{"id":10177,"date":"2018-04-13T15:13:46","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T15:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pjhmail.wordpress.com\/?p=10177"},"modified":"2018-04-13T15:13:46","modified_gmt":"2018-04-13T15:13:46","slug":"humility-and-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/10177\/humility-and-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Humility and Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pastor John,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Last night, you and I had a short discussion about your father, specifically about an event that you had described in the Preacher Clark Stories<\/a>.\u00a0 I can’t help but to think more on it today, and I want to share it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The setting was this: Your father was a young man, zealous for the Lord and preaching where he could, and doing so without the holy Ghost baptism.\u00a0 In this particular case, he was preaching to a group that he described later as folk that seemed to talk at a low volume, or even mumble while he was preaching to them.\u00a0 He was not aware at the time that those folk were Spirit-filled and that they were speaking to the Lord quietly in order not to disrupt preacher Clark’s sermon – but speaking nonetheless, as the Spirit gave the utterance.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are two things about this story that I recall in particular that are really standing out to me now.\u00a0 Last night’s meeting made these things come to life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

First, preacher Clark was preaching to a group of God\u2019s Spirit-filled saints, without having the spirit baptism himself! – not yet anyway.\u00a0 And those folk were so kind, and so willing (and able) to receive whatever\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0from God, in whatever situation they were in, that they were yielding and speaking in tongues as this unconverted man preached Christ to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

The second thing, much like the first, is that during at least one of those services, he pulled open the rolled up picture of Jesus on the cross that he had previously painted, and now carried with him, and often showing it to those he preached to when the time was right, and the crowd jumped from their seats when they saw it, praising God and shouting and speaking in tongues!\u00a0 One of those saints even took the time after one service to tell preacher Clark that she had not heard such good preaching in years!<\/span><\/p>\n

I am trying to imagine just how free those saints were to be able to humbly glean what\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0from God, from a man they\u00a0knew<\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

did not yet know Him!\u00a0 They were utterly unafraid of what was not God in the young minister, they held no contempt toward him for trying to teach them something, and they apparently made him feel enough of the love of God for him to return there.\u00a0 They even remained humble and pliable enough to be in such a condition as to leap to their feet in a shout, the moment he hit the nail on the head with the picture of Jesus!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I wondered last night, if I could do what those saints were doing in that story.\u00a0 And then I realized that I had wondered about it because of the liberty in Jesus that you spoke of last night, a liberty that transcends anything that we can imagine.\u00a0 It isn’t human, and humans can’t be that free; only God in us can, but we have to grow to it.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is the kind of freedom Jesus was experiencing when he spent his time around people that needed him.\u00a0 Jesus never feared that their ignorance of God or their sin was going to rub off on him.\u00a0 He was above that; He was where his Father was.<\/span><\/p>\n

After I received the holy Ghost back in the 1990’s, I began to cling to a standard that I thought was God’s righteousness.\u00a0 It was a form of rightness, to be sure.\u00a0 But that \u201crightness\u201d was leaving out the liberty and freedom I had to hear from God, and to love and to laugh and to just be good to all men; to be happy!\u00a0 That standard that I called God then, would not have permitted me to humbly sit under your unconverted father, collecting every good thing that he had to offer and then loving him for it, like those saints did in that story.\u00a0 That standard couldn\u2019t have received a thing from him.\u00a0 Nor could it have rejoiced when he unrolled that picture of Christ on the cross.\u00a0 That standard I had was nothing but fear, I think.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I believe I better understand the scripture now: \u201cperfect love casts out all fear.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Thank you for\u00a0Wednesday\u00a0night.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jerry<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pastor John,\u00a0 Last night, you and I had a short discussion about your father, specifically about an event that you had described in the Preacher Clark Stories.\u00a0 I can’t help but to think more on it today, and I want to share it.\u00a0 The setting was this: Your father was a young man, zealous for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-netmail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}