COMMITMENT;
LONGING FOR GOD

In order to get launched into my message let me introduce a little lady who has been dead for about six hundred years. She once lived and loved and prayed and sang in the city of Norwich, England. This little woman hadn’t much light and she hadn’t any way to get much light, but the beautiful thing about her was that, with what little Biblical light she had, she walked with God so wonderfully close that she became as fragrant as a flower. And long before Reformation times she was in spirit an evangelical. She lived and died and has now been with her Lord nearly six hundred years, but she has left behind her a fragrance of Christ.

England was a better place because this little lady lived. She wrote only one book, a very tiny book that you could slip into your side pocket or your purse, but it’s so flavorful, so divine, so heavenly, that it has made a distinct contribution to the great spiritual literature of the world. The lady to whom I refer is the one called the Lady Julian.

Before she blossomed out into this radiant, glorious life which made her famous as a great Christian all over her part of the world, she prayed a prayer and God answered. It is this prayer with which I am concerned tonight. The essence of her prayer was this: “O God, please give me three wounds: the wound of contrition and the wound of compassion and the wound of longing after God.” Then she added this little post-script which I think is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read: “This I ask without condition.” She wasn’t dickering with God. She wanted three things and they were all for God’s glory: “I ask this without condition, Father; do what I ask and then send me the bill. Anything that it costs will be all right with me.”

1 Chronicles 4:10; Psalm 42:1–2; Philippians 1:29–30

Man: The Dwelling Place of God, 109, 110.