I can’t help but feel a pang of bitter-sweet emotion when I think of my daughters growing up and going away. My Heidi will marry a month from today. What a joy. What a gift. What a job its going to be to day dry-eyed on that day. Holly found this beautiful film. I would love to take this walk, wouldn’t you?
Raising a Godly Family
“It is a good thing when a man has a house of his own, thus to convert it into a church, by dedicating it to the service and honour of God, that it may be a Bethel, a house of God, and not a Bethaven, a house of vanity and iniquity. Every good Christian who is a householder, no doubt doth this habitually and virtually; having first given his own self to the Lord, he freely surrenders all he has to him.” –Matthew Henry
Here is a worth-while book. Obviously we have our differences about infant baptism, but this is a worthwhile read. When you browse a Christian bookstore and you happen across a book like this one you can tell in just a few minutes that it has much greater “weight” than most contemporary books. I have a weakness for good covers, too, so this one caught my eye and made its way into my library. May God give us homes like the one the great puritan divine describes here.
Where Do You Keep Your Stuff?
11:00 AM
Ken Pierpont
Series: Jesus, The Master Storyteller; Luke 12:13-21
/
RSS Feed
Perfect In Your Generation
06:00 PM
Ken Pierpont; Genesis 6:9 and 7:1
/
RSS Feed
Does Your Service Flow Out of Your Worship?
This afternoon it rained. It was a sweet, refreshing, gentle rain. I stole the luxury of an hour with a book I first read when not yet thirty years old. I read the book mostly lying on the couch before the fire in the parsonage in Knox county, Ohio. Without noticing it my once-and-not-long-ago-new book, was yellowed with age, and worn with use. It surprised me to realize that the book had grown old in my care. I thumbed through it and noticed my annotations and highlights faded with age. I noticed the pages marked by my daughter when she read it. I re-read a chapter. How could I have known that path that I would follow in the last twenty years?
Today I reach into this treasured book and draw out a treasure to share with each of you—a truth sweet to tell about how to sustain service when circumstances are difficult.
The chapter I read was about how God gave the vision and the inspiration for a prayer chapel in the center of the grounds of the Dohnavur Fellowship in south India. The House of Prayer has a prayer tower. There children were taught to worship the One true God with reverence and rejoicing. So they would never be bored with the hymns-singing, they were taught to sing and play tambourines and wave colored flags.
The Prayer House had two spires. The larger one was too illustrate worship and the smaller—service. The spires were to illustrate the two aspects of holiness, Godward and manward.
“The House was finished, a beautiful building standing in the middle of the compound, covered with flowering vines. The architect who designed it took its style from an old palace in Travancor, a city where the influence of the Chinese carpenters had been felt from ancient times. There was hesitation about one feature of its architecture, lest it be a mere luxury, an unjustifiable spending of money sacrificially given, but a specially marked gift came for that very thing—a prayer tower. On its roof are two pointed shafts, a symbol of the unity of spiritual and secular in the life of holiness—the men and women of Dohnavur lived a common life, but they lived it with God for others. In the tower are tubular bells, “things we should never have thought of buying.” Morning and evening a hymn is played on the bells, and each hour they ring for a moment of stillness for prayer and recollection.” –from A Chance to Die.
Amy Carmichael sailed to India and stayed over five decades. She founded the Dohnavur Fellowship to rescue little girls from moral abuse. Her writings still inspire thousands today.
How could a girl from a sea-coast city in Ireland, who had been rejected by the China Inland Mission because of her health—who had to return from Japan because of her health—withstand the heat, the rigors, the demonic persecution in south India for 53 years without a furlough?
Her sincere, sustained service grew out of worship, admiration for Jesus. And so it is with each of us. Those who have their roots down deep into the black, rich, soil of worship will not wither and waste in under the beating sun of time, the winds of hardship, or the storms of opposition. Burnout begins when worship ends.
Granville Cottage
Riverview, Michigan
Spring 2009
Recent Comments