Fleshy tables of the heart

"It was 1936 and two friends serving together at a Sunday school conference in Alabama were at lunch, sharing what God was doing in their lives," writes Aaron Earls. "One, a missionary to Brazil home on furlough, told the other, a hymn writer leading the music for the conference, that a health issue would keep him from returning to the country he had grown to love. The news, received just days before, had broken his heart.

"The hymn writer asked, 'What will you do?' And through tears, the missionary, R.S. Jones, told the hymn writer, B.B. McKinney, 'Wherever He leads, I’ll go.' McKinney was so moved that he penned the classic hymn that afternoon and sang it that night after Jones had preached, recounts Terry C. Terry, a musicologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation about McKinney. Since then, this song has been sung at invitation times and crusades, revivals and worship services."

Katherine Hankey (1834-1911) was 32 years old when she wrote the hymn, 'I Love to Tell the Story,' out of her heart's deep desire to tell the simple gospel story wherever she was in life," explains writer Helen Salem Rizk. "First, it was in the Sunday school of Clapham, England, where she became a devoted, refined, consecrated woman. Then, it was in the heart of Africa, where she spent most of her life, giving the sales of all her writings to missions. Finally, it was in the hospitals of London, where she spent the last minutes of her life telling lonely patients of God's beautiful love.

"When Hankey wrote the song in 1866, she was doing more than expressing a feeling in her own being, she was projecting that same feeling into the minds of thousands of people through the years who would sing her song and receive the same challenge."

I love to tell the story, more wonderful it seems

Than all the golden fancies of all our golden dreams;

1. I love to tell the story, it did so much for me,
2. 
   And that is just the reason I tell it now to thee.
3. *****
4. “In II Corinthians 3, Paul talks about the Corinthians being the living epistles. He explains, ‘Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.’
5. 
   
   “It struck me one day, ‘If they were the epistles ministered by Paul, didn’t Paul write some epistles?’ In essence, he’s saying that you and I are really ‘Romans through Philemon.’ THAT’S what He writes in your heart!
   
   
   “Now, God doesn’t automatically write it in there. It’s what He writes in your heart as you take in that truth. It’s the intake."