NEW PEOPLE

We need some new kind of people to do a new kind of work on the earth. In generations past the Lord has found people, (I would call normal, more than special) who were willing to be new for their time. We need to be those people for our time.

Thomas R. Kelly (1893-1941) the great Quaker thinker wrote, “Meister Eckhart said, “There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends, and honors, but it touches them too deeply to disown themselves.” It is this astonishing group who “will disown themselves” that is willing to follow him the other half, sincerely to disown this life which intends complete obedience, without reservations, that I would propose to you in all humility, in all boldness, in all seriousness. I mean this literally, utterly, completely, and I mean it for you and for me… commit your lives in unreserved obedience to him.

If we don’t realize the revolutionary explosiveness of this proposal we don’t understand what the Lord meant by, “Follow me.” Only now and then comes a man or woman who, like John Woolman or Francis of Assisi, who is willing to be utterly obedient, to go the other half, to follow God’s faintest whisper. But when such a commitment breaks through, miracles are wrought, world-renewing divine forces are released, history changes. There is nothing more important now than to have the human race endowed with just such committed lives.”

Those “other half” people need to be us and it needs to be now.

“He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” Jesus