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Walking in His Strength

WALKING IN HIS STRENGTH
Mike Cunningham
July 6, 2014

I honestly don’t know who gets the most enjoyment out of watching a familiar scene unfolding for the umpteenth time in Grandma’s kitchen. It’s a toss up between her and me and anyone else who’s present. There they are, the three of them, Zac, Michael and Jake scoffing down plateful after plateful of whatever grandma whipped up for lunch that day.

This isn’t to say that we’re surprised because we aren’t. It’s normal for growing teen-age boys to eat tons of food. Their bodies require adequate nourishment. And when they are playing sports all the time as Zac, Michael and Jake do, their bodies need all the strength that they can muster.

I was the same way when I was their age and I still am. However, the food that I devour these days is spiritual. The only way that I can endure each of my often painful and sometimes very frightening divinely ordained trials is by ‘Walking in His Strength,’ and neither can you or any other Christian.

Joel Beeke says that, “Colossians 1:11 speaks of being ‘strengthened with all mite, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness’. The gospel is not just a philosophy or set of ideas; it is ‘the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth’ (Romans 1:16). Such power is necessary because the Christian is involved in constant warfare against the world, the flesh and the devil. We have work to do, battles to fight, trials to endure, and crosses to bear. Surely what is expected of us far exceeds our own resources. We need access to a greater power which God promises when He says, ‘as thy days, so shall thy strength be’ (Deut. 33:25).

God’s intent is that believers in Christ grow from ‘little children’ to ‘young men’ to ‘fathers’ in the faith, as the apostle John writes (see 1 John 2:12-14. John Newton (1725-1807) called these the stages of desiring, conflict and contemplation. New Christians are ‘little children’ in Christ. Their experience of God and salvation in Christ is fresh and vivid (1 John 2:12a, 13c), and they are full of holy desires and affections. At a later stage they become ‘young men’ in the Lord, who have grown in their knowledge of the Word, and learned how to fight against the world, the flesh and the devil. Thus, 1 John 2:14b says, ‘I have written unto you young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one.’ Yet later, they may become fathers in the faith through wholehearted surrender and contemplation of God by beholding the glory of the Father in the face of Jesus Christ.” (A)

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’ Christians are to grow into a well-rounded, holistic maturity in which they experience the sufficiency of Christ in every need. John Davenant (1572-1641) listed five actions that require power from God:

1. Doing good works, however difficult;
2. Striving against sin;
3. Despising earthly things;
4. Resisting temptation; and
5. Enduring affliction.

“How much strength is needed? Ultimately, the need not be measured in human terms, because the might Paul speaks of is to be measured ‘according to his glorious power.”

“In other words, in ‘God’s glorious power,’ that is the infinite power by which God does such glorious things (Psalms 72:1, 19), we can find all the strength that we need.”

“This power flows from heaven to earth because as Christians, we are members of Christ, brought unto union with him by the power of the Spirit. Thus Paul in Ephesians 6:10: ‘Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might.’ The same Spirit who dwells in the God-man now seated at the Father’s right hand also dwells in us (Romans 8:11).”

“We grow spiritually as we cease striving in our own strength and rely more and more on the Spirit’s power. Every Christian must learn to wait upon the Lord who ‘gives power to the faint and to them that have no might he increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint’ (Isaiah 40:29-31).” (B)

Our heavenly Father wisely disciplines us to drive us out of self-sufficiency so that we lean on his strength alone. The ministry of the Word is fraught with discouragements and trials because God presses us beyond our strength, so that we do not trust in ourselves but on God, who raises the dead, Corinthians 1:9). Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4:8-10, ‘We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed, we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our body.’ We must live in communion with Christ. In the fellowship of his sufferings we come to know the power of his resurrection.” (C)

“In time we learn that Christ meant what he said, ‘Without me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5). We cannot so much as move without his will and assistance. God’s power is at work even when we least expect it or at least aware of it. God gives us strength at the point of our greatest weakness. ‘Weak and heavy laden, crumbled with a load of care,’ we nonetheless find the strength to rise up and go forward, and to press on in the way. We may feel like a seed planted in a rock, with no room to grow, but God may still use us to break the rock!” (D)

“Colossians 1:11 identifies the particular needs that are supplied by God’s power at work in us. God strengthens us ‘unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness’. In other words, this power does not allow us to ride along like triumphant conquerors at the head of the parade. Rather, this power is given, not to rescue us from all our troubles, but to enable us to press forward in the way, bearing the heat of the day, even if our hearts are broken and our souls are weary.

‘Patience’ is endurance, or the ability to go in the right direction and to stand firm despite weakness, opposition, feat, obstacles, pain, disappointments and discouragement. Note once more, that Paul says, ‘all patience’ meaning the patience to endure all things. ‘Long suffering’ is the strength to suffer wrongs and provocations from others, responding with love and forgiveness, instead of anger and vengeance. So ‘patience and longsuffering’ are needed by those who suffer trials and conflicts, in order to persevere in faith and obedience.” (E)

Darlene Ross is a wonderful example of a woman who endured horrendous difficulty by walking in His strength. She says that,

“Peace came to the Japanese prison camp at Kampili two weeks after it had been heralded in the highroads and footpaths, the boatyards and cobbled tracks of the rest of the world. On September 19, 1945, seventeen days after the truce had been signed aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, I stepped carefully, balancing my emaciated eighty pound frame, into a bobbing rowboat, that was to carry me from Celebes, the island of my captivity, to a flying boat lying at anchor in the harbor sent to evacuate American personnel from the military prison camp.

Eight years before, and a war away, I had arrived in the islands with my husband, on our first wedding anniversary, to begin missionary work in the interior of New Guinea. Now rowing away from the shore, I could think of nothing but two lonely wooden crosses, half hidden on some remote hillside. One was the grave of the Reverend C. Russell Deibler, my husband; the other, that of Dr. Robert Alexander Jaffray, my spiritual mentor and an inimitable pioneer and visionary, who had given more than forty years in missionary service to China, Indochina, and Indonesia.

Now alone, I started the journey back to my homeland. How desolate the island shoreline seemed, despite the lush foliage and sparkling blue waters. I turned my face away as great bitterness corroded the edges of my soul like acid. Twenty-eight years old, already a widow for more than two years, I was returning to the United States without a single possession. My mementos and of private keepsakes of married life had been pilfered or destroyed. I wore borrowed, ill-fitting clothes. A huge ulcer was eating into the flesh of one leg, and my once soft and fair skin was scarred and mottled from the hours I had spent working in the beastly tropical sun to advance the Japanese war effort. The diseases of imprisonment-beriberi, malaria, and dysentery- had left me frail and debilitated.

For almost four years, my fellow missionaries and I, along with 1,600 other women and children, measured our days in forced labor, meted the hours in separation and deprivation, and marked the anniversaries of the deaths of loved ones who succumbed, one by one, to disease, starvation, and the horrific bombings.

No other world had come to exist beyond the margins of a few barren acres for the hundreds of us incarcerated at Kampili. We were totally isolated, and the cataclysmic events that raged and scourged over the rest of the earth were interpreted to us solely through the eyes and whims of our Japanese captors.

Not a single letter arrived from home. Not one humane Red Cross package or one encouraging pamphlet was ever dropped by the Allies or ferreted under the barbed wire to assure us that someone was fighting for our freedom.

Now, suspended between captivity and a new life, I felt a fear I’d never known. Would I know how to live outside of the confined yet familiar regimen of suffering? Would I ever be free of the recurring, terrifying nightmares of trying to rescue people caught in burning building? Would I ever be able to close my eyes without seeing a young American lad lying dead before me on a bamboo bed, one leg missing cruelly amputated by an incendiary bomb, or stop hearing the ceaseless drip, drip of his body fluids splashing on the ceramic tiles of the camp commander’s office floor? Would I ever forget the mute appeal in the eyes of what had to be a beautiful blond woman-a napalm victim of a bombing raid over our camp?

When would the mention of the Kempereitai Secret Police cease to fill me with terror? Or the sound of a plane not make me want to run and hide from the incendiary or shrapnel bombs the plane surely carried?

And when would seeing others delirious with joy at being reunited not constrict my heart, still aching with deep pain with the loss of Russell?

Suddenly I was awash with deep bitterness. “Lord, I’ll never come back to these islands again. They’ve robbed me of everything that was most dear to me.” The rowboat reached the flying boat bound for intermediate stops in Borneo and the Palawan Island, then on to Manila. “Will there be healing for such hurt?” I could only cry out to God and hope. Healing would have to come if I were ever to truly live whole and complete again.

Reaching up to grab the rope ladder dangling from the blister of the flying boat, a Catalina, I heard noises from the beach-running feet and calling voices. Selamat djalan! “A peaceful journey!” the Indonesian voices rang out across the distance. Those who had come to know the Lord in our Macassar Gospel Tabernacle and those who had shared in the indescribable suffering of imprisonment stood waving in a group. Notification of our departure had come so suddenly that I had been unable to say goodbye.

Their voices were raised in a sweet benediction: “God be with you, till we meet again…their song released the waters of bitterness that had flooded my soul, and the hurt began to drain from me as my tears flowed in a steady stream. The healing had begun. I knew that someday, God only knew when, I would come back to these my people and my island home.

As the Catalina became airborne, carrying me away from the bomb-scarred terrain, the flooded rice fields, the coral coastline, and the mountains of my long bondage, I handed over eight long years of my life into the faithful, wise hands of a gracious God Who alone could help me to understand the mysteries of deep pain and suffering.” (H)

There’s so much more that I could share with you folks about Darlene and her fellow missionaries, but I decided to end today’s sermon at this point. Perhaps I will another time. Until then I want to remind you of the fact that the only way a God-centered person can make it through this sin drenched world in a manner that’s pleasing to Him is by ‘Walking in His Strength.’

Lord willing, next week….

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A. Developing Healthy Spiritual Growth, © 2013 by Joel R. Beeke, JPL Distribution, 3741 Linden Avenue Southeast, Grand Rapids, Mi. 49548 Pages 92-93
B. Ibid page 94
C. Ibid pages 94-95
D. Ibid page 95
E. Ibid Page 96
F. Ibid page 97
G. Ibid page 99
H. Evidence Not Seen: A Woman’s Miraculous Faith in the Jungles of World War 2. © 1988 by Darlene Ross ix-xi

 

EVIDENCE NOT SEEN

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July 6, 2014 Posted by Categories: Uncategorized 4 comments

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