The deeds of faithless men. . .

We have served the Lord in Congo for almost 33 years. My husband, Jim, was born into missionary life. He was handed down a legacy full of the wealth of faith, the peaceable fruits of righteous parents, the challenges brought about by living in a third world country, the ecstacy of seeing the Hand of God work in the hearts of men so that 1200 were baptized in a day at a time multiple times, and the transformation of depraved souls being rebirthed into the family of the Etneral One. This is the springboard of his childhood from which he jumped into serving Christ as an adult, making his own inroads, knowing God for himself through the death of his father first at the age of 11, and then promising God after the death of his 18-year-old brother when Jim was 16 that he would give God a year by reading the Bible. If, during that year, God proved Himself to my husband, he would give that Book its due for the rest of his life. This he has consistently attempted to do.

I come from great stock but stock who did not embrace the Savior passionately, nor did they know Him for most of their lives. But God in His mercies reached down and lifted my head and heart to know Him at the age of twelve. I walked upstream as a teenager to go to church, to read my Bible, to venture out in faith because my parents were both burned as teenagers by the church and its leaders and did not understand my newfound faith.

When Jim and I met in Bible school, I was captivated by his confidence in God. Our first 13 years of marriage were spent serving Christ at a local church in Michigan. Then Congo called, and I was never to be the same person again. I owe much of my molding and shaping to this country we missionaries can love and hate at the same time. Love it for the opportunities it offers to minister, for the hunger we see here to know Christ, for the simplicity of life and the forcing of one's soul to get and live back to and in the basics of life. We at the same time can hate the injustice we see all around, including graft and corruption beyond imagination that has become a mindset and mentality for those used and abused by the system.

Corruption in the "church" is the worst. We face a community group who has taken on the name of a denomination here in Congo that is full of hypocrisy. And, as Ezra faced great lapses in time while rebuilding the temple because of opposition and discouragement, and Nehemiah had to take a strong stand against men who tried to bluff him and his coworkers into fear and dismay, so we must take courage as we make our way to the mission campus to fight the good fight of faith.

We Christians tend not to like that word, fight. BUT it is Biblical, and there is such a thing as righteous indignation. Righteous indignation over impudence and hardheartedness. Spurgeon (and I paraphrase and quote his commentary out of Morning and Evening on April 28 (evening):

"Impudence refers to a hardness of forehead, a lack of holy shame, or boldness in evil. . . For a sinner to go to God's house and pretend to pray to Him and praise Him displays a brazen-faced hypocrisy of the worst kind!. . . Hardheartedness is having a heart of stone, although through grace I now have a new and fleshy heart, much of my former stubbornness remains. I am not affected by the death of Jesus as I ought to be. Neither am I moved by the ruin of my fellowmen, the wickedness of the times, the chastisement of my heavenly Father, and my own failures, as I should be. O, that my heart would melt at the mention of my Savior's sufferings and death. The Savior's precious blood is the universal solvent. It will soften even me, until my heart melts as wax before the fire

We all identify with these two ugly descriptions of character. No one is devoid of them. However, when both hardheartedness and impudence not only come knocking but are allowed to stay because we don't battle or deal with them or are so sin sick we don't recognize them, then that's another issue.

And this is what we are up against at the mission in the months ahead. Some of the impudence and hardheartedness we will find in people there who are unredeemed, instruments of satan. We will also find it in believers. Believers who have allowed sin to come and indwell, make itself at home in, and overtake their wills and hearts. They have stopped endeavoring to lead a blameless life as described in Psalm 15. They have stopped doing what is righteous, stopped speaking the truth from their hearts, stopped refusing to have slander on their tongues, stopped refusing to do their neighbors wrong, stopped refusing to cast slurs on their fellowman, stopped despising vile men, stopped honoring those who fear the Lord, and stopped keeping their oaths. . .

So we are approaching this time out here in a fighting mode. Fighting for what pleases God, fighting for righteousness, fighting against evil, rampant immorality, corruption in the church, and fighting against lifestyles impregnated with lies. We do this on our knees; the battle is the Lord's. Will you fight the good fight with us?

In the meantime, God forbid that we allow the deeds of faithless men to cling to us, Ps. 101:3b. We must not obsess ourselves with their evil slander, with their evil tongues, with their bullying, with their threats and their illegal documents. We must not allow these evil deeds to rob us of our joy and the abundant life for which Jesus came, but glory in His Presence, and praise Him which is the highest form of trust we can give to our Lord Jesus Christ because we know it's not about us but about His glory!