No! No! Praise God I know many of us agree there, it is a present-tense rest. But that bothered me more than it does now because I hadn’t a resting life. I didn’t rest in my works. Brothers and sisters, I am absolutely sure of this as a missionary secretary: I don’t want to be unkind, but I think 75% of those who come home from the mission field don’t come home with genuinely physical reasons. I don’t think so. Deep down there has been spiritual turmoil which has not been resolved. Deep down you’ll find it. I don’t want to be uncharitable. There are real physical sicknesses too, but a great many are not that and they are to be traced back to the fact that we have not entered into that rest because, “he that is entered into rest has ceased from works.”
Not “ceased from working,” because somebody else comes and does the work inside you and He’s a much harder worker and that is God Himself. God is a Person of never-ending working unto never-ending resting. The two are combined in Him; they are one. God has an unending centre of absolute rest, and out of that unending centre come unending works. The two have married there. Works which come from restlessness end in a breakdown if not in the asylum. Works which come from rest go on and on and on. You never get tired. That’s a fact! There’s a life in this relationship where you do not get tired as you used to get tired! I know it. What Paul said is perfectly true, “Yes, I am daily dying but the life of God is manifest in this mortal flesh which is daily dying, and then life works in others.”
Karuizawa Japan Conference of 1954
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Norman Grubb (1895 - 1993)
Read freely text sermons and articles by the speaker Norman Grubb in text and pdf format.Was a British Christian missionary, writer, and theological teacher. Despite having a Christian upbringing it was only at the age of eighteen that Grubb seriously began to consider what it meant to be a Christian. It was a conversation with a family friend that challenged him to think more deeply about his faith, and from that point on he became committed to evangelistic work. While recovering from his bullet wound in 1917 Grubb was handed a tract about the Heart of Africa Mission and the work of C.T. Studd in the Belgian Congo. After reading this tract he felt a calling to join Studd in his missionary activities.After Studd’s death in 1931, it was learned that he had left a letter appointing Grubb as president of the ministry he had founded, World Evangelisation Crusade (W.E.C., WEC International), in place of himself. Grubb however thought it would be better to be called secretary instead. W.E.C. grew from one mission field with 35 workers to a worldwide mission operating in over 40 fields with thousands of workers from around the world, all living according to the principle that all needs will be supplied by God with no appeals to man. The mission continues to this day under the name of Worldwide Evangelization for Christ.