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INSPIRATIONS: THE LIFE OF A GREAT PREACHER JOHN G. LAKE BY TRIUMPHANTRADIO ADMIN

John Glake the healing evangelist who was born in the city of Ontario Canada on March 18, 1870. When he was small his family moved to Michigan, in the United States. While he was still young, Lake attended a Salvation Army meeting and became convicted of his need for a savior, and he invited Jesus to become Lord of life. Lake was incredibly impacted by illness. He was one of sixteen children, and over the course of his young life eight of them died. He grew to hate the sickness, grief, and death that was so much a part of his family life.

THE MINISTERIAL CALL
Lake felt a call to the ministry, and studied to become a Methodist minister. He took to heart the Methodist teaching on sanctification and sought it passionately. When his studies were done, however, he made a decision to go into business and start a newspaper in Illinois. Then he moved back to Michigan and began a career in real estate. He met Jennie Stevens and married her
Sickness still continued to hound Lake. His brother was an invalid, one sister had extensive cancer, another sister had bleeding problems, and his wife had tuberculosis and heart disease. In 1899 the family had heard about John Alexander Dowie, in Chicago, because he was receiving substantial media attention. They took Lake’s brother to the healing rooms in Chicago, and he was instantly healed. Both sisters then went, as well, and were also healed. Finally, Lake had contacted people to pray for his wife in June of 1899, and she was also healed. He opened the scriptures to see Acts 10:38 “You know of Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how He went about doing good, and healing all who were oppressed by the devil; for God was with Him. (NASB) He saw outlined clearly for himself that Jesus is the healer and Satan is the oppressor of men. Lake became a member of Dowie’s Christian Catholic Church and a branch was opened in Sault Ste Marie, where he was living at the time. Lake became a deacon in the new church. In August 1900 Lake’s wife Jennie was accidently shot by her 4 year old son. Following Dowie’s teachings the Lakes refused medical help and depended on prayer. The event was so startling an article was written up in the Chicago Daily Tribune, which regularly reported on Dowie’s activities.

In 1904 Lake moved to Chicago to work with Dowie. Seeing the power of God, Lake began to cry out for more of the Holy Spirit. He spent nine months seeking a fuller level of the presence of God. Lake went, with another man to pray for a sick woman. God’s presence fell on and over him like he’d never known before. The next six months were marked by conviction, repentance, and heart cleansing. The gifts of the Spirit became magnified, and the discernment and healing giftings increased dramatically. Lake was receiving training under John Alexander Dowie, but did not always agree with his way of doing things. At one point, Dowie listed his accomplishments and told him “If you ever develop constructive qualities, equal to your critical capacity, you will be a greater man than I am.” John Lake knew that he would have to start his own work. He felt called to Africa and went there in 1908, after a short-term pastoring stint in Indianapolis. Over a five year period in South Africa Lake saw 1,000,000 converts, planted hundreds of churches, and raised up over 1000 local ministers. The work was strenuous, however, and his wife died in December 1908. He committed to keep his family together. In 1913 Lake returned to the United States, with his seven children.
There is also renewed interest in Dr. Lake’s teachings, which cover every area of healing. Dr. Lake taught that any Christian should be able to heal the sick, saying, “All that is needed, is for the person praying…to let the tangible Spirit of God flow through them into the sick person.”

Dr. Lake goes on to say, “The Spirit of God is just as tangible as electricity is. You handle it, you minister it to another, you receive it from God through faith and prayer, your person becomes supercharged with it. The old apostle (Paul) took handkerchiefs or aprons, and held them in his hands until the handkerchiefs or aprons were supercharged with the Spirit of God. Then they were sent to the sick, the sick were healed and the demons were cast out of them. Acts 19:12

“It is one of the most difficult things in all the world for people who are not familiar with the ministry of healing to comprehend that the Spirit of God is tangible, actual, a living quantity, just as real as electricity, just as real as any other native force. Yes, and a good deal more so.

“If we could make the world understand the pregnant vitality of the Spirit of God, men would discover that healing is … a perfectly scientific application of God’s Spirit to man’s needs.”

John Lake had a remarkable ministry. His legacy includes not only his books and writings, but also a foundation of thought that has played an important role in the growing presence of divine healing in our world. He helps us understand that even ordinary believers can consecrate themselves to God and learn to minister the gifts of healing.

Husband, Lift Up Your Eyes Letter to a Would-Be Adulterer

Dear Husband,

You may think I am ill-suited to counsel a young man on how to be faithful to his wife, because, in almost fifty years with my wife, I have never felt enticed to be romantic or to have sex with another woman. However, it might be worth probing whether this (perhaps unusual) fact has causes which are transferrable to you.

Let me clarify. It’s not as good as it sounds. My eyes are as magnetized toward excessive female skin as most men’s. I am not designed for beach evangelism. I find airports to be problematic enough. I have zero tolerance for nudity in films — or even suggestiveness (which rules out almost all of them). One reason (among many) is that any sexually charged image lodges itself in my mind, with regrettable effects.

One more clarification: I have enjoyed a life of sexual intimacy with my wife, that is, I think, as intense as any can reasonably hope for. In other words, I don’t think my disinterest in sex with other women is owing to deficient hormones.

So, back to the point that needs some explanation: I am 71 years old and have been sexually attracted to Noël for 51 years. For 48 of those years (since we married), that attraction has been gratified with joy. During those 51 years, I have never been attracted to another woman romantically. I have never desired sexual relations with another woman. When I fell in love with Noël in the summer of 1966, a focused sexual longing exploded into being. That peculiar desire to be intimate with Noël has never shifted onto another woman.

Are there any discernible causes for this that might be shareable?
1. Plead with God to take away illicit desires.

“God worked a miracle to make adulterous touching not just morally wrong, but physically revolting.”
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The first thing to say is that I consider this disinterest in sex with other women a pure gift of God’s sovereign grace. It does not feel like a reward for some virtuous discipline. It’s as if God said, “I have other sorrows you will have to deal with in your family. But I will spare you this one.” I have not felt like a valiant sailor lashed to the mast while the Siren voice of alien sex sang her seductive song. I didn’t need to be lashed, because the song was not attractive.

So, the first transferrable thing I would say is this: “Ask God for it.” Don’t just ask him to keep you from giving into temptation. Ask him to take away any desire for any woman other than your wife. Plead for this.
2. Feel how revolting and disgusting adultery truly is.

The second thing I would say is probably going to sound strange, maybe even questionable. One way God protected me from adultery is by making it feel revolting to me. Ever since I fell in love with Noël and I knew we would spend a lifetime being intimate, the very thought of touching another woman sexually became disgusting, sickening. This may sound weird. I have not talked about it with many people. But I have said to myself often, with amazement, “The thought of having sex with any other woman besides Noël feels as nauseating to me as the prospect of having sex with a man.”

I mean this quite literally. I am not merely raising the moral stakes by using physically strong language. I mean God worked a miracle to make adulterous touching not just morally wrong, but physically revolting. That is one of the greatest works of divine grace I have ever experienced.

Now let me speculate about the origin of this gift. When Jesus wanted to help us deal with adultery and lust, he said,

“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.” (Matthew 5:29)

He might have said, innocuously, “If your eye causes you to sin, turn the other way, because giving in to temptation can only be harmful.”

Why did he gross us out with the revolting image of digging our eyeball out of our head and throwing it like a slimy egg yolk into the garbage? Maybe it was to awaken in us something more than mere moral disapproval — something visceral, something like a gag reflex in our throat.

“Ask God to take away any desire for any woman other than your wife. Plead for this.”
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I have been reading and believing my Bible since I was a child. The realities of God, Christ, heaven, hell, faith, and holiness have been ever-present realities to me — sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible. They are not add-ons to who I am. They are baked in. They’re part of me, shaping what I love and what makes me want to throw up.

So, my speculation is that somewhere along the way in my life, God took the reality of his massive disapproval of lust and adultery, and the threat of indescribable suffering in hell (Matthew 5:29), and created a connection between the physical terror of eternal burning and the moral outrage of cheating on my wife. The form that this connection took was physical revulsion at marital unfaithfulness. It may be way more complicated than that. But that’s the best I can do for now.

However this happened, it seems biblically fitting to me, and I thank God for it. It has freed me wonderfully to focus on other things. Whether it is transferrable to you depends on God’s free grace. But my suggestion is that you saturate your life thoroughly with the realities of Scripture, and pray for their profoundest effects in transforming what you find desirable and what you find disgusting.
3. Don’t trade permanent pleasures for temporary trysts.

I’ll mention one other thing that seems to me to be part of the explanation for why adultery has felt not just wrong to me, but also nauseating. When I was a junior in high school, something awakened in me that I could call poetic, or spiritual, or aesthetic, or otherworldly. It was a sense that there is something stupendously wonderful and joyful to be experienced beyond the sensuous pleasures of the body.

If I weren’t a Christian, I would call it the “numinous” or the “Other” or “Beauty.” In other words, many people have this sort of awakening, not just Christians. But for me, it was distinctively Christian. The wonder and beauty and greatness were in God, through Jesus. Since those days, I have experienced a kind of ache for a Pleasure beyond the pleasures of the body.

But here’s the link with nauseous adultery. At the same time as this longing for the ultimate heavenly Pleasure was awakened, I discovered that sexual sin (like lust and its mistress, masturbation) caused my soul to plummet from any heights of joy they attained. It seemed to me that I was faced with the choice of wallowing in the mire of brief physical sensations (called pleasures) or soaring in my heart where something much more substantial and lasting and satisfying was offered.

“Sexual immorality cuts off the wings that lift us toward the highest, richest, most durable Joy.”
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This built into me the visceral conviction: Sexual sin and spectacular satisfaction are utterly at odds. As Jesus put it, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).

I now see this as God’s existential gift of Colossians 3:1–5:

Seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above. . . . Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality . . .

In other words, sexual immorality cuts off the wings that lift us toward the highest, richest, most durable Joy.

But I wanted this Joy with a vengeance. And as this desire grew, so did my opposition to anything in me that stood in the way. And Colossians 3:5 put sexual sin at the head of the list. I believe God turned this opposition into physical revulsion in proportion as the desire for real Pleasure in God grew stronger.
Keep Asking God for Help

Well, that’s my effort to interpret my experience in the light of Scripture. I hope there are lessons to be learned here that are transferrable to you:

Ask God that he would make sin sickening to you, not just morally wrong.
Ask him to make biblical realities, like hell and heaven, terribly and wonderfully real to you — real enough to taste and feel.
Ask him to open your eyes to the glory of the spiritual world “where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.”
Ask him to give you a massive desire for ultimate Pleasure in God that is so strong that it makes sinful pleasures nauseous.
Ask him to transpose the pleasures of intimacy with your wife into foretastes of the unending ecstasies of heaven.

When you have prayed, lift up your eyes. Lift them up to the deep, blue sky. Lift them up to the brilliant whiteness of the billowing clouds. Lift them up to the unfathomable star-filled darkness of the night. Lift them up to misty mountain ranges, and to the rivers that have run for a thousand years, and to the mighty trees that took their time to become strong imperceptibly, and to the orange day-lilies and purple vines and the yellow-souled daisies, and to the ripple-free lakes at dusk, and the great bow of the ocean horizon.

Take your eyes off your computer, off your mirror, off your pain, off your dead dream, off your self-pitying lust. God is speaking to you. He is waving a thousand flags to get your attention. He has more to give you than you have ever tasted or felt or dreamed. The price he paid to satisfy his people, with never-dying joy and ever-new beauties, was great. Don’t push him away.

REFERENCE
JOHN PIPER

SINGLE AND MARRIED CONNER: Sex God, Gross Or Gift ❃Mark Driscoll❃

Part 6♦ Sex God, Gross Or Gift ❃Mark Driscoll❃

https://youtu.be/heg78tVPKG8

In the beginning, God created our first parents, and brought them together to meet. For Eve, it was a big day. She had just been created, met God, and was going to her first “date” —her wedding. Upon seeing his wife for the first time, Adam was overwhelmed and uttered first recorded human words in all history in the form of a song, which explains why guys with a guitar will always have an advantage.

God brought Eve to Adam as her Father. And as their pastor, he officiated the first wedding ceremony, declaring them husband and wife.

God blessed them, invited our first parents to steward creation, make a culture that reflected his glory for our good, and make some babies. Sex was good. God was glorified.

Then something terrible happened. God’s enemy, and ours, shows up, twisting God’s words. Our mother Eve’s sin of commission was, in a proud effort to become like God, partaking of that which God had forbidden. Our father Adam’s sin of omission was failing to intervene as he sat by quietly, idly, and timidly watching the enemy, Satan, deceive his wife as so many of his cowardly, passive, silent sons have done ever since. Rather than living as one, they separated as two sinners.

This fall of humanity into sin has infected, polluted, and corrupted literally every aspect of life on the earth, including sex. As a result people tend to think that sex is god or gross, rather than a gift.

Sex as god
Sex is deeply spiritual.

In the days of the Old Testament, most religions taught that God was to be experienced through nature, particularly through sexuality. Because of this thinking, many of these religions had sexuality and temple prostitution as integral components of their spirituality and religious ceremonies. In contrast, God’s people were strongly opposed to such thinking because they held that God could not be reduced to something he had created.

Today, the worship of sex as god is as passionate as ever. Our culture celebrates sex through movies, music, and television. Women’s magazines scream sex at our children as we stand in the grocery store line. And some people are so enslaved to sex that they do horrific things to others such as rape, abuse, pedophilia, and more.

Sex as gross
Often as an overreaction to sex as god, people adopt the position of sex as gross. As such, sex is viewed as a sort of necessary evil for procreation, but otherwise a rather vulgar, repulsive, and off-putting act. This is unfortunately common in the church, leading many godly men and women to look outside the church for wrong answers to their sex questions from culture.

Sex as a gift
The reality is that sex is not gross, but for many it is perverted. The goal should not be to reject sex but rather to redeem it as God intended it, a loving act between a husband and wife that binds them together as one flesh.

Contrary to sex as god or gross, the Bible teaches that sex can be redeemed as a gift. Because sex is a gift that God gave, it is his intent that we steward and enjoy that gift, like every gift he gives, in such a way that is glorious to him, and good for our marriages.

Here are six benefits of having sex with your spouse that my wife Grace and I identify in our book, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, & Life Together.

Sex is for pleasure.
Throughout the most erotic book in the Bible, the 3,000-year-old Song of Songs, children are never mentioned, as the entire focus of the book is simply marital passion and pleasure. The book is frank without being crass. And, it is the wife who speaks first and speaks most about exactly what she enjoys sexually. Without getting into the specifics here as we do in the book, single Jewish men were forbidden from reading the book because it was simply too hot to handle.

Sex is for creating children.
Children are repeatedly considered a blessing throughout Scripture. God created a husband and wife to conceive children at the moment of deepest connection. (In chapter 10, we address birth control use, too.)

Sex is for oneness.
A faithfully married couple with a free and frequent sex life is literally bonded together as one, physically and chemically by God’s design. This oneness is expressed in such things as having one last name, living in one house, sleeping in one bed, attending one church, sharing one bank account, and worshiping one God.

Sex is for knowledge.
In the act of sex, and the related intimacy that surrounds it, a couple learns to know each other in a way that they are not known by anyone else. This sacred and experiential knowledge means that a faithfully married couple has an intimacy and connection that is not only exclusive but also unprecedented in all their other relationships.

Sex is for protection.
While there is no excuse for sexual sin, there are factors that can increase the temptation for sexual sin. Perhaps chief among them is a marriage in which at least one of the people is sexually dissatisfied because the sex is not free or frequent enough. If one person feels sexually denied and discouraged, it increases the temptation to wander outside the marriage for sexual satisfaction. But free and frequent sex within marriage helps safeguard and protect the marriage from such sins as bitterness, adultery, and pornography.

Sex is for comfort.
We knew a couple who suffered the death of their young child. They were understandably devastated.

The husband was unsure what to say or do to comfort his grieving wife, and so he simply asked what she needed. She told him that she wanted to go away for a few days to a quiet bed and breakfast, lie unclothed together, visit, pray, weep, and make love so that she did not feel alone in any way. They reported that being able to physically comfort each other at that time was a vital part of their healing and grieving process.

There are seasons in life when nothing can be said or done to comfort a suffering spouse. In those moments, it is the ministry of touch that allows us to connect with our spouses in a way that lovingly serves them and binds us together in the suffering.

It is our prayer that you and your spouse would see sex as a gift from God.

A gift to be stewarded.

A gift to be guarded.

A gift to be enjoyed.

And a gift to be shared together for God’s glory and you.