"Not on Your Life!"

Charles Blondin, whose real name was Jean François Gravelet, was a French acrobat who first walked a tightrope 1100 feet across Niagara Falls in 1859. He performed this feat many more times. More than once he walked across the falls while carrying his manager, Harry Colcord, on his back. After one such trip he said to a man in the crowd, “Do you believe I could do that with you?” 

The man answered, “Yes, I’ve just seen you do it.” 

“Well, then,” Blondin said, “Hop on and I’ll carry you across.” 

But the man replied, “Not on your life.” 

Saving faith goes beyond mere mental assent that affirms certain statements as true. Faith must also involve the consent of our will. We must trust in Christ.

from High Calling, published by the Francis Asbury Society, March - April issue 2022

What Abraham Could Not Hear

(as preserved by Dennis Kinlaw)

Henry Clay Morrison used to describe this scene in a powerful way. He would say:

I thought I heard a conversation on Mount Moriah. It wasn’t between Abraham and Isaac, it was between the first Person of the Trinity and the second Person of the Trinity. The second Person of the Blessed Trinity said to the first of the Blessed Trinity. “Father, this is not the last time we’re coming to this mountaintop, is it?”

And the Father said to the eternal Son, “No, Son, this is not the last time we’re coming to this mountaintop. It will be about two thousand years and we’ll be back here.”

“Father, when we come back the next time, it won’t be one of them on this altar, will it?”

The eternal Father replied, “No, Son, when we come back the next time, it won’t be one of them on this altar; it will be one of us.”

“It will be me, won’t it?”

And the Father said, “Son, yes, it will be you.”

The eternal Son looked into the face of the eternal Father and he said, “Father, when we come back the next time, and it’s me on that altar, and the knife’s raised or the spear is raised, and they’re ready to push it in, are you going to say, ‘Don’t touch the lad’?”

“No Son. We never ask them to do in symbol what we are not willing to do in reality.”