Simplicity Cascade

Down under, in Australia, one of the more interesting cities is the city of Perth, on the west coast of Australia. Much smaller when I was there than it is now. There in the summer, it was hot and windy. I remember the wide streets and the generally pleasant atmosphere, attitude and anticipation of visiting and then moving onto the South Pacific. Staying at the wonderful and famous Duxton Hotel, I had walked to a shopping area and was sitting on a bench when a middle-aged man came over and sat next to me and began to talk to me with an accent hard to understand. It turns out that he was an Aborigines and was from the outback; a Christianity convert by a missionary, and he had come to Perth in order to improve his life.

To make a long story short, we discussed our mutual Christian beliefs and he told me that he was having great difficulty finding a church in Perth where he could feel secure in his faith. I told him that even a Christian from America had great difficulty doing that, that Christianity had been polluted by the wisdom of men and that the simplicity found in Christ is estranged by the philosophies of men. He said, “I have a child's faith; I love God's Word. I love to hear and read the scripture but I have yet to find a church in Perth where the scripture is preached in its fullness and simplicity. I keep searching; I have a hunger for the teaching and the preaching of God's Word. I feel I am at a concert hall with the formality and rituals, ushers and programs.”

The questions of this new convert, a baby in Christ, I have encountered all over the world. From a new Methodist church in dark Africa where they were trying to get a roof on the building to the Baptist Association activities in eastern North Carolina, I find people searching; trying to find public housing for their faith. We are told to come together as a church, but have seemingly forgotten the importance of the mixture associating the kindergarten with the graduate school in the verisimilitude of one worship service.

I talked with him about the great cathedrals around the world; the stained glass windows, organs that resounded in religious music, the great rose window of Notre Dame, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I talked to him of the simplicity of the rural church where I was reared; a piano and gustily singing uneducated voices, as well as well-paid, well-trained choirs in great churches - but all supposedly proclaiming the grace and mercy of almighty God. I said to him, as I say to myself so often, “The simple faith of God in Christ is within me. All the other escapade and entourage is just man-made periphery.” One's faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1) It is a matter of confidence that we have as individual believers. I said to him, “Thank God every day of your life that someone reached you with the matchless message and redemption of Jesus Christ. The very fact that you want to know more --- believe me you will never get enough. And you will learn that you can find worship with others, great or small, or just with God alone. God is a spirit and we find our greatest worship with Him in the closet.”

I talked with him about my mother's mother, my maternal grandmother, Lanie Underwood Pittman. She was a woman of astounding faith. As her oldest grandchild, she shared with me things she did not share with anyone else because, she knew something about me and saw something within me worth the experience. My mother had told me this but, I needed to hear it from her own lips, that early each morning, she would go to the family cemetery and there enjoyed the simplicity of visiting with my relatives, already in heaven, while the dew was still on the flowers. God gave her the spiritual experience of talking with the spirits from the grave --- my aunts who had died in the great flu epidemic of 1918, her small son who had died in that epidemic, my great grandparents. It was there she reinforced the stalwart, unflinching devotion to her Savior. She was able to continue her personal relationship with her departed loved ones, now in glory, and the Redeemer who would give her the faith not only to die with, but to live by.

From the time the serpent beguiled Eve, and our first parents were thrown out of God's garden, men have tried to complicate the simplicity of God's plan for the world and His own. The creation, as described in God's word, is just too simple for the educated mind. Its simplicity is all we need and even though there has been much science fiction, no one has been able to improve God's description. Just to think that it takes two and one half days for light traveling one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second to arrive at your eye from the nearest star, and just to think that God has the very hairs on your head numbered. Just to think that at the top and the bottom of this one planet there are four and a half million square miles of glaciers (I have visited both the north and south pole) with the trillions of snowflakes and ice crystals He designed each individually --- no two have ever been found the same! Just to think that the billions of human beings magnificently created by God (Psalm 139), no two have the same facial features, no two have the same voice, the same fingerprints, the same flecks pattern in the iris of their eye, is something that should astound even Mr. Darwin and his followers. Can you even imagine that the tears of joy and the tears of grief coming out of the same eye have a different chemical composition? Books have been written on this one subject yet there are still those in the academic halls who wish to cloud God's sovereignty about everything (even the clotting of blood which no scientific mind has ever been able to reproduce) with the doubts, the theories, the theorems of one little speck in the almost limitless universe.

Secondly, the simplicity of salvation is not complicated enough for the academic mind. We want rituals, laws, works, equations as a substitution for Divine Redemption. The twelve greatest words ever written “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so” is too simple for the sophisticate but God clearly tells us that the wisdom of man is just the foolishness of God. “Keep it simple stupid --- KISS” is not something new in progressive education. God made it simple for we stupid people before the very foundation of the world.

Thirdly, the simplicity of speaking to God. “GOD IS BOSS!” He only requires our trust. I am convinced that if you were to ask any human being who has lived on this earth and has now gone on to his destination, regardless of destination, what he wished he had done differently, he or she would say “to have learned to trust God completely.” God speaks to us through His eternal Word. It is the answer book to every problem, written in language that anyone can understand. One denomination, for a very long time, promoted the idea that only one with a Roman collar could explain God's inerrant Word. Even the Roman Catholic Church now promotes the idea of Bible study. In God's judgment, you will be on your own. Your counselor, priest, pastor, even your lawyer, saved or unsaved, will not be able to defend you. God is a perfect score keeper --- He will have all the evidence. Then as now, learn to seek His mercy. It is so simple....help!

Fourthly, the greatest power in all the world, the very power that raised Christ from the dead, the very power that brought Lazarus out of the grave, the power that multiplied loaves and fishes, the power of prayer. When you have denominations, you have what denominations can do. When you have churches, you have what churches can do. When you have education, you have what education can do. When you have prayer, you have what God can do. I am firmly convinced on the authority of God's Word that if there is anything on earth that we need, it is what God can do. The simplicity of just asking. The simplicity of knowing when we ask, He hears us and will respond according to His riches in glory. Christ Himself said, “If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” (John 14:14) Hebrews 4:16 says, “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”

In my lifetime, when asked to pray at a large gathering, religious or otherwise, I have been approached by unsaved, uncaring people who have said to me, “I cannot believe that a man of science would talk to a spirit in public?” These same scoffers and doubters will sit and listen to great religious music, will show admiration for great religious art, will recognize the change that takes place in an addict's sinful, physical and emotional condition, will recognize the history of spiritual relevance in the world, but because of their own bias, will not yield to the supreme sovereignty of God.

The grave is not the ending point in this excursion of humanity. From one end of the earth to the other, whether a monkey temple or a carving out of the wood of a tree, men have sought something greater to worship than themselves. At one time, the Lamas controlled Asia from the Danube to the Pacific. The God-less, communist Russians came in and destroyed all the Buddhist places of worship in Mongolia and Siberia. For thirty years, their worship at the base of the steps was deprived. One visit from the Dalai Lama erased their troubles of the past thirty years. The simplicity of Christ, which dominated Europe and America for hundreds of years, has been threatened by moral relevancy, technology, the winds of doubt promoted by academics and liberalism, but mankind with a need for the eternal security of the love of God through Christ will return to the cascades of the simplicity found in faith.


“Wonderful story of love;
Tell it to me again;
Wonderful story of love;
Wake the immortal strain!
Angels with rapture announce it,
Shepherds with wonder receive it;
Sinner, oh, won’t you believe it?
Wonderful story of love.”

Wonderful Story of Love
John M. Driver, 1892