Hudson Taylor - The Call to Service

*Note: If you have time (which you do if you're reading this) read Hudson Taylor's "The Call to Service". It's the second chapter of Hudson Taylor's autobiography A Retrospect. Actually, read the whole book! I plan on reading it soon, and when I do, I'll post a summary/reflection on it and link it here.

I read Hudson Taylor’s “The Call to Service” about a week ago, and I promised to reflect on how I might “be so ready for [Jesus when he comes again] as to be able, whenever He might appear, to give an account of [my] stewardship with joy, and not with grief”. One particular thing that stood out to me last week was how Hudson Taylor went and donated a bunch of his books and clothing… that his retention of those things would be a “loss of blessing”. 

I figured that after a time of thinking and reflecting on this, I might do something similar… give away some books and maybe even see about organizing a clothing drive at Caltech. Instead, three days into my stay with my grandparents (yay – Spring Break!), I’ve already ended up accumulating about two dozen more books, DVDs, and CDs. The first night here I told my Grandma about a book I read this past week, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus (again, hurray for Spring Break!!), and how good I thought it was. And lo and behold, Grandma had it! She told me if I liked that book, I really should read The Grand Weaver by Ravi Zacharias. Later that night, I mentioned that I was making my way through R.C. Sproul’s series of short booklets (all free on kindle ^_^ and hurray again for Spring Break!), and my Grandma said she really liked him (though not as much as she likes Ravi) and that she has some things by R.C. Sproul so why don’t I take a look at her things. Well, it turns out that she has dozens of Sproul’s CDs and books, and while going through and choosing a few that I felt were immediately useful to myself or would really speak to people in my life (I haven’t been able to give a really adequate response to my old roommate’s questions about God’s sovereignty and humanity’s free will and how those can both be possible so I picked up a CD series on that; an international student moved into my hallway this term, saw my cross necklace, and asked me about the “difference between Catholicism and Christianity”, to which I was also unable to adequately respond so I picked up an explanation on that too; I had coffee with someone two weekends ago and somehow we started talking about suffering and God, so I picked up a DVD lecture on that too – I’m not sure if we’ll get a second coffee (that’s not a normal date conversation, right?) but I’ll be [more] prepared next time!), I was reminded of my conviction over the course of the last couple months to pray more… and more effectively. I told my Grandma about this, and she assured me that we would be able to find some good books on that. So, the next morning, we went through all her bookshelves and located probably close to 30 books on the subject. She and my Dad looked through them all and decided on about a dozen that were “excellent”, “life-changing”, or “necessary”.

So now, a day later and a day wiser, I’ve decided that maybe I’m not in a stage of life right now to be donating a lot of books (though I will have to see about that clothing drive…), but I was able to help my Grandma bless me (haha, that sounds so backwards) and hopefully by reading those books and listening to those CDs (I do have a 1100+ mile car trip back to LA – yay Spring Break!!) I’ll get to be a blessing to those around me. My hope is that by spending my Spring Break reading and listening to God’s Word and related topics, I’ll be better equipped to share my faith and be more able to at least give an account of the next week and a half. 

Guilt

Based off the booklet What Can I Do with My Guilt? – R.C. Sproul

I’ll start with the conclusion. I picked up this book because it’s short, free on kindle, and because it’s something that’s crossed my mind several times over the past year. According to R.C. Sproul (and I’m inclined to agree with him here), our guilt should bring us to the cross. It should bring us to Jesus, to forgiveness, to reconciliation with God.

Last summer, I was struggling with feelings of guilt, and I brought this up in a conversation with a wonderful friend. I’m not sure why she said this at the time. Maybe she said this because she thought it was what I needed to hear at the time. And maybe it was. She told me that guilt never comes from God… that I didn’t need to feel at all guilty in any way. That I had done nothing wrong. And even then, God never wants us to wallow in guilt. Guilt is never from God.

R.C. Sproul’s take is quite different, isn’t it?

Guilt Vs. Guilt Feelings

Guilt – objective reality; “that which a person incurs when he violates a law”

Guilt Feelings – subjective feeling; those things we feel if we’re not a psychopath or sociopath

Side points:

-          God is the ultimate Lawgiver. Everyone is held accountable by God to God’s laws. God’s laws are perfect laws because God himself is perfect.

-          Guilt and guilt feelings are rarely in proportion

o   Having guilt feelings doesn’t necessarily indicate the presence of guilt

o   Not having guilt feelings doesn’t necessarily mean we didn’t incur any guilt

Common ways to deal with guilt

Denial; believing a law does not exist does not mean there is no law (God has written His law on the hearts of His creation…); attempt to stifle conscience

Justification, Rationalization; coming up with excuses doesn’t work with God; attempt to stifle conscience

Penance; we can’t possibly pay the penalty for breaking God’s law

REAL CURE: Forgiveness through Jesus

If feeling unforgiven/ guilty:

1 John 1:9

If after confessing still feeling guilty:

I found this part really interesting. R.C. Sproul proposes that this may be arrogance on our part.

God says that he will forgive us if we confess our sins. Yet, after time and time again after confessing the same sin to God, we still feel guilty. We assume that these guilty feelings imply the presence of guilt. But this is living according to our subjective and ephemeral feelings. We need to live by God’s objective Word and Truth. If God says we are forgiven, we are forgiven, no matter how we feel. We have no right to refuse that forgiveness. We need to trust God. To do anything less would be to place our feelings above God’s Word – arrogantly. So, despite any guilty feelings, if we know that we have truthfully confessed our sin to God, we need to trust that He has forgiven us.

I think perhaps what my friend was referring to was accusation (as opposed to conviction). According to Sproul, accusation comes from Satan with the intent of robbing us of our freedom and joy in Christ. Conviction comes from the Holy Spirit and drives us to Jesus to ask for forgiveness. And while it can be difficult to discern the difference between the two, we should never be trapped under the accusation of a guilty conscience. We need to trust that God forgives us when we confess our sins. Trust God.

God is Greater

I think what most affected me this week from Perspectives was from Andy Pearce’s talk. I’ve struggled with balancing honoring my parents with honoring what I thought was a God-given conviction for some time now. I’ve wanted to go to China as a missionary for a few years now, and I thought that was confirmed last summer when I got to go to China as a student studying in a fantastic language immersion program. I had amazing opportunities to share the Gospel with several of my teachers, had great conversations with some of the other students, and even took a relative to church for her first time. And for this summer, I had an internship all lined up with an American company with their branch in China doing research I’m really interested in. So I thought everything was working out and I’d hopefully be on my way to China in a long-ish term way, God-willing, in a bit over a year when I graduate.


But… my mom doesn’t understand why I’d ever want to go to China besides to visit relatives. In her view, it was so hard for her to be able to come to America, she doesn’t understand why I would ever want to leave America. So I haven’t pushed or even talked about going to China for any time longer than a summer with my mom until a couple weeks ago, on Feb 15, when I tried opening that up as a possibility. My mom gave her normal spiel about why America is so great, and before I could reply (which I was planning on doing for the first time), I very distinctly heard/felt God telling me to drop it.


So I did (not easy), and it was like this huge weight had been lifted off of me, but at the same time, like I was drifting and in a large sense purposeless. It’d been such a huge part of my plans and dreams for years now, and I wasn’t sure what to fill that void with. But over the next couple days, I was fairly sure that God was directing me to fill the time I’d been praying about my future in China with praying about my present here in Pasadena. I “coincidentally” ended up on a prayer walk with a friend around the Caltech campus a couple days later. And I felt even more of a burden for Caltech than before. We made plans to continue prayer walking on a regular basis throughout Pasadena. I went to an apologetics conference the following weekend where they encouraged us to live as “living, breathing billboards for Christ” where we are placed right now. In short, it was seeming like God really was telling me to focus for now on where he has placed me (in Caltech / Pasadena). Then, last week, Andy talked about so many ways he has had cross-cultural experiences right here, and I was really convicted that I’d been focusing so much on the chance of future opportunities there, that I’d probably passed up a whole lot of opportunities here.