Book Review: L’Abri by Edith Schaeffer

Book Review: L'Abri by Edith Schaeffer

“Your word is true from the beginning, and every one of Your righteous judgments

endures forever.”

-Psalm 119:160

From the Book's Back Cover:

In 1955 an American family moved into a chalet on the side of a steep Swiss alp.

They did not know exactly why God had brought them there, what He wanted them to do, or even where the money to live on would come from.

But He began opening doors, and people with questions about life’s meaning began finding the way to their home.

Edith Schaeffer Quotes:

“People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have,

and looking for it where they will never find it.

In a fallen world, if you demand perfection or nothing,

you will always get nothing.”

__________

“Our personal afflictions involve the living God;

the only way in which Satan can persecute or afflict God is through attacking the people of God.

The only way we can have personal victory in the midst of these flying arrows raining down on us

is to call upon the Lord for help.

It is His strength, supplied to us in our weakness,

that makes victory after victory possible.”

__________

“Human beings are very unbalanced and prone to go off on tangents.

In every area of life- with too great emphasis on one thing,

leaving out another important thing altogether.

What are your choices? Whom are your choices for?

Not just for yourself.

Choose now whom you will serve, and that choice is going to affect the next generation,

and the next generation, and the next.

Choice never affects just one person alone.

It goes on and on and the effect goes out into geography and history.

You are part of history and your choices become part of history.”

__________

“The most precious thing a human being has to give is time.

There is so very little.of it, after all, in a life.

We foolish mortals sometimes live through years not realizing how short life is,

and that today is your life.”

“It’s a question of priorities.

We are meant to live in the Scriptures.”

Edith Schaeffer, wife of Dr. Francis Schaeffer, tells the remarkable story of how God led them step by step, as that one small chalet grew into a whole community.

It took the name L’Abri (French for Shelter).

Day by day God faithfully provided for their family, and eventually for the entire community.

The Schaeffers believed that truth must be demonstrated as well as debated.

They wanted to show the world through the transformed lifestyle of a believing community that the personal-infinite god is really here in every generation.

In a society losing the ability to distinguish between Christian and non-Christian values, truth and untruth, good and evil, L’Abri equipped people to make that distinction.

L’Abri now has branches in several other countries, and has affected the lives of literally thousands of people around the world.

Excerpts from the Book:

…could it be possible that we had just come to February 14th again? The anniversary of that day we had been told we had to leave Switzerland…twelve months before.

…at the chalet…two people came to a clear understanding of the Bible’s central message of how to become “born” into the family of God; Bruce and Anne (two teenagers from a boarding school in Geneva) separately sought out Fran and talked with him about this.

Two days later Anne telephoned from Geneva saying, “Bruce and I want to know whether Mr. Schaeffer can come to Geneva on Thursday afternoon. We only have eight others from the school, but those eight want to ask a lot of questions and we thought we could meet at a tea-room and ask questions.”

In two days these “new-born” Christians had only interested eight others! How many Christians have a reality that bubbles over with excitement so that others are intensely curious to find out what the thrilling news is!

“…you have a place in Huémoz where people come for spiritual help.”

I said, “Remember that lovely English doctor (Jennifer) we all thought looked like a teenager? Well, she’s coming here tomorrow, and she has just left hospital after having polio.”

In addition to affected leg muscles, Jennifer’s back had been affected, and also her right hand. …What about the delicate work her hand had been doing in the accident ward on head injuries; for she had been a surgeon?

(Jennifer said) “You see, when I look for a job, I’ll have to find something quite different–in the medical line—that can be done from nine to five.”

Intelligent, with a wide knowledge upon which she had based her choice (of a liberal, secular worldview) it did not seem that she would easily come to any great change that would bring her to a position of accepting the Bible’s teaching for what it is.

The breakthrough of understanding seemed to come when she was talking by the fire one night, and suddenly said, “I’ve got to admit, when I watch a person die–I know something has gone.”

We ourselves felt as though we were standing on the sidelines watching a supernatural work, the work of the Holy Spirit, as she came to deep conviction that the Bible is truth, and as simply as a child accepted what Christ had done for her.

Her first big answer to prayer was a job: teaching anatomy at Oxford University. As she put her life in God’s hand, she found He used her there in Oxford, and later in her own home in England, where she and her writer husband Tim and their two little children have a Christian home which is having a real impact on their social circle.

Polio may paralyze muscles and change one’s former plans, but it cannot paralyze God’s purpose for the lives of His children.

There was an Ethiopian princess, beautiful and stately in her bearing, who thanked me for the help of (two of my books) Hidden Art and What is a Family? in raising her children in Brussels.

There were writers (Jennifer Mink and others) and architects and lawyers–each one unexpected–who told how their lives had been turned around! One very well-dressed businessman had been patiently and quietly waiting a bit to the left to tell me something. I did not recognize him at all…

He said, “About twenty-five years ago, I was at L’Abri. staying at Chalet Gentiana with Debby and Udo. I did not believe God existed at all, and I became deeply depressed. Not wanting to bring disgrace on the chalet, I went to a village pub, bought a drink, and swallowed a bottle of pills, expecting to die.

I passed out there at that table, and it was a young Franky Schaeffer and Os Guinness who found me, carried me out to a car, drove me to Aigle Hospital, and had my stomach pumped out. I was later brought back up to the chalet.”

With intense brown eyes penetrating mine, this man went on in a strong and vehement manner to say, “I want you to know that if what you stressed today about Christianity being TRUE had not been taught to me at L’Abri twenty-five years ago, I would not be alive today.

If I had been given teaching concerning Christianity making me happy, or giving a better life, and all that sort of thing…I would have attempted suicide again…it would NOT have answered my questions, or given me a strong base to go on in life.

I want you to know I am alive today because L’Abri taught me that there is true truth and that the Bible is really true in what it teaches. Thank you.”

I often remember that first Easter Sunday at Mélèzes, sitting at a table by the hedge in the utter quietness of a place where we had no one to talk to about Christian things, looking over in the direction of a curve of the mountain that hid Champéry and wondering–wondering why we had been torn away from a growing, fruitful work.

“What are we going to do here?” was the deep question inside; a question we hardly dared voice, except to God in prayer.

As I look around at all the people gathered at a high tea on a Sunday–often as many as fifty–and look from face to face thinking of how many of them became Christians at L’Abri; remember how many atheists are now Christians;

become bewildered at trying to sort out the happenings of the succession of years, or trying to remember the varieties of people, let alone all the individuals, who have come, and been affected in their coming; as I look around I feel a little shudder of another kind.

What if…we had decided to plan the work ourselves?

What if…we had not thrown ourselves upon the reality of prayer, and God’s promises to answer…and His ability to carry out His promises of guiding His children?

What would have been missed?

Francis Schaeffer Quotes:

“In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age:

the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.”

“If there is no absolute moral standard,

then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong.

By absolute we mean that which always applies,

that which provides a final or ultimate standard.

There must be an absolute if there are to be morals,

and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values.

If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal

to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict.

We are merely left with conflicting opinions.”

__________

“Each generation of the church in each setting

has the responsibility of communicating the Gospel in understandable terms,

considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.”

__________

“Christianity is the greatest intellectual system the mind of man has ever touched.

Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.”

__________

“I have come to the conclusion that none of us in our generation feels as guilty about sin

as we should or as our forefathers did.”

__________

“The inward area is the first place of loss of true Christian life, of true spirituality,

and the outward sinful act is the result.”

__________

“The beginning of men’s rebellion against God was, and is,

the lack of a thankful heart.”

MaRtiN Of tOuRS / SAyiNGS Of tHE dESERt fAtHERS (AbbA MiOS & Ephrem the Syrian):

“When Martin turned 15, as the son of a Roman Cavalry Officer, he was required to join a Cavalry Division himself, around 334 A.D.

While Martin was still a soldier at Amiens he experienced the vision that became the most-repeated story about his life.

He was at the gates of the city of Amiens with his soldiers when he met a scantily dressed beggar.

Martin impulsively cut his own military cloak in half and shared it with the beggar.

That night Martin dreamed of Jesus wearing the half-cloak that Martin had given away.

He heard Jesus say to the angels: ‘Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who is not baptized; he has clad me.’

This dream confirmed Martin in his piety, and he was baptized at the age of 18.

Source: Sulpicius Severus; Chapter 2.

Martin left the Army at the age of 20 and became a Monk.

In 363 A.D. He Founded the first Monastery in Gaul at Liguge. Martin Founded a second Monastery at Marmoutier in 372 A.D.

This new and vibrant Monastic Movement would attract two young men to Gaul from Britain: their names were Ninian and Patrick.

There were as yet no monasteries in Britain — the Monastic movement was too new!

But this was shortly to change. It would change during the lifetime of these two men who were on fire to proclaim the Gospel.

From Martin’s Marmoutier Monastery, in 393 A.D., Ninian of Whithorn went out as a Missionary Bishop, the first person to preach the Gospel in Scotland.

In 432 A.D., Patrick was made a Bishop, and returned as a Missionary Bishop to Ireland to preach the Gospel. The rest, as they say, is history:

The Kings of Ireland were converted to Christ. Druid Priests gave their lives to Jesus. Across Ireland, the Irish people received Christ as their Lord and Savior.”

-Lay Monk S.G. Preston

_____________________________________________________________________

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

-1 John 1:19

________________________________________

“Abba Mios was asked by a soldier if God really would accept his repentances?

The old man spoke awhile, teaching many things, and finally answered, “When your cloak tears, do you throw it away?”

‘No,’ said the soldier, ‘I repair it, and keep using it.'”

Monk Mios then continued, ‘If you take such care for your cloak, do you you not think that God will care as much for those He sent His Son into the world to die for?'”

-Sayings of the Desert Fathers