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!

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”