Questions Jesus Asks: Where Divinity Meets Humanity by Israel Wayne

Author:Israel Wayne [Wayne, Israel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: REL012070, REL006710
ISBN: 9781614584438
Publisher: New Leaf Press
Published: 2015-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

2 . E. Stanley Jones was a Methodist evangelist, missionary to India, and founder of the Christian Ashram Movement. “Running Toward the Unshakeable Kingdom” first appeared in Good News magazine in 1970. It’s condensed from an address he delivered at the Good News Convocation in Dallas that year.

Chapter 12

Has No One Condemned You?

(Forgiveness)

Have you ever deserved to be disciplined or punished for something you did, but never ended up receiving the retribution? I have. At least once. Usually, as a child, I didn’t get away with much, but one time, I was astonishingly delivered from impending doom.

When I was about five years old, we lived in an old house in Indiana. I have a few notable memories of that house. We had an epic flood that was about three feet deep, we had a neighbor who was a grumpy preacher, and it was cold and dark in the winter. It was on one of those cold and dark Indiana mornings that I did something that can only be explained inside the mind of a five-year-old. (Whatever logic was present at that time has since escaped from my memory.)

We had a gas heater somewhere in the house, and I decided that it would be a great experiment to pee in the heater and see what would happen. What happens, I discovered, is that it fills the house with an inexplicable odor that is far less than pleasant.

As the fumes wafted throughout the house, my dad knew exactly what had happened. He had been raised in a home with four boys, and he was well acquainted with the capacity of boys to do the unbelievable. When confronted, however, I lied like a dog on a porch in the summer. There was no way I was going to own up to this one. I could tell by the look on my dad’s face the he was not buying it. I was dead in the water. I was secretly making all kinds of pledges and promises to God about future devotion, and commitments to abandon my recalcitrant ways for the greener pastures of obedience and, if necessary, missionary life.

There was a saving grace, however. My dear mother. That woman has a heart of gold. She reminded my father that I had never lied before (which may have been true to that point) and that if I said I didn’t do it, there was at least the slightest, remotest chance of there being another explanation and I should not be disciplined. I was SO on her side. After a time of disagreement, Mom won out! I had never been so relieved in all my life. Okay, maybe the time when I was rescued from the car trunk, but this was epic.

What troubled me later, however, was the fact that, even though I had managed to cheat the system and get away with it, I knew that God still knew the truth. I realized that, ultimately, there would be another day of reckoning, far ahead in my future.

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