Finding Freedom in Prison

“I was in prison and you came to visit me … ” Matthew 25:36

I pulled up to the guard shack and handed the officer my ID. “I am the preacher today,” I told her as she wrote my name and license plate number on a clipboard and handed me my pass for the day. It was just barely 7:30 am, but the SC heat was already making itself known. I passed the guard towers and walls lined with spirals of razor wire to a parking lot where I said a final prayer, checked my phone one last time and headed inside.

I emptied my pockets, took off my shoes and belt, and placed my Bible on the conveyer belt that would check them all for contraband. I passed through the metal detector to meet a guard on the other side who patted down my outstretched arms and checked the soles of my feet.

I gathered my belongings on the other side and waited for the buzzer. I handed my license to a guard behind bulletproof glass who delivers a badge to me through a metal drawer. I wait for another buzzer and pass into the underground concrete tunnel that will bring me to another series of doors, a stairway,  and two more steel doors before I finally enter into the open courtyard.

There were men filing in and out of buildings dressed in grey jumpsuits. I pass through another set of doors and finally arrive at the library where Billy, Monty, and 26 other men are waiting for morning chapel.

Then the singing began. With clapping hands and unaccompanied voices, the prisoners began to sing.

I know it was the blood,
I know it was the blood,
I know it was the blood for me.

One day when I was lost
He died upon the cross.
I know it was the blood for me.

My visit that day came at a time when I had recently finished reading Bryan Stevenson’s exposing look at the American justice system, Just Mercy The stories of blatant racism, false convictions, and unjust penalties that have often plagued American courts rang in my ears as loudly as the steel doors that had closed behind me on my way to visit these men. 

But by the end of our time together, I could only hear those voices. Voices singing of a freedom that no one could ever take away. A freedom that many living outside of those four walls has never experienced.   

“Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison.” Hebrews 13:3

 

 

Sherlock Holmes: Pursued Pursuer

Throughout 4 seasons now, the brilliant folks at PBS Masterpiece and the BBC have given us the gift of Sherlock Holmes. Updated for the 21st century, the heroin addicted Holmes is now given modern tools of technology and equally modern cases to solve. For the uninitiated, there is scarcely room enough here for a full explanation of a story that provides as many plot turns as any other show in recent memory. Sherlock’s own character (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) has proven to be every bit as complicated as the cases he attempts to unravel.

All at once a sociopath, a genius on the level Savant, and a narcissistic megalomaniac, Sherlock is also a man at constant war with his inner self. Often aware of his social inadequacy, Sherlock simultaneously loathes and longs for intimacy. Of his desperately small circle of friends lies one man, Dr. John Watson (Martin Freeman), a former military medic, and Watson’s wife Mary (Amanda Abbington).

In the most recent season, Sherlock is confronted with unimaginable grief and loss. I will spare you spoilers but suffice it to say, Sherlock’s circle of friends becomes notably smaller. In his despair, Sherlock spirals downward into increased drug addiction and self-loathing. In his state of despair, Sherlock is approached by a woman who is suicidal. Their dialogue is classic Sherlock, direct and unfeeling, while logical and absolutely correct.

SHERLOCK: ‘Taking your own life.” Interesting expression. Taking it from who? Oh, once it’s over, it’s not you who’ll miss it. Your own death is something that happens to everybody else. Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.

Later in the same episode, Sherlock is confronted with a sudden act of forgiveness that chips a hole into his normally fortified soul. In the process of saving Sherlock’s life, a woman has lost her own, and the weight of the gift is simply too much for Holmes to bear.

SHERLOCK: In saving my life, she conferred a value on it. It is a currency I do not know how to spend.

Your life is not your own.

In saving your life, a value has been placed on it.

It is a currency we don’t know how to spend.

As a legendary and timeless character, I seldom ever see myself in Holmes. But in a few brief lines amidst the chaotic race to find a killer, Sherlock uttered words pregnant with eternal weight, and all at once summarized much of the world’s agonizing pursuit of meaning and the ever-present sense that there is something much more to this life than we are often told. In a word, Holmes summarized the gospel- the good news- that having been bought at a price we are not our own, but now carry the weight of value in a currency we do not know how to spend. For some that is freedom, for others a prison. And yet we remain pursued by a lover who won’t surrender until the lost are found.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me’.

Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven”

Into the Wilderness

One of my fondest memories is a journey my wife and I took together just weeks after our wedding, backpacking across the Presidential Range in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. On the morning of our second day we woke early and stepped out from under our tarp to meet a morning breaking over Mt. Washington. The sky was on fire with streaks of red and orange. The day was silent, and so were we as we sat on an outcropping of granite to take in the majesty of wilderness that seemed to stretch for miles.

It is a memory I return to often, a stone of memorial that brings me back again and again to the vastness of God’s creation and the innate desire built into every one of us to be found in wild places. In our increasingly distracted world I find myself returning to the mountains in my mind more often. 

The memory has surfaced with greater frequency lately for another reason as well, because for much of the last year I have been traveling a far different kind of wilderness. A wilderness without silence or serenity, absent still mornings or sunrises over rocky peaks. A wilderness of the soul.

In this season of Lent I have allowed myself greater freedom to meditate on the bareness the last year has brought, when our family traveled further east to enroll our oldest son in a school that is able to support his learning differences. I am in a new home, a new neighborhood, searching for a new community and a new sense of stability.

While I often reflect on the wilderness as a place of restoration and renewal, the Bible consistently calls it the place of bareness and isolation. Unless you were John the Baptist, no one called the wilderness home. Which makes the forty days Jesus spent there alone all the more powerful. Especially in light of the fact that we are told that he was sent there by his Father. Luke tells us “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil” (Lk 4:1-2). 

And he was led by the Spirit. 

Jesus was brought to the wilderness where he was alone and hungry for over a month while he battled an onslaught of Satan’s temptations. In these past eight months I have come to sense something of Jesus’ trial. But while Jesus’ test proved his perfection, my own journey has revealed my utter inadequacy, my frailty, and my weakness. The devil is having a much easier time with me. My only solace is the reality that God does not send us into the wilderness forever. We emerge, at some point, as men and women who have been tried and tested. I have come to believe that we remain in the wilderness until we have learned the lessons necessary to our journey of faith – even if I am proving to be a poor student.

I imagine what held Jesus together during the dark evenings of silence in the desert was the constant refrain of his father’s voice spoken to him before he was whisked away into isolation, “You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased” (Lk. 3:22).  Many days I feel like neither a beloved son, nor well pleasing. Having confronted every temptation common to man (Heb. 4:15), I trust Jesus wrestled with these same lies, but many days I simply get pinned on my back again.

But this is the essence of Lent, a season of preparation for death and crucifixion. Forty days of being led by the Spirit into the wilderness where we are tempted by the devil. Forty days of hunger and loneliness, forty days of remembering, against all evidence to the contrary, that we are beloved sons and daughters with whom God is well pleased. 

And at the end, resurrection. A constant reminder that we are not yet what we will become (1 Jn. 3:2), that transformation has come, and is coming. The sunset is rising in the distance and will eventually cast a long awaited light over the darkness.  While we wait in the stillness of the night, we are not alone for the Spirit has sent us with the words of the Father to whisper to us through the darkness. “You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased.”    

Thanksgiving in Prison

“I am disappointed that I am so weak. I feel at the point of failure”

The words repeated themselves several times throughout the letter, punctuated with additional confessions of panic attacks, depression, hopelessness, loneliness and fear.  

The letter was sent from a fellow colleague in ministry, and had I not been told otherwise prior to its reading, I would have assumed the author was grappling with a moral failure of epic proportion. The letter revealed pangs of regret, sleepless nights, and all consuming despair. The pastor begged for any sign of God- a vision, a dream, a single word- any gesture that would signal to him that God was present and alive. None came.

The letter was sent from a prison cell on the other side of the world. A dark and lonely space that housed a pastor who was falsely accused of crimes he never committed. Separated from his wife and children, this dear brother poured out his heart in a lengthy email he could send to his colleagues in what I suppose was an attempt by his captors to demonstrate “proof of life.”

We sat in heavy silence when the letter was finished. We were a simple bunch, void of any political power or government ties. And so we offered all that we had by bowing our heads and crying out to God on his behalf. We prayed prayers for hope and prayers for strength. We prayed for protection and we prayed for his release.

But long after our time of gathering had ended, one line of the letter has continued playing over and over again in my mind.

“let this cup pass from me – and even if it is your will, please release me, let me go back and be a normal person.” 

At first glance the words may sound very unlike the prayers of a man who has walked with God for a long season of his life. Are we not a people of faith who readily exhort one another that the safest place in the world is in the center of God’s will? Are we not taught to pray the prayer of Jesus from the Garden of Gethsemane “not my will, but yours be done.”

And yet, my heart had the opposite response. My brother’s prayer was a clear reflection of a man who knew God intimately in ways I have never yet experienced. A man who so trusted his Father, a man so deeply aware of his Savior’s compassionate and merciful bent towards his children, that he could “enter the throne of grace with confidence” and pray freely, boldly and honestly. Not only, “please let this cup pass” but even “if it is not your will, please pass it anyway.”

In the Christian community, we are often quick to pass along such trite sentiments as “God will never give you more than you can handle.” And yet our Bible is awash with tales of faithful brothers and sisters who constantly faced far more than they could ever handle – physically, emotionally and spiritually. I think of Paull wasting away in a prison cell of his own, confessing that it would be far better to simply die and be with Christ than to continue his life in chains. I think of Jeremiah, who accused God of deceiving him while cursing the day of his birth. I think of David running for his life, and of Moses wandering through the wilderness with a band of rebellious Israelites. I read the Psalms, and run my fingers across hundreds of passages penned by writers who repeatedly wonder out loud, “God, where are you?”

I think of a friend who emailed me last week to tell me the devastating news of his miscarriage, or the students I have counseled over the years who were abused by their parents. I think of couples whose marriages are crumbling under the weight of bitterness, anger, unfaithfulness, and addicts who can’t kick the habit. I visualize waiting rooms full of parents hearing the news that their child has cancer. I hear the cry of the countless victims or rape, injustice, ridicule and poverty.

I feel the weight of a world groaning under the curse and I pray too, “even if it is your will, please let it pass just the same.”     

As I sit in the quiet solitude of my office this Thanksgiving morning, I am struck anew with the revelation that the Christian faith is not for those searching for an escape from reality, but just the opposite. The promise of Heaven is not a mere opiate for the cruel realities of life, but a present reality that emboldens the human heart to face another day with a hope that will never disappoint. Far from offering an escape from pain, the Christian faith is a full embrace of the fact that the world is broken and in desperate need of redemption. Casting our lot with Christ is not a flight from suffering, but the guarantee that you are never alone in the room when the lights go out.

The God of the Universe has not forgotten you, nor is he silent amidst your cry for help. The One who looked upon His son being crushed by the sin of the world is the only God who has ever loved you enough to enter the heart of darkness to proclaim freedom to the prisoners. While we wait for our final release, we know we never wait alone.               

 

 

 

Following the Light into Sierra Leone

The paved highway ended and we turned onto red dirt roads made slick by the rainy season. Two lanes soon become one and turned upward through a potholed maze of boulders and washed-out trails, that twisted our truck higher and higher into the thickening canopy. When the trail stopped, we faced a swollen river and a weary ferry driver unable to navigate our vehicle across the water atop his wooden raft. With hippos grazing along the banks downriver, we boarded dug-out canoes and turned our bows upstream to let the current point us towards the far bank.

Greeted by a throng of villagers eager to catch a glimpse of white visitors, we quickly saddled awaiting dirt bikes that carried us deeper and deeper into the jungle. We raced our way along battered paths, trying to beat the setting sun. Pouring rains had caused local rivers to spill their banks and fill our shoes as the bikes tore through the water into the coming darkness. We gripped the sides of the bikes and learned the rhythms of shifting our positions on the back seat when climbing the root-littered embankments, or plunging down a sudden drop.

Our drivers travel this same path dozens of times each day, their expertise proven when swamped headlights went black and memory and moonlight was the only thing guiding us. For twelve hours we pushed deeper and deeper into the forests of Sierra Leone until the cycles came to a stop just 50 miles south of Guinea.

We had made this journey to meet a family.

Nestled in the heart of this Muslim village was a man named Dominic who had left his job as a lab technician at the University of Sierra Leone in order to bring the gospel to a people who are trapped in a syncretistic world of witch doctors, animism, Islam and folk religion. For over a year, he and his family lived on the concrete floor of a small schoolhouse until the locals pushed him out into the borders of the community.

Eventually, Dominic built a home and signaled to the village that he was committed to staying, to preaching, to living the gospel before their very eyes and loving them into the Kingdom of Heaven. Dominic and his family have made sacrifices that both humbled and inspired me. He is desperately alone ministering 23 miles, through the thick jungle, to the closest church in the region. And he has surrendered every comfort his family once knew in the city of Freeport. During our meal after worship, Dominic’s wife removed the bare chicken bones from my plate and placed them on her own to try to remove anything I might have missed.

But there was laughter and there was joy. There was vibrant worship, and abundant fruit from the labor.

In the years since Dominic first made the journey to these people, the local Muslim Chief has given permission for parents to allow their children to become Christians. When we preached at Dominic’s church the following morning, this same Chief made his first appearance at the worship service. The village’s Muslim Treasurer asked for our prayers simply because “the prayers of Christians are powerful.” The congregation Dominic shepherds is full of young faces who signal a change sweeping through the jungle, a new era when the demonic powers of Secret Societies, spells, and spirits are finally broken. An age in which the Spirit of the living God comes to set the prisoners free, casts out all fear, and allows the people of Sierra Leone to finally cry out “Abba, Father.”

There is no darkness in this world through which the gospel cannot shine.

Skittle or Brothers? The metaphors of Refugees

The Trump campaign and twitter have been interesting bedfellows this election cycle. Most recently, it was Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr. who has caused the uproar. In a tweet sent earlier in the week, Trump, Jr. posted an image through which an analogy was drawn between refugees and a bowl of skittles, asking if “I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?” Responses to the tweet came swiftly as thousands took to their phones in order to tweet pictures of refugees with the hash-tag #skittle. One of the most famous was the tweet posted by the Skittles corporation. 

The response from Skittles raised an important issue – metaphors matter. They matter because they shape us at a subconscious level. They work under the surface, offering guidance and informing an implicit narrative made explicit by images and words that complete a story that lacks all the details. Whether we verbalize them or not, metaphors play a vital role in our everyday lives. Which is why Obama’s move to employ his own metaphor was, perhaps, the best response he could level against Trump, Jr.’s tweet.    

During a United Nations summit meeting on the refugee crisis, Obama shared a moving letter he had received from a 6- year old boy named Alex. Making reference to the infamous picture of a wounded child refugee sitting in the back of an ambulance, the letter asked simply, if Obama could help the young boy receive the refugee as a bother. A video produced and released by the White House outlines the touching story. In the letter Alex wrote,

“Dear President Obama, remember the boy who was picked up by the ambulance in Syria? Can you please go get him and bring him to our home … we’ll be waiting for you guys with flags flowers and balloons. We will give him a family and he will be our brother.”

Skittles or siblings? Junk-food or family? Poison or brother?

Metaphors matter.

 

 

 

The Pursuing God

“Jesus reveals a God who comes after us, who is on the prowl, hunting down his world for reconciliation. And the question we’re left with is not whether we’ve been good enough, jumped high enough, or sought hard enough…The question is, do we want to be found.” – The Pursuing God

I first met Josh Butler at Multnomah Seminary in the early 2000’s. At the time I was working part-time in the admissions office while working through an MDiv. Josh had called with some interest in enrolling but had a number of questions before taking the plunge. We agreed to meet for lunch and talk through his concerns.

I liked Josh immediately. If you have read either of his books then you know how passionate and theologically profound he is. Even in his pre-seminary days, Josh drew me into deep conversations that afternoon about culture, missions, the arts, and even amillennialism. Thankfully, within a few short months, we were studying together.

In seminary, Josh was ambitious and hungry to grow both spiritually and intellectually. He asked hard questions. It surprised very few of us when his first book, The Skeletons in God’s Closet, finally hit the bookstores. With a whimsical and pastoral tone, that book tackled questions of God’s’ wrath, the existence of Hell, and the Canaanite genocide. Appropriately, it was met with applause, and his newest work is sure to receive equally as much.

In The Pursuing God, Butler sets out to make a case for “the hound of Heaven” who is not waiting anxiously for His children to come find him, but is instead, actively pursuing them at every turn. In contrast to popular expressions of spiritual formation that urge followers to engage in a constant “search for God”, Butler pulls back the pages of scripture to reveal a more accurate picture of a Father who leaves Heaven in order to bring his children home.

Along the way, Josh walks us through a myriad of theological minefields including the crucifixion, divine anger, sacrifice, human suffering and the trinity. And he does so in the same manner that worked so well in in his first book. While refusing to back away from the theological issues that many of us try so hard to avoid, Butler invites us into a conversation through his writing voice which is, first and foremost, pastoral. With a combination of excellent biblical exegesis, personal story, and a conversational tone, Josh’s book made me feel as if we were sitting in a coffee shop again, talking about a recent Metzger lecture, or the songs I heard him play the night before in a local bar. Josh isn’t writing to show off his theological chops (which he certainly has), he is writing to lead you closer to the God he knows.

If there was a shortcoming in the book, it would be that the chapters were often too brief. I wanted more. While the brevity often worked well to sustain the pace of the book, much of material felt like I was getting a fly-over. There is enough material to make a clear and effective case for his thesis, but often too little for those who will enter these pages with an analytical itch that needs to be scratched. Defending the exclusiveness of Christ in under 10 pages is a virtually insurmountable task for any theologian.

This is not to suggest that the work is somehow “theology light.” It is in fact, quite the opposite. Josh’s explanation of recapitulation, biblical metaphors, and his understanding of ancient near east culture peels back the biblical narrative and invites us all to see a familiar story with a fresh new perspective. Take a glance at the endnotes filled with names like Wright, Newbigin, and Augustine and you will quickly see that Josh has done plenty of homework, and it shows.

And if there was one more thing that I wanted more of as I read Josh’s book, it would have been a more pointed discussion of the “theology behind the theology.” When Butler pits “us pursuing God” versus “God pursuing us”, he isn’t merely offering a slight adjustment of perspective. Josh’s suggestion is a fundamental paradigm shift for anyone willing to dive in. Those who regularly teach that “God must be found” are not ignorant of the opposing viewpoint, they just fundamentally disagree. If Josh’s book was more concerned about fighting theological battles and less concerned about leading people to Jesus (which thankfully, it is not) frightening words like Arminianism and Calvinism might have appeared between its pages. Admittedly, including those would have been a deathblow to the text, and I am grateful that Josh has chosen a much more whimsical approach to his writing.

To be clear, Josh has written one of the most accessible books on Reformed theology drafted in recent years.  His explanation of covenant theology, the sovereignty of God, the eucharist, cultural renewal and the unified story of God’s redemption are presented without the use of language that has become weighed down by decades of caricature and religious baggage. But it is more subtle than blatant, adding to, instead of taking from, his central thesis that God is radically for his children and on a mission to bring his orphans home.    

In the end, this is Josh Butler at his best. Taking theology from the high shelf and feeding it to the masses in ways that are both attractive and digestible. If you are anything like me, you too are prone to hiding, tempted to spend each day searching for fig leaves that will cover your nakedness, always anxious that God might discover we are all frauds at some level. Josh’s book offers an invitation to step out of the shadows and be found.

It is frightening, but there is freedom to be found. Take the invitation.

The Second Coming

2,000 years is a long time to wait. So long in fact that I humbly admit that the return of Jesus scarcely crosses my mind. When I am confronted by it in the Scriptures, in ways so matter-of-fact and so full of certainty, I cannot help at times to scoff at the wishful hopes of persecuted disciples left longing for the impossible to be true.

This is not to say that I disbelieve the validity of Jesus’ physical and bodily return to Earth. It is, in fact, a cornerstone of my faith. It is written on nearly every page of the New Testament and is foreshadowed throughout the Old Testament where the Messiah is repeatedly described as the one who will “rule forever on Davids throne” (Is. 9:7; Ps. 89:4). It is the climactic end to the entire story of human history depicted in the book of Revelation and the very promise of Jesus himself who spoke of the things to come “when I return in my glory” (Luke 9:26). It is the declaration of two angles who stood among the bewildered apostles as they starred at the sky through which Jesus ascended to the Father:

“Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11-12).  

But 2,000 years is a long time to wait. 

My complacency about Christ’s return has often been made worse by the seemingly endless cycle of theologically inept speculations of the Left Behind variety and its facsimiles. While I admit it is shallow to allow my theology to be so reactionary, it is honest to confess that the more Jesus’ return is reduced to popularized fiction, the less I want anything to do with it. But it is too my demise.

I have been working my way in the past month through Paul’s letters to the church at Thessalonica. In them he makes numerous references to Christ’s return, arguably more here than anywhere else in his writing. But as I have read the letters in their entirety I have been struck again at how easily we (“we” being the church, the academy, preachers, commentaries, etc…) have often reduced Paul’s message to a theological argument about the details of timing and circumstance rather than his intended focus on hope in the midst of suffering. Paul writes,   

“For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words” (4: 16-18)

If you have heard this verse before, most likely it has been in reference to some irrelevant debate about the rapture, or the millennium, or the tribulation or a beast, a dragon, the antichrist or the perpetually mysterious “666.” Maybe you have heard this verse as I once did  in a conference during my teenage years in which I remember little except the evil’s of Nancy Reagan’s New Age leanings and the Satanic mission of the United Nations. 

Today, I can hear Paul with greater clarity and can read his words within the context they were first delivered, to a persecuted people desperate for justice, for freedom, for life and for hope. The promise of Christ’s return is not merely an opiate to get them through the day or a manipulative ploy to create fearful converts longing to escape Hell by the skin of their teeth. The promise that Jesus will stand once again on the soil of this planet is a deep and powerful reminder that the King is coming back to right everything that is wrong once and for all. No evil will go unpunished. No righteousness will go unrewarded. “Hold on” Paul tells us. “Hold on.” 

But 2,000 years is a long to wait, and Paul knows that we will inevitably grow weary, and our patience will wane. This is perhaps why he reminds us of Abraham who waited decades for a child that never seemed to come. So cynical did he and his wife grow that they eventually laughed in God’s face. Yet, we are told that despite all the evidence to the contrary, Abraham continued to hold on for dear life for God to make good on his word.  

“Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed…he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised” (Rom. 4:18-21)

Our King is coming. And while you wait, prepare his Kingdom. No matter how many years we wait, eternity will be infinitely longer. Hold on.  

 

God of War

     I only met Ben Patterson once. We were together for a weekend in Houston taking part in a private gathering of Christian educators who assembled to discuss campus evangelism. We only talked briefly, and I am certain he does not remember my name or my face. At the time my oldest son was nearly 10, and we were well into the storm of issues that converge on a family raising a child with learning disabilities. I did not know anything about Ben’s story or the fact that, he too, had a son with disabilities, but I do remember that Ben was particularly humble, easy-going, and peaceful to be around. I sensed nothing of my own paralyzing anxiety in him that weekend. Which is what made his article “Holy War Within” all the more powerful to me. It is a piece that Patterson first penned back in 1999, almost a decade and a half before we met. The contrast between the man poured out on the pages so many years ago and the one I met in person gave undeniable evidence to the reality of his battle with God in the trenches of honest prayer.

     Below is just a sampling of passages from the original script. It is raw, it is honest, and ultimately, it is sentence upon sentence of the most freeing words I have read in months. I encourage you to read beyond this blog and digest the entire column by following the link at the end. I hope doing so grants you the same measure of hope I received in the reminder that wrestling with God is good for the soul.

“Both anger and tenderness are forms of passion. As is prayer. God doesn’t mind our anger. He even relishes it, if it drives us to him instead of away from him. Better an outburst than a theologically correct and spiritually pallid rationale, and a dangling conversation.”

“You can speak your mind with God and not be afraid that he will blow things out of proportion. He already knows what’s inside. But we need to let it out for the dialogue to proceed.”

“If our faith in God cannot be bewildered and perplexed, then we have domesticated him, and our faith is no longer in him but in our religious systems. Beware: when you handle holy things often, your hands and heart can become cauterized and you are no longer burned and jolted by what you hear.”

“There is no pain or perplexity so heavy that they outweigh his glory. And it would seem that both are necessary for us to see it.”

“I’ve come to believe that God is not nearly as fastidious in matters of faith as we may like him to be, and that when faith moves mountains, there is bound to be rubble.”

 

Read the full article: “Holy War Within”

The Deliverance

Last night I gathered around a large dinner table to share a meal with missionaries. We gathered to celebrate and we gathered to share stories. Some had been lifetime servants who ministered on the field for decades, others of us were relative rookies, serving now for just a few years. But all of us were bound by a common commitment to the Great Commission and the God who has called us to bring light into the darkness.

Early into the meal our host urged us to share tales of God’s deliverance. As so much of the work our organization engages in centers on ministering in the Muslim world, stories flowed freely. There was a story about a family being separated during their emergency evacuation at the start of the Egyptian Revolution. There were tales of narrow escapes in darkened alleyways, corruption, bribes, rejected visas, missing passports, angelic appearances at security checkpoints, lengthy interrogations at government offices and the hard lessons learned about being duped by local cab drivers. And there was much laughter as well over adventures in foreign airports, translation debacles, and exploding stoves.

Above it all, God took center stage as testimony after testimony highlighted the providential care of his children who have been willing to sacrifice everything to follow his lead. I was surrounded by heroes of the faith whose names will never be known to the majority of the world. People who are so great precisely because they care so little for their own fame. Faithful men and women who have thrown their lot in with Jesus and found life because they are willing to lose it all for Him.

But there was a particularly sobering moment when the host of our gathering helped us to pause for a moment and remember those moments when “deliverance” in any sort of temporal way, never seemed to come. We thought about brothers and sisters who had fallen- through sickness, through tragedy, through persecution. There was silence until one of the missionaries reminded us that our temporal notions of God’s deliverance pale in comparison to the ultimate deliverance of a new life.

“God’s true deliverance is the resurrection,” he mused.

In many other contexts his reflection would have come across as particularly trite. Mere sentiment akin to the notion that no matter the tragedy “God works it all out for our good.” True, but often insincere.

Instead, surrounding by this great cloud of witnesses, uttered by a man who has sacrificed much to minister the gospel in foreign lands for his entire life, the words had a weight I had not felt for quite some time. A truth so real that it seemed as if it hung above the table for us to touch, taste and gaze upon. Especially in this season of Lent, during our collective pilgrimage towards the cross, his statement pushed the reality of the resurrection one inch closer on its journey from my head to my heart. God is indeed a promise keeper, unstoppable in his ability to bring to fruition his glorious commitment to make all things new.

Jesus taught us to pray “deliver us from evil” and pray in earnest we will. But we pray as a people deeply aware that whether that deliverance comes today, tomorrow, this week or this year, God promises that deliverance always comes, and has come already.

“But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I’ll probably never fully understand. We’re not all going to die – but we are all going to be changed. You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet, and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes – it’s over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we’ll all be changed.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52, The Message)