I'm holding the book in my hand right now....and I opened it....I didn't notice where it opened to....and I put my nose right up to the inner spine. I would do this on occasion over the years....thirty....twenty....ten years ago....and I could detect a faint smell of pulp paperback...and it took me back to early 1973. I had just started at Pitt on the G. I. Bill....and my habit was to cross Forbes Avenue and browse the National Record Mart....for a new paperback to begin reading on the bus trip home. I should have been opening a text book but after getting out of the army after three years....I wanted to major in intellectual life before concentrating on Economics or Psychology 101.
So I would put the old paperback up to my nose and that faint aroma transported me back to that bus ride home....as I opened for the first time in my life....the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The book was and is....Reach Out....The Living New Testament Illustrated....a paraphrase of the New Testament by Ken Taylor and published by Tyndale House Publishers....1967. This was a pure and childlike reminiscence of the glimpse of a Father in heaven....and in His Son Jesus Christ. I put that book down back then after only perusing it for a few days. It would be almost a decade before I opened the New Testament again.
Tonight....it is 4:45 in the morning....and I couldn't sleep....and I no longer can detect that faint smell in the spine of the book....not even a moldiness. Maybe my olfactory senses are getting weaker....in fact I know they are....but in just holding this now very supple paperback....I can take joy in remembering that I was once lost....but not lost to Jesus....and that in His perfect timing He had mercy on the least person in this world deserving of it....in fact deserving of it not at all!
This whole thought....and taking the book off the shelf....came to me tonight as I was reading the latest news story on multiple baptisms at universities....mostly in the South. I thought about what we knew as Jesus Freaks back then....and I recalled the recent movie starring Kelsey Grammer....The Jesus Revolution....about the early days of the ministry of Greg Laurie....and I went over in my mind the movie that my wife and I saw about twelve hours ago in the theater....Average Joe....that is about the high school football coach that prayed after games on the 50 yard line....causing such a stir that it wound up in the Supreme Court of the United States....(it's an enjoyable film by the way....in the genre of the 60s Jesus Freaks....and the college baptisms of today.)
I Googled news on John MacArthur. I do this every few days....hoping to hear something encouraging on his illness....and that he might return to his pulpit soon....because we in America need an authoritative voice to get our attention! For they are all retiring or dying away....replaced by younger men on the national scene who may have that college baptism vitality....but lack the gravitas of an experienced preacher....a Paul or a Bunyan or an Edwards or a Spurgeon or a Martyn Lloyd-Jones....or a Billy Graham.
After that quick Google search I went to MacArthur's Grace To You....(gty.org)....website....and listened to a 2022 sermon....of which I recommended to you here....The Most Hated Christian Doctrine. There is more here than showing up on campus to be baptized.....(or in the ocean)....encouraging as that may be....for it is something that all of us evangelicals....of even forty years such as myself....need to hear on a regular basis....the pure....and adultlike....reminder of where we were....and what indeed Jesus accomplished for us. The following was included in John MacArthur's prayer at the end of his sermon...
"And I just pray today that, in the clarity of this, all of us who are true believers might have a fresh and new commitment to be honest with the truth of the gospel, honest with the bad news....honest with the good news."
