Messages by Gordon Binning

Gordon Binning spent years living alone in the Idaho mountains, convinced that life had little left to offer him. He had grown up without faith, had become a respected church musician without knowing Jesus, and eventually withdrew from people altogether. By the time he was thirty-five, he had made plans to take his own life. Instead, an unexpected encounter with God changed the direction of his life completely. Gordon went on to become a longtime Camps Farthest Out speaker, teaching from his own experience about hearing Jesus, forgiveness, healing, and learning to live in the freedom Christ gives.

I Turned to the Woods

Gordon grew up in Idaho during the Depression in a family that did not go to church. His mother taught singing, and music became an important part of his early life. He eventually served in the Army, went to college, and moved to Kingsport, Tennessee, where he became minister of music at a large Methodist church. He directed five choirs, but despite being surrounded by Christians, he did not know Jesus and did not believe in Him. In his late twenties, Gordon returned to Idaho. He took a job at a service station, built himself a log cabin, and withdrew from the world.

“I turned to the woods,” he said. “Some people turned to booze and drugs, women or whatever. I turned to the woods.”

Thirty Days of Kindness in Tennessee

By then, he had been struggling with thoughts of suicide for years. When he was thirty-five, he decided he was going to end his life. Before going home to do it, he returned to Tennessee to visit some old friends whose children had been in his choirs. For thirty days, those friends did not preach to him or try to convince him of anything. They simply loved him and treated him with kindness. As he prepared to leave, Gordon thanked them. They asked him why he didn’t thank God. The idea seemed ridiculous to him. He didn’t believe there was a God. Still, he decided to try.

God, If You Exist, Thank You

“God, if you exist, I want to thank you for the way these people treated me.” That simple prayer changed his life. Gordon described being taken into a vision of heaven where he encountered the Father. What impressed him most was that God loved him simply because he was Gordon. His acceptance had nothing to do with what he had done or failed to do. He understood that his sins had been forgiven and that he had been made clean. “I was born again there in heaven,” he said.

On the flight back to Idaho, Gordon was convinced that the old airplane he was riding in was going to crash. Then Jesus appeared to him in the airplane and put His hand on Gordon’s shoulder. “When he put his hand on my shoulder, the fear left me.” Gordon reached up and took Jesus’ hand. For the first time in years, he wanted to live.

He returned to Idaho with three clear instructions: read the New Testament every day, pray every day, and get into Christian fellowship. The transformation did not happen overnight. During the first several years, he struggled to live out what he was reading. He couldn’t love his enemies or forgive people who had hurt him. About four years after his conversion, he experienced the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Christian fellowship eventually came through The Camps Farthest Out. His first CFO camp was in Montana, where he encountered the ministry of Bernie Warfield. Gordon watched the way Bernie loved people and recognized something he had never seen before. “I knew that he had met Jesus.”

Giving Away What He Had Depended On

Gordon eventually became deeply involved in CFO himself. At one point, he believed God told him not to take another job but to trust Him for his needs. The years that followed required Gordon to surrender practically everything he had been depending on. He gave his car to Jesus. He gave his house to Jesus. He even had to learn to give his wife and his relationships to Jesus rather than trying to possess or control them. It took him a long time to understand what that meant.

After two years of working through his attitudes toward women and relationships, Gordon met Emily on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. She was an Iowa farm girl, fifteen years younger than Gordon, who had gone to Montana with a college group helping rebuild a mission church.

They married and eventually built an unusual octagonal log house together. They had no children but spent years traveling on lay-witness missions from Oregon to Alaska. Emily later wrote about their life together in Gordon Takes a Wife, published in 1977. Emily’s presence in Gordon’s life helped bring healing to three deep wounds he had carried for years: rejection, self-rejection, and the fear of being rejected. Gordon described the change as coming out of a briar patch into a meadow.

He had difficulty expressing affection, even toward Emily. He would sometimes go outside, put his arm around her, and say, “I feel love for you, Emily.” He kept doing it until the love became real to him.

Hearing Jesus, and Moving the Rocks

One of Gordon’s central teachings came from Jesus’ words in John 10 about the shepherd and His sheep. Gordon believed that Christians could hear the voice of Jesus and follow Him. He explained that when Jesus spoke to him, the voice came into his mind in much the same way as his own thoughts. It sounded as though he were talking to himself, but he knew it was Jesus communicating with him. For Gordon, hearing Jesus was not an abstract spiritual idea. It was meant to affect everyday decisions.

He also believed that Jesus would provide whatever was needed, including miracles. When he was building a house and encountered rocks beneath the foundation that he could not break with an iron bar, he asked Jesus what to do. The answer was simple: “You use miracles when you need them.” Gordon spoke to the rocks, and they moved. But some of his most important lessons came through forgiveness.

The Shingles and the Full Enemy Treatment

At one point, Gordon developed a severe case of shingles that would not go away. He asked Jesus why. The answer took him back to the choir he had directed in Tennessee and to people he had left behind. Jesus told him to name his enemies.

Gordon listed fifteen people. As he worked through them, he discovered that only four were actually enemies in his heart. He was then given what he called “the full enemy treatment”: forgive them, love them, pray for them, and do good to them. Forgiveness was not simply a decision Gordon made once. He learned that he had to keep forgiving whenever the old resentment returned. The shingles disappeared. The lesson became one of the things he carried with him wherever he went. Gordon came to see unforgiveness as being at the root of many of the problems people brought to him.

Washing His Own Minister’s Feet

One of his hardest lessons involved his own minister. Gordon had been angry with the man for two years over the choir. Then Jesus told him to wash the man’s feet—not necessarily in a literal sense, but by submitting himself and doing what the minister asked. Gordon resisted. “Jesus, I can’t do that.”

Eventually he called the minister and simply told him that he wanted to be able to love him and do what was right. While they were still talking on the telephone, the love Gordon had been unable to produce came into him. Both men wept. Gordon later said, “I don’t think any man has blessed me so much as that man who I was calling an enemy.” By the middle of the 1970s, Gordon and Emily had established a Christian fellowship in Salmon, Idaho. Gordon continued teaching at CFO camps and ministering wherever he was invited. Barbara Ann Chase described him as a prophet.

Gordon never pointed people to his own accomplishments as proof of what Jesus could do. He pointed instead to the difference between the man he had once been and the man Jesus had made him. “If you see any change in me now, then you can see that Jesus has redeemed me,” he said. “But until you see where I came from, you can’t appreciate what he’s done.”