Monday Morning Music Ministry

7-13-20

The tenth chapter of Matthew is one of the hardest chapters in the Bible. Not hard to understand, at all. No, it has the hardest truths, hardest warnings, and hardest of challenges – commands, really – as anywhere in Scripture.

It contains the words of Jesus, start to finish.

This is not the moony-faced Jesus of paintings on Sunday-school lessons or church bulletins or calendars. The chapter quotes the Jesus we saw in flashes like overturning the tables of money-changers in the Temple courtyard; or when he rebuked people. Just as God the Father in the Old Testament would show Himself sometimes as a God of jealousy and vengeance, so Jesus was sometimes “hard.”

When children need correction, we discipline them. When God sees sin, He hates its presence and routs it out. When Jesus perceived lack of faith, He sternly confronted His followers with… the Truth.

The Lord disciplines the ones He loves, and chastises every child whom He receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as children. For what child is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not His (Hebrews 12: 6-8).

Most of Matthew 10 is teachings and warnings, a battle plan for His warriors. The chapter names the disciples; directs who should be first given the Good News; and promises spiritual gifts of healing power.

Significantly, He says if people are not receptive to the Message, to “shake the dust from your feet and move on”! For such people and such communities, He said, what befell Sodom and Gomorrah would be better than the fates they deserve. Hard-sounding, but in our times there will be an urgency preceding Judgment; and some people will have stiff necks, hard hearts and stopped ears, will reject the Truth no matter what we do.

Jesus promises here that if we are in jeopardy in perilous times, the Holy Spirit will give us wisdom to answer, and power to withstand. This is the chapter where He reminds us that if a sparrow cannot fall without the Father seeing, how much more will He care for us? God knows the number of hairs on our heads, and will provide.

But then… get ready for the Hard Gospel. Not warnings, but marching orders into the midst of oppressors. Difficult Times, Persecution, Trials.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law…. He that loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me: and he that loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he that takes not his cross, and follows after Me, is not worthy of Me. He that finds his life shall lose it: and he that loses his life for My sake shall find it.

Thus saith the Lord.

I regret to say that many of our churches today, filled with Sharing the peace, and “Smile like you mean it” mantras, and happy music performances with PowerPoint projections of springtime fields, and more smiley faces on banners than crosses on the walls… they only preach half the Gospel. Or less.

They don’t know the Jesus of Matthew 10.

How many of us do? “Weren’t those warnings only for the early Church?” No. “Didn’t Jesus give these words as fall-backs for occasional crises they faced?” No, He spoke in the future tense. “Weren’t those words just for End Times?”

We are living in End Times. His words are for today.

Christians are under persecution in America, in the West. Not only in Communist and other oppressive regimes – where, despite persecution, individuals and communities of faith are thriving. But believers in the United States are being crushed from two sides: an Establishment that uses the power of the State to suppress rights, remove Bibles from schools, Jesus from the public square, references to faith from daily life, except, virtually, in secret. Where saying “God bless you” is proscribed, and statues of Jesus are defaced and toppled. Also squeezed, now, by common rabble, from below.

It is times like these that Jesus told us to be ready for… and how to be ready… and what to expect.

We should expect – no, we are seeing it now, aren’t we? – our neighbors and our children turning against us. The “world” defining us in libelous terms… and that we suddenly face life-choices that we never dreamed of; and with life-altering consequences. But Jesus here tells us, in effect, to preempt these attacks. Not only be ready for it, but proactively act it before it kills us.

For our sake. For His sake.

Choices are seldom easy. I guess that’s why they are “choices” and not slam-dunks. The “hardest” part of all the warnings and commands of Jesus in this passage is verse 36, right in the middle. It is hard to hear… but we see – especially in these very days – in the news and on the streets:

A man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

We need to understand that those rebels, the “protesters,” anarchists-with-initials, the vandals and arsonists and looters and murderers, the cop-killers… we need to understand who they are. They not a foreign army; they are not romantic revolutionaries; they are not philosophers with agendas for utopias; they are not lovers of anything but selves; they are haters. They hate the nation and our heritage. They hate themselves and the society that bred them. They hate the Revealed Word of God and they hate you.

And where did they come from? Jesus called them out already. “Foes of our own household.” They are perverted versions of ourselves. They grew from the soil of our increasingly secular, self-absorbed, prosperous, liberal and “accepting” culture.

We ignore the foes of our own household at our peril. What has happened lately is only a little foretaste. We cannot let it – and them – roll over us. We can continue to fool ourselves about where we were until recently in America, that we had “found” lives of comfort and security.

Just remember that Jesus said that those who find such lives… will lose them.

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Click: I’m America

7-6-20

Another thought? Gee, haven’t we discussed it enough with the protests and riots?Haven’t we put it into context with all the rules about confronting the virus? Isn’t the Fourth of July over? Are we going to debate these things endlessly? Don’t we have freedom? Didn’t we end slavery?

Well, no; yes; no; yes… not so fast!!!

Whatever views have been weaponized in these recent controversies – offensive and defensive – at the end of the day it is a good thing that citizens consider the value of freedom. Even if opponents characterize each other as using freedom to destroy, or freedom to suppress (the middle ground of debates has been abandoned), freedom is the essential matter at hand.

For those us who might confuse the terms – most of all us, at times – and to save yourself from registering for three or four college courses, a problem with contemporary society is that we have lost the distinction between freedom and liberty. Basically, freedom is an internal matter of the mind, a gift from God that is a matter of the heart. We are free from… fill in the blank; sin, for instance. And we are free to… fill in the blank; worship, assemble, speak, and publish, for instance.

Liberties are what we do with freedom. The Enlightenment thinker Rousseau mistakenly thought that freedoms were bestowed by the state (and not by God) and ten years after his death, the French Revolution erupted, defacing monuments and churches, massacring and beheading people. Significantly, the Revolution’s slogan was “Liberty (not Freedom), Equality, Fraternity.”

The Bill of Rights – the first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution – carefully recognized and guaranteed freedoms in America. Since then, and no doubt into the future, liberties have been debated, granted, modified, withdrawn. When slaves were freed, they became at liberty – subject to further efforts and guarantees – to exercise that freedom.

It is a distinction with an enormous and consequential difference. In times like these crazy days, we are reminded that Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots every generation. How that blood is shed, or for what causes, are dispositive questions we ask of Mr Jefferson, yet the willingness to rebel ought to be cherished.

Whether Christians and patriots are as willing to fight for things they believe in, as nihilists are willing to fight for things they don’t believe in, is the question that confronts history right now.

Who the Son sets free is free indeed.

John 8:36 records that promise. It is one of those wonderful Bible verses that is short in words but unlimited in meaning. Simple but profound. Every word should be parsed. “Who”? – a notice to all, without restriction. “Sets free” – as we discussed, all manner of things we might be free from… and we can joyfully consider all we are freed to! “Indeed” – God puts a period on the sentence; an emphasis; a promise of totality; no reservation.

“Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, free at last!” Dr King said. Carefully. Free… to enjoy liberties. History is littered with societies that have confused liberty with license.

Jefferson, seduced somewhat by some of Europe’s philosophers, did insert “liberty” in the Declaration of Independence’s famous passage, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Brilliantly crafted needle-threading: Rights including liberty are secured by governments supported by the people… in order to guarantee God-given rights… fulfilling Natural Law… and our Creator’s will.

And “Equality,” unlike a mere slogan and goal of the French Revolution, is addressed as something that is.

Next – as it always has been – is the question of what a free people will do with their liberty.

We know what anarchists, subversives, and nihilists do with it. What will Christian patriots do?

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Click: I’m Free

6-29-20

After many statues have been yanked down, marble figures broken, bronze artwork twisted, heads of memorialized people broken off, bodies and pedestals spray-painted with obscene words and Communist slogans…

And after so many windows broken it looks like memorials to Kristallnacht; after streets and stores and buildings covered with obscenities and slogans; random cars laid waste by clubs and tire irons; mothers and children terrorized; fires set in stores and dumpsters…

And after sections of cities have been occupied, stores looted of TVs and apparel in the name of civil rights for a dead man, after grocery stores and toy stores, many started by black people struggling to make a living…

And after police are told not to counter the anarchy, after police are killed, and after officials from the White House down to local mayors talk tough – or don’t – and the jungle is thereby encouraged to spread its savagery…

WHAT IF –

What if the Theodore Roosevelt statue at the museum is the next to go?

What if the next target is the Lincoln Memorial, slogans spray-painted all around, paint splashed on the Great Emancipator?

What if the Washington Monument is next, obscenities around the base, and then, maybe by drones, the top of the monument felled?

What if Mount Rushmore is defaced from the top, paint and acid dribbling down over the “evil” faces?

What if the House and Senate are shot up, rushing guards; if the Library of Congress is set afire? What is that long-feared attack on Times Square finally happens? What if the Statue of Liberty is the target by planes or drones, and explosions and fires in its base? What if headstones and memorials are defaced at Arlington National Cemetery?

What if… the targets shift to your town, your city hall, your police station, your schools, the car in your driveway, your front windows…

What if the nihilists continue to deface and burn churches, from across the street from the White House to… your neighborhood?

Or…

WHAT IF –

Those in “authority” sweep the “zones” and arrest the vandals? What if they look at news footage and video tapes and know who to prosecute? What if people who destroy public property pay for their destruction? What if the Department of Justice files amicus briefs on behalf of shop owners, business people, small entrepreneurs, and average citizens, against mayors and governors who prevented law enforcement, and aided and abetted the destroyers?

Further, what if police were allowed to be police again? What if police funding were restored and increased? What if deluded citizens stopped defunding and started defending?

What if Christian “leaders” stopped making excuses for savagery in the streets, and in their basements? What if Christian worshipers started to find preachers who started reading the Bible instead of Marx, who would look for lost souls instead of hiding criminals?

What if God would (in effect) apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah, in any event I mean give America one more chance?

WHAT IF –

America doesn’t deserve it?

In fact, we don’t. We have, as God spoke in II Chronicles, turned away and forsaken My statutes and My commandments which I have set before you; and served other gods, and worshiped them… And God would uproot them from My land which I have given them… And as for this house [which we may see as America, once dedicated to Him] which is exalted, everyone who passes by it will be astonished and say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land and this house?’ Then they will answer, ‘Because they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, who… embraced other gods, and worshiped them and served them; therefore He has brought all this calamity on them.

Many Christians know, and quote, over and over, an earlier passage in II Chronicles: If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

That is a very big if in there. What if God really wanted Solomon to beware – and for us to be warned – what calamity we may bring up ourselves?

How many ways we have strayed from Him!!!

What if He is a God of justice?

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Please view the music video this week. It is the instrumental version of achingly beautiful Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott (“Have mercy Lord, My God, for the sake of my tears”) by Johann Sebastian Bach. The violinist, Lisa Batiashvili, speaks before her performance about the street violence and downed airplanes, everything in between, in her homeland. The audience, Dutch people on their boats in Amsterdam Harbor, share the intensity of the sacred music.

The words in Bach’s full version ask God for mercy and plead for His forgiveness –
Have mercy, my God, for the sake of my tears!
See here, before you, heart and eyes weep bitterly.
Have mercy, my God.

Click: Have Mercy, For the Sake Of My Tears.

6-15-20

These messages here, especially in the past three weeks, have evoked letters from readers who asked virtually the same questions.

How did you know I needed those words at this time in my life?

The Holy Spirit must have guided your hand. You answered questions that were eating at me lately!

I found your site by accident… but it was no accident. Your message brought tears to my eyes.

When I receive messages like this, I am reminded that this is all worthwhile. Sometimes (I hope all the time) I write by inspiration. But who reads; who is impressed of a Godly message… that is out of my hands.

Christians sometimes obsess over what impact we have. We think we have to close every deal when we share the Good News. To borrow from recent messages, that is the Holy Spirit’s job. Our job is to bear witness to the Truth. The Holy Spirit will work on peoples’ hearts.

We plant seeds. The Holy Spirit cultivates and harvests.

When I speak at Christian writers conferences I make a point of pointing to random spots in the audience, or sometimes making eye contact here and there, and encouraging the discouraged as well as the hopeful – that is, reminding every writer and aspiring writer of the consequential opportunities they have; and the responsibilities.

“Something you wrote last week might seem like it died without being noticed. But perhaps one person read it and was touched and saved the clipping. And next year might share it with a distant relative. And that relative might pass the thought along to a stranger who needs those words at that very moment. And that person might change his or her life because of that thought, which can then spread to family members and neighbors. Hundreds, or thousands, of people can find truth and beauty and salvation, all because of something you wrote, and maybe thought a failure or a waste of time.”

Or I share variations of that very plausible scenario. Or that this pertains not only to things we write, but things we might say. Or a way we acted when challenged a certain manner. Or how we reacted, maybe when we thought nobody was looking.

Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us (Hebrews 12:1).

Many times I have thought of the time a small family of missionaries visited our little church when my daughter Emily was a young schoolkid. Their testimonies and stories and slideshow impressed her so much that she broke out in spontaneous prayer, and told my wife later that day that she wanted to be a missionary – that God told her she would serve in the missions field. She did. She went to Bible college; joined missions trips to Russia and Mexico and Ireland. She went to Ireland a second time to do street ministry, more training at a Bible college, and did church work.

I often think what might have happened in her life, or not happened, if she had skipped church that day, or was not open to that message from that family.

But we should all think about the pictures from life’s other side. What if that family had not been open, themselves, to the Holy Spirit’s leading? What if they had grown weary, and not visited that church that morning? What if they had checked their passion at the door, and shared a mere travelogue instead of the powerful stories of lives changed in a faraway land of hurting and needy people?…

The Bible chapter preceding the one cited above – Hebrews 11 – sometimes is called “The Hall Of Fame of Faith.” It contains a long list of the Bible’s heroes who believed, and stepped out, and persisted, and fought the good fight for God’s truths, or “ran the race” well. By the way, they did not all achieve their “goals.” But they are honored in God’s eyes, and in history, for being faithful… as witnessed by uncountable angels, the heavenly host, the “great cloud of witnesses,” and by us today.

You see, God does not require success; only obedience. The Holy Spirit takes the baton to finish our race for us.

For that reason (and as the attached music video powerfully illustrates) we need to be aware of those who watch us. Not to be paranoid, but to be encouraged! Be aware of who watch you – God; the heavenly “great cloud of witnesses”; angels; your spouse or children; your neighbors.

And, sometimes, people you will never meet.

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Click: Thank You For Giving To the Lord

6-8-20

I write this as the third part of an informal tracking of a neglected but essential part of church history – the period after Jesus’s crucifixion and death; Resurrection and 40 days of preaching and witnessing; His bodily Ascension into Heaven, confirming His divine nature; then came the day of Pentecost.

It was the promise of Pentecost – what we have come to call the Pentecostal experience – and Jesus’s careful explanation that it was good that He leave earth, because He would then send to believers the Helper, the Healer, the Comforter: One who would empower and instruct. The Holy Spirit, third manifestation, the third Person, of the Trinity. We shared how the Spirit first fell on worshipers in the upper room, how they received a strange gift of speaking in unknown languages, but understood or interpreted.

This was the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit,” this spiritual joy and maturity. It was not a one-day event in history. It was merely the first time.

I write this in the midst, whew, of the worldwide pandemic’s fears, afflictions, and social disruption; and in the equally chaotic riots following a police suspect’s death. And… what’s next? People are right to be unsure if not unsafe. Or vice-versa.

As a natural skeptic, I wonder whether we will look back on the shutdowns, this virus, and feel blessed, feel relieved, or feel scammed. And these riots – will we look back and see an explosion of righteousness, or a period of anarchy and looting?

I will keep to my promised theme. I can write about things we see and don’t know are true; or I can write about things we cannot see, but know are true.

Things were different, once the Holy Spirit came. Peter, for instance, had been a bumbling and impulsive disciple who denied knowing Jesus three times when things were dicey – scarcely less an offense than Judas’s betrayal. Yet after the Spirit came upon him in the upper room, Peter became the mature leader of the new church that formed, and a powerful preacher.

What happened to Peter 2000 years ago can happen to believers today, and does happen to believers today. Can you have salvation without the “baptism” of the Holy Spirit? Yes. The gifts are… extra. But who would reject gifts, especially from Almighty God? Would children at birthday parties reject gifts?

Yet, some Christians do. If God chose to express Himself in three ways, we need to remember they were equal manifestations. Jesus was all God and all man; and so is the Spirit.

This same Spirit was explained by this same Peter after he was blessed with gifts of wisdom. He recalled, and shared, the passage from Joel chapter 28 (500-800 years earlier) – And it shall come to pass… says God, That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your young men shall see visions, Your old men shall dream dreams…. I will pour out My Spirit in those days…

Now it became clear. “Greater is He that is within you [the Holy Spirit], than he who is in the world [Satan].”

Some Christians claim that the gifts of the Holy Spirit were only for that first crowd. But that is to doubt Jesus and limit the Father, not to mention denying the subsequent evidence. I know because I have experienced the Baptism, and I have witnessed miracles; I have received the gifts. Many people have.

Other Christians believe that sudden outbreaks of tongues, ecstatic worship, and miracles broke out in Wichita around 1900 and in a black church on Asuza Street, Los Angeles, in 1906 is where it started. And then, as we shared, Pentecostalism spread to half a billion people around the world, second only to Roman Catholicism among Christians. Not for now? How would that explain miracles, church growth, healings, and blessings over the following 2000 years?

There are accounts (described by no less a person than Theodore Roosevelt in his classic book The Winning of West) of pioneer camp-meetings and revivals where worshipers would gather for several days, overtaken by ecstatic worship and strange tongues. In the 1700s, similar responses in Philadelphia to public sermons of Charles Whitefield; Benjamin Franklin recorded these. In the 1800s, a similar reaction among lunchtime worshipers on Wall Street, of all places. The blind hymn-writer Fanny Crosby prayed in “the language of angels” only she and her Lord knew. And so forth, all before Azusa Street.

After that, however, there were spontaneous and simultaneous “eruptions” of Holy Spirit preaching, singing, worship, healings, Words of prophecy, and such, all over the world. Two decades ago I twice attended a famous such revival in Pensacola, Florida – a visiting evangelist was used by God to spark ecstatic worship that was not extinguished – 24/7, for month after month; people attracted from all over the world.

If the Holy Spirit is the equal of Jesus… but you don’t have to receive this “Spirit baptism” to enter heaven… why do some of us consider it so important? But as I implied before, if God offers a spiritual gift and we decline it, we are spiritual fools.

What are the Gifts of the Spirit? They listed several times in the New Testament. Any can be prayed for; they can be-one-time gifts – for self-edification, or ministering to a situation – or occasionally are specialized lifetime ministering gifts, for instance to evangelists with healing ministries. They are wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, speaking in tongues, and interpretation of tongues.

As I said, I have experienced some (blessing others when needed, or to communicate with God when I felt helpless) and I have witnessed healings, emotional breakthroughs, astonishing revelations.

Listen: Christianity is nothing if not a system of faith and belief and miracles. Plain and simple. How have Christians become so blasé about a Man who was born of a virgin, performed miracles, and rose from the dead? “Oh, well, that was God, 2000 years ago.” How can there be so many people who go to church (if at all) out of dull habit; who never feel joyful when “Hallelujah” is read from the same old prayer book; who have “forms of godliness, but deny the power thereof”?

They quench the Holy Spirit, embarrassed to seek… reluctant to accept gifts… afraid to exercise the power it enables.

Instead – bringing it today – Christians complain about current events in the news. They feel helpless to do anything about them. They are lost, spiritually, in these uncertain times. In this time of threats and potential disasters facing us, they might even wish for some miracles.

You know what? It is as easy to pray for miracles, as to wish for them. And you have a loving Father who has stored up gifts you can access. Why, oh why, do people neglect the third Person of the Trinity?

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Since the Pentecostal movement is spread across the world, with no one denomination or pope – the Bible is sole authority – it is joyful to see the workings of the Holy Ghost everywhere… and especially, in these day of persecution, how the Spirit empowers traditional Christians, new believers, and persecuted Christians. Here, a group of Iranians who support underground Christians churches in Iran, singing of the sweet Spirit of God.

Click: Come, Holy Spirit

6-2-20

God’s message for the time of plagues, lockdowns, economic distress, international strife, riots in the streets.

I tell you I am going to do what is best for you. This is why I am going away. The Holy Spirit cannot come to help you until I leave. But after I am gone, I will send the Spirit, the Comforter, the Helper, to you.

We think we are going through strange times, rapidly changing events of great magnitude. Prosperity. Then suddenly the world stops spinning and millions are out of work; schools and shops are empty. The stock market breaks records; commerce is humming. Then suddenly a plague threatens to kill millions. The world’s major trading partners are at odds, then break relations; exchange deadly threats. Hong Kong, reveling in tastes of freedom… waving American flags… singing Christian hymns in the streets… brutally is suppressed and taken over by the Communists. In America, peace in (weirdly empty) streets, then suddenly major cities and towns are in violence, its (savagely crowded) streets aflame.

All within a few months; some things changing overnight.

Jerusalem once was like that. Jesus, that street preacher with a healing ministry, enters the city amidst celebrations and hosannas. Suddenly, in less than a week, He is framed, accused, jailed, tortured, sentenced, and killed. All in five days. The government is repressive, the religious leaders defensive. This Jesus is dead and His followers weep, also fearing for their lives. Earthquakes; the temple veil spontaneously rips in two; the environment is dark. Suddenly Jesus comes back to life. His broken body is perfect. Thousands see him, even skeptical Romans confirm the events.

All within a few days; some things changing overnight.

Jesus did return. He communed. He preached. He explained. People saw. People understood. People believed.

After a whirlwind 40 days – that frequent Biblical number – another change. Jesus left again… lifted up not on a cross but bodily into the heavens. From the Mount Of Olives this Ascension, as we discussed last week here, was the final, supernatural, confirmation that He was God; returning to the throne to sit at the right hand of the Father.

Father? Son? One God? Ah, the mystery of the “Godhead.” God chose to reveal Himself in three ways to His children. He could have chosen two, or two dozen. The Trinity is His choice, all God in three natures. (If we could fully understand, we would be Gods.) Like water, ice, and steam.

The third “person” of the Trinity? That is the Holy Spirit. Present and referred to in the Old Testament. But specifically promised and explained by Jesus before the Ascension. “It is best for you that I depart… The Holy Spirit cannot come until I leave. But after I am gone, I will send the Spirit, the Comforter, the Helper, to you.”

Who is this Holy Ghost?

The world still asks this. The Holy Spirit is the most misunderstood, and the least accessed, member of the Trinity. When Jesus left this earth in order to send us the Holy Spirit… it is almost like disobedience that we do not welcome the Holy Spirit more, seek its wisdom and guidance and power and comfort.

Fifty days after the Resurrection, Jesus’s followers, men and women, met for the celebration of Pentecost in Jerusalem. They were praying, and as recorded in the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles, something like a mighty wind came through the room. What appeared to be flames rested on peoples’ heads. They all began to speak… in unknown languages. Foreign tongues, unknown words, unbidden.

They ran to the streets. People heard; some understood; some thought they were drunk.

But “they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance”; that is what was going on.

And this has been “going on” ever since.

Given the broad expanse of time, this Holy-Ghost experience that has occurred again in these last days – perhaps close to the End of Time – is also a relatively brief and crowded time. In only a century, marked from 1906, Pentecostalism counts a half-billion people around the world, second in numbers only to Roman Catholicism among Christians.

It is a movement that adheres not only to the Bible, in literal terms, but to the practices, power, mystery, ecstatic worship and closeness to Jesus, and miraculous gifts that all Christians experienced on the First Century churches.

Of those “gifts” there are nine listed in the Bible, available to us. Pentecostals (and Charismatics) seek and accept them, and they change lives. I will finish this three-part discussion in the next message – not to be as a schoolmarm lecturing about history, but to share what I have joyfully come to experience.

However, in these troubled times – these very days, these troubled and confusing and dangerous and evil days – I think the Holy Spirit holds more help, and hope, that we can know. And what better time to know that we are not alone. I will share practical Biblical truths. For times such as these, the Holy Spirit was sent to us.

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Click: Sweet, Sweet Spirit

5-25-20

The Pandemic, or as most of us have come to know it in our daily lives, the Pandemonium, even in relative slow motion, has been absorbing seemingly every conversation, every newscast, every blog message.

It is difficult to believe that Easter was only a couple of months ago. Harder still, perhaps, to address the fact that the meaning of Easter seems light-years away. We can note, we do note, that except for a few exceptions the Church has been almost silent on the plague and the reactions to it.

Are church leaders “rendering unto Caesar” and dutifully following rules? Are faith leaders being cowardly? Are they at least stepping forward in their communities, in newspapers, on television, and offering… help? Prayers? Shelter? Alternatives to church meetings?

Mostly, no. Franklin Graham plans a tent hospital in Central Park, in fact in response to a request from Mt Sinai Hospital across the street. The city rejoices. Until he prays when it opens, and dozens of volunteers are in place. Then a successful move begins to force him out of the city. Those New York types hate Christ more than they hate Covid.

Believers have begun to rise up, and now churches are nervously – and occasionally boldly – joining the brave move to exercise First Amendment rights. It is about time! It was getting to be that I thought, if I ever find myself in a foxhole, I would want hairdressers and barbers at my sides.

Yes, we can worship in our living rooms; we can kneel at a stump in our back yards. Yes, we can, but we tend not to; and there is something about worshiping God in a place of God with the people of God.

Since Easter, among the Biblical things that might have been eclipsed is a holiday in the Church calendar that was already fading in importance anyway; a shame. Ascension Day for centuries was a major observance, more important than Christmas.

It falls 40 days after Easter, after the Resurrection. The day is always, therefore, on a Thursday, and most often celebrated on the next Sunday in churches. It marks the event, after Jesus’s final visits and ministering, being seem by multitudes, when He invited the Disciples and others to the Mount of Olives… announced another fulfillment of prophecy… and ascended into Heaven, into the clouds. Bodily. Witnessed by many.

And in that manner, He promised, He would return some day.

In many churches and much of public life today, Ascension Day is scarcely noted. In some countries it still is a national holiday, with schools, banks, and businesses closed… whether it is celebrated in peoples’ hearts or not. I do not know.

But Ascension Day is a holiday in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia(!), Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.

Ascension Day should really be the most important celebration on the Christian calendar. My argument here is theological but certainly not dogmatic; I want to address how apologetics – explaining the Gospel – works.

The Annunciation? The world had to take Mary’s account of her pregnancy by her word. Christmas? A beautiful picture, fulfilling prophecy in ancient books. Jesus’s miracles? Coincidences or persuasions, perhaps. The Passion of the Christ? Foretold, too, but… His death? Did that prove Jesus was the Savior – and skeptics asked about the Resurrection.

And so forth. I flirt with blasphemy, forgive me, to make a point. We are told that with the heart one believes and is justified; and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. What do we believe, what do we confess? That Jesus is the Son of God, and God raised Him from the Dead. The final confirmation of Christ’s divinity is when He rose to be again at the right hand of the Father.

A bodily Ascension, witnessed by many, was the final thing that could not be cast into doubt by a skeptical world.

Of course I believe in fulfilled prophecy, the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, powerful miracles, the Passion and substitutionary death of Jesus, and the Resurrection. But until he rejoined the father He was not fully God again.

Jesus did ascend into the clouds; He was witnessed; and He promised to return to redeem His saints, where we will be caught in the clouds with Him. If you wonder whether you would still be in confusion – as, frankly, the Disciples were – after such a unique scene… note, on the linked video, that Jesus directed them to go to Jerusalem and wait. For what?

It was about a week away, and we shall visit ourselves in about a week.

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Click: Ascension Day

5-4-20

“Where Is Jesus?”

Some people in these troubled times call this out to the heavens, to God, to Jesus Himself as they deal with challenges to health, family, income, sanity.

“Where is your Jesus now?”

That is a question that friends – skeptics, cynics, and non-believers, especially – ask in times like these. To certain people in this post-Christian culture, it is a rhetorical question, a taunt.

This causes me to remember a challenging time of my own, and my family’s: years ago my wife was listed for a heart and kidney transplant. Both organs were failing, and she was wasting away in hospital. My mother was near death in Florida, and I simply had to be there with my father. Driving to the Amtrak station, my car was T-boned and totaled at a Philadelphia intersection. My kids were staying with friends, but other challenges, including financial ones, loomed.

Mercifully, a family of friends was watching my children; neighbors helped with food and bills. My pastor loaned us his SUV until we could get back on our wheels.

And so forth. I could not be there for my mother’s actual passing – which was hours after I left Florida to come home for Christmas. Nancy received her transplants on Valentine’s Day, and lived another 16 years. Things worked out, in unexpected ways.

When things returned to “normal,” I gave thanks to Jesus in a conversation with a writer friend who was one of those skeptics. He said, “Why do you thank Jesus? Listen to yourself! It was friends who took your children in. It was relatives who helped with meals. It was your pastor guy who loaned you the car… Not your Jesus.”

I never had articulated the perspective properly before; but I quickly answered, “Those things were Jesus. He was just working through friends.”

+ + +

We are grateful, always, for gifts and givers. And we bless and thank recipients too, because they provide us opportunities to exercise charity. Not only to do love, but to be love.

That is what God desires for His children, even if “getting there” seems awkward to our little selves and our expectations.

Let God run His world. He doesn’t  always require that we understand everything; just that we be obedient.

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“Where is your Jesus now?” skeptics ask now in these troubled days.

Of course a single death is grievous; and if it could have been prevented, tragic. But in the long view, I think this pandemic has caused more trauma, anxiety, dislocation, and grief, from fear than from deaths; or possibly more than negative aspects of plagues in the past. Apart from things we cannot now know, like possible manipulation and skewed statistics and overreactions, we suddenly live in a dystopia, the opposite of a utopia. This revolving planet has come to a standstill!

Where is our Jesus? Of course He is still present. Behind the black storm clouds, the sun still shines. The One who created the entire universe is greater than microscopic viruses. Of course. Is there sin (and therefore death and disease) in the world? Yes.

Is a tiny virus, sweeping across continents, much different, really, than giant tornadoes, or massive floods, or unexpected earthquakes? No. Can plagues be prayed away? Sometimes, but mostly our duty is to cleave to the Word of God and trust Him.

“Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil, for I will be with you.” He does not promise a detour from that valley; or avoidance of what lies in the shadows… but for me, trusting that He is with us is a real and present help in time of trouble.

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“Where is Jesus?”

There was a poignant time in history when that question was cried with intense emotion.

Actually, back to back: after Crucifixion, Christ was in the tomb for three days. Jews mocked. Romans dismissed. The followers of Jesus, despite having seen Him perform miracles and manifest the Incarnation, despaired. Even His mother grieved.

“Where is Jesus?”

Then He rose. Came back to life. In a restored body. As by a speedy miracle, as the word spread and people saw Him, the hundreds of prophecies became clear. He had foretold of His Resurrection, and by rising proved His divinity.

“Where is Jesus???”

Then for 40 days He roamed the land preaching. People saw Him; listened and believed. The skeptic called Thomas doubted, and was invited touch the wound that still graced His side.

Where is Jesus? WHERE IS JESUS? “Let’s go down to the river and see the man who conquered death!!!” Until the Ascension, Jesus spoke, ministered, and encouraged multitudes, as historical accounts affirm.

Between those appearances and rallies, He must have had quiet moments. He had to go from place to place. It was His practice during His earthly ministry to seek solitude at moments, and commune with the Father.

I have a little idea that during the quiet moments, maybe in dark nights between towns, He roamed alone… looking, perhaps, for individuals. Not crowds, but solitary souls wandering, maybe spiritually lost, who needed a touch of the Master’s Hand.

In fact He is still doing that – seeking out lost souls who need the touch of the Master’s Hand.

You might be one of those. In fact, we all are, at least at one time or another.

Where is Jesus? Closer than you think.

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Click: God Walks the Dark Hills

4-27-20

Plandemic. That is not a typo.

I believe this current crisis, across the entire earth, touching health and finances and well-being and emotions is not random. I believe it has been planned.

We hear of “Acts of God” on the news and in insurance policies. To me, acts of God are not hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, nor epidemics.

Acts of God are love. And beautiful days. And happy families. And babies’ smiles. Generosity; charity; forgiveness; gratitude; joy.

These current hard times have us confused and worried. Soon, these emotions might turn into widespread bitterness, suspicion, anger. Maybe not soon, but… eventually. We do not know, now, how long this all will last. People read this message all over the world, and if there still is a world, might read these words ‘way into the future. Now, we see through a glass darkly, because that is as far as our eyes can discern today.

So I say that I am persuaded that this pandemic was planned. Readers who are not Christians might share my own immediate suspicions that China charted a war but without bullets or bombs. Lab-made or natural virus, it is plausible that the worldwide spread was not an accident. Our instincts tell us that, like children caught in the jelly jar, Communist China’s myriad stories, versions, corrections, cover-ups, disappearances, suppression of news, falsified statistics, denials of reliable assistance, arrogance toward truth-seekers… prove them as culpable as gunmen in a bank heist or drivers of getaway cars. If they act guilty, they likely are guilty.

Readers who are Christians may see this view as irrelevant. But I invite skeptics to consider the other evidence of “planning.”

I am persuaded that there is a God; there is a heaven and there is a hell; there is a Savior, Jesus, through whom we are reconciled to the Father. When humankind chose to sin and to rebel against God, yet He sent His Son to bear the penalty for our sins.

As part of our rebellion, for some reason people – even His chosen, those who know Christ – often think that sickness and sorrow are sent by God; and that events like epidemics and death are, oh well, just part of life; not part of Satan’s evil intentions.

Believers and skeptics alike still have to deal with the details, fine-print, and reality of such a worldview. But our 100 per cent understanding of the world and its woes would not change anything in the world. Including the dizzying array of theories and “solutions.” Especially we must deal with things like this awful, stark reality before us.

How do we deal with things? For personal security, a current view is that we engage in social-distancing. OK, having chosen the professions of writer, historian, and cartoonist, my own decisions have put me closer to the “hermit” mode of daily life. I am a little primed, but believe me, I realize this is not for everyone.

First (among many perspectives) we must realize that, at the moment, it might be said that more disruption and misery has been caused by fear than by the virus itself.

I recommend to you not to surrender your spirit to this bizarre solo life of isolation. Rather, realize that as Christians – which I hope all readers are, or will be while there is time to deal with the Truth of the Gospel – we all actually are pilgrims and strangers in this world, already.

We are called to “be apart.” To be “in the world, but not of the world.” This world is not our home! And “I don’t want to get adjusted to this world.” “Be not transformed to this world.” We’re headed for the Promised Land!

I have used quotation marks here because I quote Bible verses and song lyrics – sermons in song, poetic and life-saving advice.

So you may follow the news and the advice about the virus. That is good! You might be curious about whether we are under attack by forces of flesh and blood. But be aware of the real enemy. Through boredom and annoyances and inconvenience, discern the enemy of your soul. Be aware – this is a war, whether we like it or not. Trust God, not headlines.

Spiritual terrorism is being waged against us. You might perceive sniper-fire. But Kamikaze attacks are what we face.

Oh, what a weeping and wailing,
As the lost were told of their fate;
They cried for the rocks and the mountains.
They prayed, but their prayer was too late.

The soul that had put off salvation,
“Not tonight; I’ll get saved by and by,
No time now to think of religion!”
At last, they had found time to die.

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On Easter, Lily Isaacs and her children Sonya, Becky, and Ben were quarantined, but recorded a message and song in the little chapel at Sonya’s home.

Click: I Have Decided… It Is Well

4-20-20

The late pianist Anthony Burger used to tell a story about his son Austin, at five years old, in his church’s Easter pageant. He was cast as Jesus, dressed in sandals and one of his dad’s old T-shirts.

The other kids in their little costumes beheld the empty cardboard tomb. The little girls acted sad, and when little Jesus appeared he told them not to be afraid, or to be sad. “I died, but now I am alive! I will never leave you!” Parents in the church audience were moved, and proud.

All of a sudden, Austin ran back into the tomb – not in the script! But right away he popped out and yelled, “Ready or not – here I come!!!”

Somewhere between parents’ embarrassment and the church’s laughter we might find – “out of the mouths of babes!” – some decent theology.

Ready or not, Jesus did leave that tomb. He conquered sin and death. He returned. To live among us.

He actually never did go back into that tomb. He just needed it for the weekend. He lives; He lives; Christ Jesus lives today. He walks with us and He talks with us, along life’s narrow way… We sing it, but are we ready… or not?

Jesus was ready, but are we?

We have to be ready. When a Savior dies – for us; and lives – for us, we cannot be indifferent. Life on earth was never the same again, and when we meet the Incarnate Lord, the Risen Savior… we cannot be the same again. Ever.

If you are not changed, you need some serious time with Jesus… but with yourself too.

Maybe, make use of the self-isolation these days.

Jesus used His isolation to live again.

Let us use our isolation to be born again.

Ready? Or not?

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Click:A Child’s Easter Story

4-12-20

The night was so different from all the rest,
And a silence covers the Earth;
The stars have no glimmer, the moon tries to hide,
For in death lies the Man of their birth.

The night was so different from all the rest,
And a silence covers the Earth;
The stars have no glimmer, the moon tries to hide,
For in death lies the Man of their birth.

In a room filled with sorrow, a mother cries,
For Jesus, her Son, now is gone;
Her Child sent from Heaven was taken away,
Heartbroken, she feels all alone.

At the feet of his mother a little boy cries,
Saying, “Mama, I don’t understand’;
I remember the look of love in His eyes,
That I saw, by the touch of His hand.

The King of all ages, the Giver of life,
For a moment lies silent and still.
But a power sent from heaven comes breaking the night,
And death must bow to His will!

The stone moves, the Earth shakes, and birds start singing,
The sun shines, the Earth warms, for the new life it’s bringing!
That little boy stops crying, a Mother is smiling,
For death could not hold a King!

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Every year it’s the same story – not the “same old story” – but the Story we need to hear again and again, not every year, really, but every day of our lives. Death could not hold our King. Spiritual death, emotional death, both symbolic and real. It’s about death… and life.

Every year since that first Easter, skeptics ask, “Yes, but…” or “That was Jesus. This is now…” This year the Coronavirus prompts the questions and doubts and fears. “Jesus said He came that we would have life…?”

Yes, He did. “… and life more abundantly.” While we are here we can have life, and it more abundantly. We don’t avoid the questions, because Jesus didn’t. Did He heal? Can He heal? Does He heal?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Then we demand to know, Why… this person? Why… these numbers of sick? Sometimes… Why me?

Yes, Why? If we knew, we’d be as God. It is very hard to say, and hard to believe, but God’s Hand is in all, and as the Bible says, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” That is not the opening line in a debate. It is a fact. God does not demand that we understand all things; He asks us to have faith. He lovingly requires that we be obedient.

Just as “Jesus was obedient to the cross.” His sacrifice was God’s plan to substitute for the punishment we deserve as sinners.

But there is no point to the Easter story, by itself as it happened and was witnessed by many, even with all the ifs and buts through the centuries, unless the story does not include the next part.

Jesus overcame death. He promises us a new life. A new life. A new life.

Viruses – and broken bones, and infections, and diseases – are gruesome, and deadly, yes. And different but horrible, too, are sinful habits, and broken relationships, and hatreds, and abuses. I don’t suggest a game of comparison, but sometimes a broken heart is harder to mend than a broken bone. Sin can be deadlier than a virus. If we don’t stick to diets that help our bodies, can we commit to blameless lives for the sake of our souls?

Jesus came to help us with those dilemmas. Jesus died to save us from those weaknesses. Jesus rose to redeem us from our sins and weaknesses and failings.

The night before Easter – between His physical death and His resurrection – were the loneliest, most desolate days in humankind’s history. Despite the numerous prophecies, despite His disciples seeing uncountable miracles performed, and despite Jesus’s own words… there was despair and hopelessness. Even His Mother despaired; the earth was dark; heartbroken, they felt all alone.

But then…

The stone moves, the Earth shakes, and birds start singing,
The sun shines, the Earth warms, for the new life it’s bringing!
That little boy stops crying, a Mother is smiling,
For death could not hold a King!

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Click: The Night Before Easter

4-7-20

It’s me, again, God. Rather, it’s us.

You’ll remember us from Christmas. We prayed then, too; or repeated the prayers and sang those familiar hymns. Of course you’ll remember us – You’re God! I hope it doesn’t look bad that some of us only come to You on Christmas and Easter… or when things are going really bad down here.

Things are going really bad down here.

But here we are. I trust you to know us, Lord, like I said. I mean, when my kids were not perfect, and then they tried to hide, I just loved them all the more, and wanted to hug them and hear what was wrong. You’re a loving Father, too. I know that. There are some things I learned from Bible stories!

It’s a coincidence, maybe, this being Holy Week before Easter; and this awful virus sweeping the world. You don’t bring death and disease, but we have two reasons right now to run to you, and get hugs. Please open Your arms.

It’s a little weird. On Palm Sunday Jesus rode into Jerusalem, and maybe He knew what was coming, but His disciples didn’t. The people in the streets didn’t. And this virus thing… we don’t know what’s coming for us, either. We don’t, our families don’t, our neighbors don’t, our country doesn’t, the world doesn’t.

Can you read our hearts, God? Do you know that we’re afraid? Even if we don’t pray often, or pray enough, or pray fancy… You do read the prayers in our hearts, don’t You? When my kids on my lap could do nothing but cry, I loved them more and hugged them tighter. I think I was doing what You do.

I have another favor to ask, God. The other day, on the phone with a friend, I said that I trusted You. We were talking about this virus, and he said, “Well, you’d better trust masks and quarantines and soaps and doctors and scientists too!” Oh, sure, I said.

Later, I thought, do I trust all those things? No… actually, I only hope. Can I trust You and at the same time trust masks and vaccines too? Sure. If I put all my trust in them, does that mean I trust You too? I guess not.

Your people down here had it straight, once, or a little clearer. I mean, our coins don’t say “In Masks We Trust,” nor does the Pledge have the words, “One Nation Under Vaccines.” We knew where our strength and trust and wisdom came from. If you bless me – I mean all of us down here, please – with some of that strength and trust and wisdom, maybe we’ll be better children of Yours. Even before next Christmas.

As you see us through this epidemic.

In the meantime, God… hug us a little tighter, please.

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The marketplace is empty, No more traffic in the street;
All the builders’ tools are silent, No more time to harvest wheat..
– Holy Week, or our cities and towns today?

Click: The King Is Coming

3-23-20

To write of perfect days when every day lately – no, every hour – seems filled with dread. To ask us to stop and savor, or even search hard for, good news, good times, and a good tomorrow… seems naive or crazy these days.

Well, let us be crazy for a moment. It might keep us from going insane.

Someone threw the word psithurism at me recently. I will tell you, it is the precise and compact term for one of nature’s supernal gifts – the sound of a breeze rustling through trees. In Estes Park, CO, after the Christian Writers Conference, up the “hill,” every year I visit a grove of aspen trees whose wind-kissed sounds are like the tones of a distant organ. When winds sometime meet mountain snowbanks and desert sand dunes they produce eerie but beautiful sounds; music, almost. Where there are rock formations and in caves, breezes can bring forth heavenly chords.

Wondrous coincidences explained by science, or God’s messages – like rainbows – of His presence, His hand in creation, His reminders of lovingkindness? It makes no difference, which, to believers, because with God there are no coincidences anyway; but He ordered the moon and the stars and enabled such blessings.

Everyday blessing they are. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in “A Day of Sunshine”:

I hear the wind among the trees
Playing celestial symphonies;
I see the branches downward bent,
Like keys of some great instrument.

God is in all. Creation proclaims His glory. That means sunshine and shadow; rain and drought; good times and – sometimes – hard times. I do not believe God sends sickness or disease. He is not a child abuser. Yet we struggle to comprehend the “bad”…

We wonder why God “permits” viruses, plagues, epidemics. People ponder and pray these very days about this. It has always seemed clear to me that there is sin the world – nurtured further by humankind’s rebelliousness, evil acts, and, yes, our sin natures. Nature can be beautiful: the way God created. But we waste our gifts, pollute and corrupt, and wonder why nature, sometimes – creatures, weather, resources – “turns on us.” Do we deserve things like pandemics? We say no, especially about innocent victims.

But this is our world. Is it God’s will, any more than cancers or tornadoes? The Lord can chastise in many ways, but we should not look for lessons or punishment in every act like the Coronavirus. It might be so but rather we should look to the God who loves us and shows His love and mercy in so many other ways.

The clouds are stormy? Blue skies and bright sunshine still are above those clouds.

The agonies of birth pangs yet bring forth beautiful babies, miracles of life, souls to love.

The suffering and death of Jesus Christ had to be endured, as per prophecy, in order to bring Salvation to the human race.

We cannot see or understand fully, not all the time; in fact very seldom. The ways of the Lord are inscrutable. His acts do not depend on our understanding of them. His ways are not subject to our approval. His plans will not come up for our votes.

A sickness in our household, or a pandemic sweeping the globe ought to be no different in terms of our responses. God help us, let us curse the little virus less and trust in our mighty God more. And praise Him. Is not God bigger than a microscopic virus?

His sun still shines brightly behind those dark clouds.

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Click: The End Of a Perfect Day

3-16-20

The title here is from a story about London during the “blitz,” the bombing by enemy planes in World War II. Supposedly, Winston Churchill and an aide viewed the city on fire from some vantage point, and the aide supposedly said, “Maybe this is a blessing in disguise.” Churchill supposedly harrumphed, “Some blessing. Some disguise.”

The Bible says, Woe unto those who call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20), but that wise warning addresses those who intentionally bend the truth to their own purposes. In a time of confusion and near-panic – may I characterize the Coronavirus situation that way? – there surely are forces who might be manipulating events, if not having conspired somehow to initiate them; as well as people who might profit. My suspicions and plausible scenarios aside, confusion and panic are the predominant emotions around the world right now.

And I invite us to take the long, long view of things. And woe unto those who think that my speculation about a silver lining to the Coronavirus pandemic means that I am indifferent to the suffering and deaths. Of course not, not any of us. But there is a future: let us wonder what it will be.

Do we know what is ahead, after “this too” shall pass? No, we don’t know, but we can ask; and we can guess. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know… (I Corinthians 13:12). Being a “Futurist” does not mean having flawless predictions but – perhaps rarer – knowing the right questions to ask. Let us see if that hat fits us.

First of all, in human history, disasters like plagues and wars often are followed, roaring, by comebacks and revivals. When I researched my biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, I learned that a monstrous plague and the Thirty Years’ War left one-third of Germany dead and displaced. Yet the middle-class resurgence, and literacy, and a culture that could produce Bach and Handel sprouted and blossomed in its aftermath.

It is not only culture and commerce and stock markets that rebound after calamities, but, somehow also the human spirit. If under-girded by a firm faith, human nature when fed by democracy and capitalism, gets up, finds the path, and races to the goal. And the next goal, and the next.

For several generations we have been advancing to a major re-calibration of societal interaction. This virus “dislocation” will actually cause an acceleration: a good thing. And a major thing; new and better ways of doing things.

If we are indeed headed for paradigm shifts, we should recognize that when such things seem “major” in our human existence, the most profound changes are, rather, the many minor things that weave themselves together as the basic fabric of our lives.

We already are at the advent of tele-medicine. I have interviewed hospital staffs who tele-diagnose from a great distance. Tele-procedures, operations conducted from other states, are here. Auto mechanics already diagnose, too, with computers in their garages. We are a step away from plugging under our own hoods and having mechanics diagnose from across town. Except for package delivery, most mail will be obsolete; we can sense that already.

Uber and Lyft. Transporting people, then restaurant orders; then groceries. Easy, socially distant… ultimately economical. Ford should transition to be a mobility and vehicle-sharing company. Someday cars will be like time-shares: Only when we need them.

Teaching at almost all secondary and advanced levels, maybe elementary too, will be by screens. Excerpt for labs and hands-on training, this is overdue.

Is anything counter-intuitive? Sermons, fellowship? In the 1950s California churches experimented with drive-in worship, like drive-in movies. It didn’t work – neither did drive-in movies survive – so corporate worship, fellowship, conventions, will not die.
“What about old folks? Those without web?” Neither will the “marginal” be marginalized. In the future, every house will be built, or equipped, with, basic computer terminals. As common as phones.

Drones were mere foretastes. They will be not only be for mischief or spying or wedding photographers but for crop analysis, mineral exploration, climate warnings.

Is there a danger of social isolation? Will personal interaction die? This already is a situation, if not a challenge, in contemporary life… but reunions, meetings, rallies, sports, all will be more special, when they happen, if they are less common. People will find ways. And maybe feel more motivated to find ways.

Sports without crowds? I have two visions: (a) – when the virus is history, stadiums will be packed again. (b) We will have adjusted, however, to crowd-less stadiums. I currently pay $129 a year to watch every baseball game played by every team for a whole season, at home. If tele-fandom becomes the norm and not the luxurious exception, I might complain as prices go up… but this will be the future for tele-fans, plain and simply. It is inevitable. Sing: “Take me out to the home-screen…”

Skype will become less “ghostly” and eliminate audio echoes. In the past, when I was a guest on, say, CNN, I was “happy” to drive two hours to Manhattan, tolls and parking, to be interviewed and on air for less than three minutes. Not in the future; we already see a lot of Skype interviews. Split screens will bring Q-and- As to virtual classrooms. In the same way, there will be no way to avoid virtual town halls with our politicians – not face-to-face, but screen-to-screen. A good thing.

Maybe those awkward and obligatory hugs will disappear from the bundle of social habits. Many readers of this essay – of this I am sure – will someday be explaining to their grandchildren what mailmen were, and school buses, and bank tellers; and driving to libraries or lectures.

Will baseball games, or concerts, or rallies, be outlawed? No… but they will seem more special, because they will be more special.

We already have to explain to our kids what polio was; black-and-white TV; and and having to ask telephone operators to “dial” numbers for us. My grandparents, as kids, did not know cars or planes or walking on the moon. Those changes came, and – hardly believable – they happened slower than the changes will come to us about things just on the horizon.

– a horizon, possibly, with a silver lining? Nothing to sneeze at.

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A classic Ira Stamphill song, written just after his wife was killed — for those who wonder about moving forward when a virus seems like a big problem. Sung by the amazingly talented and sensitive pianist / singer Sangah Noona.

Click: I Know Who Holds the Future

3-9-20

A recent poll of American citizens revealed surprising percentages of correct answers about basic American civics, as high schools used to call courses in the essentials of government when they taught such things. The results might surprise you:

70 per cent did not know that the Constitution was the supreme law of the land;

44 per cent were unable to define the Bill of Rights;

8 per cent could enumerate the Bill of Rights;

36 per cent did not know how many Supreme Court justices there are;

41 per cent did not know the countries the US fought in World War II;

38 per cent knew how many Representatives and Senators sat in the houses of Congress;

34 per cent knew the lengths of terms of Congressmen and Senators;

… and so forth. I had a high school history teacher who once said, “Statistics don’t lie, but statisticians do.” That might have been the only things really remembered from the year in his class, but he was, mostly, a nitwit. Anyway, this survey might be “off”… but surely not by much. Civics courses on the schedule do not guarantee students being educated in civics.

In a democracy we are supposed to school ourselves, embrace our heritage, protect our freedoms, and advance our liberties. On our own. Even in a constitutional republic – which the United States is; not a democracy, although it leeches into our system – citizens should want to be informed about our “basics,” and not only for final exams, grumble grumble. By the way, citizenship tests for legal immigrants ask the questions above; and applicants, new citizens, know the answers. Hmmm, maybe we should be required to re-apply for citizenship every five or 10 years…

Ask yourself the following questions. And – no snap quiz here – how many basic questions about the Bible, basic questions about the bedrock of Christian doctrine, can you, or friends, answer?

The books of the Bible? The 10 Commandments, in order? The (basic) lineage of Jesus, through Mary and Joseph? The prophesies of the Redeemer? Typology of Salvation and the Savior? The Beatitudes? The nine spiritual gifts? The acts of the Apostles and early-church martyrs? The seven churches of Revelation?

… And what, exactly, we need to do in order to be saved?

When I was young – even now, and I am not young – I could recite the American Dental Association’s endorsement of Crest toothpaste. It is, pun intended, a mouthful, yet I know every word of it. Had I intended to memorize it? No, but as I watched uncountable commercials that once quoted it… it hid itself in my heart. Recently, over dinner, I found that I could repeat the My Pillow pitches of Mike Lindell. And the old guy needing a hearing aid and his son’s love. And those poor little kids in special-needs hospitals. I know all their scripts, and can imitate their voices.

What is wrong in a society where citizens, and “Christians,” do not know the tenets of their citizenship and their faith, yet know by heart things like commercials and pop music lyrics? That is a question we can answer – a lot is wrong.

Contemporary church services are too often entertainment concerts. Church youth programs are too often desperate alternatives for potentially wayward teens. Sunday Schools are too often play dates. Not all – of course – but these are tendencies of the contemporary church. People more in love with the music than with (as Joe Biden recently said), “you know, that Thing.”

God knows I am not a fan of intolerance and the old religious wars, yet I do know why disputes arose – the desire to understand Scripture – and knowledge informs our own views. Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism and Presbyterianism and Methodism and Pentecostalism emerged from cherished views of theologians and followers. Today (again: not all, but many) members of denominations do not know the differences between them, or if they have strayed from the Bible. And worshipers’ ignorance can be partly forgiven because their pulpits do not preach the great truths nor the practical distinctions any more. Political correctness, “acceptance” of sinful differences among us, a relativist view of god, whoever he or she really is.

A lot of our church-going neighbors (whose numbers shrink every year) wind up repeating the things they hear, too, by osmosis – learning those heresies by heart. Creeds? The Lord’s Prayer? Endangered species in a lot of churches.

These abominations are rife these days… but are not new. Throughout history, people have gone astray and become lovers of selves, and with “itching ears,” not merely willing but hungry for lies by which to live. In the past, when humankind sinned, God dealt severely. And when His own people turn their backs, He chastises them – with the justice they deserve.

Jesus Himself prophesied, Peoples’ foes shall be those of their own households (Matt 10:36). Don’t blame others; we must blame ourselves.

God chastises those whom He loves. He loves us. Like the old guy in the hearing-aid commercial, pray to God: “I heard you the first time. I just wanted to hear it again!”

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Click: Don’t Forget To Thank the Lord

3-2-20

Despite being shrouded in religious symbolism and tradition, Lent also is a part of Christianity that largely has no Biblical sanction nor institution. That is to say, the holidays and succession of observances were not established by Jesus, the Disciples, St Paul, nor the churches of the early evangelists.

In fact, there are myriad definitions of Lent, numbers of days of Lent, whether Sundays are counted or not, what constitutes holy fasts, what meats can be eaten, what colors of church vestments and displays should be assigned, what parts of the liturgy should be sung or suppressed, even when Lent ends. As many definitions as there are Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox traditions… and of course different views within Protestantism and Orthodox churches. Denominations like the Mennonite church, for instance, traditionally did not observe Lent at all.

Is the observance of Lent a corruption of Christian teaching? No! It is not even obliquely related to anything pagan, as can be deduced from Christmas, Easter, and other holidays. And Lenten practices are informed by the suffering and death of Jesus; the Passion; the meanings behind the largest aspects of Easter (the atonement) to the smallest (reminders of the significance of every “station” of the cross that Jesus carried to Golgotha).

If Lent is not a corruption of the holy aspects of the period preceding Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem and the horrible events of Holy Week, certain observances of Lent can be corrupt. When people “give up” broccoli, or even chocolate – perhaps things they already hate, or things they might indeed love; you have heard them all – it trivializes the acts of the Savior.

“How can self-sacrifice, or discipline, be bad?” we are asked. “And if we lose weight, or spend time in better ways than going to the movies…” is a sentence that does not need to be finished. Dieting, better use of your free time, less video-gaming, can all be done any time (or all times) during the year.

Jesus Christ did not suffer and die for your chocolates or your video games.

I am going to suggest something in place of sacrificing something for Lent. Since the precise details of Lenten observances are not in the Bible, I might feel secure to propose a different way to recall, even “imitate” (in the view of Thomas à Kempis) Christ’s Passion.

Instead of giving something up for Lent, can we take something up for Lent?

Jesus sacrificed His life, but He also gave us something very real: salvation. He renounced earthly pleasures, but He also gave us a supreme picture of service. He endured rejection, betrayal, and torture – which can remind us of how much He loved us, even while we were yet sinners – yet are we only to dwell on these things… or be inspired to lives of fellowship, reconciliation, and love?

He died… that we may live.

Should we think of taking up things – not only the cross, which after all we are commanded to do – and not merely sacrificing this or that for 40 days?

In the spirit of the Lenten season, and Christ’s Passion of which we are mindful, forget the chocolates and video games, and take up something.

These might be word games, of course: To take up something might be seen as a sacrifice; fine. And, as with New Years resolutions, or Lenten sacrifices, we can also “take up” something all the year ‘round. Also fine! In a sense, the life of faith is to see things, and act, in upside-down manners sometime. We need new perspectives. Do we really belong in a life of the world’s old ways of seeing and doing? We should yearn for a place where dead men live, and rich men give.

Take up charity work. And do it as privately as possible. Share something about Jesus to someone. Especially if you are uncomfortable doing so. Think of someone you have resented, and write a note saying you forgive them. And then… forgive them.

Take up something, not because it’s traditional when the calendar says so. Take up something out of passion – your passion – and not automatically.

TAKE UP something for Lent. For Christ’s sake.

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Click: I Don’t Belong (The Sojourner’s Song)

2-24-20

We humans – not me, but most of the rest of you – are inventing and innovating to the point where I wonder whether we are near the time when anything we can imagine will be developed, named, and available next week through Amazon Prime. Probably out-of-date the month afterward; but counterfeited by the Chinese next year.

I know that there are new microscopes that can see between the particles that orbit around atoms, those little atoms. And telescopes that can see hundreds of thousands of light-years away from us. All of this bemuses me, because I have questions in the face of such advancements like, Why can’t I see the fine print on my large-screen TV when commercials for medicines and lawyers flash by?

Well, I am not a scientist. Nor am I a theologian, but that doesn’t keep me from thinking about God and the things of God.

In fact, maybe it is a good thing that I am not a theologian, because those God-thinkers sometimes act like they have it all figured out. Since I don’t have it all figured out, I keep thinking about God and the things of God. Which is a good place to be.

Sometimes I feel like I live a little north of hell and a little south of Heaven, like most of us do at present. In the same way, knowing that I live somewhere between atoms and in a galaxy far, far away keeps me in perspective.

Thinking too much, or too hard, about such things can make one’s brain hurt. The real lesson in humankind’s inventions and discoveries is that we learn that there always is more, and more, and more that we don’t know. That is axiomatic, perhaps, but when we contemplate how much we don’t know – that is the beginning of wisdom.

To be tempted to think humankind can be close to solving all the mysteries of atoms and galaxies, is a self-swindling delusion. We might discover whether neutrons taste like vanilla, or whether distant planets have the internet… but can we ever know how many atoms are in, say, a piece of wood? Or how many galaxies there are? – astronomers vaguely estimate “millions,” but, then, each galaxy might have millions of stars and planets in them. And atoms!

But God knows these things.

Are they important facts? I suppose they are, to Him. Knowing the numbers of hairs on our heads, which the Bible imputes, is simple in comparison, hey.

To me, the most amazing aspect of God in a discussion like this is the astonishing variety of His ways. The abundance and assortment of His wonders.

For instance (thanks, scientists, for determining the truth of the following things!) –

There are no two snowflakes alike. Linus thought he captured two, but they melted. No, seriously, no two snowy doppelgangers have ever been found. And – now that those microscopes work so well – they are not all different, but each one is incredible, beautiful, symmetrically constructed. Every last one of the gazillions in every snowstorm.

No two cloud formations are alike. A heavenly display every day!

No field of flowers, even of the same variety, looks like another; nor the way one looked last week, or will look next week. Thank you, God!

No duplicated faces in the world… no smile is the same… every baby’s laugh is different – different every day; different than other babies’.

Let’s go one step further, thinking about the “uncountable” aspects of God. They are, in fact, reflections. Our God is a God of infinite variety. His universe is interesting and beautiful and compelling because He is interesting and beautiful and compelling.

Many are His ways. Uncountable, in fact.

If it were not so He would have told us. The gods and objects of veneration in other religions are statues and carvings and pictures and idols. Our God is of infinite variety because He lives with each of us, every day in every way. He is there every moment we need Him (and, by the way, also when we think we don’t). He came to earth and dwelt among us; He lives in our hearts.

Atoms, galaxies, water-into-wine, are nothing. He could change your life and everything you hold dear. He did it for me; that’s how I know. And the love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell. It goes beyond the highest star, and reaches to the lowest hell.

These facts can make your brain hurt… but can make your heart glow.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8,9).

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Click: The Love of God

1-27-20

Two events were marked this week, by me, significant and related. January 21st was the seventh “anniversary” of my wife’s passing, after many years of many medical problems. Heart and kidney transplants were supposed to give her another three to five years… but she lived 16 more years, mostly healthy till the very end. She inspired people and devoted herself to a ministry serving transplant recipients, donors, and those on life’s edge, including families.

This week, also, was Sanctity of Life week. For 47 years, multiple thousands gather on the Mall in Washington, speaking and praying; and then “march” to the Supreme Court, where they pray and speak. President Trump addressed the pro-life crowd in person… the only president to do so, even including Ronald Reagan. The president, like many of us, once was pro-abortion, or at least neutral. But we have seen the light about this moral crisis, and by some polls, now a majority of the public has too.

Fifteen years ago I edited a terrific magazine, Rare Jewel. We published a Sanctity of Life theme issue, and I asked Nancy to write about her experience and perspective. Edited to make sense, after the passage of time, I offer it here:

I was diagnosed with heart disease in November, 1994, two months after my 41st birthday. My three children were 15, 14 and 11 at the time.

I also learned that I had had a silent heart attack sometime the previous summer, and that I had coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure (CHF), meaning that the arteries supplying blood to my heart were narrowed. There was no blockage that surgery could correct by bypass.

In the first diagnoses, the doctors thought that with medicines my heart disease could be kept under control and in 10 years or so I would have to consider the prospect of a heart transplant.

But after two more heart attacks in 10 months—and not so “silent” these times—the doctors told me that I would not survive a fourth heart attack. This news came on my 42nd birthday. Within the month I was transferred from our local hospital to Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia and put on the transplant list for a heart and kidney.

Events moved quickly, and I really didn’t have much time to think about what was ahead. As a diabetic, I had assumed that at some time I might need a kidney transplant—I had never thought about needing a new heart! I also assumed that the whole process was like changing a battery: take out the old and put in the new. Not quite. Because my doctors could not guarantee my survival at home for longer than two weeks, I had to stay in the hospital, with heart monitors attached to my chest, and an IV tube also in my chest, continuously feeding me medicines that kept my heart working at its maximum possible efficiency.

In the beginning of this process, I think most patients in my “group” of potential organ recipients were, like me, a bit naive. We didn’t know about some of the complications associated with the surgery; strokes, blood clots causing the loss of limbs, and blindness were just some of the problems. Our group of approximately 16 patients was relatively healthy or at least stable, but every now and then reality would strike. Without warning, people would “code” (the heart would stop); sometimes they could not be revived. Other times those who had received transplanted organs would return to the hospital with rejection (the body trying to destroy the new organ).

We all know there are no guarantees in life, but no matter how young or old, we tend to take some things for granted. However, when hospitalized in a heart failure unit, never knowing what the next minutes might bring, I developed a deeper sense of what was important to me. I prayed for more time—time to be a mother to my children, for us to be together as a family. I cried out to God, How much longer? He answered in the words of I Peter 5:6,7: Humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him; for He cares for you.

And I learned to trust Him. Just as He was taking care of me, He would take care of my family. And each time I asked “How much longer?” He would remind me of a promise I made to Him that I would stay for as long as He wanted me to. And God gave me His total peace.

In all ways my hospital stay—18 weeks before organs became available; then three weeks after the operation, until I could go home—was a good experience. I came to know God in a more intimate way, to learn to trust Him and His ways, and to appreciate all that He has given me. I began praying for the other patients on the floor; first for those on their way to the ER, then weekly Bible studies, then prayer support groups.

During my waiting period, I prayed for the heart God wanted me to have, and that He would prepare the donor’s family.

I haven’t accomplished any huge earth-shaking things since I have been transplanted, but I have seen all three of my children graduate from high school. Heather is a youth minister in Michigan; Ted is a television news producer [now in Washington DC] and Emily moved to Ireland after doing missions work [and has started her own business of American-style foods]. I have seen them grow into adults with career dreams and goals. And I am very proud of them. At one time I did not have real hope, leaning on my own view of life.

But My comfort in my suffering is this: Your promise preserves my life (Psalm 119:50).

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Click: I’ll Have a New Life / Everybody Will Be Happy Over There

1-13-20

Religion is one of the poisons in contemporary life.

Sometimes – a lot of times – we have trouble because we really don’t care to avoid trouble. Counter-intuitive? It is a human tendency, emotional inertia; unreasonable fear of change. When it comes to matters of the spirit, too many Christians get stuck in Neutral.

Yet life goes on. Every Sunday – or every Christmas and Easter – there will be church, and we will see the same old friends. It is easy for weeks to turn into months and months turn into years this way. A sort of spiritual comfort zone, without getting serious about faith.

We know, or ought to know or remember, that God hates this condition. When we sense that we have needs, maybe even empty holes in our spiritual hearts, how often do we turn to God? To ask Him to open our eyes, to shake some sense in to us? Or how often do we complain, or sigh and move on, or moan about bad luck, or “suffer in silence”?

This is no mystery or great revelation. In the book of James we are told, plainly, that we “have not because we ask not.” God’s plan… sitting there, gathering dust in our lives?

You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet, but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures (James 4:2-3).

Are we surprised that God has figured us out? Why do we act surprised that He has given us many solutions, many answers… when and if we realize that He does?

Am I making an argument for religion – that we are not religious enough? No, my opening line here, and the lines since, identify religion as a problem. Let us understand that religion – any and all religions – are human constructs. As inventions of humankind, religions are systems. Religions are what we invent and even innovate or evolve, for various reasons.

At the best, religions are attempts to worship and systematize beliefs and behaviors. At the other end – there always is the other extreme – religions are man-made counterfeits, salves for the conscience, efforts to be exclusive and exclusionary.

To address the criticisms of the professional skeptics through the centuries, religions have committed many sins and even atrocities. In the case of those who follow Christ, it is religion – which Christianity is not – that has offended, not Christ nor His teachings.

People have corrupted Christianity, and still do. But Christ never preached hate nor prejudice nor offense. Those who do malign things in His name are the transgressors.

To reduce to bumper-strip dimensions: Christianity is not about religion, but a relationship.

Added to the acknowledgment that Christ is the sole means to eternal life; the only One who offers salvation; belief in Whom dispels other systems of faith and effective works, we have the Son of the Living God who died and rose again, as no other “god” has claimed.

It is the Person of Jesus, not the rites and rituals and customs and rules and saints and holidays and popes and evangelists and rabbis and priests and relics and temples and cathedrals that get you one inch closer to God. Those are things of religion.

Do I say we should quit our local churches or family traditions? No, but work to see they are pure… and that your faith is pure, and focused.

I leave you with one more thought: Who sent Jesus to the cross, who demanded of Pilate that He be put to death? Not cheats, thieves, whores, and adulterers to whom He ministered.

It was the religious people.

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Click: The Church’s One Foundation

1-6-20

We are deep into the new decade… Well, hardly. Anyway, far enough into the first month of the new year… actually, not so. Um, would you believe almost through the first week?

My question, disregarding the calendar page, becomes easier: how is it going with those New Year’s resolutions?

Let’s have a show of hands: How many of us resolved to give up climbing the Alps in sandals? To cut out all luxuries like miniature pineapples and baby coconuts? To economize by deciding not to purchase luxury boxes for the World Series games?

Easier: How many of us gave up chocolate… or maybe things like broccoli or squid or things we never liked in the first place?

Then we might ask how many of us – being more serious about the “root” of this tradition – how many of us resolved to do positive things, instead of avoiding negative things?

How many of us resolved to pray more, every day? Or to do something “extra” like charity work or sharing foods, intentionally serving our neighbors? To show love… to be love, in the coming year?

All of which makes us think (or should!) about resolutions – things we resolve to do – that we tend to think they should be things we subtract from our lives, when we should rather resolve to add to our lives.

For God’s sake.

And if we become intentional about such things, we can come closer to realizing that God has made resolutions, too. About us. After all, the best promise He made was to send His Son to take the punishment for our sins away… while we were yet sinners.

An amazing promise, that. And from the Giver of Resolutions whose Nature is such that He cannot break His promises.

The questions I asked above have similar answers. Whether we make promises impossible to keep; or about silly ones whose fidelity mean nothing; or even well-intentioned positive resolutions; most of us, being human, have already surrendered. Well, there is always next year.

For our God, however, for Whom a spark is like a thousand years, “next year” is like… eternity. And God’s promises are as from Alpha to Omega. His resolutions cannot be broken. He does not want to: it is not what God does.

On the heavenly scales, our uncountable broken resolutions and promises to God are outweighed by His one resolution: He will remember us.

Happy New Year!

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Click: He Will Remember Me

12-9-19

I have been blessed to be in some of the world’s great places of worship. I mean Christian churches, mostly – cavernous cathedrals; ancient basilicas; rough-hewn Gothic, grand Renaissance, and gaudy Baroque; story-telling tapestries, stunning mosaics, stained glass windows that are miracles of art. Many small side-chapels, or the seemingly endless nave and chancel and ambulatory expanses themselves, crossed by mighty transepts.

They inspire awe, and wonder, and worship because they were designed to do just that.

A profound experience of mine was in France almost 20 years ago. Near Angoulême it was, in the Charentes. I was taken as a guest to the Abbaye of St-Marie de Maumont, I think it was, a Benedictine abbey of sisters devoted to worship, prayer, service, and outreach. Mostly, however, it is what a Protestant American expected of a monastery or nunnery – an ancient site of worship; silence and reverence; modesty, sisters in cowls going about their business. And that business was, indeed, largely prayer – almost constant prayer, private and public – and worship in song.

My friend sped that evening along narrow rural roads between Bordeaux and Angoulême, on winding roads without lights on a moonless evenings… perhaps I was already in a prayerful mood. In truth I was not at all prepared. In an old candle-lit chapel, the sisters sang worship, hymns, and liturgy for four hours; in Latin, French, and Old French. Words I seldom recognized but did understand. Free to sit – observe – in the pews, what is left for the visitor? To worship. Pray. Reflect.

In this setting, enveloped by all that heritage, the sense of God’s presence, and His manifestation in the art and lives of that place; the essence of what it means to surrender and serve; to dig deep into self and reach high unto God; to feel – and be – a million miles from the world’s distractions… that is the kind of worship and contemplation, allowing the purest of Christ-centered meditation, that we seldom know in contemporary life.

I was visited, during those four hours, by past sins. I knew afresh the forgiveness of God. I met again my Savior Jesus. I was lost in the forests of a forgotten corner of Christendom, yet felt at home as if in Heaven, already.

There were no steeples, no mighty organs, no golden chalices. On the other hand – speaking as an American evangelical – there were no drums and electric guitars; no words projected on a screen; no clapping; no Starbucks in the lobby; no announcements of Holy Jazzercize on Tuesday night.

There were perhaps 60 souls there that evening, but, really, one heart beating. As I cried and as I laughed in my pew, I realized something about Christianity in the centuries since the Early Church – past the Age of Cathedrals – to our Age of Praise and Worship shows.

God touches us – or, perhaps differently said, we feel better able to touch Him – when worship experiences are at variance with the worlds we inhabit. In the “Dark” Ages, when poverty and disease were common, Christians devoted every ounce of their talents, ambitions, and resources into building astonishing cathedrals that reached up, up, up to Heaven and sought to reflect His glory.

In our day, when our multi-media world bombards us with every sensation; when celebrities have replaced heroes and sinners are elevated over saints; when the consumer culture insists on telling us what to like abd what to hate, what to believe and what not to believe… maybe people need to reject the hype by simply getting lost in Christian glitz and entertainment.

Holy bling is not my cup of tea. But, then, even tea is not my cup of tea.

Perhaps our souls need to find God by realizing that He is different than we are, and our worlds. And He speaks to us in different ways, at different times, in different places. I have heard something like that somewhere.

I just wish that people in our time can discover what used to be profound in the earlier phases of human history. “Get thee to a nunnery”? I have heard that, somewhere, too. All of us should at least taste of those experiences. After all, they were what eventually brought civilization to where we are now.

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Click: Chant

Some things that occurred to me during Thanksgiving week, and things that happened to happen, as things do, that had me thinking about ordinary things in a new way.

I called the local homeless shelter in nearby Flint – as close to a soup kitchen as we can have these days; run by a ministry, like an old-fashioned revival mission – to ask if they needed a volunteer to serve, prep meals, or clean up on Thanksgiving. “No thanks,” a man said with a chuckle. “If you want to come by and help… it would be to help eat all the food we’re going to have.”

He explained that volunteers often are needed at many times during the year (duly noted) but on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, they have more offers of volunteer help than they can accommodate. “I’m sorry.”

He said he was sorry. A turn of phrase, but I know what was behind that. “There is a season, turn, turn,” goes the famous passage from Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3.

In King Solomon’s words, or the folk song based on them, it does not say that there is a time to pity… although we know that we should have charitable impulses. It does not say that there is a time to “ignore,” of course: when things come our way but do not “go” our way, that is when it is our time to address them. That is what’s called Life. In Biblical perspective, lives well lived.

If we serve the poor, we should do so not out of pity, but out of love.

If (like my friend Becky Spencer and her Grand Staff Swaziland outreaches) (I will call friends I admire to my mind here) we work in overseas missions, it is not because it is easy or glamorous, but because it is right.

If spouses, children, or parents care for sick family members, the world might remark about burdens, but we know – only as we can know – that somehow such service is a blessing, not a burden.

My sister had a daughter with severe cerebral palsy, cared for her, and went through very hard times before losing Liza… but says she never could know the depth or precious quality of love except for the “crisis.”

My wife endured diabetes, heart attacks, kidney failure, strokes, cancer, amputations, and heart and kidney transplants… but never felt sorry for herself. She said till the end that she would not choose to go through it all again, but would not change it for the world. From the increased faith and reliance on God, she asked how she could be sorry for that?

Jesus, on the cross, was not sorry for Himself, but for the thieves on the crosses to the left and right. And He even forgave those who persecuted Him and hung Him out to die – for “they knew not what they did.”

The singer Bradley Walker, whose muscular dystrophy has consigned him to a wheelchair all his life, does not complain but asks sympathy rather for the family of his songwriting partner Tim Johnson who died at a young age. And the singer Rory Feek who lost his wife Joey, after she gave birth to their Down Syndrome daughter Indie – neither Joey nor Rory nor anyone who knows them feels sorry for them.

“Sorry.” It is a strange concept, stranger the more we contemplate. When we say we feel sorry for someone, it is really a form of sanitary self-pity? We will miss them, for instance?

It has been said – and it is a good lesson in perspective – that we are more fortunate than the angels. How? We can almost feel sorry for them, because as sinners seeking forgiveness, accepting Christ, and knowing the glory of salvation – we can sing, and angels simply cannot sing, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me!” In a way, I feel sorry for them. “I once was lost, but now I’m found!”

So let us go forth – yes, on days that are not Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter – and serve others and serve God, not out of obligation or pity or sorrow (the root-word of “sorry”) but out of a willing heart, love, and joy.

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Click: I Feel Sorry For Them

11-25-19

I am usually reminded of the same things each Thanksgiving. That is human nature, or perhaps an infertile imagination. But I don’t mean the Pilgrims and Indians, no. I do mean intentional reflection on God’s grace-filled blessings on me and mine, yes. On us all.

But I have also noticed (some would say that I am obsessed, to which I plead guilty) that “Thank you” and “Thanks” are still breathing in our conversations; however, “You’re welcome” has been displaced, or deleted. On television interviews, in phone calls, in chats around town. “Thank you” is sometimes responded to by silence – that is, not at all. Or “Thank YOU,” or “No problem,” or “You bet.”

Watch and listen; you’ll see. If you wind up thanking me, I will say, “You’re welcome,” I promise. But this development seems to be more than a conversational tic. I believe it manifests a basic unraveling of courtesy in our culture, even the loss of appreciation and thankfulness.

I also reflect on the validity of turning around the order, if not the meanings, of “Thanks” and “You’re Welcome” at this time of year. Yes, we thank God for His blessings. But can it be valid to think that, in the Pilgrims’ case for instance, when they praised God, dedicated their land to Him, and operated the colony by His precepts as a way of thanking and honoring the Lord… that His blessings and bountiful harvests were God saying, “You’re welcome”?

“He loved us, in that while we were yet sinners, He sent His Son to die for us.”

As unlikely as it would seem to be – and remembering that Grace is unmerited favor – perhaps God thanks us preemptively for our humble acts of praise and gratitude.

Circular reasoning can remind us of the miracle of God’s love, and of His wondrous ways. Those wondrous ways include uncountable things we do not understand. And we should not try to, because “such are the ways of the Lord.”

I recently came across the news about Madison Shyanne Keaton, a member of the large and talented Keaton and Collingsworth families. Below is a link to a family gathering, around the piano in the their sun room, exactly one year ago, at Thanksgiving. 

Shy, a beautiful 24-year-old, speaks very briefly about her life – running away from home at 15; drugs and sex; losing her baby and fiancee. She was also in and out and in and out of rehab. With the prayers and help of her friends and family, as she says in the moving video link below, she ought to have died, but did not. Straight and clean, her face beams with joy and faith. As everyone sings “Bigger Than All My Mountains,” she drops to her knees in… thanksgiving.

Only a few weeks ago, Shy was killed in an accident, when a car ignored signals at an intersection and hit hers. 

How can we “Thank”? Where is the “You’re welcome”? Did God have a purpose? – I always answer quickly to such questions at such times, “no, the devil had a purpose.” Our responses to these horrors in life – yes, even an aspect of our thanks and praise – is to remember the verse that “all things work for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose.” NOT “all things are good,” but “all things work for good”… and that is our job: to turn things around on the devil, and toward the glory of God. 

It is not only the random moments in life when the ways of God are mysteries. Much about Him is mysterious – although He surely has shared a lot in scripture! – but we would be, not as angels, but as God Himself if we understood everything. So we should not try. Rather for us, then, the living, to… have faith. That’s what faith is – the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen.

The “sacrifice of praise” is something He desires, that we acknowledge His goodness even when we don’t feel it. 

And maybe the essence of Thanksgiving is to thank Him when sometimes it is tough to summon gratitude. It is easy, after all, to say “thanks” when everything is rosy. But you mean “Thank you” when you have to dig deep in order to acknowledge His love and His ways. And that’s when the Master of our souls gently says, “You are welcome, my child.”

And if we don’t quite understand, we have a greater gift, God’s cycle of gratitude. Thanks for things seen and unseen.

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Bigger Than Any Mountain – Shy’s Testimony

11-18-19

Back around 1970 I was on the staff of New Guard Magazine, the monthly journal of Young Americans for Freedom, the national student organization founded by William F Buckley. At the height of the hippie culture and anti-war protests, we were, perhaps the original “resistance” movement against the political status quo.

YAF had 55,000 members across America, and more than 700 chapters in high schools, colleges, and in communities. I was state chairman for a while in DC and New Jersey, and, as I say, on the staff of their magazine, and editor of The Free Campus News Service, syndicating news and cartoons and opinions to college papers.

I cut more than a few eye teeth at YAF, but concurrent with these activities I was still a student at American University, and worked a part-time job in YAF’s mail room. Always look on the back of everyone’s business card.

Some of those “eye teeth” I cut were opportunities to meet and work with many of the leaders of our time. One seems unlikely today, and is an example of how much our nation has changed in one generation.

West Virginia Senator Robert C Byrd, Democrat, was a conservative. He wrote an article on tradition, conservative principles, and religion in America for New Guard. I was asked to illustrate it. I was a budding cartoonist, but this assignment I handled with realistic drawings. A patriot next to the flag; a student praying; etc.

Robert Byrd eventually became Majority Leader in the Senate (beating Ted Kennedy in the caucus) and when he died he was the longest-serving senator in American history.

In this period of his life he was a fierce defender of conservative values and the role of Christianity in our national life. He defended his own values, too; a country boy, he liked mountain music… and often played fiddle tunes and hoedown-music at festivals, rallies, and… well just about anywhere.

“Anywhere” included the Grand Ole Opry and the hit TV show Hee Haw. The music video to click below is one of his guest appearances on the CBS network show. More than his service in the Senate, more than his article that I illustrated, I ask you to watch Sen. Byrd, in his trademark red vest, playing and singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” the old Carter Family standard.

Watch and listen… and think about how much America has changed.

Today, a United States senator singing hillbilly music on a cornpone TV show? (More: CBS carrying a hillbilly-music show???)

Today, the Majority Leader of the U S Senate singing a gospel song on network TV? Can you imagine Chuck Schumer pickin’ and grinnin’?

Today, a politician of either party enthusiastically singing about Jesus, smiling and raising his arms in joy at every mention of the Savior’s name?

We all know that – somehow – we have arrived at a place where senators, not only local jerks, would threaten to sue TV networks or shut down TV stations for daring to mention the name of Jesus. A lot of senators spend their time and efforts working to legalize drugs and decriminalize criminals these days. Mentions of personal faith or faith-based policies, like defending the unborn, have to be done in carefully chosen places, speaking carefully selected words.

We sang the songs of childhood, Hymns of faith that made us strong…

I’m gonna sit down besides my Jesus When I lay my burdens down…

Will the circle be unbroken By and by, Lord, by and by?
There’s a better home a-waiting In the sky, Lord, in the sky.

The song has lived in several versions since it was written in 1907 by Ada R Habershon and Charles H Gabriel; the most familiar is a funeral theme by the Carter Family.

When you see the joyful and unembarrassed performance of this old time Gospel classic, on national television, by the Majority Leader of the United States Senate – not too many years ago, really – you might think it is, after all, kind of a funeral theme for America.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Meet Times, They are A-Changin’.

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Click: Will the Circle Be Unbroken

11-11-19

Many essays, and many of our own thoughts, remind us of how special we are, we human beings. Haven’t you read this, thought this – we are the only species (virtually) that laughs… or reasons… or still likes Barry Manilow… there are a hundred emotional distinctives.

Some of these thoughts are logic-based, deduced by observation. Some are theological: we have no Biblical teachings that birds or bugs can have a consciousness of sin, nor know the gift of Salvation. But God loves us, specially.

Indeed we are, we people, special in the eyes of God. He sent His (special) Son to die for us and take on Himself the punishment we deserve as creatures with the special attribute of free will.

I would like us for a moment to think about how special we are not, sometimes and in some regards.

One way in which we are common creatures with each other, no matter our social status or sex or race or age… is that we all need a Savior. One of the ways we are alike in the eyes of God.

I am thinking beyond that, however; beyond the clichés. It is more common than we tend to think, in nature, that a “family instinct” dominates behavior. Yes, we know there are strays, and herds, and seemingly impossible ways animals can discriminate and recognize… but why are we amazed, time after time seeing news stories and viral videos, at mother dogs who successfully seek out their young; penguins who nurture the right chick of theirs among a thousand wandering rubber-stamped little ones; bees that fly miles, sometimes hundreds of miles, to their home-hives?

How about the occasions of a creature of one species that protects and nurtures the vulnerable young-one of another species? Odd! But is it so rare? We hear of these things every week. Begin to see what I mean.

The family – knowing, feeling, building, protecting – is not one of those aspects that sets humans apart from animate creation. It is something that makes us part of God’s creation. And God Himself.

This primal instinct, an essential attribute of our heavenly Father, is something we should savor. We are part of His universe, not in a New Age sense, but in how He has wired us as parts of the family of God.

Family: Bonds. Traditions. Loyalties. Affections. Care. Receiving and Bequeathing. Respecting.

Loving.

The more we let contemporary life, and our rotting culture, drive family members apart, the less we respect God and His plan for our lives and well-being. In many ways we should not celebrate individualism or “independence,” when it leads to being cold and aloof, separated from fundamental and naturally healthy familial attachments. Oh! and those cursed cell phones are wedges!

When family attachments, tribal associations, and cultural traditions are erased, something has to fill such holes in our lives. These days, it is secular theories and governmental paternalism. Disaster.

We sense these things in uncountable ways every day… or, we should be aware of them. I have been in the news in little ways recently, and I have heard from friends sometimes the first time since high school or college. We always recognize that we are still friends, but, no problem, merely have not spoken in a while – do you know that feeling? I have a friend, Mark Dittmar, who writes a wonderful daily blog, “Spiritual Nuggets” at mdittmar65@yahoo.com , and we have not actually spoken in a year or so. But he prays for me every Thursday. I am aware of this and do the same for him. That is a family-thing that Children of God do.

Appreciating the simple fact of the Family of God – with all of His creation, not only family reunions – puts our hearts and minds where God would have us. It is where are already, if we would only realize it. We are part of the Family of God.

Start noticing, appreciating, and celebrating this fact. Act on it in your everyday life. You might as well prepare, because Heaven itself will be like a great family reunion, better than summer picnics. You will be hugged by the Savior; you will hug all your family members, so many you never knew you had.

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Click: Getting Used To the Family of God

11-4-19

“If being a Christian were illegal, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

Sometimes such aphorisms – what I call bumper-strip theology – pack a lot of implications and wisdom.

In many place around the world, being a Christian is illegal, or nearly so. I can tell that this blog is read in some of those countries, perhaps to the peril of those readers.

Will such a thing ever happen in the United States, in Western Europe? Many of us think so – it has happened in societies that were once like ours – and at the moment, if belief in Christ is not yet illegal it is however improper or at best impolite in many places and situations.

When the leader of ISIS recently was killed, we were reminded that one of his countless victims was the young American missionary Kayla Mueller. The Christian woman had been held in captivity for 18 months, a sex slave of al-Baghdadi himself. The man whose Washington Post obituary called “an austere religious scholar” and a shy man behind spectacles, repeatedly raped and tortured Kayla, according to eyewitnesses like Yezidi sex slaves even younger than Kayla.

That description of Kayla says more about al-Baghdadi – and the Washington Post – than it does about Kayla. Almost.

What is scarcely said in the news stories is that Kayla was repeatedly asked, and frequently beaten and tortured, to renounce her Christian faith. This she never did – by ISIS’s own frustrated reports – and it gained her torture, rape, beatings, and death. Photographs of her bruised and lifeless body were e-mailed to Kayla’s parents by ISIS.

She lost her life. By her confession and faithfulness, as a contemporary martyr, she secured a place in Heaven, we can believe.
Correction: she saved her life.

Kayla was not alone, I am sure she would maintain. Every day, Christians around the world are being persecuted, tortured, and killed for their faith.

We smugly think that things in this world are growing brighter and better. Not everything. There were more Christians killed simply for being Christians in the 20th century than in all the combined centuries since Christ, including the iconic grotesqueries of Nero.

This week we noted – did you? – Reformation Day, the commemoration of Martin Luther’s challenge to the Church of the day. He nailed 95 complaints about corruption to a church door in Germany. It spread beyond Wittenberg’s town square; past the triangle of land formed by Hannover, Berlin, and Dresden; through Germany; to Rome and other territories of the Vatican; through the Christian world… and even unto today.

Luther had not intended to leave the Catholic Church – he was an ordained priest – nor establish a denomination, much less see his protest turn into Protestant-ism. Yet the “world system” that had corrupted the people and practices of the Church transformed widespread dissatisfaction into open revolts.

Luther’s reliance on “Scripture Alone” – that is, not mankind’s rules or new doctrines not found in the Bible – was a revolution of the spirit, conscience, and faith. Indeed, Luther was not the first anti-Romish reformer: previous theologians had similar heartfelt critiques… and had been martyred.

Fired, exiled, imprisoned, tortured, killed for their consciences. Luther was to be the next. Hunted and excommunicated, he was hauled before a council in the city of Worms, Germany.

All his writings – books and pamphlets, sermons and essays – were laid on a table, and Luther was ordered to renounce them. Outside the castle, at night, the Church was burning his books.

“Renounce them?” he said in effect, “How can I, when they all quote the Bible and rely on Scripture?”

Further, he argued that they were the result of his conscience, and “no man, no council, no Pope” can force me to act “against my God-inspired conscience.”

It was made clear that he would suffer death if he did not deny his writings. He said “I will not and I can not.”

With his life on the line, and conscious of the blood of martyrs before him, in the hushed council, Luther firmly said, “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

“Here I stand. I can do no other.” Those simple words, spoken in that obscure German town, have rather thundered like mighty artillery through the ages. Indeed for 500 years they have been spiritual and intellectual bombs. They inspired the translations of Bibles into languages of local peoples. They ignited a rediscovery of Scripture. They freed believers from relying on human intercessors when praying or petitioning God. They inaugurated the spread of literacy. They were the underpinnings of democratic movements around the world.

Luther was not murdered; he was secreted away by German princes who likewise “saw the light.” Thrown out of the Roman Church, he married and continued to write and preach. Others who knew him, and many who never met him but were – and still are – electrified by his words, followed.

“Here I stand. I can do no other.” These are the words, perhaps word for word, that the missionary girl Kayla Mueller spoke.

God forbid – which cliché is my hope, but is not a certainty – that any of us will be in the position of a Martin Luther or a Kayla Mueller. It is not an abstract warning: every day Christians are in those positions.

When you have the opportunity, are you however too shy to speak the Name of Jesus? Do you hold back from sharing your faith with a stranger, or a family member, knowing that they might be on their ways to hell? When politicians, from school boards to the presidency, offend the Truth of the Gospel, do you think, speak, and act in opposition?

Do you “stand”? Will you stand? Can you do no other? If being a Christian were illegal, would there be enough evidence to convict you?

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The “Battle Hymn of the Reformation,” words and music by Martin Luther. All my life, tears come to my eyes when I sing, or try to, the last verse: Let goods and kindred go, This mortal life also: The body they may kill – God’s truth abideth still!

Click: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

10-28-19

The most effort that Christians spend in their “walks” of following Him, I sometimes think, is not time in the Word or in prayer or doing as He would have us do in our interactions. Virtually impossible to compute, but I sometimes wonder if we spend more time making excuses to God, than any other activity.

I don’t mean, “Lord, You know I really didn’t mean to kill that man.” Or the old “comedy” line, “The devil made me do it.”

No, my thought is that there are countless ways that we hope or think that God understands us, and will let something slip by… even a minor sin. (See? Even that thought is what I mean, if we start believing it. There is no such things as a minor sin.)

– that He will understand the pressure we are under, and forgive us of something before we are even contrite. (That leads to assuming less and less that we need forgiveness.)

– that our faithfulness, our good works, the crosses we bear, will in some spiritually cosmic way earn us a Get Out of Jail Free card.

– that God knows our heart, in the big picture; and surely He cannot hold us to the same measures applied to unsaved people…

Surely? When you think about it – and this reflection can be a healthy thing for our souls – if we do not verbalize such thoughts, many Christians internalize the assumptions. Almost to the extent that our spiritual DNA is mutated. Not a good thing.

What is a good thing is that we do not have to correct these tendencies on our own. If the critique sounds familiar, ask your self one more question:

Why do you think God sent the Holy Spirit?

Jesus actually said that it was good that He “go,” because One would come who would enable, guide, strengthen us. The Holy Ghost. I also sometimes think the least employed member of the Godhead, the least known of God’s ever-present resources.

We don’t have to be “better,” or more mindful of God’s commands and Jesus’s example, on our own. There is no shame in calling on the Holy Spirit’s help. He pleads for you to reach out.

It is not a sign of weakness in a Christian to seek the Spirit’s help: it is a sign of strength and maturity.

I have told the story, perhaps true, of the great comedian W. C. Fields, in the last months of his life, in sanatorium, visited one morning by a friend. Fields sat in a corner, by a window with sun shining in, a Bible on his lap, which surprised his friend. “Bill, what are you doing? I’ve never seen you reading a Bible!”

Fields looked up and said, “Looking for loopholes.”

Godfrey Daniel!!! There are no loopholes in life. We might think so… we might fervently hope so… we might fool ourselves and think there must be, “if God is a loving God!”

But God leapfrogged over that definition of love. He sent Jesus to settle that question; and sent His Holy Spirit to remind us. We need reminders about, um, shopping lists and movie times. Why not about pleasing God and doing His will?

Remind me, dear Lord.

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Recorded at the Cove, Billy Graham’s retreat center in North Carolina, a place with special memories for me, having interviewed Bev Shea, Cliff Barrows, Joni Eareckson, and others there. A beautiful spot.

Click: Remind Me, Dear Lord

10-14-19

Some day I want to put together a new version of the Holy Bible. Ambitious, yes. But I believe that the Bible is a Book that many people know, but not everybody understands.

There is a human tendency to assume, to take for granted, things that largely are familiar to us. And you know what often happens when we assume. Familiarity does not always breed contempt… but it can lead to indifference. Hard truths, even when brilliantly expressed, can grow trite when we are intellectually careless.

My version of the Bible would be called the NSL Version – Not Saith the Lord.

If we can remind ourselves of familiar verses and passages of Scripture, and really – No: REALLY – think about them, and their meaning; their application to our lives… they can burst on our consciousness like thunderclaps. Sometimes as if we had never heard them before!

I know, because it has happened to me.

I will revisit this idea, going forward, and solicit nominations of verses and passages from you.

Here is one instance. “Give us this day our daily bread…” Yes, yes, “provide for me, please.” I think too many of us focus (if we focus at all as we rush through the Lord’s Prayer or the “Our Father”) on the “Give” and “us” and “bread” and what they represent.

But when Jesus outlined the perfect prayer, or topics to include when we approach God, I believe He wanted, in this passage, to remind us of the “daily.”

The Lord provides for us, we know and trust that. As with the sparrows, as with the lilies of the field. We seek it, and He indeed provides, spiritually as well as materially.

But how often does God provide? Not occasionally… not in crises alone… not only when we are desperate. But, daily. Daily “bread.”

That is not merely a petition of wanting, but is worded to remind us to be thankful that God does provide. Daily!

In fact, between spiritual and material matters, so much, so often, so “daily,” that sometimes we take His provisions for granted.

So when you next pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” you can remind yourself of how much more than bread He hath provided (and we “shall not live by bread alone,” right?). But have your mind focus too on His daily, constant, reliable provisions.

His gifts… before we know we need them! Indeed, great is His faithfulness.

Our daily “bread”? Be bold to ask… be grateful to receive. Thus saith the Lord.

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Click: Great Is Thy Faithfulness.

10-7-19

I.

These weekly visits are called “Music Ministry,” and the thoughts I share usually lead to, or are inspired by, a song or a hymn. But they can be read independently and (sadly, to me) often are read without people peeking at the video clip.

Independent or not, whether you are busy or not, I urge you to click the music video here. You might, or not, have heard of Joey Feek, the beautiful female half of the duet Joey+Rory.

Joey Martin sang with her husband Rory Feek and made quite an impact on the country-music scene when she gave birth to a daughter, Indie, in 2014. They decided to take a year off from performing, and raise their daughter on their farm. Soon after the birth, Indie was diagnosed as having Down Syndrome. The couple, of course, doubled down on the love and attention… and so did their fans.

Soon after that, Joey herself received a diagnosis. Cervical cancer. Excruciating episodes of prayer, pain, surgery, radiation, chemo, “success,” return of cancers in many areas; more prayer; home treatments; “wasting away”… during which time Joey and Rory kept diaries in the form of written and video blogs. Their anxious and supportive friends and fans followed every detail of the trials, every loss of hair and pounds, every decline of health and strength.

When Joey died in 2016 at the age of 40, she had fulfilled some dreams – recording a Gospel album with her husband (sometimes singing from the sickroom), and seeing Indie turn two. When healthy and strong enough, she sometimes had held Indie in her arms on stage, mother and daughter dancing, the beautiful infant waving happily to audiences.

Another singer entered the lives of Joey+Rory, or vice versa. Bradley Walker has kept Joey’s memories alive in some of his own songs and videos. He has a handsome country and Gospel baritone, and has won awards, has performed around America, and has recorded albums (at Joey+Rory’s recording studio on their farm).

Bradley also has muscular dystrophy. He has been in a wheelchair since the point when most children learn to crawl, and has scarce use of his hands. But he sings when and where he can, which is often.

Joey+Rory and Bradley Walker each recorded the meaningful song In the Time That You Gave Me. What I recommend to you this week is that you click on the video of a special performance, Bradley singing the song in a duet with the previously recorded track of Joey’s performance, her beautiful voice accompanied by photos of the healthy Joey, cancer-battling Joey, and Joey the mom with sweet Indie.

II.

I could leave it there, surely touching hearts with the stories of these amazing people – strength in the face of horrible challenges, of life’s frequent frustrations (at best) and crushing disappointments at times. Faith. Bradley could be spending his days in non-stop pity parties. Joey could have hidden herself in anger… or shared her bitterness with the world.

If she had learned about Indie’s Down Syndrome before birth, she could have aborted that sweet baby.

Ninety per cent of mothers do, these days, in that situation.

That comes to the second part of this message. Life is cheap these days. In movies, on streets. In classrooms, in politics. In hospitals – or half of them: when medicine does not innovate and extend healthy lives, it develops more efficient ways of ending them. The elderly, increasingly; and babies. Babies before birth… during birth… now (this should be shocking) right after birth.

What sort of monsters have we become? I curse the culture for developing uncountable means to camouflage this perversion of values, this holocaust of millions, this triumph of calling good “bad” and bad “good.”

This week I attended a dinner for the Flint Pregnancy Resource Center, and heard speakers present statistics – for instance, the number of murdered babies since Roe equaling the combined populations of California and Florida – a litany that threatens to inure us from its nightmarish essence, not because we hear horrors so often, but because society shrugs its collective shoulders.

“It’s none of your business.” “You are you to judge?” “Whatever.” Those reactions seem louder than our arguments. They are more common than desperate pleas for help and rescue and support. They tell us there is no such thing as right and wrong… but these people will insist we are wrong.

Louder than the arguments on either side, however, are quiet, nervous voices like the mom who shared her testimony at the dinner this week. Guilty about past abortions, she recently gave birth to a daughter, and the mom’s palpable joy and acceptance of forgiveness, her redemption and new life (new lives!), and knowing that people love and value her… provides inspiration.

Even louder still are the tiny cries and giggles of babies – not blobs or tissue masses – who join the human family. They should drown out any other noise.

If you were moved to tears by the stories and music video of Joey and Indie and Bradley at their stages of life, stop and ask why the experiences of babies killed in the womb should be any less compelling, at their stages of life.

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Click: In the Time That You Gave Me

9-30-19

Do many people confess this – ‘I Don’t Know How To Pray!’ – or would, if pressed? You would be surprised how many Christians, even, are uncomfortable when called upon to pray audibly, or front of others.

My late wife Nancy’s birthday was last week; and she died almost seven years ago. I have written how she suffered almost uncountable numbers of ailments and afflictions, including cancer, strokes, and heart and kidney transplants. She never stopped attending church all her life through, but her natural shyness plus an upbringing in church and home that did not encourage spontaneous and public praying, brought her seldom to pray in front of others. Even before our family, at mealtimes.

But when she was listed for transplantation, she began a ministry on the Heart Failure floor of the hospital. She saw a need, particularly as – believe it or not – clergy seldom visited and prayed with patients there.

A Catholic priest scurried through once a week, sharing the Host and the Sign of the Cross to Catholic patients on his list, and then moved on; scarcely chatting. Protestant clergy, sometimes from patients’ home churches, occasionally made calls and had conversations more than prayers. In those times, almost 25 years ago, transplant recipients were wired to monitors and telemetry units, so the machinery and poles prevented them from even venturing to the chapel on the hospital’s ground floor.

It seemed curious and, frankly, cruel to Nancy that patients were receiving medical care but not spiritual care.

She started a hospital ministry. She visited rooms. She had us bring Bibles that she could distribute. It became a family ministry, even as our children Heather, Ted, and Emily would pray, sometimes with children of patients. We began holding services on Sunday mornings in rooms, or the lounges, or atrium, depending on attendance.

And attendance grew. Patients were wheeled in; nurses joined as they could; family members timed their visits to the services. We dealt with crises of faith. We saw miracles. We played recorded music, always surprised that rural men fell in love with Black spirituals; faithful Jewish couples lost themselves in the joy of Southern gospel songs; Hispanics sang the traditional hymns in Spanish as we sang in English.

And before we knew it, people prayed with us… and prayed, themselves. Enthusiastically, and spontaneously. People opened up to request a specific prayer, as, they said, they never had done in their lives. Patients shared thanks for things that happened during the week, or for a breakthrough they experienced. Very often, patients or family members were bold enough to ask God questions, in front of all us. (You don’t know how liberating, and Biblical, it is to answer “I don’t know! I don’t know, either! Let’s pray about it!”).

Sometimes widows or widowers, or children of patients who died after transplantation, or during procedures, or while waiting, came to thank us all. And to share peace with their “new” families. Local TV stations, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, did multiple stories on Nancy and this ministry. We continued it as a family for almost seven years after she received her heart and kidney, until we moved to San Diego.

Nancy received more than a heart and a kidney; she had a personality transplant. This woman who was so shy that she seldom audibly prayed over dinner… became a prayer warrior.

“Out of the abundance of the heart, so the mouth speaketh.” Once, a patient’s wife said that she believed her husband was “listed” at that time and in that place, in order that he learn about Jesus from us. He accepted Christ – over which she had prayed for years – but I don’t believe God sends sickness. The lesson, however, is that our job is to turn circumstances around on the devil.

There were many times patients prayed, in front of others as well as the Lord, for the first time in their lives. I still can almost hear the accelerating thump, thump, thump heartbeats on the monitors at those times. Spiritual emotion. Once, on New Years Eve, a sweet hulk of man from the Philly suburbs requested that we all gather in his room. “I don’t know how to pray!” he confessed… but declared that he wanted to do so, for the first time in his life. He did, through tears – his and ours – and his “Amen!” was followed by the biggest smile you could imagine.

Is it possible, dear reader, that you don’t know how to pray? Is it awkward? Either before others, or privately to God?

If so, that grieves God more than you can know. He wants to communicate with us; the Bible says we should share the burdens of our hearts. He knows them… but he wants to hear from you. Is there a guilt that impedes you? Confess it! He knows that already too! Are you so joyful that you think prayer is not necessary? Shame on you! You have extra reason!

All of us live a little south of Heaven and a little north of Hell. We are in a common (even crowded) place from which to approach the Throne of God. You don’t know how to pray, or what to pray?

If your slate is that empty, start by simply praising Him. Thank Him for Who He is, and what He has done. Can’t think of anything? You will. It will start as a “sacrifice of praise” and then start to roll. He will speak to your spirit. Are you getting through? The Bible says that the Holy Spirit will speak, even groan when we are troubled, to God on our behalf. Pray. I pray of you.

You don’t need to be confined to a hospital’s Heart Failure floor, but, believe me… we all need heart transplants.
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Click: Prayer

9-9-19

One of the confirmations of Christ’s divinity is the number of times He is mentioned, and was prophesied and predicted, in the Old Testament. And not just vague associations: the Bible overflows with specific references, made previous to His incarnation, regarding Jesus’s life, ministry, and activities. Every one was fulfilled.

So the names and attributes of Jesus are interesting. And they are instructive to our Biblical understanding, and to our mature faith. Jesus was His given name; Christ was His title… but there were, and are, many other names by which He can be known, and which explain His numerous facets and roles.

You know them, from the Old Testament and New Testament both. Among them are: Almighty; Alpha and Omega; Author of Salvation; Bread of Life; Chief Cornerstone; Creator of All Things; Deliverer; Faithful Witness; Firstborn From the Dead; Good Shepherd; High Priest; Horn of Salvation; Image of God; King of Kings; Lamb of God; Last Adam; Light of the World; Lion of the Tribe of Judah; Living Stone; Lord of All; Morning Star; Only Begotten Son of God; Passover Lamb; Precious Cornerstone; Prince of Peace; Rock; Savior; Son of David; Son of God; Son of Man; The Stone the Builders Rejected; Truth; The Way; Wonderful Counselor; The Word…

The great evangelist R W Schambach frequently referred to the Savior in a unique (and correctly theological) way – “My elder Brother Jesus.” This not only delineates a sweet fellowship with Jesus; it explains the precise relationship of our New Life after the Born-Again experience.

When Jesus walked out of that tomb, He greeted the world as the risen Son of God, yes, but in effect He said to all of humanity: “I was God-with-you, and now you are with Me – my brothers and sisters.” If Jesus reigns in your heart, God sees Him when He looks at you. Hallelujah!

So. Should this make us happy? Yes! But I wonder why many church services resemble funerals and not celebrations. I have got to thinking about how people refer to God and Jesus these days, especially when we have so many options. A list of some:

God d*** and Jesus Christ! (when uttered as curses). Of course these are not what I am seeking as examples. But I wonder whether “taking Names in vain” are spoken more frequently among us, if we could count, than in prayers or spiritual respects. For shame. And it strikes me, even, how many people who are not even nominal Christians use “Jesus” and “Jesus Christ” or “Christ,” as curses. I have rebuked friends and strangers, sometimes asking them to be more polite about my Best Friend.

Jesus H Christ and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph – as “antiseptic” curses. As if the humorous (?) twist will not offend the One who suffered and died for our sins. Or offend us, when in their midst.

The Man Upstairs. Really? The Man upstairs?? This is usually a coward’s way of appearing spiritual without (gasp) actually mentioning God. Also shameful. Would you refer to your spouse as “that dark-haired person who lives down the hall and watches TV in the evening”?

“I’m sorry, but religion is too personal for me to discuss.” How about that? The most important thing in your life – or should be – is something to avoid talking about? Not all of us are evangelists, OK; but to hide Jesus from view likely indicates a fateful unfamiliarity with Him… a fatal lack of knowledge of God’s ways… and an insecure realization of what Jesus requires of believers.

If you had a cure for cancer, would sharing that knowledge be “too personal” to talk about? Those who have no knowledge of the basic tenets of being a Christ-follower, frankly, condemn themselves. Jesus’s own Entrance Exam, so to speak, was easy – To believe in your heart that He is the Son of God; and confess with your mouth that He rose from the dead.

Yes, that simple. But “confess with your mouth” precludes “too personal for me to discuss.” Can’t do both. If parents are followers of Christ but let their children “decide for themselves” matters of faith… it means they are comfortable with the chance their children will go to Hell. Don’t believe in Hell? Well… Jesus did; and you believe in Him, right?

You can see the many implications and responsibilities that attend the use of “mere” words and proper titles. They are the markers on the meter of your soul.

Your everlasting soul, as a child of God, a brother or sister of Jesus, seeking to do His will and, more, desiring to share Him.

To know Christ and to make Him known. That is not a task: We should love to be doing it.

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Click: What a Friend We Have in Jesus

8-26-19

Oh, yes; God plays games. Not to deceive us, of course. But He is a play-ful God, never think otherwise. Despite the moon-faced Jesus of some movies and Sunday-school calendars, I believe He smiled as much as He rebuked; He wept but He laughed. He was tender with His mother; He gathered children around Him; He welcomed crowds.

“Jesus loves me; this I know.” He doesn’t get there by being stern or vacant. When God created the earth, He paused and “saw that it was good.” Smile!

God has used – and still uses – uncountable ways to instruct us. He shares His will for our lives through inspiration of the Holy Spirit; by Biblical passages; via circumstances. Balaam’s ass, you know the story. Sometimes even people who themselves are… well, you know, unexpected sources. Hard lessons. “Coincidences,” that some of us recognize afterwards as “God-incidences.” Sermons. Books. Radio and TV preachers. Song lyrics.

When God doesn’t whisper, sometimes He shouts.

Thinking on these things, I wondered whether we can find Godly messages even in games. Games, that is, that we might re-purpose, to see His purpose.

Here are some suggestions:

Ready Or Not, Here I Come! Can you picture Jesus calling that out? In a very real way, that’s what He said as He emerged from the tomb on Easter Sunday. His mother, and the disciples, hoped for the Resurrection, and vaguely remembered His promise… yet they were surprised. Were they ready? Are we ready? Because the Resurrection was an event at which to marvel, but – “ready or not” – then there is the life-long obligation to remain joyful, and to follow His commands. Here He Comes!

Tag, You’re It! In that game, the rules are strict. As much as you might wiggle or hide or evade, when the leader tags you… you are it. You know that Jesus seeks you, and soon enough will “tag” you. You’re it!

Leapfrog. Do kids play this any more? And maybe it’s a stretch, but let’s compare the jumpers to the challenges in life we have to get over. Isn’t it funny (or not) how every time we overcome the challenge before us, something or someone jumps over us and gets in the way all over again. Gotta keep jumping, running the race, and leaping!

Truth or Dare. This is easy. Can you keep secrets from God? Can you avoid His call? Can you avert His gaze? He already knows the Truth about your situation better than you do… do you dare break the rules?

Rock, Paper, Scissors. Um… whatever configuration, no matter how many do-overs, God always wins. He made the rocks, paper, and scissors!

Simon Says. Another old-timer. In the new version, Simon is God, giving the requests. Or, Simon is Jesus, who showed us how to obey. Or Simon is the Holy Spirit, who will help us play.

And win.

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Click: Hide Thou Me

8-12-19

Conversation in the doctor’s waiting room. A woman next to me said, after reeling off her worries, “… but as the Bible says, God never gives us more than we can handle.”

Me: “You know, the Bible does not say that.”

“It doesn’t? I’m sure it does!”

Fortune cookies, yes. Greeting cards, yes. Even sermons, yes. But the Bible – prophets, poets, kings, disciples, Jesus? – no.

In fact, if we think about it, troubles and sickness and problems usually are attacks from the devil, or the results of our own folly… but not “sent” by God. He doesn’t “give” us more than we can handle. That is not how He works. He “gives” us hope. And strength. And faith. And wisdom. And, yes, deliverance.

But He does not visit us with bad things, even temptations. That’s in the devil’s job description, not God’s.

A proper understanding of this can change our lives. We should be free of the pagan superstition that God pushes us to the edge all the time. We are His children, and He is not a child abuser.

He did not tempt Jesus in the wilderness. That was Satan.

Let’s dig deeper into these ideas about challenges and God. I say He does not “give” junk to us. The world will ask, “If He is a loving God, then why doesn’t He prevent those problems?” A question that seems logical. He could have plucked Jesus from the cross. He could have put out the fire in the furnace before the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar ordered Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to be tossed therein. The “valley of the shadow of death”? Why didn’t God promise simply to keep us away from the cursed valley?

Well, those actions are not in God’s job description.

He never promised us a trouble-free life. Some people never quite understand that! In fact, it is guaranteed that troubles will come our way… and the more Jesus there is in our hearts, the more the devil will attack. Stone cold, that. So what does God promise? Let us re-visit the three examples:
Jesus was on the cross to fulfill God’s plan, and to demonstrate His love for us. He would not interrupt that.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did not avoid the fire, but were saved in the midst of the fire. Brought through. And manifested the “fourth man” who appeared with them, the pre-incarnate Jesus. Lesson delivered.

Walking though the valley of the shadow of death? God promises to be with us… not to slap us down a detour. We learn (or should learn) trust and faith, because He is with us in those times.

As Andrae Crouch wrote and sang, “I thank Him for the storms He brought me through, For if I’d never had a problem, I wouldn’t know God could solve them… I’d never know what faith in God could do.”

God always “gives” us exactly what we need.

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Click: Through It All

8-5-19

I am writing this in the first week of August, a time that once, and elsewhere, carries more significance than a new calendar page. In the 19th century, a lot of magazines published “Mid-Summer Numbers,” observing some sort of moment in the earth’s cycle, like taking a breath. In Europe – France especially – the entire month of August is devoted to vacations; trips far away from home. Some streets in Paris are virtually empty except for unlucky waiters and gendarmes.

For me, August reminds me of summers growing up outside New York City, in New Jersey. The Jersey Shore? Palisades Park? No, as an eternal foodie, my memories are of the best corn and the best tomatoes on earth. It is futile to seek such quality elsewhere, but these weeks beat Spring flowers and Fall harvests in many ways. De gustibus and all that…

It requires no stretch to see a spiritual aspect to the unique time between planting and harvest. We make plans, we live in hope, we anticipate; we pray. Planting seeds is a metaphor for being intentional about life, and commitments, our directions. Harvest? We anticipate the results of our work and plans. And prayers.

This week my son Ted, my daughter Emily, and I coincidentally went through separate but similar experiences, all related to the work we do. We praise God (always) for His leading, and His hand, the calling on our lives. But sometimes – without stopping to acknowledge God as the Master Farmer – it seems like we plant soybeans and we harvest alfalfa (or whatever those two plants look like; have mercy on this City boy; this is still a metaphor).

That growth period is just as important as Planting and Harvesting.

When Emily was very young, missionaries from Central America visited our little church and made a presentation about their work. Somehow their stories, their passion, affected her. As young as she was, she was overtaken with emotion and tears and… a conviction that she would serve in the missions field when she grew up. She eventually went to Bible College, joined missions trips to Mexico, Russia, and Ireland. And Ireland again. Her heart was joined there – in two ways; as she fell in love with Norman, attending a Bible college in Dublin, marrying, and being fruitful and multiplying. Still serving the Lod, of course.

Would all this have happened without that impactful visit of a missionary family decades ago? Maybe, or maybe not in the same way… but as a father I am awestruck at the growth (and nurture) of certain seeds that are planted in lives.

My friend Becky Spencer (writer, missionary, singer, songwriter) and her husband Tracy run a B+B and a Thrift Boutique in Kansas, to help finance their longtime work in Swaziland, now eSwatini in Africa. (I’m sorry, but the country’s new name sounds more like a video game to me…) It is a land with many challenges of health, poverty, disease, and education. And more. These past weeks has seen her crew from GrandStaffMinistries (.com, you know) experienced some family crises among relatives before they left America; financial challenges of course; a stolen passport at a stopover airport; stolen credit cards and money at another airport, followed by crazy rules and balky “facilitators” when help was needed; a ton-of-bricks debilitating infection to Becky herself… and so forth.

[And just as I write this, I received an emergency message from Becky in eSwatini that their facilities have caught fire that is spreading. Please pray, friends!]

Hard truth: when the devil attacks, it often means that you are doing something right. But when missions work – schools, clinics, worship centers, food sharing, teaching – is savagely attacked… is this God’s harvest for work well planned?

Well, yes, it is. For the overall accomplishments and victories of Grand Staff Ministries; for the work Emily has done and the blessings she receives; for the results of yieldedness that unfolds for Ted and me (and multiplied other testimonies), God does not bless our agendas. It’s about His plan, not our ideas of what His plan should be. He knows where we are headed. (Pssst – I can share a secret about how to know it: It is where He wants us.) And, almost always, He does not ordain where, and in what form, that harvest will be manifested.

Excuse me: He does ordain it. He just seldom shares it with us. And if we do work as unto the Lord, there are no “good” results or “bad” results; only God-results.

In fact I believe there is an aspect to spiritual planting-and-harvesting that we seldom think about. We offer ourselves as living sacrifices to serve Him, by serving others; we understand that, and we obey (not often enough, most us, but that’s another message). But our Sovereign God can use other people and other methods. But… the fact that He chooses us is a reminder that He cares about us as much as the people we serve.

It is truly the case that God wants to do a good work in us, not only in third-world kids or starving villages or abused women. By sharing Christ, sharing resources, and sharing ourselves we do not only do favors for the “lost”… but for ourselves.

And that is good theology. God will not take our lives, or our souls, for granted, as we do good. He cares about us as much as the people we serve.

Mary did not merely honor and bless Jesus by anointing His feet. She was blessed, and received honor and blessing from the Savior, for the choice she made. “The poor ye shall always have with you.” St Augustine saw that not as an admission of futility. He recognized that God wants to encourage in us, not only our loving targets, the reality of His love.

Not something only to deliver, but something to live, ourselves. Harvest time approacheth.

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Click: Thank You For Giving To the Lord

7-29-19

There is a story about the late gospel singer J D Sumner, once cited by the Guinness Book of World Records as possessing the deepest bass voice ever recorded. He performed as a member of famous groups, and even backed up Elvis Presley for a time. Variously gruff and given to broad humor, this story showed a side of him that displayed, appropriately when all is said and done, Biblical wisdom.

J D held sway in parts of the South, and one Christmastime he persuaded local authorities to release a prisoner whom he befriended and witnessed to, from jail over the holidays. The inmate would visit and stay with his own wife and kids.

The singer-comedian Mark Lowry was a neighbor of J D and when he heard this news he asked what the prisoner had done; what his offense had been.

“Does it make a difference?” Sumner replied in his other-worldly deep drawl.

How much do we really appreciate Forgiveness and Pardon? When Don Adams’ catch-phrase in the old Get Smart TV show entered the language, “Sorry ‘bout that” became everybody’s euphemistic apology. A substitute, really. Once upon a time, “Excuse me” and “I beg your pardon” were more formal ways of expressing formal apologies, perhaps until dulled into irrelevance.

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” This is the best-known reference to Forgiveness in our language; and, again, perhaps blunted by uncountable recitations. But we must realize that Jesus, when offering this “model prayer,” suggested a deal of sorts. He suggested that God’s forgiveness is granted in some relationship to the forgiveness we show others.

But isn’t God’s forgiveness, as an aspect of His love, unconditional? Yes, if we repent He will forgive our sins.

But we should be prompted – by gratitude if not basic theology – to forgive unconditionally, in the same manner as God does, those who have sinned against us. Wronged us, offended us, harmed us. “But, Rick, that’s hard!” (By the way, talk to God, not me…) Yes, it is hard. Almost impossible. But as God reads our hearts, He does not count the results of our forgiving spirit, but the number of times we exercise it.

“Forgiveness,” “Pardon,” “Second chance,” and all those related impulses, elevate our spirits. Indeed they open our ability to receive God’s forgiveness… more accurately to be aware of it and savor it. No longer an aspect of a spiritual bargain as we might be tempted to think, the Spirit of Forgiveness is blessed liberation you cannot imagine until employed fully and without strings.

There are very few things the Bible suggests that God cannot do. But it says that when we are Forgiven, God takes our sins and figuratively “throws them into a Sea of Forgetfulness.” I return to my question up top – how much do we appreciate Forgiveness?

Here is what I mean: have you ever done something, or thought something, that made you feel guilty? Did you repent and pray for God’s forgiveness? And again, and more times, reflecting your remorse and guilt?

You can understand Forgiveness a little better if you realize that after your first sincere prayer you are only telling God about something He already forgot.

Forgive… and forget. We have a great Role Model to show us how.

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Click: Forgiven

7-15-19

I think contemporary folks see a wall of separation between knowledge, belief, and faith. Not necessarily hostile camps of the mind, mutually exclusive; but different provinces. Maybe like summer and winter: hardly the same, but both are “weather.”

However, knowledge, belief, and faith – and other versions of our core convictions; trust, security, even firm hope, you know them all – are really just words, words, words for the same thing. I can know the lamp will turn on when when I flip a switch; but that knowledge is based on a belief that a lot of people know how to make that happen. And I have faith that they will do so, tomorrow too.

These are not superficial distinctions… and they apply to, yes, our core convictions.

In Western civilization in the 21st century, “progress” has freed us from the necessity to have faith any more in many things once requiring faith. Of course this goes beyond religion: and I mean, very much, to have us realize how rudderless, value-less, we have become. We have been coddled into thinking that so-called progress, and intelligence, and science, are sufficient in all things; indeed, that vital aspects of traditional faith… are obsolete. Impediments. Relics of the ignorant.

But we still exercise faith – more than ever. Only in different things.

Governments, politicians, scientists, heroes, philosophies, secularists, the “mind” of the “universe.” Superstition. Self-help courses. Gurus, not God. At the end, however, we all still believe in things; we all have faith in something. Or other.

It surprises some people to know that the mighty Reformer Martin Luther, during the Renaissance and at the cusp of the Age of Enlightenment, declared that Reason is the enemy of Faith.

As we fight against the greatest surge of slavery in history; as we face oppression and abuse and heartache in our midst; as we wipe our hands of the blood of the previous century’s myriad slaughters… let us think for at least a moment where Human Reason, unleashed for 500 years, has gotten us.

Another figure of faith, an example of embracing faith in the face of the world’s certainties, and hostility, also speaks through the centuries:

To sacrifice what you are, and to live without belief, is a fate more terrible than dying.
– Joan of Arc

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Click: I Believe; Help Thou My Unbelief

7-8-19

Many well-meaning agnostics, and ill-intentioned atheists, and clueless friends who think they are being “welcoming,” showing they can meet Christians half-way, will intone that they regard Jesus as a “great man,” surely a “great teacher.”

Close on the heels of such specious arguments often come the “open-minded” assertions that every religious tradition has great teachers… that all of these teachers must lead to god (whatever they think god is)… that all the teachers all preached peace. And taught how to get along. Didn’t they?

Regarding the chief attributes of Jesus as being a good man and a great teacher: these are worse insults than outright denial that He was God incarnate. Blasphemy. (Blasphemy, by the way, is the one “unforgivable” sin spoken of in the Bible.)

An incomplete God is not God at all.

A “shadow God” is one or the other, not both. Jesus casts shadows. He is the Light Of the World. He is “the image of the One True God; the first-born of all Creation.”

Other “teachers” of other religions did not claim to be more than teachers or prophets; does everyone know that? Jesus, however, claimed to be the Messiah – “I and the Father are One” – literally, God-with-us.

Other religious leaders died. Alone of them all, Jesus rose from the dead, and physically ascended to Heaven.

“Oh, I respect Him as a great man, a wise teacher.” Your friends who say that to you are in effect calling Him a liar – funny thing for a Holy Man to be! – because Jesus was the Son of God who taught; yes. But He also healed. He read minds and convicted people of their sins. He raised others from the dead. He performed a multitude of miracles, recorded not only in the Bible but in contemporary accounts. Miracles.

He taught love, yes. But, more, He was love.

Can mere teachers transform lives; heal families and their pain; redeem the desperate among us? Can a mere teacher have turned my own heart from inclinations toward sin to seeking forgiveness, redemption, and holiness? Teachers can try – religious and secular teachers both – but only Jesus, come to earth for these missions, can do these things, be these things.

You say Jesus was a good man, a great teacher? Let me say in love: shut up – I have got some life-changing details to share with you. Good man, great teacher… are the first two of uncountable check-boxes in the list that describes my Savior and Friend, Jesus.

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Click: Yes, I Know

7-1-19

Two different things, faith and faithfulness.

We can generalize and say that Faith is what you believe, and faithfulness is how you act.

As with most generalities, we can go deeper than that. Both concepts are two-way streets, at least. In the matter of God Himself, I reckon that we don’t always think of the implications that God has faith in us, not merely the necessity of our belief in Him; in Christ as His only Son; in Jesus’s death for out sins and His resurrection and ascension to the Heavenly throne.

With Jesus in our hearts, that completes the requirements for salvation… but only begins the duties of Children of God. We need to be versed in the Word, and attentive to the leadings of the Holy Spirit. “Imitators of Christ.”

Saying “Yes” to Jesus is more than a “Get out of jail free” card. God has faith in us – you and I individuals of the flock – to do His will. He has faith in us: what an awesome concept… and responsibility.

Faithfulness is, perhaps, an easier concept to grasp. We can make resolutions, and establish purposes, and try our hardest, to be faithful to God. To trust Him; to share His love; to do His will. “It is meet and right so to do,” the old liturgies say. And it is a matter of belief that God can only act faithfully on His words and promises and gifts.

So, that’s that. Right? Not really. Sometimes the most well-meaning Christians can substitute their own versions of what they think is faithfulness. Maybe some people you know –

* Thinking that infant baptism seals their souls into Eternity?
* Believing that church membership satisfies God, with no other factors?
* That charitable works, or giving, is a step toward Heaven?
* Trusting that welcoming sinners, and accepting their sins, is doing God’s will?
* Assuming that God’s rules for life are not for today; only other people, other times

… and so forth. We are nation – our Western civilization is a culture – where the Bible probably still is the best-selling of books. Almost every home has one, somewhere; and every Walmart and Barnes and Noble has stacks of them. Where churches are on many street corners, and dot the landscape.

But those are not signs of faithfulness; nor, by themselves, of faith. How many Bibles remained stacked in super-stores? In how many homes is there “dust on the Bible”? How many churches are closed, or merging, or converted to community centers for Jazzercise?

Such “relative” proof of faithfulness or, God help us, faith, may grieve the heart of the Lord.

However we can be – we are – secure in the knowledge that God’s faithfulness is not relative; does not change; and is something we can hold to.

May that knowledge, and profound gratitude for such a loving God, have us cleave to Him… to exercise our faith… and blow the dust off our Bibles whenever it settles.

Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul; ‘Therefore I hope in Him!’” (Lamentations 3:22-24)

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Click: Great Is Thy Faithfulness

6-10-19

It is hard to hear the voice of God when we are stressed.

This is something most of us know, especially in these days when stress is blamed – probably correctly – for myriad ills from emotional problems to actual physical afflictions. It is the epidemic of contemporary life in many societies.

My son-in-law Norman McCorkell recently delivered a sermon on this message. At moments of high stress, we can not only miss the wisdom of God, but the words of those around us, and even that “still, small voice” of our own convictions. Stress can be like the moon in a full eclipse, blotting out the sun.

There is a frequent reaction among the faithful who occasionally feel abandoned that God has grown distant. Well, He does not grow distant – we move; He doesn’t – but when stress somehow keeps us from hearing God, the problem is not God’s voice, and maybe not even our internal “ears”… but our eyes.

We can seek God, not only in prayer, but by reading His Word.

It is human nature (which we must try to fight) that we seek God less when things are going well. When challenges, problems, crises – stress – comes, then we despair. Do we blame God? We pray and seek Him in those times.

If that is true, then short of physical sickness, should we not think, or fear, that God might allow those things, even stress, to cross our path… if that is a trigger for us getting closer to Him? It should make us shiver.

My late wife Nancy used to say that the devil is not really after our minds. After all, through life we believe this and that, learn and forget things, follow old or new theories. But the devil is after our hearts. He hates us not because we have pulses, but according to the amount of Jesus that exists in our hearts.

Head-knowledge is nothing when compared to heart-belief.

When your heart is serene, you will find that frustration over “hearing” the voice of God, or of friends, or of your own feelings, is less demanding.

And. Less. Stressful.

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Click: Till the Storm Passes By

5-27-19

Alexa, Siri, Hey-Google… 2019, meet 1984. Ten years ago, the FBI Director calmly told a Congressional committee that he (even he) puts tape over his computer screen’s mini-camera lens. A friend of mine who has worked in sensitive national intelligence schooled me about secret surveillance a few years ago – we should regard the “off” buttons of our electronic communications devices as irrelevant: they still listen and watch us.

Not can listen and watch. They do. “You can turn your lamp off,” he explained; “but electricity still runs through it.”

Do we care? Most of us don’t. Should we? Most of us say Yes, but surrender to the inevitability; or to the futility of resistance. Sometimes we joke about it. But it is not funny.

On the other hand (a very other hand), God watches us all the time. He even knows our minds, reads our thoughts. And our hearts.

About this reality – not a scary rumor or headline – I believe that people react in one of three ways.

* They become numb to it, hoping that God will not really notice the details of our existence and the fine-print of our lives. Or that eventually He will grade us on a curve;

* They become paranoid to the point, perhaps, of ceasing to believe in God, which they think is an easier way to cope; or to believe in a fuzzy version of God that the world manufactures as a conscious-salving substitute;

* Or they believe, trust, accept. Repent. Reform. Welcome, not fear, His watch over us. Use the truth of this reality as a discipline to act right, and please Him. This may be called a Conscience; so be it. Its agent is the Holy Spirit, sent to indwell us.

I pray we all choose what’s behind Door Number Three.

Then we will discover that God is not a spiritual spy, but a companion. A familiar Friend. The One who represents conversations waiting to happen. My daughter Heather used to audibly chat with God while driving or doing household chores. My friend Marlene Bagnull will pray in the middle of conversations with friends – “Father, please…” thus and so; seldom saying “Amen” as she switches back to human-chat – a sort of Constant Comment not bound by teacups. Cool examples, I think.

Yes, He watches us; knows our hearts. But you know what? We can listen to Him. I like to call studying the Bible “eavesdropping on God.”

“Big Brother is watching”? Only if you see that brother as Christ – Jesus our elder Brother! And welcome His fellowship!

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Click: How About Your Heart?

May 20, 2019

I have returned from a writer’s conference, one of several I attend each year. Writers, like artists and poets and few others, are obliged to be hermits. We wear our hearts and lives and fears and joys on our sleeves; but require solitude to work. It seems an odd thing for fragile creative spirits ultimately to toss their precious babies, so to speak, for the world to seize upon… maybe criticize… or, maybe worst, reject. Or ignore.

Yet we do it because we must. I think (without being presumptuous) that the closest we can get to understanding the essence of God is to create. In a sense, as we are to be spiritual “imitators of Christ,” we can savor the Creator by being creative too. Besides, it is His fault since He put the creative spark in us! Seriously, if He has gifted some with creative gifts as He apportions other gifts to other people as He wills, writers, artists, poets, performers, and other creative people have special responsibilities to touch the world… and translate the myriad aspects of God to others.

I will reaffirm some of the thoughts I had last year at another conference. The recent confab was the wonderful Write His Answer conference annually organized by Marlene Bagnull in Estes Park, Colorado. I was one of several speakers, conducting a couple of classes, and meeting a lot of great new friends. I also was reacquainted with some old friends.

It was attended by a couple hundred people, a majority of whom are aspiring writers, and many who had published a book or books or some blogs, still looking for tips to advance further.

When you want to write, you write. In fact, you need to write. And write. And read and write. It’s what you do because you are God-wired that way. I often heard people before and after classes, in the auditorium and lunchroom, in hallways: “Did you read what I wrote since last year?” or “Have you read my book?”

Never boasting, these questions were asked by people from nervousness or justifiable pride, and every writer’s sub-textual intention – hoping that people notice and understand your message; touched, maybe changed, by what you have to say, how you write His answer.

It always strikes me that the frequent question – “Have you read my book?” – might indeed have been the de facto theme. “Up above our heads”; all around us; and a part of everything we did, everything to which we dedicate our careers. But in a very real sense, God Himself also asks, “Have you read My Book?”

He asks that every day.

He asks us, not to read the Bible every moment of every day, but some time during every day, as many of us do. A passage, a chapter, a book, a verse. It is not an unreasonable request – but a request is inherent in the question – as God’s admonitions never are unreasonable.

The Bible is what we know of God. Yes, there is nature – I know well enough from our mountaintop experiences in Colorado. Agnostics who pose, and Christians who are lazy, can say that they can know God from communing with nature.

Wrong. That is one of the ways we can see God, even feel Him. But to know Him, we must read His book.

He meant it to be so. We have the Ten Commandments… written. We have Jesus’s teachings… recorded and written and published. I recommend visiting the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. I saw its substantial portions when it was on tour (in Colorado a few years ago!), and a lesson for believers and skeptics alike is that, for the hundreds and hundreds of texts from different countries, different scribes, different languages, different centuries, the texts of the Holy Scriptures vary hardly at all. The Holy Spirit “dictated” to the hearts of many writers, and oversaw the consistency of God’s Words.

Words.

Jesus communicated God’s love for us. And words, books, scripture, communicate Jesus to us.

The Bible says we are to “hide the Word in our hearts.” How better than through study of those words? They are precious. I shared with an attendee at the conference that, even when I read a Bible passage for maybe the hundredth time, some new revelation dawns on my heart. One speaker this year, Ava Pennington, delivered a powerful message that made we weep. She used phrases, and cited truisms, that I have heard all my life. But when we write or speak, and organize thoughts, the old can become new; and the new become newer. The wonder of words.

How much Bible reading is proper? Have things turned irrelevant? The Bible’s first history lesson reminds us, “In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Are some passages obsolete? II Timothy 3:16 tells us, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” A beloved old hymn states, “I love to tell the Story… ‘twill be my theme in Glory.”

Have you read His book lately?

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Stephen Hill (1956-2012) was a Baptist preacher and session singer before he launched his own gospel-music career. This is a song he sang when he and Woody Wright were invited to perform in the Netherlands. A moving song; you will be impacted in spite of the overlapping Dutch and Norwegian subtitles (he was very popular in Europe). Words!

Click: Will He Look At Me and Say ‘Well Done’?

5-6-19
There is a particular pitfall in Christianity, or rather the “walk,” the life, of Christians. Even sincere and fervent Christians – I would say maybe more so with dedicated believers.

It is a type of presumption, and is totally natural: our human nature. I am not talking about rebellion or faulty belief. Perhaps we can characterize it as total faith but imperfect understanding. Believers, acting by their human natures, sometimes tend to assume, or presume, to know what pleases God.

Is this a good thing? Usually. To address this pitfall has pitfalls itself, I know. Bear with me. I will paint an exaggerated picture; but I know it is true because I have fallen into this pit myself during my Christian walk.

Of course we want to please God. And He knows when we are in the Word; and not. He hears us when we pray; and when we don’t. He knows the burdens of our hearts; when we grieve and cannot pray well – we tell ourselves – the Bible assures us that the Holy Spirit groans in Heavenly languages before the Throne. Yet we pray, and we should, fervently, and we are promised in all these things that God hears the prayers of the righteous.

Have you ever prayed about a crisis – a nephew on death’s door; an unsaved loved one; an issue with your marriage, job, finances – and prayed something like, “Thank You, Lord, for hearing my prayer. Thank you for restoring my spirit. Thank you for the guidance that you will speak to me.”

What I mean is, have you ever prayed, in effect, “Thank You, God! I’ll take it from here”?

If we pray for a miracle… why take half of it back, before God even acts?

I shook my fist at heaven for all the hell that I’ve been through, Now I’m begging for forgiveness and a miracle from You.

We sometimes – maybe oftentimes – have the spiritual feeling that a good Christian just needs a little boost, some prayerful reinforcement, that “just a little talk with Jesus makes it right.” And then, all our training and Bible-reading can kick in.

I suggest that this attitude might be something we design to impress God… not beseech of Him. God wants our total mind, soul, and body… but not merely up to a point. He needs our total commitment, and total surrender. Especially in times of total trouble.

I’ve tried to fight this battle by myself, But it’s a war that I can’t win without Your help…

Let us consider, among many personal challenges, the example of alcoholism and the ravages it inflicts on people and families. I suggest that it is not wrong to ask God for “help,” “strength,” “understanding,” a family’s “patience,” a boss’s “forbearance,” and God’s “forgiveness.” Fervent prayer… even hundreds of prayers.

But, as long as we have God’s ear, so to speak, how many of us pray for a miracle – beyond, say, receiving one more chance from a spouse; but the kind of miracle only God can enact. For instance, losing the desire? being freed from “those places”? waking up a New Creation? Not when you need more than a “fix”! When you need a miracle, not a break.

Once upon a time You turned the water into wine, And now, on my knees, I’m turning to You, Father: Could You help me turn the wine back into water?

Think, when you pray, to realize what is the nature of your Loving God, and all He wants for you… what He can do for you!

When you pray for miracles, be mindful not to pray for partial-miracles. You have taken it as far as you can go; He knows. Let Him take it from there!

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A song written and sung by T Graham Brown. Guest slideshow by a man who has lived this song:

Click: Help Me Turn This Wine Back Into Water

4-8-19

I actually am a respecter of what I call “bumper-strip theology.” Sayings, aphorisms, Bible truths that can fit on a bumper strip on cars. Or note cards, or refrigerator notes, even on T-shirts. When lacking in formality or reverence that they threaten to be sacrilegious, no – but usually the wearer or bearer intends to honor God.

And… if there is an easy, attention-getting way to convey Bible truths, it is a good thing. I know one of one example of a lady who first saw the ubiquitous “Footprints” poster in a discount store… was profoundly impressed by the message … and became a devoted Christian. Holy ground? Think about it.

Pretending to possess no such wisdom as the creator of that graphic seashore image and legend, I have however thought of some phrases appropriate for the Easter season… that might encapsulate the Easter message; or the gravity of the Passion of Jesus; or the nature of the Incarnation; or the blessings of the Resurrection.

Bumpers… fridges… bulletin boards… caps and T-shirts… texts… go for it.

You can tattoo on your hearts, too.

Jesus Willed 

To Be Killed

His heart bled… for you

Surrender Led to Victory

What makes you think you’re so special?

…Just because Jesus did?

The world’s first evangelists were women!

He was born to die

Our sins helped drive those nails

He has risen indeed!

He was on the cross,

but you were on His mind

Would you sacrifice YOUR son for strangers?

It is Finished!

“I find no fault in this Man.”

Would you have denied Jesus too?

“If I be lifted up,

I will draw all people to me.”

“Even though I die…”

He died for you while you were yet a sinner

If He’s not in the tomb, where is He?

Render Unto Jesus

… Your Everlasting Soul

HE LIVES!!!

“Father, forgive them…”

“Who do YOU say that I am?”

What man meant for evil, God meant for good

Quick: Name another leader who rose from the dead!

For Christ’s sake… Think of what He did for you.

You can tattoo these on your hearts, too.

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Click: Bach’s “We Thank You, God, We Thank You.”

4-15-19

The week started great, remember? Jesus enters Jerusalem, hailed by throngs on all sides with praise and Hosannas.

In rapid succession, it dissolves. Conspiracy, trumped-up charges, accusations, kangaroo court trial, arrest, persecution, torture, betrayal, denial, imprisonment, humiliation, death sentence, crucifixion, agonizing death.

And the crowds that sang His praises only days earlier, now cursed and spat at Him.

What could be worse than that Friday? In world history, what could be worse – from the perspective of confused followers of Jesus, I have tried to picture the excruciating period between the death on the cross and the Resurrection.

Where did He go? What did we do? What about His promises? What happens now? Is hope gone…?

In the larger sense, for followers and observers alike, many would have seen irony in the fact that this day would come to be called Good Friday. Remember, the earth shook, the sky turned dark, the veil in the Temple was rent top to bottom. Even a Roman centurion said, “Surely this was the Son of God.” The Jewish historian Josephus, who never was to believe, nevertheless recorded the facts of the crucifixion, Resurrection, and Jesus’s subsequent appearances.

Indeed people still wonder, through it all, why it is called Good Friday.

“Good”?

There are etymological theories that the German Gottes Freitag (“God’s Friday”) or Gute Freitag (“Good Friday”) were the origins; the Ancient English Godes Friday (“God’s Friday”) is also cited. In parts of Europe the day is called “Great” or “Holy,” not “Good.” In Denmark the ancient Angle term “Long Friday” still survives. In Greek Orthodox practice, the day is called “Holy and Great Friday” in the Greek liturgy. In parts of southern Europe, “Holy Friday”; in middle Europe Karfreitag (“Sorrowful Friday”).

Clearly – no mystery – we understand that in God’s view, in His holy plan, the sacrificial death of His only-begotten Son was good for Him, and we humans, if we would realize it. We have a means to be reconciled by that substitutionary death.

Anyone who has lost a child knows how horrible it was for God to allow – no, to plan – the death of His son. But it was good; it was good for the rest of His children.

And it was long prophesied: What man meant for evil, God meant for good (Genesis 50:20). It was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer (Isaiah 53:10).

All for us.

That is good.

Specifically, all for you. You, and me, individually. I believe that if had been possible that you or I were the only sinners in history, God would still have delivered Jesus to the cross, that the Atonement would be applied even to you or me.

That is good!

Can we comprehend such Love? Don’t try; it is overwhelming. Rather than fully understanding, we should wholly respond… in gratitude, honor, praise, contrition, repentance, humility. In… faith.

That is good.

When we are able to sincerely thank God for his Goodness, we have a sense that the Crucifixion, as horrible as it first seems to us, is God saying “You’re welcome.”

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Click: The King Is Coming

Saturday, 4-21-19

Luke 23: 33 And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left.

34 Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots.

35 And the people stood beholding. And the rulers also with them derided him, saying, He saved others; let him save himself, if he be Christ, the chosen of God.

36 And the soldiers also mocked him, coming to him, and offering him vinegar,

37 And saying, If thou be the king of the Jews, save thyself.

38 And a superscription also was written over him in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, This Is The King Of The Jews.

39 And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.

40 But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation?

41 And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss.

42 And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.

43 And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

44 And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.

45 And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.

46 And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.

47 Now when the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, saying, Certainly this was a righteous man.

48 And all the people that came together to that sight, beholding the things which were done, smote their breasts, and returned.

49 And all his acquaintance, and the women that followed him from Galilee, stood afar off, beholding these things.

50 And, behold, there was a man named Joseph, a counsellor; and he was a good man, and a just:

51 (The same had not consented to the counsel and deed of them;) he was of Arimathaea, a city of the Jews: who also himself waited for the kingdom of God.

52 This man went unto Pilate, and begged the body of Jesus.

53 And he took it down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.

54 And that day was the preparation, and the sabbath drew on.

55 And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid.

56 And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment.

Luke 24: 1 On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them.

2 And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.

3 And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.

4 And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:

5 And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?

6 He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,

7 Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.

8 And they remembered his words,

9 And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.

10 It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.

11 And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.

12 Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.

13 And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.

14 And they talked together of all these things which had happened.

15 And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.

16 But their eyes were holden that they should not know him.

17 And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?

18 And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering said unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days?

19 And he said unto them, What things? And they said unto him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people:

20 And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him.

21 But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to day is the third day since these things were done.

22 Yea, and certain women also of our company made us astonished, which were early at the sepulchre;

23 And when they found not his body, they came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels, which said that he was alive.

24 And certain of them which were with us went to the sepulchre, and found it even so as the women had said: but him they saw not.

25 Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken:

26 Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?

27 And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

28 And they drew nigh unto the village, whither they went: and he made as though he would have gone further.

29 But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with them.

30 And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.

31 And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.

32 And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?

33 And they rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them,

34 Saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon.

35 And they told what things were done in the way, and how he was known of them in breaking of bread.

36 And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.

37 But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.

38 And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?

39 Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.

40 And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.

41 And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said unto them, Have ye here any meat?

42 And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb.

43 And he took it, and did eat before them.

44 And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.

45 Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures,

46 And said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day:

47 And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.

48 And ye are witnesses of these things.

We are witnesses of these things. He is risen!

Click: The Night Before Easter

3-11-19

There are many “new” Christians, converts, and born-again believers, who experience many fresh insights into God; or at least their relationship with Him.

One of those feelings, and I speak from experience, is to be overwhelmed by an awareness of God’s majesty, and all those Omnis – Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent.

Sometimes that flood of awareness is manifested in the type of awe that makes us feel unworthy. We realize that we are “the apples of God’s eye,” and that He loved us so much that He sent His only-begotten Son into the world to provide a way for our salvation.

And we know that we can “boldly approach the Throne of Grace.”

But we become aware that our righteousness is still as filthy rags compared to the glory and holiness of God.

So many of us consider a proper prayer to begin with the confession that we are unworthy in His sight. We humble ourselves, begging that He deign to hear our prayers.

Even seasoned Christians, not only “baby Christians,” will pray to God in this manner. He created the heavens and the earth; and despite His knowing the numbers of hairs on our heads, it easy to see ourselves as microscopic sinners in the great hands of a God such as He. Whether He is angry or merciful, surely we should be humble and realize how insignificant we are –

– except that we are not.

If you want to pray properly, you should see yourself properly. That is, as God sees you. The Bible more often says “worthily.” Not to be Unworthy – meaning that Worthiness is to understand and respect God’s own perspective.

We are Worthy because it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.

We are Worthy because He loved us with an everlasting love, before we were formed or born.

We are Worthy because He became flesh and dwelt among us; the Incarnate Jesus identified with our pain and suffering and joys; He was persecuted, endured agony, injustice, torture, rejection, desertion, crucifixion, and death for us; and rose and ascended to assert His divinity that we can believe and be saved…

Would the Lord do all that if we are unworthy?

Ah, some might say, we were unworthy while we were yet sinners. And now things are different. Yes! Just so. But if you understand that dividing-line… do you act like it?

Without being presumptuous, we must realize that – whatever our sins of the past or present; or however we might feel about ourselves for the moment – God cannot see those things!

When you pray, and Jesus is in your heart, God sees not you, but Jesus. He hears your prayers, but sees not the “old you” but the Jesus in you. When He looks down, so to speak, you might think He sees the sinner, but when you are covered in the blood – the sign of atonement and forgiveness that was foreshadowed ages before Jesus, in the “Pass-over,” – He sees the Blood before He sees you. And He will hear your prayers, but you need to remember that the Holy Spirit also groans and sings and advocates for us.

Guilt is drowned out; guilt has been paid for; guilt has been erased.

Understanding our relationship with God – our true standing – makes us Worthy indeed.

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Click: Victory in Jesus / Power In the Blood

2-18-19

I address Christians as a group – a fellowship that frequently is as hard to corral as a litter of frisky cats. “We” are children of the Living God, or anyway should consider ourselves so. We read the same Bible and worship the Trinitarian God. As we know, since the Church’s earliest days, there have been disagreements, splinters, deep schisms, and heresies.

Sometimes these are caused by cultural traditions that die hard; and sometimes fierce scholarly differences bring division. In the first century these debates were rife… and resulted in councils that promulgated Creeds – to remind believers what they believed.

Then we get to the questions I asked, Are we winning, and what constitutes winning?

This can sound crass… or be crass. I always wince when I hear pastors talking about how many people they “run” every Sunday in their churches. I know they care about attendance, but the term connotes fannies-in-the-seats, and inappropriate priorities. Yes, churches need to pay utility bills too, but can we hear Luke 15:10 amid the shouting? – “There is joy in the presence of God’s angels when even one sinner repents.”

There are statistics aplenty about church growth; denominations that expand or merge; “reaching” the lost; “attracting” the many; “keeping” the kids; satellite churches and retreats; conversations about relevance… until the statistics suggest irrelevance. God forbid.

“Upon this rock I will build my…” weekend retreat? Pot-luck dinner? Christian Jazzercise? God forbid.

Jesus died on the cross, and rose from the dead, for churches that define identity by these activities?

Are American Christians helping to evangelize, convert, transform the world… or are we being transformed to the image of the world?

Winning. Listen, we win in the end – I mean God wins. He already has won. I peeked ahead to the last pages of His book. You can look too. Take comfort… as long as you can be counted with the “we.”

But whether our nation is lost, whether we and our children are spared or caught up in tribulation, is a question for you to answer. As individuals, not denominations.

“Winning”? Let me share one more statistic that fixes the term in solid if shifting focus. It is reported that Christianity is on the RISE in 170 countries around the world.

The number of Christians is declining, however, in 20 countries. The United States is one of them.

“The last, great hope of mankind”? Peek ahead to those final pages…

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Click: The Church’s One Foundation

1-14-19

What impresses people these days? Rather, let us think about how we are impressed in contemporary society… how we measure success… how “success” conflates with validation… and how we let ourselves be seduced by twisted value-systems.

Ratings? Polls? Fads? The newest trends, dance moves, drinks, celebrities and their endorsements? “We like sheep have gone astray…” In contemporary life it seems like everybody salivates for the latest cultural marching orders.

We should not be surprised by a chintzy value system when the values being pursued are debased. In tragic synergy, we have lowered our standards; the core aspects of our civilization are cheapened; and they in turn inform the next generation. A downward spiral.

Exhibit A, among myriad bellwethers: throughout history (until the Modern Age in Western civilization), virtually all artistic expression was expressed heavenward. Praising God, celebrating His works. Canvases, sculpture, music, architecture. I am ready for nit-pickers: music sometimes was social; art could also be purely decorative. Ancient sculptures to their small-g gods? – still religious in nature. Architecture from, say, public buildings in ancient Greece? – Plato commended artists to reflect the spiritual Perfection that he discerned in the world; Aristotle taught people to strive for the Golden Mean, less abstract, but as spiritual.

But since the Modern Age, coalescing during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, mankind has elevated Self instead of God. We have turned inward – all the while convincing ourselves we are turning outward, with broader visions, and universal sympathy.

Works of art now “explore” ourselves; “explain” our problems; depict our low estate; obsess over our contradictions, flaws, conflict, and doom. Social scientists can say – and artists say, when they process the situation – that confronting problems is the first step to solving them. That analysis is glib, not profound.

There is no way to traffic in humanity’s misery without making it attractive, or at least compelling. Movies, for instance, have to make evil and corruption glamorous, if not inevitable, in order to sell tickets.

At one time, men and women – who knew quite well the problems of the world and the flaws in human nature – dealt with such basic challenges not by depicting awful things in ever starker details, but by glorifying God, employing Biblical standards, discerning His answers for this troubled world.

In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the man with the muck-rake was to be scorned – a man who forever focused on the mire and mud, never looking up.

It is sadly inevitable, absent superhuman enlightenment and discipline, that a civilization that empowered the Individual, encouraged literacy, and expanded democracy, would eventually replace God with Self. “Self” is human nature, which all but naive sociologists would agree is flawed. Our various communities cannot help but be flawed as a consequence. Art is debased, government is corrupted, tradition is discarded.

Again inevitably, when disaster impends, mankind in this “value” system tends not to reform but to justify. To double-down. To blame everything and everybody except… our selves. The fault, if we would stop and see it, is not in the stars, but in our selves, that we are underlings.

When Rome began its decline and fall, its leaders reacted to warning signs by distracting the populace with, famously, bread and circuses. And the Roman population, from nobles to citizens to slaves, were happy to be seduced.

The sad proof of our depravity – of the rotting core amid material glitz – is what we celebrate in art. The sensual; self-gratification; the banality of evil. These barometers reveal the reality of broken homes and broken lives; a multitude of addictions; abuse and oppression. Yet we look down, instead of Up.

A re-discovery God and His ways is not the best solution to mankind’s sorry state… but the only solution.

Revival will only come if it is sought. Salvation of the soul is still offered by God to hurting people, as always. But to understand the redemption of a society, we can advance, ironically, by looking backward. If we are not immediately impressed by God Himself as we behold the range of artistic expression, we are mightily impressed by men and women… who gave themselves over to God in profound ways.

A lost paradigm, but not irretrievable.

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Click: Bach: Air On the G String

12-31-18

The French have a saying, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It often seems apt, and is of course a variant of a Biblical principle (God usually nails it, right?) found in Ecclesiastes – “There is nothing new under the sun.”

These sort of thoughts occur to many of us around New Years, or I might say, specifically after New Year’s, when our resolutions wither and die. The French phrase translates to “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

This is not necessarily white-flag defeatism, but rather a reflection of human nature. And January received its name from the Roman god Janus, the two-faced god of endings and beginnings.

Many of us do not merely make (and break) resolutions around now. And we will not address that famous “road to hell” that is paved with good intentions, because pledges to improve, or reform, or lose weight, or clean the office, are fungible; and at least reflect proper impulses. We also, at this time of year, often grow nostalgic… remember friends… regret mistakes… miss family members… plan to renew old acquaintances. Also proper impulses.

Perhaps the fatal flaw with intentions and resolutions is that ol’ human nature. It seems wiser to pray that the Holy Spirit equip us to be tender and resourceful and sympathetic, rather than relying on our own lists and computer calendars and strings around our fingers.

Implicit in New Year’s resolutions is a whole lot of Self – we can discern; we can assign; we can choose; we can self-motivate; we can mark the dates and goals.

We can… but we often don’t.

I am thinking of this week. Most people are happy (surveys say) with the course of the economy and “optimistic about the future.” Unemployment numbers are good … and so forth. How many people have a bounce in their step as the new year unfolds?

In my own little world, I am happy enough, and grateful to God for my blessings. But just in the past few days, I have learned, or been reminded, of friends and relatives with radically different prospects. A friend whose happily married daughter is… not so happily married. The sudden death, perhaps from meningitis, of 26-year-old commentator Bre Payton, a rising star. A friend whose daughter and grandkids went into hiding because of an abusive husband. A friend whose husband has been ill for months, in pain and not eating, wasting away. A friend whose daughter has been estranged for two years, rejecting outreach and severing relations with grandsons caught in the middle. A friend whose only child is mercurial to the point of heartbreak, variously cheerful and abusive. A friend who has just gone on Hospice.

Is everything seen, all of a sudden, as the “glass half empty”? (– or half-full? I never understood the proper term or distinction of that). No. Of all my friends above, with one exception where “negative confession” is her reaction of choice, these people do count their blessings, and are mindful of silver linings. Another friend whose daughter impulsively got pregnant, got married, and got separated in mind-numbing and sad rapidity, nevertheless praises God for clarity and rededication… and so does her precious daughter. My friend on Hospice is in a situation that would make people cry, yet is full of life and enthusiasm that is inspiring.

We must always remember, or realize, that behind every storm cloud the sun still shines brightly. Storm clouds pass, but the sun shines always, after storms and after dark nights.

Our job as Christians, trying to live as Christians – and maybe to be, or to reflect, that sun to others – is, if I may put it this way, how to order the gloomy news and the hopeful news. Joy… BUT? or horrible news… BUT!

But there is hope; but there is redemption; but there is the bright day ahead.

So, here we go again, in January. Rather than relying on our own “Do-Better” lists, why don’t we all make a New Years Resolution to let God order our ways, light our pathways, and inhabit our praise?

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For all the friends with challenges and grief I listed here – and for each other – let us pray. Farther along, we’ll know all about it…

Click: Farther Along

12-24-18

I invite us to think of the manger scene, the Nativity creche, which despite the hostility of judges and hatred of some types of people, we all still see uncountable times throughout this season.

But let us try to think of the real Nativity group – not the shiny plastic, bright colors, or even inflatable angels, shepherds, animals, and Babe. How humble it was. How very humble. The root word of manger means “to eat”; and even if new straw was placed in the stable’s manger to receive Jesus, there likely were bugs and dirt and spittle that received Him too.

Aside from the fulfillment of prophecy, why did God orchestrate a situation where Joseph and Mary were rejected in all the inns? (In a city where the census was planned and held, I have often wondered if innkeepers did not want an unmarried young pregnant girl in their rooms…) Why were lonely shepherds and random animals the witnesses to Jesus’s first cries and naps? Could Mary have wondered, for a second, that the Savior of mankind deserved something a little less… humble?

The child she carried was conceived supernaturally. Behind the shepherds and next to the animals were angels. There were miracles aplenty in that lonely stable. But…

Jesus the Messiah could have descended from the clouds, just as, thirty-three years later, He would ascend to the Father.

God could have sent His only-begotten Son into the world full-grown, with the shout of angels and sound of trumpets, as He will come His second time.

The Christ did not necessarily have to be a Christ-Child; He might have appeared as a man from the wilderness where, after all, He often would go to pray.

Such appearances surely would have affirmed His divinity, no? Perhaps the world might have received Him better, believed in Him more, not be so skeptical.

Is that so? Think ahead to those thirty-three years, when even His disciples, who lived and ate and traveled with Jesus, and saw miracles and healings and raisings from the dead… they abandoned Him when things got tough, scattering like dry leaves on a windy street.

No, we should consider it a miracle that the Incarnation – Jehovah, God-with-us – was in the most unlikely Form possible. It was not God’s sense of humor or irony, but the most gentle yet powerful means of reminding the world that He identifies with us. God Almighty, Creator of the universe, Holy and August Lord… reached down.

At that moment, that first Christmas as we call it, God did not need to remind us of how omnipotent He was… but how humble He could be.

Indeed, no other Jesus could have laughed and cried and thirsted and hungered and loved and been disappointed as He was to be. No other Jesus could, later, have suffered betrayal and endured pain like we experience. No other Jesus would have submitted to crucifixion.

Another Jesus – still looking ahead to the Easter counterpart – might have summoned 10,000 angels as He loosed Himself from the cross. But He didn’t; God’s way is always the right way, and instructive to us, if we listen.

How pathetic that the world shakes its collective fist, and spews hatred, at scenes that remind us of a humble Baby in crummy, smelly, yet holy, hay. How mysterious that the most humble setting and circumstance of the Nativity yet thunders though the centuries: the nexus of history; the reminder of God’s identification with us; the confirmation of His love.

How much like Him, however; right? As he chose humility, and Jesus ultimately was humble, even unto the cross, we are humbled by His workings.

Merry Christmas, and Humble New Year!

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