Experience Seals It

I must break here, to share this experience with you. As I am before our Teacher and Counsellor, listening, learning and looking to Him to save me from myself and my narrow-minded, insular, stunted understanding about God’s mercy, I suddenly hear the intrudingly loud voice of a man. It is a man who is obviously walking, coming down the street. From the distance, I know that he is preaching or speaking about Jesus. As he comes nearer to my friend’s house, where I am at the moment, I can hear him even clearer. However, as the voice comes abreast of my friend’s house, it passes by quite swiftly and I know that whoever he is, he is walking briskly. I say to my friend, who seems a bit taken by this calling voice, as he is new and strange to her neighbourhood, that whoever the person is, he is walking quickly.

The voice stops as soon as he passes her house. She then informs me that the man has stopped by the still closed shop next door, to wipe his shoes. I got up from where I was and went to the window. I saw a strong, young man, bending over, wiping his foot. It had been raining heavily, off and on, all morning and the roads were all wet. I looked, as he carefully wiped his feet and toes with tissues, it seemed. Then he turned around and walked to the garbage bins nearby, where he disposed of the paper. He then proceeded to pick up his umbrella and something else, which looked like a little book, that were on the picnic-type table, at the side of the shop’s entrance. With long, strong, hasty strides, he left, without another word coming from his mouth.

However, I heard what he was saying that early morning. He was calling people to repent. He had said that we did not know whether today would be our last day or not, so we needed to repent. Honestly, my first thought was that it was a person not sound in mind, who was going about preaching. But that voice caught me and his words made me doubly aware of all that I was, in the heat of hearing, and learning about the text before me, and my responses to God’s Word. That unknown man to the neighbourhood, that stranger to my friend, spoke to me, and regardless of who he was or was not, I heard. I knew that I needed to repent immediately, of all that I was thinking, if I were to remain a disciple of our Jesus and not turn away at this text.

This is the time, the moment which you and I have been given. How do the words of our given text, meet you? How will you respond? Will you and I also turn away, in whatever form, because we think it’s too hard and we are not ready for such heavy food? Can little children tell the parent what food to feed them, how to feed them, what food is too grownup for them and suchlike?

Paul has spoken to the Romans and to us. We need to believe and know, first of all, that he is not some, human-taught scholar, when it comes to spiritual matters, who speaks from his scholarship. No! We must believe that what we are being told by him is of God. Listen to what he is forced to tell the Galatians. I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. Galatians 1: 11 - 12. We either believe or disbelieve, for to accept and believe in part, to hear and forbear according to our fancies and to pick and choose what to receive, depending on our inclinations, is folly to our needy, barren souls.