Pool Side Bible School

25 March 2018

Dear Phyllis,

There are many things I enjoy very much, but, hands down, my greatest pleasure in life is Bible teaching. There is nothing more satisfying than standing before a class of interested students sharing the truths of the Word of God. It has been my privilege to speak in several Bible schools, and now, in my senior years, the Lord has given me the most unusual Bible school of all. It is the Pool Side Bible school. Every morning I go to Netrahong Kindergarten to teach children English. Then for the next hour or two Sangha and I sit beside their small swimming pool drinking coffee and talking while he watches the children swim. Sangha has a wonderful thirst for spiritual truth and it is my great privilege to share with him what I know.

Last week we went over the basics again. He wanted to know about body, soul, and spirit. I started by telling him that when Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens an the earth”, this tells us that there are two worlds. There is the spiritual world and the physical world. The spiritual world was created first. The Bible tells us that there were angels present when God created the earth. And we are participants in both worlds. Just as our environment is the physical world there is also the spiritual world all around us.

When God created man He made us with three parts – body, soul, and spirit. The soul lives in the body. The soul is our life. The soul has the five senses – sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch. This gives us our awareness of the world around us. The soul and the heart are the same thing. The soul is our awareness of the external and the heart is what we are inside. The heart is composed by three parts, the intellect, the emotions, and the will. I am not giving verses here but all of this is clearly taught in scripture.

There are some scholars who quibble over soul and spirit but in scripture this is black and white with distinctly different words in Greek. Paul prays that they be sanctified spirit, soul, and body (1 Th. 5:23). I do not profess to have such a good understanding about the spirit. In his classic, The Spiritual Man, Watchman Nee describes the spirit as being composed by spiritual awareness, conscience, and worship. Obviously there is something in us that makes us somewhat aware of the spirit world around us and some people are considerably more spiritually sensitive than others. There is a great deal of communication on a level beyond our natural senses. Some people are highly clairvoyant and others are not. Some people can be hypnotized and others cannot.

But the main thing about the spirit is that all men are born dead. When God warned Adam that if he ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge good and evil that he would die, that was not a you-might warning. That was an volitional law and Adam died. Genesis 3 clearly shows what happened, and every descendant of Adam since then has been born dead (Eph. 2:1,5). Tragically what this means is that we are born with a sin nature and separated from God. The soul of Adam remained alive but his spirit died.

There is only one way this can be corrected – we must be born-again. We must have a new spiritual birth. Flesh and blood cannot produce this. Only God can produce life in the new birth (Jn. 1:13). If we had more of a conviction of the miraculous nature of the new-birth we might not be so intent in trying to save people intellectually. Somehow we think souls can be brought into the Kingdom of God intellectually, if we only teach them the 4 spiritual laws, or they understand the Gospel that Jesus died for our sins. Soulish evangelism is utterly ineffectually. Flesh cannot produce spirit. Only spirit can produce spirit. This is accomplished by Jesus speaking. Jesus told the Pharisees that, “the hour is coming – AND NOW IS – that the dead shall hear the Voice of the Son of God and THEY THAT HEAR SHALL LIVE (Jn. 5:25). Until Jesus speaks there is no life and when He speaks life is created there. God created the world by speaking and Jesus saves souls by speaking.

Oh the new-birth is amazing. What happens at the new-birth is that the very Spirit of Christ comes to live in our heart. This gives us a new nature. Suddenly we know God. Suddenly we love God and believe His Word. What happens at the new birth is similar to what happened to Mary. To produce a child there must be two seeds – the male and the female seed - coming together. In Mary's case the male side was the Holy Spirit. All human blood comes from the male seed, but Jesus never had a drop of Adam's blood in Him. That is why He is so unique. The virgin birth is a foundational doctrine. What was produced inside Mary's body is the same thing that is produced in us. There was the life of God in Mary's womb, and when we are born-again the Spirit of Christ is joined to our spirit making a new man.

If Jesus truly lives in our heart there is something of God in us.

Before I was saved I thought anyone who said, “God spoke to me”, needed to be institutionalized of put on medication. When I first got saved I noticed the Christian brothers frequently used that phrase. I didn't know that God had a Voice and He consciously spoke to people. About a month after I had accepted Christ I had my first encounter with the Holy Spirit. In my Bible reading I noticed John 14:21 - “He that hath My commandments and keeps them, he it is that loveth Me … and I will MANIFEST Myself to him”. That verb manifest stood out to me and I wondered what it meant. I thought it probably it meant when we die we will go to heaven and see Jesus. But one morning as I was walking through a parking lot the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, “I have fulfilled that. I have manifested Myself to you”. Suddenly I stopped and thought, “That is true. The Lord has manifested (revealed) Himself to me. I know the Lord”. That verse has always been special to me and for 61 years I have thought it was CAUSE and EFFECT. If we keep His commandments He will reveal Himself to us. Keeping is the cause and manifesting is the effect. But last week for the first time I saw that I was wrong. Keeping the commandments is the effect not the cause. The real cause is being born of His Spirit. Keeping the commands is the effect (result) of Jesus living in the heart. When Jesus said, “He that has My commandments and keeps them”, He is not talking about something to do but the description of someone who is born-again.

Last week I had a very serious discussion with Sangha about this. We really went at it for 20 minutes. He said, “You are wrong. Keeping the commandments is the cause not the effect”. I replied, “That is exactly what I thought for 61 years, but now I see it differently”. To explain this I said, “No one becomes a Christian by living a clean life. Many good people go to hell. But if Jesus truly lives in someones heart he will live a clean life. Living a clean life is the effect (result) of Jesus living in their heart.” No one gets saved by stop smoking but when someone gets saved they will quit. A friend wanted to get saved but he liked to smoke. He asked the pastor, “Does smoking have anything to do with salvation?” The pastor to him, “Not at all” - so he got saved - and quit smoking. He told me, “What the pastor didn't tell me was when I got saved I wouldn't want to smoke any more”. Sangha saw what I was talking about and said, “You are right. Loving and keeping God's Word is the effect – not the cause - it is the result of what happens to someone when Jesus take up residence in the heart.

The Lord has only given me one student in the Pool Side Bible school, but the joy level is the same. I got my training sitting on a milk stool in Florida, but the main issue is “is the Holy Spirit the teacher?”. Oh how wonderful that Jesus has come to live in us, to speak to us, and teach us. Oh thank You Jesus,

                                      bill

The Blessor

4 March 2018

Dear Phyllis,

In the 1970s I was the most blessed man on planet earth. I had one of the best jobs in Japan and lived in the finest house in the country. More than that, Karuizawa was unchallenged as the number one town in Japan. The thing that made Karuizawa so special was the environment. We were located at exactly 1,000 meters (3,ooo feet) at the base of an active volcano, Mt. Asama.

In the 1960s and 70s riding a train in Japan was so bad you could hardly see from one end of a coach to the other. Taking the train home from Tokyo to Karuizawa was just like being in a smoke house and when you got off you felt like a smoked salmon. It was an exhilarating experience just to get off the train. Taking a deep breath of cool, fresh, Karuizawa mountain air was a sensual experience. The air smelled like steak, and the cool tap water in Karuizawa was more delicious than the finest French wine. My property was easily the best land in Karuizawa. It was all by itself slightly higher than any other place in town on the base of Hanareyama. I built a prayer tower for myself and would go out there to meet with the Lord every morning. In the early morning, frequently there would be fog over town and looking down on it was like being in heaven looking down on the earth. And off in the distance I could see the snow capped Japanese Alps. Oh my goodness it was wonderful. But getting home was not the main attraction. I loved my wife and two sons. I loved my house and everything in it but there was nothing I would swap for my family. Being with my family was the greatest pleasure.

Samuel Rutherford wrote, “The Lord has opened His door and taken

a poor sinner into His house of wine, and has left me so sick of love for my Lord Jesus that if heaven were at my disposing I would not give it for Christ, and would not be content to go to heaven except persuaded that Christ were there. … Christ has come and run away to heaven with my heart and love so that neither my heart nor love are mine. I pray God that Christ may always keep them without reservation.”

In his classic The Sands of Time hymn Rutherford wrote, “The Bride eyes not her garment but her dear Bridegrooms face. I will not look on glory but on my King of grace. Not to the crown He giveth but to His pierced Hand. The Lamb of God is all the glory of Imanuel's land.”

This is what it is all about. It maybe trite but it's true; the most important thing is not the blessing but the Blessor. We love things but do we love the One Who gives them more? Reading Rutherford has convinced me that there is so much more of Christ to be had right now than what we experience. There is no doubt, that if we knew Him better we would love Him more. In writing of Jesus, Solomon said, “As the apple tree among the wood, so is My Beloved among the sons. I sat down under His shade with great delight, and His fruit was sweet to my taste (S of S. 2:3). I trust you can identify with that. There have been some outstanding men in this world and we have some very dear friends, but are there any that compares with Jesus. It is one of the high light blessings of salvation to be able to say, “I sat down under His shadow with great delight”. There are a lot of pressures and problems that beat down upon us like a scorching sun. The burden of sin and daily struggles. But when we learn that Jesus is willing, and wants, to bear that for us; oh my goodness what relief! Man howdy that feels good. What a blessing to be able to sit in the shade of Jesus. Let Him take the heat. And the things He gives us. You know the song Count Your Blessing. Have you ever tried to count them one by one? You can't. You can start but we will never get to the end of all the blessing Jesus gives us daily. His apples are oishi (delicious) but we should never get to the place where we enjoy the apples more than the tree.

It has been my privilege to personally know a number of great Christian men. But there is one unusual brother that I would put in the top ten of men who have had the greatest influence on my life. Bill Schak was about the nearest to nothing of any Christian that I had ever met. He was a simple farm boy from a small town 5 miles from Mariana, Florida. Bill's heart was good but it would be a compliment to call him a baby Christian. His English grammar was so bad sometimes you wondered if English was a second language with him. In 1960, when the Russ O'Quinns returned to the states, we had to get a new Bible teacher for the adult Bible class at the Church of the Open Door. Of course I was the logical candidate. I had the best knowledge of scripture and was the most gifted teacher. But somehow I got passed over and Bill was selected to teach the class. Grief. But no one knew what the Lord had in store. When Bill got that Bible study he panicked. He decided to study 1^st Peter and started at verse one. I would stop by his room on Monday evening and say, “Le's go get some ice cream and a coke.” Bill would say, “I would love to go with you but we have 1 Pet. 1:1-5 for our study Sunday. I have no idea what it means and I can't go out tonight.” That was the story of Bill's life for the next six months. I never saw a man with such fanaticism for studying the Bible in my life – before or since. And it shouldn't be surprising that the Holy Spirit began to show Bill some things that were really deep. It was just like Song of Sol. 1:4 says - “Draw ME and WE will run after You”. This is one of the first spiritual laws that we find in the Song of Sol. There is an interesting play on pronouns – ME and WE. The spiritual law is this; when God begins to draw one person to Himself the result of that is plural - “Draw Me and We will run...”. It wasn't long before that Bible class was the main point of the church. It was not uncommon that when two people from that class got together mid-week the main topic of conversation was the Bible class last Sunday.

Bill told me that he got to the place that if he woke up in the middle of the night his mind was either studying the Bible or praying for friends. Nothing else crossed his mind. Day or night his mind was totally absorbed in the Word of God. I believe Rutherford was a man like that. He said Jesus had taken his heart and run off to heaven with it. Oh blessed loss. Bill Schak was a man like that. Would to God there were more like him. The reason Bill had such an impact on my life was because I saw what the Holy Spirit could do with a man that had little natural resources and make a giant out of him. Bill has always remained a model for me but I have never come close to his stature and I have never taught a class that provoked more interest than Bill's.

I love wood working. I love making things. I can sit for hours thinking about how to make something. There is nothing wrong with that. But oh that I had an obsession for Jesus. Rutherford wrote, “Oh, that I could peek trough a hole in the gate to heaven or climb up to a chamber-window to gaze upon that lovely Face. Time, time, why are you so cruel to me? When will it be that I shall be with my lovely Beloved?” There is a man with a real obsession for Jesus.

I fear there is an enormous gap between the Lord and ourselves. Why should this be. Is there any restraint in the heart of God? What Jesus told Nicodemus about the heart of the Father (Jn. 3:16) and the fact that the Father sent His Son on such an expensive mission should settle any doubts about what God thinks. And the fact that Jesus came, plus all that He told us while He was here should settle any question about His desire. And the Holy Spirit... . That one just blows my mind. In the Trinity, I wonder Who suffers the most. Jesus only had to put up with us for 33 years but the Holy Spirit has indwelt carnal Christians for 2,000 years. It is abundantly clear that the heart of God longs for our fellowship. In looking for the problem, that leaves only us.

Oh Lord feed us with hunger. Give us a craving for Yourself. Oh Lord draw us and we will run after You.

                    bill