Family Man

What Lincoln Was

Someone has well said that we remember Washington for what he did, but we remember Lincoln for what he was.  Although Abraham Lincoln did not make a loud profession, his virtues were pre-eminently the Christian virtues.

Lincoln was honest.  In his law office one day, after listening to a would-be client for some time, he said bluntly: “Well, you have got a good case in technical law, but a pretty bad one in equity and justice.  You’ll have to get some other fellow to win this case for you.  I couldn’t do it.  All the time while standing talking to that jury, I’d be thinking: ‘Lincoln, you’re a liar,’ and I believe I should forget myself and say it out loud.”

Lincoln was self-controlled.  He grew up in rough frontier communities where practically everybody loved liquor and tobacco and made a joke of gluttony, but young Abe had no use for any of these.  True, he good-naturedly ignored the bad habits of his friends and would not reprove them.  His own abstemiousness he modestly attributed to the fact that he just didn’t like the taste of tobacco or alcohol; and as to over-eating, he just wasn’t that much interested in food.  But whatever his motives, Lincoln remained throughout life a temperate man.

Lincoln was a man of integrity.  When he became president, the people knew they had a man whom they could trust.  The day before the convention which was to nominate him for the U. S. Senate, he read to a group of friends the speech he had prepared for the occasion.  It was the one on the theme, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  They all warned him that it would defeat him in the election.  He replied simply: “Friends, the time has come when these sentiments should be uttered, and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked with the truth.”  He never reached the Senate, but he reached the White House.  And he did not take the presidency for personal gain.  He was interested in the people.  Subjected to a thousand temptations in the rough-and-tumble of politics, he veered not an inch from his white-souled incorruptibility.

Lincoln was gentle.  Amazing as it seems when one considers his uncouth exterior, his raw humor, and his lack of educational and social advantages, the man was as tenderhearted as any woman.  While traveling with friends on the old judicial circuit in Illinois, he is said to have turned aside at the piteous cries of two little fledglings that had fallen out of their nest.  He couldn’t bear to pass them by.  He had to put them tenderly back with their mother.  To his political opponents, some of whom criticized him mercilessly, he was incredibly good-natured.  At home he was such an indulgent father that it is a wonder his boys were not completely spoiled.  Neighborhood pranksters took advantage of his gentle ways to lie in ambush near the sidewalk and knock off his hat has he passed.  All he did was to turn about, pick up the hat, and go on.  In the White House this softness sometimes betrayed him into unwise appointments and too-generous pardons.  It has well been said that the only criticism of his use of his vast powers which stand today is his lavish exercise of the pardoning power.  Yet his gentleness also produced some of his finest actions.  Said he, “After all, the one meaning of life is simply to be kind.”

Lincoln was firm.  Imbued with a keen sense of justice, he stove mightily to make the right prevail.  When the seceding states left the Union, certain fuzzy-minded individuals in the North naively thought that the chief problem of the Nation was solved.  Said Horace Greeley, for instance, “Let the erring sisters depart in peace.”  To Lincoln such a notion was silly.  This great Nation, “conceived in liberty,” was being disrupted.  His plain duty as chief executive was to hold it together.  Much as he hated ware, the terrible struggle that ensued, “testing whether the nation, or any nation so conceived … can long endure,” represented the pangs of “a new birth of freedom.”  It is interesting to imagine what he would say today to the “peace-at-any-price” folks….

Lincoln was humble.  On that dark February morning when he stood on the rear platform of the train which was to take him to Washington for his inauguration, he removed his hat and gazed at the little crowd of neighbors in a moment of silence.  When he spoke, his voice husky with emotion, his brief farewell message included these words: “I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.  Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed.”  More than once, as the gloom of civil strife deepened around him, he called in a trusted minister of the Gospel for counsel and prayer.  Later he confessed: “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.  My own wisdom and that of all around me seemed insufficient for the day.”

Lincoln was compassionate.  There were nights during the war when he could not sleep because thoughts of the wounded and dying overwhelmed his tender spirit.  Many a court-martialed soldier boy, pardoned by the president, went willingly into battle to prove his loyalty.  Late one night a man came to Lincoln to plead for a 19-year-old boy condemned to be shot the next morning for sleeping at his post.  Lincoln arose from his bed and sat down in his night clothes to write an order suspending the execution.  Then, troubled by the thought that the telegram might go astray, he dressed himself, when over to the War Department, and got into direct communication with the army.  In the pocket of a dead soldier after the battle of Fredericksburg they found a photograph of the commander-in-chief.  By the president’s mercy he had been spared a dishonorable death to die in battle.  Under the picture was written: “God bless President Lincoln.”

Lincoln was forgiving.  Northerners of ability who had belittled him were invited without hesitation into his official family.  Edwin M. Stanton had ignored him and even insulted him when the two were practicing law, and continued to do so after Lincoln became president; nevertheless he was made Secretary of War, and continued in that position to the end.  A congressman who once went to Stanton with an order from the President came back to report that Stanton had ignored the order and had called Lincoln a fool.  The magnanimous answer: “If Stanton says I’m a fool, I must be a fool, because Stanton is nearly always right and generally says what he means.”

As to the rebelling Southerners, Lincoln was never known to belittle or berate them.  He did his best to convince them that he desired only reconciliation and reunion.  He long hoped for compensated emancipation as a solution of the slavery question, a plan that would not have required the slave owners to bear the entire economic loss.  At the end of the war he was for welcoming the seeded states back into the Union with a minimum of penalty of delay.

The oft-quoted words from Lincoln’s second inaugural address admirably reveal his Christian graces-the graces which made him truly great: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us fight on to finish the work we are in-to bind up the nation’s wounds, to call for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphans, to do all that may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

By Allen Bowman

"How Great Thou Art" by Carrie Underwood with Vince Gill

Christ Has Risen!

All ye that seek the Lord who died,

Your God for sinners crucified,

Now, now let all your grief be o’er!

Believe, and ye shall weep no more.

The Lord of life is risen indeed,

To death delivered in your stead;

His rise proclaims your sins forgiven,

And shows the living way to heaven.

Haste then, ye souls that first believe,

Who dare the gospel word receive,

Your faith with joyful hearts confess,

Be bold, be Jesus’ witnesses.

Go tell the followers of your Lord

Their Jesus is to life restored;

He lives, that they his life may find;

He lives to quicken humankind.

Charles Wesley

The Unknown Bible

The following passage is from Jurgen Rausch’s memoirs, written while in a prisoner-of-war camp.  “George developed quite a friendship with a Persian prisoner who was with us in the camp, and this Persian explained to him the religion of his homeland.  One day he said to George: ‘Now that I have told you all about my religion, please tell me about your Christian religion.’  As George was telling me about this whole event later he confessed: ‘I was ashamed of myself.  I had no sooner begun when I realized that I actually didn’t know anything about it.’”

You can notice this time and time again.  In discussions, even in Bible classes, it comes out again and again how very little Christians actually know about their faith.  How many have ever read their Bible from cover to cover even once?  Many don’t even know the bare “minimum” of the New Testament.  And when they do have occasion to reach for the Scriptures, they lay the Book down again after a short while because even with the best of intentions they are unable to find anything there that speaks to them.  They think that the fault lies with the Book, and do not suspect that something may be missing in them.  They must be told the words of the woman of Samaria:  “You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep” (John 4:11).  But many times they will still maintain that there is no water in the well.

A Fragrant Influence

It may not be given to you to speak with tongues of eloquence that may sway the crowds, but you may loosen the tongues of others who have been silent too long.

You may not be able to perform miracles of healing, but like some of old you can assist by carrying the paralyzed into the presence of the Healer.

If you cannot wield the influence that commands, you can exert the influence that blesses; and while those who have been merely gifted will die out of remembrance, like street lamps at dawn, your life of goodness may be as the name of the woman who anointed the Savoir-a fragrant memory both for earth and heaven.

Jesus On Twitter

Just To Be With You - Paul Baloche

When This Earth Has Passed Away

A soul will never die.  When this earth of ours has crumbled to dust and has passed away into the forgotten past, a soul will still be in the freshness of youth.

When the fathomless future eternity has become hoary with age, the soul will still be young.

When a million, million eternities have each lived out their endless ages and have rolled by into the unthinkable past, and time is no more, the soul will be living, a conscious, personal reality, endowed with perpetual life.

God has said, “He that winneth souls is wise.”  If Christians would only realize the value and the immortality of a soul and the shortness of this earthly life, they would work feverishly, unceasingly, with all their  greatest energy, day after day, year after year, that they might save one soul….

Are there souls passing your way?  Are you bestirring yourself in their behalf that they may have eternal life and joy?  Ore are you allowing them to cross your path and pass on unwarned to an eternal death?

–W. K. Norton

The Ultimate Question Regarding Christ

Everyone who believes on the Son of God, and trusts their soul to Him, is at once pardoned, forgiven, justified, counted righteous, reckoned innocent, and freed from all liability to condemnation. Their sins, however many, are at once cleansed away by Christ's precious blood. Their soul, however guilty, is at once clothed with Christ's perfect righteousness. It matters not what they may have been in time past. Their sins may have been of the worst kind. Their former character may be of the blackest description. But do they believe on the Son of God? This is the one question. If they do believe, they are justified from all things in the sight of God. It matters not, that they can bring to Christ nothing to recommend them—no good works, no long-proved amendments, no unmistakable repentance and change of life. But do they this day believe in Jesus Christ? This is the grand question. If they do, they are at once accepted. They are accounted righteous for Christ's sake. 
 -J.C. Ryle 1816-1900

Praise God for the “Good News” that is found in Jesus Christ.  This message of forgiveness, redemption, and transformation has been celebrated in every generation dating back to the first century church.  Unfortunately today's church continues to bleed the power and victory that is promised in this “Good News.”

Why?  Because somewhere along the way we began to forget what is implied in these words.   We began to take the "Good News" for granted.  We relied more on the miraculous transformation of Gods' grace and forgot about the commitment and discipline it takes to stand in that divine grace.  Instead of killing the "old man" forever, we quickly resurrected our old personalities and habits, then proclaimed the blood of Christ and God unconditional love as our justification.  

How did we drift so far?  Why do we experience such a diminished presence of God’s power and victory in our lives?  Simply put, we forgot what it means to be a “follower of Christ.” 

“Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what is says.  Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says, is like a man who looks at his face in mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.”  James 1:22-24

Every Sunday many attenders are content to look in the mirror, but after they go home… Well, we all know the story.

Who is to blame?  Certainly the Church should take the lion’s share of the blame.  Jesus created the Church to make disciples.  Our decision to get out of the discipleship business and into the entertainment business has cost our people dearly.  To be fair, not all churches, but enough churches were sold on cheap grace and the self help philosophies of this age.  As a result, the church has lost its voice in the affairs of mankind and with its own people.

Individuals are to blame as well, for too long we have opted for “itchy ears", we have dined on “cheap grace” and we have fully bought into what the world has been selling.  So much so, that our mantra has become,

“I do not understand what I do.  For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”  Romans 7:15

When is the church going to wake up and begin to make disciples again?  When are Christians going to start taking responsibility for their rebellious lifestyles? If we choose to remain in our slumber, someday (perhaps very soon) will we tragically hear Jesus say to us, “depart from me, I never knew you.”

"So let us go up to the mountain of the Lord....  He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths."  Micah 4:2

Rattling of Living

In the larger cities of our countries, I have often seen men walking the streets as human billboards.  They were advertising for some restaurant in town.  But when I looked into their faces for the first time, I was startled.  They were the starved and emaciated faces of the unemployed, who were doing this in order to get a little money.

Many of us make the same sort of advertisement for the life of God, but when other people look at us closely they can see in our faces the traces of death.  Naturally we don’t want that to be known, hence we try to convince ourselves and others, as well as God, of the very opposite.  Thus the so-called “show of religion” begins.   It has the appearance of a skeleton that has been put together again with wires.  You can make the skeleton move and it might give the impression of being alive; but in reality it is only a dance of death, the hopeless rattling of the dead.

And yet God bids us to hope.  The beginning of a new life lies with Him.  We may hold fast to this one thing, “Thus says the Lord: Behold I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.”  Or doesn’t this rattling even bother you anymore?

--Arthur Stephen

A Reminder That Laughter Is The Best Medicine

Chris Medina - What Are Words

G.O.S.P.E.L.

No Other Name

How sweet the name of Jesus sounds

In a believer’s ear;

It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,

And drives away his fear.

It makes the wounded spirit whole

And calms the troubled breast;

‘Tis name to the hungry soul

And to the weary, rest.

Dear name!  The Rock on which I build,

My Shield and Hiding-place;

My never-failing Treasury, filled

With boundless stores of grace.

By thee my prayers acceptance gain

Although with sin defiled.

Satan accuses me in vain,

And I am owned a child.

Jesus, my Shepherd, Guardian, Friend,

My Prophet, Priest, and King,

My Lord, my Life, my Way, my End,

Accept the praise I bring.

--John Newton, 1779

Have A Joyous Week!