FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell

Episode 80 - CHRISTMAS AND HANUKKAH

Rocky Barrett: Welcome to the podcast, From Our Home to Yours, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy Campbell: Hello everyone! Well tonight is Christmas Eve, so I am sure you are having the busiest day. Perhaps you won’t even get to listen to this today. Maybe you will listen to it after Christmas.

I thought today we would talk about Christmas celebrations and other celebrations. I know that some of you love to celebrate Christmas and some of you don’t celebrate Christmas. Some of you celebrate Hanukkah.

Let me tell you what we do. As you know, we are one of these celebrating families, so we love to celebrate everything! So we celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah. We do them both because they are both so very special.

So first of all, about Christmas. We don’t like to celebrate all the tinsel and the commercialism and the Santa Clause of Christmas. That’s not what Christmas is about at all.

Christmas is about Jesus.

Now of course we all know that Jesus wasn’t born at this time of the year. It just doesn’t even fit in with Scripture. It talks about when the angels came to herald the birth of Jesus that the shepherds were out in their field in the night. So it wasn’t wintertime.

Back then the shepherds would keep their sheep on the fields from about April to October. In the winter months they brought them in because it was too cold and sometimes even snows in Jerusalem. So we know it wasn’t at that time.

It also was the time when Augustus Caesar sent out the decree for everyone to come and register and they wouldn’t do that in winter when it wasn’t safe for everyone to travel and it wasn’t safe.

From Scripture and from the time frame of when the angel came to Zacharias and told him that his wife would have a baby and we work out the times, most scholars believe that Jesus would have been born around the end of September or early October during the time of the Feast of Tabernacles.

But of course He obviously would have been conceived at this Christmas time.

This is the time when we remember His immaculate and miraculous conception when God sent His Son into the world into a womb of a virgin and she conceived by the power and the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.

It was an immaculate and miraculous event and something I believe we can celebrate. It is so awe-inspiring.

I think that this miraculous conception of Jesus, how He Who was God came to this earth as a seed in Mary’s womb (I mean, it is just too much for us to hardly even think about) at that moment He was God in eternity and then He was God in the womb of Mary.

He was not, like some people say today that a baby in the womb is just a clump of cells. He was the Son of God even at that moment—at the moment of conception.

This truth reveals again that a baby is a living person the moment they are conceived. It is an incredible thing.

We love to celebrate His conception and His birth, and we just love the carols.

I have sitting beside me today my wonderful husband. Colin and I have been married for over 56 years. I just thought I’d get him on our podcast today. I’m talking away here, but soon I’m going to ask him a few things of how he feels about Christmas.

But we love to sing the carols. You love to sing the carols, don’t you darling?

Colin Campbell: Yes, I do, I certainly do.

NC: It used to be that all the shops would have the Christmas carols playing, but they don’t so much now unfortunately.

But even though we know it wasn’t the time when He was born, we can still celebrate it. I mean we need to celebrate the birth of Jesus because it is such an amazing thing.

 I love that Scripture, John 1:14: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . ..” He came and dwelt. The word is actually the word “tabernacle.” He “tabernacled amongst us.”

The word means: “To tent, to encamp, to reside as God did in the tabernacle of old.” It’s a symbol of protection and communion. Just as God tabernacled in the Holy of Holies back there in the wilderness, now Jesus came. He came temporarily because He belonged to the eternal realm. He tabernacled for a while and He came in the tent of flesh.

I love some other translations. The Young’s Translation says: “And the Word became flesh, and did tabernacle among us . . ..” Isn’t that beautiful? That is the correct, original word in the original Greek.

“. . . And we beheld his glory, glory as of an only begotten of a father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 Young’s Translation).

It’s interesting that He would have been born at the time of the Feast of Tabernacles which is when the Israelites remembered how they tabernacled in the wilderness and how even God tabernacled with them.

I love that Scripture back in 1 Chronicles 17 when David wanted to build a permanent temple for God.

God came to him and said to David in verses 4, 5: “ . . .For I have not dwelt in an house since the day that I brought up Israel unto this day; but have gone from tent to tent, and from one tabernacle to another.”

God was prepared to dwell in this temporary tent and it’s interesting that Jesus came at that time of the Feast of Tabernacles remembering that.

Many believe that the true, ultimate fulfillment of the Feast of Tabernacles will be maybe when Jesus will come at that time. But we don’t know the day or the hour, but some speculate that this will be the time when He will come and completely fulfill that feast.

Of course then we will be with Him forever.

He uses the same word tabernacle again in Revelation 21:3. The apostle John was on the island of Patmos. He was looking up into the heavens and he saw the new Jerusalem coming down.

Verse three says: “And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell [that’s the same word tabernacle again where it says Jesus came and dwelt with us] with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.”

Isn’t that wonderful? We’re remembering when Jesus, the Son of God, the Lord of glory, came to tabernacle with us.

He is Immanuel, Christ with us. He made Himself one of us.

Oh goodness, we surely need to celebrate that. We don’t need to celebrate all the tinsel and the commercialism, but we can celebrate His birth. Isn’t that so beautiful?

Anyway, I’ve got to ask my husband: what does Christmas mean to you, darling?

CC: Yes, well, it means a lot to me, actually. It was just a few years ago that I got a revelation about this time. I was just driving down the road and I got to thinking about it. It came across to me quite strongly and I believe it was from the Lord.

I began to understand the great lesson of humility that there is in this Christmas season. Of course we have the tinsel as my dear wife was talking about and the commercialism of Christmas and it puts people off and that’s fair enough.

But it was profound to me that from God’s perspective it’s a time of a tremendous lesson that He gave to mankind of how humble God is.

He displayed it through the provision of His Son, the Son of God who is the King of kings and Lord of lords. God, who is so high and is the highest of all, should humble Himself and come to this earth in the way that He came. It is an incredible lesson of humility.

I think that man needed that lesson. I believe the entire world needed to see that God indeed believes in humility. It speaks in the Scriptures about how He lifts up the humble and puts down the proud.

Just thinking about Joseph and Mary, how poor and humble they were. Mary said in her song, The Magnificat, when she prophesied in that, she said: “He hath scattered the proud” and “He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaid.”

She was obviously a very humble woman, perhaps the humblest of all women. That’s the reason that God chose her to be the mother of the Savior of the world because of her incredible humility, as she said: “He has regarded the low estate.”

Then she spoke about how He has put down and rejected the prideful. Even amongst all the women of the world, the one who would bring forth the Christ was the humblest of all women of the world at that particular time.

I think God had planned it that way.

Of course Joseph himself was a poor man. He didn’t have a tremendous amount of money. Though I do believe in builders. I think builders are incredible people. I wish I could build like some of the builders that I know. But in Israel it was never regarded as a great career to be a carpenter.

But when Jesus said: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He has anointed Me to preach” and so on, the people said: “Is this not this Joseph the carpenter’s son?” They were kind of prideful about it and thought that there is no way that this could be the Christ; there was no way that the carpenter’s son could be the Savior of the world.

He was born, of course, in a very humble place, a place called Bethlehem, as we know. The Scriptures prophesied about that and talks about that.

In Matthew 2:5,6 says: “And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda [in other words, princes as far as cities are concerned]: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.”

That comes directly out of Micah 5:2 in the Old Testament. It says: “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands [of villages and cities] of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.”

He was everlasting. He was there with God before the world was created and it says “from everlasting” so He was the Son of God. It’s just profound to me the fact that God particularly chose such a humble place; even the city itself was the humblest of all the towns of Israel.

NC: I love it, too. I think how amazing it was what the King of kings decided for His Son. If we, just from our human standpoint, would think that He would choose some very important man in the city, but no. When God chose Joseph, He chose him because he was a just man. He wasn’t a rich man, but he was a just man.

That is such an important part of parenting. God didn’t look for riches and for them to have everything. No, He just looked for humble hearts and for those who were walking in righteousness. These things are far more important than going after all these material things.

You know, getting back to our families, we don’t have to have everything. I was just talking to someone recently and this person was brought up in beautiful rich homes and had everything she ever wanted. She’s married now and she said to me, ”That’s not what I want for us. I just want to have love. I just want to have a marriage.”

Actually, she was looking at Colin and me and said, “I would just like to have a marriage like you.” Starting off her married life, she knew what was the most important. It’s so true.

I think, too, of how some people say, “Oh well, you think God would choose a home where there was a room for every child and there would be bedrooms for each one.”

But no, Jesus was later a part of a big family. Yes, a poor family, not a rich family, but a rich family in children and family life because there would have been at least seven in Jesus’ family.

There may have even been more because there was time in Scripture (Matthew 13:55, 56) where it talks about His brothers and it mentions the names of four brothers—including Jesus, that’s five sons. There were five sons in the family and His sisters. That’s plural. Now that means there was a minimum of two sisters so that would be seven. But there could have been five sisters like there were five sons. There could have been ten in the family or more, we don’t know.

But it was a big family, and this is what God wanted. He wanted His Son to be brought up in a loving family—the riches of family life not the riches of things.

Even when Jesus was older, He said: “The birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man does not have anywhere to lay His head.” Isn’t that true?

CC: It is true. I think that if we don’t celebrate Christmas we could miss out on this incredible lesson of humility. I know that probably a lot of people don’t think about that.

But when you think about giving gifts, it’s appropriate that we do give gifts to one another, but not to get taken up with that to the point where we miss the incredibleness of the greatest gift of all when Jesus came down to this earth.

God gave Him as a gift for our salvation, which is a gift. I think we need to realize that.

Once I was traveling in South East Asia in an Islamic country. It was in Malaysia. There in the middle of Kuala Lumpur, which is the capital of Malaysia, on Christmas Eve, the Islamic population permitted a nativity scene in the middle of that Islamic city.

Everything around was just Islam, Islam, Islam, but there in the middle of the capital city, right in the square, right in the middle of the city, was a wonderful, beautiful nativity scene. I thought, “How wonderful.” I prayed that God would speak to the people about that.

But where was Jesus born? It’s a very interesting thing.

We all know that He was born in a manger, but if we didn’t have a Christmas time, we probably wouldn’t be going over these beautiful things of Scripture. We probably wouldn’t be thinking about the manager. We wouldn’t be thinking about the humility of Christ if we didn’t have Christmas.

It says there was no room for Him in the inn. I think God planned it that way. I think God knew that before the world was ever created when He planned our salvation.

There was no room in the inn. That’s tremendous humility that God permitted that His Son would be born in such a poverty-type place.

I don’t necessarily think that God is against a beautiful home or a palace. He’s not necessarily against that but He does want us to be humble people.

Scripture says in 2 Corinthians 8:9: “ . . .though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor . . ..”

We need to remember that Christianity is couched in the whole atmosphere of being poor in spirit, poor in heart, and poor in attitude.

NC: I noticed, too, how it was the angels that didn’t come to the elite people of the city or the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They came to the shepherds who were considered the humblest people. They came to just these Bedouin shepherds out there on the fields with their sheep. Jesus came to them. It was to the humble people who were of no esteem for whom He put on this incredible, angelic display that filled the sky.

CC: I think that if I was God, that if I was King of kings and Lord of lords, and I lived in Heaven where the streets are paved with gold and the foundations of the city are made of amazing stones and the gates are made of pearls, I would have thought of something different for my only beloved Son.

I wouldn’t have been so humble about His birth. I would have wanted to have the biggest fanfare that Heaven could provide for earth to confirm that this was my Son.

But that’s not the way God thought. He wanted it to be very, very humble.

He was born in a manger. Who would have thought that God, the Son of God, God in the person of man would come to be born in a manger?

It was outside the inn and was a place where cattle or horses or whatever who were traveling through would come and eat.

It was such a tremendous thing. He was born in a manger and in my margin(of my bible) that says: “the trough.” It was a place where they fed the animals in a little trough. Obviously, they took out and cleaned out whatever was in there and put straw or hay and then that’s where she laid the baby— the Son of God. It’s just mind-boggling.

NC: I notice, too, that when it came time for the dedication of Jesus, they couldn’t afford a lamb, which was the usual to bring a lamb. Instead they had to bring just a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons, which was for the poorer people.

CC: That’s what it says. In Leviticus 12:8 it says: “And if she be not able to bring a lamb, then she shall bring two turtles, or two young pigeons . . ..”

They brought the turtle doves or the pigeons. I’m not sure which one they brought because it doesn’t say in Scripture, but they obviously didn’t have the money to pay for a lamb. It’s really amazing.

The other thing is, did Jesus have His own house? It seems like He didn’t, although He would have been born to Mary and Joseph and I’m sure they lived in a house somewhere. But when it came to Himself, He didn’t have any earthly possessions of His own. He said: “ . . . The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”

When somebody said: “I will follow You wherever You go” He reminded this scribe that He never had anything that He could call His own.

Who was invited to His birth? As my dear wife just said, it was not the elite of Israel. Where was the king at the time of His birth? Where were the high priests? Where were all of the people like that? They were not there. It was the humble shepherds God chose to be at the birth of His Son, humble shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. That was not a career that people would do that seemed to be significant in Israel. It was probably the humblest of all careers.

Of course, wise men did come from the East, but they weren’t wise men from Israel. They were from the Eastern country.

NC: Getting back to the shepherds and the sheep, I just love this thought.

One time I was watching this little children’s movie about Christmas. It showed the shepherds with all their sheep going to the place to find Jesus. I thought that was amazing that when Jesus was born, He would have been surrounded, not only by the shepherds, but also by their sheep all around. Well, you know, it was a place for animals any way.

Shepherds would not leave their sheep on their own out in the fields for the wild animals to come. Shepherds looked after their sheep at night. Usually they would put them in a fold and a shepherd would lie at the gate of the fold to protect them. They never left their sheep unattended.

So isn’t that amazing? All the sheep would have followed them, and they would have been around Jesus at His birth. Of course He calls us His sheep, doesn’t He? We’re His lambs, we’re His sheep, we’re the sheep of His pasture and they were there at His birth, too.

CC: The angel came and spoke to the shepherds and said, “You go to Bethlehem and you will find the baby lying in a manger.”

While this angel was speaking, this is an interesting thing, it says: “Behold, there came a multitude of angels.” The whole sky would have been lighted up with angels singing “Glory to God.”

 I think the significance of such honor being given to humility and how God thinks so much more of humility than man could ever imagine. I think that we have to understand that God looks at the humble, He lifts up the humble, and puts down the proud.

Here were these angels now, telling them to go to Bethlehem and find a baby, the Son of God, in a manger and then all of a sudden all these angels burst out, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, and goodwill toward men.”

NC: Amen, so I’ve got to have time to tell you what else we do at Christmas, too. We love to think about the birth of Christ, but we also celebrate Hanukkah. Now I know some of you already do this but some of you may have not heard of Hanukkah so let me just tell you a little bit about that.

Actually, Hanukkah has already started because it started on the evening of Sunday the 22^nd. But you can still get in on it because we celebrate Hanukkah for eight days.

What is this Hanukkah business? It is a feast that is celebrated by the Jewish people, but it is a feast that Jesus also celebrated. We read in John 10 that Jesus went up to Jerusalem to enjoy and to take part in the Feast of Dedication.

Hanukkah has a few different names. It’s called “Hanukkah.” It’s also called “The Feast of Dedication.” That’s what Hanukkah really means. In the Hebrew the word chanukkah means: “to dedicate.” So Hanukkah means “dedication.”

Why is it called “The Feast of Dedication”? It is the story of the brave Maccabees. Have you ever heard of the Maccabees? It’s an amazing story! If you haven’t heard about them, I’m sure you can look up online and find out so much information. You can also go to the Apocrypha.

The Apocrypha, which is in quite a few Bibles, but it’s not part of the canon of Scripture. The books of the Apocrypha were not chosen to be part of the pure canon of Scripture, but they are very interesting to read, especially the books of the Maccabees.

They tell this amazing story of what happened at that time. Back in 167 B.C. Antiochus Epiphanes tried to completely extinguish the Jewish people. He was out to totally wipe them out.  Anyway, this family of Maccabees, just a family, they rose up in revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes. They began to war against him and gathered more to them.

God was with them in a mighty way. Eventually they were able to overtake him and claim the temple because Antiochus had already taken over the temple. It was in disarray. They say he had even dedicated a swine in the temple; it was just so sacrilegious.

You can read amazing stories about these brave, incredible Maccabees in the Books of Maccabees.

When they eventually got back the temple, of course, it was overgrown. There was were even shrubs growing in it. It was just totally wiped out. All the glorious things in the Holy Place—the Table of Showbread, the Altar of Incense, the Menorah, they were all just broken down.

God had said that the seven-branched-candlestick, the menorah, was to never go out. But of course it had been out for a long time. So when they had got the temple back, they wanted to dedicate it and they wanted to light the menorah again.

History and tradition say that they couldn’t find enough light to keep the menorah going. They could only find enough light for one day. Then they had to make the new anointing oil according to the Scriptures because this was holy anointing oil. It couldn’t be any old oil. They couldn’t just throw in some olive oil.  It had to be according to what God had prescribed.

While they were making that, history says that the light miraculously kept going for the eight days until they had enough to keep lighting it every morning and every evening.

So that was the miracle of Hanukkah. They rededicated the temple back to God.

That would have been an amazing dedication.

It’s also called “The Festival of Lights” because it was the relighting of the menorah.

The menorah in the Holy Place speaks of the anointing of the Holy Spirit, especially on the revelation of the Word of God because opposite the menorah was the Table of Showbread on which were the twelve loaves of bread.

This bread, “The Bread of His Presence,” or “The Bread of Faces,” as it was often called, pointed to Christ, to looking at Him and Who He is. It also spoke of Jesus as the Bread and the Word is the Bread, which is our life.

The menorah, the light shone down to bring revelation, so it’s also about the lighting.

Over this Hanukkah period we love to read the Scriptures about the light in the Word of God. I have listed out Scriptures for the eight days of Hanukkah. They are wonderful and I have them listed under headings for each day.

Day 1 is God is the Source of Light and the Scriptures about that.

Day 2 is Jesus is the Light of the World.

Day 3 is shine Jesus to the world.

Day 4 is the Word of God is our light.

Then it goes on for the eight days.

We read them for our morning and evening devotions during Hanukkah.

If you go to this link you can find these Scriptures and print them off to read with your family.

It’s just: https://tinyurl.com/hanukkahscriptures and if the link doesn’t work, you can just email me and I will send you the link. I also have a daily post for each of these days of Hanukkah. I know you will enjoy that.

What we also do during one of the days of Hanukkah, we usually choose which day is the best, and we will have a dedication meal because that’s what it’s all about.

Back in the time of the rededicating of the temple it was the literal temple that they were rededicating. But God no longer lives in the temple. I mean, they no longer have a temple in Israel. In A.D. 70 the temple was wiped out completely.

But now Christ comes to dwell in different temples. He comes to our temples. Our bodies are now the temples of the Holy Spirit. In fact, more than that! In 1 Corinthians chapter 6:19 is where it says that our bodies are actually the temples of the Holy Spirit. But that is actually not the right word. In the Greek the word is naos and it literally means “The Holy of Holies.”

It wasn’t just the tabernacle or just the temple. It was the Holy of Holies.

That Scripture is saying that you and I, we are now the Holy of Holies where God wants to come and live and dwell with His Shekinah Glory!

One of the translations of John 1:14 says: “The Word became a human being and lived with us, and we saw his Sh’khinah, the Sh’khinah of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.” Now He wants to come and dwell in our Holy of Holies with His Shekinah Glory.

But somehow with life we kind of get jaded and maybe we’re a bit like that temple that gets a bit overgrown with weeds and junk and everything’s broken down. It’s good to have a time where we can rededicate out temples to God. We can rededicate again and give our lives back to Him.

So we like to do that, each one of us personally around the table and then the father can dedicate our whole family to the Lord to renew our dedication to Him.

That’s something lovely you may like to do over this Hanukkah period.

So I just thought I’d tell you about how we love to celebrate the birth of Jesus and how we love to celebrate Hanukkah.

You can find more about—just  email me for the link if you can’t remember the name.

The Lord bless you today. Let’s pray, shall we?

NC: Darling, I think you should come and pray. Pray for all these wonderful mothers and families.

CC: Yes, let’s pray, shall we?

“We thank You, oh Lord God, for this tremendous display that You brought forth in the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

“We thank You, Lord God, that when we honor You that we seek to learn and understand that message of humility and how You came in such a humble place, a little baby so innocent and so unable to defend itself, but subject, Lord, to the looking after by the mother and the father.

“We thank You Lord that You planned this whole Christianity to be based on this rock of humility. We give You praise, and we thank You, oh God.

“Bless all those that are celebrating Hanukkah as well and let us all be lights and rededicate our temples afresh to You just like they did back then. In Jesus name, amen.”

NC: Amen.

 

FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell

Episode 79 - NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT!

College, Vasectomies, and Vaccinations! Join in as Brittany Howell and I talk about these controversial subjects.

Nancy Campbell: Hello again, ladies. At the moment, Serene and Sam and three of their boys, and Pearl and Charlie, and Kendall and Meadow and their little boy are down in New Zealand and Australia. They are going back to their roots. This is where we were all born and bred. We actually come from New Zealand and then we lived for ten years in Australia. So this is the very first time they will have taken their husbands down to the bottom of the world to see where they lived. So it’s going to be such a precious time.

So we have some of the girls and precious little Remmy staying with us. Breezy just passed by so I called her to the podcast seat.

Breezy, can you hello to the ladies?

Breezy Allison: Hello!

NC: Breezy is ten years old and on Friday evening we had Breezy’s Ball. Every year we have Breezy’s Ball and it all started when she was four years of age. Breezy always loved to dance and loved to dress up like a princess and be a princess and one day marry a prince.

Breezy: Yeah!

NC: [Laughing] So anyways, Serene said, “We’re going to have a ball for Breezy and I want everyone to dress up like princesses and all the men to dress up like princes or knights or men in armor or whatever. And it was just the most glorious night, because when we have a birthday party, even for a little child, we have a family party. So, it was so great, we made it a tradition. So now, we’ve just had Breezy’s ten-year-old ball.

But anyway, Breezy, why don’t you just tell the ladies your latest Bible memory verse. Can you say it?

Breezy: Yep, okay. John 15:7: “If ye abide in Me and My words abide in ye, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.” John 15:7.

NC: That is so great. Great darling, you can pop downstairs now, and how are you getting on with your story?

Breezy: I finished it

NC: Oh you finished, good on you!

Well ladies, I’ve got Brittany with us again for this session. So I know we are going to have a great time. We don’t quite know what we are going to talk about yet, but I know its going to be great. Yes, we got on to talking about homeschooling in our last session. Then after the session, Brittany and I got to talking about college and how so many students and even their parents are getting into debt over this, and it’s really quite a negative on their life. Tell me what you were sharing with me, Brittany.

Brittany Howell: So many of my friends have debt. One of the moms that’s in my little group, she has a couple children and she is my age and her husband has over $100,000 in school debt that they have not been able to pay off. She told me it’s such a burden. Like it’s always there in the back of her mind, knowing that she has to pay it off.

NC: Yes, and is he fulfilling the degree that he got? That’s huge.

BH: No, he’s doing something different.

NC: Exactly, I know. You find that this happens over and over again. Young people go to college, and they go because, well that’s what you do, so off they go. And they end up with all this debt. And they get through college and they don’t even use their college degree. Most times they get into something different, so it has already been a waste of time.

And I think it’s something we do have to think about ladies. Some of you have got children, you know, maybe going to college, maybe some are getting ready to go, maybe some are just little ones and you’re thinking, how will we pay for it all? This is why a lot of parents limit their families. They stop having children because they think, we will not be able to afford to send more children to college. If we can get two through college that will be amazing! Really, it is a ploy of the enemy to stop the godly seed coming into the world. There are other ways.

Did you know, ladies, we don’t have to do everything status quo, just like everybody else does? There are always ways. Today we are so blessed with a whole computer age, that young people can do their college degrees online without even going to college and without spending so much money. That can be a wonderful idea.

There are some that do, definitely, need a college degree, especially men who are growing up and that is their bent where they are going, they’ll need a college degree. But there are many who don’t actually need a college degree. They just go to college because that is what you do. And they can get on with life and do amazing things. In fact, I think the statistics are that most of the millionaires and billionaires in our country, not one of them has been to college.

BH: True, most of them dropped out at high school is what I read.

NC: Yes, of our six biological children, I have to confess, not one has been to college and yet they are all doing things that people with college degrees haven’t gotten around to doing.

So, you know, our life is not dependent on a college degree, it’s dependent on the gift God has put within us. My father always used to say, “A man’s gift makes room for him and brings him before kings.” That’s not just my father’s words, by the way, it’s a Scripture, in the Word of God. But He believed it, and he raised us on it, and it’s true. It was true for his own life, in the things that he did in his life. They brought him before kings. He had a number of opportunities where he spoke with the queen and so on. You know, this is what happens. Your gift makes room for you in this world.

BH: And God provides where you need to go as well, to step out and go into debt, He hasn’t given you that provision to be able to do that yet, He hasn’t provided the money. For my husband, when he decided he wanted to go to seminary, he bought and flipped a house and took the profit off of the house and that paid for his entire seminary so that when we got married we had no college debt, no anything, because he was committed to not going into debt over it and assumed if God wanted him to go to seminary, or anywhere else, He was going to have to provide the money for him to go. And that was his conviction.

NC: Wonderful testimony. Yes, it’s just a matter, I think, of thinking outside the box. Well, I should say there’s a better way of saying that. I think it’s just thinking Bible. Instead we think humanistically. What does society do? We just go along with what everybody else is doing.

And so, I think if you are in this time, this season, where you have children getting ready for college, think about these things before you send them off because that’s what you do. There are other ways. Maybe they could do their college degree online.

I know a family, and I’ve stayed with this family, and she has written a little book and you can order it, it’s on my Above Rubies webpage, www.aboverubies.org. It’s called “His BA was only 8K” and this is about her 16-year-old son who got his BA when he was only 16, never going to college. She homeschooled all her children.

Those who were needing college degrees have just continued to study and then they would go the college and just do the tests, and she learned how to do that. And that’s all they had to do. They didn’t have to put their vulnerable young people into these colleges, which one time, years ago, were great places for learning, but now they are breeding grounds for socialism. They are not the place to send our very young people.

So, they were still able to get their degrees and their young son got a BA at sixteen. Wow, when he had that on his resume, it just opened the world for him, doors everywhere. You see, there are other ways of doing things. I think it’s important to pray about it and I don’t believe God intends our children or us to get into debt over college.

BH: And it’s not just the debt, it’s the time lost, too. If you go for four years, you need to think about how many thousands of hours you are spending learning. Is that what you want to learn? Is it what God has called you to learn? It’s a time/cost analysis of what you’re not doing. You’re not able to be working as much to be saving up money to buy a house for your future wife to be more prepared. So for us it was a blessing when we came together in marriage, since both of us had no debt and we had a bunch of money saved up. There wasn’t so much pressure on us that so many young couples feel. Not only did we not have debt, but we were actually able to work and do things in the four years we would have gone to school to actually make money.

NC: Yes, that’s wonderful and I think this is what we need to put into the hearts of our young people as we’re raising them, that they are preparing for marriage. Now most young people today, it’s not even in their brain, they’re not even thinking about marriage. In fact, the statistics are for USA that the average age of a man marrying today is 29 years of age and for women it is 27.5 or something.

Just think of all those beautiful twenties, just gone. And those are the most wonderful years of childbearing, they are just lost. And what have they been doing? Just getting debt, and yes, studying many times, and sometimes they will purposefully use those, but many times they don’t even use those degrees.

So we have to give them purpose. “What are you going to do in life? God’s intention for you is to get married and raise a family.” That is God’s original intention. My, even in the Christian church today, young people don’t even know God’s original intention. Their parents haven’t even told them. Their pastors don’t even preach about it. My it’s time we got back to the Bible. We’ve gone out so far on a limb and we’ve got to just come back. But what you have to know dear mothers, is God is with you and He is for your children and He is working it all out. And you’re going to be surprised at what God will do. Amen?

And I’ve got another book about college. What is it Gosia? What is it called?

Gosia (Above Rubies Helper): Chucking College.

NC: That’s right,” Chucking College.” That’s another book you could get by checking Amazon. This is written by Melanie Ellison. She went off to college. She started off there and, oh my, she just didn’t find this was where she was meant to be. She saw what was going on and didn’t feel it was going to really help her life, so, she chucked it. Anyway, she didn’t chuck it and do nothing. No, she felt that she could accomplish more in life by establishing herself in business. I think that she has actually done about three different businesses that have all been very, very successful. So, that’s another book you could read as you’re thinking and praying about these things.

Okay, now another thing we got to talk about yesterday at our mother’s luncheon, we got talking about that V word. There are a couple of V words. I wonder which one we’ll talk about first. Let’s start on Vasectomy, that V word. Actually, you know, that’s just so common today, isn’t it? So many men are getting what they like to call, “get the snip, “and they like to think nothing of it.

And not even in the secular world, but in the Christian church, so many men just go along with society. Okay, we have two or three children. And I think men, are perhaps, you know, they are affected by society too. They are working out amongst men and all their mates have got the snip and all their mates have got a couple of children and they’re all struggling to think how they’ll put their children through college one day so we’ll just fix this, it’s easy, let’s just go and get the snip. But I believe there are repercussions and I think it is something we have to think very carefully about.

In fact, I believe myself, I’ve always felt that I don’t think we can do anything to our bodies to change the way that God created us, because God’s works are perfect. You know that Scripture, “All His works are perfect” and all His creation is glorious and perfect, and His highest creation was male and female.

Every single little tiny way He created our bodies is perfect and when we go into our bodies and seek to completely change the way it works, I don’t think we get away with it. What do you think?

BH: No, anytime we mess with God’s design there are going to be consequences for it—physically, emotionally, maritally, and spiritually, in all of the realms.

NC: Yes, I know and yet, you will find if you go onto the web, you could put in something like that, “Are there problems if you get a vasectomy? What are the repercussions?” and you’ll get all these articles coming up saying “No worries, mate.”

They don’t quite say it like that, but oh yes, you get these articles from doctors saying “Oh yes, you know, everything’s fine. We don’t have any problems, it’ll all be okay, you just go ahead.” But behind the scenes, that’s not actually true. Have you heard of any situations?

BH: Yes, it’s been surprising, actually, a couple years ago, I think someone had actually shared an article with me about the concerns of vasectomies and I had posted it or something and I started getting so many messages and so many moms reaching out and talking to me, because, I didn’t even know there were so many complications following vasectomies.

One of the bigger ones that’s just recently come out are autoimmune issues. Because when they do the vasectomy, God designed the man to produce sperm, the sperm can’t be stopped from production, they’re just rerouting it. So where does it end up after about a year and a half? In the bloodstream, and then your body begins attacking itself. I’ve even been finding this true even just in general life, if I come across men who have autoimmune issues and I’m able to ask, “Have you had a vasectomy?” it’s almost always, yes they have, and a year or two later these major symptoms start showing up.

NC: Absolutely, I know someone very personally who has struggled with autoimmune problems for years and I know it was from his vasectomy. In fact, in one of our retreats, a family retreat, Colin and I were speaking there, and this man, this husband, was in a wheelchair, and that was after his vasectomy. And he had been a great sportsman and so active and Colin just shared with him and said, “You know, you can get a reversal?” and he did. He got a reversal and he came out the wheelchair.

BH: That’s amazing. And I think the less common or the less known about side effects were what surprised me the most. In a couple of the Mom’s groups I’m in, many of them shared that after the vasectomy, their husband has such pain afterwards during lovemaking that it has been so hard for them to deal with that amount of pain and that no doctor warned them about that first and some of the moms were arguing saying, “It didn’t affect my husband, we’re great.”

And then one of the moms actually came back about a year or two later and said that her husband had just shared with her how much pain there has been but he hasn’t wanted to say it or share it because it’s a sensitive topic for men. They don’t want there to be any issues there and so many of them are in pain in that time with their wives and don’t admit it anymore. So I think it’s one other attack that Satan is using and bringing against couples and keeping them apart.

NC: Yes, absolutely. This is where, you know, the very first thing that God did when He brought the male and female together was, He said they’ll leave their father and mother and be joined and become one flesh. Now, everything that God has ordained, the enemy comes against. He seeks to distort it and to destroy it and so he will do anything to come against this one flesh experience because it’s God-ordained.

And even, you know, that incredible oneness, even flesh oneness, and the oneness of spirit and soul. Oneness is also revealing the oneness of the triune God, you know, the Holy Spirit, the Son, the Father, they are intertwined as one in total unity. We, as male and female, are revealing the image of God.

How does God reveal His image? He does it in flesh and blood, He does it through us. This is a revelation of the oneness of God and the enemy comes against it in so many areas and this is just another area. So these are things, dear wives and mothers, people just take them for granted today, even doctors and things you read on the internet, “Oh it’s all okay” but we have to think seriously because there’s too many incidents behind the scenes they don’t publish. And who would want it, I mean, I would be too scared to go ahead and think oh that could happen. That could be the end?

BH: Yes, permanent issues.

NC: Yes, and I’ve had a book in my library for years, actually it’s an old book, but you can still get it on the internet. The statistics are still the same, it was back in 1993 it was published by H. J. Roberts (Dr. Roberts), and it’s called “Is Vasectomy Worth the Risk?” and he brings out the statistics there that after a vasectomy, that the risk for cancer goes up 56%, but after a man has had a vasectomy for 22 years or longer that then his risk goes up 89% for prostrate cancer, which is almost 90%.

And, you know, we do see that in society, don’t we? We see so many men with prostrate problems today, who now have cancer. And of course there are other cancers, too, with those statistics. Where did I read that? Somewhere.

BH: And there’s marital tension many times that comes about when the husband and wife aren’t in agreement., I know moms have shared the most hurtful thing in their marriage has been when their husband has gotten one and they haven’t been in agreement on it.

NC: Yes, oh yes, that’s so hard, yes. We were, Colin and I, were asked to speak at a marriage seminar, quite a number of years ago, and when we arrived there, we met the pastor  and his wife, and they both looked yellow. Oh goodness me, they were yellow! And we found out it was because they were carrot juicing and they were juicing so many carrots that their skin had gone quite yellow. And the reason they were juicing was because he had prostrate cancer and he was seeking to do everything in his power to overcome it.

So anyway, that was fine, but I was speaking to the women on marriage and Colin was speaking to the men separately and he was talking about marriage, and then someone piped up with a question. This was towards the end of one of the sessions, and he said, “Well, I’ve got the feeling that you don’t agree with vasectomies and birth control and all that. Can you tell us what you think about that?

So Colin thought, well, I am here under the covering of this pastor so I will have to put it to him. So, he said to the pastor, “Would you be happy for me to talk about this subject?” and the pastor said, “Yes.” Then Colin talked for a while and the pastor got up and he said, “My congregation, I have not ever told you this before, but you all know that I have prostrate cancer.” And he said, “I know it was because I got a vasectomy.” And he was very aware that that was the source of it.

BH: And it’s sad that it’s not being talked about in churches. That great churches, that love the Lord, are completely leaving the topic of birth control out. I remember when me and my husband went to get married, one of the premarital questions that was asked, was like, “So which birth control are you guys going to use?”

NC: That’s usual isn’t it?

BH: It’s terrible that it’s not being talked about. And so vasectomies, I agree, are in the church, too, because there are no men of God that are really speaking out against it so a lot of men are either feeling pressure from their wives to do it because their wives are done, or pressure from others.

NC: Yes, yes. And even tubal litigations. The statistics are that most tubal litigations will eventually lead to a hysterectomy. So we can’t tamper with our bodies and get away with it. I remember way back in the beginning days, before I understood what I do today, and before I had the revelation of God’s heart for children, and, you know, we were saying, “Oh, well perhaps we’d better use something to stop having children.” And before we ever got to knowing God’s full revelation, I knew I could never use the pill. And it was becoming so common, and something inside me, although I didn’t know  at that time, well I was just coming into God’s wonderful understanding of the blessing of children, but I knew I couldn’t ever do that because it was going to tamper with the way God created me. And we know all the side effects that happen from that, but people just don’t seem to care. Don’t they understand the intricateness of their body? It’s perfect, and God made it, and it was made for a purpose.

BH: And I think that God’s grace is there, that there are vasectomy reversals, that not every decision, every mistake we have made, can we reverse and there’s always going to be consequence of it. But if you’ve had one done, or your husband has and you feel convicted, I would say, don’t let the cost of a reversal throw you off. Because I know they can be several thousand dollars but I’ve also heard amazing stories of couples who humbly went to God and repented, you know, and either did it out of ignorance or disobedience, whichever, and said, “God forgive us and give us the funds to be able to reverse this, to put my husband’s body back the way You designed” and God has miraculously provided for them each and every time. And so many couples have been able to get it reversed.

NC: Oh, Yes. And there are doctors who do it at a reduced rate. You can email me for that. I can give you the names of those doctors. And the testimony of so many mothers that even I know who’ve had reversal babies. I have a dear friend, she has, I think she may have five reversal babies. They started off and then got the snip, because they were just victims of society, but along the way God revealed to them His plan and oh, they just wanted to have more children.

Of course what happens too, often after a vasectomy or tubal, the couple begins to long for children again, especially the wife, the mother, because God created us this way, He created our womb to long for life. As it says in Proverbs chapter thirty, there are four things that never say, “It is enough” that are never satisfied, and one is the barren womb. It longs for life and a mother may feel kind of overwhelmed with her little two or three children all around her, “Oh, this is too much” and they do something permanent. But then, that womb begins to long for life again, but they can get it reversed.

But this couple that I know, they said, “We had friends at the same time, they all did the snip, we did it together.” She said, “Now I look at their lives, and their two children, they’ve grown up, and they are totally bored, they’ve got nothing. We have these children all around us, and now some of the older ones are getting married and grandchildren are coming on. We have a life! It’s just so amazing! And we’d have missed out on it if we hadn’t done that reversal, you know.”

Well, there’s another V and it’s a controversial one too. And that’s Vaccination. Did you vaccinate any of your children?

BH: Our adopted child is partially vaccinated as required by law, but no, not the others.

NC: So, what caused you to make that decision?

BH: For us, it honestly started with, we just wanted to know what was inside the vaccines. We started with that because we thought we are careful with what we put in our children’s bodies, you know, we cook from scratch, we don’t give them dyes, we don’t want all that stuff. So it was just natural to be like, okay, a doctor wants to put these inside them, let me just see what the ingredients are.

So I just started looking up the ingredients, and I was horrified to learn what was inside of them, probably the most concerning being aborted fetal cells, which I did not even know that when my oldest was getting his partial vaccines as he was being adopted. I did not even know that there were babies that were murdered and aborted and used in, I think 26 of the vaccines have the aborted baby’s DNA and proteins in them.

So, as someone who is pro-life who has adopted, who has worked with many abortive moms, who goes to the abortion mills regularly, that was horrifying, that I could stand up for life and take in children and foster children we’ve had several times, and stand up in front of an abortion mill, and turn around and at a doctor’s office inject some of a baby into my child, that alone was horrifying. So of course, you know, I began looking up that. How many hundreds and hundreds of babies were used in the process to develop the vaccines. We just kept looking at other ingredients, I mean many other, monkey, sheep, pork, blood, many other things that we are commanded against to not consume, you know it’s not wise for us either, they’re also in vaccines as well. So it started for us with just looking up the ingredients.

NC: Yes, and then, of course, we see what has happened to so many children through these, although, once again, if you go to the internet and you look up about vaccinations, you’ll see nothing, it’s all fine, there will be no problems. It just seems as though we’re dumbed down with all this information. And yet, then we hear the testimonies. In fact, the first testimony I ever got was when I was a young mum. I started off vaccinating my children because once again I was a victim, I can’t believe how I was a victim in those days. Oh goodness me! I’m nothing like a victim now. It’s true that we grow in knowledge and we grow in our convictions, don’t we?

And so, praise the Lord, they didn’t hardly vaccinate much back then, it was just a few basics, but anyway one day, I was just going down the road, with my children in the stroller. No, maybe my twins in the stroller, and my little boy walking beside me, and this lady was at her gate, and I stopped and got to talk, and she said, “Oh, lovely to see your children. I have a little girl who’s the same age as your little boy. Would you like to come in and see her?”

So I came in. I walked into the bedroom, and there was this little girl, lying on the bed, a vegetable. She couldn’t see, hear, talk, do anything. She was a complete vegetable, but beautiful. This mother said to me, “She was a perfect baby until she had her three-month shot, and that was that. When I saw that, before my very eyes, that finished it for me. I mean, before I even got into really learning and finding out all the information, that was it. I never, ever, vaccinated again. That was enough for me. But, of course, you know, there are so many testimonies, and of course you can find out also the true studies and so on. But they’re trying to vaccinate our children more and more aren’t they?

BH: They added new ones to the schedule. There are hundreds just being tested.

NC: And yet, that’s not all the diseases there are. If they wanted to protect us from all the diseases, we’d just be a total vaccinated person, wouldn’t we?

BH: There’s over two thousand active diseases in the US. For example, leprosy kills several hundred people a year. But you never hear about leprosy on the news, no one scares you about leprosy, because there’s no vaccine for it, so its not even out there, but there’s many, many active diseases.

NC: Yes, yes. And so I think a lot of mothers do it out of fear, don’t they?

BH: Fear from their doctors that will scare them and use all sorts of manipulated statistics to try to convince you that your child’s going to die if you don’t do this. Which the Bible says, obviously we’re not supposed to do anything out of fear. And then also the fear of man and “What will my family members think?”

Many moms have confessed that they’ve done it even though they knew they shouldn’t, or they’ve heard something in their conscience, you know, that mom voice saying “Don’t do it.” They did it anyway because of pressure from their mom, or their aunt, or their in-law.

I encourage them, you know, your doctor, your mom, your aunt, your in-laws, they will never answer to God for the decisions for your child. You are the only one that God has made the mom over this child, and you’re the only one who has the special knowledge and wisdom for this child, and you’re the only one who will stand before God for your choices, and this is a choice that you cant be ignorant in. It’s not a morally neutral choice, it’s not a gray issue of maybe this, maybe this.

This is big for the abortion industry, and I didn’t tell you this yesterday, Nancy, but in a moms group that I’m in, one of them was sharing how about a year and a half ago, her sister went into the OB with her ninth child to get tested. So she went in for her normal checkup, and the OB came to her and said, “I would like to give you a proposition.” And she was like, “Okay.”

And she said, “Would you consider having an abortion?” And the Mom was like, “No, like why would I do that?” And the OB was like, “Well I’m asking you to donate your child for scientific research because your child has a rare type of blood and we need more of this for vaccines, so I want to know if you would donate your child for medical research to do more vaccines.” And, in America, flat out asked for her child for vaccines!

Because I’ve heard many Christians argue before and say, “Oh, it was only one or two children used for vaccines and it was a cell line that was developed in the sixties.” That has been their argument, but that is not true at all. There are many babies being aborted on a regular basis to keep creating new cell lines to do testing on.

If you look up Stanley Plotkin, he’s the grandfather of vaccines, and he’s not anti-vaccine at all, but if you just Google it and watch any of his videos, he will testify how many hundreds of babies they went through to develop one vaccine and there’s over twenty six of our vaccines that have aborted baby DNA and protein in them.

NC: Yes, so these are things, you know, we have to think about, we have to be proactive mothers. Dear lovely mothers and wives, if I can just encourage you today, don’t become a victim.

Remember, the other week, I shared that scripture from Nehemiah where it says: “They have dominion over our bodies” (Nehemiah 9:37).  Oh my, what a terrible testimony. And this is what is beginning to happen even in our nation today, where we are meant to be the Land of the Free. We cannot give up our freedoms and our rights to decide what we will do with our children.

Don’t give up your rights. Don’t give up your freedoms. Whatever you decide to do, if you are a mother who decides to vaccinate your children, or if you are a mother who decides not to, you have to do it after study and research, and be proactive about all these things. These Vs, the vaccinations and the vasectomies, and so many issues that we are being faced with today, and we are being crowded in more and more with all these liberal and socialistic things which are all anti-family and anti-God’s original plan.

So let’s keep close to God, dear mothers, let’s keep in His Word, because the Word, just having the Word in you, is the antidote to deception. When you have the Word, somehow when you hear things, or even things in society, or even things everybody else is doing, you get that check in you. And when you feel that check, take notice of it, and don’t give in to becoming a victim.

We’re not victims, God has called us to freedom, and we’re slowly losing our freedoms in this country, but we’ve got to hang on to them, we’ve got to fight for them. Amen?

BH: Amen.

NC: So fight for your freedoms, amen.  Let me read you as we close, just a couple of quotes here. This quote says, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but not so popular.” Sometimes we have to go outside of the box, go against the grain, be looked upon as weird because we’re choosing truth. But we are going to be those who stand.

This is actually in this book, Is Vasectomy Worth the Risk? which you can order if you’re interested. And I read this prayer, it’s a Jewish prayer, you can’t imagine anyone praying it today, but this is what it says: “Blessed art Thou, O God, King of the world, Who formed man in wisdom and created in him various offices and tubes. Before Thy glorious throne it is revealed that if but one of these be opened or closed, it would be impossible to exist and endure in Thy presence. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who heals all flesh and works wondrously.”

What a prayer. I mean, remember how, if someone was not perfect, they were not allowed to come into the holy presence of God, and I think that’s taken from that. Okay, something is contaminated, it’s changed, it’s not like God created the perfect man. And so, you know, let’s just get back to God’s ways.

Time has gone again, so let’s pray.

“Father, we thank You for these times when we can talk together about issues that we all face, because these things are all around us in society. Help us to be those who seek You, who seek after Your Word. We know the little saying, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” and sometimes we just have a little bit of knowledge but help us to be those who really seek after Your knowledge. We thank You that we can find all our answers in You. In You are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

“Help us, Lord, to live in You, live in Your word, and to be strong. I pray for every wife and mother and daughter listening today, that You will strengthen them, strengthen them in their convictions. O God, give them grace to stand true to truth, and not become victimized. And Father I pray, that as they stand, You will fill them with Your grace and anointing. Because, Lord Jesus, You came to this earth and You revealed Yourself, You were full of grace and truth and we want to also live that way, we want to never compromise on truth but we want to be full of grace as we share. So we ask that You will give us this anointing and enabling, in the Name of Jesus, Amen.”

 

Transcribed by Stephanie Johnson

 

BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

 

IS VASECTOMY WORTH THE RISK?

A Physician’s Case Against Vasectomania

By Dr. H. J. Roberts

Go to Amazon.

 

HIS B.A. WAS ONLY $8K

Quick, Fun, College for Ages 12 – 99 Years

 By Kathy Cooksey

Go to Above Rubies Book Store

https://aboverubiesbookstore.mybigcommerce.com/his-b-a-was-only-8k-quick-fun-college-for-ages-12-to-99-years/

 

 

CHUCKING COLLEGE

By Melanie Ellison

Go to Amazon

FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell

Episode 78 - MOTHERING AND HOMESCHOOLING

Rocky Barrett: Welcome to the podcast, From Our Home to Yours, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy Campbell: Hello ladies it is so great to be with you again. You will remember that last week I was talking to you about how we are to glory in our tribulations.

Well I’m wondering how you’ve been going this last week. I wonder if maybe you have been going through some difficulty and trial and how you’ve been getting through it? I wonder if you were able to glory in it. Oh my, we really don’t usually feel like it, do we?

But isn’t it wonderful to have the Word of God that encourages us? So I just want to encourage you again today.

This morning I was reading another Scripture that I just have to share with you. It is James 5:11 and it says: “Behold, we count them happy which endure . . ..”

There is another Scripture that doesn’t often quite relate to our lives. You mean to say that I’ve got to be happy when I’m enduring something and going through it?

Well, that’s the Scripture. That word “endure” is one of the hupo words. I haven’t got time to tell you all about them today but this one is hupomenō.

Hupo means “to be under” and menō means “to remain.” So it literally means to remain under your trial without saying, “Oh help, how can I get out of this?”

Sometimes something we’re going through goes on for a little bit longer than we really want it to. God wants us to go through it with patience.

There’s another Scripture in James 1:4 where it says: “Let patience have its perfect work . . ..”

There is another hupo word. “Let patience have its perfect work . . ..” But this time it means to endure with cheerfulness and hopefulness.

So when we’re going through our trial, yes, we’re remaining under it, but we’re not going under it.

What I mean is, we’re not just letting it take us over and we’re not coming under the stress of it. Even in the midst of our trials we can actually live above them.

We remain under them, but we remain under them with cheerfulness and joyfulness knowing that we can live above them because we are living above them in Christ.

We are seated in Christ, in the heavenlies, at the right hand of the Father. We are in Him and He is in us. So we can go through them with joyfulness.

I was thinking about that this morning and I wrote this little ditty. I wrote:

“Be patient in your trial, but not with resignation.

Instead remaining under with cheerful jubilation.”

Well I read it to my husband, and he said, “Well Nancy, it sounds a bit over the top. Do you think people will really be jubilating when they’re going through their trials?”

I said, “Well, what about Paul who said: “I glory in my tribulations. I take pleasure in my infirmities, persecutions, and trials.”

We may not really be having a special celebration party, but I do believe that as we look to Christ that we can go through them with cheerfulness and hopefulness.

That’s how God wants us to go through our trials. “Behold, we count them happy which endure . . ..”

Well here is another little quote. It might be a bit more to reality.

Dr. Daniel Gregory says:

Common patience says: ”Grin and bear it.”

But Christian patience says: “Sing and bear it.”

How do you like that? That’s so good isn’t it?

Even though we still have to bear it, and we’re still going through it, we can sing as we bear it. So be encouraged.

Here is just a couple more Scriptures: First is Romans 2:7. Here it is talking about if you are buffeted for your faults. That word buffeted actually means “to get a wrap with a fist.” It’s like being hauled over the coals because something we’ve done is not right and we deserve it.

But when we do good things and pour out love and minister to people and then they come back at us with hateful words and persecute us then when we bear it, what does the Bible say? “With patient continuance.”

Do you like that? See, sometimes we think, “Oh I need patience” or we think, “Oh, if only it could last just for today or till tomorrow or just one week.” But it’s patient CONTINUANCE. Yes, it goes on longer than we think, but by “ . . . Patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life.”

In other words we go through these things because we are looking to glory that will be revealed in us on that day in eternity.

First Peter 2:20: “ . . . But if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God.” So there we go. Be encouraged again, ladies.

But today, I have something so special for you because I am going to introduce two lovely mothers to you. First of all, one of these mothers is one of my granddaughters-in-law. I guess that’s how we say it, yes. I have Stephanie with me. Stephanie is married to my grandson, Crusoe. Crusoe Johnson in one of Evangeline’s sons.

How did it happen? Well, Stephanie came to be an Above Rubies helper. She was another one of my wonderful Above Rubies helpers. I think some of you have got to know that some of our helpers have got married to our grandsons.

We never sort of planned that to happen, but it’s happened, and it’s been so wonderful and exciting.

So Stephanie is with us today. She’s now married to Crusoe and they have a little girl called Hosanna.

Say hi Stephanie!

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: Hi!

NC: You can hear that Stephanie is filled with joy and filled with light! She is such a joy to have around wherever.

When she came, in fact she was only 16 years old when she came, and I usually like our girls to be older than that, but I gave in for Stephanie.

She wasn’t like a normal 16-year-old; she was just so mature. The lovely thing about Stephanie and her whole family, it’s just part of their family, they will say, “Oh, can I pray for you?”

If there’s some problem we’re talking about they don’t just talk about it, they say, “Oh, let’s pray about it!”

It’s just so great; I love that about you, Stephanie.

SJ: Thank you!

NC: Yesterday I had a YOUNG MOTHER’S LUNCHEON at my home.  I always love to have things happen around my table.

I had this desire to have all the lovely young mums because all these beautiful couples are getting married and all of their babies are coming along.

As we sat around the table I said to the mums, “Now tell us, what are some lovely things you enjoy about motherhood?”

So Stephanie, tell us, what did you say?

SJ: Oh well, being a wife and mom is definitely the best job I have ever had. I love it so much. One of the things I love is nursing Hosanna. It is so amazing just holding her in my arms and seeing her cute face. When she falls asleep it’s so cute.

I also love playing with her. She’s at the age now where she loves to tickle, and she’ll come up and touch my feet and start laughing. She’ll start laughing to get me to start laughing. It’s so cute. I love tickling her, hearing her laughing and squealing, and chasing her around the house.

Crusoe is such an amazing dad. One of my favorite things is when he comes home from work. She’ll go running outside and spread out both her arms just waiting for him to walk from the car to her.

Once he comes, she gives him a huge hug and then he will come and play with her. Just watching them play together blesses my heart so much because it’s so special to see them playing together.

I love being a wife and mom, it’s just so fun.

NC: I love now just seeing these beautiful couples and seeing their delight and joy in motherhood. I love to see what beautiful fathers they are. It is just so wonderful.

You were telling me, Stephanie, that you are actually reading The Power of Motherhood at the moment. Tell me, are you finding it a help to you?

SJ: Oh my goodness, yes, I love it. Nana had given it to me a few months back and I just started reading it and it is so good. Every day I get so excited,  so excited when I read it. I’ll read a section and it’s so powerful, everything that’s in it.

I was just reading about nursing and how healthy it is for your body. I had already loved to nurse, and I knew it was so healthy for the baby and I had heard that it was healthy for me. Reading the lists of everything that is so good for you was just a reminder of “Wow, this is so healthy!”

I definitely want to keep nursing because it is so good.

It also makes me know how important my role is as a mom. I love all the Scripture verses and how Nana goes into the meaning of different words in the book makes it so powerful.

Like El Shaddai, one of the ways of describing God is one of the ways that women are described, the mothering-type side of God.

For example, how Jesus longed to gather Israel together and how God has that heart too, that tender heart and how we’re supposed to show that to our children and to the world, that tender, compassionate, loving heart of God. It’s so important that we represent God correctly.

NC: Amen, you’ve got it, Stephanie! You’ll be able to take over from me and tell the world about motherhood! That is just so wonderful.

Thank you for coming and being with us today.

SJ: You are so welcome!

NC: Oh, I have got to tell you something else! I have got to tell you where Stephanie lives.

Now, you’ll just love to hear this because Stephanie, Crusoe, and little Hosanna, they live in the Trim Healthy Mama Poddy house, can you believe it?

SJ: Yes, it’s P-O-D-D-Y, as they say!

NC: That’s right! When they are doing their podcasting, of course, Stephanie has to get out.

SJ: Yes, I do my grocery shopping.

NC:  With all our couples getting married and currently we have another three couples that are courting, we’re just getting all these houses. Wondrously you were able to go into the THM Poddy house. But it’s just temporary isn’t it?

Because they have fixed up an old barn on Pearl and Charlie’s property and they have built a new Poddy cabin up on top of the barn. It’s going to be wonderful, but they are just waiting for some more equipment. Then you will have the whole Poddy to yourself, won’t you?

SJ: Yes!

NC: Well thank you so much, Stephanie.

And now I’m going to introduce to you Stephanie’s sister! Well there’s actually four girls and three boys in your family, isn’t there?

BRITTANY is Stephanie’s older sister and she is staying with Stephanie at the moment. They come from Florida.

Brittany was with us at the luncheon yesterday and we got to talking of course about all the things to do with marriage and motherhood. It’s never ending what we can talk about.

I said to Brittany, “Oh goodness me, you’ve got to come and share on the podcast today.”

So here she is this morning before she goes back to Florida.

Now Brittany and her husband have five children and actually your oldest son is adopted, isn’t he?

Brittany Howell: Yes, he is.

NC: Tell us how that all happened!

BH: Well thank you, first of all, for letting me be on this podcast. Like I said yesterday, it’s been such a blessing to me to listen to it.

NC: So you listen to it yourself?

BH: I have never missed an episode, ever!

NC: And now next time you’ll be listening to you!

BH: I share it with my friends and every week they will say, “God knew exactly what I needed to hear. Nancy spoke exactly what I needed to hear.”

It’s been such an encouragement to all my friends and me so I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to do this and to invest into so many of us because it is a huge blessing.

So yes, my oldest is adopted. My husband and I had been married for about six months and we had just found out that we were pregnant with our first baby.

We received a call from a friend of mine saying that her nephew needed a place to go and wondered if we would be willing to take him in? We said yes and five and a half hours later he was dropped off at our house. We didn’t have nine months to become parents. We had five and a half hours!

NC: I think a lot of parents would love that miracle to happen.

BH: Thank you, yes! Just skip straight to it. We had custody through the state of him for about three years and then we were able to adopt him before he turned four.  He is seven now and such a joy. He fits right into the oldest role in our home.

NC: So when your first biological son was born, how old was he?

BH: They are 14 months apart, so he had just turned one.

NC: Well that’s lovely. Actually, you were blessed because I think the firstborn take more time than any other child in your family because you’re not just mothering them. There is no one else to play with them, look at them, goo with them and so you are their playmate 24/7 as well.  But you had another one that as they grow, they are best mates!

BH: Yes, yes.

NC: When you have a second child it’s amazing because they learn to play with one another, and you can actually do something while they’re happily playing together.

BH: It’s so true.

NC: I know, it’s amazing.

BH: I tell moms that when they ask about having children. I said that having one or two was harder than having four or five because when I had just one or two, they needed me constantly. There was nobody to play with them or help them get a drink of water except me.

So when I hit the stage of having four or five, my house was cleaner, the meals were better, because they all played together and they had each other, so it freed me up more.

NC: Oh I know, and I really think that’s something that you new mothers, dear mothers, that you need to know. It is your most challenging time when you have your first one or two.

You think, “How can I keep doing this?” But as Brittany said, it gets easier because they play with one another.

There is this modern philosophy that every child has to have so much attention each day. Well, they think that in their brains, but the people that think that are typically the ones going out to work in their careers anyway, so they usually can’t do it.

But that’s not how family life is. God didn’t intend for our children to grow up with that entitlement that they have to have so much attention from my mother or I have to have this or that. No, that’s not the way it’s meant to be.

In fact, I think mothering can often be portrayed as MOTHERING MOMENTS. When your child is a little baby or toddler you are just their soul sustenance and so on.

But they get older and then it’s mothering moments. They play happily for a while and then maybe they hurt themselves and they run to mummy.

They need you and so you comfort them and cuddle them, and you just bless them, but it only takes a few moments and off they go. They run off all happy again because they know mother is there.

That’s such a beautiful thing, isn’t it? For children to know that their mother is there. One of the names of God is Jehovah-Shammah ,“The Lord is there.” He’s always available. That’s another thing about motherhood and how we show to our children what God is like, that He’s always there.

Mom is not out in some career. She’s not out somewhere. She’s there. She’s there when I need her.  Whenever they need her, they come running and we give them that mothering moment.

They’re also gaining from one another and I think that happens the older they grow.

See, God created family. He didn’t create independent people to live on their own. No, He puts the solitary in families.

He brought your son into your family. This is what God does.

In a family we interrelate with one another and we’re all gaining something from one another. As the children grow and more children come into the family it’s not just totally on mum and dad. IT’S THE FAMILY, isn’t it?

BH: It is. They get more helpful as they get older but not just practically. I’ve seen them helpful emotionally, too.

Like the other day, I forget why, but my two-year-old was crying in her bed but I was nursing and couldn’t get to her at that moment. But my six-year-old, he jumped up, ran into her room and I overheard him say, “Naomi, what’s wrong? I can help you out. Do you want me to tell you a story until you fall asleep?”

He rubbed her back and told her a little story until she fell asleep. He did that on his own initiative. I didn’t even ask him to do that. He saw that.

So I so agree with you, Nancy, the thought of having so many children can sound overwhelming like, “How can I give to them practically and emotionally?” But God multiplies that love through your children and what you pour into each child, they then have a chance to pour out to the next sibling when you give it. So they have four or five older siblings who can help them if they get hurt instead of just mommy.

NC: I know! That is beautiful. I think that is the most beautiful story. I love it. And they are learning how to nurture and care for one another. I mean, it’s just beautiful, isn’t it? I just love it.

Now your children are getting a little bit older, so what are you doing about schooling them?

BH: My oldest is seven and my next child is six. It is interesting to see different personalities. The oldest one is very active. He loves to be running around, outdoors, hands-on. The second one does prefer to sit quietly and work with his hands.

My husband and I are taking the perspective of praying and asking God what He’s called each child to be and not putting them in a box or putting our homeschooling or curriculum choices in a box, but really being open to let them explore what they’re interested in and what God could have on their life.

We’re not pressuring them to know their letters by the age of five and recite all their facts, but really be hands-on learning.

NC: Yes, that is so good because children each learn at a different pace, don’t they? I think it is so good for us to know and understand this, dear mums. I didn’t understand it when I started, and I so wish I had.

In fact, I didn’t home school my younger ones who are now in their fifties. Back then in New Zealand I had never heard of homeschooling. I was just a victim of society and thought I just had to send my children off to school. To tell you the truth, I hated it. I wasn’t one of those who wanted to get their children off.

I thought, “If only I could teach my children at home.”

But I was a victim and didn’t know I could do it. It had to be pioneered. Sometimes I look back and think, “If only I had pioneered it.” I remember when I was homeschooling Serene who was the youngest until we adopted others. When I started homeschooling her when we had moved to Australia, I didn’t know one other family in my whole city that was homeschooling. It was back in the early days but now that has changed so much.

I remember once when my oldest son was at school and I had to go to the parent/-teacher interview and the teacher said to me, “Your son is at school but he’s not aware of anything that’s going on. He sits at his desk and I look at him and he’s looking out the window. But I do have to concede that he’s not daydreaming because he has his brow furrowed and he’s thinking, and I know he’s in another world.”

I thought to myself, “Yes, I know what he’s doing. He’s planning and inventing.”

Because when he came home from school he would begin to create and make all these things.

He had spent his whole day at school just working it out in his mind, planning it, and getting it aleady to go. Really, school was just a waste of time.  In fact, he never really learned how to read. He had a block there. I would try to teach him when he came home.

This is what I couldn’t understand because I had always been a book learner. Not everybody learns from books. I had been a book learner. I loved to read, I loved to study, and I still love to study. It’s just my life and suddenly I had this child who couldn’t really even read and who didn’t want books.

He was hands-on and creative, and I thought, “Oh goodness me, what kind of a child do I have? Is he a little dumb or something?” only to find out as he grew that, goodness me, his intelligence is far beyond mine! I mean, I’m just kind of down here on the lower scale compared to him.

But you see, it wasn’t like mine, this great learning from books. He learned in a different way.  As he grew, of course, he grew into the giftings that God had given him and has moved into them in his life and is so successful today.

But I don’t think there was a day of school that did anything for him.

Another problem that happens is that, because we’ve had in our psych this school system, and it is a place that it is so anti-God and anti-family and anti-marriage and against everything that God has created that when we know we have to bring our children out of it.

We are putting them into such an absolutely foreign environment. We could have gotten away with it years ago, but not today.

The homosexuals have come in with their ideologies and it’s being taught in our schools and now transgender is even sanctioned in schools. Our children are taught about the Islamic faith and not the Christian faith.

Really, how would any God-fearing and Bible-believing parents send their children into this foreign environment?

But apart from that, they bring them home and think that they’ve got to school them just like they do at school. But really that’s not always the way that they will learn.

Some will learn that way. More likely girls are prone to book learning and some boys, but not every boy.

In fact, the majority are really not book learners; they are more hands-on learners.

I think we have got to come to that place to see what is learning. Is it just sitting at a desk going through some curriculum or filling in some questions? Is that learning? Half the time they don’t even remember what they were doing!

I think you were telling me a statistic about that yesterday, weren’t you?

BH: Yes, I had read a statistic that said by the time a child graduates at the age of 18 they will have forgotten 95-97% of what they have learned in school.

NC: That’s amazing. What does that do for them? I think, to me, that education is LIFE. It’s not just in a few years of schooling. In fact, we are the best teachers. Mothers, we are born teachers. By the time a child is four or five we have taught them so much, haven’t we? We teach them how to speak. We teach them about life.

In fact, from the very beginning they are just little babies and we’re touching their little nose and saying, “This is your nose, your little nose.”

We say, “These are your eyes.”

We don’t have to go to college to learn how to teach! We are the greatest teachers! We teach them so excitedly and creatively. We’re amazing!

You’re an amazing mother. You’re an amazing teacher and you don’t have to stop. Just keep on teaching them the way you started. Teach them about life.

BH: Homeschooling has gotten more popular and more common than a while ago, which is great to have so much more support and more groups and moms helping moms, which I think is great.

One of the negatives, I think that has come with that, too, is that there are now hundreds of thousands of curriculum choices and conferences. So many moms that I interact with on a regular basis feel so much pressure from that each child has to be finishing this curriculum by a certain day.

I had a mom contact me crying saying that she needed a private tutor because her six-year- old’s reading level was at the level of a five-year-old and not a six-year- old. My heart just grieved for this mom who felt like she was failing her daughter because her daughter wasn’t reading according to some standard some person out there has put on it.

I think it’s great, it’s so much more support for homeschooling.  But I think we have to be careful, too, that it doesn’t become a pressuring thing that we lose the joy of homeschooling and the joy of being with our children or make our children hate or despise learning because they’re sitting at a desk for hours doing worksheets and learning things that they’re going to forget.

NC: Yes, it’s so true and we only really passionately learn and remember what we’re interested in.

If we just have to do it because we have to do it our brain may learn it for now and it may even learn it for a test, but it will forget. We only really take in what we’re passionate about.

Our God is such a creative God. He has created every person differently. Every precious child you have is unique. There has never been any children or people like them in the history of the world and there never will be again. There is no one except them and God has put different abilities and passions in them that He wants to use for His glory.

Let’s not bog our children down with all the other junk that they’re never ever going to remember. I mean they do, yes; they do need to learn to read, to write, to spell, to do basic math. There are basic things that they need to know as a foundation for life.

Even those we will teach differently to each child and at different times.

I have another friend, a dear friend of mine, her son is grown now, but when he was young, he had such a baulk at reading. He couldn’t read and she was just giving up. She thought something was wrong with him too.

But when he was 12 years old—12  years old, can you believe it? He lay down on the sofa and started reading medical journals. That’s how he learned how to read, he just suddenly started reading them. He got interested in that. He never started to read before, he just somehow didn’t do it.

BH: Well, my husband didn’t read his first book on his own until he was an adult. He had a hard time with reading, and he was a slow reader. Now he teaches at schools. He reads way more books than I do and devours them.

NC: My son that I was telling you about who never learned to read at school, he learned everything when he left school because he was getting on with life.

Goodness me this school, it was just nothing to do with life. It was just his waste of time.  Then he moved into life and he learned everything he needed to learn. He reads huge books and he does so many things. I could just do a podcast on the things he does today!

BH: In the Bible times they were moving on to the next part of their life, adulthood/marriage closer to the age of 13 or 14. Here we’re holding back what God put in them to rise up at about the age of 13 and 14 and we’re forcing them to stay in a confined environment five additional years past the age that God designed it to be.

NC: That is so true because just a few months back I was doing a study about the age of the disciples and found out that very truth that at about 13 or at the very most 15 they had finished their education. Actually, they were well educated. Many of them could recite the whole Torah. They were well educated.

At that time, they would either get into their father’s business or they would go with a Rabbi who didn’t sit at desks.

Like the disciples that Jesus brought to Himself. Jesus, who was one of the rabbis in Israel at that time, because you had to be thirty years of age to become a rabbi back then. They would take these young disciples, these 13, 14 and 15-year olds, and that’s who Jesus’ disciples were. They learned with Jesus as they walked by the way just as it says to parents to teach your children as you walk in the way (although we drive in cars today!).

We’re to teach them as we’re sitting, lying down, or going about life. That’s how Jesus taught His disciples. They weren’t sitting at a desk.

They were young teenagers, ready to get on with life!

Some mothers have problems when they’re sons start to get into teens. They think, “How can I control this man? He’s starting to get into manhood.” You’re still trying to keep him sitting at a desk doing some little curriculums? Goodness, he’s ready to take on the world!

Oh goodness me, it’s time we stop keeping our sons as little boys and let them grow and become mature as the Bible says: “That our sons may become great even in their youth.”

That’s how it’s meant to be, isn’t it?

BH: Amen, I agree.

NC: Be encouraged today, dear mothers. You homeschooling mothers, you are doing such a great job. I want to encourage you today. Don’t get bogged down in feeling all that responsibility on you that if they don’t get through all these paces how will they make it?

Lovely ladies, they are going to make it because they’re going to make it according to what God has put in them.

You see, I talk to you not as a fellow young mother. I am talking to you from an older mother. I am now in the fourth generation. I have great-grandchildren coming on and I am looking back.

I look back and I see all of my children fulfilling their destinies. I know it is because of the goodness of the Lord and because we have prayed so much for them over the years. Their destinies did not come through their schooling; it came through their God-given gifts that God put innately within them. They are gifts that even my husband and I don’t have. They come from God.

As we give them opportunity to develop them and as we pray over their lives, God will do it. He will do it in His way.

I remember going to an Above Rubies retreat. This is when I would take the girls with me. One time we came as a huge entourage. It was Serene, Pearl, and Vange. They had little ones with them who were babies and still nursing. They may have had an older child to help with the little one.

Someone came to pick us up and they came with this big fifteen-passenger van to fit us all in and all our luggage and books.

Anyway, this lady got out and she was this young, beautiful woman. She was just so gorgeous. I thought, “This is so strange. She’s got this fifteen-passenger van and she only looks as though she’s got two children.”

We were driving along, and I said, “Well, how many children do you have?”

She said, “Oh, well I have fourteen!” And she was this beautiful, gorgeous mother.

Any way, we had a fun time at that retreat. But I met her a few years ago when she came to another retreat. This was a few years gone by now. It was testimony time and she got up and began to share about her children.

She said, “As I was mothering them [fourteen children!] I just felt a failure so much as I was homeschooling them. I would feel like, how was I getting them ready for their lives? I didn’t feel capable of teaching them as I should, but I just plodded along the best I could.”

Then she began to share what was happening with her children and the openings and the doors God had opened for them. They were doing things that young people who have been to college for I don’t know how many years weren’t even doing. You know, God had opened the doors and they were all fulfilling great things.

God is faithful. You just be faithful, lovely mum.

Okay, let’s pray:

“Lord Jesus, we just thank You that You are with us in our mothering. “Oh Lord God, You are the One Who has created us to be mothers. You have given us our children and Lord, they’re not just our children, they are Your children. Oh God, they are in Your hands and we’re just stewards to be faithful and impart Your ways to them. To make a home that’s a beautiful place for them to grow up in and become settled, stable, mature, and strong so they can go out into this world.

“Lord, we thank You that You are the One Who is working in them and You are the One Who is going to fulfill their destinies.

“We thank You that we can lift each one of our children into Your wonderful, wondrous care and guidance and we thank You in the name of Jesus. Amen.”

 

FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell

Episode 77 - THE GLORY OF WOMANHOOD- PART 10

Rocky Barrett: Welcome to the podcast, From Our Home to Yours, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy Campbell: Hello ladies. We are continuing our series, The Glory of Womanhood and we’re on a new point today.

Today we’re going to be talking about GLORYING IN OUR TRIBULATIONS. Wow, now that doesn’t sound too exciting, does it? But I think it’s something that we need to talk about because we’ve been talking about the glory of motherhood and the glory of our homes and the glory of even breastfeeding.

I know that many of you have faced problems and difficulties as you mother and train your children. It’s just not all a piece of cake! It doesn’t always go smoothly. Some of you face difficulties. Some of you have children with physical problems or even neurological problems.

You’ve got lots of challenges and you’re saying to yourself, “Where do you get the glory in all this?”

Once again, lovely ladies, we’ve got to come back to the Word, the Word of God, because that gives us our comfort and our answers. As we come to the Word, we can see how we are able to cope with life, cope with our difficulties, cope with our trials, and cope with our challenges because not one of us are exempt. Every one of us faces them in different ways and in different circumstances. We all face them because life isn’t perfect.

Whatever you are going through today, I want you to be encouraged as we go into the Word.

Let’s start with Romans chapter 5. You will notice that in every podcast I am taking you into the Word. I’m not just making up the things to tell you. I’m speaking to you from a foundation of the Word of God.

Now in Romans 5:2-5 we read: “By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but we GLORY in tribulations also . . ..”

Oh goodness me, there it is, ladies, in black and white. Paul is writing and he says we GLORY in tribulations.

Wow, we actually rejoice and praise the Lord even in tribulations?

“ . . . Knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.”

And so, dear ladies, somehow, we must come into a new mindset, don’t we? We usually complain in our tribulations. We are usually miserable in our tribulations.

But Paul’s confession was that we GLORY in our tribulations because we know that God is doing something bigger.

As we trust the Lord in our tribulations, God works things in our hearts.

As it says, He works patience in our hearts. He works hope in our hearts. He fills us with His love even in the midst of difficult relationships.

We’ve got to just let God do it.

We go over to 2 Corinthians 4:16-18. I’m going to read it to you and as I read the Word, lovely ladies, just drink it in because the Word will minister not just to your mind, but it will go down into your spirit.

 ^“For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment . . ..”

Ladies, I know that sometimes you think your affliction is heavy. Oh, it is weighing you down and it feels too much for you. But you see, what we have to do is, we have got to put our trials and afflictions on God’s scales. Now when we put them down on our scales, on our side, oh this trial, oh it’s so heavy! The scales weigh right down.

But then we put it on God’s side, and we see what it is doing for us. We’re going to see more as we read this Scripture. We’re going to see how God’s scales make our light affliction go right up and down comes God’s side.

So we’ll see about that as we go on!

“Our light affliction is but for a moment.” Sometimes we think it is going to go on and on and on and on and oh, when will we get through this? In the eyes of eternity it is but for a moment.

Now get ready to look at this: we are going to see five adjectives. I’ve often told you, look for adjectives in God’s Word. God’s Word is extravagant. It is filled with adjectives because not one word is enough to describe what God is trying to say to us.

Now He uses five. Look at them:

“ . . . Worketh for us a FAR MORE EXCEEDING and ETERNAL WEIGHT of glory . . .”

Oh ladies, do you get it?

You see, our light affliction, which we think is so heavy, weighing us down, it’s but for a moment, but we feel it’s just never ending.

Then we put it on God’s scales. We look at it in the eyes of eternity and God says it’s (and watch the scales go down as we say the words) working for us a FAR MORE EXCEEDING and ETERNAL WEIGHT of G L O R Y!

You see, God is working in us that which will prepare us for the eternal realm because this life is preparation for eternity.

In eternity we don’t have any more chance for preparing. We have no more chance of learning how to overcome evil.

It’s only in this life we have opportunity to learn how to overcome evil and how to overcome and stay on top of our trials.

I know some of you can be going through such hurtful trials. You’ve been hurt. You’ve been cut off. Other people have abused you, even in your family, and it’s so hurtful. It’s so hard to get over. It’s weighing you down.

But dear ladies, don’t let it. We don’t have to let our problems overtake us.

In this life we’re learning how to overcome as we look to Christ.

We say, “Oh God, I don’t know how to get through this, but I give it to You. I thank You that You are in control and You are working it out for my good.” For He has promised that He is working everything out for good to those that love Him.

Yes, He is working it out. We can trust Him. We don’t have to work it all out ourselves.

God is not only going to work it out here. He’s not only going to work it out in us so that we come out stronger. He is working for us this great glory—a FAR MORE EXCEEDING and ETERNAL WEIGHT of G L O R Y that we will receive in the eternal realm if we are overcomers.

Isn’t this exciting? So praise the Lord when you have things to overcome because it is the overcomers who receive the rewards. Revelation tells us that it is the overcomers who receive the crowns. Even the martyrs will receive the crowns.

I think of the persecuted church (because we have such a burden to pray for our brothers and sisters who are in prison for their faith) who are being tortured for their faith; who are cold, who are hungry, who have been torn apart from families, and who are going through trials that we could not even imagine.

Here we have our few trials and we complain and we’re miserable and go on about them. We know nothing, nothing of persecution and torture and pain like they are going through. As I think of them, I think, “Wow, they are actually going to get rewards as they are trusting in God and overcoming in their situations. What am I going to get?”

I mean, I think the more that we have to face the more reward we will have in eternity.

We don’t have to think, “Oh why should I have to go through this?”

No, as we trust God in it, He is working out such a great reward for us because the Bible says that we’re going to be rewarded for everything that we have done in the body, that which is good and that which is bad. Everything will be rewarded (1 Corinthians 3:13).

I think of that passage in Hebrews 11, the faith chapter.

There in Hebrews 11:33, 34 it’s talking about these great men of faith:  ^“Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions. Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword [and listen to the next words], out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”

These great warriors, lovely ladies, did not start out strong. They started out weak.

“Out of weakness were made strong.”

We are like that. So often we begin weak in our trials. We begin, “Poor me,” and we get into self-pity. We groan and we complain, “Poor me.”

But as we get into the Word and we learn that, yes, we can trust God, we can learn to be over comers.

As we put it in God’s hands, and we trust Him, He works in us and we become stronger. We realize that Yes! God got me through this. God did it. We become stronger in faith. The next time we face a trial we know, “Yes, God’s got this in control.

“I’ve got to suffer this, and I’ve got to go through this, but I’m not coming under it. I’m living with God in this. I’m sitting with Christ at the right hand of the Father in the heavenlies with my enemies subdued under me ( Ephesians 2:6). This is where I am in Christ and this is where I’m going to go through my trial, NOT UNDER IT BUT OVER IT in Christ and Christ in me.

We get stronger and we wax valiant in the fight. The more challenges we face in this fight of faith and in this life that we live, the stronger we get and the more valiant we become and the more we learn how to overcome.

We need these trials, don’t we, to learn how to overcome? So you can rejoice! Amen?

Let’s go, shall we, to 2 Corinthians 12:7-9. I know you know this passage but it’s good to read it again.

Paul is writing: “And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”

Don’t despair when you feel weak, dear mother. Know that God is your strength, and, in your weakness, He will show you His strength.

Trust in His strength. Confess it. Say, “Oh thank You Lord, You are my strength. You are my shield, You are my buckler, You are my rock, You are the One in Whom I trust.”

Change your confession from, “Oh poor me, I don’t know how to get through this trial” into, “Thank You Lord. I thank You that You are in control and I can trust You.”

I want to take you to Isaiah 43:2: “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.”

In this wonderful promise we learn how to change our confession.

It’s so easy to say, “I’m going through the waters. I feel like drowning.” No, that’s not what’s happening here. God says, “When you’re going through the waters, I WILL BE WITH YOU.”

That’s the testimony. So we change our testimony: “Thank You, Lord. You ARE WITH ME. I’m not going through this alone. Thank You Lord, thank You! You are in me, You are with me, You are in front of me, You go behind me, You are all over me. Thank You Lord Jesus!” Amen?

When you’re going through the fire instead of saying, “Oh, I’m going through this fiery trial, oh help me.” No, that’s not your confession. That’s not the testimony here. The Scripture says, that when you walk through the fire; yes, it does not say that you’re not going through it. When you walk through the fire. IN the fire, you are IN the fire, just like those three men were in the fire.

But there were not just those three men, there was a fourth man, “like unto the Son of God” AND HE WAS IN THE FIRE WITH THEM.

They came out of that fire and they didn’t come out with the smell of the fire upon them.

Some people come out of their trials and they still have the smell on them. They say, “Oh, I had to go through this.” They are still complaining even when God has delivered them. No, that’s the smell of the fire.

These men came out and the Bible says that there wasn’t even the smell of the fire upon them. You wouldn’t have even known that they had been in that fiery furnace.

That’s how we come out of our trials: with not even the smell of it on us.

We confess, “Thank You, Lord that even though I am I the fire I am not going to be burned. Hallelujah, thank You, Lord! The enemy can’t burn me, he can’t touch me. You are with me in this fiery furnace. You are with me in this trial. Thank You, Lord Jesus! My trust is in You!”

This is your confession. Can you change your confession? Amen?

Let’s go back to 2 Corinthians 12:9: “And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities . . ..”

There it is again ladies: glory. GLORY in them.

Wow. We certainly have to change our mindset, don’t we?

“ . . . Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

I love the Amplified Translation. It says: “ . . . So that the power of Christ may completely enfold me . . ..”

When you’re going through these afflictions and trials, God has promised to be with you to completely enfold you in His arms.

The Amplified Classic version says that the: “ . . . power of Christ may rest (yes, may pitch a tent over and dwell) upon me!”

That translation is exactly according to the Greek because the Greek word there is episkēnoō. It literally means “to pitch a tent over me.”

It’s the picture of God residing in the tabernacle in the wilderness. It’s a symbol of perfection and communion. Isn’t it beautiful?

That is the word when it says: “That the power of Christ may rest,” may rest. May pitch a tent over me. He pitches a canopy of protection over me.

Can you claim that next time you’re facing this difficulty or trial?

Say, “Thank You, Lord Jesus. I thank You that in the midst of this difficulty that You are pitching a canopy over me. I thank You that I am not alone. You are with me.”

Amen.

We’re carrying on here. We haven’t finished with 2 Corinthians 12. He says in verse 10: “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.”

Let’s look at some of those things that Paul went through.

Infirmities, that means your weaknesses. Are you going through a weakness in your body? That’s not easy when you are raising a family is it? But look to Christ and look to His healing too.

God is our Healer: “I am the LORD that healeth thee.” He is Jehovah-Rapha. That is Who He is; that is His name.

Claim your healing. Ask your husband to pray for you. It is important for your husband to pray over you because God sees him as your covering, and He hears your husband’s prayers. Get him to lay hands upon you and pray over that area of weakness in your body. Ask for God’s healing power.

Ask for the elders to come. That’s what the Bible says, that if you are sick, ask the elders to come and pray over you (James 5:14-16). Sometimes we forget about that but that’s what the Bible says in James 5:14: “Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church: and let them pray over him . . ..”

Reproaches, that means your insults, mistreatments and hurtful speech that people say against you. Those can be hurtful things. They’re not physical things but often they do become physical. Hurtful words and reproaches and things that people say, they can actually become physical. I have seen this happen. I have seen a person go right down in health just because of things and rejection and things that have been spoken over them.

But when that happens to us, we dare not let those words go into us. No, we just give them back.

God shows us the way in 1 Peter 3::9 where it says that when people speak against you, PAY THEM BACK! That’s what we want to do, isn’t it? We want to pay them back.

But the Bible says how to pay them back. He says to PAY THEM BACK WITH A BLESSING.

Isn’t that beautiful? God’s principles are the opposite to how we feel but they always work. So you pay them back with a blessing. You get on your knees and you bless them over and over and over again.

Another translation says: “Retaliate with a blessing.” When you feel like retaliating, instead of retaliating with hurtful words back, you retaliate with a blessing. You learn to overcome in this area too.

In necessities, that means in distresses and in hardships. In this affluent society we don’t really go through many hardships, do we? It seems that we are so affluent that even those who are poor, even those who live from hand to mouth, still have a roof over their heads and still have food to eat and clothing to wear. We do have far more than we need, don’t we?

The other weekend I had to go to Colorado to speak at an Above Rubies retreat and my case didn’t arrive. I thought, “Oh that’s no trouble. It will arrive the next day.”

But it didn’t! In fact, it didn’t arrive the whole weekend and so I had to live with nothing. I had to wear the same clothes that I traveled in every day. The poor people looking at me had to look at me in the same traveling clothes. I didn’t have a thing with me, no changes, not even underwear. I had nothing!

But you know what? I survived. It’s amazing what you can do without.

We just think we need so much, don’t we? We think a lot of things are necessities but even necessities we can do without. We can through those trials.

Persecutions and distresses, that means narrowness of room. When you’re in a tight situation, even there, God is with you.

Pressures, that’s anguish, troubles, and difficulties.

That just about covers all the things we go through, doesn’t it?

Paul said, “Even in all these things I GLORY in them. I TAKE PLEASURE in them that the power of Christ may rest upon me, may pitch a tent over me.”

I think of 1 Peter chapter 4:12:  ^“Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you.”

In other words, when you are going through a fiery trial don’t think it’s strange because it’s a part of life. All of us will face these things at certain times and in different ways.

Verse 13 says: “But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory [there is glory again] shall be revealed [that’s in that coming day when we will enter the eternal realm], ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.”

Oh if we can just keep eternity in our minds, we can go through anything because it’s only just for a moment. Even our trials here are not forever. They are just for a time and just for a season. We don’t go through them forever, even on this earth.

In eternity we will be free which is the eternal realm.

I think of Job. Sometimes we read Job and we imagine him and think that this is the man who went through all the suffering and Job lived a life of suffering.

No, that was only for a season. At the end of Job we read how God blessed him far above all that he had before and restored everything to him after that season was over.

So suffering is usually for a season. Then glory is an eternity.

“If ye be reproached for the name of Christ . . ..”That is when people speak against you and say hurtful, nasty, and negative things to you. I am sure if you are homeschooling and having more children than the usual two children family that people will say these negative things to you.

What do you do? Do you get upset? No, don’t get upset. Feel sorry for these people who are saying these things. You know, many are only saying them because they’ve been programmed to say them. They’ve been programmed that you don’t have too many children. They’ve been programmed in all these humanistic ways. They don’t know the truth.

God has been revealing His truth to you. He’s been showing you His ways. You can rejoice that you are in His perfect will and so you respond with a smile.

When they say, “Oh goodness, look at all these children, are they all yours?” you can say, “Oh yes, we love children! Don’t you?”

When they say, “Oh you have got a lot on your hands!” you can say, “Yes, my hands are truly filled, they are filled with blessings! We just love blessings, don’t you?” and you put it back on them.

Sometimes you are also reproached for your faith in Jesus Christ. But what does it say? That “ . . . ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.”

This is the one “if you are reproached;” that is what we are talking about: “If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory [the Holy Spirit of glory. He is the Spirit of glory] and of God resteth upon you . . ..”

Here again it talks about in our difficult times that God rests upon us. But it is a different word. Our last word was episkēnoō, meaning: “He pitches a tent or a canopy over us.”

This word is anapauō and it means: “To refresh.” This time this is the actual meaning of the word that “ . . . spirit of glory and of God resteth upon [will refresh] you . . ..”

Isn’t that beautiful?

Even in your trial, as you look to the Lord, as you trust in Him instead of keeping your eyes on the problem, you put your eyes on the Lord Who is your Strength, Who is your Rock, Who is your Deliverer, that you will find His rest comes on you, His refreshing.

God is able to refresh you even in your trial as you look to Him.

It’s where we keep our eyes. We take our eyes off our problem; yes, the trials are still there. We have to go through them, and we’ve got to face them. Sometimes God doesn’t take them away immediately. Sometimes they just keep there, and it takes some time, but God wants us to learn to trust Him in them.

We put our eyes on Him. Learning to keep your eyes on Him.

What does Isaiah 26:3, 4 say? These two verses are some of my favorite Scriptures: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee . . ..”

This is where we keep our peace, ladies. When we stay our minds on the Lord, we keep our minds on the Lord.

“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace.” There’s another double. It’s a double plural word: “Peace, peace.”

It’s perfect peace because, why? Because “He trusteth in thee.”

He trusts in the Lord. When we trust in Him and keep our eyes stayed upon the Lord, we will know His peace in us, and we will know His refreshing upon us.

“ . . . Because he trusteth in thee. Trust ye in the Lord for ever: for in the LORD JEHOVAH is everlasting strength.”

Ladies, did you get that? God’s strength doesn’t run out.

Our strength runs out but when we get to the end of it ,we go to God because He is everlasting strength and His strength never runs out. Amen?

And so: “ . . . the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you: on their part he is evil spoken of, but on your part he is glorified.”

Dear ladies, as we glory in our tribulations, we glorify God. We bring praise to His glory because people can then see Christ, His life, His peace, His rest, and His joy in us even in the midst of our trials. Amen?

I trust that these Scriptures have been an encouragement to you. I will leave you with one last one, Romans 8:18: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the GLORY which shall be revealed in us.”

Amen?

“Dear Father, We thank You, Lord, that Your glory is not only for when times are good and everything is just going perfect. Lord, You give us Your glory even in the fiery trials and even in the difficult times.

“We pray that You will help us to glory in our tribulations, in our difficulties, knowing that You are working for us a far more and exceeding and eternal weight of glory.

“Help us to live in the light of eternity, not getting bogged down with all that we have to go through here but knowing that it is preparing us for that glorious eternal world.

“We thank You in the name of Jesus. AMEN.”