A review of the missions module on Chronological Bible Teaching with Jerry Smyth

Last week Jerry Smyth demonstrated phase one of Chronological Bible Teaching using Trevor McIlwain's book, Firm Foundations: Creation to Christ. This book is a must read. It uses the King James Version of the Bible and is available in several languages. It contains the fifty lessons of phase one (salvation) and is equally valuable for its lesson formats and teaching helps. The book may be purchased from New Tribes Mission.

The instruction was a remarkably powerful overview of selected Bible stories (from Creation to Christ) in which God's attributes, actions, deliverance, judgments, and man's sin are consistently highlighted. The repetition of truth consistently revealed in these stories magnifies God's plan of redeeming man from the common problem caused by sin. The method was probably the closest we could come to understanding the Old Testament history lesson Christ gave to the two disciples on the Emmaus Road.

While Bro. Jerry's shared experiences as a tribal missionary contributed to the twenty-five students' understanding of their need to employ Chronological Bible Teaching on the field, it was equally evident that this teaching method would better facilitate the growth of functioning New Testament believers here in our own Bible-saturated context.

by David Parker

What do Caleb, George Mueller, Oswald J. Smith, Raymond Lull, Charles Simeon, and Clifford Clark all have in common? The answer is that they didn’t (and in Clifford Clark’s case, hasn’t) retired from God’s work during their golden years. This is a heroes line-up who loved (and loves) the Lord enough to follow Him to the finish. Oswald J. Smith and George Mueller continued their ministries of traveling and speaking into their nineties, and Charles Simeon in to his mid-seventies. Oswald J. Smith continued to write books and preach on the mission field in his nineties. Raymond Lull left his position as a Bible professor and trekked off to North Africa to evangelism Muslims. As an elderly missionary (eighty years of age), Lull died a martyr’s death at the hands of those whom he had come to proclaim God’s message of deliverance.

We all know Caleb’s story from the Old Testament. At the age of eighty-five, he asked God (and fought) for a mountain. Instead of leaving it to the younger guys, Caleb responded in obedience, faith, and God- dependent effort. Here it is from Caleb himself, “I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war. Now therefore, give me this mountain” (Joshua 14:11-12). Caleb was a faith- filled fighter.

What about Clifford Clark? Well, this long-time pastor of over thirty years (Oklahoma) has just turned 82 years young; he’s publishing his autobiography this March (2006); and he continues to preach across the country, traveling weekly with the passion of a missionary statesman. Recently, I asked him when he and his wife would be heading to Florida for their twilight years of golfing and sea shell collecting. His response, “I can’t quit: I don’t know how.”

May the example of these men motivate each of us to make faith-filled prayers, to take mountains for God, and to say, “I can’t quit: I don’t know how.”

An excerpt from "Good-Bye" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines; I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools, and the learned clan; For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?