If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I will answer, ‘I am here to live out loud’. This is the best-known quote from the French novelist and critic, Emile Zola. Whether our beloved brother knew the line or not, I cannot say. But I can say, ‘he lived by it’. Other men are willing to live without friction said James Dickey, and choose flat and (supposedly) safe lives, rather than a life of peaks and valleys, as Sheldon Vanauken noted in his great book, A Severe Mercy.

If other men live lives of quiet desperation, Gilbert Garger was not as other men are. To call his seventy-three years ‘colorful’ or ‘flamboyant’ is to put into those words more than they can hold. His was an amazing life of rags and riches, feasts and famines; risks, rewards and reverses.

Gilbert was an exceptionally smart man, charming, bold, opinionated, and outspoken. But underneath it all, he was something else. Until the last few months of his life, he was an insecure man, a man who never felt loved or accepted. People said they loved him, but he was never sure if it was he they loved—or what they could get out of him.

His insecurity, it appears, stemmed from an unhappy childhood. His stepfather was a cruel man, and—at a time when ‘child abuse’ was not in our lexicon, he earned a place in the newspaper for mistreating his baby. The baby was Gilbert, who learned early on that he was not loved and—whatever he did—he would not be accepted.

The lessons learned in childhood stayed with him till the end of his life. Or, not quite the end. After learning he had cancer and the cancer could not be treated, he also learned that he was loved and accepted.

Some of that love and acceptance came from you—from people who visited him in the hospital and rest home. People who sat with him. People who read the Bible to him. People who prayed for him. People who cooked for him, even when he could no longer eat solid food. You were agents of God’s love to Gilbert—and you ought to be thankful to the Lord for using you, and deeply humbled, too, for who are you and I that we should communicate the love of Christ to others? Angels would burst into tears for the privilege, but the Lord has not chosen them to do it. But us.

You came to him when—he thought—there was nothing to get out of him. You know better, of course: in the last weeks of his life, he gave far more than he received. You blessed this dear man, who, for the first time in his life knew he was loved. It was not the first time he was loved, but the first time he believed it.

I am grieved that it took inoperable cancer to show him he was loved, but I praise God for turning this hideous evil to Gilbert’s good.

If Gilbert learned late that people love and accept him, this is not the most important lesson his last weeks taught him. He also learned that God loves him—just as he is—and that Gilbert Garger, like every other Christian, is accepted in the Beloved.

The line comes from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, chapter one, verse six. The paragraph begins in v.3—

The passage begins with a burst of praise—

It is God who made Gilbert acceptable, or to put it in plain English, it is God who accepted him. By ‘God’, St. Paul doesn’t mean a Higher Power of some kind or another, but rather, the God who is also the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—this God and not another. The God who has definite and nameable qualities, likes, and dislikes. It is He who has done it. And not nature or luck, the church or oneself.

The God who accepted Gilbert did it on purpose—

God did not blunder into accepting Gil, our brother, but He chose to do it before Gil was born, in fact, before the universe came into being. This throws light on why He did it, too—not because of who Gilbert was or what he would do—but because who God is and what He would do. The word we’re looking for here is…grace. Gilbert was accepted by God’s grace and not by his own merit intrinsic or otherwise.

God’s purpose to accept our friend was worked out in detail—

The word, ‘predestine’ scares many people, but it shouldn’t. It simply means the God who wants to make us His children arranges everything so as to do just that. To illustrate, Gilbert did not become a child of God until well into middle-age. But, at six months old he contracted the whooping cough, a disease that killed many people back in the thirties. It didn’t kill our brother, however, because God had something better for him than death: He had life—a long life on earth and an eternal life in glory.

God’s motive for doing it is Grace—

He adopted Gilbert into His family because the Lord is good. Three weeks ago, I told Gil he was forgiven and accepted and would soon enjoy the Presence of Christ, and one day, rise from the dead immortal and incorruptible. Gil said, But I don’t deserve these things. To which I could only say, You’re right. But God has willed them anyway.

God’s end or goal in accepting our friend is His own glory—

Finally, God made our friend acceptable by putting him in Christ—

Jesus Christ is accepted by God. Through faith Gilbert and all Christians get into Christ, and in Him we are as acceptable to God as Christ is Himself. Thus, the old Scottish Divine said,

In the last days of his life, Gilbert got an inkling of God’s acceptance. But now, he has seen the Lord face to face, and heard the words he has long wanted to hear, but was afraid he would not—

Gilbert Garger has died in Christ, and now we can say with Balaam—