Bible Gems

March 6

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?  As it is written, For Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.  Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us."  (Romans 8:35-37)

    In verse 31 we read, "What then shall we say to these things," and a series of answers comes through the rest of the chapter.  In verse 35 is the final answer to this great question.  Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.  It has been shown that we are absolutely one with the Lord Jesus Christ, and the certainty of our salvation and our union with Him have been manifest.  We have been declared united to Christ.  We have been looked upon by the Father as being in Christ.  "What then shall we say to these things?"

    In the face of all that He has done for us through His matchless love, what is there left to say?  The love of Christ!  What a theme!  What is there in literature to compare with this love?  What is there in history that can approach the magnitude of that which our Saviour has shown to us of His heart for us?  He loves us.

    Harold Voelkel went to Korea as a missionary.  When the Korean war began he was immediately taken into the US Army as a Chaplain, and assigned to the camps of the prisoners of war.  Tens of thousands of North Koreans were imprisoned in great compounds.  The communists had infiltrated the camps with their agents and there were riots and rebellion.  Then Voelkel came with the truth of God.  He entered the first pen where there were several hundred men.  When he began to talk to them in their own tongue their resistance faded and they crowded around him and waited for his message.  He began by telling them he wanted to teach them a song.  It was a rude translation into Korean of the children's hymn "Jesus loves me, this I know," and sung to that tune.  He kept them about an hour and told them he would be back the next day.  He then went into the next pen and began all over again.  Day after day he continued, entering a dozen or more pens each day and teaching them to sing "Jesus loves me."  Weeks passed and then months.  By this time there were several thousand of these North Koreans who were professing their faith in Christ as their personal Saviour.

    Discipline in the camps became easier.  The communists could not find easy followers as they had at first.  When the question of repatriation arose, these men insisted that they did not want to go home.  They wanted to live in the free world.  It was the message of the love of Jesus Christ that had transformed these men, and had given them vision not only of the world to come but of free life here on earth.  (Donald Grey Barnhouse)

N.J. Hiebert # 2180