AN ORDINARY FOLLOWER OF CHRIST
Mike Cunningham
July 20, 2014

I’m always saddened whenever I read a newspaper article such as the following which reports that,“Disappointed health officials announced Thursday that a nearly 4-year-old Mississippi girl, thought to have been cured of HIV, has detectable levels of the virus.”

“Although doctors heralded the girl’s case last year, they also held their breath, hoping her disease wouldn’t come raging back. In a routine clinical visit this month, the child was found with detectable HIV levels. A repeat test confirmed those findings.” (A)

I can imagine how the folks who love that little girl must have felt when they received the terrible news. It would break my heart if I were to learn that my wife or one of our four children or their spouse’s or any of our sixteen grandchildren was facing such a divinely ordained ordeal. My mind would be racing all over the place. I would be very anxious and fearful about what might happen and what they would have to endure. And I would certainly wonder why God is allowing such a thing to happen. My faith would be tried to the max. The fact is that this kind of news is a daily occurrence in our country.Ed Welch, a Christian psychologist for almost 30-years, has written a very helpful book in which he speaks about the reaction of followers of Christ receiving similar awful news. News such as,

“An otherwise healthy man goes for a yearly checkup and hears that his PSA level is elevated. It might mean nothing. More tests will tell, but his mind immediately remembers friends who had prostate surgery and lost sexual functioning. Then he remembers the older man in his church whose prostate cancer has dogged him for fifteen years before finally taking his life.

“Until recently, the descent into death was a quick one. Now, it can be prolonged so that a long, slow demise is a fear that has spread into the national consciousness. Not that a slow death is necessarily worse, than a speedy one because there is no good way to die, but a slow death can be more painful.” (B)

“For women who have abnormal mammograms, the threat is even worse. If you have made it to middle age, you have already lost a friend to breast cancer. You know that this kind of cancer seems to tease you with occasional good news while the fight against it becomes a full-time painful job.

And what about Alzheimer’s disease, strokes, and illnesses that could force you to be dependent upon others? You can’t like the thought of being cared for by your children-or worse, by an anonymous nursing home staff.

At first glance, the Psalms seem to be little help. So many Psalms speak with confidence about deliverance, but you feel it would be presumptuous to claim that deliverance as your own. This is a different era, after all. No longer does God bring glory to himself by a human kingdom that stands for His righteousness against the surrounding idolatry. Now He brings glory to himself by allowing the church to multiply, sometimes through the suffering of many of its people.

When the cross became to pivotal point in human history, the definition of deliverance changed. It had once meant temporal deliverance from neighboring marauders. Now it means that you could die for the cause of Christ but still be delivered from the worse or “second” death.
God certainly does heal His people, sometimes in miraculous ways: but unless the return of Jesus intervenes, you, all of us, will die. If the disease from which you were healed doesn’t take your life, another one will.

Feeling better yet?

Believe it or not, you should be. While the rest of the world would be breaking out into a cold sweat at the thought of such things, you can have a growing confidence that you will have grace to deal with those difficulties if, indeed, they come to pass.

Manna. Just think manna. Today you do not have the manna—the grace—to endure what could come in the future. Even thinking about how you could die should give you a mild case of the willies. But whatever happens tomorrow, you will have all the manna you need. Tomorrow. God gives you what you need for today, not tomorrow.

You can’t predict what form that manna will take because God is in the habit of giving better than what you think. But what do you think that manna could look like when your body is wasting away?

Who do you know who has found grace despite physical disability? You might want to talk to someone who has demonstrated unwavering faith during sickness. Ask such people how God’s grace and mercy found them at their most difficult times.

You might think that followers of Jesus Christ, who are certain of the resurrection, would be inoculated against this fear, but you are not. All you have to do is imagine how your life would be different without any traces of the fear of death, and you will find that it courses through your veins. What would you do or stop doing if you knew you would not die?

One mark of Christ’s true followers is that they face the reality of death because of their faith. Another is that they can face it with fearlessness.

The twelve disciples fell apart when Jesus was taken into custody. Without their leader they scatter. Peter’s fear of death is singled out as a particularly dramatic one—for fear of his life he denies even knowing Jesus. Of course, most of the other disciples would have done the same thing given similar circumstances. Give Peter some credit for at least following Jesus to the scene of His trial.

Something happens to a man when he has witnessed someone rise from the dead. Even more, something happens when the Spirit of Christ dwells within him.

For Peter and the other disciples, that transformation occurs immediately. One day they are hiding behind locked doors, the next they are preaching about Jesus in the temple courts—where it is likely that they will be treated just like their master had been and condemned to death. For the rest of us, that transition from fear of death to fearlessness usually takes more time.

Solomon wrote: “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2).

To face “the destiny of every man” is the task you naturally postpone. But, like fear itself, when you know that good answers exist to a disagreeable problem, you are more eager to tackle it. And if there are answers to anything in the Bible, it is to the fear of death.” (C)

By the grace of God the apostles finally conquered the fear of death. From that point forward, they lived what should be an ordinary Christian life for every believer as Burk Parsons explains:

“The ordinary Christian life is not the opposite of the radical Christian life. The ordinary Christian life is a radical life. The ordinary Christian life is a life of daily trusting Christ; daily repenting of our sins; daily abiding in Christ; daily loving Christ; daily dying to self; daily taking up our cross and following Christ; daily loving God and neighbor; and daily proclaiming the gospel to ourselves, our families, our friends, and our communities. Every Christian is an ordinary Christian, and every ordinary Christian is a radical Christian. The ordinary Christian is not a complacent, passionless, nominal, or casual Christian. On the contrary, every ordinary Christian person—child, teenager, college student, father, mother, husband, wife, single man, single woman, retired man, and retired woman—every Christian is radical because every Christian is united to Christ by faith and will bear radical, life-giving fruit.

And what about the “radical” call to foreign missions? It’s true that not every Christian is a foreign missionary, but every Christian is on mission. We’re on mission not just when we drive out of our church parking lots every week but when we roll out of bed every morning. As followers of Christ, we are on mission when we go across the globe, when we go across the street when we sit at the kitchen table with our family, when we enter our workplace or classroom, when we kneel to pray at the bedsides of our children, and when we discipline them and point them to our sinless Savior. Although not every Christian is called to serve God in a foreign Country, every Christian is a foreigner in his own country—a citizen of Heaven—and an ambassador of Jesus Christ. Every Christian is called out of darkness and into the light, and then called to go back into the darkness to shine—wherever God places him. And wherever He has placed us, we are called to be radically faithful, radically diligent, and radically shining as a light in our dark world. We are called to radically go wherever He calls us to go or radically stay right where we are, as we radically send and support those whom He has called to go. All of this we are to do with the same commitment and passion with which we radically serve alongside one anther in the ordinary way Christ has ordained.

Throughout history, God has done extraordinary things through ordinary people. The ordinary Christian will always fight the status quo of lukewarm Christianity. The ordinary Christian will always fight nominal, passionless Christianity. Whatever we do, wherever we live, whatever our income, whatever our vocation, whatever our education, whatever we do in retirement, whatever we drive, whatever we eat or drink—-we are called to do all for the glory of God as ordinary, radical followers and proclaimers of Jesus Christ on mission to make disciples of all nations, in whatever place God has called us to live and serve.” (D)

There is a lot of food for thought in this sermon and I could end it at this point. However, I decided not to. I know that some of you have been wondering how things turned out for that remarkable woman missionary I’ve spoken about in the last few sermons. And so I will include the following account.

“Darlene Deibler arrived in Oakland emaciated and emotionally fatigued to be welcomed into her family’s love and care on November 30, 1945. The twenty-three pounds that had been starved from her body returned slow as did her physical and emotional reserves. Over the next two years, Darlene testified to the power and presence of God throughout her prison experiences before many who marveled at the fact that she had survived at all.
Time eased her grief over Russell’s death while her memories of their life together in New Guinea confirmed her calling and the necessity to return. She had been called to serve as a missionary long before she met Russell. She resisted the many words of advice against single women missionaries, especially one as young as she, as well as stay home and let some years of comfort repay her pain in the South Pacific.

In 1946 a young man named Gerald W. Rose was given a film to use in deputation. It was a documentary of Rev. C. Russell’s trek to the Wissel Lakes in the interior of Dutch New Guinea. Rev. Gerald Rose was already under appointment to this primitive mission field. Mutual friends arranged a meeting between Darlene and Jerry unbeknownst to either of them. As it was in God’s plan, Jerry and Darlene married on April 4, 1948 and they began their ministry in New Guinea in early 1949.

Together Darlene and Jerry returned to the Wissel Lakes area and later pioneered the work among the Dani tribe in the Baliem Valley and the lower Wahgi Valley of Papua New Guinea. Their two sons Bruce Gareth and Brian Jaffray were raised among the native peoples.

Darlene and Jerry stayed in New Guinea until 1978, when their station, Nondugl was expropriated by the newly independent nation of Papua New Guinea. Then they moved to meet another challenge in the Australian Outback. Darlene and Jerry lived on a station five hours drive south of Darwin in the Northern Territory of Larrimah for several years.

Darlene left the Celebes in 1945 knowing that Mr. Yamaji had been sentenced to be executed for killing the man at Pare Pare; but because of his kindness to Darlene while she was in the Kempeitai prison, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with hard labor. Still later that sentence was also commuted.

In 1986 Darlene and Jerry visited Elsie David, a fellow Kampili internee living in Australia. She related the following story: A friend vacationing in Java happened upon a priest who had just returned from bicycling in Japan. While in a small coastal village, the priest had stopped at a bicycle shop for repairs. Striking up a conversation with the owner, who spoke Indonesian, the priest discovered that the man had been the commander of the woman’s POW camp outside of Macassar during World War 2. The owner asked the priest if he ever met any of the women who had been in Kampili, to tell them he was sorry he’s been so cruel. He said he was a different man now. Later, Darlene heard that Mr. Yamiji had spoken on radio, sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the Japanese people. Darlene felt this to be one of the greatest rewards of God’s work in her life.”

“On Tuesday, February 24, 2004, Darlene Rose laid her head back, smiled that special little smile and closed her eyes. Jerry, seeing this, moved swiftly to her side to help. He realized in a moment that her body was beyond human intervention. God had called, and His calling is irrevocable. And five months later, God called Jerry home, both now at rest but their work still to impact the world.

When Darlene had returned home after World War 2, she still wanted desperately to return to the islands. She had met Jerry and they had married in 1948 and in 1949 she and Jerry returned together. Jerry was already under appointment to this primitive mission field of Papua New Guinea. Side by side they worked together raising their two young sons, Bruce and Brian, teaching, preaching, building landing strips, delivering babies, standing against headhunters and leading them to Christ. Then in 1978, they met another challenge when they moved to the Outback of Australia.

In 2003 and in their 80’s Darlene and Jerry, having returned to the United States some years earlier, settled into a retirement center in Tennessee. They slowed down but never retired; always ready in season and out of season to inspire and encourage those they came in contact with to know the Lord. Long time friends, Dr. Bill Henry, Pastor of Faith Bible Church and his wife, Jan, helped to care for them during this time, volunteering to take up the role of correspondence. Months before her death, Darlene asked them to faithfully promise to keep her story alive to share it with the world. This they have done, believing this was God’s call.

At the beginning of World War 2, the Lord had given Darlene this verse; “The beloved of the Lord shall dwell in safety by Him; and the Lord shall cover (overshadow) him all the day long and he shall dwell between His shoulders.” Deuteronomy 13:12. This promise of God was not only the cornerstone of her faith during her internment, but demonstrated that God is able to do abundantly exceeding above all that she could ask or think as this promise remained the firm foundation of her faith all her days on this earth.”

It’s been one of the major desires of my heart that each of you folks will enter Heaven when you leave this sin drenched world. When you meet Darlene there and ask her to describe her life on earth; I believe that that godly woman would tell you that she was simply An Ordinary Follower of Christ doing her very best to live an ordinary Christian life.

The question you and I should ask ourselves is, “Am I?”

Lord willing, next week….

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(A) Liz Szabo, USA Today, July 11, 2014.
(B) When I Am Afraid, © 2010 by Edward T. Welch. Published by New Growth Press, Greensboro, N. C. 27429
(C) Ibid, pages 41-44
(D) Burk Parsons, editor of Tabletalk magazine August 2014.
(E) Evidence Not Seen, © 1988 by Darlene Rose, pages 223-224.
(F) www.darlenerose.org/

I encourage you to listen to Darlene speaking about her experiences on YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9k5WuqluSQ