Astonishment, Part III

Kenneth W. Linsley's sermon on "The Doctrine of the Lord" (Part III)

(Do you want Christian maturity or respectability?)

Part I is here. Part II is here.

Kenneth W. Linsley was a pilot, an attorney, a pastor and an author.  Read his account of his extraordinary mother here.

Astonishment, Part II

Part II of Kenneth W. Linsley's sermon on "The Doctrine of the Lord."  Part I is here.

Part III is here.

Kenneth W. Linsley experienced a dramatic conversion while a young pilot in the United States Air Force. Read the account of his experience here.

Astonishment at the Doctrine of the Lord

Kenneth W. Linsley's sermon on "The Doctrine of the Lord" - Part I

Part II is here.

Alice Williams Linsley

The Rev and Mrs. Williams at home in Redlands, California in 1915 

with their children, shown here from left to right: 

Robert (chemist), Henry, Paul, Alice (philosophy professor) and Roger (chemist)

May her memory be eternal.


My paternal grandmother, Alice Williams Linsley, was born in India in 1883, the daughter of pioneer missionaries. She was the only daughter and had 4 brilliant brothers. One was a Philosophy professor in New York City. Another was a successful businessman and finance consultant. Another was Dr. Roger J. Williams, the biochemist who discovered pantothenic acid and concentrated and named folic acid. The fourth brother, Robert R. Williams, published the chemical formula of vitamin B1 (thiamin) in the 1930s and set out to eradicate Beriberi in the Philippines. Robert wrote of his efforts in his book Towards the Conquest of Beriberi (Harvard, 1961).

My grandmother met her future husband at Redlands University. She married Paul Judson Linsley, a published poet and horticulturalist who cultivated hybrid roses with Luther Burbank of Santa Rosa, California. He also developed several strains of disease resistant avocado trees. His twin brother was Earle Garfield Linsley, a well known astronomer and former Director of the Chabot Observatory in Oakland.

My grandmother may have felt overshadowed by all this brilliance and productivity, but I doubt it. She too was an exceptional individual. She was ordained to the “Defense of the Gospel” in 1925 and she read the Bible in four languages, one of which was Telegu. The Telegu translation of the New Testament was largely the product of her father’s labors.

I was named after a woman of great faith and I am humbled and honored to uphold this godly heritage. What follows is my father’s testimony about his mother, Alice Williams Linsley.



An Extraordinary Witness
By Kenneth W. Linsley

My sheep hear my voice, and I knew them, and they follow me: And I give them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. --John 10:27,28

By anybody’s standards my mother was an extraordinary person. She was born in Ramapatnam, India, in 1883 the eldest child and only daughter of Baptist missionary parents. Until she came to the United States at age twelve, she had no experience in going to school in the customary sense and spoke only Telegu, a Hindu dialect. Even so, she did well in school and ultimately graduated from Ottawa University in Kansas and later went on to obtain a master’s degree and to become a teacher at the University of Redlands.

She was a master of the English language and read her Old Testament in Hebrew and her New Testament in Greek; and- what is perhaps more unusual – she was a minister, ordained by a church which was then part of the Northern Baptist Convention.

As a small boy, I probably heard my mother speak more times than did any other person, but you will have to excuse my fogginess with respect to sermon content. I just didn’t get it. I do remember that her approach was always positive, that she had a kind of Churchillian eloquence, and that she spoke easily and with great personal conviction.

For the first thirty-seven years of my life I did not know what it meant to be a Christian. But I could not have been an atheist, for in all of my years of floundering in darkness I never once doubted that my brilliant, praying mother knew what she was doing.

Near the end of her life she literally became as a little child. Her magnificent mind was damaged by a massive paralytic stroke that deprived her of her remarkable abilities to write and to speak. She required constant care and was unable to acknowledge that she understood anything that I said. She knew me, her only son, and at our last reunion she seemed to enjoy listening to my voice as I stood by her bed and read to her about the good shepherd from the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John. When I finished, she took the Bible in her one usable hand, raised it to her lips and kissed it, and smiled radiantly; and then suddenly, as if very tired, she dropped off to sleep. I never saw her again. Several months later she was liberated by death.

To have a funeral for Mother would have been a kind of blasphemy. So we simply had a reunion in the church to which she had given so much of her life. We asked her favorite young pastor to come and conduct a service of worship and praise. Long before that service started, my mother’s earthly remains had been buried in an unmarked grave in a public cemetery. There was no graveside ceremony. Her mortal clay was attended by a solitary grave digger. Mother simply was not there. She was “present with the lord.”

We began the service by singing one of Mother’s favorite hymns. Because it had been her father’s favorite, she especially liked “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” We also sang George Matheson’s great hymn, “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go.” Then Dr. Ivan Bell, my mother’s pastor, explained to the crowd what my mother believed. There was not a tear from any member of the family – husband, children, or grandchildren – just a kind of joyful sadness, as in our minds we placed her great faith alongside of the promises of God.

When Dr. Bell finished, a prominent judge, who, at sixteen, had accepted my mother’s invitation to give his life to Christ came to the platform; with marvelous love and a lawyer’s consummate skill, he pretended to talk to members of the church who had long since been in glory, calling each one by name and reminding us that my mother had brought them to Jesus. There is no possible doubt in my mind that seeing this parade of people in heaven would have been the grandest reward my mother could ever have contemplated.

Flowers were deliberately limited to one great bouquet sent by mother’s four distinguished brothers. But because Mother had been a Sunday school teacher for more than sixty years, members of her Sunday school class collected several hundred dollars to be used in Mother’s memory. This money was sent to the Christian in Ramapatnam, India, who read the New Testament in Telegu and worship in a beautiful sanctuary which I was able to visit in the 1950s. Both the Telegu New Testament and the church are products of my grandfather’s loving concern and personal efforts.

The persistent claim of Christians like my mother is that the man Jesus was God; He was not merely “divine” but God, declared to be God by His resurrection from the dead.

Those who accept Him have eternal life and those who reject Him are condemned already, He says, and will never see life. When one believes this, as I now do, it becomes clear that the ultimate tragedy of life is not death but rejection of Jesus, the Christ. The only real failure is not to give your life to Him. Death simply marks the end of the time of testing and opportunity. For those who die having rejected Jesus the tragedy is irrevocable and complete.

But the Bible says that Jesus came to “deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetimes subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:15). For the “Christ-one,” death means eternal glory. In the words of our Savior, “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (John 11:25-26).

My mother surely bore glorious witness to this truth, both in life and in death. And a few short years before her death, I too, had begun to bear witness to this truth.


Taken from Kenneth W. Linsley's book, Advocate for God, Judson Press, 1977, pp. 27-29

You Must be Born Again

What follows in my attorney father's testimony of his conversion. This was first published in Faith at Work magazine, vol. 80, no. 1 (Jan-Feb 1967), pp 3-5.


A Certain Lawyer
Kenneth W. Linsley

"Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John 3:3)



It was a beautiful January day. The bright morning sun gave an aura of exotic elegance to the lowly castor bean trees near the window.  The apartment was quiet. Betty Ruth had gone shopping, taking our three daughters with her. I was at home alone, intent on fixing the family washing machine that had long since failed to function.

Across the cluttered courtyard a huge, one-eyed Alaskan malemute lay motionless in the mud, as above him a kindly faucet dripped incessantly. The world as then seen from my kitchen window gave no cause to suspect that this was to be a very special day for me.  If I had any needs greater than a way to wash dirty clothes, I was unaware of them. I commenced dismantling the washing machine.

Lying on the kitchen floor amidst faint odors of rust, grease, stale detergents, and a growing accumulation of washing machine parts, I began to hum the tune of a hymn I had heard a few nights before on a telecast from Billy Graham's San Francisco Crusade. And then, unable to remember the words, I did what was, for me, a very odd thing.

I got up, went to the piano in the living room, found the words in a hymnbook, and then went back to my place on the kitchen floor, wondering why I had done such a foolish thing, but nonetheless singing.

Just as I am, without one plea,

But that Thy blood was shed for me,

And that Thou bid'st me come to Thee,

O Lamb of God, I come, I come!

I kept singing this over and over for no other reason, I suppose, than that my quite awful singing voice seemed to sound a little better coming off the floor.

A few moments later, I had a strange feeling that someone was praying for me; and immediately I suspected a slightly nutty Pentecostal woman named Joy, who had been coming to me for legal counsel.

I began to sing the hymn again, but something had changed. This time it was different. This time, I meant the words I was singing.

Suddenly, the room was flooded with a warmth and a great light. Overwhelmed, I stopped singing, knowing absolutely that I was in the presence of the Almighty.

This was my introduction to the love of God. It occurred to me that the only reason that God would ever come to my house was because He cared about me. I simply could not be in his presence and begin to see something of his love for me without also experiencing a staggering conviction of my unworthiness of such love. Some people have called this "conviction of sin."  I never knew what they were talking about before, but suddenly I did.

I pushed my face against the cold asphalt tiles of the kitchen floor and, in a torrent of tears of joy and shame intermixed, said over and over words somehow dredged up from my subconscious memory, "Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner."

That was all I could think of to say - not witty, not original - but I did mean it.

Then the Lord spoke to me. He said, "Come and put your fingers in the nail holes in my hands, and place your hand in the hole in my side."

As a young boy, I had read the Gospel of John, but with this absolutely astounding invitation came a wholly new consciousness of what our Lord had meant when he said to Thomas, "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed."

Revealed to me for the first time was the terrible sense of rebuke that is in those words, and now that sense of rebuke was mine. I did not want to be a Thomas; so I kept my face hard against the floor and exclaimed in a halting voice, "Lord, that won't be necessary."

There are no words to describe what happened next. Gertrude Behanna says of her conversion that it was more like a spiritual shower bath than anything else. Someone else has described it as feeling as if somebody pulled out a plug and drained away the sin. I suppose it may depend upon how one is accustomed to being cleansed.

The room was shiny with love. I knew that I had been permanently forgiven, and along with this came a wonderful sense of peace; and I said to myself, “This is the peace that passes understanding.”

Incredible as it now seems to me, for the first sixteen years of our marriage my wife, Betty Ruth, and I never talked much about God. I was not sure how to tell her what had happened. I began saving up courage, and that night when we were in bed, I said, “Dear, a very strange and wonderful thing happened to me today.”

“That’s nice,” she replied disgustedly as she settled into her pillows. “When are you going to get my washing machine fixed?”

With that I abandoned any attempt to tell her in so many words; but in the weeks that followed, she began to get the message. Playfully Beth Ruth now says, “I knew something had happened to you when you suddenly began to insist that we give a tenth of our income to the Lord.”

Several days later, in a conversation with my slightly nutty client, I guardedly made some vague references to having had a spiritual experience on Saturday morning. Joy volunteered that on that same morning she had walked out on an ocean pier to pray. High on her prayer list was the concern that I, Ken Linsley, be born again. She also mentioned that she had at the same time received some kind of miraculous assurance. I never pressed her for details.

Two months earlier, on a Sunday afternoon, Joy and her husband, an air force captain, and their two young children had been enjoying a drive on a back country road when, with awful suddenness, a speeding oncoming car had veered wildly across the center line, causing a terrible head-on collision and bringing instant death to the captain and their eight-year-old daughter. Somehow Joy and their ten-year-old son had escaped serious injury.

The driver of the other car had been a drunken woman returning from a weekend party. Her companion had survived the crash but had been injured to the extent that he would never regain his senses.

Tried for manslaughter, the woman had been acquitted when she testified, contrary to the state’s evidence, that the now senseless companion had been the driver of the car.

A few days following the terrible bereavement, Joy, numb with grief, came to me for help. For several weeks I worked to try to bring order out of the sudden chaos of her affairs. I was touched by her grief and apparent helplessness and resolved to be of all possible assistance. It never entered my mind that it was I to whom she was about to minister.

When by appointment she came to my office, she was trim, smartly dressed, and seemed terribly alone. She wanted to talk and proceeded to tell me virtually her entire life history. She had been raised in poverty and had no education beyond high school. Her life had been marked over and over again by tragedy, and yet there were no signs of self-pity. Even now, her greatest sorrow seemed to be the bereavement of her son.

She prays a lot, I thought, as she went on to tell me how she thanked God that her husband and the daughter whom she had loved so dearly had “gone together to be with Jesus.” She also seemed to take great comfort in the fact that her husband and daughter were, as she said, “born again Christians.”

The phrase born again Christians” disturbed me. It purported to make distinctions which seemed judgmental. A Christian is a Christian, I thought, so what is a “born again Christian”? It was obvious, however, that the term meant a great deal to Joy; and even more annoying, there was no mistaking the fact that she considered herself to be one.

In the several meetings that followed, she further embarrassed me by insisting that God had sent me to help her in this time of need. Not once did she try to instruct me. She simply talked naturally and unashamedly about her living Lord Jesus.

Perhaps the thing that impressed me the most, however, was the fact that she had completely forgiven the wretched woman whom she knew had killed her jet pilot husband and beautiful young daughter. She not only had forgiven her, but, what is far more, she also prayed for her salvation.

I suppose that all of these things were part of the reason I suspected Joy might be praying for me that glorious day when, at age thirty-seven, I first came to know what it means to be a “born again Christian.”

A few months after my conversion, I was transferred to duty in the Philippines. It was several years before it occurred to me that I should write Joy and thank her for what she had done for me. When I did, I received a reply which read, in part, as follows:

It was thrilling to receive your letter. It gave me insight into things I had not known before. It also made me feel very humble that the Lord used me as a vessel for his work in such a way.

That day out on the ocean, as I watched the water swirl and tumble, I thought about how constant is our eternal God. I was praying for the Lord to shower you abundantly with his love and blessings.

At the same time, I was surrounded by a tremendous warmth and love and glow beyond all human comprehension. Although I came to the Lord when I was eighteen, this was beyond anything I had ever experienced before. It is really beyond description, isn’t it?


END