Walking by Faith

Becoming a Believer, Believer's Path, Forgiving, Prayer, Walking by Faith, Witnessing

“Who Was Praying for You?”

gglukens 2 Comments
Janie

My sister, Janie, died in 1986 at the age of 33. She left her husband, two small children, her parents, five siblings and lots of broken hearts behind.

We think she died of pneumonia. She had called for an ambulance because she could not breathe. When the ambulance got there she was lying on the sidewalk in front of her house. She was not breathing. The ambulance crew inserted a breathing tube in her, but then her heart stopped. They got her heart beating again and took her to the hospital on life support.

She never breathed again on her own. She was in a stage four comma for two weeks before her heart stopped again. Hundreds of people came to her while she was in the coma. They wept and grieved with us. She had been working with Afghan refugees; they came to her bedside in droves.

Janie prayed, and served. One day I will write a blog post just about her, but for now, know that she prayed for me, and thousands of others.

When the roll is called up yonder, many, many will say to her, “Thank you for giving to the Lord.”

Before I learned to trust Jesus, I mocked Christians. I was young and dumb. At age 27 I was convicted of my sin, and radically saved. My conviction came when I realized how cruel I had been to my sister, Janie, while we were growing up. I was not just mean; I was cruel. Janie was the first of us six siblings to come to faith in Jesus.  I know she forgave me. I give her credit for praying me in. We know that God can cause all things to work together for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose. He even used my cruelty to my sister to convince me that I needed a savior. 

See the blog post about my conversion and the debt I owe to Janie here: https://gracegloria.com/2017/01/03/conversion/

Now, whenever I hear someone tell their story about how they came to faith in Jesus, I love to ask:

“Who was praying for you?”
They almost always know

It occurred to me to ask this question when one day I noticed at the end of the letter Paul wrote to the Romans, as he was sending greetings to everyone, he wrote, “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kin and fellow prisoners who are well known among the emissaries. They were in Messiah before me. Romans 16:7. Wow! I realized that some people in Paul’s family prayed for him while he was still persecuting the Christians! This is the power of prayer.

Over the years I have heard some great stories in answer to my question, “Who was praying for you?” I would like to tell you a couple of my favorites.

  • A man I met while I selling MSM cream at the Puyallup Fair let me know that he had become a believer as an adult. “Who was praying for you?” I asked. He laughed and said, “Back in those days I worked for FedEx. I had a delivery to make to the Tacoma Dome. I found the room where I was to take the package. When I burst through the door, I found the room full of people with their heads down, praying. I apologized for interrupting them. They said, ‘No problem, come and join us. We are getting ready for the Billy Graham crusade.’ I stood back, pointed at the clock, said, ‘That’s the only god I serve’, and left.” Now we laughed together. “Guess who was praying for me?” he said. “Years later, after I had been a Christian for quite a while, the Lord reminded me of that scene.”
  • Another man told this story. When he was a teenager, he couldn’t shake drug and alcohol. He would vow that he would never do it again, then his friends would pick him up for a party. The next thing he knew he would be high, and drunk, again. Finding himself in this condition in the back seat of a moving car one day, he hung his head in despair. “I just don’t know what the answer is,” he said to himself. Just then, he looked up and saw a sign that said, “Jesus is the Answer.” Okay, he thought, if Jesus is the answer, then I want Jesus. He was immediately sober, and saved! He knew it was a miraculous act of God. “Who was praying for you?” I asked. “My Young Life leader,” he said. “I went to find him at his college dorm. When he answered the door I handed him the Bible that he had given me and said, “I don’t need this anymore. I’m a Christian now. You can give it to someone else.” We all know what happened next. The Young Life leader invited this young man into his room and began to disciple him.

I love it!

  • Then this story: I heard a Muslim background believer tell her story. She had met Jesus in her bedroom when she was only four years old. She endured tremendous persecution from her family and community. Eventually she had to run for her life. She could not be persuaded to give up her faith in Jesus. “Who was praying for you?” I asked. She took time to look around in the room.  She pointed her finger at each of us. “Someone I DON”T even know,” she said.

Recently I was reprimanded by the Lord because I stopped praying for someone in my family. I had a vivid dream about it. I shared the dream with my daughter and told her the story about how I had stopped praying for this person. My daughter said, “Mom, how would you like to get to heaven and have the Lord ask you why you stopped praying for her?”

My daughter told me that I need to get intentional about praying for her. She suggested that I use the number of the month she was born, and the date, as a time to set the alarm on my phone as a reminder to pray. I have done that. I wrote a prayer on the notepad on my phone. Every afternoon when my alarm goes off, I read this prayer out loud.

I pray that the eyes of her heart will be enlightened that the light of the glory of the gospel will shine in her heart, and she will know the hope of your calling, Lord. I pray that she will know the truth and the truth will set her free. You are the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except by you. Draw her to you, Lord; You who are able to do exceedingly and abundantly beyond all we can ask or think, to you will be the glory, before all time, now and forever. Amen.

Pray.

Jesus told us to pray.

Paul told us to pray:

In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. Ephesians 6:16-20

Jesus is the answer
Goat Dairy, Grace Harbor Farms, History, Walking by Faith

Grace Harbor Farms History 1999-2019

gglukens 1 Comment

milking

I am in the process of writing a history of Grace Harbor Farms. This PowerPoint presentation I put together two years ago . It is a good preview.

We started with two goats in 1999. Several years ago we farmed out all the animals because our seven acres could not support the number of animals we needed to meet demand on our seven acres.

Last year, just a few months ago, we brought goats back to the farm. You will be seeing more of them soon–as the kids start arriving in the Spring!

2019 goats

Believer's Path, Creation or Evolution, Evolution, fourth commandment, Sabbath Keeping, Walking by Faith

Evolution vs The Fourth Commandment

gglukens 1 Comment

 

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Exodus 20:8-11

“Mom, why don’t Christians keep the 4th commandment?”

My young daughter had recently started to read the Bible when she asked me this question. I didn’t have an answer for her. I am not even sure if at that point I could have said what the 4th Commandment is. Her question haunted me. It has for more than 30 years. Recently I set out to figure out the answer to that question. The answers I found have changed the pattern of my life. By God’s grace, my husband agrees with me. We now “honor the Sabbath” and are learning to “keep it holy”.

Why?

Notice that this commandment is the only one that begins with the word “Remember”.

Why?

Because God knew that we would forget.

Why did he want us to remember?

Because he did not want us to forget, to neglect, the truth of creation.

11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Exodus 20:11

What has our culture forgotten, even despised?

Answer: Six Day Creation

Recently my family had a big crisis that began when my granddaughter asked, “Couldn’t God have used evolution?”

My husband and I, with firm commitment, and, tragically, with lack of grace for my granddaughter’s struggle with this question, said “No! God could not have ‘used evolution’.”

We told her, in no uncertain terms, that if evolution were true, then Genesis is not true.

We told her that if evolution were true, then death is not the result of the fall because there would have been death for millions of years before Adam and Eve.

I asked her, “How could sexual reproduction evolve?”

I explained how I had realized that Jesus could have created everything with the appearance of age, because he had served cooked fish and baked bread to thousands of people without those things going through any process that took time. He created them, ex nihilo, on the spot.

Tim told her that if death did not result from the fall, then what did Jesus save us from?

My granddaughter could not deal with our empathic defense of the six-day creation. She left the table, and later insisted that Tim and I not come back to their home that evening.

Why?

Because this culture is not “Remembering the Sabbath, to keep it holy. . .because in six days God created everything.

At the point of that family crisis, Tim and I had not yet realized the connection between the 4th commandment and the problem of believing in the theory of evolution. We put those things together as I began to ponder my daughter’s question from 30 years ago.

“Why don’t Christians keep the 4th Commandment?”

I am convinced that this commandment begins with the word “Remember” precisely because God knew that at the heart of the apostasy to come would be the devastating lie that creation could not have happened in six days.

I have come to understand why the 10 Commandments are so offensive. It is not because they tell us not to tell lies, steal, or kill. It is not because they tell us to honor our parents, and to be sexually pure. It is because the satan does not want us to remember that God created everything in six days.

Why?

Because if God did not create everything in six days, then the story of creation is not true, so the Bible can’t be trusted; death is not the result of sin; and we don’t need salvation.

God said “Remember the sabbath” because he knew that by ignoring the truth of the six-day creation people would think that they were not created by God for his purpose, they would lean on their own understanding, they would not acknowledge him. This would lead to all kinds of debauchery as Paul explains in Romans Chapter One.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse
Romans 1:18-20

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
Romans 1:24 – 32

This is what happens when the 10 Commandments are removed from our consciousness, from our government, from our marketplaces, from our schools, and from our families. When people “believe in evolution” they don’t keep any of the commandments.

I am 70 years old, this year—2019—I could never have imaged the depravity of society that we are seeing today when I was growing up. I grew up in the Bay Area of California. I didn’t even know one person when I was in school whose parents were divorced—NOT ONE. The 10 Commandments were still in our schools then. We even learned, with shock, that in Russia the Bible was not allowed in schools!

Read Paul’s pronouncement above and think about what has happened since we took down the 10 Commandments and specifically denied that God made everything. People no longer think that we will be held accountable to him–that we need to be saved. What Jesus did became irrelevant.

In our quest to understand how to “keep the Sabbath holy” we are not trying to set up a bunch of rules, but we are attempted to keep the 7th day separate from the other six days of the week. We have a special dinner on Friday night, and another one Saturday evening to mark the start and end of our sabbath rest. We decided to close our farm store for the whole weekend, instead of just Sunday. We are basking in the peace that these decisions have made in our lives.

There is a lot more to say, volumes, about sabbath keeping. I am not going to go into any of that right now. If you have read this far in this blog, I encourage you to check out all the controversies about, and history of, sabbath keeping. Perhaps you will come to the same conclusion we did.

“Remember the Sabbath, to keep in holy, because I created everything in six days.” Amen.

Believer's Path, Grace, Testing Your Faith, Walking by Faith

Everything’s A Test

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Everything’s a Test

My mother used to say that when you squeeze a toothpaste tube, toothpaste comes out. What she meant was, what is in your heart will come out when pressure is applied.

It’s a simple concept, but how often do you really understand it. Are we surprised when a burst of anger, hurtful talk, lies, or cruelty comes out of our mouths? Under pressure, what is in our hearts comes out of our mouths and sometimes it comes out in something other than words.

Pressure tests what is in our hearts.

After people have been married for a number of years, they often develop little codes to tell each other something. Tim and I have several of those little intimacies. We sometimes ask each other, “Do you think this is a test?” We always answer, “Everything’s a test.” The exchange comes from a play Tim was a few years ago called “The Journey”. At one point in the story one of the characters says to the other, “Do you think this is a test?” The answer was, “Everything’s a test, Snedge.”

The Lord will test our hearts to see what is in there. The Bible is full of stories of people’s hearts being tested. Just this morning I read the story about Joseph testing his brothers when they came to buy food from him in Egypt.

Abraham was tested.

Jacob was tested.

David was tested.

Solomon was tested.

Mary was tested.

Peter was tested.

Paul was tested.

Some of these people passed their tests, some of them didn’t.

Everyone is tested.

The ultimate question is not whether you passed the test or not, but what did you do after you failed a test?

Paul says there is a godly sorry that leads to repentance.

2 Corinthians 7:10

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.

James 1:2-3

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

1 Peter 1:6-7

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 4:32

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

3:12-17

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

When the pressure is applied, may what comes out be full of grace and mercy. Here is a remedy for you. When your tube gets squeezed, may this be what shows up.

tube