John the Baptist

August 27, 2013January 26, 2014 Michael7 Comments

John the Baptist—the more I think of him the more I consider how his peculiar upbringing must have resembled Jesus’s.

The archangel Gabriel had detailed John’s life and purpose to his father Zechariah in the temple. John would be great and greatly used by God. Certainly Zechariah and Elizabeth were proud to know this, declared by the chief emissary of Heaven. “He will be a joy and delight to you,” Gabriel had promised.

But I wonder what became of their mood as John grew. This son of the priest bore a deep spirituality, but did it look like it was going off the rails as it evolved? Did his attitude toward Israel, fierce message of repentance, and uncustomary baptism of Jews seem radical to his parents? And were they maxed out and questioning God when John left the comfort of home for the wilderness, a preaching ascetic and possible embarrassment to his father?

I don’t know. Perhaps Zechariah had learned well from his first bout of unbelief and muteness and fully trusted despite his concerns. Furthermore, how do we respond to our relatives and acquaintances when their pattern of life or spirituality takes turns that throw our minds into tailspins? It can be scary to watch.

Everything’s Gonna Be All Right

Most of us haven’t had the assurance of an angel that our Johnny was gonna be okay. It would be great if there were a way to be certain that the people we love would turn out all right in their emotional and spiritual development. Since there isn’t, we have to do the next best things, which I will explain.

Concerns or problems do not exist in vacuums; people are involved. We must remember that dealing with potential issues is necessarily relational. We must avail ourselves to people about whom we have concerns. No one appreciates being viewed as a problem or problematic. Even mentally ill people deserve the respect of being treated as persons.

True care for people makes it easier for us to hear them, see the issue fully or discern whether there really is one, and offer our knowledge and counsel. We cannot help people we do not love.

Moreover, we must sometimes release people to discover their own way. This can be hard but none of us like hearing stories about folk hard-pressed by religious rearing who rebel. We would never want to create haters of God.

Freedom grants a person the ability to detach from all he or she knows to rummage through the piles of acquired wisdom and decide for themselves what they believe—and we should respect a person’s right to think and choose for themselves. Joshua expresses this marvelously: “But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served…or the gods…in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (24:15).

We should not view this negatively, as though we release a person to their doom. This is to forget the providence of God. Sometimes people go through periods of questioning, conflict, or gloom like stages in birth without which we would never see the light of greatness within them. No, we never give up on others but can be certain that God will control what we cannot.

The process may not always feel good or look glamorous, but just because it doesn’t look like what we expected doesn’t mean God isn’t in it. We just have to trust him.

Now, Back to John…

We see the full picture of John the Baptist and know that he was among the greatest Hebrew prophets. He must have owned a deep spirituality and interaction with God, for he sensed a profound call and exercised astute spiritual discipline.

I can imagine that John would have been viewed as uncouth by many of his society when, in fact, he was spiritually avant-garde. But he was what he was—by some an assumed religious quack roaming the back country—because of what was inside of him. John’s process was the only way for his greatness to come forth.

John’s testimony of Jesus (John 1:29-34) is pretty revealing to me of God’s power and reality in his life. John and Jesus didn’t know one another, and John had no reason to know that Jesus was the Messiah until he baptized him. But it wasn’t merely the baptism that pointed out Christ to John; Jesus already existed in John’s pronounced spiritual aptitude. Look and ponder carefully:

I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. And I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit’ (1:32-33).

If Zechariah and Elizabeth could have only seen how their boy turned out.

More on this topic: God, Our Contender

Morning Train

August 23, 2013August 23, 2013 Michael5 Comments

The Shinkansen of Japan
CC BY-NC, Home for Good, Flickr

The number of friends and co-workers that came to see me off that morning overwhelmed me. I never figured I mattered as much. The occasion effervesced with cheer, but it was also awkward. Nobody wished to see the elephant in the room. A year of good memories collected in this final moment slowly infecting with sadness.

When the time came to move to the platform, the sadness became palpable. Some could hold their tears no longer, and I was pressed to see everyone to say goodbye. Then, the train, a bullet train, arrived, as much an interruption to its own arrival. The guys helped me load my bags.

I took my seat and gazed at my friends, refusing to take my eyes off of them. There was no guarantee that I’d ever see them again. The women wept sorely. I mouthed words and made faces, fighting my own tears. I loved these people and never had an earlier time done more to convince me of this than this moment.

I ached at their grief and finally turned my face and wept. After several minutes, the departure bell sounded and, in seconds that would wait no longer, I was whisked away to be all but standing at my destination.

Isn’t this what death is, the unbearable parting with one love for the long awaited greeting of another?

I always remember this overseas farewell scene when I ponder death. My questions about the life to come are settled, and I have no fear of death or dying, as I did when I was young. I do wonder how my end will occur. I imagine the moment to be like the shock of an off-guard punch leaving me to heave celestial winds that renew my every fiber with the life of God.

Who will be the angel that greets me? Is my journey direct? Who will be in my greeting party? How long until I stand before God? And will Christ embrace me and, in that glorious moment, make me everlastingly holy? Just some of my endless questions…

Death is often my pillow thought, but I get excited when I consider it. There is no hopeless sadness about it, and neither do I have a morbid fascination or longing to die. Instead, I will live heartily and joyfully until it is my turn to wonder no more.

Getting Faith Right

August 22, 2013August 9, 2014 Michael7 Comments

Inspiration is oftentimes gradual, but it is a gratifying moment to fully see it. Moreover, it is sometimes the negation of a subject that best instructs—“A is not ___; A is ___.” The path of discovery, in some cases, is just as great as the discovery.

I have partly learned what faith is by understanding what it is not. I know what Hebrews 11 tells about faith, but reading about faith and living it are two drastically different sides of the same coin. One is theory, the other is praxis. Our reading stands to gain immeasurable depth when we’ve had to live out principles we’ve only read about.

Hebrews 11:6 always baffled me: “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” I could never unconvince myself that God exists, but was this all faith required? I sensed that I was merely scratching the surface.

Thank You, Josh Groban

Josh Groban was on my radio one day crooning his very moving song Believe: “You’ll have everything you need if you just believe.” No, I retorted, first mentally then aloud. It couldn’t be true: believe what? The reaction wouldn’t subside, and a lesson on real Christian spirituality came into sharper focus.

The song verse chalked up so much that I have witnessed with some Christians that makes me shudder. Permit me to explain it in the negative. It pains me in my heart to watch Christians who see faith only as a cure to life’s ills or as a last resort in circumstance. Faith is cliché for them. All we can hope to do is pray. God is merely our way out when there is no way. Faith is a name-it-and-claim-it gimmick. Romans 8:28 is a helpful analgesic.

Please hear me: Christ spread a message that centered profoundly on his Father and a kingdom proclamation of privileged righteousness. To see him, by his own admission, was to be introduced to his Father and to understand life—God-enriched life—fully offered, the same life enjoyed eternally in the Godhead. Christian faith and holiness that embodies this message is surely not an opiate or a trite superstition that passes for spiritual gravitas.

The Groban song was but a proxy for all those I had occasioned over the years whose roots hadn’t gone this deep to know any better.

I and Thou, O Lord

The unveiling was gloriously simple: there is no magical formula, no incantation. Though faith is the “assurance of things hoped for…the conviction of things not seen,” it is never an easy-button. And before faith is any of the scriptural and theological definitions we know it by, it is FIRST relational and personal. This is what I was not seeing in Hebrews 11:6.

“Anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists.” I knew God was there, but I didn’t understand that before all the great possibilities of his power and my obedience was our relationship and that it is the touchstone to everything. He wants me more than anything he desires for me or that I desire from him, and by transformation I should more and more want him above all things. It is a living relationship that marks the division between real faith and mere magic.

“And that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” We don’t “just believe,” apart from spiritual orientation or purpose…believing for belief’s sake. Christian faith is exclusive and incompatible with other ideological patterns of conviction. In our faith endeavors, whether the resolution we seek comes or not, God is who we desire, the very end of all our longing. He is the reward.

“People of Your Kind!”

August 12, 2013October 8, 2013 Michael7 Comments

True godliness has a way of making self-righteousness expose itself. Time after time in the Gospels, we find the religious leaders at odds with Jesus for something: his miracles, his teaching, the disciples, Sabbath violations. He could do nothing right in their eyes when all he ever did was good. He was also in constant trouble for his associations.

In the Gospels, Jesus catches flak for keeping company with two people of the same trade: Levi and Zacchaeus, both tax collectors. The scriptures clearly express the disgust the public bore for tax collectors, but that contempt wasn’t without reason. Let me explain.

Who Were the Publicans?

Rome ruled Judea at this time. A system of tax farming had already been established by the Roman government more than 100 years earlier. This system was a method of reassigning the responsibility of collecting a tax. The censor, with various public agencies including some financial duties, and concurrently with his five-year term, leased out public revenue for a region into the hands of the highest bidding private citizens or groups (companies).

These persons (NT: chief tax collectors) would pay fixed rents into the treasury and receive the right to make a profit on the revenue for the five-year term. Then, they would hire others (NT: tax collectors) who would actually deal with the public and collect the revenue.

These publicans, a term used for all tax collectors and other roles they served, were held responsible for any losses. So abuse pervaded the profession, namely extortion, not only to ensure the full revenue, but also to allow the collectors to make the most money they could. Dishonesty was more than common; it was expected and generally true of publicans.

In Judea, tax collectors were Jews and viewed as working for Rome, extorting fellow Jews. The scorn was immense. They were degraded as the worst of sinners. They were ineligible to be judges and even witnesses. Their families were stigmatized by the profession so that it would be clear in a court of law that such persons were probably untruthful, also.

More than likely, people took up the publican profession with a view of getting wealthy because the law permitted their abuses by turning a blind eye. Publicans knew they wouldn’t be liked, and I imagine most were ambitious, aggressive, thick-skinned individuals. In the Gospels, Matthew is a tax collector in Capernaum and Zacchaeus is a chief tax collector in Jericho.

Jesus, Full of Grace and Truth

So “pretty shocking” is an understatement in expressing how people feel when Jesus dines with both Matthew and Zacchaeus. Mark describes Jesus as eating with “tax collectors and sinners” (2:15), and the Pharisees, the moral police who always seem to hang around Jesus, got fed up and pulled the disciples aside and asked why. Jesus spoke up: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (v. 17).

Be very afraid when religion grants you “Me and Jesus” status and makes everyone else outsiders, even if they do bad things. The only way we can save sinners is by empathizing with them, which forces us to remember that once we didn’t have ourselves together either. Jesus found us somewhere in a dump, even the best of us. This means, we have something in common with the sinner, whether it is the same sin or simply our fallen condition. We fully understand what it’s like to be in sin and to struggle with it daily.

And what a personality Jesus was! He forced the religious to recognize their graceless, entitled, self-righteous ways and transformed those who had set religion aside to indulge their sin. Further, he wasn’t afraid to engage sinners. He went where they were, and this must have made a statement to them about his character. Sometimes we don’t approach people because we’ve scandalized them—we’ve turned them into their vice. When we do that, we shut the door of grace to them.

“She’s a prostitute.” “He’s gay.” “They sell drugs.” “She’s a gang leader.” These are “bad sins” and, in our eyes, they make these people unreachable. (Did you hear all those doors slamming?) But Paul says, “And such were some of you” (1 Cor. 6:11).

Let us never forget that just because people choose a wrong path, not only does it mean that grace remains available to them, it more importantly means that they’re not immune to being hurt by how people treat them. They’re still people; words and characterizations still cause pain. Christians, especially, run the risk of pushing these folk away from God forever if we don’t prove the great love awaiting them.

Jesus finds worth in Matthew; he calls this tax collector to preach his gospel. To Zacchaeus, whose wealth Luke candidly acknowledges, Jesus announces, “Salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9).

In Luke 18:10-14, Jesus tells the parable of—guess who?—the Pharisee and the tax collector, in the presence of the Pharisees. (Can it get any better!) It is riveting and emotional and a great final word on this discussion:

Two men went up to a temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

The Journey to Disappointment

August 10, 2013August 9, 2014 Michael5 Comments

There have been times in my life when I’ve descended to fight the fiercest battles against the past possibilities of my life. It never took much to engage: a family member’s new success; an acquaintance’s marriage or new baby; the news of old friends excelling. It could all send me over the edge because I always seemed to be going nowhere.

So I would turn my weapon and inflict harm on myself—If you had only bought this, not done that, tried harder, moved there, stayed longer, saved more, asserted yourself, learned this, said no, spoke up, imitated him, asked her, agreed to everything, and been a real man, you might be farther up the road, more pleasing to yourself, your people, and your God.

I’d snap from the madness minutes later like a limb in the face. So what if you’re right? I often thought. And what if it is partially true that the way things have turned out for you is not entirely your fault? None of this was the point though. What would that hill of sorrows ever matter? So I’d concede to the apparent: nothing so obvious in a battle.

Perhaps the places we’ve had to pass through in life were not all necessary to get us where we stand. We mess up sometimes. We fail to heed good advice; we become neglectful. It is often the case for many of us that where we are in life is not where we wish we were, but it is certainly better than many conditions in which we could find ourselves. Yet where we are might make it worth taking another look at where we’ve come from.

Look at you—the cuts and bruises, your sweat-soaked head and blood-filled mouth, burning lungs and tired limbs. They all speak wonders of a person who would have welcomed demise not long ago. Somewhere something happened that put armor in your flesh and turned a heart into iron. The double-take reveals that where you stand, in maturity and insight, is light years ahead of where methods would have gotten you by now.

Lightning couldn’t strike a more terrifying revelation in that moment that what-ifs and alternate realities cannot be trusted. Having one’s “ducks in a row” and charting every cent and second of one’s life may require just a pullet feather to topple it all. Moreover, we don’t interview the ones on hospital beds now or in prison now to hear the other half of glamorous, climbing-the-ladder, American Dream stories, the ones that take dramatic detours.

I am not what I do! I am not what I possess! I am not what others think of me! I will not be a pawn of any system!

Sure, some say, this is precisely the argument of someone lamenting his or her failed life, and it’s easy to concede to spiritualities then. But this is no failure or newfound faith. It is merely a second look at what we now understand to be the long way around, a redemptive and awfully appreciable route.

Do not make the mistake of hearing me equate the rat race with normal living and progress, for too often this is what progressiveness gets us, especially in this generation. “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matt. 6:24) is so radically inclusive of all the many cares of life in which we foolishly place our trust. I am guilty of it—why else should I share my grief?

I know what it is to put it all on paper only to watch the paper go up in smoke. I know what to tire feels like and understand rough-hewn Peter, captain and fisherman, contesting Christ: “We have been out here all night while you were sleeping. But just this once, at your strange insistence, we’ll launch again” (Luke 5:4-11).

We must trust God. “For he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold” (Job 23:10). We are not forgotten, wherever we find ourselves on this journey. He is closer to us in the process than we perceive.

“’The Lord has deserted us; the Lord has forgotten us.’ Never! Can a mother forget her nursing child? Can she feel no love for the child she has borne? But even if that were possible, I would not forget you! See, I have written your name on the palms of my hands.” (Isaiah 49:14-16)

My Neighbor the Roommate

August 4, 2013August 9, 2014 Michael4 Comments

I arrived on campus a week early for leadership training and to help move in new students soon to arrive. On the day freshmen flooded the campus, I noticed a tall, gangly black guy, very peculiar because he was albino and had chiseled facial features. He dressed like an older gentleman and appeared to have stepped right out of the 70s. I wondered who might get him as a roommate.

It was a real surprise seeing him moved into my room later that day. His name was James, and he was an interesting fellow. James was a quiet and pensive person and slightly shy. Staunchly conservative, he often ranted about the way things should be when issues raised his ire.

But James also had a lighter side. He was funny to watch when something excited him because he was prone to giddiness, and he sounded like Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants when he laughed. He loved pizza and was a movie buff. Bond was his man.

On campus, James hung out with a bunch the very replica of Fat Albert’s misfit friends of which he was the leader. He stuck out anywhere he went, more for his beanpole look and adornment in his favorite burgundy or green suit and Gatsby cap—yes, on campus. I would often chuckle watching him go to and fro.

But James had an issue. Perhaps I should say that I too had the issue since it was the second time I had to experience this type of thing at college. James had bad body odor. I suspected that it may have resulted from some type of problem in his body. My first roommate two years prior had awful odor, but he was merely unhygienic. I confronted him and the problem ceased. This was something I wasn’t sure could go away.

The odor was bad—putrid bad. I would walk in the room and detect a strong mothball scent and then the smell of decay. So when he was out of the room, I would sniff around and investigate. His clothes were my red flag that this was a personal issue because James wasn’t an unclean person.

I sat in class one winter day wearing my favorite sweater and suddenly smelled James’s scent reeking from me! I knew then that I had no other option but to confront him. Soon others on the floor took notice, and these guys weren’t the most considerate ones to handle a situation like this. I had to watch out for my own pride, too. I was the floor chaplain. Peers and other student leaders came to my room for different reasons. I didn’t want them to think I stank.

I built my nerve and decided to talk with James. It was easier to do with this roommate, but, as always, I first prayed for the right opportunity. I knew without doubt that this was an issue in his life; it was obvious to everyone else, but he never acknowledged it. I remember meeting his parents those first few days and observed how closely they kept tabs on him and all the more now with him alone halfway across the country. There was much he wasn’t saying, and I knew I had to cover him.

This is when the situation became less about James and more a search for trustworthiness and authentic care in me. I became empathetic and made myself feel the snickers and stares he drew, to feel what it’s like to be the misfit and last man chosen on the team every time. The one forced to walk alone; forced to love libraries and bookstores (because books don’t judge); forced to share yourself in fragments as you’ve had to teach and reteach yourself who to trust in what might as well be a jungle of suspects, Christian or not.

No one else was thinking this way and I knew it. Not even the group he hung out with on the floor was reaching out to him. I had to do it, not because I was Chaplain or older than everyone else. I knew that people could be cruel and cruel motives have devastating consequences. Sometimes neglect alone does it.

People don’t handle the truth about themselves well. We all have deep-seated issues and flaws that others may know or that we know about others. But we don’t glibly use that information because it’s sensitive and highly charged. People shut down when they are psychologically denuded and made to lose face. They get scared and fidgety and depressed. They fly off the deep end and kill people. James’s B.O. became a much smaller matter after I considered the stakes.

I trusted God for the right moment and it presented itself. I told James about the odor and asked him if he had an issue in his body. (Too private?) I offered some possible solutions to our problem. He mostly nodded. Then, I told him what my real concern was: him not being hurt. He opened up to me and explained that he had always been picked on for how he looked and said he knew about the odor.

In the end, it was meaningful to him that I had been honest, and he was appreciative for how I handled the situation. He controlled the problem better, too. He became very loyal to me his chaplain and roommate. The lesson has profoundly shaped my character.

Portals of Darkness

July 31, 2013November 6, 2013 Michael2 Comments

Question: What is anything that indulges our passions and leads us away from God? What is something that claims a greater priority than the holiness and love of God in our lives?Answer: an idol.

God hates idols and abhors them in the lives of his people. They are the start of all kinds of trouble. Morally, an idol represents perversion, and God often refers to it as an abomination, something vile and shameful. I think I know why.

God created humankind in his image (imago dei) and for himself. The problem with venerating a false god is not merely that we bow to it or laud it but that we give it our allegiance and service, which should be reserved for God alone. This is implicit in the first two commandments of the Decalogue.

So when we honor the idol, even if we don’t realize that we’ve provided it a ranking place in our hearts, we symbolically remove the stamp of our Creator (his entitlement of us) from our hearts, or a part of it, and spiritually choose a rival that, although not real by human standards, opens the door to darkness dedicated to our defeat in some way.

Looking even deeper is what we understand about spiritual worship: its nature to transform. I diverge for a moment. Here the worship controversy arises in which some argue that the word worship in the English Bible with today’s connotations incorrectly describes the practice and sentiment of Hebrew culture. In the original languages some of these instances might be more correctly termed ‘made obeisance’, ‘bowed down’, or simply ‘served’.

I hate taking up space about this because I feel that the issue is mostly a defense of the original languages. I think we all can agree that worship is not merely our present-day church experiences of singing songs and lifting hands. Nevertheless, I do believe that the intent of the scripture and ancient worshipers align with our contemporary understanding of what real worship of God is.

Real spiritual worship is done with the heart and should occur with every facet of one’s life, more outside of the church and synagogue than in it. Spiritual worship esteems God and responds to his holiness and love with personal godliness and conscientious righteousness. By it we are transformed into better people, a people of God.

But to open the heart this way to the idol is a grave mistake. It is to ascribe the true God’s spiritual honor to a false god. This is considerably more than merely praising and praying to it, something God mocks in the Prophets. What begins to occur in the heart is the transformation of the soul into the image of the idol. The longer this occurs, the more one will take on its character.

I met a man once with a bizarre attraction behavior that I came to understand only when I learned of the things in which he indulged. After mocking the deficiencies of human-made idols, the writer of Psalm 115 makes a sobering statement: “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (v. 8, ESV). Humankind was created to be mastered by one, God himself, and then only by our willing choice of him. To yield ourselves to any other thing means domination by evil influence and that signals torment.

Paul and Peter occasionally use the expression “slave of Christ.” The analogy is a good one. For if we are not the slaves of Christ, then in our hearts we serve our carnal nature and achieve Satan’s purposes. Simply put, we war with God.

Idols might have been wood and stone and gold once, but their true dark powers are still evident today when they are sex, money, and vanity. In Modern America we don’t erect sacred monuments in the traditional sense to personify the intents of our hearts. Instead, we simply yield to our impulses and impose upon ourselves willful blindness toward any dark motivating force. We indulge our lusts and vindicate our right to have them satisfied.

We possibly have more idolatrous dealings to contend with simply because of the age in which we live. Yet the fight for the human soul is as much the same as it was when Adam and Eve fell in the Garden. Jobs, television, ambition, power, drugs, people, fame, technology, carousing, fashion, time, even our own families—anything—can become one’s idol. We would do well to understand God’s testing Abraham with sacrificing Isaac.

God wants all of us. Yet we must solemnly acknowledge that at any moment we have as much of him as we desire.

One of the best ways to repent is to rely on those classic spiritual disciplines that lift us into God’s light, the light that exposes and restores. Then, and only then, can we be sure that we are centered in Christ and out of the shadows of sin.

How Bad Can Heaven Be?

July 30, 2013August 9, 2014 Michael2 Comments

CC BY-NC, ChristyHunterPhotography, Flickr

Jesus told us, “If I’m leaving to make room for you, then I will surely come back for you” (John 14:3). Who doesn’t want to be with Jesus? My problem is the blockheads around me who tell him, “Don’t bother.”

Okay, this is one of my spiritual peeves—Christians who understand nothing about the words “blessed hope.” It happens during conversations and in church when people, grateful to be alive, remark, “We could’ve been dead, sleeping in our graves” or something like it. Truthfully, we’ve all probably had several close calls, some we knew about and some we didn’t. So, for everybody, Thank you, Lord, for sustaining our lives!

He Shall Never Die

What bugs me, however, is the notion that death is so bad, which urges me to question if life is really that good. When people pipe up with ‘happy to be alive’ comments (and I love life), I sense that somehow this world is all the reality there might be in their minds. I don’t wish to be unfair, but I never encounter those who, like me, cannot wait to be with Jesus in the joys of the life to come.

Before you think me unnecessarily critical, the apostle Paul had to deal with the same kind of people. The Thessalonians must have recently lost some beloved person because it prompted Paul to correct their undue mourning. “We want you to know what will happen to the believers who have died so you will not grieve like people who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13, NLT). He referred to those without Christ who have either no hope or false hopes about their eternal security.

Our bodies will expire; I think we get concerned about sickness, suffering, and pain. I don’t enjoy thoughts about what I might have to endure before I pass on. But though we believers experience physical death, like all humanity, we never die. Our lives before Christ and present clash with sin is the only spiritual death we will ever know. Jesus’s own death usurped sin’s authority, so death, the fullest extent of sin, becomes a grace that makes an end of our dealing with sin—forever.

The Joy of What Awaits

Our future is alive. We immediately go to God, who welcomes us into Heaven—and what that must be like! I’ve heard theology about it, and I’ve heard people who say they’ve visited. It’s all exciting. Is Heaven anything like Earth with vast regions and social systems? And the physics must be mind-boggling! Just think of Christ after his resurrection. Then, there is the New Earth to come.

We will breathe our last here, but we will not die. And Christ’s return will ‘seal the deal’, and these very bodies of ours will be refashioned and made perfect. (The sinner doesn’t get that.) So I don’t dread death or live life ducking. Now I enjoy my humanity and the world around me until it’s time to leave. In fact, that’s my prayer to God: Grant me to live out all of my appointed days. I ask not to die prematurely.

The blind monk in the wonderful documentary Into Great Silence says, “The closer one brings oneself to God the happier one is…the faster one hurries to meet him. One should have no fear of death…it is a great joy to find a Father once again.”

I cannot wait to see God, and I often tell him this. You’re also wrong if you think I have a death wish. So until the angels finish my mansion there…on a splendid mountain overlooking God’s throne…I’ll keep at his will here and send my treasure ahead.

I Have Ownership

July 26, 2013July 29, 2013 Michael1 Comment

The joy of life in Christ is the assurance of ownership. We are God’s property, those of us whose lives are dedicated to Jesus. It is a revealing distinction between those who walk with God and those who do not. The mark of God doesn’t make one anything more than human, our gift, now flawed and frail. Yet that distinction lends us the necessary grace to push through and above the wretchedness of life and sin into fellowship with God.

It is a deep consolation to me to know that God controls my life, that I am held in his gravity and illumined by his light. I need not rely on my own headiness or caprice or draw cues from a dust cloud of wrong messages. I don’t have to be moved when trouble comes or left confused in life, lost between euphoria and depression in a tug-o-war of happiness. Instead, rest becomes my only chore—and strangely what a chore it can be but to trust that God’s sovereignty and goodness work for my good, that I can always retreat to the silent center where he dwells for instruction.

This ownership is available to all. God may not be everyone’s spiritual father, but he is nonetheless the Father of all creation. Everything and everyone already belongs to him. Life happens by his rules and according to his will, as mysterious as they can be. The difference, however, lies in our approach. I have resigned myself to need him. God ownership begins there, where we acknowledge our dependence on him and devote ourselves to him. This posture is difficult for the person who is the center of everything.