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By DR . DON HILLIS (associated with Orient Crusades)
THINGS NOT SEEN Mr. and Mrs. Vijay Kamble and their five children live in a crowded but clean one room home. There are no carpets on the floor and no curtains at the one window. Mrs. Kamble has never seen a wood, gas or electric stove. Refrigerators, washing ma- cliines, vacuum cleaners, deep freez ers and garbage disposals are totally unknown to her. She washes her clothes in, and carries her water from a distant river. Her husband Vijay has never seen a television set, never lived in a home with electirc lights, never used a telephone, and never owned a radio, bicycle or car. Not one of the seven members of the family has ever learned the al phabet, memorized the multiplication tables, written a letter or read the headlines of a newspaper. In fact, none of them has ever had the privi lege of sitting at a school desk for even a day. WHAT! NO BIBLE? What is far worse, they have never seen the inside of a church, never sung from a hymn book, never held a Bible in their hands and never heard the Gospel preached. They have of course, bathed in sacred rivers, offered sacrifices to sightless images, walked miles to pagan temples, prayed to gods who could not hear and given sacrificially of their meager income to idolatrous and unclean priests, in India, “land of religious night.”
True to the Word of God, he was im plying that our offerings do not begin until the Lord’s tithe has been given. How quickly the millions who have never heard, would be given the op portunity if all of God’s children were faithful with the Lord’s tithe. How very much more could be ac complished if our “offerings” were added. You have much for which to praise Him during this Thanksgiving sea son. Innumerable are the material, social and spiritual bounties which are yours. It is your sincere desire to imitate the one cleansed leper who spent of his time and strength to turn and thank the One who healed him. Not for a moment would you be in tentionally ungrateful. In all of this you will do well to remember that there is no real thanks without giv ing. When you pay the Lord’s tithe and add to it your offerings, then you place y o u r s e l f in the sphere of Thanks-GIVING. “I will not offer unto the Lord that which costs me nothing.”
AND NO SAVIOUR? Vijay Kamble and his family are typical of vast millions in the world today. The plain fact is that there are many, Many, MANY more people who live as he does than those who live as you do. A per-capita income of a dollar a week is the sad but com mon lot of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. Most of these have never in their life known anything but financial poverty, social degredation, academic darkness and spiritual blindness. A Savior who waits to lift the bur den of sin, break the shackles of habit, cleanse the heart, unite the home, bring peace to the mind and impart eternal life without price to him who asks, is as foreign to these millions as the teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita are to you. THANKS . . . GIVING Recently I heard a preacher ask his audience to place the “Lord’s tithe” and “their offerings” into the plates.
NOVEMBER, 1958
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