We Accept His Calling
by Norman Grubb

In the Fall ’99 issue of The Intercessor we reprinted an excerpt from Who Am I? entitled "The Height of His Calling, " in which Norman Grubb explains the role of an intercessor. The following are some additional points too vital not to be shared.

For us it [intercession] does not mean some passing prayer and faith interest in which we can passingly take a share. It means that this intercession is specifically mine to see through, and there is no giving up on it. I will pay the price, and the fruit must follow. There is no may about it, only a must.

Then it goes farther into the physical and material. At this point we have no hold-backs. God is saying, I have come to do so and so, and I have come to do it through you. On a praying level the thing may happen; on an interceding level it must. If we just pray for this or that, it may happen. If we accept an intercession, it must. For this our lives are on the altar. "A body hast Thou prepared Me," Jesus said: and "through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ we are sanctified."

So intercession is not only the spoken word of faith, but the persistent giving of ourselves by whatever ways God indicates to see the fulfilment. It is Paul’s filling up "that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His
body’s sake." So death worketh in us, but life in you." That is why I think one of the top-most sayings in the Bible is Isaiah’s prophecy about Christ: "It pleased the Lord to bruise Him." The Father’s greatest pleasure was when in His Son He had one upon whom He could put the full weight of bodily sacrifice for the whole world. It pleases the Lord if He can bruise us for those He has sent us to save, and we can take the bruises. There are no limits to that.

I had the profound influence in my life of my own father-in-law, C.T. Studd, who had said to the Lord at the moment of his full consecration when England’s greatest cricketer, "If Jesus Christ, God’s Son, gave his life to save me, I can only be an honest Christian if I give my life for Him." And God took him at his word. Called from all his earthly glory as a cricketer to inland China: while there, giving away every penny of his large inheritance, probably worth a quarter of a million in today’s values, for the spread of the gospel: living his last sixteen years in the heart of Africa in his bamboo home surrounded by the Africans he loved and came to win for Christ. When Pauline, my wife and his daughter, saw him for the last time while we sat by his simple African bed until 3:00 a.m., knowing we were not likely to see him on earth again, he said to her, "Pauline, I should like to give you something before you go," then looking round the few boxes of necessities which were all he possessed, he said, "But I gave it all to Jesus long ago." And another time he had said, "My only regret is that I had not more to sacrifice for Jesus." And what a harvest! The thousands who have found Christ in the heart of Africa, and the hundreds of thousands who heard of Him and many came to know Him in forty different countries, through those who later joined this Worldwide Crusade he founded.

What greater final word can there be than Paul’s: "I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ…that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death…. Brethren I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things that are behind, and reaching forth unto those things that are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 3:8-14).

–From Who Am I?