A few months before my father died in December 1990; I found this affirmation of faith by E. Stanley Jones. I greatly admired Jones after first hearing him preach at our Anderson International Youth Convention in 1944 when barely turned sixteen.
It is a
powerful statement of personal faith and I have turned to it many times since I
shared it to encourage my father now deceased for nearly three decades. It is a
statement I try at ninety-four to model. it is a word I hope can still be said
of me by all who come after me and long after I exit this stage of action.
At
eighty-seven, Jones wrote with palsied pen during his decline:
“When you find
Christ and his kingdom, you find yourself. I only testify: bound to him and his
kingdom I walk the earth free; low at his feet I stand straight before
everything and everybody. I have served him these seventy years, but I have
never made a sacrifice for him. Sacrifice? The sacrifice would be to tear from
my heart this wonderful, increasingly wonderful, thing he brought me when I
entered his kingdom. When my left hand begins to shake, as it has begun t shake
at eighty-seven, pre-cursor of the final shaking to the dust of my mortal body,
I smile and say; ‘But I belong to an unshaken kingdom, and to an unchanging
person, so shake on, you will shake me into immortality. And when the final
shaking comes, falsely called death, but which I know to be only an anesthetic
which God gives when he changes bodies, I know this final shaking will only do
what it did to Paul in prison: loosed his
fetters and bade him go to an awaiting home where love and joy abound (italics
mine).
From Walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com,
I leave you Shalom
No comments:
Post a Comment