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Steve Malone
Mark Buchanan writes;
“Fasting churns the stuff up from the depths. Is there anger in me? I can usually control that with a burger and fries Am I resentful, irritated, overly ambition, fearful? I can smoother that with pizza. Am I depressed or embittered, suffering from a sense of life’s unfairness? I can artificially perk myself up with a Mars bar.”
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WE do that at times – use food to deal with life…
Christian author and speaker Joni Eareckson Tada writes: I’m a quadriplegic, yet I can drive a van (my hand is secured to a big joystick so I can steer, accelerate, and brake). I enjoy being independent, so if there’s something I can do, I will - even if it means tackling the drive-thru at a fast-food restaurant by myself.
Remember, my hands don’t work. That’s why last week when I cruised into the drive-thru lane to order hamburgers and Cokes, I prayed for the fellows at the pick-up window. "Lord, give them patience, and give me a smile." Then I moved to the intercom to place my order.
When I’d finished explaining "no cheese" and "extra mustard packets," I told the voice on the intercom that I was disabled. There was a pause. Then, "Okay, no problem."
I pulled up to the delivery window and smiled. Sticking my arm out the window, I asked the cashier to take the 10-dollar bill that was folded in my arm splint. That was a cinch.
While he fished for my change, I asked him to place it in the paper bag along with the hamburgers. At that point, the server bagging my order looked over his shoulder. Both boys, confused, gave each other a look that said, "Do you know what she’s talking about? ’Cause I don’t!" I smiled and slowly repeated my instructions.
They got the message - and even wrapped my change in a napkin before they dropped it into the bag with the food. Then they handed me my order. I had to ask, "Could you please lean out your window and wedge the bag between me and the van door?" Both boys looked at each other again. "I can’t reach for the bag. Remember?"
"Oh, yeah," they laughed, then hung halfway out the pick-up window to lodge the package between my wheelchair and the door. "Are you set? Are you okay?" they asked in all sincerity.
"Great job," I assured them. "God bless you guys!" They slapped the side of my van as I drove off. When I glanced in my rearview mirror, they were waving good-bye. Thanks, God, for answering prayer. That could have been awkward, but it turned out to be fun!
This is the daily stuff of my life. It always involves more than simply picking up hamburgers or the dry cleaning. It involves a chance to make God real to people. A chance for them to serve, to feel good about themselves, to experience a new way of doing things.
Problems are often God’s way of prying us out of our rut.
"Earlier that same year, 1885, three Christian boys had shed their blood for Christ in Uganda. The king had ordered the arrest of these page boys in an effort to stamp out Christianity. The eldest was fifteen and the youngest was eleven-year-old Yusufu. They held fast their faith and staked their lives on it, though people were weeping and their parents were pleading with them. At the place of execution they sent a message to the king: ‘Tell his majesty that he has put our bodies in the fire, but we won’t be long in the fire. Soon we shall be with Jesus, which is much better. But ask him to repent and change his mind, or he will land in a place of eternal fire and desolation.’ They sang a song which is now well loved in Uganda as the ‘martyr’s song.’ One verse says, ‘O that I had wings like the angels. I would fly away and be with Jesus!’ Little Yusufu said, ‘Please don’t cut off my arms. I will not struggle in the fire that takes me to Jesus!’ Forty adults came to Jesus the day the boys died. This was a new kind of life, which fire and torture could not control. We have a memorial near Kampala where these youngsters are remembered as the first Christian martyrs of Uganda. By 1887, the end of the first decade of the church, hundreds had died. There were martyrs out of every village that had believers. They were only beginners, they knew little theology, and some could barely read, but they had fallen in love with Jesus Christ. Life had taken on a completely new meaning. The value of living and of living eternally had been discovered. They were not hugging their lives, but ready to give them for Jesus. During these dangerous days, there was an immediate and steady increase in the number of those embracing Christ."
Church bulletin - National Prayer and Fasting Conference announcement: “The cost to attend the Fasting and...
About 10 years ago, a young & very successful executive named Josh was traveling down a Chicago neighborhood street. He was going a bit too fast in his sleek, black, 12-cylinder Jaguar XKE, which was only 2 months old.
He was watching carefully for kids darting out from between parked cars & slowed down when he thought he saw something. As his car passed that spot, no child darted out, but a brick sailed out & - WHUMP! – it smashed into the Jag’s shiny back side door.
SCREECH!!! His slammed on his brakes & his gears ground into reverse, tires spinning the Jaguar back to the spot where the brick had been thrown.
Josh jumped out of the car, grabbed the kid & pushed him up against a parked car. He shouted, “Who are you? And what the heck are you doing?” Building up a head of steam, he went on. “That’s my new Jag, & the brick you threw is going to cost you a lot of money. Why did you throw it?”
“Please, mister, please…I’m sorry! I didn’t know what else to do! I threw the brick because no one would stop.” Tears were dripping down the boy’s chin as he pointed around the parked car. “It’s my brother, mister,” he said. “He rolled off the curb & fell out of his wheelchair & I can’t lift him up.” Sobbing, the boy pled, “Would you please help me get him back into his wheelchair? He’s hurt & he’s too heavy for me.’
Moved beyond words, the young executive tried desperately to swallow the rapidly swelling lump in his throat. Straining, he lifted the young man back into the wheelchair & took out his handkerchief & wiped the scrapes & cuts, checking to see that everything else was okay. He then walked with them to make sure that the younger brother was able to get them back home all right.
It was a long walk back to the sleek, black, shining 12-cylinder Jaguar XKE – a long & slow walk. Josh never did fix that side door. He kept the dent to remind him not to go through life so fast that someone has to throw a brick at him to get his attention again.
John Piper, in A Hunger for God, comments, "if the reward you aim at in fasting is the admiration of others, that is what you will get, and that will be all you get. In other words, the danger of hypocrisy is that it is so successful. It aims at the praise of men, and it succeeds. But that’s all."
On April 25, 1985 (12 years ago) over 5,000 students on Liberty Mountain fasted for one day and prayed for the healing of Vernon Brewer, the Dean of Students. He was loved by the students so they fasted and prayed. Vernon had cancer and was given 6 months to live. He’s alive and well 12 years later because of prayer and fasting.
This week I was reading the story of an Australian couple who went to Bangladesh as missionaries. When Stuart and Margaret arrived in the country they were informed, by the Baptist missionaries already there that the Muslim people were impossible to reach with the Gospel message. For the six years their experience seemed to confirm that conclusion. At the end of 6 years they were expelled from the country however they returned by themselves two years later.
They went to a city of 200,000 people, where they were the only Europeans, and to their knowledge the only Christians. They had no mission support agency but they determined to find ways to reach the Muslim people for Jesus Christ.
For six years they lived culturally as Muslims. That meant that Margaret never left the house, unless it was night. She was completely covered from head to foot in front of anyone but her husband. Stuart lived with the men and disciplined himself to eat what they ate, prayed when they prayed, and fasted when they fasted. They learned to present the Gospel in terms that were culturally appropriate to the Muslim people. For six years
The result that many many people came to know Jesus. Their effectiveness was an anomaly among missionaries to the Muslims.
Why did they succeed where others had failed?
From Bangladesh Stuart and Margaret returned to Australia to pastor a church in Melbourne. At that time, a little over a decade ago, it was a church with less than two hundred in attendance and they had been fighting for four years over where to locate the handicapped accessible bathroom. As you do in Baptist churches!!!
Stuart says that the little church in Melbourne thought they were getting a white Australian pastor who would do things like they always ha...
COMPLETE SILENCE
In college, one of the jobs I had was working in a medical file warehouse. Talk about mundane, boring, monotonous. These were huge warehouses that contained millions of files from hospitals all over the San Francisco Bay Area. I did one of three things: I pulled a file for a patient in a hospital somewhere; I put the patient's file back after the hospital was done with it; I threw out the file when the hospital asked for it to be purged. If you know your ABC's, you too could do this job.
Each warehouse had rows and rows of files reaching over 20 feet high. It was a very quiet job. The many files in these warehouses super insulated the sound so that if person was more than one row away -- you couldn't hear them. If there was another person in one of these vast places, unless they were in your line of sight, you would have no idea they were even there. It was as if you were completely alone. There was absolute silence.
There were no windows, there were no skylights -- just millions and millions of files. It was very difficult to keep track of time, it was very difficult to stay focused. I could be filing for six hours but think only two hours had gone by.
Most people would last about two weeks, and then they would quit, usually out of exasperation and many would just leave during the day and never come back. They would just lose it.
I guess they would just get to a point and see how meaningless the job was. It didn't matter how fast one could file; there were always more files. After putting away ten boxes of files, the shelves looked exactly the same as when one started. One could work at a feverish pace, and it hardly made much of a difference. "If I take this file out, it is only coming back. If I put this file away, it is only coming out again." At the end of the day, it was meaningless.
Our Scripture from Ecclesiastes sums up that job at the medical file warehouse: Eccl. 1:9 "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again..."
{SERMON HERE IN THE MIDDLE OF ILLUSTRATION}
Myself, I loved that filing job. There, I found peace and quiet. There was a place where I could finally clear my mind and think, pray or memorize study notes for college while I worked. For me, it was a wonderful place of peaceful solitude.
I knew that every file folder wasn't just a medical file; every file I placed on those shelves, every file I took off those shelves represented a life -- a mother, a brother, a sister, a father. Every file was not something random; no, it was loved, it was cared for, it represented a very real person. Most of the time I read the names and placed those folders on the shelf without a second thought, filing as fast as I could. Though, there were times I was moved to pray for the person who belonged to a particular file -- perhaps that was the only prayer said for them....
The hardest part of the job came as a surprise to me. One Saturday afternoon I was directed to a far corner of warehouse number three. I was to remove about one hundred boxes of files out for shredding. No one else was willing to move these boxes, these were the dreaded, "boxes of death". They were huge oversized boxes full of files of people who had died in the various hospitals around the San Francisco Bay Area.
I tell you, I was taken back. I stood in front of literally hundreds and hundreds of files. Those boxes represented the loss of hundreds of lives; it was a bit overwhelming. I just sat down and stared at the huge stack of files for quite some time. I guess I knew that chances were that someday a file with my name would be stamped expired, stuffed into a box and hauled off to a dark corner until some kid threw out the last record of my life without a second thought. I never expected moving boxes to be a solemn experience.
Finally, after some time, I don't know how long, my boss Roger came back and said, "Peter, let's move these boxes together." As we moved those boxes of files, I realized how God had made sure the warehouse would be completely silent--for a time such as this.
Because of her late arrival at a railroad station, a lady had but five minutes to make connection with an outgoing train. As she ran toward the train, a Pullman car porter waved her to slow down and said, “Lady, you better take it easy or you are going to come down with Americanitis.” “What’s that?” gasped the lady. “I can’t tell you what it is, but I can tell you how it acts; Americanitis is running up an escalator!”
Have you ever seen anyone running up an escalator? Sure you have. Perhaps you have been guilty of it yourself–trying to catch that plane or get to that interview.
So many of us are getting nowhere fast! Like ants disturbed on an anthill, we scurry hither, thither and yon. Taut nerves are snapping, and over-wrought minds are cracking, with the result that there are more mental patients in hospitals than any other kind.
“Be still and know that I am God!” “In returning and rest shall you be saved; In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15)
