The Jewel Box

This poem was recently given me

by an African pastor. I thought it was rather striking ...

'When God Wants a Man'

When God wants to drill a man,

and thrill a man, and skill a man;

When God wants to mould a man

to play the noblest part;

When He yearns with all His heart

to create so great and bold a man

That all the world might be amazed;

Watch His methods, Watch His ways.

How He ruthlessly perfects whom He royally elects

how He hammers and hurts him,

and with mighty blows converts him,

into trial shapes of clay which only God understands,

How He bends but never breaks,

when his good He undertakes.

How He uses whom He chooses

and with every purpose fuses him,

With mighty acts induces him

to try his splendour out.

God knows what He's about.

- C. Pierce

A reviewer in the London Guardian newspaper, commenting on the atheistic writings of Professors Dawkins and Atkins wrote

'Indeed, atheism - when you boil it down - is little more than a denial, a refusal to take seriously the proposition that there could be more to the universe than meets the eye. To use science to justify such dogma, as these professors do, is a gross misuse of their trade.'

- for more on this theme see John Lennox' new book 'God's Undertaker - has science buried God?' Lennox is Reader in Mathematics at Oxford. [pub. by Lion Hudson ISBN 978-0-7459-5303-8 ]

Extract of the famous words written by Professor C.S Lewis in his book "Mere Christianity" ps.51-53

“Among the Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if he is God. He claims to forgive sins. He says he has always existed. He says he is coming to judge the world at the end of time. ….In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history. Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit... I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the foolish thing that people often say about him ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God’.

That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic…or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up as a fool ..or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. ..We are faced then with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what he said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that he was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however, strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that he was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.”

'If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing him.

Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle front besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at the point.' Luther's Works Weimar Edition Briefwechsel (Correspondence) , vol. 3 p.81f

'Tell my brothers that I died well, and am living with Christ. And if we all die, we know that we die for the Lord.' These words were spoken by George Orjih, a pastor from Maiduguri, Nigeria, as he was about to be beheaded by an Islamic group on July 27th 2009 for refusing to convert to Islam. An eye witness says that Orjih was singing and praying all through the ordeal and encouraging the believers not to give up, even unto death.

Some Famous Last Words:

William Tyndale: 'Lord, open the King of England's eyes.'

Hudson Taylor: 'I am so weak that I can hardly write, I cannot read my Bible, I cannot even pray, I can only lie still in God's arms like a little child, and trust.'

G.K.Chesterton: 'The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.'

John Wesley: 'The best of all is, God is with us. Farewell!'

Ludwig von Beethoven: 'I shall hear in heaven.'

General Oglethorpe once said to John Wesley 'I never forgive and I never forget'. To which Wesley replied; 'Then, sir, I hope you never sin.'

Not long before she died in 1988, in a moment of surprising candour in television, Marghanita Laski, one of the best-known secular humanists and novelists, said 'What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness; I have nobody to forgive me.' (John Stott in the Contemporary Christian)