Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore, let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach. For we have no continuing city here, but we seek one to come.
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Uncle Joe and I had a relationship that was far closer than the usual uncle-nephew relationship. He was like a father to me, but we were closer than even that. Even as a child, my thoughts were his, and his were mine. From what I have seen, there aren't very many people who ever find such closeness in this life with anyone. I wish that everybody could experience such a oneness of heart with somebody in this life. It is wonderful.
I was eight years old when my father made a trip to visit Uncle Joe in the Veteran's Hospital in Durham, NC. When he returned, he took me to a room away from everyone to talk to me alone. Then, when we were alone, he tried to tell me something, but broke down and began to weep. Looking up at me as he held my hand, the only words he could force out of his mouth were, "Uncle Joe is going to die." I was to learn later that the cancer found by surgeons at the hospital was so widespread that they estimated that Uncle Joe would be dead in sixty to ninety days. I have no memory of what I did after my father told me the news. The only thing I remember of that evening was weeping my heart out on Aunt Leatha's lap. She was holding me to her breast and through her own tears, said over and over to me, "Jesus will heal him. Jesus will heal him."
And he did.
In Psalm 90, the only one assigned to Moses, we are told that God has determined that seventy years would be the normal term for a human life; eighty years if that person was physically strong. Uncle Joe was a large and robust man; in his working days his arms seemed to me to be hard as steel. Other than that horrible cancer from which the Lord miraculously healed him in 1959, I don't know of any serious health problems Uncle Joe ever had until he went to be with the Lord Jesus on October 17, 1996, at the age of eighty.
I will tell you about a short, touching testimony that I heard as a young man, a testimony that can only be given by those who have experienced suffering such as Uncle Joe endured. It was in a Sunday afternoon meeting at Grandma's farmhouse, and Uncle Joe was standing as he talked.
"Brother Clark," he said to my father, the tears giving expression to the deep feelings flowing out of his heart. "It says in the Bible that on the night before Jesus died, 'As they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to his disciples.' It has never changed, Brother Clark; Jesus is still the same. He never uses anything but broken bread. If you're going to be used by the Lord, you must first be broken. He takes us up and blesses us first by giving us the holy Ghost and making us his, just as he took the bread on that table and blessed it, and then, he breaks us the way he broke that bread, so that we can be used for the good of others."
Uncle Joe knew. He had been broken by the powerful, loving hand of the Lord, and he knew what was required for a man to be made "fit for the Master's use." He told me once during a radio interview that he understood why God had afflicted him years before with cancer, and he knew the moment when, in his hospital room with the sentence of death upon him, that he surrendered to the will of God and was forgiven. Then the door of healing was opened for him, and God sent His angel to set His humbled servant free.
Jesus gives us only two options: either we fall on the Rock now and be broken, or we resist God's will and wait until the Rock falls upon us and crushes us to powder. To fall on the Rock means simply to submit to Jesus' instruction and correction; to resist and wait is to refuse chastisement and be called "bastards" and not sons, as the writer said (Heb. 12:7-8): "If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons, for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastening . . . then are ye bastards and not sons."
To be blessed, broken, and used by God or to be cursed, crushed, and destroyed by Him (Mt. 21:44); these are man's only two options. The more quickly we submit to God's authority and become "broken bread" , the more quickly He will finish His good work in our lives and make us "fit for the Master's use".