Name It! Claim It! Take It! Order Printed Copy

Author: Dag Heward-Mills
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About the Book

"Name It! Claim It! Take It!" by Dag Heward-Mills is a motivational book that explores the power of positive thinking and visualization in achieving one's goals. The author emphasizes the importance of speaking out one's desires, believing in their attainment, and taking action to make them a reality. Heward-Mills provides practical advice and examples to inspire readers to take control of their lives and manifest their dreams through faith and determination.

Charles Wesley

"O for a thousand tongues to sing / My dear Redeemer's praise / The glories of my God and King, / The triumphs of his grace!" He was said to have averaged 10 poetic lines a day for 50 years. He wrote 8,989 hymns, 10 times the volume composed by the only other candidate (Isaac Watts) who could conceivably claim to be the world's greatest hymn writer. He composed some of the most memorable and lasting hymns of the church: "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," "And Can It Be," "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing," "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today," "Soldiers of Christ, Arise," and "Rejoice! the Lord Is King!" And yet he is often referred to as the "forgotten Wesley." His brother John is considered the organizational genius behind the founding of Methodism. But without the hymns of Charles, the Methodist movement may have gone nowhere. As one historian put it, "The early Methodists were taught and led as much through [Charles's] hymns as through sermons and [John] Wesley's pamphlets." Language scholar Charles Wesley was the eighteenth of Samuel and Susannah Wesley's nineteen children (only 10 lived to maturity). He was born prematurely in December 1707 and appeared dead. He lay silent, wrapped in wool, for weeks. When older, Charles joined his siblings as each day his mother, Susannah, who knew Greek, Latin, and French, methodically taught them for six hours. Charles then spent 13 years at Westminster School, where the only language allowed in public was Latin. He added nine years at Oxford, where he received his master's degree. It was said that he could reel off the Latin poet Virgil by the half hour. It was off to Oxford University next, and to counteract the spiritual tepidity of the school, Charles formed the Holy Club, and with two or three others celebrated Communion weekly and observed a strict regimen of spiritual study. Because of the group's religious regimen, which later included early rising, Bible study, and prison ministry, members were called "methodists." In 1735 Charles joined his brother John (they were now both ordained), to become a missionary in the colony of Georgia—John as chaplain of the rough outpost and Charles as secretary to Governor Oglethorpe. Shot at, slandered, suffering sickness, shunned even by Oglethorpe, Charles could have echoed brother John's sentiments as they dejectedly returned to England the following year: "I went to America to convert the Indians, but, oh, who will convert me?" It turned out to be the Moravians. After returning to England, Charles taught English to Moravian Peter Böhler, who prompted Charles to look at the state of his soul more deeply. During May 1738, Charles began reading Martin Luther's volume on Galatians while ill. He wrote in his diary, "I labored, waited, and prayed to feel 'who loved me, and gave himself for me.'" He shortly found himself convinced, and journaled, "I now found myself at peace with God, and rejoice in hope of loving Christ." Two days later he began writing a hymn celebrating his conversion. Evangelistic preacher At evangelist George Whitefield's instigation, John and Charles eventually submitted to "be more vile" and do the unthinkable: preach outside of church buildings. In his journal entries from 1739 to 1743, Charles computed the number of those to whom he had preached. Of only those crowds for whom he stated a figure, the total during these five years comes to 149,400. From June 24 through July 8, 1738, Charles reported preaching twice to crowds of ten thousand at Moorfields, once called "that Coney Island of the eighteenth century." He preached to 20,000 at Kennington Common plus gave a sermon on justification before the University of Oxford. On a trip to Wales in 1747, the adventurous evangelist, now 40 years old, met 20-year-old Sally Gwynne, whom he soon married. By all accounts, their marriage was a happy one. Charles continued to travel and preach, sometimes creating tension with John, who complained that "I do not even know when and where you intend to go." His last nationwide trip was in 1756. After that, his health led him gradually to withdraw from itinerant ministry. He spent the remainder of his life in Bristol and London, preaching at Methodist chapels. Magnificent obsession Throughout his adult life, Charles wrote verse, predominantly hymns for use in Methodist meetings. He produced 56 volumes of hymns in 53 years, producing in his lyrics what brother John called a "distinct and full account of scriptural Christianity." The Methodists became known (and sometimes mocked) for their exuberant singing of Charles's hymns. A contemporary observer recorded, "The song of the Methodists is the most beautiful I ever heard … They sing in a proper way, with devotion, serene mind and charm." Charles Wesley quickly earned admiration for his ability to capture universal Christian experience in memorable verse. In the following century, Henry Ward Beecher declared, "I would rather have written that hymn of Wesley's, 'Jesus, Lover of My Soul,' than to have the fame of all the kings that ever sat on the earth." The compiler of the massive Dictionary of Hymnology, John Julian, concluded that "perhaps, taking quantity and quality into consideration, [Charles Wesley was] the greatest hymn-writer of all ages."

Death Is Not the End

“And they lived happily ever after. The end.” That’s a common way to end a story that begins “Once upon a time.” We call those stories fairy tales. Fairy tales are imaginary stories for children, filled with magic and with fanciful people and places. We love a good fairy tale because it echoes the real story of the Bible. God has wired us to love stories that resolve — stories that end with not only justice but with exuberant joy. “God will transform your natural, earthly body into a supernatural, heavenly body.” This conviction was held by two friends who wrote some of the most iconic fiction of the twentieth century: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. After the great battle at the end of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, the characters discover that the new Narnia has been their real country the whole time, and they have nothing left now but to travel further up and further in. Tolkien, in Lord of the Rings, enlists Sam Gamgee to ask, after the ring has been destroyed, whether everything sad would come untrue. Tolkien even coined a term for a sudden happy turn in the story toward this blissful resolve: eucatastrophe. We can summarize the story line of the Bible as “Kill the dragon, and get the girl.” That joyful resolution is what the final two phrases of the Apostles’ Creed capture: “the resurrection of the body” and “the life everlasting.” Resurrection of the Body God will raise the corpses of Christians. That is the main point of 1 Corinthians 15, the Bible’s most famous passage on the resurrection of believers. “How can some of you say,” Paul asks the Corinthians, “that there is no resurrection of the dead?” (1 Corinthians 15:12). The Corinthians believed that God resurrected Christ (1 Corinthians 15:1–2, 4, 11), but some of them denied that God will resurrect the corpses of Christians. “Resurrection” translates the Greek word anastasis (1 Corinthians 15:12–13, 21, 42), which does not ambiguously refer to “life after death,” as if it could be a non-bodily existence. It specifically refers to bodily life after a person has died. The idea that God would resurrect a human corpse revolted Greco-Roman pagans (Acts 17:32). They believed that the material body has no future beyond the grave and that only the immaterial soul is immortal. They valued the soul over the physical body. Consequently, some applied that philosophy to ethics — namely, that what you do now in your physical body does not matter (1 Corinthians 15:32–34). So, Paul corrects the Corinthians who had adopted worldly assumptions about resurrection from their pagan culture. He asserts that God will certainly resurrect the corpses of believers (1 Corinthians 15:12–34). Such a belief is reasonable given two analogies from nature: seeds that die and rise to life, and different kinds of bodies, like the sun and the moon, heavenly and earthly (1 Corinthians 15:35–44). He argues that the analogy of Adam and Christ proves that resurrecting the corpses of believers is certain (1 Corinthians 15:45–49). Finally, he writes that God must transform the perishable, mortal bodies of dead and living believers into imperishable, immortal bodies to triumphantly defeat death (1 Corinthians 15:50–58). God created a material universe. He created humans with physical bodies. Jesus took on flesh and will have his physical, resurrected body forever. God will transform the current physical earth into a new and better one. And God will transform your natural, earthly body into a supernatural, heavenly body. “‘The life everlasting’ is so glorious and satisfying because we get to enjoy the triune God more and more. Forever!” That is wonderful news for us believers in earthly bodies, because our bodies are deteriorating and groaning (1 Corinthians 15:42–44; Romans 8:18–25). Your earthly body is perishable, but your heavenly body will be “imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:42, 50, 52–54). Christ’s resurrection guarantees that death will die. So, we look forward to enjoying a supernatural body like Christ’s resurrected body: “Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Philippians 3:20–21). Life Everlasting All humans will exist forever, but only some will enjoy what the Apostles’ Creed calls “the life everlasting.” That refers specifically to the resurrection life of the age to come, which believers experience in some measure now (John 3:15; 17:3). We will fully experience “the life everlasting” after Jesus says to each of us, “Well done, good and faithful servant. . . . Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:23). In his book God Is the Gospel, John Piper asks a piercing question, If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ were not there? (15) The gospel is good news not merely because God will rescue us from hell and because we can enjoy the pleasures of heaven. It is good news ultimately because we can enjoy God himself like we never could in our shackles of sin. “The life everlasting” is so glorious and satisfying because we get to enjoy the triune God more and more. Forever! We can experience now what David wrote in Psalm 16:11, You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. We long for the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting because then we will eternally and increasingly experience Psalm 16:11 like never before. Only the Beginning In C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle (the seventh and final book of The Chronicles of Narnia), Aslan explains, “The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.” Lewis continues, And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. (210–11) “The end” of the story of the Bible is “the beginning of a never-ending, ever-increasing happiness in the hearts of the redeemed, as God displays more and more of his infinite and inexhaustible greatness and glory for the enjoyment of his people” (Desiring God: An Affirmation of Faith 14.3). For now, we need not fear death. Indeed, we should be able to say with the apostle Paul, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23). And if it is far better even now than remaining in a natural, earthly, non-glorified body, it will be far better still to experience the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting with Christ in the new heavens and new earth. So, we pray, “Now to him who is able to keep [us] from stumbling and to present [us] blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen” (Jude 24–25). Article by Andy Naselli Professor, Bethlehem College & Seminary