Scripture reading: Romans 5:1-5
One day I went down to the Ford factory. No place on Earth reminded me of hell more than that foundry where they smelt the metal. We walked along, watching the metal being changed, and I could imagine if I were that metal I would be complaining all the way. They put it in a terrible furnace; it was glowing so brightly that you couldn’t even look at it. Then they began to push it through rollers. One roller flattened it a little. I thought it was flat enough, but the other roller flattened it again. They kept on stretching and flattening that one small piece of metal until it was 3,000 feet long. It started at the length of about 20 feet, but they flattened it and stretched it to 3,000 feet. I said to God, “Lord, isn’t this what you are doing to us?” Some of the metal complained so badly that they had to discard it; it just wasn’t up to the mark. They had to take it off and throw it away. May God help us to realize that the circumstances of life which beat us, the ones that hit us hardest, are the things which are transforming us into the image of Christ. Every one of us has something that we hate. We would almost prefer to die than for some things to happen to us. But sometimes these are exactly the ones that happen to us.
One of the things that I feared most was my family being in want. When God sent me out on the mission field, I had no church behind me, no congregation behind me, and yet He commanded me to give up my profession, go out and preach to a people who I didn’t even know. I lived with people who never had a meal for a day; the area was so poor. They would boil a bush tea, take some sugar (sugar was easy to get in a sugar country of Jamaica) and give it to the baby. And that is what the baby and the parents lived on. We had to weed a field of about 10 acres with a hand hoe. There we were weeding all day so thirsty and so hungry that at about 2 o’clock we prayed that God would send us some food. Then we looked around the rocks and saw a little tray coming. It was a sister who said the Lord told her to bring us water and food. This is how those people lived. They really had a faith in God that was above the faith of those who had something. Sometimes they would eat one little dumpling and a little coconut oil for all day, but then when we got home from the fields in the evening, we would go off to service and God would meet with us. God taught me to live with those people to learn what it was to really trust God and to know Him.
(Excerpt from The Omega Message, February 1978)
Thought for today: May God help us to realize that the circumstances of life which beat us are the things which are transforming us into the image of Christ.
Sonlight Devotional 