Jump Start # 4011
Acts 5:29 “But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than men.’”
Throwback Thursday: an article written from the past
The Determination to Obey the Lord
At Shell Knob, Missouri, a few years ago I was preaching one miserably cold day. The thermometer registered ten degrees below zero when we started to the meeting house. The ground was completely covered with sleet and ice, and the crowd was rather small as a result of slick roads. I preached a simple and practical lesson, but noted as I began, a young mother with a tiny baby in her arms who had come in and was seated near the stove. When the closing song was sung (more as a matter of formality than anything else, for I had no idea that there was anyone there who was not a Christian) this young mother went forward and told me she wanted to be baptized. I asked her, “When?” She answered, “Right now.” That started a murmur among the folk present. A few of them were not very well informed I suppose, and they were heard to say, “It will kill her” and “It will make her sick,” etc.
Well, we went down to White River and Henry Applegate took a crowbar and walked out on the ice to a place where he thought the water could be about the proper depth for baptizing and broke through the ice until a pit large enough had been broken through. He pulled a piece of the ice up on top and measured it with a carpenter’s rule. It was EIGHT INCHES THICK. I slipped off into the water and two men took the woman by her arms and lifted her over the edge of the ice. I tucked her long coat about her feet as she was let down into the icy water, but she never so much as shivered! I baptized her and she was put into a car and taken back to the house where warm, dry clothing was provided.
The weather warmed up that afternoon and we had a house almost full for the evening service. When I entered the church house I saw that little mother with her baby again. I walked up and looked at her and with mock surprise said, “Aren’t you dead?” She smiled and said, “I am very much alive and quite well.” I then said, “Why surely you have pneumonia, or measles, or maybe pellagra!!!” She insisted that she was perfectly well and happy. So I said, “Well, that proves that people can be mistaken. Some of the folk here this morning said it would kill you if you dared the cold to obey the Lord’s commandment to ‘be baptized.’ I was certain that our Lord would never ask a person to do something which would kill him to do.”
It is better to obey God than men.
Rue Porter (1890-1967) from I Remember, pg. 54-55
Roger
January, 2006