Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

Be Thou my battle Shield, Sword for the fight;
Be Thou my Dignity, Thou my Delight;
Thou my soul’s Shelter, Thou my high Tower:
Raise Thou me heavenward, O Power of my power.

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,
Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

High King of Heaven, my victory won,
May I reach Heaven’s joys, O bright Heaven’s Sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.  Words: Dallan Forgail (8th Century)

We sang these majestic, soul-stirring words yesterday in chapel at school. I sat looking at the students as they sang - their heads hanging down over the papers in their hands - the words printed on them. They appeared to be going through motions. Such wonderfully rich words .......... I couldn't let them pass so I began each class yesterday with a question about "High King of Heaven."
Not one single student had any clue what the words meant. I knew they all knew the land of Narnia so I started there.
Narnia - 

• the land where it is always winter but never Christmas, the land frozen under the witch's spell 
• the land where the Great Lion Aslan shakes his shaggy mane and begins his move across the land bringing the thaw of winter into spring and life to all its inhabitants
• the land beyond the lamp post where the woodland creatures talk and live beside other wonderful mythological creatures
• the land created by C.S. Lewis to enchant children and adults alike

Peter Pevensie is the oldest brother who shares his adventures in Narnia with Susan, Lucy and Edmond. Peter is eventually crowned High King of Narnia which gives him authority over all the other Kings and Queens that country will ever have.


Since the name Narnia probably comes from the Italian town Nami (or Narnia in Latin), it seemed appropriate to take advantage of the teachable moment to make the connection in my Latin classes yesterday.

Of course, Jesus is the High King of Heaven! He is our Treasure! He is our Victory won - the conquering, Risen Christ! He is the King of all Kings and Lord of all Lords!

 

And, best of all, He is the Risen Christ who took all my sin and who made the awful trade giving me, His orphan daughter now adopted into the High King's forever family, His righteousness in return.
He gives me radical, astonishing, amazing grace! Just because He can!
HE is the High King of Heaven!

The Heart of a Lion for God - Chuck Colson

Saturday, April 21st Chuck Colson "slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God"!* I am old enough to remember Chuck Colson's other life when he served in the Nixon White House. He went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. But Watergate DID NOT define Chuck Colson. Chuck said he went to prison and never left. That is true in the sense that he spent the rest of his life writing, speaking, founding Prison Fellowship and its related ministries including his daily op ed pieces on Breakpoint.
What defined Chuck Colson was his incredible faith in Jesus and his unique, scholarly ability to put his faith and faith concepts in words that gripped the heart of his audience! I own and have read many of his books beginning with Born Again which is the story of his fall from the halls of power and the new life he found in Jesus Christ. I think my favorite of all his books is Loving God which he wrote in 1983.
Chapter 2 in Loving God is titled The Russian Doctor. It is one of the most profoundly compelling stories I have ever read - perhaps because I have read most of the writings of the person who is the patient of the Russian doctor. The Russian doctor is Dr. Boris Nicholayevich Kornfeld, a Jewish doctor and prisoner in the Soviet gulag. If anyone kept a record of the offense that landed Dr. Kornfeld in the gulag it is lost in time. In prison Boris Kornfeld became a believer in Jesus. Another prisoner spoke to Boris about another Jew who lived, died and came back to life. Boris was captivated and eventually believed that Jesus was indeed the Messiah of God! Dr. Kornfeld's new faith gave definition and boundaries to his bleak existence in the gulag. He refused to stoop to the "dog eat dog" existence in that dreadful place! He stood against injustice.
One night he was making rounds on a patient with serious pellagra - a disease caused by malnutrition that ultimately killed the patient. This man was clearly ravaged by pellagra. Dr. Kornfeld had been scavaging for white chalk, bread and herring to try to help his patient but the man was too far gone. He was too sick to even know his own name. He died as Dr. Kornfeld attended him.
As Boris Kornfeld walked away he came upon a criminal who had stolen the bread of another pellegra patient and was stuffing it down as fast as he could. In spite of the danger to his own personal safety, Dr. Kornfeld turned the man in to the commandant even tho he was effectively signing his own death warrent by his action. For safety the Russian doctor began sleeping near his patients. Apparently Dr. Kornfeld had never told another human being about his new found faith in Jesus.

One gray afternoon he examined a patient who had just been operated on for cancer of the intestines. This young man with a melon-shaped head and a hurt, little-boy expression touched the soul of the doctor. The man's eyes were sorrowful and suspicious and his face deeply etched by the years he had already spent in the camps, reflecting a depth of spiritual misery and emptiness Kornfeld had rarely seen.
So the doctor began to talk to the patient, describing what had happened to him. Once the tale began to spill out, Kornfeld could not stop. The patient missed the first part of the story, for he was drifting in and out of the anesthesia's influence, but the doctor's ardor caught his concentration and held it, though he was shaking with fever. All through the afternoon and late into the night, the doctor talked, describing his conversion to Christ and his new-found freedom. ... The patient knew he was listening to an incredible confession. Though the pain from his operation was severe, his stomach a heavy, expansive agony of molten lead, he hung on the doctor's words until he fell asleep.
The young patient awoke early the next morning to the sound of running feet and a commotion ... the whispers of a fellow patient told him of Kornfeld's fate. During the night while the doctor slept, someone had crept up ... and dealt him eight blows on the head with a plasterer's mallet. And though his fellow doctors worked valiantly to save him, in the morning the orderlies carried him out, a still, broken form.
But Kornfeld's testimony did not die.
The patient pondered the doctor's last, impassioned words. As a result, he, too, became a Christian. He survived that prison camp and went on to tell the world what he had learned there.
The patient's name was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. (Chuck Colson, Loving God, p. 27-34, 1983).

I remember well how my breath caught the first time I read this chapter! WOW! What a story!
The man who wrote that wonderful story and all the other chapters in Loving God has now moved on to the "BIG TIME - HEAVEN" but the things he said, the words he wrote and the way he lived will stand as a memorial to God's amazing grace!

*Ronald Reagan, 28 Jan 1986 after Challenger disaster quoting "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee

The Wonder of the Gospel Matters!

My friend Tim Keller (from long ago when he wasn't world-wide famous) is a wise man who truly understands and articulates the Gospel! You will be blessed by his thoughts and he's spot on!!!

If you think you really understand the gospel – you don’t. If you think you haven’t even begun to truly understand the gospel – you do. As important as our ‘gospel theologizing’ is, it alone will not reach our world. People today are incredibly sensitive to inconsistency and phoniness. They hear what the gospel teaches and then look at our lives and see the gap. Why should they believe? We have to recognize that the gospel is a transforming thing, and we simply are not very transformed by it. It’s not enough to say to postmodern people: ‘You don’t like absolute truth? Well, then, we’re going to give you even more of it!’ But people who balk so much at absolute truth will need to see greater holiness of life, practical grace, gospel character, and virtue, if they are going to believe.Traditionally, this process of ‘gospel-realizing,’ especially when done corporately, is called ‘revival.’ Religion operates on the principle:I obey; therefore I am accepted (by God). The gospel operates on the principle: I am accepted through the costly grace of God; therefore I obey. Two people operating on these two principles can sit beside each other in church on Sunday trying to do many of the same things – read the Bible, obey the Ten Commandments, be active in church, and pray – but out of two entirely different motivations. Religion moves you to do what you do out of fear, insecurity, and self-righteousness, but the gospel moves you to do what you do more and more out of grateful joy in who God is in himself. Times of revival are seasons in which many nominal and spiritually sleepy Christians, operating out of the semi-Pharisaism of religion, wake up to the wonder and ramifications of the gospel. Revivals are massive eruptions of new spiritual power in the church through a recovery of the gospel. In his sermon on Mark 9 Lloyd-Jones was calling the church to revival as its only hope. This is not a new program or something you can implement through a series of steps. It is a matter of wonder. Peter says that the angels always long to look into the gospel; they never tire of it (I Pet. 1:12). The gospel is amazing love. Amazing grace.- Tim Keller