David and Svea Flood

Today on Wisdom for the Heart, Stephen Davey begins a series introducing you to Heroes of the Christian Faith. Then one day, a Swedish religious magazine is deposited in her mailbox.

One photograph kind of grabbed her attention. It was a picture of a gravesite and a small white cross planted in the earth and on the cross was written the name, Seveja Flood. Welcome to Wisdom for the Hearts. With today's broadcast, we're beginning a series that's become our favorite and most requested teaching series. It's entitled, Legacies of Light. In it, Stephen Davey looks at several heroes of the Christian faith. In many ways, you and I stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us and it's encouraging for us to know who they are and study their life and legacy. Today, Stephen introduces you to David and Seveja Flood. They have an amazing story. It's the story of Seveja's endurance, David's despair, and our Savior's incredible mercy.

Please settle in as Stephen begins this lesson for today. Have you ever thought about the fact that we'd have no record of Jesus Christ in the New Testament ever laughing? Although you read his sermons and his offhand comments and he had a wonderful sense of humor, and I'm sure that he split the sides of his disciples often. In fact, his first miracle was at a wedding party, but we're never told that he laughed. More than likely because we would assume that he would, but while we would assume that God the Son might laugh, we would never, and certainly in the first century, they would never assume that the Son of God would cry, and so we're told that he did on more than one occasion. Jesus arrives at the tomb of Lazarus and he's been dead now for four days, according to verse 17.

He stands nearby. We're told in verse 33 that when Jesus saw her, that's Mary, Lazarus' sister, weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. That is, Jesus was moved deeply when he saw the grief and observed the emotion of these who'd lost their loved ones. He, God the Son, was not apathetic.

Look at verse 35. Jesus wept. Here's God crying.

He's crying at a graveyard. By the way, if God can cry, so can you. In the garden, Jesus Christ effectively surrenders, of course, to the will of the Father.

That's another incident where he will weep. Matthew's Gospel account in chapter 26, at verse 36, Jesus comes with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, sit here while I go over there and pray. In Matthew chapter 26 and verse 37, we're told that Jesus took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and began to be sorrowful and troubled. This particular text refers to being surrounded by sorrow. Jesus not only cries over the death of a loved one and the rebellion of a nation, but he's crying over the suffering that he will bear for the sake of a rebellious world and what it will mean. Jesus Christ is about to go out weeping, but what a difference Sunday morning will make when he brings a harvest. He's the first fruits of that harvest, translating into a harvest of joy. The seed of self-sacrifice, similar to what we've seen demonstrated several times in the lives of believers, we've studied believers who were surrounded by the sorrow of night.

We've watched some of these, haven't we? Go through great, great trouble. And then the tables turned and there was a harvest of fruit, some of them only after they died, some of them while they were alive. But the sorrow of night was replaced with the joy of the morning. Sowing with tears brought in a harvest with great joy.

In this last biographical study in our series, it remains to me one of the most touching demonstrations of self-sacrifice, death and sorrow and fruit. In 1921, a man by the name of David Flood and his young wife, Sevea and their little two-year-old son left Sweden for the interior of Africa. They traveled with another missionary couple from their church in Philadelphia. Both couples sang in the choir.

Sevea, in fact, was the leading soloist of the church. But they committed their lives to the field and left for unreached villages in Africa. They were filled with this sense of enthusiasm and optimism and courage and excitement. They literally hacked their way through the mountains, the mountainous region of the Congo to begin their ministry at yet an undetermined, at least at that point in time, village. Just totally on their own going into the unreached arenas of that area. To their surprise and sadness, one village after another refused them entrance. They were told by villagers that they couldn't come in because the missionaries would anger their village gods and bring them trouble so they wouldn't even let them in. Days of carrying their own supplies, they're hungry, they're weak, they're already stricken with the oncoming effects of malaria. They reach another village on the side of a hill, a small mountain, and they would finally settle there, but the chief, at least they hoped, but the chief was even more hostile than all of the others.

He demanded that they leave. Their biography reads, you can imagine four young adults and a two-year-old boy hacking their way through the jungle. They struggled to carry their supplies to the summit of that hill. Putting up their tents, they knew they were too weary to set out again. So they decided to clear the brush and build mud huts, doing their best with these hostile neighbors. During the next agonizing weeks, which stretched into agonizing months, David and Sevilla and the Ericksons struggled to learn Swahili. They tried everything they could do to reach into the village, but they were turned away every time.

The chief simply tightened his grip on his people. The villagers were even prohibited from visiting the missionaries. They were very curious about them. But one little boy was allowed to go up weekly and sell them eggs. David was amazed at his wife's insistence that they might never reach that village and probably it didn't look like it impacted Africa, and maybe she could win this child for Jesus Christ. So every time the boy would visit the camp, she showered him with love and attention, and she would teach and learn from him as well. Sure enough, the other missionaries watched one afternoon as Sevilla dealt with this little boy and led him in a prayer of repentance and faith. Now he had to keep his decision for Christ a secret in the village, lest he not be allowed to return or maybe worse. To the others, this mission was a failure.

Eventually the Ericksons decided to leave David and Sevilla and their little boy, and they returned to an established mission post several miles away. Flood and family remained battling malaria, desperately crude conditions, no connection to the village, and then Sevilla announced that she was expecting their second child. She was already weak with the battle with malaria, struggling.

David feared for the worst. It was too late to travel through the jungles of, this is the Belgian Congo, without risking her life and the life of their unborn child. The baby then they decided would be born in that mud hut on the mountain. That little native boy carried the news that she was to deliver very soon, and the chief surprisingly graciously allowed a midwife from the village to serve Sevilla. So with Sevilla weak with malaria, when the African midwife arrived, in fact she was groaning in pain and suffering from high fever, and their little girl was born, and Sevilla whispered that she should be called Aina, one of the classical Swedish names for girls. Seventeen days later, Sevilla Flood died. The little girl lived.

I was able to find that little girl's autobiography and read it last week to fill in some of the details. David Flood was filled with rage and hopelessness. He dug a crude grave for his 27-year-old wife and wondered how in the world was he going to care for a two-year-old boy and a newborn girl who was very sickly without any assistance. Besides, it seemed in his mind that God had abandoned him.

So he hired some young men from the village and with others took his children down the mountain and to that mission station miles away, finally made it there. He was finished with the ministry. He was finished with the gospel. He was finished with God. As far as he was concerned, God had taken the life of his faithful bride, and their ministry had been nothing but total failure and a tragic waste. Now, the problem still confronting him was that returning to Sweden was still this monumental trip.

David knew that he had nobody to help care for or feed his daughter. The Eriksons, you remember them? They're back at that mission station. They had been unable to have children, and David offered them the opportunity to adopt Iena, and they were thrilled with this opportunity, this chance to do so.

But they agreed. With that, David took his little boy by the hand, left that mission station, never to return again. In fact, he never even looked back, and he would never be back. Before Iena turned one year old, Joel and Bertha Erikson, her adopted parents, were poisoned by unbelieving natives and within days of each other died excruciating deaths. Iena was once again without parents. She would soon, however, be claimed by another missionary couple there at the station and raised as their own daughter. And when she turned three, this couple decided to return to the States, and they came back and lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Her Swedish name was changed to Aggie, so if you try to find her autobiography, you'll have to look for Aggie Hearst. Iena would later write that even as a young girl growing up in Minnesota, she knew that she was different. She quickly became known as the daughter of a missionary who died on the mountain, rescued by missionaries who were poisoned, and as her biography title reads, she was effectively a girl without a country. She felt terribly alone, never fitting in.

Someone to be watched, stared at. She did give her life to the Lord and eventually attended North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, in fact married a young, godly man who entered the ministry, and then the years just kind of traveled along. She had absolutely no information about her father. She knew very little of her past. She did know her parents' names, of course, and their homeland of Sweden, and something about the mission station and her mother's death. She really had little time to think about it. Her husband, her own family, their busy ministry life.

In fact, her husband Dewey Hearst became the president of a Bible college in Seattle, Washington, where they moved and lived. Then one day, unexpectedly, it's just one of those things God does that you can't explain, a Swedish religious magazine is deposited in her mailbox. She wasn't on the mailing list, she had no idea who sent it, and she couldn't read it.

She didn't know the native tongue of her parents. But as she turned the pages of that magazine, one photograph kind of grabbed her attention. It was a picture of a gravesite and a small white cross planted in the earth, and on the cross was written the name Seveja Flood.

She jumped in her car and raced to the home of a college professor who knew Swedish, and she translated as she read. It's about two missionaries pushing through the African jungle, camping at night, traveling by day, came across a village in the Belgian Congo, and they came across this burial plot, and they took a picture. They began to inquire, found out that it was the missionary mother of a baby, the death of the mother, but not before leading one African boy to Christ, then how the father left her in the hands of fellow missionaries, and has never been seen since.

The article continued. Sadly, Seveja Flood didn't live long enough to learn that the little African boy they'd won to Christ on that mountaintop went on in time to gain permission from the village chief to start and build a school. Gradually, now a young man, teacher, leader, he taught the gospel of Christ, all his students came to trust in Jesus as well, then they evangelized their parents, and even the chief became a Christian, and now that village has 600 believers and an active church professing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, all because of the sacrifice and the tears of David and primarily Seveja Flood.

Ayina couldn't believe the news. She began to cry and thank God for letting her learn the truth and of this harvest. For their 25th wedding anniversary, the Bible college gave Dewey and Ayina paid vacation to Sweden, where, among other things, Ayina could search for her father.

It wasn't difficult to find him. David Flood had remarried, had four children, but his wife, his second wife, had also died. Now, as an old man, he was wasting away as an alcoholic and a professed agnostic who dared anybody to mention God in his presence. After an emotional reunion, that's a chapter long with her half-brothers and sister, Ayina brings up the subject of seeing their father, and the other grown kids aren't too optimistic about the idea.

He had become deeply bitter, of course, and had little to do with any of these children. Most of all, he hated God. So they told her, look, if you do go and see him, we'll take you to his apartment.

Don't talk about spiritual things. Whenever he hears the name of God, they said, he flies into a rage. Ayina was determined to see him. Finally made it to his little apartment. Door was answered by a housekeeper. She writes, inside his room, there were liquor bottles on every windowsill. The table was covered with even more bottles, and in the far corner was a small, wrinkled old man lying on a rumpled bed, his head turned away.

Diabetes and a stroke had further crippled him, and he had lived in this one room for the last three years. Ayina writes in her own autobiography, and let me just read it. The housekeeper bent down and said, Papa, Ayina's here. He turned toward me and I took his hand. Papa, I said. And he began to weep.

Ayina, I never wanted to give you away. Oh, it's all right, Papa, I said softly, holding him in my arms. God took care of me.

He stiffened suddenly and the tears stopped. God forgot us all, he spat. Our lives have been like this because of him. I was in Africa all that time, and only one little boy came to faith, and I lost your mother. Papa, I've got a little story to tell you. You didn't go to Africa in vain.

Mama didn't die in vain. The little boy you won to the Lord grew up to win that whole village to Jesus Christ, and today, 40 years later, there are now 600 people in that village serving the Lord because you followed the call of God in your life. He turned slowly around until his eyes met mine, hopeful eyes, longing to believe what I told him, longing for the turmoil of his life to be redeemed in some way. Papa, it's a well-known story now.

We have a great God. The tears returned and he began to talk. By the end of that afternoon, the kindness of God had brought him back to repentance and forgiveness and restoration of fellowship. Ayina and her husband eventually returned to America. A few weeks later, David Flood went home to heaven. Ayina would learn that in the final hours of his life in his delirium, he reverted back and began speaking in Swahili.

Now, that'd be a great place to put a period, but that isn't all to this harvest. Let me give you one addendum to this remarkable story. It would be a few years later that Ayina and her husband would attend an evangelism conference in London, and there were several leaders, in fact, a long line she wrote, representing denominations and associations of believing churches throughout Africa, and they were there to give their reports one after another, just very briefly. One report was given from the nation of Zaire by the superintendent of that national church association. He represented 110,000 baptized believers, and he, in his brief time at the platform, spoke eloquently about the spirit of the gospel in this country. He said, we now have 32 mission stations. We have 120-bed hospital. We have several large Christian schools.

Our churches now have more than 100,000 believers. Of course, you know, Ayina rushes up to him after that service, and she has one question for him. I'll let her speak from her autobiography. Sir, could you have possibly met a young missionary couple by the name of David and Sevea Flood?

They were on a mission station, and all I know about it was that it was high on a hill. Yes, ma'am, he replied. I used to sell them chickens and eggs. It was Sevea Flood who led me to Jesus Christ.

And who are you? I'm Sevea Flood's daughter, and I was born on that mountaintop. Tears began to run down his cheeks. He embraced me, and an African style held me and began swaying with me, sobbing from the depths of his soul. I've so often wondered, he cried, whatever happened to that little girl whose mother died for us? He said to me, you've got to travel back to our village. Your mother is the most famous person in the history of our church. Aina agreed. After months of planning, she and her husband made the long journey back to the place of her birth.

Can you imagine that? They eventually arrived at the outpost where she had been given by her father to the Eriksons. She had played as a toddler with the little African friends. She had learned the Swahili language there. She visited the graves of her adopted parents, the Eriksons.

Thank God for them. But eventually they drove several miles to the village her parents had so desperately prayed to reach. Only this time when she arrived, there were hundreds of villagers waiting and cheering as she came into view.

They built arches and covered with flowers for her reception. Aina writes, Eventually the pastor of the village church led me up the hill, all the people following. At the top of the hill was a flat place beneath a grove of trees and the pastor pointed to it and said, that's where your parents mud house once stood.

That's where you were born. He then turned and pointed without a word to a simple grave framed in cement. Over it stood a tall beautiful palm tree overlooking the entire valley below. And marking the grave was that small white cross.

And on it written, Sebeia flood, 1896 to 1923. Aina writes, I was standing where my mother had stood declaring the gospel to one small boy. She writes, And now I knew the harvest of the seed she had sown in tears. The pastor opened his Bible.

Crowding around were hundreds of believing villagers and he read a single line from the Psalms. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. Beloved, God knows what it means to weep. God knows what it means to suffer loss. Jesus Christ knows what it means to sow seed that doesn't seem to bear fruit.

Right? But God knows the end. He knows the end. That the tears of sorrow and frustration and pain and grief are going to be soon wiped away, replaced by indescribable joy and the fruit of the gospel seed, you and me, and the fruit of your efforts, which you have no idea, you have no idea how they exist and where. Along with thousands of villagers and David and Sebeia flood and all the others we've been privileged to study, we, we, the fruit of the seed of Christ sown in tears and the harvest that has come from our own lives will turn into this harvest of great joy that we cannot even imagine.

By God's grace, thousands of people who come after us will be the beneficiaries of God's work through our lives today. With today's lesson here on Wisdom for the Heart, Stephen Davey began a series called Legacies of Light. I want to make you aware that Stephen has taken this entire series and turned it into a beautifully bound hardback book. Each chapter in this book highlights the life and ministry of a Christian hero who's gone before us. Of course, David and Sebeia flood are featured.

In addition to them, you'll learn about Oswald Chambers, Amy Carmichael, and many more men and women. While supplies last, you can receive this resource at a special price. The book is on sale during the time that we're broadcasting this series. This resource also makes a great gift. Give us a call today at 866-48-BIBLE and we'll give you information over the phone. That's 866-48-BIBLE. You can visit us online at wisdomonline.org. While you're there, be sure and look around at all the other resources we have available. Once again, our web address is wisdomonline.org. Please plan to join us next time as we continue through this series here on Wisdom for the Heart. .