Saints, the annals of Christian history are filled with ordinary people performing extraordinary works through God’s powerful Holy Spirit! Some people are more gifted than others in human terms, but God uses the least of these too in a mighty way. +Enjoy these vignettes and beg and beseech the Lord for your life to be one of perpetual fruit not just religious knowledge…these are from many sources and in particular the Christian History Institute and used by permission.
Johann Arndt Pointed the Way to Pietism
THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION was more that thirty years along when Johann Arndt was born on this day, 27 December 1555, at Ballenstedt, Germany. His parents schooled him at home as a boy, emphasizing the importance of Christ’s life in a believer. To put him through college, they deprived themselves of necessities. In time, he would call for a reformation of the Reformation, insisting on the need of a mystical experience of Christ in addition to the Reformation’s legal theory of justification.
While studying medicine, Arndt developed a painful illness. Doctors held out no hope for recovery. Arndt turned to the Lord, vowing that if God healed him, he would devote his life to Christian service. He recovered and studied theology in Lutheran and Reformed universities of Germany and Switzerland. In 1583, he accepted a pastorate at Badeborn. However, Duke John George, a Calvinist, forced him to leave after seven years because Arndt allowed images in his church and practiced exorcism.
Arndt moved to Quedlinburg where he pastored for nine years. A dedicated pastor, he visited the sick, helped the needy, made peace between enemies, and did much good. However, he preached boldly against sin. A clique who hated his forthright preaching forced him to leave.
While at his next post in Brunswick, Arndt issued the first volume of his book True Christianity, calling for genuine discipleship. Noting that jealousy, self-seeking, greed, and covetousness were rampant among professed Christians, he observed, “The modern life of persons outwardly professing Christianity is not with [Christ] and therefore it is against him, that is, not Christian but unchristian. For now most men are at discord with Christ, and hardly are there any of one soul, one will, one mind, and one spirit with Christ; and none but such as these ever can be Christ’s or be called rightly by his name, and accounted for Christians.” This brought down the wrath of colleagues who wanted a faith to ease their guilt without the inconvenience of giving up sin.
Because of Arndt’s emphasis on practical Christianity and the inner, emotional component necessary to belief, he is considered the first Pietist. John Wesley especially appreciated his writings.
—Dan Graves
+++
Innocent, Godly Marie Durand Kept Faith in Prison
PROTESTANT CONVERTS in France were known as Huguenots. They fought desperate wars for survival when Roman Catholics tried to stamp them out of existence. In 1598 King Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes, giving Protestants considerable rights. However, over the years, France’s Catholic majority chipped away at these provisions until 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the edict altogether. Huguenots who could not flee the country worshiped secretly and suffered penalties when caught.
Unable to lay hands on a minister named Pierre Durand in 1728, the king’s soldiers arrested his father Etienne. Etienne’s wife, Claudine, had already died in captivity. To arrange some protection for his thirteen-year old daughter Marie, Etienne married her to Matthew Seres. However, Seres was imprisoned alongside his father-in-law. The Catholics held Marie hostage unless her brother Pierre would give himself up. Marie urged him not to do so. As a consequence, when she was just fifteen, she was taken to the tower of Constance.
This tower, which stood in a swamp near the River Rhone in Aigues Mortes, France, served as both a women’s prison and a lighthouse. The prisoners were kept in an upper room. Narrow windows allowed only a little light and air. A hole in the floor opened to a guardroom below. Smoke belched upward through the opening, and the women tossed their waste down. The dungeon was bitterly cold in winter and suffocating in summer. Marie, however, was a ray of sunshine in this gloom. She comforted the prisoners, taught them Huguenot songs, nursed the sick, and wrote letters for those who could not write.
In 1732, Pierre was captured and hanged. However, because Marie refused to recant her faith, she was not freed. For thirty-eight long years she endured the privations of the tower. Her appeals to churches and government officials sufficed to get the prisoners a copy of the Psalms, which she read aloud each evening. She also obtained permission for the women to get a breath of fresh air on the rooftop.
In 1767, Prince de Beauveau, the newly appointed governor of the region, inspected the prison. His aide wrote “We saw a great circular apartment, destitute of air and of daylight, and in that great room forty women languishing in misery, infection, and tears. The governor could scarcely contain his emotion, and for the first time, without doubt, those unfortunate women perceived compassion on a human face. I see them still, at our sudden entrance, like an apparition, all falling at his feet, deluging them with their tears, striving to find words, but able only to express themselves in sobs…The youngest of those martyrs was more than fifty years old. She was only eight years old when she was arrested, because she had gone to a preaching service with her mother, and the punishment was lasting still.”
Voice trembling, the governor told the women, “You are free!” and arranged for their care, ignoring the objections of the bigoted and debauched King Louis XV, who was determined to stamp Protestantism out of France. On the day after Christmas, 26 December 1767, thirty-six wretched women stumbled from the tower. Marie’s face was gaunt and drawn from suffering. She returned to her childhood home, but everyone dear to her was long dead. A church in Amsterdam supported her until her death in 1776.
—Dan Graves
+++
Blumhardt: Must Christian Life Remain so Beggarly Poor?
“PEOPLE DON’T NEED CHRISTIANITY. They need Christ,” said Johann Christoph Blumhardt. Born in Stuttgart, Germany on 16 July 1805, he was reared in Pietist surroundings. After training, he became a pastor to the small towns of Möttlingen and Haugstett, where he learned to detest powerless religion. “Have I a right to preach Jesus, the risen one, when so little changes?” he asked.
His own life changed when he reluctantly began to deal with a woman in his congregation who was oppressed by evil. After counseling and prayer failed to relieve her, he felt compelled one day to challenge the devil in Christ’s name. There ensued a terrible fight which lasted for several months until on this day, 28 December 1843 a demon left the woman, shrieking “Christ is victor, Christ is victor” so loudly that the whole village heard. The woman, who had dabbled in the occult, was freed from her bizarre behavior and became a gentle, helpful associate in Blumhardt’s work.
Having awakened to the struggle between light and darkness, Blumhardt could not return to powerless Christianity. “I wish all this religious warmth and comfort would die,” he said. Revival broke out in his area after a wicked man asked to confess to him and pleaded for absolution. When Blumhardt placed his hands on him, the man shone with joy. After that, hundreds came to confess their sins. Many found physical healing, too.
Blumhardt was accused of returning to Roman Catholic practices. However, he pointed to scriptures such as John 20:23 “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.” He added, “The present genteel, self-loving brand of piety assumes, ‘I don’t need anybody; I can set things right with God myself.’ But as long as people quietly try to work out their own salvation, they won’t get anywhere. Only when they recognize the need for one another, and reach out and open up to one another will they move forward.”
Revival followed. “Everywhere, guilty consciences were struck. Old enemies became reconciled. In several cases stolen goods were returned…Previously, hostile villagers had spitefully blocked a footpath that shortened his way from Möttlingen. Now they love him like a father,” wrote an observer.
When outsiders flocked to Blumhardt for help, his superiors in the Lutheran church forbade him to directly assist anyone outside of his own parish. He was also ordered not even to pray over such people. “Are we really doomed to continue in so wretched a state? Must Christian life remain so beggarly poor?” he lamented. “We are a dehydrated people. Nothing will quench our thirst and end the drought but God pouring out his Spirit once again.” When he was ordered not to give hope out of the scriptures, he refused to obey.
Eventually Blumhardt founded a Christian spa by the sulfur springs at Bad Boll where many people reported healing through prayer and Christian instruction. His son Christoph carried on the work after him.
—Dan Graves
