The Wall of Remembrance We are finally nearing the end of moving back into our home on Beaver Lake in Northwest Arkansas. Today we completed “the wall of remembrance” in my office/library. To some it might appear egotistical to display awards, book covers, and other memorabilia from 48.5 years of ministry but I don’t think of it that way. To my way of thinking it does not represent things that I have accomplished but the faithfulness of God. Every time I look at that wall I am reminded that God has a long history of using the insignificant to accomplish the impossible. One of the things I treasure most is a piece of concrete from the old Berlin Wall. Perhaps more than any other single thing it represents the fact that with God all things are possible. Let me set the stage for you. In the 1970’s a minister “prophesied” that the Soviet Union would collapse and that following its collapse, there would be a great spiritual awaking in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet block countries. I managed not to snicker when I heard about it, but just barely. I told someone that it was a good thing we didn’t stone false prophets or that man would surely die. As far as I was concerned there was no way his prophecy was going to come true. The Soviet Union was a super power; an atheistic government that persecuted Christians and the possibility of its demise was inconceivable to me. I should have reread Daniel, especially that part about a rock not made by human hands. Daniel put it like this: “This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands...the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever” (Daniel 2:45, 44). At this point, I pause in my writing to glance at the wall to my left. Prominently displayed among my memorabilia is a piece of the Berlin Wall, or perhaps I should say what used to be the Berlin Wall, for on November 9, 1989 that wall came down. Following that historic moment, Communist governments begin to fall in rapid succession. Finally the Soviet Union itself collapsed in August 1991. What neither military might nor the threat of nuclear war could do, God did! There followed a spiritual awaking in the former Soviet Union of nearly unprecedented magnitude. Old churches were reopened, new churches were planted, and Bibles were freely distributed in schools and hospitals. High-ranking government officials made public confessions of their new faith in Christ. God’s kingdom was coming! That’s the kind of thing I think about when I look at my wall of remembrance—God’s great faithfulness displayed in acts both great and small.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 04:42:17 +0000
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