Love Your Fellow Believer

1 Peter 3:8

Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)

⁸ Now finally, all of you should be like-minded and sympathetic, should love believers, and be compassionate and humble.

Bob*, the Animal Control Officer in Lancaster, showed up at my door on a Sunday evening. He looked belligerently from me to Prince, my Black Labrador. “Your dog has been disturbing the peace!” He went on to describe how he was going to have to fine me and possibly dispose of the dog. He went on to describe how a man who lived a full city block away couldn’t sleep at night because the dog was barking.

I looked incredulously at him and suggested: “He lives a long ways away and there are lots of houses between his and mine. Are you sure it was my dog?” Bob attended the same church I did. He had a reputation of picking on fellow church members more than on others.

“Yes! He walked around the block about three o’clock in the morning and said that it was at this house that all the barking came from.” Bob was quite upset.

“When did this happen?” I asked.

“Last night.”

“Oh!” I said, relieved. “We just returned from a weekend in Athol, an hour’s drive from here. Prince was with us. So it must have been another dog!”

“I don’t believe you!” Bob was emphatic. “It was your dog alright.”

“You can ask the family,” I replied, “or you can contact the friends whose house we stayed in!”

“No, it was this dog. You’re lying!” Bob saw he was getting nowhere but absolutely refused to admit that he might have to look further. “I’ll get you!” he threatened over his shoulder as he stalked away.

Just before going to bed I looked across the street. Bob’s car was parked in a dark corner of the bank parking lot across the street. I chuckled as I thought of his staying the whole night in his car waiting in vain for Prince to start barking. He never spoke to me again.

Why, Lord, is it so hard to love our fellow believers? Please perfect that love in us.

*Bob is not his real name.

Need Wisdom?

James 1:5

Contemporary English Version (CEV)

⁵ If any of you need wisdom, you should ask God, and it will be given to you. God is generous and won’t correct you for asking.

For years I have told my students that this is indeed the students’ memory verse. Here’s why I believe that this is a special promise to students.

Ph.D. students at the University of Iowa in my day had to take three comprehensive exams over three different fields of their discipline before they could start doing their research. A student has two chances to pass each exam. If she fails any one of them twice, she is automatically eliminated from the program. Since the exams are comprehensive, the examiner can ask any question in the field: Nothing would be regarded as an unfair question. I felt a tremendous amount of stress as I approached each exam. At stake were four years of undergraduate and two or three years of graduate preparation.

In my preparation for each comprehensive, I obtained the exams from the previous ten years. For each previous exam I would find a quiet desk in the library, spread the exam and paper in front of me, and time myself for exactly three hours while I answered the questions on the examination. When the three hours were up, I would research until I had found all the answers for the questions. Then I would test myself on the next exam. I chose to do comprehensives over Topology, Algebra, and Analysis. I did the first two in the autumn of 1972 and passed them comfortably.

In the following spring I took the Analysis exam. It had seven questions, and I was instructed to answer five of them. I had three hours to complete them. After two-and-a-half hours, I had answered only three questions and couldn’t answer any more. I knew I had failed the exam. Gloomily I turned it in and went and sat down and prayed and claimed the promise in James 1:5. Suddenly it dawned on me that I knew how to answer a fourth question. Since I hadn’t left the room, the examiner let me work on that question. The question had been phrased in a tricky way so that it appeared far more difficult than it really was.

I passed the exam on the four questions I had answered. I had a friend who answered only three questions, and he failed the exam. When he retook the exam the next fall, it was a very difficult exam, and no one passed. I would not have passed it either! My friend had to leave the program and never did get his degree.

To this day, I believe that God fulfilled this promise that day.

Thank You, Lord, for promising us wisdom and then so graciously fulfilling it.

A Strong Helping Hand

Isaiah 41:13

1599 Geneva Bible (GNV)

¹³ For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not, I will help thee.

Last week I went out to Joshua Tree National Park with my brother Elwood and his wife and a couple carloads of friends. My wife, Sylvia, longed to go along, but she had other duties and her 97 year-old mother to look after.

We did a lot of climbing on the boulder kopjes around Hidden Valley. Most of the group decided to climb Rainbow, the highest point on the rim of kopjes surrounding the valley. There are two ways to climb these piles of rocks. One is to send a capable person up the rock with a rope and have him or her anchor this rope at several points on the way up. Then one person in the group can climb up and rappel back down again. Then the next person does the same thing until finally all have had a chance to climb.

Another way is to forget the equipment and take the whole group up and down less precipitous routes. All of us have some degree of fear of heights. I think I have more fear than my brother or my daughter. On our way up Rainbow we came to several spots where we had to cross a gap between two boulders. The gaps were about twenty feet deep so that any fall would be very painful and very possibly fatal.

The gap was only about three feet across and had some good handholds and spots to step on. The drop between the boulders sent shivers up and down the spine, however. “What if my hand lost its grip or my foot slipped?” Self-preservation instincts took over. An adrenalin rush in the blood stream almost paralyzed some of the climbers. It was at this point that the proffered hand of an experienced climber or the offer to “spot” the foot (hold the foot from slipping) became very welcome. The climb proceeded with renewed confidence.

At the summit we all sat around and viewed the entire Hidden Valley. Dozens of earth-bound tourists walked the “Loop Trail” unaware of the thrill of the climb. Meanwhile the warm breeze and sunshine dispelled the fear. All of life’s stressors, snubs, and slights were forgotten. A new joie de vivre enveloped our very souls.

Thank You, Lord, for taking my hand or spotting my foot just when I need it most in my life’s difficulties.

Talking with Jesus

Numbers 12:3

Good News Translation (GNT)

³ Moses was a humble man, more humble than anyone else on earth.

Dad and Mom spent 42 years as missionaries in Africa. They arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, on a hot January day. They were met at the ship and spent the day with a family who put them on the evening train to Somerset West. Arthur Davy met them at the station in a “lorry” (a truck) and took them out to Helderberg College where they worked for the next 18 years. The two families became fast friends.

The Davys moved to a mission to the north a few years later. When I started to school in 1950, their daughter June Davy was in the same class. She had been sent close to 2000 miles from home to attend the first grade at the Helderberg Primary School. I still am deeply moved to think of the sacrifice the Davys made for the Lord. They were very anxious that their children get a good, Christian education. June was so young she still couldn’t pronounce all the English words. I remember how she would say “hope” when she meant “help.” Our teacher joked that if she really needed help, people would here her calling “hope!” and she might not get the help she needed.

In 1956 my parents took my brother and me back to the States with them on furlough. The Davy’s were on board the same ship. This was the first time I had met them. We joined them in worship on a Sabbath at sea. When the time came for prayer, Elder Davy was asked to pray. Never in my life had I heard anyone pray like he did. I certainly don’t remember the words, but I do vividly remember his style of prayer. Gone were the “thee” and “thou” so common in everyone’s prayers in those days. He spoke to God as I would have to a friend. It was obvious from the first word that he knew God intimately, that he had total confidence that God not only was listening closely but would also supply exactly what we needed. Davy’s prayer provided me a real-life sample of how God and Moses spoke face-to-face (Numbers 12:8) as to a friend. After that I never viewed prayer the same!

Thank You, Jesus, for being a real, understanding Friend!

Wurmbrand

Psalm 37:12-13

King James Version (KJV)

¹² The wicked plotteth against the just, and gnasheth upon him with his teeth. ¹³ The Lord shall laugh at him: for he seeth that his day is coming.

It was in the midst of the Cold War in the late 1960’s that we spent five years as missionaries in Tanzania. The country had been independent from England for a mere 5 years when we arrived. The rural economies were socialistic by nature, so the communist ideology was proving very attractive to the average citizen. On a monthly basis our students would receive beautifully illustrated glossy propaganda magazines from Red China. These urged an atheistic dependence on the state as a final solution for all of life’s problems.

Books were hard to come by in upcountry Tanzania in the late 1960s. Once in a long while I would get to go into Nairobi in Kenya. There was a Christian bookstore that I would visit with every such opportunity. On one of these visits I bought Tortured for Christ by Richard Wurmbrand. His experience had a huge impact on my life and Christian experience.

Wurmbrand was a Christian minister in communist Romania. He had fearlessly preached salvation by Christ and the futility of communism. He was arrested on several occasions and thrown into the most terrible of prisons. He spent three years in absolutely total solitary confinement. He maintained his sanity by daily creating a new sermon and then preaching it to the four walls of his cell every night. Later he was able to recall over 350 of these, and he published them in a book titled With God in Solitary Confinement.

He was tortured repeatedly in ways that only people under Satan’s control could devise. For fourteen long years he endured physical and psychological torture. Finally he was ransomed by Norwegian Christians and eventually immigrated into the United States. Then he was able to found the organization The Voice of Martyrs to help Christians who were still being tortured for their faith.

Living as I was in a country on the verge of choosing to join the communist world, this book had a huge effect on my life. I took every chance to warn my students about the dangers of communism should Tanzania choose to go that direction. Fortunately enough similar voices prevailed in the country.

Lord, grant us the patience and fortitude to resist evil even under torture and persecution.

Black and White

Galatians 3:26-28

Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)

²⁶ You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. ²⁷ For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ like a garment.²⁸ There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

In 1957 I went to Sedaven High School near Johannesburg, South Africa. As was required by apartheid law, Sedaven was a whites only boarding school. In church I would hear how the blacks were cursed by God in the curse Noah pronounced on Ham and Canaan shortly after the flood. Blacks were merely children, and whites were placed in South Africa by God to govern them and care for their well being.

Fellow classmates used to exclaim vehemently, “If blacks are going to be in heaven, then I’m not going!”

I’d laugh and say, “Well, I’d rather be in heaven with the good ones than in hell with the bad ones!” But this never changed any of their attitudes.

Twenty years later I was back in South Africa teaching mathematics at the all white Helderberg College. Solusi College, a black school far to the north in war torn Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), had been forced to close its doors on account of the civil war. Many of its students were from South Africa originally, and Helderberg had quietly offered to let those students attend its classes as long as they lived in areas designated for blacks by the government.

There were two black students from this group who would slip into my calculus class every day and sit very quietly on the back row and say nothing to anyone. I watched the other students carefully for any kind of reaction: they simply ignored them. One day after I had returned the second test a group of them came to my office.

“Dr. Clarke,” Pieter said guardedly, “after each test you write our scores on the board. We’ve compared all of our scores carefully, and none of us got either of the top two scores. Is it possible that it belongs to the two blacks sitting in the back row of class?”

Now, of course, I had to be careful. “What does your research show?”

“Well, by the process of elimination it has to be them. But we have been told that they are just children and aren’t very clever. So how can they possibly get the top scores?”

“I taught for years in Tanzania,” I laughed, “and I found that God handed out brains pretty equally across all races.”

This led into an excellent discussion about misconceptions of racial superiority.

Thank You, Lord, that indeed You love me and everyone else just like You love Christ. Grant us the grace to do the same.

Random Hospitality

1 Peter 4:9

Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)

⁹ Be hospitable to one another without complaining.

We were living in the smallest house on Ikizu Mission in Tanzania. We had one small baby and so pretty much filled up the home. The room we used as our “dining room” had bookcases from floor to ceiling and a table and several chairs. It also had a crack that ran from floor to ceiling about an inch wide all the way through the 18 inch thick mud-brick wall caused by one of the many earthquakes the rift valley area of Africa frequently experiences. We had a bathroom and kitchen with cold running water and had one of the old ringer type Maytag washing machines.

One day a Land Rover piled high with personal possessions and towing a trailer filled with more things pulled up outside our house, and a man and woman got out. As some kids tumbled out of the Rover behind them, they introduced themselves as Robin and Diana.

Robin was on a surveying mission in East Africa for one of the universities in England. On a clear night he would haul his equipment to the top of a mountain and carefully pinpoint the exact astronomical position of 50 to 100 stars. Then he would spend long hours calculating--without a calculator. His purpose was to determine the precise position of that point on the surface of the earth. These points had been surveyed using triangulation methods decades previously. But his methods were regarded as being more accurate than the old method. This all happened before global positioning satellites and actually helped perfect the new system.

Diana explained that they needed to spend upwards of two weeks in each place. All they desired was a place to set up camp near a bathroom and washing machine. We welcomed them, and they camped in the shade of the jacaranda trees in our back yard. This helped us get to know them pretty well. We had occasional meals together and became good friends. We left the back door unlocked so they could access our bathroom any time of day or night.

We did not push our religion on them, nor did we have Bible studies. I don’t remember whether they sat in on our daily family worships occasionally or not. They certainly didn’t seem religiously inclined at all. Yet as we kept in touch with our annual Christmas cards for years, we noted with joy their descriptions of becoming very involved trying to interest the young people in Christ and the gospel once they returned to England. Decades later on a trip around the world, they stopped in and spent a night with us. Robin was very excited about his lay ministry with the young people and spoke of it at length.

Thank You Lord for allowing us to work with You by using our little bit of hospitality to encourage Robin and Diana in serving You. May we continue to show hospitality to the people you bring our way!

Conflicting Reports

Job 33:14

New International Version (NIV)

¹⁴ For God does speak—now one way, now another—
    though no one perceives it.

Have you looked up your name on Google? You probably have. We all have an innate curiosity to know what is being recorded about ourselves. I was proctoring a test one Friday and happened to have my laptop with me. I looked up a teacher’s name that some student had been inquiring about. Then I looked up mine. I hadn’t looked it up in at least a year, and I remembered none of the entries. Down towards the bottom of the first page was a commercial site for students. Its primary purpose is to sell stuff students might be looking for. It also has a part for students to rate their professors. It was to this page that Google took me.

I had been teaching evening classes at a local community college, and there were three entries. The students rated me a 4.5 out of 5. I couldn’t have paid them to write nicer things about me. The only mildly negative comment was that the class I was teaching went way too fast. Indeed it did: we covered pre-calculus in 8 weeks. This is normally covered in 16 weeks at that college. I had to drive both myself and them relentlessly. Yet the students continued that I was always interested in their well-being. I would never get impatient when they asked questions. I was always interesting to listen to and even found time to tell humorous personal experiences just to lighten the extreme pressure we were operating under.

That evening I mentioned this to my son Fred. He pulled out his smart phone and looked it up. He found the corresponding site for the school I taught at during the day. It had only one entry about me, and that student rated me a 1.5 out of 5. The writer went on to contradict everything the three students at the other school said about me. I doubt that my detractor even knew of the existence of the other three commentators.

God speaks to each of us, sometimes through inane things like Google. He often speaks different things to us; some we delight to hear; others really put us in our place.

Thank You, Lord, for encouraging us and keeping us humble. Thank You for guiding us step by step in the various directions You want us to go.