In Christ Alone

...in all these things we are more than conquerors
through Him who loved us. For I am convinced 
that neither death nor life, neither angels nor de-
mons, neither things present nor the future, nor
any powers, neither height nor depth, nor any-
thing else in all creation, will be able to separate 
us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our 
Lord.   Romans 8: 37-39

Reader, I was able to watch Blake's funeral and it
was rather glorious as his Mom, Dad and brother
spoke about their lives with him. He was Christ
filled from an early age and loved to help others.
He grew up in Young Life as he attended all the
camps and weekends from infancy, and saw multi-
tudes saved. He was born on July 4th 1998 and
lived but nineteen short years.

In Christ Alone was sung at the end of the funeral.
The music is at the end of the blog:

In Christ alone my hope is found
He is my light, my strength, my song;
Firm through the fiercest drought and storm.
What nights of love, what depths of peace
When fears are stilled, when strivings cease!
   My Comforter, my All in All,
Here in the love of Christ I stand.

In Christ alone who took on flesh
Fullness of God in helpless babe!
This gift of love and righteousness
Scorned by the ones He came to save;
    Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied--
For every sin on Him was laid;
Here in the death I live.

There in the ground His body lay
Light of the world by darkness slain:
Then bursting forth in glorious Day
Up from the grave He rose again!
    And as He stands in victory
Sins curse has lost its grip on me,
For I am His and He is mine--
Bought with the precious blood of Christ.

No guilt in life, no fear in death,
this is the power of Christ in me;
From life's first cry to final breath
Jesus commands my destiny.
    No power of hell, no scheme of man,
Can ever pluck me from His hand;
Till He returns or calls me home,
Here in the power of Christ I'll stand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWiFYJMGas0

I Will Never Leave You

...As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will
never leave you nor forsake you.  Joshua 1:5b

I thought that holiness, practical holiness, was to be 
attained by a diligent use of the means of grace. There 
was nothing I so much desired as holiness, nothing I 
so much needed; but far from in any measure attaining 
it, the more I strove after it, the more it eluded my 
grasp, until hope itself almost died out, and I began 
to think that--perhaps to make heaven the sweeter--
God would not give it down here. I do not think that I 
was striving to attain it in my own strength. I knew I 
was powerless. I told the Lord so, and asked Him to 
give me help and strength. Sometimes I almost believed 
that He would keep me and uphold me; but on looking 
back in the evening--alas! there was but sin and failure 
to confess and mourn before God...All the time I felt 
assured that there was in Christ all I needed, but the 
practical question was--how to get it out. He was rich 
truly, but I was poor; He was strong, but I weak. I knew 
full well that there was in the root, the stem, abundant 
fatness, but how to get it into my puny little branch was 
the question. As gradually light dawned,  I saw that faith 
was the only requisite--was the hand to lay hold on His 
fullness and make it mine. But I had not this faith. 

I strove for faith, but it would not come; I tried to exer-
cise it, but in vain. Seeing more and more the wondrous 
supply of grace laid up in Jesus, the fullness of our pre-
cious Savior, my guilt and helplessness seemed to in-
crease. Sins committed appeared but as trifles compared 
with the sin of unbelief which was their cause, which 
could not or would  prayed for faith, but it came not. 
What was I to do?

When my agony of soul was at its height, a sentence in 
a letter from (my dear friend) McCarthy was used to re-
move the scales from my eyes, and the Spirit of God re-
vealed to me the truth of our oneness with Jesus as I had
never known it before. McCarthy, who had much been
exercised by the same sense of failure but saw the light
before I did, wrote (I quote from memory):

But how to get faith strengthened? Not by striving after
faith, but by resting in the Faithful One.

As I read, I saw it all! "If we believe not, he abideth faith-
ful" I looked to Jesus and saw (and when I saw, oh, how
joy flowed!") that He said, "I will never leave thee."

"Ah, there is rest!" I thought. "I have striven in vain to
rest in Him. I'll strive no more. For has He not promised
to abide with me--never to leave me nor forsake me?"
And dearie, He never will!  Hudson Taylor

Reader, I believe that Taylor wrestled with this question
when he was one of the few missionaries living in China.
He was not married and was seeing practically no fruit.
I have posted his biography below. It is the wide view.
His biography--Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret-- is much
more personal and includes his many struggles. He was a
pioneer

When I was in nursing school I had a classmate whose
parents were with China Inland Mission which was begun
by Hudson Taylor. I wish I had spent more time with her
and listened to her stories of China and of also ending up
in Boarding School away from home.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/people/missionaries/hudson-taylor.html

Do It Yourself

Casting down imaginations and every high thing
that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.
2 Corinthians 10:5

Determinedly Demolish Some things.
Deliverance from sin is not deliverance from the
human nature, such as prejudices, which the saint
has to destroy by neglect; and other things which
have to be destroyed by violence, i.e. by Divine
strength imparted by God's Spirit. There are some
things over which we are not to fight, but to stand
still in and see the salvation of God; but every
theory or conception which erects itself as a ram-
part against the knowledge of God is to be deter-
minedly demolished by drawing on God's power,
not by fleshly endeavor or compromise.

It is only when God has altered our disposition
and we have entered into the experience of sancti-
fication that the fight begins. The warfare is not 
against sin; we can never fight against sin: Jesus
deals with our sin in Redemption. The conflict is
along the line of turning our natural life into a
spiritual life, and this is never done easily, nor
does God intent it to be done easily. It is done on-
ly by a series of moral choices. God does not 
make us holy in the sense of character. He makes
us holy in the sense of innocence, and we have 
to turn that innocence into holy character by a 
series of moral choices. These choices are contin-
ually in antagonism to the entrenchments of our
natural life, the things which erect themselves as
ramparts against the knowledge of God. We can
either go back and make ourselves of no account
in the Kingdom of God, or we can determinedly
demolish these things and let Jesus bring another
son to glory.  Oswald Chambers

Reader, we cannot live the Christian Life from a
passive frame of mind. We may not be in battle,
but the enemy is in battle--for our mind, for our
testimony, for our peace in Christ. He comes to
kill, steal and destroy. Chambers has outlined the
various attacks and battles we face and how to
handle them. Our natural life wants to be in the
ascendency and will erect things as ramparts
against the knowledge of God. We can make our-
selves of no account for the Kingdom of God, OR,
we can determinedly demolish these things and let 
Jesus bring another son to glory.
Press on, dear warrior, press on.

PS I purposely reiterated what Chambers wrote at
the end because it is easily passed over as one has-
tens to the next blog or website or FB posting.
Besides, he uses big words!

Instant in Season

Be instant in season, out of season
2 Timothy 4:2

Many of us suffer from the morbid tendency to be
instant "out of season." The season does not refer
to time, but to us, whether we feel like it or not.
If we do only what we feel inclined to do, some
of us would do nothing forever and ever. There 
are unemployables in the spiritual domain, spiri-
tually decrepit people, who refuse to do anything
unless they are supernaturally inspired. The proof
that we are rightly related to God is that we do 
our best whether or not we feel inspired or not.
Oswald Chambers

Reader, this is a spiritually difficult season which
we are in. There are too many days in a row where
it is hard to move, to plan, to go forward. I find it
helpful to ask Jesus to manage my time, to be my
energy, to be my life in any given situation. It
means that I have to be "instant out of season,"
much of the time, relying only on Him. You see,
my best is never enough.

Two things:
I understand that readers have had difficulty under-
standing a series of posts on a dying 18 year old.
If you missed one of them it was confusing be-
cause I did not share the posts that had gone before.
Here are the three posts in order:
So Close to Death--5/15
Loves Like a Hurricane--5/18
His Departure--5/20
You can scroll down for the earlier posts.

Secondly, one of my readers emailed me to say
that she had commented twice and both com-
ments had been removed. This might explain
why I have seen so few comments in the past
six months. :(

The Mind of Christ

Let this mind be in you, which was also in 
Christ Philippians 2:5

May the mind of Christ my 
   Savior
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
   All I do and say.

May the Word of God dwell richly
  In my heart from hour to hour,
So that all may see I triumph
   Only in His power.

May the peace of God my Father
   Rule my life in everything,
That I may be calm to comfort
   Sick and sorrowing.

May the love of Jesus fill me,
   As the waters fill the sea;
Him exalting, self abasing,
   This is victory.

May I run the race before me,
   Strong and brave to face the foe,
Looking only unto Jesus
   As I onward go.
Kate Barclay Wilkerson

Reader, it is all about Jesus. He is our all
in all. 

His Departure

Blake woke up on Saturday, full of life, as he entered
into glory where he will live for eternity. It was the 8th
day--which is "new beginnings." It was a hard fight:

For I am already being poured out as a 
drink offering, and the time of my depar-
ture is at hand. 
I have fought the good fight, 
I have finished the race, 
I have kept the faith.  2 Timothy 4:6,7

Fully unconscious patients can hear and they have
reported their surroundings after waking even with
closed eyes. (could seeing and hearing be part of our
spirit?) I believe that Blake was aware of his family
and that he fought to stay with them. But his work
on earth was finished and God took him home.
In Psalm 139:16 we read:

Your eyes saw my substance,
   being yet unformed.
And in Your book they all 
   were written,
The days fashioned for me,
When as yet there were none
   of them.  

The 139th psalm details life from conception to our
final day. It also appears that God knows the date of
our death before birth and we are invincible until
then. As a Christian I find this to be of great comfort
especially when death comes at the hands of a killer,
in a terrible accident, or a long bout with cancer. It
takes the pressure off of the "if only's." There are no
"if only's" with God.

In my last post I shared the poem by Teresa, the Mom.
I think she knew how things were going to end and
shared with others her inmost self. I am not connec-
ted with the family--except through the Spirit--, but I
was able to grieve with her through her transparency.

Reader, as this dad and brother go to Young Life in
CO in a few weeks, pray that the teens who come to
camp this summer will be powerfully impacted by
Blake's death. May they give themselves completely
without reservation to the God who bought them and
sought them, who has given them Eternal Life.

Loves Like a Hurricane

I am a tree,
bending beneath the weight of His
   wind and mercy...

I am shaking from the inside out,
My mouth is dry as in desert dry,
My muscles cramp,
And there is sweat between my toes.

A bar lies across my chest,
Sobs come from way down,
Yet my spirit is not crushed.
I realize this bar is actually
   the wooden cross beam from Jesus' cross.

I am not crushed because He protects me.
He will not let the pain destroy me.
The vertical beam is at my back,
   allowing me to go forward.
In His strength, His truth, 
   His righteousness, His joy, His will.
Teresa, Blake's Mom

From the Physician and friend:
Blake remains the same.
God's primary patient is the soul
The sentiment is pain
Pain is a response to brokenness
As for the body pain is a physical
   sensation, relayed from the tissues of the brain
As for the soul, pain is a spiritual sensation
   manifested within our unexplainable depths.
It is real.

The pain of this brokenness should not
   be avoided, but faced.
Pain is loss in mourning.
The brokenness within mourning is a longing
   for the known and established, completeness
   in relationship.
The pain is meaningful, even useful,
   as those who mourn are blessed and can
   expect comfort.

The second pain is compassion. You share in
   Blake's physical pain, and you share in the
   mourning pain of the family. Embrace both.
   
We tend to avoid, or worse, mask pain.
We run from it or pretend it isn't real,
Worst of all, we synthesize happiness.
Instead, we ought to face and embrace
   the pain head on...

Remember love is a gift
Receive it in all forms.

Reader,
We are pressed on every side, but not crushed
perplexed but not in despair,
persecuted but not abandoned,
struck down but not destroyed.
We always carry around in our body, the 
   death of Jesus,
so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed.
(These scriptures have new meaning.)

See a previous post--So Close to Death in
order to know what is happening in this
precious family...