Henty....I have not hidden your righteousnes psalm 40:10

Someone asked a question about Henty...

“I love reading Henty -- I do have a question for you -- what do you think about some of the books where Henty's characters, Christian and Muslim, come to the idea that they worship the same God? I finished reading the book "With Kitchener in the Soudan, A Story of Atbara and Omdurman" where there is a brief interchange about this thought.”
Use the Henty books like a tool, to help bring out understanding on areas that you want to reinforce.

But Gods Word trumps everything. When we come across something that is at odds with God, I point it out. I may say “Henty was wrong about that.” In this case while reading “The race for Karhtoum” the same issue came up, I mentioned that we serve the Triune God and Muslims serve a singular false god. I have pointed out to my family that Henty’s culture had been shaped by Christianity to a far larger extent than our culture is. So honor, bravery, loyalty, faithfulness, protecting women, selflessness and a “no apology made conviction” that some things are right and some things are wrong.

But at the same time during this period Christianity was being gutted in many ways. Pietism was on the rise, and there were heavy elements of the romantic period permeating all over. Which show up when two characters at the end of a Henty book will just profess to have been in love with each other for a long time, thought they had almost no interaction in the book, and they are just ready to be married.

Now I would rather deal with that, then with a bunch of romantic sections in the books. As the Word says “…do not awaken Love before its time”. I am working at protecting my daughters hearts. Our wives have just oodles of baggage from our modern culture that can be so confusing. That can seem instinctively correct, but it can be so at war with what God says. While on this subject of women…

On Sunday night most of Legacy was at our house and Marc was doing a great job of stirring the pot over some verses from Gods Law. No fur flying or anything but a good exorcize at really trying to see what God says and trying to understand the why. We have this HUGE handicap of being washed in Americana and trying to make Gods word fit on our terms, to our understanding. As with everything, it will only really fit and make sense by Gods terms and conditions. At one point a couple of the Ladies said “that would be so hard”, when we read about what God said to do in a certain circumstance, it didn’t seem right to our Americana mind. But the more we talked about it, we started to see that Gods care and love seemed to appear through our Americana fog. At that point the ladies start going ok, ok, but it was so counterintuitive till then. The word Lovingkindness comes to mind.

Psalm 40:10… I have declared your faithfulness and your salvation: I have not concealed your lovingkindness and your truth from the great assembly