A ROCKY FOUNDATION

  In 1933 the middle of the great depression, a young Irish man named J. Edwin Orr left a good paying job and with no fixed source of income, he trusted that God would provide for him. He planned to travel around Great Britain with the message of prayer, salvation and revival. He left Belfast with 2 shillings and 8 pence. He had a bicycle, clothes and a Bible. He spent the next year traveling to every country in Great Britain. He organized 300 prayer groups dedicated to pray for revival. He wrote a book about it all and finally convinced a publisher to take it. The first book titled “Can God..?” was based on Psalm 78:19 and published in 1934. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was a tremendous inspiration to Christians in that day. Orr’s book and life were a remarkable demonstration of the fact that God can prepare a table in the wilderness. In Psalm 23:1-4 David described his relationship to God using the imagery of the shepherd and his sheep. But from verse 5 he describ

     One rainy day on his way to the market, Wandaro had noticed a clinic erected by a newly arrived white couple. The white man Earl Lewis beckoned Wandaro and others to take shelter from the torrential rain. Lewis began reading from a strange book. A book brought by a foreigner! Was this what the Ethiopian prophet Asa had prophesied long ago? Wandaro wondered “a foreigner would bring a book telling about the creator, whom people should worship”. The next week Wandaro returned for more of this news and eventually declared “I renounce Satan to follow Jesus”. For the first time he felt joy. He longed to read more about God for himself but he had never been to school. Mrs Lewis helped him learn Amharic. Wandaro was the slowest in the group, but his love for his savior burned strongly. In 1933 he and nine others became the first wolaytos to be baptized. When Ethiopia fell to the Italian invaders in 1936, corrupt officials, resentful of evangelical witness, saw their opportunity to g

                          An army sergeant and a recruit were doing sur vival trainings in the Rocky Mountains. As they made their way through the woods they suddenly encountered a very large hungry looking grizzly bear coming towards them. The sergeant immediately sat down, ripped off his hiking boots and took a pair of top of the line running shoes out of his backpack.   The recruit watched him and asked “sir, do you really think you are going to outrun that bear?   Putting his arm on the recruit shoulder, the sergeant said “well, you see, I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you” Psalm 23 is a psalm of David; in the first three verses David delightfully sings of a God who is a personal shepherd. He sings of a shepherd who makes him to lie down on green pastures and leads him besides quiet water. He describes himself as a contented sheep. The shepherd leads him in path of righteousness and restores him anytime he strays.   Then, in verse 4 we find the first

                                                                Work out your sa lvation Gordon MacDonald, in his book “Ordering Your Private World”, wrote of an experience in his own life that illustrates that sanctification becomes progressively hard as one move from big obvious sins to tiny hidden ones. He wrote "Some years ago, when Gail and I bought the old abandoned New Hampshire farm, we found the site where we wished to build our country home strewn with rocks and boulders. It was going to take a lot of hard work to clear it all out. The first phase of the clearing process was easy. The big boulders went fast. And when they were gone, we began to see that there were a lot of smaller rocks that had to go too. But when we had cleared the site of the boulders and the rocks, we noticed all of the stones and pebbles we had not seen before. This was much harder, more tedious work. But we stuck to it and there came the day when the soil was ready for planting grass."