Les’ Letters to my Grandchildren 005
Letter # 5: Thinking Outside of Yourself
From Grandpa Leslie Briggs Wilson January 2, 2012
Dear Grandchildren,
Today and everyday this month try to have compassion for your parents. Just try this for 30 days and see if your life doesn’t get better. Many of you already do this everyday. Thank you for reflecting your parents love.
Your parents love you more than you comprehend. You will understand this when you hold your precious new born baby in your arms.
When your parents look at you all grown up, they see you through the rosy glasses of a million precious memories. Don’t spoil it. Let them bask in the beauty of your unselfish conduct.
Every one of us invests a portion of our lives in the people of our lives.
Good parents invest a great portion of their lives in the lives of their children. Be a good investment. Show them that you are. They have given you the best they had to give. They have given you a large portion of their lives. They have given you their love.
Life & love are all we have. The more we give, the more we have. We have an endless supply of love from the only source of love. God is Love.
“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
“Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. (Rom.
We have an endless source of life from the only giver of life when we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior.
Our supply of Love and Life is limitless because our Source Love and Life is Jesus the infinite eternal omnipotent omnipresent Creator of the universe. So don’t be stingy with either. The more you give away, the more you have. Let me add a word of caution. “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” (Matt. 7:6 NASB)
Today’s letter is extra long, because I have included a wonderful message from Oswald Chambers. But let me start with a few words about freedom.
Every American who enjoys freedom should thank the Scottish preachers who laid the groundwork for our freedom.
Men like George Buchanan who wrote De Jure Regni Apud Scotos in 1579 and Samuel Rutherford who wrote Rex, Lex, which was published in 1644.
These great Scottish preachers stood up to the kings and tyrants of their day at the risk of their own lives.
A Scottish born preacher named John Witherspoon signed the U.S. Independence
One great Scottish preacher was Oswald Chambers who lived from 1874 to 1917.
Sometime between 1897 and 1906 Oswald Chambers prepared a sermon in Dunoon Scotland
I would like to share that message with you today.
The last 100 years have warped the English language, so Oswald’s phrases may sound a little strange.
Also remember that he was a Scot, not an American.
But, a beautiful thing about God’s word is that even though languages change, the message never does.
Our Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and translated into nearly every language on the face of the earth.
These translations have been made in obedience to the Great Commission given to us by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
For over 2,000 years brave men and women have given their lives to bring the Word of God’s Love to us.
Every once in a while it is good for us to learn something about these heroes and what they did, and said and wrote.
I like to study the writings of Oswald Chambers because what he wrote tells me that He lived what he wrote.
He understood what it means to be one with Christ. He understood walking in the Holy Spirit. He understood surrendering your self to Jesus.
And his writings convict me of my own sinful ways and hold out the beautiful message of experiencing Christ living in me.
Please listen as Oswald Chambers speaks from 100 years ago:
The Love of God (by Oswald Chambers)
God is love.
No one but God could have revealed that to the world, for men, and we all indeed, see nothing but its contradiction in our own limited world of experience.
It needs but little imagination to construe the life of hundreds of this great city’s inhabitants into a vehement laughter at such a declaration as “God is love.”
From shattered, broken lives, from caverns of despair where fiends seem living rather than men, comes the existing contradiction to any such statement.
No wonder the carnal mind, the merely intellectually cultured, consider us infatuated, mere dreamers, talking of love when murder and war and famine and lust and pestilence, and all the refinement of selfish cruelty is abroad in the earth.
But, oh the sublimity of the Abraham-like faith that dares to place the centre of its life and confidence and action and hope in an unseen and apparently unknown God, saying, “God is love,” in spite of all appearances to the contrary; saying “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” Such faith is counted to a man for righteousness .
Look back over your own history as revealed to you by grace, and you will see one central fact growing large—God is love.
No matter how often your faith in such an announcement was clouded, no matter how the pain and suffering of the moment made you speak in a wrong mood, still this statement has borne its own evidence along with it most persistently—God is love.
In the future, when trial and difficulties await you, do not be fearful, whatever and whoever you may lose faith in, let not this faith slip from you—God is Love; whisper it not only to your heart in its hour of darkness, but here in your corner of God’s earth and man’s great city, live in the belief of it; preach it by your sweetened, chastened, happy life; sing it in consecrated moments of peaceful joy, sing until the world around you “is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.”
The world does not bid you sing, but God does. Song is the sign of an unburdened heart; then sing your songs of love unbidden, ever rising higher and higher into a fuller conception of the greatest, grandest fact on the stage of Time—God is Love.
But words and emotions pass, precious as their influence may be for the time, so when the duller moments come and the mind comes to require something more certain and sure to consider than the memory of mere emotions and stirring sentiments—consider this revelation, the eternal fact that God is Love, not, God is loving.
God and love are synonymous.
Love is not an attribute of God, it is God; whatever God is, love is.
If your conception of love does not agree with justice and judgment and purity and holiness, then your idea of love is wrong.
It is not love you conceive of in your mind, but some vague infinite foolishness, all tears and softness and of infinite weakness.
1. God Is Love—In His Very Nature
Some exceptionally gifted men may derive their conception of God from other sources than the Bible, but all I know of God I have got from the Bible, and those who taught me got what they taught from the Bible.
In all my dreams and imaginings and visions I see God, but it is the God of the Bible that I see, and I feel Him to be near me.
I see ever amid the mysteries of Providence and Grace and Creation “a Face like my face,” and “a Hand like this hand,” and I have learned to love God Who gave me such a sure way of knowing Him and left me not to the vain imaginations of my own sin-warped intellect.
(God is Love) In Creation.
The love of God gives us a new method of seeing Nature. His voice is on the rolling air, we see Him in the rising sun, and in the setting He is fair; in the singing of the birds, in the love of human hearts, the voice of God is in all. Had we but ears to hear the stars singing, to catch the glorious pealing anthem of praise echoing from the hills of immortality by the heavenly hosts!
(God is Love) In His Wisdom.
God did not create man as a puppet to please a despotic idea of His own, He created us out of the superabundant flow of overflowing love and goodness, He created us susceptible of all the blessedness which He had ordained for us. He “thought” us in the rapture of His own great heart, and lo, we are! Created in the image of God we, innocent of evil, of great God-like capacities.
(God is Love) In His Power.
The whole world moves but to His great inscrutable will, animate and inanimate creation, the celestial bodies moving on their orbits, the globe with all its diversified issues and accompaniments, are all subservient to this end.
Yes, God is good, in earth and sky,
In ocean depth and swelling wood,
Ten thousand voices ever cry,
God made us all, and God is good.
In ocean depth and swelling wood,
Ten thousand voices ever cry,
God made us all, and God is good.
(God is Love) In His Holiness.
God walked with man and talked with him, He told him His mind, and showed him the precise path in which he must walk in order to enjoy the happinesses He had ordained for him; He rejoiced in the fulness of His nature over man as His child, the offspring of His love. He left nothing unrevealed to man; He loved him. Oh, the joy and rapture of God the Father over man His son!
(God is Love) In His Justice.
God showed to man that compliance with His dictates would ever mean eternal bliss and joy unspeakable and life and knowledge for evermore, but that ceasing to comply would mean loss of life with God and eternal death.
That was in the world’s bright morning when the morning stars sang together and all creation leapt in joy, but the wild, wild desolation of sin and disobedience and pride and selfish sinfulness entered and drave a great gulf between God’s children and Himself. But, as ever, Love found a way, God came to us and for us, and we this day with chastened hearts and quivering lips and glistening eyes, yet with love deep and strong in our hearts, say all afresh with deep adoration, God is Love.
If God exhibits such glorious love in His Nature, what, oh what, shall we say of the glories of the dispensation of His Grace! That God would have walked this earth had sin never entered is very likely, yet sin did not refrain Him from graciously walking and revealing Himself in communion with men. No, still He came. But men were so blinded by sin that they saw Him not, they knew Him not, while He hewed a way back through the hard face of sin to the heavenly shores.
2.The Gift of God’s Only Begotten Son
The gift of God’s only begotten Son surely reveals His love in an amazing degree—“He that spared not His own Son”—till now it matters not how bad a man is, if he will but lift his eyes to the Cross he shall be saved. But yet so blinded and infatuated and imbecile has man become by sin that he can see nothing in the life of Christ save the evidence of a beautiful, good life, the best of human beings, living misunderstood, suffering, dying as a martyr. To meet this difficulty Love itself gave another gift—the gift of the Holy Spirit.
3. The Gift of the Holy Spirit
When He shines on the Historic Christ, all the great and grey outlines spring into glorious relief and colour and beauty, and the soul amazed, calls out, “My Lord and my God.”
When the Holy Spirit has begun His gracious work in your soul and heart by making it tremulously expectant, you see a new light on the Cross and the “martyr” becomes the Saviour of the world. †“Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed” (rv).
Though it is too difficult, nay impossible, to trace that God is love by mere unaided human intellect, it is not impossible to the intuitions of faith.
Lift up your eyes and look abroad over the whole earth, and in the administration of God’s moral government you will begin to discern that God is love, that over sin and war and death and hell He reigns supreme, that His purposes are ripening fast.
We must by holy contemplation of all we have considered keep ourselves in the love of God, then we shall not be able to despond for long.
The love of God performs a miracle of grace in graceless human hearts. Human love and lesser loves must wither into the most glorious and highest love of all, viz., the love of God.
Then we shall see not only each other’s faults, we shall see the highest possibilities in each other, and shall love each other for what God will yet make of us.
Nothing is too hard for God, no sin too difficult for His love to overcome, not a failure but He can make it a success.
God is Love—one brief sentence, you can print it on a ring: it is the Gospel. A time is coming when the whole round world will know that God reigns and that God is Love, when hell and heaven, life and death, sin and salvation, will be read and understood aright at last.
God is Love—a puzzle text, to be solved slowly, as with tears and penitence, by prayer and joy, by vision and faith, and, last, by death. 1
1) These words of Oswald Chambers’ about God’s Love are from pages 655 to 657 of ‘The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers’ copyright 2000 by Oswald Chambers Publications Association, Limited. This would be a great addition to your library. It can be ordered online from CBD @ $25.99 + S & H. The CBD stock number is WW30392.
Grandchild, if you want one let me know. Lord willing I can probably afford one copy per month from His funds. Requests will be answered in the order received.
If you’ve read this far you’ll probably read OZ. God bless your attention span.
Love and Prayers
Grandpa Les
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