Quite a few of the Little Rock team enjoyed the hospitality of the Lord’s people en route to the outreach there. We were reminded of the words of John, who at the same time spoke of the Lord’s workers who “went out for the sake of the Name, taking nothing of the Gentiles” (3 Jn. 7) and of the believers helping the Lord’s people on their way “after a godly manner,” or “worthy of God” (v. 6), that is, the way you would treat God if He came to stay at your house. We saw love at work in preparing rooms, serving meals, cleaning up afterward, even giving us gifts of fellowship! Who else but the Lord’s people would do such a thing?
Their motive was evident. They were doing it for the same reason we were going to Little Rock: “for the sake of the Name.” It was the love of Christ that constrained them. Although their labor was obviously sacrificial and costly, it was also obviously a joy, a labor of love. Like the observation of Sheba’s queen, we also note, “Happy are thy men, happy are these thy servants” (2 Chron. 9:7).
But as we sat at breakfast in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Bob and Jane Clark, our hosts, told us of the love story behind the one we were enjoying.
Jane had grown up in Arkansas and had been saved at a “revival” but had been untaught. She didn’t know she should not marry an unsaved man–and she did. He was called one day to fix a well at a retirement home in nearby Marble Hill. The well pump was the most stubborn one Bob had ever faced. He had to return time and time again–and each time he did, Miss Minna Jean Bollinger “gospelled” him. She gave him coffee, mixed with a generous dose of Good News. She put tracts in his pocket, and sent prayers after him, as he disappeared down the road. No one would suspect her of sabotaging her own well to encourage his return visits, but Someone seemed to be doing it!
Meanwhile Jane kept prodding him to find out who these people were. She liked those tracts, and the interest these people were showing in her husband. But their answer–“We’re just Christians, meeting in the Lord’s name”–led her to believe they were Jehovah’s Witnesses or something. And this bit about living by faith? Bob had heard that before! He wondered if he would get paid. But he received his payment on schedule, and concluded, “These people really do live by faith.”
As they made their way to Marble Hill for a Bible study, Bob remarked to Jane, “We’re not going to make a habit of this; I don’t want to miss my Gunsmoke.” But Bob was saved the second week, and has missed a few Gunsmokes since then. And all because someone loved the soul of a repairman for Christ’s sake.
But the love story doesn’t start there. How did El Nathan Home end up in the hills of Missouri? For the love of elderly saints–for the sake of the Name. And before the Bollingers was Sister Abigail, Abigail Townsend Luffe, who received the saintly benediction of George Mueller, who was led to the Lord as a wild-living college student by those who saw beyond his lifestyle to his lost soul.
Nor does the river of love begin there. We may follow it back through church history to the apostles who went out for the sake of the Name. Back to Calvary, to Nazareth, to Bethlehem, to heaven itself, back to the heart of God.
For love of a soul, for love to the saints, for love of the Master, the people of God carry on. Nothing else would carry them through–through the bone-wearying labor, through the opposition of the enemy and unfair criticisms of brethren, through sleepless nights and disappointments, through the dark night of our pilgrimage “until the long dawn appears.”
But such love is enough. “Love never fails” because its headwaters are in God, the God of love, who “faileth not.” The great love story flows on. This desert world, parched for love, desperately needs a drink from this refreshing supply. “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given unto us” (Rom. 5:5).