About the Book
"When I Don't Desire God" by John Piper explores the reasons why Christians may struggle with their desire for God and offers practical guidance on how to cultivate a deep and lasting affection for God. Piper discusses the importance of delighting in God and provides insights on how to overcome spiritual dryness and apathy in one's faith journey. Through biblical teachings and personal anecdotes, Piper encourages readers to actively pursue a vibrant relationship with God and find true satisfaction in Him alone.
Smith Wigglesworth
Smith Wigglesworth was born in 1859 to a very poor family. His father did manual labor, for very little pay. Smith himself went to work at the age of six to help with the family income. At six he was pulling turnips and at seven he was working in a woolen mill twelve hours a day. His parents did not know God, but Smith hungered in his heart to know Him. Even as a youngster he would pray in the fields. His grandmother was the critical Christian in his life. She was a Wesleyan Methodist and would take Smith to meetings with her. At one of these meetings there was a song being sung about Jesus as the lamb and Smith came into the realization of God's love for him and his decision to believe Christ for his salvation was decided that day. He was immediately filled with the desire to evangelize and led his own mother to Christ.
Smith has various church experiences as he was growing up. He first went to an Episcopal church and then at thirteen a Wesleyan Methodist church. When he was sixteen he became involved in the Salvation Army. He felt deeply called to fast and pray for lost souls. He saw many people come to Christ. At seventeen a mentor shared with him about water baptism and he decided to be baptized. The Salvation Army was experiencing a tremendous level of the power of God in those days. He describes meetings where "many would be prostrated under the power of the Spirit, sometimes for as long as twenty-four hours at a time." They would pray and fast and cry out for the salvation of fifty or a hundred people for the week and they would see what they had prayed for.
At eighteen Smith left the factory and became a plumber. He moved to Liverpool when he was twenty and continued to work during the day and minister during his free time. He felt called to minister to young people and brought them to meetings. These were destitute and ragged children, whom he would often feed and care for. Hundreds were saved. Smith was often asked to speak in Salvation meetings and he would break down and weep under the power of God. Many would come to repentance in those meetings through this untrained man. At twenty-three he returned back Bradford and continued his work with the Salvation Army.
In Bradford Smith met Mary Jane Featherstone, known as Polly, the daughter of a temperance lecturer. She left home and went to Bradford to take a servants job. One night she was drawn to a Salvation Army meeting. She listened to the woman evangelist, Gipsy Tillie Smith, and gave her heart to Christ. Smith was in that meeting and saw her heart for God. Polly became an enthusiastic Salvationsist and was granted a commission by General Booth. They developed a friendship, but Polly went to Scotland to help with a new Salvationist work. She eventually moved back to Bradford and married Smith, who was very much in love with her.
The couple worked together to evangelize the lost. They opened a small church in a poor part of town. Polly would preach and Smith would make the altar calls. For a season, however, Smith became so busy with his plumbing work that his evangelistic fervor began to wane. Polly continued on, bringing Smith to conviction. One day while Smith was working in the town of Leeds he heard of a divine healing meeting. He shared with Polly about it. She needed healing and so they went to a meeting, and Polly was healed.
Smith struggled with the reality of healing, while being ill himself. He decided to give up the medicine that he was taking and trust God. He was healed. They had five children, a girl and four boys. One morning two of the boys were sick. The power of God came and they prayed for the boys and they were instantly healed. Smith struggled with the idea that God would use him to heal the sick in general. He would gather up a group of people and drive them to get prayer in Leeds. The leaders of the meeting were going to a convention and left Smith in charge. He was horrified. How could he lead a meeting about divine healing? He tried to pass it off to someone else but could not. Finally he led the meeting and several people were healed. That was it. From then on Smith began to pray for people for healing.
Smith had another leap to make. He had heard about the Pentecostals who were being baptized in the Holy Spirit. He went to meetings and was so hungry for God he created a disturbance and church members asked him to stop. He went to prayer and prayed for four days. Finally he was getting ready to head home and the vicar's wife prayed for him and he fell under the power of God and spoke in tongues. Everything changed after that. He would walk by people and they would come under the conviction of the Holy Spirit and be saved. He began to see miracles and healings and the glory of God would fall when he prayed and preached.
Smith had to respond to the many calls that came in and gave up his business for the ministry. Polly unexpectedly died in 1913, and this was a real blow to Smith. He prayed for her and commanded that death release her. She did arise but said "Smith - the Lord wants me." His heartbroken response was "If the Lord wants you, I will not hold you". She had been his light and joy for all the years of their marriage, and he grieved deeply over the loss. After his wife was buried he went to her grave, feeling like he wanted to die. When God told him to get up and go Smith told him only if you "give to me a double portion of the Spirit – my wife’s and my own – I would go and preach the Gospel. God was gracious to me and answered my request.” His daughter Alice and son-in-law James Salter began to travel with him to handle his affairs.
Smith would pray and the blind would see, and the deaf were healed, people came out of wheelchairs, and cancers were destroyed. One remarkable story is when He prayed for a woman in a hospital. While he and a friend were praying she died. He took her out of the bed stood her against the wall and said "in the name of Jesus I rebuke this death". Her whole body began to tremble. The he said "in the name of Jesus walk", and she walked. Everywhere he would go he would teach and then show the power of God. He began to receive requests from all over the world. He taught in Europe, Asia, New Zealand and many other areas. When the crowds became very large he began a "wholesale healing". He would have everyone who needed healing lay hands on themselves and then he would pray. Hundreds would be healed at one time.
Over Smith's ministry it was confirmed that 14 people were raised from the dead. Thousands were saved and healed and he impacted whole continents for Christ. Smith died on March 12, 1947 at the funeral of his dear friend Wilf Richardson. His ministry was based on four principles " First, read the Word of God. Second, consume the Word of God until it consumes you. Third believe the Word of God. Fourth, act on the Word."
Everyone You Meet Will Live Forever
In a post-Christian, post-modern, post-everything society, God’s people are called to operate from courage, not fear. And when we live courageously, putting our hope in the reality of who God is and what God has already accomplished, it changes everything. We’re freed up to be the people of God living out the mission of God despite what new challenges come our way. But given our increasingly hostile cultural landscape, what does making new disciples, in terms of evangelism, look like? And how do we go about it? I think you’ll be surprised by where we end up, though you probably shouldn’t be. Evangelism in an Age of Unbelief When we talk about what it means to be courageous and faithful in the age of unbelief, we have to talk about the Great Commission. That’s our mission. And though it’s always been true, I think it’s truer than ever to say that evangelism will include hospitality. Hospitality is not the sum total of courage or evangelism, but living courageously will involve living hospitably. The idea of hospitality has been hijacked by popular culture. When the Bible speaks of hospitality, it almost always ties it to aliens and strangers — people who are not like us. Hospitality means welcoming those outside your normal circle of friends — the kind of people it takes a new heart to invite in. It’s opening our lives, and our homes, to those who believe differently than we do. “Hospitality means opening your life and your house to those who believe differently than you do.” Hospitality is all over the Bible. In fact, it’s so important to God that when Paul lists out the traits necessary for a man to be qualified for the office of elder in a local congregation, we find that he must be “above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach . . .” (1 Timothy 3:2). To be an elder, a man has to be able to open his life and show kindness to those who believe differently than he does. He has to open up his world to those who are outside of what he believes. Now, why would God be so serious about hospitality? Well, because he has been so hospitable to us. Even when we were living as his enemies, he came and saved us. He opened the door and invited us into his presence. We demonstrate that we truly appreciate the divine hospitality we have received as we extend our own hospitality to those around us. I’m not suggesting that biblical hospitality is the silver bullet for making evangelism work in the twenty-first century (news flash: there’s no silver bullet). But might it not be — in our cynical, polarizing, critical, dumpster-fire culture — that a warm dose of welcoming hospitality will take some folks by surprise and open up the door for opportunities to make disciples of Jesus Christ? Four Ways to Show Hospitality The God of the universe is serious about hospitality. Hospitality can create an entry point for living out the Great Commission and evangelizing our neighbors — especially in the age of unbelief when most think the church is about something completely different. Yet we still have to ask, How do we show hospitality today? It’s not complicated — though that doesn’t mean it’s easy. 1. Welcome Everyone You Meet I think the best first step is to greet everyone you see. That’s easy to do if you are wired like me — I’m a total extrovert. That’s hard if you’re an introvert, and maybe you’re thinking, “Can we just skip to number two, please?” But often the best actions to take are the hardest to do. Pray for grace, ask for strength, take a risk, and greet people. 2. Engage People Remember that every person you encounter is eternal. You have never met a mere mortal, as C.S. Lewis famously observed, and you have never met a human not created to image your God. How can we not seek to care about and take an interest in those we run across? I don’t think this is overly difficult. It simply requires us to be asking open-ended questions, letting our inner curiosity out. We may think this is all obvious — but often we hold back from doing it. We need to get to know people, take an interest in them, and listen to them, rather than just trying to think about how we can say something memorable or hilarious. 3. Make Dinner a Priority Over and over again, God’s word testifies to the holiness of eating together. Long dinners with good food, good drink, good company, and good conversations that center around our beliefs, our hopes, our fears — that’s a good dinner. And I don’t mean just dinner with friends. Yes, eat with your church small group, invite over your good friends, but remember that hospitality means to give loving welcome to those outside your normal circle of friends. It is opening your life, and your house, to those who believe differently than you do. 4. Love the Outsider In every work environment, every neighborhood, we know people who, for whatever reason, are outliers. These men and women are all around us — perhaps more so than ever, in our globalized world. Because of the way sin affects us, we tend to run away from differences and from being around people who think differently and look different than we do. But I want to lay this before you: Jesus Christ would have moved towards the outsiders. God extends radical hospitality to me and to you. That’s why we learn to love, and pursue, the outsider — because we were the outsider. It All Starts with Courage As dark and dire as the landscape may appear right now, as vast and venomous as it may be, we know that the battle has already been won — and that means we don’t fight on the world’s terms. This age of unbelief may feel big and intimidating for the church, but it’s simply a small subplot in a bigger, better story — the greatest story ever told. And in a truly spectacular paradox, there’s a yawning chasm between God’s story and our stories. While we know there are spiritually significant realities at work, we are called to simple, everyday faithfulness that works itself out in lives marked by hospitality. In some ways, it’s the big, flashy acts — the kind of stuff we photograph, slap a filter on, and show all our “friends” online — that go most noticed yet require the least of us. True Christian courage probably looks more like inviting a group of strangers into your home for dinner than the attractive, successful ideas we have dreamed up in our minds. “Remember that everyone you meet is eternal. You have never met a mere mortal.” Taking a risk to be genuinely hospitable actually requires courage because it forces us to rely on our Lord and his strength, not our own. When we open up our homes and build friendships with those who don’t look like us, believe like us, or act like us, we open up our lives and make ourselves vulnerable. We risk getting hurt and making enemies with those who don’t think the way we think or act the way we act. Yet we can do it because of the hope, strength, and courage that we have in the Lord. So, greet the people you see today. Learn to ask good questions. Open up your home to them, especially if they’re lonely or isolated. And above all, trust in God to use your weak hospitality to show his power. Article by Matt Chandler
