On our third evening we had a third retired man in his sixties. This time, Stephen Clark, formerly at Abersychan, Llandrindod and Bridgend. He now lves in Cyprus. He took us through Colossians 2:6-23 and was helpfully evangelistic. Near the end he used this well known illustration, which Stephen had heard a friends give at a Senior Camp. He said this "It is an imperfect illustration. If you push it all the way you will end up with a monstrously distorted doctrine of the atonement but it was meant to illustrate just one thing, the love of God in Christ Jesus ... it's a true story of a little girl whose mother had horribly deformed hands and this little girl had friends in school. They'd ask her to go to her friends' houses for tea but she never asked any of her friends to come for tea and she didn't ask them because she was ashamed of her mother's hands. This went on for quite some time and then the mother felt she had to deal with it. She said, "You never ask anyone to come here for tea. Why is that?" The girl didn't want to come out with it. She teased it out of her in the end. She said, "yes it's your hands Mum, I don't want my friends to see the awful scarring and shape on your hands. So she said, "I'll tell you why my hands are like this. I wasn't born like it" she said "I had lovely hands but one day the chip pan was on and you were in the kitchen. You came to the chip pan, your hand went up and if that pan had been pulled down you would have been marred for life and I rushed over and put my hands in the way so that you wouldn't be scarred. And that's why my hands are like this. He to rescue us from danger interposed his precious blood. And that's why you and I can go on in the Christian life. Because we've been rooted in Christ, we've been renewed in Christ and most of all we've been redeemed by the blood of the lamb and that is so immense that that will be the theme of Praise forever and ever. Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.
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