Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Norman Grubb.
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Fear, anger, and resentment are not sins to hide but springboards, Norman Grubb tells campers as he closes his series at the North Florida CFO in 1967. Through them, he says, God’s courage and love can enter. They replace a self-rejecting Christianity with plain self-acceptance.
Continuing his teaching on the God who is spirit, Norman Grubb describes a sun that must give its fire outward as light or turn it inward and consume itself. The being who chose to burn inward, he says, became the devil. He gave this message to the North Florida CFO in 1967.
Opening a series on the nature of life at the 1967 North Florida CFO, Norman Grubb compares faith to a road you learn, forget, and simply drive on. He urges campers to leave “becoming” behind for “being,” since John wrote that “as he is, so are we.”
Norman Grubb continues his teaching on union with God, recalling that scripture says “God is love,” not “God has love.” At the North Florida CFO in 1967 he describes an all night vigil with his wife in a Congo cookhouse on a moonlit banana plantation. There they affirmed that Christ lived in them, and two years later it finally became real.
Norman Grubb lays out the historical basis of “Christ for us, Christ as us,” then turns personal. He recalls how at eighteen the question “do you belong to Christ” broke years of dutiful, bored churchgoing and sent him to ask forgiveness that same night. The talk comes from the 1967 North Florida CFO.
Speaking to the Iowa CFO in 1973, Norman Grubb describes intercession as sharing in Christ’s death so that life may reach others. He then recalls a wealthy English cricket champion who gave away his fortune for Africa and died years later in a hut with no doors. That story closes his talk.
A son of God exists for others, not for himself, Norman Grubb tells campers at the 1973 Iowa CFO. Hardship, then, is only a ripple across a deeper pool of God’s purpose. He reads it in Job’s persistence under loss and in Joseph’s word to his brothers, “you meant it for evil, God meant it for good.”
At the 1971 Ohio CFO, Norman Grubb retells the story of the cricketer turned missionary C.T. Studd, who gave away his inheritance, married Priscilla, and spent his life pressing the gospel into unreached areas before dying decades later at his remote mission post deep in Africa. He closes by calling the campers, like a “corn of wheat,” to fall into the ground and die so that a fuller life can grow from them.
Sin is not really the wrong act, Norman Grubb tells a session at the Ohio CFO in 1971. The wrong thing is the indwelling spirit behind it. The gospel, he says, is not self-improvement but “a change of God,” in which Christ replaces the self-centered spirit that first took hold in the garden.
Norman Grubb opens a week of teaching with his own missionary story from the Belgian Congo. He then lays out his foundation that people are spirit, not matter, coining the phrase “see-throughers, not see-atters” for those who perceive God through everything instead of grasping at it. The teaching came at the Iowa CFO in 1973.