PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “Touched by a quote, and knowing where it came from”.
By: Ron Woodrum
I love writing a Pastor’s Perspective. I will keep doing it as long as God gives me the mind and strength to do it. Sometimes you may think it is a little wordy and that it quotes alot of different people. I do that on purpose. It would be very easy to put only my opinion about the subject being addressed each Lord’s day in the bulletin. That is what happens in alot of Pastor’s Perspectives. But that would not stretch your faith. That would not enable you to grow. That would limit your exposure to a very limited source-me! Several years ago I was challenged by Howard Hendricks, of Dallas Theological Seminary, when he said, “do you want your people to drink deeply from a stagnant pool, or a flowing spring?” If all you get is my opinion, my knowledge, without me constantly studying and sharing what I have learned, you would be drinking from a stagnant pool! But if I am constantly reading, preparing, studying the topics that God assigns me each Sunday, and I share all of it with you, it may be a bit overwhelming at times, but over the long haul some of it will touch you, stick with you, stretch you, make sense. You will remember those special quotes that struck a nerve, and you will be able to refer to it, and find its source, so you can share it with others too. If you can’t remember it, you can always go back to the web site and find it. Believe me this is a labor of love! I intend to keep on exposing you, not only to expository teaching and preaching of Holy Scripture, but adding the most pertinent illustrations and quotes that support God’s truth. Last week I shared one of my favorite, and I might add hard to locate quotes of Malcom Muggeridge, about his failure to embrace true devotion to the cross. Why? To show you what not to do. As the cross of Christ, draws you to surrender, don’t put it off like Muggeridge admitted that he did. Make it your cult, your devotion, your life, early in life. Don’t make Jesus bear the cross alone!
This week I want to share with you two more quotes from Muggeridge. One of them is a great quote from Muggeridge, who was a famous British journalist/intellectual writer, whose life and perspective was transformed when he found Christ as his Saviour. He was not shy about writing about his new found faith. The world was amazed at his change and his wit in defending his faith. He was very precise in his description of how our modern world got into the condition it is currently in. Listen to his accurate description of our de-evolution to destruction. He writes, “So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with the facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide at the public expense. Thus Western man decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought down the walls of his own city tumbling down, having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill, scapel, and syringe, (birth control and abortion), to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over-a-weary, battered old brontosaurus and became extinct!” Have you ever heard a more accurate and convicting, and discerning summary of our current state in the Western world. Our walls are collapsing to the blowing of our own trumpets! We may be too late to reverse the process, but revival among the influence of the Church in our Society is the only hope to slow it down.
But a second quote of Muggeridge may be my favorite. His success as a Journalist led to fame and fortune. But late in life, after finding out that kind of human glory does not satisfy, he was not shy about telling the media, of which he was a big part, the truth of where joy, life, and fulfillment was found. He wrote, “I may, I suppose, regard myself as a relatively sucessful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets: that’s fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the highest lopes of internal revenue: That is seen as success. Furnished with money, and a little fame, even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy diversions: that is seen as pleasure. It might happen once in awhile that something I wrote, or said, was sufficiently headed for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time: that’s fulfillment. Yet I say to you and beg you to believe me. Multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them altogether, and they are nothing-less than nothing!-a positive impediment measured against one draft ( drink) of that Living Water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are!”
Letting the Spirit of God bring that kind of real testimony deep into our hearts can help us avoid all the detours of chasing fame, fortune, pleasure, and fulfillment in all the wrong things, realizing with Muggeridge and Solomon, that such pursuit is chasing the wind, a vanity of vanities. That should help us stay focused on loving our Saviour, and taking up our cross and following Him, and finding that as the true road to His kind of fame, fortune, pleasure and fulfillment. Amen? Amen! That’s my perspective, as well as that of Malcom Muggeridge! May it become your perspective too. That is worth sharing with others! Pass it on in Your Perspective!