Dear Father, I choose to serve you. I surrender my life to you. Open my eyes to the impact I am having on others. Use my words and actions to change lives for Your Kingdom.

In Jesus’ name
Amen

Read Psalm 9:7-12

⁷The LORD reigns forever;

he has established his throne for judgment.

⁸ He will judge the world in righteousness;
he will govern the peoples with justice.

⁹ The LORD is a refuge for the oppressed,
a stronghold in times of trouble.

¹⁰ Those who know your name will trust in you,
for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you.

¹¹ Sing praises to the LORD, enthroned in Zion;
proclaim among the nations what he has done.

¹² For he who avenges blood remembers;
he does not ignore the cry of the afflicted.

This passage teaches a great truth: The safest and strongest protection we have is the name of the Lord. “And those who know Your name will put their trust in You, for You, Lord, have not forsaken those who seek You” (v. 10). As I read those words, I’m reminded that God forsook His Son for us. Jesus said from the cross, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46). Has it ever occurred to you that the only person God ever really forsook was His own Son? “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32). Because He did this, we can be sure He will never forsake us for the sake of His Son. The Father loves His Son and says to Him, “You have died for these people. I will never forsake them.” God’s promise to us is “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Heb. 13:5). “Lo, I am with you always” was our Lord’s last statement in the Gospel of Matthew (28:20).

The safest place in all the world is in the will of God, and the safest protection in all the world is the name of God. When you know His name, you know His nature. His names and titles reveal His nature. They tell us who He is and what He can do. For example, He is Jehovah, the God who makes covenants. He is the Lord, the sovereign king. He is Jesus, the Savior. Each name He bears is a blessing He bestows on us.

Are you getting to know God? “And those who know Your name (who know God’s nature) will put their trust in You” (v. 10). The better you know God, the more you will trust Him. The more you trust Him, the better you will get to know Him–an exciting and enriching experience.

One of the great experiences of the Christian life is the personal relationship we enjoy with our God. To trust God is to seek Him (Isa. 55:6). Today, seek Him with a desire to know Him better.

“All generalizations are false, including this one,” yet we keep making them. We create images–graven ones that can’t be changed; we dismiss or accept people, products, programs, and propaganda according to the labels they come under; we know a little about something, and we treat it as though we know everything.

I couldn’t count the times I’ve heard nineteenth-century missions and missionaries cited as examples of stupidity and failure. I heard a whole lecture predicated on this assumption. They were bigoted and imperialistic and naive and arrogant and hypocritical. Some of them probably were some of those things. Some twentieth-century missionaries might make the ones of the last century look like paragons by comparison. Missionaries are (and need we go over this again?) human like everybody else, but the world has seen some great ones, some men and women who saw something to which they witnessed with truthfulness and often with real sacrifice.

In a box of old family papers, I found a little frayed booklet put out in 1906 by the Yale Foreign Missionary Society entitled A Modern Knight, by Joseph Hopkins Twichell. It broke up some of my categories. It was the story of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of Melanesia. He was English (“of course,” I said to myself–I think of nineteenth-century missionaries as English–my generalization).

He came from a refined English home. He was the nephew of the famous poet Coleridge and the son of an eminent jurist. He had his place “by birth,” the booklet says, “in the upper circles of English society.” Exactly. No categories shaken by those facts. He grew up in a “praying household, notably pervaded with the spirit of humble piety and with all sweet gospel savors. There is no mistaking the evangelical tone and quality of the religion there prevailing.” He went to Eton, was confirmed in the Church of England, and graduated from Oxford, a “rarely accomplished scholar.” He was elected fellow of one of the colleges of his university.

But instead of becoming a jurist like his father, John went as a missionary to the Melanesian Islands to work with people who were nearly all savages and naked and cannibalistic–a people marked by “features of repulsiveness and horrible ferocity,” according to the chronicler. But it is interesting to note that Patteson himself spoke of them as men. To him they were “naturally gentlemanly and well-bred and courteous. I never saw a ‘gent’ (by which term I think Patteson meant one who vulgarly tries to imitate a gentleman) in Melanesia, though not a few savages. I vastly prefer the savages.”

He saw that they spoke a language, not the “uncouth jargon of barbarians” as many assumed. (“They don’t speak a language, do they?” people have asked me of Ecuadorian Indians. “They only make sounds.”) Patteson considered some of the Melanesian languages better than English for translating the biblical Hebrew and Greek.

“He gave them his company,” writes Twichell. “For years together he scarcely saw any human being save his handful of assistants and his dark-skinned Melanesians. He never married. He adopted that wild race as his family.” It is Twichell who thinks of them as a wild race. Patteson “had none of the conventional talk about degraded heathen. They were brethren.”

He was ecumenical in spirit, at one time having to assume charge of a mission of another denomination where he scrupulously conformed to the practices of that mission, though he admitted that he greatly missed the Prayer Book.

The nurture of the indigenous church has been thought to be a recent emphasis in missionary work. Patteson made this his primary object. He visited the islands for four to six months of each year, and spent the rest of the time instructing people of both sexes at a central location. He insisted that they return to their homes at the end of the instruction period as a test of their own progress.

Patteson himself was up against gross misconceptions of the nature of his work, but he wrote truthfully about it. “In these introductory visits scarcely anything is done or said that resembles mission work in stories. The crowd is great, the noise greater. The heat, the dirt, the inquisitiveness, the begging, make something unlike the interesting pictures in a missionary magazine of an amiable individual very correctly got up in a white tie and black tailed coat, and a group of very attentive, decently clothed, nicely washed natives.”

Patteson could not abide sentimentality, that lifeless, heartless, and ultimately cruel idol of many Christians. “One who takes a sentimental view of coral islands and coconuts is of course worse than useless,” he wrote. “A man possessed with the idea that he is making a sacrifice will never do. A man who thinks any kind of work beneath him will simply be in the way.” He was to be found milking cows and cutting out girls’ dresses and doing things the people in England thought shocking.

“Integration” was not a word in his vocabulary as we use it today, and he deplored “that pride of race which prompts a white man to regard colored people as inferior to himself. They (the natives) have a strong sense of, and acquiescence in, their inferiority (‘Does an ant know how to speak to a cow?’ one of them once said) but if we treat them as inferiors they will always remain in that position.”

Progress reports? “My objection to mission reports has always been that the readers want to hear of progress, and the writers are thus tempted to write of it; and may they not, without knowing it, be, at times, hasty that they may seem to be progressing? People expect too much. Because missionary work looks like failure, it does not follow that it is. Our Savior’s work looked like a failure. He made no mistakes either in what He taught or in the way of teaching it, and He succeeded, though not to the eyes of men.”

Patteson saw his own work as seed sowing. He was prepared to wait long and patiently and not to dig up in doubt what he had planted in faith. He gave to the handful of Melanesians whom he was training a care of instruction and discipline that was “deliberate and painstaking beyond measure.”

We have heard missionaries of the last century accused of transferring European civilization to the native culture as though it were synonymous with Christianity. Patteson said, “I have long felt that there is almost harm done in trying to make these islanders like English people. They are to be Melanesian, not English, Christians. . . . Unless we can denationalize ourselves, and eliminate all that belongs to us as English and not as Christians, we cannot be to them what a well instructed countryman of theirs may be. . . . Christianity is the religion of humanity at large. It has room for all. It takes in all shades and diversities of character, race, etc.”

When he was little over forty, Patteson visited an island he had never been to. He was received from his ship in a native canoe and taken to shore. The crew waited hours for his return, and at last saw two canoes leaving the beach, one towing the other which appeared to be empty. Soon the empty canoe was cast adrift while the other was paddled rapidly back to shore. Cautiously the boat’s crew made toward the drifting canoe. As they drew alongside they saw the body of John Coleridge Patteson, wrapped in a mat, a palm frond laid on his chest. It was the year 1871.

The church, for the most part, has forgotten this name in the long list of its martyrs. It forgets most of what has been done and suffered, and thinks it is doing and suffering now as never before. We boast of our progress (from missions to “mission,” for example) and criticize those bunglers of one hundred years ago. But criticism is an easy-chair exercise, especially when the critic does not trouble himself to look at the data but relies chiefly on what he himself feels or on “what everybody knows”–on generalizations.

Thank heaven the work of Patteson and all other missionaries, as well as the work you and I have to do today, is subject to the judgment of “a judge who is God of all,” who never mistakes the counterfeit for the real, never needs to revise his categories, never lumps men together.

A Heavenly Messenger Visits Mary - Matthew 1:18-25; Luke 1:26-56

God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth to speak to Mary, and announce the coming of the Savior.

ARY WAS A Jewess. She had grown to womanhood in Nazareth, a city of Galilee. And she was expecting soon to marry a good man named Joseph.

Dear Father, show me if I am guilty of compromise. I surrender my life anew to you. I dedicate my time, talent, and treasure to you. I worship and praise you.

In Jesus’ name
Amen

(²¹Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.")

Jesus said to him, "If you want to be perfect, sell what you own. Give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then follow me!"

“Now King Ahaz…saw the altar which was at Damascus; and King Ahaz sent to Urijah the priest the pattern of the altar and its model, according to all its workmanship. So Urijah the priest built an altar; according to all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus.” - 2 Kings 16:10 11

Ahaz was interested in religion. But instead of being content to worship God according to His Word, he became fascinated with an altar he had seen in Damascus. He had a sketch made with “detailed plans,” which he sent to Urijah the priest with instructions to build a replica. Then he rearranged the furnishings in the temple in Jerusalem and placed the “new altar” in a prominent place.

Ahaz then developed his own style of worship, issuing a new set of orders that detailed the way he wanted offerings to be conducted. How did the religious leaders respond? Urijah ignored God’sWord regarding worship and every part of religious life, and “did just as King Ahaz had ordered.”

It can be easy to criticize Ahaz, but the fact is that many people, including many Christians, are tempted to create their own altars and write their own rules. They interpret the Bible to fit their own interests and ignore anything that makes them uncomfortable. But the Bible makes it clear that we need to base our Christian lives on God and His Word. Instead of living for self, we are to take up our cross daily, die to self, and follow Jesus (Luke 9:23).

Today, let the actions of Ahaz serve as a warning to you. Dedicate your life to God, and live according to His Word. Stay faithful to God’s timeless principles. Surrender your life anew to Him. Don’t give in to compromise.

(14Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.) Live like the

Lord Jesus Christ did, and forget about satisfying the desires of your sinful nature.