This is awesome, amen and amen!


Corrie Ten Boom

"One night I tossed for an hour while dogfights (war planes) raged overhead, streaking my patch of sky with fire. At last I heard Betsie stirring in the kitchen and ran down to join her.

She was making tea. She brought it into the dining room where we had covered the windows with heavy black paper and set out the best cups. Somewhere in the night there was an explosion; the dishes in the cupboard rattled.

For an hour we sipped our tea and talked, until the sound of planes died away and the sky was silent. I said goodnight to Betsie at the door to Tante Jans’s rooms and groped my way up the dark stairs to my own. The fiery light was gone from the sky. I felt for my bed: there was the pillow. Then in the darkness my hand closed over something hard. Sharp too! I felt blood trickle along a finger.
It was a jagged piece of metal, ten inches long.

“Betsie!” I raced down the stairs with the shrapnel shard in my hand. We went back to the dining room and stared at it in the light while Betsie bandaged my hand.

“On your pillow,” she kept saying.

“Betsie, if I hadn’t heard you in the kitchen—”

But Betsie put a finger on my mouth. “Don’t say it, Corrie! There are no ‘ifs’ in God’s world. And no places that are safer than other places. The center of His will is our only safety—Oh Corrie, let us pray that we may always know it!”

-Excerpt from The Hiding Place

The following link is to a YouTube Play List of the Main Sessions of the Pastor's Conference that Ron and Bob attended earlier this week.  The conference was hosted at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio where Alistair Begg is the senior pastor.  The messages are excellent and available free of charge.

2014 Basics Conference Video Playlist

What follows is the last couple of paragraphs from Chapter 19 of J.I Packers book “Knowing God”  I highly recommend the book to you.  Chapter 19 is titled “Sons of God” and deals with the wonders of God’s adoption of us.
…. the immediate message to our hearts of what we have studied in the present chapter is surely this:  Do I, as a Christian, understand myself?  Do I know my own real identity?  My own real destiny?  I am a child of God.  God is my Father;  heaven is my home;  every day is one day nearer.  My Savior is my brother; every Christian is my brother too.  Say it over and over to yourself first thing in the morning, last thing at night, as your wait for the bus, any time your mind is free, and ask that you may be enabled to live as one who knows it is all utterly and completely true.  For this is the Christian’s secret of – a happy life? – yes, certainly, but we have something both higher and profounder to say.  This is the Christian’s secret of a Christian life and of a God-honoring life, and these are the aspects of the situation that really matter.  May this secret become fully yours, and fully mine.

To help us realize more adequately who and what, as children of God, we are and are called to be, here are some questions by which we do well to examine ourselves again and again.

Do I understand my adoption?  Do I value it?  Do I daily remind myself of my privilege as a child of God?

Have I sought full assurance of my adoption?  Do I daily dwell on the love of God to me?

Do I treat God as my Father in heaven, loving, honoring and obeying him, seeking and welcoming his fellowship, and trying in everything to please him, as a human parent would want his child to do?

Do I think of Jesus Christ, my Savior and my Lord, as my brother too, bearing to me not only a divine authority but also a divine-human sympathy?  Do I think daily how close he is to me, how completely he understands me, and how much as my kinsman-redeemer, he cares for me? 

Have I learned to hate the things that displease my Father?  Am I sensitive to evil things to which he is sensitive?  Do I make a point of avoiding them, lest I grieve him?

Do I look forward daily to that great family occasion when the children of God will finally gather in heaven before the throne of God, their Father, and of the Lamb, their brother and their Lord?  Have I felt the thrill of this hope?

Do I love my Christian brothers and sisters with whom I live day by day, in a way that I shall not be ashamed of when in heaven I think back over it?

Am I proud of my Father, and of his family, to which by his grace I belong?

Does the family likeness appear in me?  If not, why not?

God humble us; God instruct us; God make us his own true children.