Padded Pews

On my second trip to China in 1980, I visited the famous Mogao Caves (a system of 492 temples in which thousands of Buddhist statues are located) where statue of Buddha and other Buddhist art is located. It is a treasury of Buddhist history and one of the many phenomenal aspects of Chinese life as affected by art and religion. The thing I remember most about the visit, four Chinese men walked up to me and said in English, “Are you a Christian? We are Christian.” This was the last question I ever expected to hear in a godless, communist country, by men dressed in the usual Mao uniforms and who looked no different than the zillions of Chinese men and women everywhere. I said, “Yes, praise God. I am thankful you are able to recognize a fellow Christian. I wished there were some way I could express to you how much God loves you and how much the Christians in the world are praying for you.”

Knowing the prying ears of government agents, including my guide, I made their photograph, shook their hands, gave each of them my card and retreated. The first words out of my guides mouth were, “What did those men say to you?” I said, “They were anxious to practice their English. I told them how much I was enjoying the caves.” The Chinese Christian church is growing because, like the early Christian church started in Antioch. Life is not easy for the Christian there, they are suffering persecution, but always, under persecution, the church grows. I understand that in spite of the starvation and degradation of the people in North Korea, the Christian church is growing even though 100,000 Christians are in prison. If you can imagine the absolute depravity of existence outside prison, can you even imagine life inside a communist North Korean prison.

My son, my only child, (Dr. John M. Morris) after all his years of education, microbiology, medicine, theology, (2 doctorates) spent many years, along with his wife and children, on the mission field in South Korea. He said, “The new Christians are so sincere in their faith that even in sickness, they believe in the power of prayer which comes even before the doctor.” The most sickening matter of 21st century liberal Christian thought in this country at present, is that even in a case of counseling, the modernist pastor will send a Christian church member to a godless psychologist for help.

Other than visiting homes of many ambassadors in world travel, I always tried to visit missions and churches because like healthcare, soul care is the interest of my life. I was embarrassed before the holy spirit of almighty God to witness the simplicity of faith in impossible situations with mission churches around the world. (They do not have padded pews)

In the Cameroon’s, I attended a worship service under a large “brush arbor” with crude benches and many worshipers just sitting on the ground. They would spend much time in prayer with their knees and heads on the ground pleading for God’s mercy and thanking God for their blessings. There were no musical instruments just timing type drums to which they would sing with great gusto. Their worship did not include any of the voodoo type activity I had witnessed in voodoo festivals much of which had extended to the catholic services. These people had been taught the difference in true worship than just pretending with God on padded pews. It is not my purpose here to describe the mosque found in Muslim countries, the Zongs and temples of the Buddhist and Hindu religions or even the state sponsored religious houses found in secular countries such as Scandinavia.

You find about as much passion and faith in a state sponsored secular worship activity as you do in an American civic club or TV pseudo entertainment mockery. (Benny Hinn, Jimmy Swaggart, Robert Schuller, etc) I define faith as a verb, action based on belief, sustained by confidence. There are many definitions of faith in God’s inerrant word. I understand the word faith is defined as the safety under the wing of a mother bird or in the cleft of a large rock. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) We are saved by grace through faith and nothing more.

A blind person depends on faith much more then a sighted person. We truly walk by faith not sight and, I HAD RATHER WALK IN DARKNESS IN MY BLINDNESS WITH GOD THAN TO WALK IN DAYLIGHT WITH GOOD EYES ALONE.

We exercise our faith in other things everyday. We put a letter with a stamp on it addressed to a certain place with faith believing it will get there. We buy a can of food at the grocery store with faith believing the can is correctly labeled. We put a pill from a bottle into our throat with faith believing that some half drunk or drugged pharmacist did not mix up the pills with ones of poison. We could give thousands of examples of using faith everyday in our daily activities, starting the car, or turning on a light switch.

The tragedy is that too few young people have experienced farm life where expensive seeds and fertilizer are put in the ground and we have the faith to believe that God in his omnipotent mercy will send the rain and sunshine essential for plant growth. It is too bad that young people cannot see the incubation of eggs, the hatching of small chicks with the innate knowledge of how to drink water. Or hear the definite sound of a mother hen different from any other hen. The sheep recognizes their own shepherds voice.

“For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.” (Job 14:7) The trials of life is such that most would not want to continue without hope. For the Christian, our hope is in our salvation and the many promises and prophecies of God’s word that until this very minute have been fulfilled and He has never forgotten. In knowing this, the disabled, the disenfranchised, the depressed and the despondent keep going with the “blessed assurance” that God will “never leave us or forsake us”. We are told that without vision the people perish, without hope, those with vision or without vision cannot long survive. Hope is found in encouragement and accomplishment. Why else would anyone strive to do better? We live with the blessed hope of our eternal salvation, enduring, life’s problems and disappointments.

God is love and our one commandment is to love one another. (John 13:34) Even if I were not sure and assured by the omnipotence, omniscience, and inerrancy of God’s infallible word, I would have to be convinced of God’s love and faithfulness by one great story in the Bible.

Abraham, the first Jew, perhaps one of the wealthiest men in the world, was living in Ur of the Chaldeas, was instructed by God to leave to an uncertain place, six hundred miles north. His father Terah, a worshiper of idols, died on the trip, near Damascus. But, in a long story of faith and promises, women and sons, he was instructed to offer his son of promise, Isaac, as a sacrifice. In a marvelous story, a type of Christ before Christ, the son of promise, about the same age as Christ when he was crucified, carried the wood for the fire on his back, up on the mountain, and Abraham, in complete obedience, just before killing his son in the sacrifice, was told by God not to kill his son, but rather a lamb. One of the most remarkable things about this story, a father knowing he would sacrifice his long awaited son of promise, they arose early in the morning.

All this happening 4,000 years before the sacrifice of God’s only Son, who likewise carried wood on his back, was killed to redeem both you and me. God showed once and for all with the rending of the veil of the temple, top to bottom, that the supreme act of love had been demonstrated for eternity. Sad to say, from then until now, people are still partial to thieves. Today, more than ever, Barabbas, the thief, would still be selected. “And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13) Christianity has become so comfortable, padded pews, drama and drums, bells and smells. If Christians lived their faith before the world, the world would be changed. Instead, in the comfort zone of wanting to be accepted by the world, the world has changed and converted the church.