Watumishi wa Neno

Any of this sound familiar?

His perplexity was this: he had heard and read his teachers describing a state of sustained victory over sin. It was pictured as a condition of peace and power in which the Christian, filled and borne along by the Holy Spirit, was kept from falling and was moved and enabled to do things for God which were otherwise beyond him. To yield, surrender and consecrate oneself to God was the prescribed way in…. But the student’s experience as he tried to follow instructions was like that of the poor drug addict whom he found years later trying with desperate concentration to walk through a brick wall. His attempts at total consecration left him where he was – an immature and churned-up young man, painfully aware of himself, battling his daily way, as adolescents do, through manifold urges and surges of discontent and  frustration … it all seemed a long way from the victorious, power-packed  life which those Christians were supposed to enjoy, who by consecration had emptied themselves of themselves.

But what should he do? According to the teaching, all that ever kept Christians from this happy life was unwillingness to pay the entry fee – in other words, failure to yield themselves fully to God. So all he could do was repeatedly reconsecrate himself, scraping the inside of his psyche till it was bruised and sore in order to track down still unyielded things by which the blessing was perhaps being blocked. His sense of continually missing the bus, plus his perplexity as to the reason why he was missing it, became painful to live with, like a…stone in your shoe that makes you wince every step you take.

However, he happened to be something of a bookworm, and in due course he  stumbled across some reading which became a lifeline, showing him how to deal  with himself as he was and enabling him to see the thing he had been seeking as the will-o’-the-wisp that it is…. A burned child, however, dreads the fire, and hatred of the cruel and tormenting unrealities of overheated holiness teaching remains in his heart to this day.

Now I was that student, and the books I read were volumes 6 and 7 of the works of the Puritan John Owen (Goold’s edition) and J.C. Ryle’s Holiness….” (J. I. Packer, Keep in  Step with the Spirit, IVP: 2005, 128-129)

(The John Owen works referred to can be downloaded in full here – but they are quite large PDFs(4o+MB). You can read the key texts online: Mortification of Sin, Temptation, Dominion of Sin and Grace. Or for a straightforward contemporary review/summary see here. For Ryle’s classic Holiness see here (you’ll need to download a free ePub reader) or to get hold of a Kiswahili translation (Utakatifu) see Click Literature.)

And another testimony:

Perhaps no Bible story has had more impact on me than the account of Jesus praying in Gethsemane.  It haunted my teenage years especially.  It said to me: ‘This is what honouring God looks like.  This is the epitome of religious devotion – overwhelmed to complete prostration, loud cries and tears, commitment to the point of death.’  And I attempted to emulate this.  Not in practical, daily ‘thy will be done’ service – no, no!  Instead I would attempt to re-enact Gethsemane.  I’d sneak out of the house at night and find somewhere really scary – a forest in dead of night was best.  And I would literally fall on my face and ask God to take my life, to make me His servant, to do whatever He wished with me.  (Of course I imagined that His wishes would be awful, dark and painful).   Nonetheless Gethsemane had taught me that this was the way and so I’d try (unsuccessfully) to work myself up into some kind of hyper-serious state of emotional sincerity.  I was massively aware that I was falling short of offering the required… what?  devotion?  gravity?  sacrifice?  Whatever was needed, I was painfully aware of lacking it.  But I made my dramatic teenage offering and waited for the results.  But no angel came to comfort me.  No spiritul blessing was poured out.  No command from heaven.  Just an overwhelming sense that heaven was silent and my devotion was clearly not sufficient to rouse Him.

And, over time, my response to this was ‘God doesn’t want me, I don’t want Him.’  I wandered from Him for years.  But it was Gethsemane that brought me back.  Because all of a sudden I saw what should have been most clear all along.  I’m not at the centre of Gethsemane!  I’m sleeping with Peter, James and John.  I’m the weak, flesh-driven, good-for-nothing follower who cannot stay awake even for one hour.  But Christ!  He prays to the Father.  He intercedes for His worthless, pathetic friends.  He offers to drink their cup.  And suddenly it all fell into place.  Christianity was not about me burying my face in the dirt for Him.  He buried His face in the dirt for me.  It’s not about me stooping low enough to be worthy.  It’s about Him stooping lower still because I’m not.  I don’t offer my life to a silent heaven.  The Man of heaven offers His life for a silent, sleeping, sinful me. (G. Scrivener, ‘Gethsemane’)

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The John Owen works referred to by Packer can be downloaded in full here – but they are quite large PDFs(4o+MB). You can read the key texts online: Mortification of Sin, Temptation, Dominion of Sin and Grace. Or for a straightforward contemporary review/summary see here. For Ryle’s classic Holiness, see here (you’ll need to download a free ePub reader) or to get hold of a Kiswahili translation (Utakatifu) see Click Literature.