Walking In the Light
There is one other way, the healthiest of all, to maintain fellowship in personal relationships, as well as the freshness of the walk in Jesus. We learned lessons which have much affected many of us over the past fifteen years through our friends from Ruanda, East Africa. From these, missionaries and Africans, we caught the reality of the walk in the light, not only with God but with one another.
Our first contact with them came through Edith Moules, the founder of the Leprosy and Medical department of WEC. She had noted the quality of brotherly love and fellowship between missionaries and Africans, beyond anything she had seen before, and a way of walking in the Spirit together which could be called brokenness, openness, and challenge. That is to say, they were quick to repent when they slipped, calling sin sin, and to claim the cleansing blood of Jesus.
This was the walk in the light according to 1 John 1, which they spoke of as brokenness. But they were also open and sharing with each other where the Spirit had convicted them and the blood of Jesus had cleansed them. They would do this not only on the spot in their daily contacts but in their open fellowship meetings at night. This was down-to-earth reality.
Edith Moules stood at her husband’s deathbed crying, and, mighty woman of faith as she was, maybe temporarily questioning God’s dealings in so suddenly taking her husband. One of the Africans standing by the bedside discerned that her tears were more of questioning than of faith, sorrow of the world rather than godly sorrow as Paul said, and he boldly challenged her: “Lady, if your husband is with Jesus, why are you crying like that?”
She left the room filled with indignation at being spoken to like that, and that by an African, one of those whom she was supposed to have come to teach. But there in her room with the same sensitiveness to sin which she had seen around her, responding to God’s light, God showed her her own pride and anger, and took her back to the many times she had been hot-tempered herself while in the act of pointing out the faults of her leprosy patients. He reminded her of the saying of the Africans that when you point one finger at your neighbor, the other three fingers of your closed hand are pointing to yourself. Follow the three first! So she did, and began this same walk of brokenness and openness.
When later she returned to Congo and told her leprosy patients the same thing, a move of the Spirit began among them also.
–Summit Living
