Cleansing pow'r

Matthew 7:28-29 says, “And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”

Jordan explains, “That word ‘scribe’ there means a guy that writes things; he wrote down the scripture, copying it out. Jesus doesn’t teach like the scribes. He teaches with authority. He teaches the truth clearly, plainly, where they can get it.

“He’s saying, ‘Not like the scribes where you can’t understand what’s going on.’ If you want a comparison to that in modern terminology, the scribe would be the commentaries all written out. The Lord teaches different than that. He teaches you out of the Book clearly and plainly.

“You begin to see a series of miracles in 8-10 that Christ does. The Book of Matthew is not laid out in chronological order. Matthew brings together a bunch of different things that happened at different times, and lays them out here on the table for you to now scrutinize.

“Now, that’s a legitimate method of giving evidence. It’s not a method of giving a chronological story, but it is a legitimate method of giving evidence to prove a point, isn’t it? Matthew is more interested in the evidential value.

*****

“Verse 8:3 says, ‘And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.’

“Brother, He cured him by a touch. A touch that would have defiled any mere man. If you’d have reached out and touched that leper, you would have been unclean. Isn’t that what the Old Testament says? The Lord Jesus touches him and does something no mere man could do. He heals him. Instead of being contaminated, He HEALS him!

“You know who the Old Testament says is the only person who can heal leprosy? Jehovah! Jesus is manifesting Himself for who He is.

“Verse 4 says, ‘And Jesus saith unto him, See thou tell no man; but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them.’ That’s a great verse to use to show people when they say, ‘We just believe in doing what Jesus said.’ They don’t do that because that verse commands the man according to Leviticus 14 to go offer a blood sacrifice for his cleansing.

“How many folks when you want to get clean go out for a blood sacrifice? What’s a matter? Don’t you believe what Jesus said? That’s a great verse to show the dispensational difference there. The explanation of that is Christ lived under the law. Different program.

“Now notice the man is told to go show the priest. When the guy came in to the priest and shows the priest that he’s clean, what should the priest note? Who’s in their midst? Messiah!

“Isaiah 35 and the prophets back over there said the leper’s going to cleansed when the Messiah shows up! That priest ought got excited, don’t you think? Don’t you think he ought to at least went and investigated who did it and who He was and who He said He was? Did he? No evidence of it.

“The priest doesn’t go out and proclaim the good news that Jehovah’s appeared in the midst of the people. You know what? Did the nation Israel, when Christ appeared in their midst, go out and proclaim, ‘He’s here!’ and accept Him? Just like the priest.

“You see the typology involved in the story here? How it speaks to what’s going on? Somebody says, ‘Well, why did He say ‘tell no man’? The reason for that is Christ is pressing the issue of the nation Israel’s responsibility herself to recognize and proclaim Messiah. Go to the priest! Don’t go tell everybody. You go to the priest and let him tell everybody.

“Who’s the priest? Who’s the nation of priests? Israel. You see how that works? Verse 5: ‘And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him. [6] And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented.
[7] And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him.
[8] The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.
[9] For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.
[10] When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.

“That centurion is a Gentile, coming to Christ through Israel. Notice the parallel passage in Luke 7. Notice that centurion comes at Him from a distance. That’s a type and a picture of that distant Gentile crying out for help.

“You have to remember, people, the Lord Jesus Christ didn’t come just to cleanse Israel. He came to cleanse Israel, so that through them He might reach the world. Over and over, you’re going to see Christ looking out yonder to the nations and His heart longing to go to them but Israel won’t go. That’s what’s happening here.

“The Gentiles are ready to receive Him, ready to hear. Ready to get it. Israel doesn’t have any faith. Israel won’t get up and go.”

Connections at O'Hair

The internet is just the craziest thing. The other day my mom and I got to talking over the phone about the health and longevity of relatives on her side of my family, and I mentioned that my grandmother’s sister, Nel, lived to be 96. My mom said, “She didn’t live that long, did she? I know she was in that car wreck and then had to go to the nursing home, but she was only there a couple of years. I think she was only 93 or 94.”

I had my computer on right next to me so I responded (knowing how popular Nel was in her town and that there was a huge outpouring of love community-wide at her funeral), “Well, let me type her name into Google. Her obit should come right up and then I can tell you exactly how old she was.”

I then typed in her name, Nel Wolf, followed by the words “West Virginia,” and much to my complete surprise, the first entry listed was an article I wrote on her for my website LisaLeland.com! It was actually the very first article I ever wrote for the blog-style site I started in 2003!

*****

So, yesterday at our church conference, the associate pastor came up to me during a break and told me somebody from out of town wanted to meet me since I was a “researcher of J.C. O’Hair.” I said to the pastor, “I don’t know where he got that idea. I don’t know anything much more really than anybody else around here.”

It turns out that if you type J.C. O’Hair’s name into Google, an article I wrote on him in 2008 appears on the second page of listings. This tickles me to be linked to such a great man of faith like that.

*****

Here’s another one of 5-6 little articles from my blog archives that contains O’Hair stuff. I thought this one fit in with the theme of the conference, just ended tonight with an excellent heartfelt talk by preacher Dean Antonucci of Oregon (get the CD!):

"A good trivia question: Who was born only four years before General Douglas MacArthur in their same hometown of Little Rock, Ark.? The answer is J. C. O’Hair, born Dec. 31, 1876.

O’Hair, a one-time accountant, was in his late 20s when he became the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico! After returning to the U.S. he made a name for himself in the construction and lumber business and married a woman from Kansas named Ethel, whom he had six kids with. In 1917 he entered into full-time evangelism and went around the country preaching and teaching. On Sept. 1, 1923 he was installed as a pastor of North Shore Church.

*****

For O’Hair, it was a labor of love. Jordan says, “Let your watching, let your standing fast in the faith, let your’ quit ye like men, be strong,’ be done with charity; with that mental attitude of grace.  Do it out of charity, out of a heart of evaluating the thing the way God evaluates it . . .  

“You know what the long and short of it is, folks? When you read a verse of Scripture, that verse says that this action and attitude ought to be the action and attitude you take as a Believer because you’re a Believer. You want the verses to work in your life; believe them! The only response grace will accept is faith. When you believe them they’ll transform your life into what they say.  The reality of what they say will work in your life . . .

“You don’t live on your emotions; you live on choices of your will. You emotions think anything your mind is thinking is true. It’s only a movie; it’s not real!

“God has built you so that there is a part of your inner man that is designed to put into motion the things that your heart and mind have chosen to do. Facts first, then faith in the facts because until your faith rests in the reality of the facts, those facts can never go to work in your life. They’ll just be rolling around in your head.

“When you faith rests in the facts, your faith in the facts release the power of that truth to begin to produce its fruit in your life and works effectually in you that believe . . .

“When it says that Philemon had refreshed the bowels of the saints, that’s that innermost feelings down in the seat of their inner being. He had refreshed them right down to their very core. This wasn’t a superficial refreshing: ‘Hey, how ya doin? Ya feeling alright? Yeah, good to see ya!’ and you go off and there’s still the hurt down inside, there’s still the loneliness.

“Philemon’s ministry of truth to these people worked right down into the core of their being and refreshed them in their inner man to the place it extended all the way over to their emotions.

“He believed the truth. It worked and lived in him and that truth, as it lived in him, bore fruit among the saints that was able to refresh them even in their most inner recesses of their being! Right down into their very bosom.

“The ‘bowels ‘ are the innermost feelings, the innermost recesses. It’s the farthest, hardest to reach place. This wasn’t superficial living at Colossi. Philemon didn’t minister to people in a way that was just covering over. The reason it worked that way for Philemon is the issue of faith. He really believed the doctrine and he taught people to believe the doctrine because they saw it living and producing the fruit in him. It wasn’t just facts with him; it was his faith resting on the facts that produced that life in him.”

*****

The Bible’s written in such a way that to really understand it you’ve got to keep poring over it and poring over it.

Jude 9 informs, “Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.”

Now, that passage can be found back in the last chapter of Deuteronomy. When Moses died, Satan and Michael contend over his body.

Jordan explains, “Some people say, ‘Well, maybe it wasn’t his physical body; maybe it was the nation Israel.’ I Corinthians 10 talks about when they came across the Red Sea they were baptized under Moses in the cloud and in the sea and so that nation when it came across, it’s called in Acts 7 the Church of the Wilderness.

“Some people say the body of Moses was really the nation of Israel once it had become that separated nation—that set apart people of God. Either way you take it, Satan and Michael are contending over the body of Moses.

“And when that happened it says Michael ‘durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.’

“Now you can go back in the book of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers and read all day long ‘til your eyes bug out on the table and you’ll never find that statement back there! You wouldn’t know this event took place except that it’s written subsequently in the Book of Jude. Without Jude 9 you’d never know there was a contention between Michael and Satan over the body of Moses.

“If you drop down to verse 14, it says ‘Enoch also the seventh from Adam’ (Genesis 5). When It says seventh from Adam, that’s because there’s another Enoch. You remember Cain’s son? This isn’t Cain’s son, Enoch, this is the other one, the seventh from Adam, the one who prophesied.

“Enoch from Genesis 5 didn’t die; God took him and translated him (verse 11). The text talks about Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah.

“You begin to understand when you read Hebrews 11 that something happened at the birth of Methuselah that changed Enoch’s life and ‘he began to walk with God.’ The verse says Enoch prophesied, meaning he had a message from God. So there was some communication between God and Enoch and then Enoch and the people around him.

“Methuselah, his name means ‘when he dies it shall come.’ When he died, the Flood, the Judgment came. Enoch is prophesying about these saying ‘behold the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints to execute judgment upon all ungodly.’

“Every time I read that verse I think, ‘There were some ungodly dudes back there!’ Just over and over again. But there’s the prophecy about the judgment of God. One’s gonna be at the Flood; here it’s gonna be at the Second Advent, which the Flood was a type of, the tribulation.

“And Enoch prophesied of that and that’s the verse where people get, ‘Well, there’s a lost book of the Bible called the Book of Enoch which should be in there.’ No, this is the rule of subsequent narrative. You wouldn’t know Enoch did this stuff except the Book of Jude wrote it down for you.”

Walking the walk

In the Gospel event of the feeding of the 5,000 and the sending of them away, Jesus Christ sends the multitude away because they’re just there to get fed.

“They’re fed and then they come back to Him; in fact, in John 6 they try to make Him king,” explains Jordan. “They try to take Him by force and make Him king, not because they believe on Him as the Messiah, but because He fed them and, wouldn’t you like somebody to give you a free meal every day?

“They say, ‘Hey, we’d like to have you running the show! You feed us and you just pull it out of your hat there, man! You made it go!’

“That’s the great exposition on ‘the bread of life.’ That’s where it came from is their failure to understand the miracle He did and, because of their rejection of Him, and their failure to see who He was, and their desire just for the material blessings without the eye of faith, Christ separates Himself from the multitude and takes His disciples and sends them into a ship across to the other side of the sea of Galilee and then He goes up into a mountain to pray.

“Matthew 14:22-24 reads, ‘And straightway Jesus constrained his disciples to get into a ship, and to go before him unto the other side, while he sent the multitudes away.
[23] And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone.
[24] But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary.

“If you look at Mark 6and John 6 you’ll see they were in the middle of the lake. The Sea of Galilee at its widest point is just 10 miles across. It’s about 8 miles by 15 miles, so if they’re going across it, and they’ve only gotten half way, they haven’t got very far, and in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them.

“In other words, they go at 6 and the fourth watch would be three o’clock in the morning. They been out there rowing for 9 hours and hadn’t gotten but about four miles. That’s tough sledding, you know that? I figure I could walk that far in 9 hours!

“The problem is there is a storm and these men are having a real tough time getting anywhere. Now Jesus has gone up into the mountain—a type of the ascension of Christ.

“Verse 25-26 says, ‘And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.
[26] And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.’

“Have you ever wondered why they were troubled? Why wouldn’t they be happy? It says they ‘cried out in fear.’

“Now that passage is a great demonstration of the deity of Christ. If you want to talk about somebody doing something, talk about them walking on water.

“Notice Job 9 very clearly identifies when you can walk on water, that’s a sign of deity. There’s a tremendous demonstration of the deity of Christ in this miracle. The passage reads, [1] Then Job answered and said,
[2] I know it is so of a truth: but how should man be just with God?
[3] If he will contend with him, he cannot answer him one of a thousand.
[4] He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength: who hath hardened himself against him, and hath prospered?
[5] Which removeth the mountains, and they know not: which overturneth them in his anger.
[6] Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble.
[7] Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars.
[8] Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea.

"When Job says He ‘sealeth up the stars,’ that’s describing the majesty and the awesomeness of who God is. One of the demonstrations of the majesty, and the deity, and the strength, and the power, and the greatness of Almighty God, is as Job says it, ‘Who’s like Him that can tread on the waves of the sea?’

******

“Jesus comes along His disciples in the midst of a storm-tossed sea and He walks right across out there. And those guys knew the Old Testament. They knew those verses and they knew, or should have known, what that was a demonstration of in their midst. A tremendous declaration of the deity of Christ in front of them and what do they do? They’re troubled, they’re afraid, they’re bothered.

“You say, ‘Why in the world is that?!’ Mark 6:52: ‘For they considered not the miracle of the loaves: for their heart was hardened.’

"You know what the problem of those men was? Fear had mastered them. Fear had overtaken them. Fear controlled them and they didn’t expect to be delivered.

“They were out there in the middle of that ocean (to them) in the storm and they didn’t expect any deliverance. They were scared to death and when Christ showed up coming as the deliverer, they were all afraid. You see, they didn’t learn the lesson of the feeding of the 5,000. The doctrine He was trying to communicate to them was not that upon which they were operating; they were operating on human viewpoint and their own emotions, rather than having learned the lesson God was trying to communicate to them.

“That point needs to be well-taken. In these things going on here, they’re not just stories to tantalize and to tell little children in Sunday school. There’s some tremendous lessons being taught in the feeding of the 5,000 and Christ walking on the water. There are some tremendous prophetic truths; truths that affect the kingdom program that these apostles represent.

“Christ comes walking to them on the stormy sea. That’s a type; a picture of the tribulation period, the time of Jacob’s trouble.

“Daniel 7:1-2 says, 1] In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon Daniel had a dream and visions of his head upon his bed: then he wrote the dream, and told the sum of the matters.
[2] Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea.

“It’s a night vision. Matthew 14 is a night experience. The wind is whipping up a storm on the sea and you know what the rest of that passage is? It’s a picture of the 70^th week of Daniel and the tribulation period and the Antichrist and the persecution and the torment raised by the Antichrist against the nation Israel and how he torments and persecutes and seeks to wear out the saints of the most high god in Daniel 7 and that’s just a picture.

“Revelation 13:1 says, ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’

“You see, he says, ‘I saw the sea,’ and a beast comes up out of the sea and all those kind of things.

“Again, the issue has to do with the tribulation and, as these men go out on the sea, they go out upon that time of Jacob’s trouble. It’s a night vision as the tribulation is. As Daniel 7 and so forth are. Christ appears to them. He comes down walking on the water. He comes treading upon Israel’s enemies and He appears to them as who He is—the Son of God, Jehovah Himself, to rescue them, and He comes walking on the water.

“All of these things are a type of what’s going to happen in the tribulation involving the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. What you’re seeing in the feeding of the 5,000, and Jesus coming to them in that fourth watch of the night to rescue them in that storm-tossed sea, is a picture of the Second coming of Christ, and when that ‘little flock’ gets into the real storm, and the real time of Jacob’s trouble, they’ll have some information they’ve gone through to draw upon, and the things He’s illustrating to them here will REALLY come about and they’ll have some lessons they’ve been taught to get them through that real time in the wilderness in the tribulation when He feeds them (Rev. 12).

******

“And then in the Second Coming of Christ is Psalm 93: [1] The LORD reigneth, he is clothed with majesty; the LORD is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved.
[2] Thy throne is established of old: thou art from everlasting.
[3] The floods have lifted up, O LORD, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their waves.
[4] The LORD on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.
[5] Thy testimonies are very sure: holiness becometh thine house, O LORD, for ever.

“When He comes back, the waves are roaring, the storm is tossed, the billows rage, and He comes back and He’s mightier than that and He just calms the whole thing down, and He fixes it and puts it to rest and brings peace.

“Rev. 12:6 says, ‘And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.’ Time wise, this passage is in the middle of the 70^th week of Daniel (chapter 9). It’s right in the middle of the tribulation.

“Where are these men in the sea of Galilee? In the middle. That’s half of the 70^th week.

“The woman Israel flees into the wilderness. Just like Christ took that multitude in the wilderness and fed them in the wilderness, He one day in that tribulation is going to take the nation Israel and feed them in that wilderness.

“In fact, Hosea 2:14-15 says that in the tribulation God is going to allure the nation Israel, bring them out into the wilderness, and deal with them in that wilderness just like He did when He brought them up out of the land of Egypt.

“The passage reads, ‘Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.
[15] And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope: and she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt.’

“The information is in Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and He says, ‘Here in Hosea, the way I’m going to deal with Israel in the trib is just going to be just like it was back there, so if you want to know what’s going to go on over here, where can you go in your Bible and find out some instruction, go to those books.

*****

“Matthew 14: 25 says, ‘And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.’  It’s important you understand the issue of the watches of the night, especially as they relate to the Second Coming of Christ. At this time a night was divided into four sections. Each of those sections had a watch to it. 

“In the Old Testament, the Jews divided the night into three watches, but at this time the Romans are in control and you go by their system and so it’s four watches.

“You see the names for the four watches in Mark 13:35: ‘Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning.’

“The first one is even (6-9), then there’s midnight (9-12). We call that the ‘graveyard shift.’ The next one is the cock crowing. That runs from 12-3 and then the next one is called morning. That would run from 3-6. So you’ve got four watches that run the night.

“From Matthew 14:25, we know Jesus comes in the fourth watch of the night. Now, there’s an interesting thing you learn when you study Bible prophecy. The Second Coming of Christ is described as the sun coming up in the morning.

“Malachi 4:1-2 says, ‘For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.’

“You see that ‘s-u-n.’ Who is that? That’s Jesus Christ. In Christ’s coming, and the beginning of the millennium, it’s like the sun going up in the morning.

“Matt 13:41. That kingdom is like the sun coming up so it’s called the daytime. John 9:4. Then when Jesus Christ is here it’s daytime. He dies on the Cross, He’s resurrected, and then He ascends up into heaven, and when He goes out of the world, it’s called nighttime here.

“The time period in your Bible between the ascension of Christ, His going up into the mountain, and the time that He comes back over here, is called nighttime in the prophetic scripture. 

“In fact, the Apostle Paul in I Thessalonians 5: 1-10 describes the period in which we live today as night, and he says, ‘You are not children of the night but are of the day,’ and He’s describing, the fact, you’re a child of God and not a child of Satan. You’re part of God’s program, not part of the world’s program—Satan’s policy of evil out there in the world. Without Jesus Christ, the world’s in darkness.”

Little is much (when God is in it)

The disciples come to Jesus and ask, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

Jordan explains, “These guys are arguing, and they’re arguing about who’s the greatest, who’s the biggest, who’s the most important--the key guy in the kingdom of heaven. They are confused about the nature of the kingdom because they’re arguing, ‘I’m going to be up there, and you’re going to be here, and which one of us is going to be bigger than the other guy?!’

“What they’ve done is, sort of like most of us, forgotten and missed the real nature of the witness they were going to carry on in the absence of Christ.

“They’re have been some heady things going on here (in Matthew 16-17) about these men as it becomes evident to them Christ is going to go away, but they don’t fully perceive that, and yet it’s beginning to be evident He’s going to turn the mantle over to them and He’s beginning to talk to them about it and they begin to get a sense of that coming kingdom.

*****

“Come over to Matthew 20 and notice this is a contention that goes on all through this period. Matthew 20:20 says, ‘Then came to him the mother of Zebedee's children with her sons, worshipping him, and desiring a certain thing of him.’

“Momma’s bringing her boys and momma’s always taken care of the boys.

“You know, through the years I’ve done a lot of marriage counseling, and I’ve married a few people, and you know who causes more trouble among in-laws in a marriage than anybody else, dare I tell you? The one individual consistently on average is the mother of the husband. That’s a fact. God knew that and that’s why the man is to shake mother and father and get away.

“That boy’s momma will make sure he got a good deal, see? Well, these boys in chapter 20 are big enough to take care of themselves, but they just haven’t been assertive enough for her and so she comes, worshipping Him—she’s buttering Him up—to get something.

“ ‘And he said unto her, What wilt thou? She saith unto him, Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.’

“What does she want? She wants her son to be the big guy, see? He’s up top and everybody’s going down.

“Jesus talks to him about it in verse 25: 'But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them.
[26] But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister;
[27] And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant:
[28] Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.

“In other words, the way the Gentiles run their kingdom is a dictatorship, or one or two great guys and everybody in subjection.

“You see Christ’s kingdom is not going to be like the Gentiles’ kingdom and He’s trying to communicate that to these guys. The basis and standard of greatness isn’t going to be might and ability to be exalted. The basis of the standard of greatness is in verse 27.

*****

“So this issue back in Matthew 18:1 of discussing who’s going to be greatest is they misunderstand God’s kingdom as though it was going to be one of the Gentile’s, and missed the nature of the witness they’re to have in the world.

“So Christ, in verses 2-3, uses an illustration. Verse 2 says, ‘And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them.’

“There is indication, if you compare the other gospel accounts, that they may have been in Peter’s house and perhaps He called one of Peter’s children there.

“When He says ‘little child,’ He’s illustrating the character of the testimony that these men are going to bear. [3] And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
[4] Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
[5] And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.

“The point there is very clear. The little child is a humble, simple child. Someone who just comes in and believes. The word ‘convert’ means you can change it over—like a convertible top on a car. You gotta be changed from the kind of thinking you have, and from the way you are, into somebody who thinks and acts and is like this little child. And if you don’t do that you’ll never enter into the kingdom of heaven.

“You don’t want to miss the point about the little child. Why did He pick the little child out? Come to Luke 12 and John 13.

“There’s a special reason He talks about the little one. Who’s going to get the kingdom? The little flock. In Matthew 18 the little child gets the kingdom. You see the comparison there?

“Notice what He calls His apostles in John 13:33: ‘Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek me: and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go, ye cannot come; so now I say to you.’

“Notice the mental attitude they’re to have. He says in Matthew 18:4: ‘Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’

“Old Bob Jones used to say that ‘humility is truth’s most becoming garb.’ The most becoming clothes and dress, and deportment, and mental attitude, that truth can have is humility. Because, folks, when you profess the truth, you’re not professing something that is innate in you—you’re professing something God gave you!

“If you’ve got the truth, it didn’t come from you—it came from God, and you have an ability to perceive truth. It comes from God, not from you. People who are stuck on their own ability and their own mind and their own greatness, as these men being discussed here, are people who never rely on the Lord.

“Luke 10: 21 is a verse of Scripture I hope you men never forget. Every Believer needs to understand this verse because this is the key in any age to understanding the Word of God and the will of God.

“The verse says, ‘In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight.’

“In other words, don’t rejoice in all this business of powerful demonstrations, where you can go out and zap people and all that kind of thing, and throw out demons, but rejoice that your name’s in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

“In Luke 10:21 you’re fixing to read a verse of Scripture that is the only time in your new testament, that I know of, where the Bible says Jesus rejoiced. I’m sure He had many happy times. I don’t think He went around poker-faced and unhappy all the time and, in fact, there are too many illustrations in the Gospel accounts of the sense of humor in which He dealt with people.

“The Lord has a marvelous sense of humor. He has a marvelous biting sarcasm in the Word of God and He has a real sense of humor as He looks there at man’s feeble efforts to get things done, you know, and He considers our frame that we’re just dust and ashes, and the Lord is not some ogre sitting in the heavens with a stick looking for some way to crown you in the back of the head and knock you in the mud. The Lord’s not that way; that isn’t His nature or outlook.

“But it’s interesting to me that the only time I know of that Jesus is said to have rejoiced is in this verse. You see who gets it? Look people, child-like humility is the first requisite for learning the Bible. It’s the first requisite to learning the will of God in any and in every age.

"Now that is especially true in this kingdom age. For He told them back in the Chronicles: ‘If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.’

“He says to Peter, ‘Humble yourself. God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble.’ The verse has been quoted in Matthew already—Micah 6:8: ‘He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’

“The idea is not self-assertion, which is what these men were doing here, but it’s just being like a baby. It’s being like a child, like a little one, just coming in and not making anything of yourself.

“Haven’t we already studied through Matthew where you see the little flock had nothing in themselves to brag about. In fact, Moses said that they were going to be considered a foolish nation. And Paul recites that passage in Romans 10 that describes that little flock in the eyes of the nation Israel as a ‘foolish group of people.’ The idea is that it is foolish that this little group of people could ever accomplish the great purposes He has and that’s what He’s dealing with here.

“In Acts 5 they look at them and call them ‘ignorant and unlearned men.’ They say, ‘Where’d you guys go to school?’ They said that about Jesus in John 7: ‘Where’d you get your degree?’ and He said, ‘Nowhere. Not the schools of men anyway.’

“And they called them those ‘ignorant fishermen,’ but they took note of them that they had been with Jesus, see? The point is they weren’t taking in the wisdom of men.

“I’m for education but I’m not for trusting men’s brains and calling that education, see? When you start trusting your noodle and your ability to figure out and logic your way out, you’re just in trouble.

“You can get some nuclear physicists together and they can figure out atomic fission and then they can pollute the whole world with radiation. Technology’s one thing, but I’m talking about the brains to use the technology, and the moral character and fiber to use the technology in a way to enhance men.

“You take all the technology of the 20th Century and all it’s done is allow us to kill each other faster.  Man’s brain doesn’t figure out the answer to problems; it just creates more problems, so you don’t want to trust man’s brains.

"It’s not man’s effort; it’s what God does, and the way you want to get in line with that is you just be humble. As soon as you get up you ought to get down, and when you get down, God will put you up.

“God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble. What did the Beatitudes say? ‘The meek shall inherit the earth.’ Sometimes it doesn’t look that way in the eyes of world so He’s assuring them there, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ The point in the passage is God takes care of His own.”

I'm in heaven

A lot of people think of eternal life as just going to live forever in heaven. “Eternal life isn’t living forever,” says Jordan. “Everybody’s going to live forever, folks. Eternal life isn’t just existing forever. And it isn’t EXISTING in heaven.”

“Paul writes in II Corinthians 1:22: ‘Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.’

“The emphasis in the ‘earnest’ is not just that you’re guaranteed to get there; the seal did that. The earnest is telling you that you have the Holy Spirit present in your life today as a foretaste of that; That this isn’t all just out yonder but here as a present reality of that life that’s going to be lived out there.

“The point is, it’s your PRESENT possession. You don’t have the full reality of it yet, but you’ve got the foretaste, just like when you make the down payment (on a condo) you put $100 down; there’s $900 coming. There’s a whole lot more we want to get later on, but we’ve got this NOW!

“John 17:3 is a verse you need to circle and keep in your heart. This is life eternal. You want to know what it is—Jesus is fixin to tell you: ‘And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.’

“Eternal life isn’t just going to heaven and living forever; it’s having an intimate personal relationship with God the Father through His Son the Lord Jesus Christ. There’s contact, commune, knowledge of the Creator and His plans and purpose and how He’s going to bring it about through His Son.

“That eternal life is your privilege to possess right now. You don’t have to wait until you die and go to heaven to get it! You’ve got the earnest of it right now and the Holy Spirit’s presence in your life is the GUARANTEE of that future fulfillment, but He’s also the present reality of that future glory.

That’s why Paul can say in Romans 6:13, ‘Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.’

“You can bring that life into your life now because it is there. But how does it work? How do you get it to operate? How do you get that life to flow and function?”

*****

We know the Messiah is going to claim the throne of David by divine right but, as Jordan says, “There is a problem in the accomplishment of that promise in your Bible.

“I’ve been fascinated through the years how many premillennial, fundamental dispensationalists don’t know about this problem, and how many anti-dispensationalists do.

“Luke 1:30 says, ‘And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.’ Gabriel is here announcing to Mary the issue of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. In verse 34 she says, ‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’

“I’ve always found it funny that the RSV says she says, ‘Seeing I have no husband.’ Twelve and 13-year-old kids in the public school system can tell you how you can have a baby without having a husband! That’s kind of a dumb way to translate that.

“Well, how can it be? Mary’s a virgin. Verse 35 says, ‘And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.’

“The virgin birth is necessary in order for verse 32-33 to be accomplished. Not just to accomplish your redemption, but so that the Messiah can reign on the throne of His father David forever. Now, why did I say that?

“Come back to Jeremiah 22. Before the captivity of Israel into Babylon, there was a guy on the throne of Jerusalem called Jeconiah and God was so upset, angry, so much in a rejecting mood of Jeconiah, verse 24 says, ‘As I live, saith the LORD, though Coniah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah were the signet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence;’

“The ‘Je’ on Jeconiah is Jehovah. He says, ‘Take my name off that dude’s name! Don’t even put my name on him! Just call him Coniah. I don’t want to be associated with that guy at all! He’s that rotten.’

“Verse 29-30: O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the LORD.
[30] Thus saith the LORD, Write ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days: for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah.

“Now here’s a message from the prophet of Israel in Jeremiah for the whole world to listen to. ‘Write this man childless.’

“You’ve got David, Solomon, Jeconiah. And he says, ‘Nobody from that line is ever going to sit on the throne.’ Well, then how are you going to get a Messiah, a son of David, to sit on the throne?

“David had another son by the name of Nathan. Mary’s lineage in Luke 3 comes from Nathan. Mary is not the mother of God; she’s the mother of His humanity. Jesus Christ’s human connection. So He’s the Son of David, not through Solomon or Jeconiah, which is written childless, but He’s the Son of David through Nathan via the virgin birth.

“In fact, if you look in Matthew 1, Joseph is the son of David through Solomon. And as his earthly father, adopted father, the Lord Jesus Christ could claim the rights to the throne from Solomon through Joseph, but the verse that says that nobody of this guy’s seed shall ever sit there, well, it isn’t Joseph’s seed that produced the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s God’s seed through Mary.

“So when he says in Psalm 89:4 that ‘thy seed will I establish for ever, and build up thy throne to all generations,’ come over to Psalm 132:1: ‘LORD, remember David, and all his afflictions.’ The essence of the Davidic covenant is that verse right there.

“God made David a promise that it would be the fruit of His body that would sit on that throne. That the Messiah would be of the seed of David. That seed line is important.

“I don’t tell people about this because I don’t like to give the guys on the other side of the table ammunition to argue about it, but if anybody ever brought this up to you, the answer is it’s true that Coniah, the royal line, gets cut off there. That’s where the virgin birth comes in because the virgin birth . . .  Joseph being His legal father has the legal rights to his father’s inheritance, which would be the throne, but he has the lineage (the literal right) as a son of David through Mary.

“To me that’s fascinating. That’s one of the most fascinating intricacies about God’s Word about how God’s protected His Son in spite of the failure of man.”

*****

In Psalm 89:5 the writer’s going to begin to celebrate the Jesus Christ. Verse 9 says, ‘Thou rulest the raging of the sea: when the waves thereof arise, thou stillest them.’

“He has POWER over nature. That’s why you’ll see Christ stand and say, ‘Peace, be still.’ We sing that song, ‘The winds and the waves shall obey Thy will,
Peace, be still!
Whether the wrath of the storm tossed sea,
Or demons or men, or whatever it be
No waters can swallow the ship where lies
The Master of ocean, and earth, and skies;
they all shall sweetly obey Thy will,
Peace, be still! Peace, be still!
They all shall sweetly obey Thy will,
Peace, peace, be still!

“He demonstrates Himself, by walking on water and so forth, that He’s Jehovah. Verse 10 says, ‘Thou hast broken Rahab in pieces, as one that is slain; thou hast scattered thine enemies with thy strong arm.’

“Rahab is another name for Egypt, and when he broke Rahab in pieces, write down by that verse Isaiah 51. In that chapter he’s associated with a dragon; Satan.

“When God brought them out of Egypt, He brought them out of satanic captivity. But when He breaks Rahab, that’s a tribulation passage prophecy about the last days.”

Contemplating comfort

“I remember I used to read Psalm 88 years ago and think, ‘Man, there’s not a ray of sunshine in that psalm!’ ” recalls Jordan in an old study. “Somebody has said that there’s ‘no ray of light or word of comfort’ in this whole psalm. That’s true except for verse 1: ‘O LORD God of my salvation.’

“The only hope in that psalm is the first phrase. The rest of it is just a plaintive cry of the Believing Remnant in Israel as they are consumed by the despair and the persecution of that time of Jacob’s trouble, and you see that deep longing that takes hold of the Little Flock’s heart as they look to the Lord for deliverance.

Psalm 89 is the deliverance. It’s sort of the capstone of the description of the deliverance and the avenging and the release of Israel from all the persecution into this great light—this sunshine of the sure mercies of David. Coming as it does after Psalm 88, it would certainly be a great balm.

Isaiah, when he talks about John the Baptist, he says, ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,’ this is the kind of stuff that will comfort them. Just like the words about God’s grace and the provision you have in Christ comforts you, these things are what give hope and comfort, strength and support for the nation Israel.

“The word ‘comfort’ is an interesting word. We usually think about comfort like patting somebody on the back, making them feel better. But the word comfort really means to fortify somebody in their inner man. ‘Fort’ is for fortitude. The prefix ‘com’ is ‘to bring it into your life’ with fortitude. ‘To be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man.’

"That’s what comfort is and that’s what sound doctrine does in your inner man. The more doctrine--the more explanation, the more details you have--the more comfort there is.

“I’m often struck by I Thessalonians 4:18: ‘Wherefore comfort one another with these words.’ After describing the details of the rapture, he says, ‘Wherefore comfort one another with these words.’ I’ve thought and thought about that passage in the context of I Cor. 15:52: ‘In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.’

“It takes longer to read that than it takes for that to happen! Your resurrection is going to take place at the speed of light.

“That moment there . . . the Greek word translated ‘moment’ is our word ‘atom.’ When that word ‘atom’ got into the English language, it meant ‘the smallest part of something.’ Now, we now know you can split the atom and find some smaller things, but the reason they use that word in English is because that was the smallest thing anybody knew about. In order to define that, Paul goes on to call it ‘in the twinkling of an eye.’ The reflection of light off of your eye.

“Well, how fast does light travel? 186,000 miles per second, rounded off. That’s kind of fast, give or take a few miles. That’s pretty quick. It’s only 24,000 miles around the earth. That means every 100,000 miles you go better than four times around the earth and for 186,000, you’d go about 7-8 times around the earth a second. Whoa, you talk about BUSY, man!

*****

A Maschil is a psalm designed for the edification, the education, the understanding to be enlightened. It’s an instructive psalm. These titles, when it says a Maschil, there other kinds of psalms, and what those titles do is they tell you what the intent of the psalm is.

Psalm 89 says it’s a ‘Maschil of Ethan the Ezrahite.’ In I Kings 4 and I Chronicles 25 you’ll find Ethan. He was the wisest of Solomon’s counselors. God had told Solomon (I Kings 11) that because of his idolatry, the kingdom was going to be taken away from his sons and wasn’t going to continue in his family, and Ethan would have known about that.

“That’s why we’re going to read about the failure of the son of David to accomplish, and so Ethan writes this in the light, obviously, of knowing God was going to take the kingdom line lineage of Solomon away from his sons. But God wasn’t going to take the covenant away from David because there was going to be another son of David to accomplish what God promised.

“Psalm 89 says, “I will sing of the mercies of the LORD for ever: with my mouth will I make known thy faithfulness to all generations.
[2] For I have said, Mercy shall be built up for ever: thy faithfulness shalt thou establish in the very heavens.
[3] I have made a covenant with my chosen, I have sworn unto David my servant,
[4] Thy seed will I establish for ever, and build up thy throne to all generations. Selah.’

“In either verse two or three, Ethan quits talking and now God’s talking. And it’s really going to be God, through Ethan, talking for the rest of the chapter.

“Now, that term ‘Selah’ in prophecy . . .  I know what they say in the devotional commentaries, that that’s a rest note in music, and that’s true, and that you are supposed to stop and contemplate that and think about what he just wrote.

“But, you know, you’re supposed to meditate on all the words. When you see that word Selah in your Bible, especially in the psalms, that term does two things. No. 1, it tells you the context is the Second Advent. Two, you want to stop and think about this passage in light of the Second Coming.

“So it’s a little flag, a reminder, a thing to point out to you the context doctrinally is going to be the Second Advent. And if you want to see where you can know that for sure it’s Habakkuk 3.”

Me and the Chapmans

Some of the coincidences in life, seemingly overlooked by all, are so remarkable you’re just glad that none of it is lost on God. At least you can share the chuckle with Him!

On Easter Sunday I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mom, casually scanning the morning’s news headlines online, when I clicked on the New York Post website and saw one of their top highlighted stories was a long profile of a British woman, now in her 60s, who’s just released a book about how she was raised as a little girl by a colony of Capuchin monkeys after being abandoned deep inside a South American rainforest by kidnappers who botched her abduction.

She survived on bananas, Brazil nuts, guava and figs as she modeled the monkeys' eating habits and high-pitched cries and “even learned to climb trees, though she slept in a hollowed-out tree trunk at night.”

The article informed that Marina Chapman, who has written a just-released book about her 1950s experience, was “playing in her family’s vegetable garden when a man grabbed her and smothered her face with a rag she would later assume was dipped in chloroform. Such kidnappings were common in the era of La Violencia, a precursor to the civil war that continues in Colombia to this day . . . She believes the kidnapping was interrupted somehow, which is how she awoke from her drugged state alone in the jungle . . . Over time, Chapman shed all evidence of her past self, discarding her clothes and human habits.”

She was quoted as having written in her book, “I was growing a new, muscular body, strong in ways a child’s body normally isn’t. I had harder heels and palms, and an appetite for strange jungle foods. I was also beginning to move around like a monkey, and one of the reasons, perhaps, that I wasn’t aware of how I was growing was that I almost always walked on all fours now . . .”

*****

Intrigued by the woman’s tale, wondering if it really, really was true and anxiously wanting to see a photograph of her (not provided by the Post), I immediately typed “Marina Chapman” into Google and started reading other posted articles about her.

One I pulled up from the London Telegraph reported that “after 10 years in Bogotá, Chapman moved in with the Eusse family to the United Kingdom, where she worked as a nanny and a cook. The family, though Catholic, attended the Abundant Life church, a Christian Renewal congregation in Yorkshire. There, she met her future husband, John Chapman, a 28-year-old church organist and bacteriologist. In 1979, they wed. Marina Chapman did not share her jungle life with her husband until after they were married.”

It was at this point I stopped reading dead in my tracks and my eyes just stared at the screen, thinking in amazement, “That’s Johnny Appleseed’s name!!!!!”

Appleseed, a favorite character of mine in my childhood, was really John Chapman and, as anyone who knows anything about the Christian adventurer, he lived in the wilderness, had bear-like feet from walking barefoot all the time, even in winter, climbed trees, slept in a hollow log and befriended and acted like animals who he lived with and deeply cared about!!!

*****

To give you the whole scoop on why this all has me so tickled, here’s an article I wrote a couple of years ago:

I was nine years old when my family returned from being missionaries in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador, and after a year of camping out inside my grandmother's house in Akron, Ohio (I actually slept on the floor in a sleeping bag set up beside my grandmother's bed), we moved an hour-and-a-half away to a tiny farming/resort village called Loudonville.

Loudonville is popular statewide for its canoe liveries and campgrounds on both the Mohican and Blackfork rivers. It's also home to the Mohican State Forest and nearby Pleasant Hill Dam. Tons of campers fill the area each summer.

My summer jobs in high school included working at one of the liveries and at a custard ice cream stand in town. For two summers while attending Ohio State, I worked at both a water slide and Putt Putt golf course inside Wally Campgrounds (yes, just like in the Chevy Chase movie "Vacation," but its name precedes the classic comedy by at least two decades).

I spent all my free time during these summers cross-country cycling through the gorgeous rolling farm hills or woods that stretched for miles any direction you ventured outside Loudonville's city limits.

I preferred the back roads (and sometimes had to fight off unchained dogs with my attached bicycle pump), but would also ride country highways to destinations like Millersburg (known for its large Amish community), Mt. Vernon, Mansfield, Wooster, Butler and Mt. Gilead.

Whenever I rode up Route 60 (the road my family lived on) into Ashland, I'd pass a large fruit stand my mom always bought her cooking apples from every fall. The outdoor/indoor market was named for Johnny Appleseed, who was said to have spread the apple seeds and nurtured the young trees that led to the property's apple orchards.

Because Johnny Appleseed was known to have been all through the territory surrounding Loudonville, clearing trees and brush to spread seeds and plant orchards, I'd think about him now and then on my excursions—actually more often than I should admit!

I was fascinated by the guy's story. He was a true free spirit, roaming the earth barefoot in a tattered, patched coat with a Bible buttoned inside it, using his head to haul around the cast-iron stewpot he cooked in.

He loved children, animals and nature and befriended the Indians even as he helped settlers avoid them. Historical records even verify that in the War of 1812, he traveled 30 miles to summon American troops to Mansfield, Ohio, thus forestalling a raid by Native Americans who were allied with the British.

Johnny's real last name was Chapman and he was born in Leominster, Mass., in 1774. He left home at 23, heading westward into the wilderness with a simple dream to plant apple trees. All he brought with him was his stewpot, a hatchet, a flint and steel for making fire, a bag of cornmeal and a sack of apple seeds.

"He gave away his clothes to anyone who needed a coat or trousers or shoes," says the children's book I have on him, "The True Tale of Johnny Appleseed," written by Margaret Hodges. "Most of the time he wore no shoes. One man said that he saw Johnny breaking the ice in a creek with a bare foot.

"All along his path he planted apple seeds. If he was invited to spend the night in a cabin, he would not take a bed, but slept on the floor. He would not eat until he was sure that the children in the family were full. He loved honey but would never take it from a bee tree until he saw that the bees had enough honey to keep themselves alive during the winter. A strange man indeed!"

Johnny followed creeks and rivers westward using borrowed canoes, then crossed the wild Alleghenys on foot. When a record winter storm caught him unaware, he wrapped his feet with pieces of cloth torn from his coat and wove tree branches into makeshift snowshoes.

"As time went by, Johnny walked so long and so far that his feet grew almost as tough as an animal's paws," writes Hodges in her book. "In other ways, too, he came to be like an animal. He could curl up to sleep under a bush or in the hollow of a tree."

Of course, there were people who thought Johnny was nuts, walking about in no shoes, a ragged coat and stewpot hat, but the children always loved him and they were the ones to coin his famous name of Appleseed. He would read stories from the Bible to them and even would tear Bible prayer and devotional books apart, leaving sections in tree boughs during the summertime for children to find.

By the spring of 1845, Johnny had come as far west as Fort Wayne, Ind. and was staying with a family when news arrived that cattle had broken into one of his new orchards 15 miles away.

"The weather was cold and wet, but he set off at once and never stopped to rest on the long walk," writes Hodges. "'Cloudy. Snow showers,' an Indiana farmer wrote in his diary that day. The next day the weather report was, 'Snow showers all day.' When Johnny got back to his friends' house, they put him to bed with a high fever. During the March snows, Johnny Appleseed died, and his body returned to the earth that he had loved. By early April, winter was past. The weather report read, 'In the night thunder showers—then fair—first apple blossoms."

*****

When I wrote this article on Appleseed I didn’t even know as much as I do today about how closely linked he was with the Loudonville area. Wikipedia, for one, writes, However, Henry Howe reported that Appleseed had been a frequent visitor to Perrysville, Ohio. He was to propose to Miss Nancy Tannehill there—only to find that he was a day late; she had accepted a prior proposal.

Perrysville was the other half of the Loudonville-Perrysville School District that I graduated high school from and I rode my bike through the little town and its outskirts, only five miles from downtown Loudonville, all the time. I knew its back roads by heart!

My sister lived in Mansfield all of her adult life. Wikipedia says:

According to Harper's New Monthly Magazine, towards the end of his career, he was present when an itinerant missionary was exhorting an open-air congregation in Mansfield, Ohio. The sermon was long and severe on the topic of extravagance, because the pioneers were buying such indulgences as calico and imported tea. “Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is traveling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?” the preacher repeatedly asked until Johnny Appleseed, his endurance worn out, walked up to the preacher, put his bare foot on the stump that had served as a podium, and said, “Here's your primitive Christian!” The flummoxed sermonizer dismissed the congregation.

Well, I know I’m not going to forget Marina Chapman’s story, especially after writing this! I can’t wait to see the documentary National Geographic’s going to make on her!