| Brian Jones, formerly a Calhoun resident, pastored the Seventh-day Adventist congregations in Gassaway, Glenville and Spencer, before moving to Wheeling. He frequently wrote a column for the Herald's Church News. He died this week in Wheeling. Obituary will follow.
Pastor Brian Jones
"Why Me?"
This question is rarely asked
in reference to our good fortune
to be so loved by God
that He sacrificed His all to save us from sin
and make us fit subjects for His kingdom.
If our understanding of His love
matured to the depths and heights
that it could, we would have little
to complain about - except
the dimness of our gratitude to God
for who He is what He has done,
and the leaden languor
of our obedience to His gracious
and sovereign will which ever
operates for our highest good
and our best happiness.
It is the vital glow of appreciation for the
immensity and diversity of God's love
that lends so large a measure of
compelling interest to the Bible.
All the Bible writers were animated by
a profound sense of God's goodness and grace
flowing with inexhaustible profusion,
rushing with incalculable speed
yet infinite delicacy of action toward
the driest and most desolate of lives.
Jesus did not come
to congratulate the righteous
or start a religious club to celebrate
and reward the civic achievements
of men adept at fabricating
a lucrative and prestigious morality.
He came to save sinners,
among whom we all number.
To save us by no mechanical
stereotyped process,
nor with patronizing detachment
as though He were a cosmic clinician come to
renovate us through genetic modification.
He donned no rubber gloves to protect Himself
from the infective slough of our
moral putrefaction. Rather He bodily
touched the lepers and said, "Be clean!"
Thus causing their plague to vanish.
Yet for all His unshielded contact with us,
He remained holy harmless, undefiled, separate
from sinners, higher than the heavens
not in pride, but in character
not in accessibility, but in charity
not in distance, but in aspiration
for our ennoblement through
Blood-bought union with Him.
His plans for us contemplate
nothing less than full restoration
to the divine glory of His character.
And this He accomplishes by the gospel
whose power is unto all and upon all
that believe in Him. Our unworthiness of
the blessing is the most potent argument in favor
of our need for it, and of His desire to impart it.
"Many, O Lord my God, are Thy wonderful works which Thou
hast done, and Thy thoughts which are toward us:
they cannot be reckoned up in order unto Thee:
if I would declare and speak of them,
They are more than can be numbered." Psalm 40:5
"Thou hast beset me behind and before,
and laid Thy hand upon me. Such knowledge
is too wonderful for me; it is high,
I cannot attain unto it." "How
precious also are Thy thoughts unto me, O God!
How great is the sum of them!
If I should count them, they are more
in number than the sand: when I awake,
I am still with Thee." Psalm 139:5,6,17,18
"Who is like unto the Lord
Our God, Who dwelleth on high,
Who humbleth Himself to behold
the things that are in heaven,
and in the earth! He raiseth the poor
out of the dust, and lifteth
the needy out of the dunghill,
that He may set him with princes,
Even the princes of His people." Psalm 113:5-8
See also Isaiah 44:22,23; 1 John 2:2; Jer. 31:3; 1 Peter 1:18-25; Matt. 11:28-30; John 7:37,38; Revelation 22:17; 2 Cor. 8:9; Titus 3:5-7; Isaiah 55:6-13; Psalm 63:3-7; 116:12,13.
"There's a wideness in God's mercy
Like the wideness of the sea;
There's a kindness in His justice
Which is more than liberty.
"For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of man's mind;
And the heart of the eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.
"But we make His love more narrow
By false limits of our own
And we magnify His strictness
With a zeal he will not own.
"If our love were but more simple,
We should take Him at His word;
And our lives would be all sunshine
In the sweetness of our Lord.
"He is calling, 'Come to Me!'
Lord, I gladly follow Thee." ... (Faber)
| 
