On October 14 we lost to cancer an outstanding leader among us, Ray Stedman. Long-time pastor of Peninsula Bible church in Palo Alto, California, and author of Body Life and other books, Ray contributed largely, yet humbly.
Why? “He had his ego under control,” says his close friend, Fred Smith. Fred always marveled that a man so gifted could seek applause so little.
Another close friend, Jack Modesett, Jr., quotes Ray himself as saying, “If we will admit our inadequacy, we can have God’s adequacy.… The greatest problem in the church is trying to do God’s work with man’s strength.… The key to Christian sufficiency is realizing that everything comes from God and nothing comes from me.”
Then Jack adds this: “In Ray’s book Authentic Christianity, he tells the story of Paul’s escape from Damascus by being let down over the wall in a basket. Ray commented that Paul was useless to God until he became a basket case! He adds that we also are useless until we are ‘utterly bankrupt before some demand of life, and then discover it to be a blessing,’ because it forces us to ‘depend wholly on the Lord at work in you.’ When I read that I thought, It may be that no one has ever lived a life that was fully yielded to Christ, but Ray Stedman came very close.”
Life Slipping Away
Jack is not alone in that assessment. Perhaps it was because Ray’s perspective on earth foreshadowed his current perspective from heaven. In a sermon he preached just a year before his death, he quoted Paul’s statements about our “light affliction” working in us “an exceeding great and eternal weight of glory” and followed that with a call to break out of the limitations of this-world thinking:
“The world tells us, if you don’t take it now, you’re never going to get another chance. I have seen that misunderstanding drive people into forsaking their marriages after 30 or 40 years and running off with another, usually younger, person, hoping they can still fulfill their dreams because they feel life is slipping away from them. Christians are not to think that way. This life is a school, a training period where we are being prepared for something that is incredibly great but is yet to come. I don’t understand all that is involved in that, but I believe it, and sometimes I can hardly wait until it happens.”
The Best Is Yet To Be
In the same message, Ray spoke of being readied for “something tremendous” and warned his congregation, “Don’t succumb to the philosophy that you have to have it all now or you will never have another chance. You can pass by a lot of things now and be content because you know that what God is sending you now is just what you need to get you ready for what he has waiting for you when this life is over. One of my favorite quotations is the words of Robert Browning, which you sometimes see carved on sundials:
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first
was made.”
Ray is now experiencing “the best,” and the best conclusion here is to quote Ray’s own challenge to his congregation: “So don’t lose hope. You are headed for hope, headed for life, headed for glory. All of this life is working toward that end; that’s the first thing to hang on to. You don’t need to be depressed or feel that everything is useless, that you can’t do anything because you are getting older … that is not true. Paul prays that these Christians may feel in their hearts the great hope to which God has called them. It is all waiting for them, the shining hope beyond death.”
