...just ask Dietrich
But you don't understand, Philip..... I am in the Ministry.... I am a Pastor... I am a Missionary... I am serving God.... God always does what we ask Him to do... we are standing on His promises... and God always answers our prayers... hmmmm.... well.. that is true... He does answer... eventually... but not always the way we think He should or have asked him to... so.... maybe... we should just ask Dietrich about that...
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pretty well known German Lutheran Pastor born in 1906... arrested by the Nazi's in April of 1943.... executed 2 years later on April 9, 1945 just 23 days before Germany surrendered to the allied forces... surely God could have kept him safe for another 23 days... yes... that is true... He could have.. God can do anything He wants to do...God answered the prayers of people from all over the world asking Him for Dietrich's safety and release from prison... the Lord did release... but not the way He was asked to do it...
" the execution was particularly brutal. Bonhoeffer was stripped of his clothing and led naked into the execution yard, where he was hanged with thin wire for death by strangulation."
He was just 39 years old.... we cry out ...why Lord? ... a great man of God like this... He could have accomplished so much...what a great ministry he had... cut off in the prime of life... and what a horrid humiliating way to die.... only 23 more days.... why God?
Because His ways really are not our ways....the point here.... is... that what is so important to us... how we see things....God sees differently... our function on this earth is not for us to decide what God ought to do and try to control what God does... rather it is for us to submit to what God decides instead. Like Bonhoeffer did... a man that the doctor had hardly ever seen "die so entirely submissive to the will of God".....
And you know something else.... if Bonhoeffer hadn't spent that 2 years in prison.... hadn't been murdered by the Nazi's on April 9, 1945... you and I would never have heard about him....thousands upon thousands of lives have been impacted in a powerful way over the past 66 years... because ... God decided to do it differently than the way He was asked to do it...
Next time... I would like to say some things about the importance of prisons in the plan of God...... we need to be arrested.... and placed in our prisons... and... like it or not... we will be.
:)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pretty well known German Lutheran Pastor born in 1906... arrested by the Nazi's in April of 1943.... executed 2 years later on April 9, 1945 just 23 days before Germany surrendered to the allied forces... surely God could have kept him safe for another 23 days... yes... that is true... He could have.. God can do anything He wants to do...God answered the prayers of people from all over the world asking Him for Dietrich's safety and release from prison... the Lord did release... but not the way He was asked to do it...
"Bonhoeffer was led away just as he concluded his final Sunday service and asked an English prisoner Payne Best to remember him to Bishop George Bell of Chichester if he should ever reach his home: "This is the end — for me the beginning of life."[30]"
Obviously Dietrich was praying differently for himself at that point than others were.
"The camp doctor who witnessed the execution wrote: “I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer ... kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”[30]
" the execution was particularly brutal. Bonhoeffer was stripped of his clothing and led naked into the execution yard, where he was hanged with thin wire for death by strangulation."
He was just 39 years old.... we cry out ...why Lord? ... a great man of God like this... He could have accomplished so much...what a great ministry he had... cut off in the prime of life... and what a horrid humiliating way to die.... only 23 more days.... why God?
Because His ways really are not our ways....the point here.... is... that what is so important to us... how we see things....God sees differently... our function on this earth is not for us to decide what God ought to do and try to control what God does... rather it is for us to submit to what God decides instead. Like Bonhoeffer did... a man that the doctor had hardly ever seen "die so entirely submissive to the will of God".....
And you know something else.... if Bonhoeffer hadn't spent that 2 years in prison.... hadn't been murdered by the Nazi's on April 9, 1945... you and I would never have heard about him....thousands upon thousands of lives have been impacted in a powerful way over the past 66 years... because ... God decided to do it differently than the way He was asked to do it...
Next time... I would like to say some things about the importance of prisons in the plan of God...... we need to be arrested.... and placed in our prisons... and... like it or not... we will be.
:)
