The Lost Cord of Early Christians
The year was 1925, the setting was the Belgian Congo. Charles Thomas Studd sat in an exhausted solitude well beyond much western Christian imagination and wrote:
Sometimes I feel and especially of late, that my cross is heavy beyond endurance... my heart seems worn out and bruised beyond repair, and in my deep loneliness I often wish to be gone.#
Later he met with eight other torn but also bickering missionaries of his team. Studd shared Hebrews 11, the passage he had studied in that chilled African darkness at 3 am. C.T. loved it so. He knew it was His Lord's purple passage for faith to be inspired in those whose faith waned.
He taught it and the Holy Spirit moved amongst these disgruntled servants, his team of workers.
As C.T. Studd fed his team, unity was re-sown and party-spirit laid threadbare. A fresh surrender of his missionaries again dead to self, ignited his mind with a new label - they were now the unconquerables.
This refreshed faith is described:
it was the lost cord of early Christianity revived - those men whose honor was to suffer for Christ, who sang praises with bleeding backs and feet in the stocks, who had faces of angels and prayed for their enemies when being battered to death by a howling mob.##
C.T. Studd's lost cord appears misplaced once again. Who this day will lift their cross or count the nails?
To this day what has changed about western Christianity to make it weak and wobble?
- We have been educated well beyond our ability to obey.
- Sin is whitewashed. It looks so inoffensive.
- The Bible's claims are diluted and therefore emptied.
BUT this truth still hangs from the clouds and swings over every believer and pagan alike:
Christ is either Lord of all or not at all.
Then He called the crowd toHhim along with his disciples and said: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Me.' (Mark 8:34)
Could the good Lord be calling you too, to be His next unconquerable?
Today's Soul Snippet:
'Jesus came not to save us in our sins, but from them.' ~ C.T. Studd
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#Norman Grubb, "C.T. Studd - Cricketer & Pioneer" (Guildford, Surrey: Lutterworth Publishing, 1982) 198
## ibid 201
Enjoy these two C.T. Studd inspired SoulSnacks:
Read the truth of 13 Very Early Unconquerables and The Posts of Discomfort