June 7

ALL WILL SHARE ALIKE

David replied, “No, my brothers, you must not do that with what the Lord has given us. He has protected us and handed over to us the forces that came against us. Who will listen to what you say?

The share of the man who stayed with the supplies is to be the same as that of him who went down to the battle. All will share alike.” David made this a statute and ordinance for Israel from that day to this. 1 Samuel 30:23-25

It seemed logical for those followers of David who had finally been victorious in defeating the Amalekites, to divide the spoil themselves and not to share it with those who stayed behind—some of them “too exhausted” to continue on in the pursuit of the enemy. But David vehemently disagreed, insisting that “All will share alike” because all of them had contributed to the conquest. So it is with the work of the Lord. The unsung heroes of the church will also have their reward.

It was this passage from 1 Samuel that served as the text for one of Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s most memorable sermons. “The very last time Spurgeon preached in Metropolitan Tabernacle was the Lord’s Day morning of June 7, 1891. He appeared a broken man, ‘utterly weary in the Lord’s work, but not of it’; prematurely old, though but fifty-six; his hair white, anguish lines in his face, so enfeebled that he supported himself with his right hand on the back of a chair.” That afternoon, he suddenly became ill and remained bedridden for most of the remaining eight months of his life.

His final sermon reflected his own situation: a man too exhausted to go on in the battle. But he was not speaking of himself as much as he was of his parishioners—many of whom had worked faithfully over the years without receiving public acclaim. One such individual was William Higgs, the contractor and builder of the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Two others were Joseph Passmore and James Alabaster, the printers who served Spurgeon and the ministries of the church over the years.

Still another was Lavina Strickland Bartlett, who for sixteen years taught a Bible class for young women. “The class averaged six hundred in attendance, one thousand of whom had joined the church when she died in 1875. Of her Spurgeon said, “She aimed at soul-winning every time she met the class. Her talk never degenerated into story-telling, or quotations of poetry. She kept close to the cross, extolled her Saviour, pleaded with sinners to believe, and stirred up saints to holy living.”

Spurgeon loved the people in his congregation individually and collectively, and knew well how dependent he was on them. “Truly I may say, without the slightest flattery, that I never met with any people on the face of the earth who lived more truly up to this doctrine—that chosen of God, and loved by him with special love, they should do extraordinary things for him—than those among whom I have been so long and so happily associated.” 7

June 6

WHY DO YOU PERSECUTE ME

Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem.

As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied.

Acts 9:1-5

Saul’s conversion story is unique. Very few people testify to such an electrifying salvation experience. But there are those rare conversion stories that are similar. One of those is the story of Sundar Singh, a man who turned away from his heritage of wealth to travel, barefoot, the dusty paths of India and Tibet with the gospel of Christ.

Sundar Singh was raised in India in a Sikh family, but through his mother he had come to appreciate not only the Sikh scriptures, the Granth, but the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran. The Bible, however, was not on his reading list. He hated the Bible—not because he had read and studied it, but because he hated Christians. Their religion was not part of his heritage, and in an effort to express his outrage for their presence in his country, he joined with others in a Bible-burning ceremony in his village square. But burning the Bible was an act of outrage against God, as Sundar learned through a vision.

“Though I thought I had done a good deed in burning the Gospel, yet my unrest of heart increased. On the third day, when I felt I could bear it no longer, I got up at three in the morning and, after bathing, prayed that if there was a God at all He would reveal himself to me, and show me the way of salvation. I firmly made up my mind that if this prayer was not answered, I would before daylight go down to the railway, and place my head on the line before the incoming train.

“I remained till about half past four, praying and waiting and expecting to see Krishna or Buddha, or some other avatar of the Hindu religion; they appeared not, but a light was shining into the room. I opened the door to see where it came from, but all was dark outside. I returned inside, and the light increased in intensity and took the form of a globe of light above the ground, and in this light there appeared, not the form I had expected, but the living Christ whom I had counted as dead.

“To all eternity I shall never forget His glorious loving face, nor the few words which He spoke: ‘Why do you persecute me? See, I have died on the cross for you and for the whole world.’ These words burned into my heart as by lightning and I fell to the ground before Him. My heart was filled with inexpressible joy and peace, and my whole life was entirely changed.” 6

June 5

FREELY YOU HAVE RECEIVED, FREELY GIVE

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.

As you go, preach this message: ‘The Kingdom of heaven is near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.

Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts, take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals or a staff; for the worker is worth his keep.

Matthew 10:5-10

Growing up the son of a prosperous textile retailer offered young Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone a privileged lifestyle with plenty of opportunity for leisure-time activities. He studied French and Latin in school, but was far more interested in spending money and socializing with his friends. His one fascination in life was the adventure of military conquests, and he looked forward to the day when he would become a soldier himself.

At the age of twenty, his dream came true. But the excitement of a military campaign quickly dissipated when he was taken a prisoner of war. He was released after two years, and he vowed that he would return to complete his mission. On his way to the battlefront, however, his mission suddenly changed. A voice in a dream commanded him to serve God and not man. His marching orders were very clear as he later related:

“When I was yet in my sins it did not seem to me too bitter to look upon the lepers, but the Lord Himself did lead me among them, and I had compassion upon them. When I left them, that which had seemed to me bitter had become sweet and easy.” His response to God was volunteer work at a leper hospital.

Soon after this he heard a voice from God charging him to repair the house of God, which he interpreted as being St. Damien’s Cathedral. How could he take on such a momentous task? The most obvious means was to appropriate expensive cloth from his father’s warehouse. His father was furious and the local bishop ordered him to return the goods. With that, he renounced his wealthy upbringing and his own fine clothing and donned a hair shirt and began living the life of a solitary hermit.

For two years he lived by himself spending his energies repairing the old church. Then in 1209, at the age of twenty-eight, he heard a sermon from Matthew 10 about Jesus sending out his disciples with no money or belongings. That was just the inspiration he needed. He would spend his life preaching the gospel and helping the poor.

As he traveled around, others joined him—many of them like him, sons of middle-class merchants. They took a vow of poverty, and used an old cow barn as their headquarters. It was the beginning of what became the Franciscan order headed by a man who would later be canonized in the Roman Catholic church—St. Francis of Assisi 5

June 4

BEAUTY IS FLEETING

“Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.”

Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.

Proverbs 31:29-31

Paul Brand, a physician known worldwide for his medical breakthroughs for leprosy patients, paid high tribute to his mother and the formative influence she had on him. Who was this uncommon woman known by the people she served as “Granny” Brand? “I say it kindly and in love,” writes Paul, “but in old age my mother had little of physical beauty left in her. She had been a classic beauty as a young woman—I have photographs to prove it—but not in old age.

The rugged conditions in India, combined with crippling falls and her battles with typhoid, dysentery, and malaria had made her a thin, hunched-over old woman. Years of exposure to wind and sun had toughened her facial skin into leather and furrowed it with wrinkles as deep and extensive as any I have seen on a human face. She knew better than anyone that her physical appearance had long since failed her—for this reason she adamantly refused to keep a mirror in her house.”

When she was seventy-five, Granny fell and broke her hip. Workmen carried her on a stretcher down the mountain, after which she was taken over one hundred and fifty miles of bumpy roads by jeep to the nearest hospital. When Paul visited her some time later she was walking with two bamboo canes and managing to travel on horseback to outlying villages.

“I came with compelling arguments for her retirement,” writes Paul. “It was not safe for her to go on living alone in such a remote place . . . With her faulty sense of balance and paralyzed legs, she presented a constant medical hazard . . .

“Granny threw off my arguments like so much nonsense and shot back a reprimand. Who would continue the work? There was no one else in the entire mountain range to preach, to bind up wounds, and to pull teeth. ‘In any case,’ she concluded, ‘what is the use of preserving my old body if it is not going to be used where God needs me?’

“And so she stayed. Eighteen years later, at the age of ninety-three, she reluctantly gave up sitting on her pony because she was falling all too frequently. Devoted Indian villagers began bearing her on a hammock from town to town. After two more years of mission work, she finally died at age ninety-five. She was buried, at her request, in a simple, well-used sheet laid in the ground—no coffin . . .

“One of my last and strongest visual memories of my mother is set in a village in the mountains she loved . . . She is sitting on a low stone wall that circles the village, with people pressing in from all sides . . . They are looking at an old wrinkled face . . . To them she is beautiful.” ⁴

June 3

BRINGING A BROTHER TO JESUS

Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus.

The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah” (that is, the Christ). And he brought him to Jesus.

John 1:40-42a

When Jesus admonished his disciples to be fishers of men, he certainly was aware that such a commission might very well arouse anger, kindle persecution, and tear apart families. Yet it was a command that he did not give lightly, and he expected his followers—even as Andrew had done—to bring their brothers to him.

For Christiana Tsai, the daughter of a wealthy Chinese provincial governor, bringing her brother to Jesus was a dangerous proposition. She was raised in a Buddhist home, but attended a mission school to take advantage of the excellent education it offered. She vowed, however, that she would never convert to Christianity, and she deeply resented the religious services she was required to attend. “This only increased my resistance,” she later wrote, “and I made up my mind that I was not going to ‘eat’ their Christianity, so I used to take a Chinese novel with me to chapel and read it as I knelt at the bench.”

What Christiana wanted most from her education was to perfect her skills in the English language so that she could quench her insatiable thirst for knowledge. To do that she joined an optional English Bible class, and, by her own testimony, “God used my love for English to draw me to Himself.” It was through reading Scripture that she was converted—an experience that created anger and despair among her family members. One of her brothers tore up her Bible and hymnbook, and her mother openly grieved that her daughter would care so little about her as to deny her future homage through ancestral worship.

Eventually, however, Christiana’s testimony and changed life began to have an effect on her family, and one by one they converted to Christianity. “So the brother who tore up my Bible and persecuted me in the early days at last confessed my Lord,” she wrote. “In all, fifty-five of my relatives, adults and children, have become Cod’s children and expressed their faith in Jesus. I have never been to college, or theological seminary, and I am not a Bible teacher; I have only been God’s ‘hunting dog.’ I simply followed at the heels of my Master, and brought to His feet the quarry He sent me after.” 3

June 2

REMEMBER ME WHEN YOU COME INTO YOUR KINGDOM

One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!”

But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”

Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Luke 23:39-43

The prisoners in the Montinlupa Prison who gathered for a large assembly were astonished to see a woman in her seventies make her way up the steps of the platform to address them. What would an old woman have to say to them, and how did she even obtain permission to get in? Mass assemblies were rare, and usually only armed men were brave enough to enter this maximum security prison that housed only the most hardened criminals.

As she began to speak, these defiant men—most of them in chains—had difficulty understanding her words through her thick Dutch accent, but slowly she captured their attention. She told how she and her family had hidden Jews from the Nazis during World War II and how German police, because of a tip from two of her fellow citizens, had pounded on their door one frigid February day in 1944 with warrants for their arrest. The speaker was Corrie ten Boom. She knew what life was like in a death-camp prison, and she could identify with these men in their misery. But there was more to her story than her own suffering.

After the war was over, the two Dutchmen who had betrayed her family were taken into custody and put on trial. That they were getting what they deserved would have been the natural response, but not so. "My sister Nollie,” Corrie told her audience, “heard of the trial of these two men who told the Gestapo about us, and she wrote a letter to both of them.

“She told them that through their betrayal they had caused the death of our father, our brother and his son, and our sister. She said we had suffered much, although both of us had come out of prison alive. She told them that we had forgiven them and that we could do this because of Jesus, who is in our hearts.”

Both men responded. One wrote: “I have received Jesus as my Savior. When you can give such ability to forgive, to people like Corrie ten Boom and her sister, then there is hope for me. I brought my sins to Him.”

The other letter gave an opposite viewpoint: “I know what I have done to your family, that I have caused the death of several of you who have saved Jews, and above that I have helped to kill many hundreds of Jewish people. The only thing I regret is that I have not been able to kill more of your kind.” Corrie went on to challenge the prisoners that every one of them—even as those criminals who had been on the cross—could accept or reject Christ and his forgiveness. ²

June 1

THE WORD BECAME FLESH

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:10-14

When Peter Kingston, a missionary to Brazil, was translating the Gospel of John for the Mamainde people, he left the first fourteen verses of the book to be done last. That passage was a crucial passage not only because of its placement in the book, but also because of its doctrinal content. It was late afternoon when he finally arrived at the very last verse, as he later recounted.

“With me was Timoteo, a young man with a highly astute mind, one who was seeking God, one of the best translation helpers. We began to grapple with the tremendous sentence: ‘The Word became a human being and lived among us.’ And it took time to get that verse right.

“The sun was not so hot now, though the air was heavy and humid; gnats circled in agitated clouds above us. The sun slipped further down; mosquitoes began to buzz and whine impatiently, anxious for an evening meal . . .

“Soon it would be dark; but still we talked on, trying to understand together what that one verse was really saying; what it meant for the Word to become a human being—and how it came about; what grace was and glory was; how a man could be full—not of food or of anger, but of truth; how it should all be translated into Mamainde.”

Finally after more struggling, Timoteo grasped the full meaning. Together they went over the verse and Peter carefully copied it down to complete his first draft. With a sigh of relief, he was finished. He could go back to his house, get something to eat, and sleep with the satisfaction of having jumped another hurdle in his ministry as a Wycliffe Bible Translator.

For Timoteo, there was a sense of release as well. Indeed there was a feeling of exhilaration as he ran across the village and shouted, “Hey everybody, come and listen to this! This person called Jesus Christ was not just a spiritual being, as we thought; he was a man at the same time! He was two and yet one!”

The people gathered around and a lively discussion followed. Forgetting his hungry stomach, Peter stood and listened, “fascinated to hear a man expertly explain one of the very deepest of spiritual truths to his family and friends—even though he had just understood it himself.” ¹