Old-fashioned Navigator Discipleship

My life has been profoundly and positively influenced by the ministry of the Navigators and the teachings of its founder, Dawson Trotman. (I named my first son Dawson.)

You can imagine my excitement recently when I discovered this treasure-trove of audios by Dawson Trotman and many other early Navigators. I think you will enjoy them.

http://www.discipleshiplibrary.com/dawson_trotman.php

Here is an excerpt from the classic work, Born to Reproduce:

A few years ago, while visiting Edinburgh, Scotland, I stood on High street just down from the castle. As I stood there, I saw a father and mother coming toward me pushing a baby carriage. They looked very happy, were well dressed and apparently were well-to-do. I tried to catch a glimpse of the baby as they passed and, seeing my interest, they stopped to let me look at the little, pink-cheeked member of their family. I watched them for a little while as they walked on and thought how beautiful it is that God permits a man to choose one woman who seems the most beautiful and lovely to him, and she chooses him out of all the men whom she has ever known. Then they separate themselves to one another, and God in His plan gives them the means of reproduction! It is a wonderful thing that a little child should be born into their family, having some of the father’s characteristics and some of the mother’s, some of his looks and some of hers. Each sees in that baby a reflection of the one whom he or she loves.

Seeing that little one made me feel homesick for my own children whom I dearly love and whose faces I had not seen for some time. As I continued to stand there I saw another baby carriage or perambulator as they call it over there. Coming in my direction, it was a secondhand affair and very wobbly. Obviously the father and mother were poor. Both were dressed poorly and plainly, but when I indicated my interest in seeing their baby, they stopped and with the same pride as the other parents let me view their little, pink-cheeked, beautiful-eyed child.

 I thought as these went on their way, ‘God gave this little baby whose parents are poor everything that He gave the other. It has five little fingers on each hand, a little mouth and two eyes. Properly cared for, those little hands may someday are the hands of an artist or a musician. Then this other thought came to me. “Isn’t it wonderful that God did not select the wealthy and the educated and say, ‘You can have children,’ and to the poor and the uneducated say, you cannot.” Everyone on earth has that privilege.

The first order ever given to man was that he “be fruitful and multiply.” In other words, he was to reproduce after his own kind. God did not tell Adam and Eve, our first parents, to be spiritual. They were already in His image. Sin had not yet come in. He just said, ‘Multiply. I want more just like you, more in my own image.

Of course, the image was marred. But Adam and Eve had children. They began to multiply. There came a time, however, when God had to destroy most of the flesh that had been born. He started over with eight people. The more than two billion people who are on the earth today came from the eight who were in the ark because they were fruitful and multiplied.

In the physical realm when your children have children, you become a grandparent. Your parents are then greatgrandparents, and theirs are great-great- grandparents. And so it should be in the spiritual.