Frieda Lindsay, a strong woman of faith, who with her husband started “Christ for the Nations” in Texas, wrote the following:
“With nine of us children at home and no job, my father was desperate. He rented a house next door to a charismatic church which we attended. I had a loud voice, and the pastor called me to the platform to sing. The pastor, realizing our desperate financial predicament, came to my parents with this offer. ‘Allow us to adopt Freda.’ My little five-foot-two mother replied, ‘If I have to live on bread and water for the rest of my life, not one of our children will leave our home.’ At the age of six, I had my first real example of love.” True human love is such a boost, a blessing, a comfort, an assurance. If only husbands would love their wives and likewise their wives love their husbands, instead of this incessant squabbling and competition. If only parents would love their children instead of belittling them, tormenting them, even torturing them.
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Over the last ten or fifteen years, I’ve known scads of people who want to join a Jewish synagogue. I thoroughly believe in gleaning as much as we can from our friends, the Jews. They have preserved the Word for us. But don’t go backward and become one. Jesus came, and they wanted to remain as they were. Growth is mandatory in this—the last, the only, the greatest—move the earth has ever known, this glorious Body we call Christianity. Our future demands risk taking, that is to say, Jesus requires something unheard of—profound love.
I mean, when the Bible speaks of loving your neighbor as yourself, how on earth am I going to be capable of doing that? For instance, I am buying myself a home, the first one I’ve owned in forty years. I recently met a pastor who is living in exile, kicked out of his country. Why? He actually changed the culture. He challenged his congregation to do something to love their neighbor as themselves. He told them that if they owned their own home, but they knew someone who had never been able to do that, then they should help them buy their own home. |
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