against hostile nature.
he needed other people to aid in hunting
and to give him a sense of status and the encouragement to develop his own abilities.
jews have been involved in tribal relationships for centuries
because of the need to insure their own survival as God's chosen people .
God called abraham out of the urban society of ur of the chaldeans
and commanded him to assume a nomadic life.
jews ever since then have manintained an internal tribal organization,
whether they were moving around as itinerant peddlers
or living in the ghettos of surope and russia.
despite increasing cultural assimilation,
there is still a strong jewish subculture in many parts of the US.
it is from this sort of background that most of our young people have come.
the hippie and jewish tribal traditions have merged in the jews4J movement.
there are usually about 20 of us at any one time
who belong to our san francisco core group.
the number that works on any given project is usually even smaller, say around 8.
a primary goal of the primeval hunting band was to get enough food for the tribe to survive.
we are also mobilized to achieve an overriding goal - encounter evangelism.
we're 'achievement oriented,
as vickie kress, one of the original J4J, put it.
everyone who is an active member of our core group works, and works hard.
to be accepted as a full participant, a person has to contribute at least 24 hours a week to our activities.
the old hunting band had its chieftain, spear makers, spear throwers, scouts and medicine men.
we have our leaders, artists, musicians, tract passers and other specialists.
there are no formal membership requirements to join the tribe,
because we are not an organization in the conventional sense of the word.
we'll accept any sincere christian, or sincere seeker after the truth,
who shows a willingness to work.
but several attempts by hostile groups to infiltrate the tribe
have forced us to examine more closely the apparent motives
of anyone who expresses an interest in joining us.
with regard to fulfilling tribal functions, i have told each brother and sister
that those who can work should work.
they should not sit around all day to praise Jesus.
this was a radical concept for many of the hippies.
in the past, a person would get saved, throw his savings into the community pot,
and then just sit around and read the bible.
but i told them they could not deal with most landlords that way.
it was necessary, if they wanted a sustained ministry,
to settle down somewhere and demonstrate an ability to pay regular rent.
some of them had unemployment money coming in,
but i pointed out that their inactivity was bad for their development as christians.
although it's good to pray and read the bible, these things tend to deteriorate
when a person is not doing something constructive with his time.
i encouraged them to get jobs or go to school,
and most have bought the advice.
of the core group, two thirds have either graduated or are attending bible college.
most are church members in addition to attending synagogue regularly.
accepting responsibility is the key to discipleship.
our living arrangements range from ordinary homes and apartments to communes.
at my suggestion, eight young men and women got permission to live in a vacant church parsonage
in return for keeping up the grounds until a new minister arrived.
at least one married couple always lives with the group.
i believe such arrangements are healthy because the guys behave better
when the girls are around and vice versa.
this enhances the social development of the tribe.
it has been said that we are organized generally along revolutionary lines
because we are trying to change people and situations in a radical fashion.
but we are more dynamic in our individual roles than most of the radical paramilitary groups.
any individual J4J may wear several hats, depending on the function he is performing at the moment.
my role is that of the tribal leader.
i preside over our weekly staff meeting and act as primary spokesman for the press
and in major public debates.
i'm usually the primary strategist in demonstrations and other confrontations,
and i handle the overall coordination for our activities.
but i am by no means a dictator who always gets his own way,
a svengali or hypnotist who controls pliable young minds.
on the contrary, i am frequently challenged or overridden on ideas
i may propose to the group.
my role has been described by one of the J4J as that of a spiritual elder brother
because i have more experience in many christian matters than the younger people.
we J4J, then, are a tribe of contrasting individuals
who have been welded together by one primary goal:
we want to let nonbelievers, and especially young jews, know what Jesus has done for us.
we are not, however, a separate, isolated sect.
most of us also belong to nearby churches, where we serve on committees,
teach sunday school classes, and participate in musical programs.
in one church there are representatives from our tribe,
a tribe of gentile hippie christians,
and a third tribe of straight christians whose main contacts
are with the local business community.
the J4J are constantly in touch with these other tribes
and we've learned to help and reinforce one another,
as one in the body of Christ.
each tribe makes a contribution to the worldwide spiritual 'nation' of the church
through the local congregation;
but at the same time each has its own special role
in working outside the congregation to carry the gospel to non christians.
87...in our contemporary society, we have conditioned our young people to think
that they are participating if they sit and listen to what is being said.
from the time a child enters the first grade,
he is encouraged to pay attention to his teachers,
to be an academic sponge that soaks up knowledge.
he sits through college, through church.
he has to use his seat instead of his feet
as a way of showing commitment.
many church members think that they are doing the work of God
by sitting through 4 or 5 prayer meetings, bible studies, sermons and committee meetings each week.
if i could tell the church anything about christian service, it would be,
'G-E-T O-F-F Y-O-U-R S-E-A-T and G-E-T O-N Y-O-U-R F-E-E-T.
or, as the bible says:
'how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him
that bringeth good tidings,
that publisheth peace;
that bringeth good tidings of good,
that publisheth salvation;
that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth! isaiah 52.7
our strategy is to have each person MAKE A STATEMENT ABOUT GOD
AND HIS WONDERFUL WORKS OF REDEMPTION. (ps. 51.15)
our young evangelists tell the wonderful stories of redemption from
dope, the devil, depression and disillusionment.
since the J4J movement has become more prominent,
there have been many who have approached us and volunteered their services.
we can't accept most of these people,
even though they are willing to pay their own way,
but those we do accept are initiated into our tribal life in a very simple way.
either baruch goldstein or i will take them out on the streets,
hand them a stack of broadsides and take a stack for ourselves.
we then begin handing the literature out to the crowds of pedestrians.
if the new volunteer is the kind of person we want, he'll try passing the tracts as well.
usually he's surprised to see that more people accept the literature than refuse it.
frequently he becomes enthusiastic and excited.
that's the kind of person we want.
...my dictionary defines confrontation as
'to stand or come in front of, stand or meet facing'.
that's what we want-to face people.
we don't want to get in their way or aggravate them into accepting Christ,
but rather to make ourselves available for anyone who may be interested in learning about Jesus.
our demonstrations in front of the topless bottomless clubs are often misunderstood.
we're not there to protest what's going on inside,
but to attest to the fact that
Christ alone can satisfy the longing of the human heart.
...we usually choose the street or campus as our place of confrontation,
not the pulpit or the pew.
and vocal confrontation for us is not merely shouting slogans and chants,
but being able to verbalize our feelings with conviction
and tell them to others.
after each street action we have a period of debriefing which includes
prayer and a discussion of what we've learned.
in addition, each person in the group relates questions that have been asked him,
and we then talk over possible answers.
for example, at one session one of our volunteers said,
'this guy asked me how much i get paid to evangelize.
i told him $1000 a convert,
and if he'd convert, i'd split my prize with him.
'why did you tell him that? asked another.
'why couldn't you give him a straight answer?
'because it wasn't a straight question.
the bible says 'answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit' proverbs 26.5
our confrontations frequently involve direct, unequivocal communication,
but since such an approach can produce conflict and misunderstanding,
we always try to be loving and accepting, as well as honest toward the other person.
down on market street i was handing out broadsides,
and a young...well, i couldn't tell if the person was a boy or girl,
approached me.
the dress was female, but the walk didn't seem quite at home in high heels.
when i heard the voice, i knew that the individual was a male.
he asked, 'do you believe that homosexuals are going to hell?
'yes, i said, but i believe all those who choose to serve self and not God
are guilty of sin and are going to hell.
only those who have committed themselves to Christ can escape the penalty of sin.
but let me ask you a question.
do you believe in hell?
'we homosexuals are living in hell now and
it's a hell made by people like you, he replied.
'wait a minute, i said.
'you're the one who approached me with a question.
i didn't stop you.
i have nothing against you.
the question you have to ask yourself is whether or not God is satisfied with
the life you've chosen for yourself.
'the problem is you with your literature.
you're promoting a morality that i can't accept
because i have a different physical nature.
it's not natural for me to try to be like you.
i pointed out that as a natural man, a non christian,
he was not able to perceive the things of God.
but i also told him that God could give him a supernatural power
that would enable him to follow a christian morality.
jimmy, who called himself janie, was interested when i mentioned the power to be different.
he had never been satisfied to think of himself as being
a helpless victim of environmental conditioning.
that afternoon, he mad a decision to bring God into his life.
i haven't seen jimmy again,
but i did get a letter that said that he was straight,
going to church,
and dating a girl that he hoped to marry.
'well, i mused recently with a friend, many psychiatrists give up on homosexuals,
but an encounter with God in a brief few minutes can sure change things.
God used the confrontation on the streets...
effective evangelism often takes place within an arena of confrontation...
many christians hesitate...
confrontation occasionally produces conflict...
unpleasantness ..might occur.
..if we're not willing to endure possible difficulties
and risk possible rejection..
we'll never be able to achieve much for God..
..roger kahn has noted in his book 'the passionate people,
'one cannot stop being jewish by choice;
personal choice is irrelevant to jewishness.
the covenant between God and abraham, renewed between God and moses,
is what binds jews, according to the (halakah)...
contrary to what some jews think, our purpose in relating to the jewish community
involves more than just evangelism.
i'm an evangelist both by profession and by interest.
my ministry is similar to that of a guy who loves to play tennis.
if i could, i'd spend all my time doing it.
but my jewishness isn't simply the bait on a christian hook
to catch jewish fish. it's authentic.
unfortunately, some jewish leaders have refused to recognize
the genuineness of our jewishness.
they have chosen instead to yield to an innate, emotional hostility to christians
and have tried to exclude us from their community.
because we won't stand such unfair and illegal attacks on our rights,
we occasionally find it necessary to
turn our confrontation tactics toward other jews in an effort to point out
the error of their ways.
sometimes, the confrontation may involve a little repartee on the street.
baruch goldstein has come to some definite conclusions
about his own jewishness,
so he was ready to respond when a jewish fellow
accosted him at a north beach demonstration and said gruffly,
'you jewish?
'yeah, bauch replied.
'well, let's hear your rap!
'i don't have any rap. what are you talking about?
'come o, come on, let's hear your rap, the fellow pressed.
'you say your're jewish. you have a jewish mother?
'yeah, and i've been circumcised too, you want to see? baruch retorted.
the young jewish man backed off, shaking his head.
'no, that's okay. i believe you.
baruch was just trying to shock the guy, make him think,
and this sort of approach is usually effective in a none to one confrontation.
but when other jews ORGANIZE to challenge us,
our response becomes more complex...97
...one of the things that has always bothered me about the protestant church
is that aesthetically it is rather sterile.
protestants stress evangelism, social action and individual piety
and that is certainly putting first things first.
but there is also a creative dimension to human existence
-literature, art, music (food).
all of these are ways of communicating,
but protestants have often been content to express their faith
through old, tired artistic forms,
rather than to seek new channels of creative expression.
..112 we have combined our penchant for pity sayings
with a knack for satire and irony in our broadside tracts...
the furor over the book by dr. david reuben,
'everything you always wanted to know about sex and were afraid to ask',
inspired a broadside by steffi geiser that we entitled:
'everything you always wanted to know about Jesus but were afraid to ask your rabbi'.
though the title may seem flippant, the text involves a rather serious series of questions and answers..
one technique we use in writing broadsides is to employ irony
by taking a jewish concept or slogan
and 'reinterpreting' it in a christian context...
the difference between christian artists and those who do not have an abiding religious faith
is that our primary aim is to communicate to others
WHAT GOD HAD DONE IN OUR LIVES.
the worst sin in our creative expressions is to be boring
and the greatest virtue is to MAKE JESUS ATTRACTIVE FOR OTHERS.
my own creative abilities are modest, if not subnormal.
but i know the potential of those around me
and i believe we have rediscovered a distinctively jewish way to present Jesus
which has been lying dormant for centuries.
there was a large and vital jewish christian group in new testament times;
but their rich and distinctive way of expressing their faith
was eventually swallowed by the tidal wave of gentiles that came into the church.
we are now issuing a general invitation to our gentile brethren to return with us
to those lost cultural treasures and enjoy, enjoy.
God has consistently revealed Himself,
from old testament times to the present,
as a God who acts in history,
who intervenes in concrete ways in the lives of men.
to many people, the idea of an
action oriented, personal god may seem a superstitious concept of bygone days,
not at all suitable for the sophisticated space age.
satan falls into the same category: he just doesn't belong...
but we J4J KNOW, beyond any doubt,
that the God of the old and new testaments is still operating today.
we have experienced His power through direct answers to prayer.
we also know that the enemy, satan. IS HAVING A FIELD DAY
because people refuse to believe in him
and therefore fail to prepare for his attacks.
i've found that God requires two things of me before His power becomes available.
first..i have to ask.
He knows what i want and need even before i ask,
but it is up to me to establish a vital spiritual link with concrete requests.
second...i must ask in faith
...when we get together as a group to pray,
i'll often ask the one who feels he has the most faith
to offer our supplications to the Lord,
and it works!
..we've gotten used to praying for SPECIFIC AMOUNTS and SPECIFIC THINGS,
and as long as we're working and doing our share,
we have found God is faithful in providing for us.
..satan...succeeds in subtle ways in diverting us from always following God's directions.
65 while i was getting initiated into the hippie scene in san francisco,
some unusual things were happening in the backwoods of oregon
that would have a tremendous impact on my ministry.
a middle aged christian, jack dunn, and his wife, liz,
felt called by God to prepare their house.
jack said God told him that he was going to send some people to them
and that the couple should feed and love these visitors.
although jack explained that god spoke to him directly through a voice and a vision,
the exact purpose of his task was not revealed.
but he and liz obeyed by immediately furnishing and repairing their extra rooms.
one of the first groups to arrive after the preparations were completed
were some motorcycle roughnecks.
one of the dunns'
later guests, mark winter, called these people
'bikers, heavy duty greasers'.
they put jack and liz through lot of grief.
they ruined part of a field jack had planted and they got stoned on pills and dope.
jack finally put his foot down.
he said that nobody who stayed there could possess or use any drugs.
needless to say, the christian couple seemed baffled as to why god wanted them
to take care of these hell's angels types,
especially since the bikers didn't seem particularly interested in the gospel.
but soon, this bunch moved on, and a different breed of guest started wandering in.
these were all hippies, and most of them were jewish.
jack's house, which has become known affectionately as 'the ranch',
a retreat with an atmosphere that encouraged serious consideration of the claims of Jesus Christ.
one of the early jewish visitors up there was baruch goldstein,
a stocky, bearded young man from the bronx who eventually joined me in san francisco.
baruch, who laughs and jokes as much as anyone i know,
had led a wild, adventurous life before wandering into the oregon haven.
he was a typical hippie with the 'turn on, tune in, drop out' philosophy.
knowing he would confront the inevitable draft, he joined the army.
he served as a combat soldier in vietnam,
was wounded and began receiving a disability pension on his discharge.
just before he was released from the service, he got involved in drugs in a naval hospital in new york.
that experience encouraged him to by a small bus with his steady veteran's pension
and head toward a life of drugs and sew in the counterculture.
i tried heroin, a lot of grass, and i'd sell anything, he explained.
'i moved out to california and lived in a couple of communes,
traveled around, did anything i wanted.
girls, dope, i enjoyed it all.
but then i heard that my brother, fred, had become a christian
and that he was staying in oregon at a place called 'the ranch'.
i really couldn't believe it.
i always thought people who believed in Jesus were weak,
so i decided i had to talk to him about it.
'i stopped off in a forest on the way up to the ranch to have some lunch and smoke some dope.
but all of a sudden this car came up and a guy jumped out.
he handed me a piece of paper and drove off without a word.
i glanced at the paper and saw that his testimony was written on it:
'i used to be a dope smoking, pill popping hippie until Jesus came into my life and set me free.
i though 'wow! i must be getting into Jesus country.
'when i arrived in the town that was closest to the ranch, i knew i was in trouble.
for all practical purposes, the ranch was inaccessible.
there were only two ways to get out there:
you either hiked about forty miles through the woods and came in from behind,
or you had to find a boat that was hidden in some bushes outside the town
and then row across this huge river.
daniel boone couldn't have located the place even if he had radar.
i had been told to call jack at the ranch
and then either get him or someone else to come over and meet me.
i didn't have his phone number, so i decided to turn left and call the town operator from a small drugstore.
but i couldn't turn left because of a couple of cars coming from the opposite direction,
so i turned right into a gas station.
the operator told me jack had an unlisted number,
and none of the old new york tricks i had up my sleeve would work it out of her.
i said it was an emergency, i had to speak to my brother, but nothing moved her.
baruch was thoroughly frustrated at this point.
'i was tired, hungry and cold, but then i came up with an idea.
it was a small town, only a few thousand people.
i decided if i started asking enough people, somebody was bound to know jack.
so i walked up to this man, a weird looking guy with a gray beard,
who was getting gasoline for his buss.
i said, excuse me, do you know a jack dunn?
'what do you want to find that kook for? he dais.
'i was happy and upset at the same time- upset that this guy seemed so uptight,
but happy that the first person i met knew jack.
the guy said, 'wait right here, and he went to the gas station phone.
a few minutes later, he motioned me over and handed me the receiver.
my brother freddy was on the other end of the line!
but that was only half the surprise.
the guy i'd been talking to, the first person i walked up to in the town-
and at a gas station i hadn't even wanted to turn into- was jack dunn himself!
'wow, what a coincidence! i said.
'coincidence, ha!' jack knowingly replied.
baruch recalled that after he'd been at the ranch for a few days,
he felt there was something different about the place.
'i really sensed a different kind of love there, and that made me question a lot of things.
one of the other hippies suggested that i start reading the new testament to find the answers
to what i was looking for.
i got zapped out by the Holy Spirit somewhere between matthew and revelation.
the sermon on the mount really made an impression.
i could see the adulterous, sinful, lustful life i had been living.
in an effort to find and answer, baruch said,
'i began to pray, at first like the scribes and pharisees.
i asked for a sign or a miracle because i decided i wasn't a fool,
i wasn't going to believe in nothing.
'dear God, i said,, please split a river for me or send down a thunderbolt.
well god showed the miraculous to me, but it wasn't what i thought it would be.
it was a very simple, subtle thing.
i saw the miracle one morning when i awoke and watched the others getting together for breakfast and praying.
it was us, you and me, His creation.
i knew inside of me that there was a god, but i still didn't understand Jesus.
then i continued to read the new testament, and
god showed me Jesus was the Promised One,
the Messiah of the Old Testament.
i fell for it hook, line and sinker.
god went fishing and i got caught.
baruch's life underwent an immediate, radical change.
'i completely gave up drugs.
before i became a christian, i sold anything anybody would buy.
i used to fly from california to new york with a cargo of grass.
in new york, i'd pick up some heroin and bring it back to california.
but after i discovered Jesus, my cargo changed.
now, when i fly, i take thousands of gospel tracts east, distribute them
and return with a tremendous sense of accomplishment and satisfaction
that drugs could never give me.
his faith in Christ also encouraged him to rediscover his identity as a jew.
'when i was into the hippie scene,
i remember writing a letter home saying, dear brother and sister instead of dear mom and dad.
i wanted to tear down all ethnic and social walls and traditions.
i considered myself to be Baruch from the universe, rather than baruch the jew.
but i started seeing the significance of my jewish heritage at the ranch.
we conducted a sabbath service wile i stayed there, and since then
i've started going to synagogue fairly regularly.
i believe God created the situation at the ranch so that young jews could find Christ.
the large majority of hippies who visited there were jewish,
and many of them have contributed to the work of the jews for Jesus.
the ranch doesn't exist anymore-it was flooded after about a year-
and jack and liz have moved on to another town.
but as short lived as their ranch experience was, they were there when God needed them.
their work at the ranch occurred almost simultaneously with the beginning of moishe's san francisco ministry.
some might say the timing was just a coincidence,
but i've seen too many such 'coincidences' to believe god didn't have a hand in it.
another one of the ranch crowd and a close friend of baruch's from new york, jh'an moskowitz,
had an even more startling encounter with god.
'i come from a conservative jewish family, explained jh'an,
a lanky, bearded fellow who would rather argue a philosophical issue than eat.
'my father and mother were in a nazi concentration camp,
and my dad still has the number stamped on his arm.
my people had suffered because of their jewishness,
and i knew from an early age just how serious a thing it was to be a jew.
it was always them and us. them included the nazis and christians.
jh'an's early commitment to his people culminated when he joined a zionist group
and volunteered at the age of seventeen for the israeli army during the 1967 war against egypt.
'i decided i'd rather die in Israel than in vietnam,
but i never was officially admitted into a combat unit.
i stayed in the reserves and lived on a kibbutz,
but then i began to realize that war wasn't where it was at for me.
although i still supported israel, i saw a subtle racism over there.
the arab refugees were treated pretty poorly
and i didn't like that.
so, disillusioned, i started looking for personal truth in the youth subculture.
he graduated from long island university, but the though of an ordinary, middle class career
repulsed him.
so he retreated into drugs and sex and finally decided to head out west.
'baruch and i got together out here in california, and we planned to become psychedelic pirates..
'we met some old friends in the bay area and got into dealing and suing all kinds of dope.
i was really crass toward girls because i only wanted them as sex objects.
we were living in san francisco in a commune called the Freaky Dude Ranch
when a couple of our close friends became christians.
i had read some of the bible, but Jesus didn't seem real to me.
things began to get a little boring and repetitious around the commune-
the same sex, the same drugs, over and over-
so i decided to take a vacation in the caribbean.
jh'an hitchhiked to florida and worked in a warehouse for a couple of weeks to earn enough money for the plane fare to jamaica.
'i was still looking for truth, so i headed for the jamaican hills
and sought out some tribesmen i'd heard about
who were supposed to worship the ethiopian emperor, haile selassie.
l lived in a hut with a guy named joshua
and tried to learn the spiritual truths i thought these people had to offer.
one old wise man used to say to me in a deep voice with a rolling jamaican accent
'king of kings and lord of lords, Conquering Lion from the tribe of judah.
though your skin may be white, if you smoke the herb, the blood of your heart will be black.
so i puffed on his grass and really grooved on everything he said.
many things seem especially profound when you're stoned.
'but i had overstayed my visa, and the authorities came looking for me.
i had overstayed my visa, and the authorities came looking for me.
i had to hightail it out of there and head back to the states.
still, i was no wiser than i had been a month or a year before.
and i got a shock when i received a letter from the commune:
baruch had become a christian.
i really felt bad, like i'd lost a friend.
i could see the others getting on the Jesus kick, but not baruch.
he was a stone cold heathen, a jolly, fun loving guy who hadn't even been looking for anything.
i, at least, had been on a spiritual quest.
i thought, that's really heavy, man.
jh'an returned to san francisco in april, 1971,
and at the request of one of his old hippie buddies, mitch glaser,
who had recently become a christian,
he attended a bible study i was teaching in san francisco.
jh'an's concept of a christian was simply a person who loved other people.
by that definition, he thought he might be a christian himself.
mitch introduced me to jh'an and asked me to rap with him about Jesus.
'do you believed Jesus Christ died for you, jh'an? i asked.
'yeahm man, i go for that, jh'an replied.
'and do you believe he was resurrected from the dead?
sure.
after a few more such questions, i decided that what jh'an said he believed was similar to
what any christian would believe.
but i didn't
t know him too well at that time,
and he told me later that in retrospect he's convinced he wasn't a christian at that point.
'no change had come about in my life when i first talked to moishe,..
'i didn't see why a faith in Christ should affect the way i lived.
if someone offered me dope, i took it without really thinking about it.
in other words, i hadn't really committed myself.
because i was still looking for spiritual knowledge,
i hitch hiked up to the ranch to see what baruch was doing.
it was a heavy experience for me.
after staying there three days, i decided i had to get out.
everybody was talking about God this and God that.
i tried to inject my own ideas i had just dreamed up about Jesus
-the cosmic Jesus.
but my intellectualized Christ had no impact on my daily life,
no relationship to the personal God these people seemed to know.
i wanted to believe, but i couldn't force myself.
i asked God to give me a real experience.
i had to know that He was really, really who the bible said He was.
i couldn't do it on blind faith.
i had to know it was more than a psychological high.
the night before he left the ranch, jh'an said he had a dream:
'some dark haired young lady came up behind me
and put her arms around my shoulders and began to seduce me.
when i woke up, her face was vague in my memory, but i did recall a distinctive was her arms crept around me,
and a peculiar kind of dress she was wearing.
i thought, 'tsk, tsk, God, what a horrible dream.
i had some idea it was from God,
but i also suspected it might have resulted from some kind of psychological suggestion
from the Jesus freaks who were all around me at the ranch.
at any rate, i ignored any special religious significance.
'baruch told me the next morning that he was ready to return to san francisco
and he asked me if i wanted a lift.
i accepted, and on the way down i mentioned my dream in passing
and said that it was really far out because i though God had seduced me.
he thought i was goofing on God, that i'd really never had the dream.
he accused me of being really gross and didn't talk much more to me during the trip.
'baruch dropped me off at about midnight at my commune
and then drove down the street to see mitch glaser at another apartment.
when i walked through my front door, i realized all of a sudden what a dark scene i was into.
the place looked like sodom and gomorrah.
all the speed freaks were there and everyone was stoned, tripped out.
people had painted their faces and were dancing around like maniacs.
remembering the beautiful, peaceful scene in oregon,
i didn't feel like getting involved with them just then.
i decoded this wasn't where things were at.
these people were really blowing themselves out.
i went back to the kitchen and tried to get my head together.
but while i was standing with my hands resting on the sink,
i felt these arms start to slide over my shoulders.
i looked around out of the corner of my eye, and this chill went up my spine.
the girl behind me had the same dress pattern,
the same general physical features of the chick in my dream at the ranch.
i flipped out!
the dream was actually coming true.
i didn't move. it was really heavy.
'i though, is this really happening, man?
maybe God's really real.
maybe He's trying to tell me something.
meanwhile, this chick was really coming on strong.
she said, 'what's going on? let's get it on.
i shrugged and said to myself,
'look jh'an, don't freak her out.
she started running her hands up and down my body, and i got excited and decided God would forgive me this time.
so i turned around and put my arms around her and looked over her shoulder.
suddenly, everything went BOING!
on the window in front of me, the sign of the cross had been traced clearly on the glass.
as it happened, baruch and mitch had been walking outside just at that moment.
mitch, as was his custom, drew that cross on the window,
but neither of them could see me through the glass.
coincidences were one thing, but this was too much.
there was a pattern now that i couldn't deny,
and i knew i wasn't hallucinating on drugs.
i hadn't had any dope for several days
because it was prohibited at the ranch.
i said to myself, 'hey jh'an, enough coincidences!
let's get it together and find out what you've got to do'.
i met mitch and baruch just after they came through the door and said,
'look, fellows, i think God is real.
maybe i'd better get together with Him, maybe He's really there.
let's go have a talk'.
as they walked toward a nearby park, jh'an told baruch,
'hey, man, the dream really came true. what should i do?
maybe you should ask God to come into your life,
give yourself over to Him,' baruch suggested.
'well, if the Guy's real, why should i run away from Him?'
when they reached the park, jh'an got down on his knees
and baruch and mitch laid their hands on his head.
jh'an prayed, 'Father, forgive me for pretending i knew You,
for being the imperfect person i am.
come into my life, take it over, i'm Yours'.
in explaining his commitment, jh'an said,
'coincidences that lead to a spiritual commitment can't happen in an isolated way.
there may be a couple of minor external events that don't seem to remarkable
to an objective observer.
but in my case-and i know for other christians as well-
there's a corresponding internal event,
an insight God provides that ties the coincidences together and produces a divine revelation.
that's what happened to me with that dream incident'.
these fellows gravitated in my direction initially because of a strange experience
that mitch glaser had in sausalito.
he had spent some time at the ranch but was still into the hip scene,
unsure of what direction his life should take.
while sitting near the shore in sausalito, he prayed that God would show him what to do
and almost immediately one of my broadsides,
bearing my name and address, came floating up in the tide.
he hitched over to our house, knocked on the door,
and declared, 'the Lord sent me to you. what should i do?'
'i don't know, i said, somewhat taken aback.
don't ask me, ask Him'.
'i did and He sent me here, mitch replied. what should i do?'
'i don't know, i answered again.
we were at something of an impasse,
but i wouldn't attempt to tell him something i didn't know myself.
that's one thing i won't budge on:
i know an individual should accept Jesus as Lord,
love God, read the bible, lead a christian life and pray.
but as for the specific direction of life's affairs,
he'll have to go to God himself to find the answer.
we talked for a while longer and he rode with me to a nearby shop
to get some bagels and then headed back toward the ranch.
while he was up there, mitch asked jack dunn if he knew me.
jack replied that he didn't, but that God had told him i was okay.
the next time i got together with mitch, he had baruch and jh'an in tow,
and they were all christians.
'i'm hungry, i said when i joined them on that occasion.
'why don't we go have some chinese food?'
they accepted my invitation and we headed toward an inexpensive chinatown restaurant.
we each ordered huge amounts of food,
but when the check came, i found i had left my wallet at home.
baruch had to dig into his pockets and pay with some of his army disability money.
i learned later that baruch was a little disconcerted with me at that point:
'i wondered what kind of guy this was..
he asks you out to eat and then you have to pay for it.'
but he soon forgot about the meal after we walked outside the restaurant.
i began to show them how i conducted my street ministry
by pulling out 500 or so broadsides and handing them out to pedestrians.
baruch was so fascinated that he grabbed them away from me
and started distributing them himself.
he was like a child and kept saying,
'look, people really take them!
look at that guy-he's walking down the street reading it!
hey man, this is really terrific!'
'i really liked handing out those tracts, baruch recalled.
'it was flipping me out that i was standing there on a street corner in downtown san francisco
dealing out gospel literature.
i always had this stereotype of Jesus freaks walking around with their placards warning,
'repent! the wold is doomed!
and there i was doing essentially the same thing myself-and enjoying it.
while baruch was getting high handing out the pamphlets,
mitch was just staring at him in utter fascination.
and jh'an, who will argue about any subject under the sun,
whether he knows anything about it or not,
was interrogating me on some esoteric theological point.
it was almost surrealistic.
but as weird as that tableau must have seemed to any onlookers,
i realize now it marked the beginning of some friendships
that were to be significant for evangelism among the jews in the bay areal.
the Jews for Jesus were gradually drifting together,
feeling their way into a working relationship.
but before i leave the ranch episode, i want to mention something about mark winter,
another graduate of jack dunn's oregon hideaway.
he's an aggressive tract passer and is becoming involved in helping us
in film work and photography, his specialty during graduate school.
but the mark winter of today and the mark of the ranch are two different people,
for he suffered from a severe case of 'ranchitis'.
ranchitis was a spiritual malady characterized by enjoying Jesus
into a state o almost total inactivity.
some would describe it as an immersion in mysticism,
and others would call it grooving on Jesus.
mark explained his condition like this:
'at the ranch i didn't do anything unless i felt the Lord told me to.
jack didn't encourage us to work, only to read the bible
and after i accepted the Lord that's all i felt like doing.
jack would say, 'this is a place to grow tall,
the city is a place to put on the muscle.'
there was nothing to distract me there.
it was just me and God.
there was nobody laying any trips on me,
nobody saying, 'Jesus loves you.'
the only time they'd answer me about God was if i asked them a question.
we could do some work in the fields, but jack didn't push it
all the work he wanted us to do was turn the pages of the bible.
we didn't even have to do that if we didn't want to.
i couldn't have come to God anywhere else because i had a hand up about authority,
as did a lot of people i knew in the counterculture.
i didn't have to worry about any authority up there but God.
'the problem was that i remained in an inactive condition
when i came back to the city.
i lived with n aunt but i wasn't really functioning.
i couldn't see that God wanted me to do any work, so i didn't do any.
some of the guys with moishe would ask,
'do you want to hand out some tracts with us?
i'd just reply, 'if Father wants me to'.
it was really a bad place to be,
not junctioning at all for a couple of months.
then i started slipping out of it,
getting involved in activities with the other Jews for Jesus.
now, my life is almost all action-action for God.
as baruch mentioned, the ranch doesn't exist anymore.
after a flood washed them out, jack and liz dunn began traveling around the country,
doing other work to which God called them.
but despite the short existence of their oregon retreat,
their efforts had and immeasurable impact on our
urban, action oriented ministry in san francisco.
the jews for Jesus, with their demonstrations, confrontations, and exuberant creative expressions,
are in a sense the direct spiritual descendants of the detached, contemplative life of jack dunn's ranch.
75 the tribe
in our society anyone whose religion matters is considered to be too religious.
for most people, a religious faith is like a blood type.
it's just something you put on an identification card,
but it doesn't affect your life very much, except in emergencies.
this observation by stuart dauermann reflects a basic complaint of the group which,
in the fall of 1970, came to be known as the jews for Jesus.
these young people, ranging in age from the late teens to the middle twenties,
were attracted to Jesus not by contemporary, watered down versions of christianity,
but by His call for a total commitment.
they joined a movement, not an organization.
their operational structure, which has many lessons to offer the church as a whole,
can best be described as tribal.
the innate impulse to gather into tribal groups is deeply embedded
in the human personality.
the popular anthropologist, robert ardrey,
has pointed out in his book, the social contract,
that for thousands of years men spent most of their waking hours in
roving, hunting bands of about 11 individuals each.
in those early days, when agriculture and even the bow and arrow were unknown,
humans had to learn to work together to kill game, or they perished.
the jews for Jesus movement represents a return to the tribal relationship within the church.
the sources of our tribal tendencies are twofold.
in the first place, many of our young people came from the hippie subculture,
where communal living and extended family units were a way of life.
in most of the urban communal pads i've visited,
each person has an informal, natural function that satisfies a peculiar need of the group.
some me of the hippies are dealers.
they bring in money for food and other necessities by selling drugs.
others are poets or artists.
they enhance the cultural life of their tribe.
if cleanliness occupies a high priority for another communal hippie,
he might be the first to help with the domestic cleaning chores.
the best cooks will also contribute their skills to the welfare of the whole social organism.
no matter what an individual's particular 'thing' may be,
he contributes to the overall raison d'etre of the group,
which is usually just to 'be beautiful'.
but there's a second, peculiarly jewish tradition that reinforced our tribal instincts.
as i've mentioned, primitive man recognized he
couldn't stand alone against hostile nature.
he needed other people to aid in hunting
and to give him a sense of status and the encouragement to develop his own abilities.
jews have been involved in tribal relationships for centuries
because of the need to insure their own survival as God's chosen people .
God called abraham out of the urban society of ur of the chaldeans
and commanded him to assume a nomadic life.
jews ever since then have manintained an internal tribal organization,
whether they were moving around as itinerant peddlers
or living in the ghettos of surope and russia.
despite increasing cultural assimilation,
there is still a strong jewish subculture in many parts of the US.
it is from this sort of background that most of our young people have come.
the hippie and jewish tribal traditions have merged in the jews4J movement.
there are usually about 20 of us at any one time
who belong to our san francisco core group.
the number that works on any given project is usually even smaller, say around 8.
a primary goal of the primeval hunting band was to get enough food for the tribe to survive.
we are also mobilized to achieve an overriding goal - encounter evangelism.
we're 'achievement oriented,
as vickie kress, one of the original J4J, put it.
everyone who is an active member of our core group works, and works hard.
to be accepted as a full participant, a person has to contribute at least 24 hours a week to our activities.
the old hunting band had its chieftain, spear makers, spear throwers, scouts and medicine men.
we have our leaders, artists, musicians, tract passers and other specialists.
there are no formal membership requirements to join the tribe,
because we are not an organization in the conventional sense of the word.
we'll accept any sincere christian, or sincere seeker after the truth,
who shows a willingness to work.
but several attempts by hostile groups to infiltrate the tribe
have forced us to examine more closely the apparent motives
of anyone who expresses an interest in joining us.
with regard to fulfilling tribal functions, i have told each brother and sister
that those who can work should work.
they should not sit around all day to praise Jesus.
this was a radical concept for many of the hippies.
in the past, a person would get saved, throw his savings into the community pot,
and then just sit around and read the bible.
but i told them they could not deal with most landlords that way.
it was necessary, if they wanted a sustained ministry,
to settle down somewhere and demonstrate an ability to pay regular rent.
some of them had unemployment money coming in,
but i pointed out that their inactivity was bad for their development as christians.
although it's good to pray and read the bible, these things tend to deteriorate
when a person is not doing something constructive with his time.
i encouraged them to get jobs or go to school,
and most have bought the advice.
of the core group, two thirds have either graduated or are attending bible college.
most are church members in addition to attending synagogue regularly.
accepting responsibility is the key to discipleship.
our living arrangements range from ordinary homes and apartments to communes.
at my suggestion, eight young men and women got permission to live in a vacant church parsonage
in return for keeping up the grounds until a new minister arrived.
at least one married couple always lives with the group.
i believe such arrangements are healthy because the guys behave better
when the girls are around and vice versa.
this enhances the social development of the tribe.
it has been said that we are organized generally along revolutionary lines
because we are trying to change people and situations in a radical fashion.
but we are more dynamic in our individual roles than most of the radical paramilitary groups.
any individual J4J may wear several hats, depending on the function he is performing at the moment.
my role is that of the tribal leader.
i preside over our weekly staff meeting and act as primary spokesman for the press
and in major public debates.
i'm usually the primary strategist in demonstrations and other confrontations,
and i handle the overall coordination for our activities.
but i am by no means a dictator who always gets his own way,
a svengali or hypnotist who controls pliable young minds.
on the contrary, i am frequently challenged or overridden on ideas
i may propose to the group.
my role has been described by one of the J4J as that of a spiritual elder brother
because i have more experience in many christian matters than the younger people.
we J4J, then, are a tribe of contrasting individuals
who have been welded together by one primary goal:
we want to let nonbelievers, and especially young jews, know what Jesus has done for us.
we are not, however, a separate, isolated sect.
most of us also belong to nearby churches, where we serve on committees,
teach sunday school classes, and participate in musical programs.
in one church there are representatives from our tribe,
a tribe of gentile hippie christians,
and a third tribe of straight christians whose main contacts
are with the local business community.
the J4J are constantly in touch with these other tribes
and we've learned to help and reinforce one another,
as one in the body of Christ.
each tribe makes a contribution to the worldwide spiritual 'nation' of the church
through the local congregation;
but at the same time each has its own special role
in working outside the congregation to carry the gospel to non christians.
87...in our contemporary society, we have conditioned our young people to think
that they are participating if they sit and listen to what is being said.
from the time a child enters the first grade,
he is encouraged to pay attention to his teachers,
to be an academic sponge that soaks up knowledge.
he sits through college, through church.
he has to use his seat instead of his feet
as a way of showing commitment.
many church members think that they are doing the work of God
by sitting through 4 or 5 prayer meetings, bible studies, sermons and committee meetings each week.
if i could tell the church anything about christian service, it would be,
'G-E-T O-F-F Y-O-U-R S-E-A-T and G-E-T O-N Y-O-U-R F-E-E-T.
or, as the bible says:
'how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him
that bringeth good tidings,
that publisheth peace;
that bringeth good tidings of good,
that publisheth salvation;
that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth! isaiah 52.7
our strategy is to have each person MAKE A STATEMENT ABOUT GOD
AND HIS WONDERFUL WORKS OF REDEMPTION. (ps. 51.15)
our young evangelists tell the wonderful stories of redemption from
dope, the devil, depression and disillusionment.
since the J4J movement has become more prominent,
there have been many who have approached us and volunteered their services.
we can't accept most of these people,
even though they are willing to pay their own way,
but those we do accept are initiated into our tribal life in a very simple way.
either baruch goldstein or i will take them out on the streets,
hand them a stack of broadsides and take a stack for ourselves.
we then begin handing the literature out to the crowds of pedestrians.
if the new volunteer is the kind of person we want, he'll try passing the tracts as well.
usually he's surprised to see that more people accept the literature than refuse it.
frequently he becomes enthusiastic and excited.
that's the kind of person we want.
...my dictionary defines confrontation as
'to stand or come in front of, stand or meet facing'.
that's what we want-to face people.
we don't want to get in their way or aggravate them into accepting Christ,
but rather to make ourselves available for anyone who may be interested in learning about Jesus.
our demonstrations in front of the topless bottomless clubs are often misunderstood.
we're not there to protest what's going on inside,
but to attest to the fact that
Christ alone can satisfy the longing of the human heart.
...we usually choose the street or campus as our place of confrontation,
not the pulpit or the pew.
and vocal confrontation for us is not merely shouting slogans and chants,
but being able to verbalize our feelings with conviction
and tell them to others.
after each street action we have a period of debriefing which includes
prayer and a discussion of what we've learned.
in addition, each person in the group relates questions that have been asked him,
and we then talk over possible answers.
for example, at one session one of our volunteers said,
'this guy asked me how much i get paid to evangelize.
i told him $1000 a convert,
and if he'd convert, i'd split my prize with him.
'why did you tell him that? asked another.
'why couldn't you give him a straight answer?
'because it wasn't a straight question.
the bible says 'answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit' proverbs 26.5
our confrontations frequently involve direct, unequivocal communication,
but since such an approach can produce conflict and misunderstanding,
we always try to be loving and accepting, as well as honest toward the other person.
down on market street i was handing out broadsides,
and a young...well, i couldn't tell if the person was a boy or girl,
approached me.
the dress was female, but the walk didn't seem quite at home in high heels.
when i heard the voice, i knew that the individual was a male.
he asked, 'do you believe that homosexuals are going to hell?
'yes, i said, but i believe all those who choose to serve self and not God
are guilty of sin and are going to hell.
only those who have committed themselves to Christ can escape the penalty of sin.
but let me ask you a question.
do you believe in hell?
'we homosexuals are living in hell now and
it's a hell made by people like you, he replied.
'wait a minute, i said.
'you're the one who approached me with a question.
i didn't stop you.
i have nothing against you.
the question you have to ask yourself is whether or not God is satisfied with
the life you've chosen for yourself.
'the problem is you with your literature.
you're promoting a morality that i can't accept
because i have a different physical nature.
it's not natural for me to try to be like you.
i pointed out that as a natural man, a non christian,
he was not able to perceive the things of God.
but i also told him that God could give him a supernatural power
that would enable him to follow a christian morality.
jimmy, who called himself janie, was interested when i mentioned the power to be different.
he had never been satisfied to think of himself as being
a helpless victim of environmental conditioning.
that afternoon, he mad a decision to bring God into his life.
i haven't seen jimmy again,
but i did get a letter that said that he was straight,
going to church,
and dating a girl that he hoped to marry.
'well, i mused recently with a friend, many psychiatrists give up on homosexuals,
but an encounter with God in a brief few minutes can sure change things.
God used the confrontation on the streets...
effective evangelism often takes place within an arena of confrontation...
many christians hesitate...
confrontation occasionally produces conflict...
unpleasantness ..might occur.
..if we're not willing to endure possible difficulties
and risk possible rejection..
we'll never be able to achieve much for God..
..roger kahn has noted in his book 'the passionate people,
'one cannot stop being jewish by choice;
personal choice is irrelevant to jewishness.
the covenant between God and abraham, renewed between God and moses,
is what binds jews, according to the (halakah)...
contrary to what some jews think, our purpose in relating to the jewish community
involves more than just evangelism.
i'm an evangelist both by profession and by interest.
my ministry is similar to that of a guy who loves to play tennis.
if i could, i'd spend all my time doing it.
but my jewishness isn't simply the bait on a christian hook
to catch jewish fish. it's authentic.
unfortunately, some jewish leaders have refused to recognize
the genuineness of our jewishness.
they have chosen instead to yield to an innate, emotional hostility to christians
and have tried to exclude us from their community.
because we won't stand such unfair and illegal attacks on our rights,
we occasionally find it necessary to
turn our confrontation tactics toward other jews in an effort to point out
the error of their ways.
sometimes, the confrontation may involve a little repartee on the street.
baruch goldstein has come to some definite conclusions
about his own jewishness,
so he was ready to respond when a jewish fellow
accosted him at a north beach demonstration and said gruffly,
'you jewish?
'yeah, bauch replied.
'well, let's hear your rap!
'i don't have any rap. what are you talking about?
'come o, come on, let's hear your rap, the fellow pressed.
'you say your're jewish. you have a jewish mother?
'yeah, and i've been circumcised too, you want to see? baruch retorted.
the young jewish man backed off, shaking his head.
'no, that's okay. i believe you.
baruch was just trying to shock the guy, make him think,
and this sort of approach is usually effective in a none to one confrontation.
but when other jews ORGANIZE to challenge us,
our response becomes more complex...97
...one of the things that has always bothered me about the protestant church
is that aesthetically it is rather sterile.
protestants stress evangelism, social action and individual piety
and that is certainly putting first things first.
but there is also a creative dimension to human existence
-literature, art, music (food).
all of these are ways of communicating,
but protestants have often been content to express their faith
through old, tired artistic forms,
rather than to seek new channels of creative expression.
..112 we have combined our penchant for pity sayings
with a knack for satire and irony in our broadside tracts...
the furor over the book by dr. david reuben,
'everything you always wanted to know about sex and were afraid to ask',
inspired a broadside by steffi geiser that we entitled:
'everything you always wanted to know about Jesus but were afraid to ask your rabbi'.
though the title may seem flippant, the text involves a rather serious series of questions and answers..
one technique we use in writing broadsides is to employ irony
by taking a jewish concept or slogan
and 'reinterpreting' it in a christian context...
the difference between christian artists and those who do not have an abiding religious faith
is that our primary aim is to communicate to others
WHAT GOD HAD DONE IN OUR LIVES.
the worst sin in our creative expressions is to be boring
and the greatest virtue is to MAKE JESUS ATTRACTIVE FOR OTHERS.
my own creative abilities are modest, if not subnormal.
but i know the potential of those around me
and i believe we have rediscovered a distinctively jewish way to present Jesus
which has been lying dormant for centuries.
there was a large and vital jewish christian group in new testament times;
but their rich and distinctive way of expressing their faith
was eventually swallowed by the tidal wave of gentiles that came into the church.
we are now issuing a general invitation to our gentile brethren to return with us
to those lost cultural treasures and enjoy, enjoy.
God has consistently revealed Himself,
from old testament times to the present,
as a God who acts in history,
who intervenes in concrete ways in the lives of men.
to many people, the idea of an
action oriented, personal god may seem a superstitious concept of bygone days,
not at all suitable for the sophisticated space age.
satan falls into the same category: he just doesn't belong...
but we J4J KNOW, beyond any doubt,
that the God of the old and new testaments is still operating today.
we have experienced His power through direct answers to prayer.
we also know that the enemy, satan. IS HAVING A FIELD DAY
because people refuse to believe in him
and therefore fail to prepare for his attacks.
i've found that God requires two things of me before His power becomes available.
first..i have to ask.
He knows what i want and need even before i ask,
but it is up to me to establish a vital spiritual link with concrete requests.
second...i must ask in faith
...when we get together as a group to pray,
i'll often ask the one who feels he has the most faith
to offer our supplications to the Lord,
and it works!
..we've gotten used to praying for SPECIFIC AMOUNTS and SPECIFIC THINGS,
and as long as we're working and doing our share,
we have found God is faithful in providing for us.
..satan...succeeds in subtle ways in diverting us from always following God's directions.
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