Below are two excerpts from my journal, Volume 16:
November 17, 2025: I have come to know a God who requires sacrifice. Who requires that I leave behind friends and family, and to lay on the altar every plan and convenience, to become a stranger in a strange land. He demands and commands and uses me to accomplish His will. He is the only true God, and expects me to be content to be His servant. And it pleases me to follow His commands, although in this life at times I am, like Paul, most miserable.
December 15, 2025: I trust the Lord. I would pass through the valley of the shadow of death with Him. I believe Him to be trustworthy and true. It does not matter what He requires of me, His ways are true and His purposes can always be trusted.
Today those are being made public, for whatever use people choose to make of them. They have made me reflect and consider the following:
In a recent discussion about “covenants” as part of the Hebrew translation, the most formal term in Hebrew means “cut”– or looking at it in context it requires the shedding of blood. That is why the Lord was ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.’ His role in shedding His blood was known before the creation began, and appears in use by mortals as early as Enoch in Genesis: “And behold, Enoch saw the day of the coming of the Son of Man, even in the flesh, and his soul rejoiced, saying, The Righteous is lifted up and the Lamb is slain from the foundation of the world.” RE Gen. 4:19. (see also RE Rev. 4:8.) I reflect on how difficult it was for the Lord to accomplish His role. He has explained it to us in T&C 4:5: “how sore you know not, how exquisite you know not, yea, how hard to bear you know not. For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all that they might not suffer, if they would repent. But if they would not repent, they must suffer even as I, which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, to suffer both body and spirit, and would that I might not drink the bitter cup and shrink. Nevertheless, glory be to the Father, and I partook and finished my preparations unto the children of men.”
Our inconveniences, sacrifices and challenges are nothing in comparison with what the Lord undertook to obey His Father. There is some slight similitude in our reluctance, our self-will, and our hesitation and the Lord’s own confessions. But, He explained that: “I set my face like a flint” (RE Isa. 18:1) and would not be deterred from drinking the bitter cup given to Him.
How often do I hesitate, count the costs, wish it were otherwise, and regret the pathway He requires me to walk! How unlike Him I have been. Too weak, too proud, too self-willed to even be called a servant. And how poorly have I served, when the results are measured by the vanity, foolishness and pride of these people! He blesses us all, and yet He asks us to be precisely like Him, and nothing else. For salvation consists in the glory, authority, majesty, power, and dominion which Jehovah possesses, and in nothing else, and no being can possess it but Himself or one like Him. (T&C 110:Lecture 7:9.) I am not that, nor are the people anything like that. I fear that we are all lifted up in the pride of our hearts above all nations and above all the people of the whole earth, and filled with all manner of lyings, and of deceits, and of mischiefs, and all manner of hypocrisy, because we will not confess our failings but cover ourselves in the cloak of piety. I have been instrumental in making them prideful. I have given them reason to think themselves blessed.
I am nothing and have accomplished nothing… far worse, I have helped make them prideful and therefore I fear I am of no value to them as a messenger. May the Lord bear with us, be patient with us, and give us yet time to reconcile ourselves to His will.