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About the Book
"7 Questions Wise Women Ask" by Kingsley Okonkwo is a practical guide for women to navigate through life's challenges by asking insightful questions that lead to personal growth and development. The book encourages women to reflect on their beliefs, motivations, relationships, and aspirations in order to achieve fulfilling and purposeful lives.
John G. Lake
John G. Lake was born in Ontario, Canada on March 18th, 1870. He was a family man, person of integrity, honor, a savvy businessman and a good father. If you knew him you wouldn’t otherwise know that he would soon become one of the greatest men of God the world would ever know. He had a genuine love for the Lord Jesus and was known by his friends as a man who dedicated himself to intimacy with The Lord. It was out of this place that he loved his wife, was a man of integrity and built a very successful business career. To give you perspective, by 1905 John G Lake was making $50,000 per year this sum would be like upwards of 1.3 million dollars per year annually today. John grew up in a family environment which was plagued with sickness and death, it is said that his earliest memories were of sickness, death and funerals. Lake was from a large family, he had 16 siblings, 8 of which tragically died of various diseases. It is no coincidence that “the man of healing” was tormented from a young age with death and disease. The enemy will often oppose destinies with radical circumstances through a distortion of the very thing that we are called to walk in. Lake Was exposed to dramatic healing when he visited John Alexander Dowie’s ministry and was, in prayer, instantly healed of a rheumatism which had caused his legs to grow incorrectly. Just two short years into their marriage, Jennie Lake was diagnosed with tuberculosis and heart disease. Over the next couple of years, the condition worsened and the doctors resigned to the fact that it was only a matter of time before she would die. John allowed this situation to provoke him into faith, after being exposed to such death and disease from a young age he had a hatred for such things. When he would read the word of God he saw that his Christian experience was less than the promised “power of the Holy Spirit”. As Jennie was on her deathbed and perhaps taking her final breaths Lake was overcome with anger over sickness and threw his bible against the fireplace mantle! When he went to pick up his bible it was opened to Acts chapter 10:38 which says: "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.” Lake had a surge of faith in that moment and sent a telegram to Dowie asking him to pray. Within an hour of Dowie praying she was fully healed! Not long after Jennie was healed, God began to speak to Lake about going into full time ministry. After some time of contemplation and seeking the Lord, God confirmed to John and Jennie separately that they were to move to South Africa to begin their life of ministry. John and Jennie then gave away all that they had, John forsook his mega-salary and they went on their way alongside some of their friends as ministry partners.
When they arrived in South Africa, they had no money. The problem was, that they needed at least $125 in order to clear customs. they nervously waited for their turn in line, rehearsing what they would say to the immigration officer They were in desperate need of a miracle, as the law read that they would be subject to deportation as quickly as they arrived in South Africa. Just as they were about the get to the front of the line, John felt a tap on his shoulder… A man was standing behind John and said “excuse me sir, can I have a word with you?” John nervously steps out of line at the man’s request and the man said “when I saw you and your family in line, the Lord told me to give you $200 cash”. The Lord provided just enough money for John and his family to enter the country. But their needs didn’t stop there. The Lakes and their crew had no ministry contact in Johannesburg. Soon after they cleared customs, a woman approached John’s friends and asked how many people are in their family, when they told her, she responded “no, not you” and went over to John and asked the same question. John replied “9” and she said “you’re the ones!” She went on to tell John that the Lord had spoken to her last night that she was to give her home to a family of 9 people who are coming from America to do God’s work. John, Jennie and their crew rejoiced in the dramatic provision of the Lord. Their time in South Africa was marked with waves of revival, there were multitudes saved, healed and delivered over the course of their 5 year ministry tour in South Africa.
By far my favorite story from this season of Revival takes place shortly after the Lake family and their team arrived in South Africa. A mighty plague was sweeping through the nation, the death count was climbing dramatically. So much so that there was a surplus of corpses who were victims of the plague and there was no one to bury the dead; if someone was to come in contact with a dead body they would most certainly become infected and their death sentence would immediately begin. John G. Lake astounded the medical officials because he, without any gloves or protective clothing began burying the dead. Physicians in a panic approached John and rebuked him for coming in contact with the dead, John boldly responded "when the disease comes in contact with my skin, you can watch it die". The doctors thought he was insane, so he challenged them to put a drop of the plague on his skin and watch it under a microscope. When they did so, John was right! The plague cells literally burned up the second they came in contact with his skin!
It is tough to understand what would happen towards the end of the Lake’s missionary journey in Africa. One day while John was away on a ministry trip, his wife Jennie suddenly passed away. The cause of her death was malnutrition and exhaustion. It wasn’t uncommon for the sick and broken to line the lawn of John G Lake’s home and Jennie, as an act of sacrifice, gave away all their food and any resources she could to the broken which frequented their house.
Although John and Jennie’s faith and sacrifice is commendable we must learn from this fatal mistake. John’s priorities clearly became altered as the demand for ministry raged on. He failed to guard and keep the very precious gift that God had given him, he allowed the demands of ministry to distract him from the needs of his family unto the tragic and preventable death of his wife. In the wake of Jennie’s death their children became bitter with John and subsequently God. Some of his children left the faith and the most recent accounts of them suggest that they died not following Christ. To this day some of John’s great grandchildren do not follow the Lord. John’s failure to obey the basic command of scripture for “husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church” and his preoccupation with the demands of ministry opened up the door for the enemy to ravage his family. After Jennie’s death John moved back to the United States and remarried. He would then pioneer his famous healing ministry based out of Spokane Washington. Unfortunately John did not learn his lesson the first time, in the midst of more flames of revival he continued to be a poor father, emotionally disconnected from his children.
you can’t fake what you love
The soul is measured by its flights, Some low and others high, The heart is known by its delights, And pleasures never lie. I was 25 years old when John Piper’s book The Pleasures of God  was first released in 1991. My wife and I had been attending Bethlehem Baptist for two years and had read John’s book Desiring God , which unpacked what he called Christian Hedonism. His fresh emphasis on the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him  was working its way into our spiritual bones. But as I read the introduction to The Pleasures of God , the one-sentence poem above crystalized the truth of Christian Hedonism for me, opening my mind to the role delight plays in the Christian life. One Sentence Begets Another John wrote that life-changing sentence as a kind of exposition of another  life-changing sentence he had read four years earlier. In fact, the whole sermon series that birthed the book was born of his meditation on that sentence written in the seventeenth century by a young Professor of Divinity in Scotland named Henry Scougal. Scougal had actually penned the sentence in a personal letter of spiritual counsel to a friend, but it was so profound that others copied and passed it around. Eventually Scougal gave permission for it to be published in 1677 as The Life of God in the Soul of Man . A year later, Scougal died of tuberculosis before he had reached his twenty-eighth birthday. John Piper describes what gripped him so powerfully: One sentence riveted my attention. It took hold of my thought life in early 1987 and became the center of my meditation for about three months. What Scougal said in this sentence was the key that opened for me the treasure house of the pleasures of God. He said, “ The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love .” (18) John realized that this statement is as true of God as it was of man. The worth and excellency of God’s  soul is measured by the object of its love. This object must, then, be God himself, since nothing of greater value exists than God. John previously devoted a whole chapter in Desiring God  to God’s happiness in himself — the God-centeredness of God. Scougal’s sentence, however, opened glorious new dimensions of this truth for John as he contemplated how the excellency of God’s soul is measured. And John’s sentence opened glorious new dimensions for me as I began to contemplate that a heart, whether human or divine, is known by its delights. Pleasures Never Lie It was the last line of John’s poem that hit me hardest: The heart is known by its delights, And pleasures never lie. Pleasures never lie.  This phrase cut through a lot of my confusion and self-deceit to the very heart of the matter: what really matters to my heart. “Our lips can lie about what we love, but our pleasures never lie.” “Pleasures never lie” doesn’t mean things we find pleasurable are never deceitful. We all know, from personal experience as well as the testimony of Scripture, that many worldly pleasures lie to us (Hebrews 11:25). Rather, it means that pleasure is the whistle-blower of the heart. Pleasure is our heart’s way of telling us what we treasure (Matthew 6:21). When we take pleasure in something evil, we don’t have a pleasure problem ; we have a treasure problem . Our heart’s pleasure gauge is working just like it’s supposed to. What’s wrong is what our heart loves. Our lips can lie about what we love, but our pleasures never lie . And we can’t keep our pleasure-giving treasures hidden, whether good or evil, at least not for long. What we truly love always ends up working its way out of the unseen heart into the plain view of what we say and don’t say, and what we do and don’t do. My heart, like God’s heart, is known by its delights. I found this wonderfully clarifying. It resonated deeply; all my experience bore out its truth. And I saw it woven throughout the Bible. The more I contemplated it, however, the more devastating this truth became. Devastated by Delight It’s devastating because if the worth and excellency of my soul is measured by the heights of its flights of delights in God, I find myself “naked and exposed” before God, without embellishment or disguise (Hebrews 4:13). No professed theology, however robust and historically orthodox, no amount of giftedness I possess, no “reputation of being alive” (Revelation 3:1) can compensate if I have a deficit of delight in God. And to make sure I understand what is and isn’t allowed on the affectional scale, John says, You don’t judge the glory of a soul by what it wills to do with lukewarm interest, or with mere teeth-gritting determination. To know a soul’s proportions you need to know its passions. The true dimensions of a soul are seen in its delights. Not what we dutifully will but what we passionately want reveals our excellence or evil. (18) As I place my passions on God’s soul-scale, my deficits become clear. I’m a mixed bag when it comes to my passion for God. I can savor God like Psalm 63 and yet still sin against him like Psalm 51. I have treasured God like Psalm 73:25–26, and questioned him like Psalm 73:2–3. Sometimes I sweetly sing Psalm 23:1–3, and sometimes I bitterly cry Psalm 10:1. At times I keenly feel the wretchedness of Romans 7:24, and at times the wonder of Romans 8:1. I have known the light of Psalm 119:105 and the darkness of Psalm 88:1–3. I’ve known the fervency of Romans 12:11 and the lukewarmness of Revelation 3:15. Many times I need Jesus’s exhortation in Matthew 26:41. “We must know our spiritual poverty before we will earnestly seek true spiritual wealth.” It is devastating to stand before God with only what we passionately want revealing the state of our hearts, measuring the worth of our souls. But it is a merciful devastation we desperately need. For we must know our spiritual poverty before we will earnestly seek true spiritual wealth. We must see our miserable idolatries before we will repent and forsake them. We must feel our spiritual deadness before we will cry out, “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” (Psalm 85:6) That’s all true. However, the longer I contemplated John’s sentence over time, the more I realized the devastating exposure of my spiritual poverty is meant to be a door into an eternal world of delight-filled love. Pleasures Forevermore I made this discovery in the story of the rich young man (Mark 10:17–22). When Jesus helped this man see his heart’s true passions (when he exposed his spiritual poverty), the exposure wasn’t Jesus’s primary purpose. Jesus wanted the man to have “treasure in heaven,” to give this man eternal joy (Mark 10:21). And Jesus knew the man would never joyfully sell everything he had to obtain the treasure that is God unless he saw God as his supreme treasure (Matthew 13:44). So he tried to show him by calling the man to the devastating door of exposure and knocking on it. And he grieved when the man wouldn’t open it, because the door led to a far greater treasure than the one he would leave behind. God created pleasure because he is a happy God and wants his joy to be in us and our joy to be full (John 15:11). When he designed pleasure as the measure of our treasure, his ultimate purpose was that we would experience maximal joy in the Treasure. And that the Treasure would receive maximal glory from the joy we experience in him. It is a marvelous, merciful, absolutely genius design: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him . If God has to expose our poverty to pursue our eternal joy, he will. But what he really wants for us is to experience “fullness of joy” in his presence and “pleasures forevermore” at his right hand (Psalm 16:11). And so it is a great mercy, even if at times devastating, that our pleasures never lie.
