The act of Redemption

One of the greatest mystery and a miracle that happens across the world is the act of redemption. How joyful is the soul that has broken free from the passions of the flesh and looks anew to the face of God. Herein let me relate three true stories of redemption.

Saint Augustine was a young man who lived an immoral life, but he was always in quest to search the answers for the fundamental questions of life. This led him to the group of thinking called Manichean sect. Augustine soon realized that while Manichaeism tends to promise answers to questions relating to God. It never did. In one summer, while he was sitting at his friend’s garden, weeping for his sins he heard a child singing in Latin from a neighboring house, “Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege!” (“Take up and read! Take up and read!”)  Augustine thought to himself that these were strange words indeed for a child to be singing at play, and so he took them as from the Lord. Picking up a scroll, which lay at his friend’s side, he let his eyes rest on the words:

“… Not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.” (Rom 13:13-14).

“No further would I read”, he wrote later, “nor had I any need; instantly at the end of this sentence, a clear light flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt vanished away.”

John Wesley, the founder of Methodist movement, relates to his conversion like this.

He was miserable. Even though he had been preaching for years together, and had been to mission trips to India, he had a deep sensitivity to sin, and had bible reading and praying as his regular habits and a scholar of Oxford. He still had doubts regarding his salvation. He used to constantly ponder whether he was right with God. It all changed on evening when he went for a meeting. That evening he reluctantly attended a meeting in Aldersgate. Someone read from Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to Romans. About 8:45 p.m. “while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” (Excerpt from http://www.umcworship.org).

Something we can learn from this is that none of our works are going to save us. No amount of preaching, good works, and donations to church or filial love is going to credit us unto salvation save the complete faith in Jesus Christ.

Paris Reidhead was a writer, who went to Africa to serve the poor people there and to show them the knowledge of the true God. In his own words, he recounts the experience like this.

“If you will ask me why I went to Africa I will tell you I went primarily to improve on the justice of God. I didn’t think it was right for anybody to go to hell without a chance to be saved. And so I went to give poor sinners a chance to go to heaven. And I hadn’t put it in so many words, but if you will analyze what I have just told you, do you know what it is? It is humanism that I was simply using the provisions of Jesus Christ as a means to improve upon human conditions of suffering and misery.

And when I got to Africa I discovered that they weren’t poor ignorant little heathen running around in the woods waiting for…looking for someone to tell them how to go to heaven, that they were monsters of iniquity that were living in utter and total defiance of far more knowledge of God than I ever dreamed they had. They deserved hell because they utterly refused to walk in the light of their conscience and the light of the law written upon their heart and the testimony of nature and the truth they knew. And when I found that out I assure you I was so angry with God that one occasion in prayer I told him that it was a mighty little thing he had done sending me out there to reach these people that were waiting to be told how to go to heaven. And there, alone in my bedroom as I faced God honestly with what my heart felt it seemed to me I heard him say, “Yes, will not the judge of all the earth do right? The heathen are lost and they are going to go to hell not because they haven’t heard the gospel. They are going to go to hell because they are sinners who love their sin and because they deserve hell. But I didn’t send you out there for them. I didn’t send you out there for their sakes.”

And I heard as clearly as I have ever heard—though it wasn’t with physical voice, but it was the echo of truth of the ages finding its way into an open heart—I heard God say to my heart that day something like this. “I didn’t send you to Africa for the sake of the heathen. I sent you to Africa for my sake. They deserved hell, but I love them. And I endured the agonies of hell for them. I didn’t send you out there for them. I sent you out there for me. Do I not deserve the reward of my sufferings? Don’t I deserve those for whom I died?”

In conclusion, let me ask you a question. Why do we preach about Jesus Christ? Why do we try to live righteously? What’s the point of all the sacrifice we make?

Beloved, the only answer should be, not because we want to go to heaven, or have to save our souls from hell fire. Or be at peace with God, but because of the Love of Christ, because the Lamb is worthy.

Let us not be guided by any personal motives in following Christ but let it be for Him and His Glory alone.

May God bless you.

Bro Gideon Paul Rufus

God’s Love Missions Family