Preparing now for some responsibilities in connection with the 125th Annual meeting of the Covenant in June, my thoughts are centering both on the roots out of which we have grown, and the relevance of those roots to our forward movement as part of the body of Christ.
We all know that changing times require ever new incentives and responses. What matter most in the long run, however, are not our programs and procedures but the spirit that underlies and informs them. Can one point to what remains essential in a life movement like our own, and are its essences as central to our own forward movement as they were in the common life of our forebears?
One can and one must if we are to faithful to all we have inherited. God's gift to us of faith and new life springs not only or primarily from our roots in Pietism and the early Mission Covenant but in larger perspective from his dealings with his people throughout history.
Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain (Psalm 127:1). Only when we are set free by him, new-born in him, steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:58) can we be assured that our labors are not in vain.
Have I been set free by God? And have you? Are we sure? Mathilda Foy wondered when she wrote the following somewhere between 1850 and 1851. Have you experienced the same assurance she found in the midst of her wonderings? Listen to her witness, and let the spirit it reveals be a powerful reminder of the life we too must receive from God if his will is to be accomplished through us:
I longed for assurance, but I could not accept it.... [Then one day when home alone recovering from an illness] the thought struck me like lightning, “You are saved and blessed--it is done, it is finished, it has long been your experience but you have not seen it. Christ is your Savior--you have the forgiveness of your sins--you don't have to pray any more to be forgiven: you can rejoice, for you are saved, blessed for time and eternity. All your doing, all your striving, all your praying is nothing–[Christ] is all.” I flew up from the sofa and got hold of a Bible. The Holy Spirit led me to look up Romans, and I read it through without stopping. He himself explained the contents to me. Everything fell into place.... The snare was broken and the bird was free.
Quoted in Karl Olsson, By One Spirit (1962), p. 65.
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