WHERE WAS GOD WHEN THE TSUMANI HIT?
The devastating tsunamis that have hit the nations surrounding the East Indian Ocean have raised the old question—where was God when this happened. This is not the first time people have objected to the goodness of God based on a natural disaster.
Voltaire objected to the goodness of God by the reality of human suffering. Voltaire lived in the 18th century. During his lifetime, a massive earthquake hit Lisbon, Portugal on a Sunday morning, killing thousands of people while at church. Musing on the reality of this awful death and suffering, Voltaire made this famous statement:
If God is good, then He is not all-powerful, and…If God all-powerful, then He is not all-good.
If God is good, says Voltaire, then He had no power to stop the earthquake and spare those people from their suffering, and if God is all-powerful, and He allowed the earthquake, well, He can’t be all-good!
What Christians have said—what the Bible affirms again and again is that God is all good, and all-powerful. But—is there any evidence for a God of love in a world like this: a world of holocausts, terrorists, starvation, AIDS and Ebola?
The #1 question people would ask God (according to a Barna Poll): “Why is there pain and suffering in the world?”
CLUES THAT POINT TO THE GOODNESS OF GOD
CLUE #1: Maybe we aren’t as smart as we think!
Many times people object to the idea of a God of love in a world of suffering by saying, “I can’t imagine of a God that just stands by and lets such suffering happen.” Maybe the clue is in those words, I can’t imagine. Maybe we’re not as smart as we think we are.
Consider this story: a park ranger is making his way through the forest when he comes on a bear caught in a trap. The poor creature is writhing in pain, and the ranger wants to set him free. He approaches carefully and examines the trap. Unfortunately, to set him free, he will have to put more pressure on the bear’s leg before the mechanism will open. He does that and the bear, knowing no better, thinks the ranger just wants to hurt him more. He lashes out, and the ranger ducks just in time.
So the ranger gets out a dart gun to knock out the bear to set him free. He shoots, the painful dart hits, and if bears can think, he’d think this as he passed out: “Not only does he want to make me suffer, now he’s killing me!”
Now would you agree with me, that the ranger had nothing but the bear’s interest in mind? Maybe the bear isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. And maybe we aren’t as smart as we think we are either.
Isaiah 55:8-9 says: “‘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.’”
CLUE #2: The fact that we object to suffering/evil in the world points to objective right and wrong—evidence of God’s reality
“Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe” is the title of chapter one of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. He points out that everybody believes in right and wrong—everybody. Nobody ever justifies something because it’s evil, but because they say it’s good. Even Nazis (Lewis wrote during World War II) say that it’s good to conquer so-called inferior races.
Lewis asks, where did we get the notion of good and evil? Wherever it came from, it’s universal. Basic morality seems written into our soul’s code. Who wrote that code? The very fact that we object to suffering and evil in the world points to the reality objective right and wrong, which itself is evidence of God’s reality—and His goodness and love. But we need more clues.
CLUE #3: Sometimes present evil/suffering leads to long-term good
Homework is suffering. Taking the time to read, study, write, memorize, is much harder than watching reruns of “Seinfeld” and surfing the net. But taking the time to do the homework leads to not only better grades, but also a better, more informed and rounded person.
Our experience tells us that many times, present suffering leads to long-term good. Athletes tell us, “No pain, no gain.” Four years ago, when I first got on an elliptaziod (that’s the exercise machine that mimics the motion of cross-country skiing), I thought I was going to die after five minutes. Today I can do thirty minutes, no problem. My blood pressure is down and my tone is way up. Present suffering can often lead to long-term good—if we are willing to wait long enough.
And note this: the cross of Jesus is the #1 of example of this. His suffering, the Bible says, led to spiritual rescue of all that believe. No suffering, no salvation!
CLUE #4: Wisdom often comes from suffering
Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft describes watching his seven-year-old daughter trying to thread a needle. Several times she stabbed her thumb as she tried again and again. He was sorely tempted to intervene and help her—especially when she drew blood—but he held back. Finally she threaded it and turned to see her father. “Look what I did, daddy!” She was thrilled.
The point is: her sense of understanding and even joy would have been lost if her father had intervened to relieve of her pain. Now could that be true on a worldwide scale as well?
This was true even for Jesus! It says in Hebrews 5:8: “Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered…” Even Jesus grew (in terms of His humanity) through the means of suffering. Suffering can be a great teacher, one of the best teachers of all.
The ultimate example of suffering is Job (Job 42:1-6). Job never tries to tie up the issue of why we suffer in a neat package, but does emphasize that suffering causes us to grow. Listen to Job’s words near the end of the book, in Job 46:1-6:
Then Job replied to the LORD: "I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted. You asked, `Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?' Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. "You said, `Listen now, and I will speak; I will question you, and you shall answer me.' My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes."
Job didn’t get all the answers he’d hoped for, but he did come into a place of greater peace and understanding than he’d ever known before.
God’s willingness to permit suffering, it seems to me, at least in part, has to do with His desire that we learn and grow—and the reality is that pain is a great teacher.
CLUE #5: Sometimes good is brought forth from the presence of evil.
In the 70s and 80s, one of the highest rated TV shows was Dallas. It told the story of the Ewing family. At the center was J.R. Ewing, a charming snake—the man America loved to hate.
In the last episode of the show, JR sees what his family and friends would have been like if he’d never lived—kind of a “It’s A Wonderful Life” moment. To his astonishment, he discovered that most of them would have been worse people if he’d never lived. Standing up to him had given them character.
Could it be that God allows a degree of evil in the world so as to draw out good in others to confront that evil? To put it another way, how could anyone be a saint if there’s no sin to fight—in yourself and in the world? Sometimes great good is brought forth from the resisting the presence of evil. Suffering, evil and pain come in a bundle—a package deal.
CLUE #6: Sometimes pain, suffering and evil become the only ways we listen to needs of others and to things that really matter
One of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes is on “God’s megaphone”: God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
A painless world would be a dull and stupefying world. It would also be a world in which we have little need to heed things of the greatest importance—like God’s reality and claim on our lives. I imagine that if I asked for a show of hands, many people here would say that God got their attention through suffering—more immediately than any other way.
CLUE #7: A world with immediate reward and punishment would be a world without faith or freedom
Many complain about this world. Like Voltaire, they find fault with God or they reject God’s existence based on the reality of suffering and evil in this world.
But let’s imagine that God made a very different world. In this world, doing good is immediately rewarded and doing evil is immediately punished. So if you walk a LOL (little old lady) across the street, you immediately find a dollar bill on the ground. If you kick your dog, you immediately get a cold. And so on and so on. The bigger the good thing you do the better the reward. Cure cancer, you win the lottery. Kill your neighbor, fire and brimstone fall from the sky on your house.
God could have created a world like this. But he didn’t. Instead He created a world in which the connection between the good (and evil) that we do and the reward (or punishment) have the appearance of randomness. Sometimes we are rewarded immediately. Sometimes years later. Sometimes the reward is on the other side of death. The same goes for evil. For years, the authorities sought Dr. Josef Mengele, a Nazi concentration camp doctor, who performed hideous experiments on camp internees. Then it was discovered that he’d died peacefully in Bolivia. Many felt that justice hadn’t been served. They didn’t count of what happens after death!
A world with immediate rewards and punishments may reduce to near zero the degree of suffering, but it would be at the price of the end of human freedom, and the end of real faith. No faith is involved if there is immediate positive and negative effects for every action we take. Again, God uses the consequences of our actions, even the ones that cause suffering to give us both freedom and to allow us to have real faith, not just fearful submission.
CLUE #8: The cross is the proof that God cares about suffering
Hebrews 2:14-15 says this:
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil--and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
When we lived in New Hampshire, a UNH student asked to interview me for a paper she was doing on the holocaust. She asked me, what impact the holocaust had on my faith? I answered her that the holocaust demonstrates to me that I could not believe in God except for the cross of Jesus.
How could we believe in a God of justice and love who was content to standby and allow human suffering to go on forever unabated and just watch? But in the cross, God enters the arena of human suffering at its worst: a good man put do death in a horrible way by crooked leaders.
How many times have I stood by the beds of dying saints, often in agonizing pain, who have taken comfort in the fact that Jesus also died in pain?
Hebrews 2 says that Jesus got inside the pain-prison of this life as well and took the best shots suffering and evil could dish out. God did not—does not—stand by and watch suffering from the comfort of heaven. He got dirty—and bloody—in human suffering.
CLUE #9: The real mystery of suffering is why we don’t do something about it
In Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus says that the real test of a believer is their entering into the relief of the pain and suffering of the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the poorly clothed, the sick and the imprisoned.
I saw a cartoon once. Two frogs are sitting on a lily pad. One frog says, “I’d like to ask God a question. When is he going to do something about all the suffering in the world?” The other frog says, “I’m just afraid God’s going to ask me the same question!”
CLUE #10: Eternity puts all things into perspective
“Wait till you get to heaven” as the only answer the problem of suffering strikes me as a cop-out. Yet you can scarcely turn page in the Bible without reference to the life to come. One thing we learn about suffering in life is that time often gives us a better perspective on suffering. So much more eternity. St. Teresa of Avila had this to say on suffering: “In the light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth will seem no more serious than one night in a inconvenient hotel.” I thought of this one day when I was home from college. My parents had taken all the things from my childhood—toys and such—and put them in a closet. When I saw them, they were like from another life. They had seemed so precious to me—but now they were so childish. From eternity’s perspective, not only will the things precious to us now seem silly, but also the things so terrible to us will seem trivial. As passing as one night in a bad motel.
People ask me sometimes, what do you say to someone who’s just lost a loved one. What answer can you give them at a time like that? My answer is—at a time like that, most people aren’t looking for an answer. They just want you to be there. At the end of Job, God doesn’t answer all his questions about why he and his family had suffered so much. He basically told Job it was over his head—that he couldn’t possibly understand any answer He could give Him. But what God can do, that we can understand, is what Jesus did at Lazarus’ tomb. He can weep with us. When we want answers, He offers something better: an Answerer. From the depths of a Nazi death camp, Corrie ten Boom wrote, “No matter how deep our darkness, He is deeper still.”
He is there: He is gassed at Dachau. He is crushed at the World Trade Center. He is enslaved in Sudan. He is poverty-stricken in Thailand. He is oppressed in Shanghai. He is shot at in Tikrit. He is crucified on Golgotha. He is swept out to sea in Sri Lanka. And is there for you as well, in your grief, in your pain, in your loss. He is there.
Monday, December 27, 2004
Friday, December 24, 2004
From today's Evangelical Outpost:
http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/001088.html#more
Hail Mary, Full of Grace:An Evangelical's Reappraisal of Mary
Earlier this year, The Passion of the Christ sparked a great deal of controversy, shocking even believers with its realistic scenes of torture. But one of the most stunning scenes of the movie was one of the least violent. As Jesus stumbles and falls while carrying the cross, an inconsolable Mary watches and reflects on a similar memory from his childhood.
Being a parent myself I empathized with her sense of helplessness and discovered that I had never really thought of her in this way. I was struck by the realization that Jesus wasn’t just the son of God; he was Mary’s son too.
I also realized that I suffer from a mild case of Maryphobia – the fear that any appreciation of Mary will be viewed as a sign that I'm a closet Catholic. Like many evangelicals, my renunciation of Marian theology causes me to downplay the importance of Mary herself. Oddly, while we are quick to defend the virgin birth, we are often hesitant to praise the virgin mother. Even during Christmas we often pay more attention to the magi than we do to the woman who gave birth to our Savior.
How is this possible? How can we ignore one of the most incredible humans who every lived? How can we not be in awe of this woman when we realize she held God in her womb.
Consider for a moment what it must have been like for this Jewish virgin. At home in Nazareth, planning her wedding to a stout young carpenter, dreaming of the children they will have and the home they will make and then…the angel Gabriel appears in order to tell her she's been chosen to give birth to the Son of God.
And everything changes.
She dreams about the honor it will be to bring this child into the world…and then gives birth to him in a stable, surrounded by mules and visited by smelly shepherds.
She waits patiently for the day that he will change the world…and watches as he suffers and dies, hanging on a cross in Golgotha.
She thinks back to the visit by the angel and wonders how everything could go so wrong…and then he comes back, alive and unbroken.
She thanks God for her son’s return…and watches as He goes home to be with His Father.
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” said Mary, “for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.”
Indeed we should. As Gabriel told her, she had found favor with God. She should find favor with us evangelicals as well.
http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/001088.html#more
Hail Mary, Full of Grace:An Evangelical's Reappraisal of Mary
Earlier this year, The Passion of the Christ sparked a great deal of controversy, shocking even believers with its realistic scenes of torture. But one of the most stunning scenes of the movie was one of the least violent. As Jesus stumbles and falls while carrying the cross, an inconsolable Mary watches and reflects on a similar memory from his childhood.
Being a parent myself I empathized with her sense of helplessness and discovered that I had never really thought of her in this way. I was struck by the realization that Jesus wasn’t just the son of God; he was Mary’s son too.
I also realized that I suffer from a mild case of Maryphobia – the fear that any appreciation of Mary will be viewed as a sign that I'm a closet Catholic. Like many evangelicals, my renunciation of Marian theology causes me to downplay the importance of Mary herself. Oddly, while we are quick to defend the virgin birth, we are often hesitant to praise the virgin mother. Even during Christmas we often pay more attention to the magi than we do to the woman who gave birth to our Savior.
How is this possible? How can we ignore one of the most incredible humans who every lived? How can we not be in awe of this woman when we realize she held God in her womb.
Consider for a moment what it must have been like for this Jewish virgin. At home in Nazareth, planning her wedding to a stout young carpenter, dreaming of the children they will have and the home they will make and then…the angel Gabriel appears in order to tell her she's been chosen to give birth to the Son of God.
And everything changes.
She dreams about the honor it will be to bring this child into the world…and then gives birth to him in a stable, surrounded by mules and visited by smelly shepherds.
She waits patiently for the day that he will change the world…and watches as he suffers and dies, hanging on a cross in Golgotha.
She thinks back to the visit by the angel and wonders how everything could go so wrong…and then he comes back, alive and unbroken.
She thanks God for her son’s return…and watches as He goes home to be with His Father.
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” said Mary, “for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.”
Indeed we should. As Gabriel told her, she had found favor with God. She should find favor with us evangelicals as well.
“How to Live by Faith”
(Galatians 2:20)
January 16, 2005
What is faith? The Bible says—this is my paraphrase of Galatians 3:11--“The person living right before God does so on the basis of faith.” So faith is so very important. It’s not something we exercise once to become part of God’s family and then set on a shelf. If we’re following Jesus, it’s our way of life.
I’ll return to that passage later. What I want to communicate to you is that there’s hardly any more important issue for followers of Jesus to understand than faith. Faith is our way of life. But when we think about faith, we are prone to make two different kinds of errors. One is to think that faith is “believing the unbelievable”—that faith is a blind leap in the dark. The other is to make faith a kind of hollow agreement with certain doctrinal truths. Both miss the point. Let’s take those errors one at a time.
On the one hand, there is a tendency to think of faith as “believing the unbelievable.” It’s like saying, “Nobody in their right mind would believe this stuff, so we prove just how much faith we have by believing it anyway.” I think it was H.L. Menken who said, “There are some ideas so foolish only a theologian could believe them.”
In the 19th century there was a man from Denmark named Soren Kierkegaard. In many ways, Kierkegaard loved God and honored Christ, but he did popularize a phrase pretty that’s misleading: “leap of faith.” It makes it sound like faith is something to get to when you get to the end of your brain, faith means that you just have to jump blindly—a blind leap of faith in the dark.
On the other hand, for a lot of people, faith is simply agreeing to a stated truth. To “have faith” is to say that you agree with what the church teaches, or that you agree with a statement of faith. Faith becomes a kind of nod and a grunt. Millions of Americans think they are Christians based on this pygmy-sized idea of faith, and they aren’t.
Neither of these ideas do justice to what faith is—that is, faith as it’s presented in the Bible. In the Bible, faith is not a leap in the dark, or just an agreement that something is true. In the Bible, faith is immediate, consistent and relational trust in God and in His Son, Jesus Christ. You don’t have faith in a church or in certain doctrines; you have faith in God Himself.
That’s never clearer than in the ministry of Jesus. As we’ll see, Jesus was never shy about calling people to have faith in Him. Faith isn’t something you have about Jesus; faith has to really, truly, rest in Him to be real faith. It’s kind of like a drowning man: real faith in a life preserver means reaching out and holding on for dear life, not just agreement with the idea that life preservers are good things!
Over the next four weeks, we’re going to cover a lot of territory on this subject of faith. This is going to be a very practical study that just may change your life. We’ll talk about different types of faith, how to increase faith, and how faith needs to impact our daily lives.
But we need to build from a firm foundation. To me, a great place to start in one of my favorite passages, Galatians 2:20:
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
For Paul, this is what the life of a follower of Jesus Christ is all about now. This is a key verse. At the heart of it are the words, “I live by faith.” Many of you have memorized this verse. But what does it mean?
Notice how the verse zigzags between the past and the present. It starts with the past:
I have been crucified with Christ…
Then it comes to the present:
…and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God…
Then back to the past:
…who loved me and gave himself for me.
This gives us our first clue on how to live by faith:
1. Faith is grounded in real historical events—when God sent His Son into our world and especially when He went to the cross for us.
We don’t buy the “leap in the dark” approach to faith. There’s a leap, but it’s in the light with the eyes wide open.
On the one hand, the Bible tells us that faith always involves things you can’t see. (If you could see it, it wouldn’t be faith.) For example, 2 Corinthians 5:7 says, “we live by faith, not by sight.” And Hebrews 11 says over and over again that faith involves the unseen. But just because something is unseen doesn’t mean it’s irrational. Most of you have wireless (cellular) telephones. Can you see the sound of the person’s voice flying through the air? No? Does that make it crazy to believe that it does do that? Of course not. Just because you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean that it’s not there.
On the other hand, faith is never described as blind faith. 2 Peter 1:16 says,
We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
We have the firsthand testimony of many of the writers of Scripture for the key events that mark the supernatural intervention of God in our world. Beyond that, we have plenty of historical and archaeological that confirm the accounts of Scripture. Our faith never says, “Just shut up and accept this”—it says, “Go ahead, investigate, check it out.”
And the #1 event worth checking out is the weekend that changed the world—from the gruesome death of Jesus on Good Friday to His resurrection the following Sunday. That’s the event on which our faith stands.
Second,
2. Faith transcends time: by trusting in God and His promises, God takes the benefit of Jesus’ death on the cross 2000 years ago and applies it to us today.
OK—listen carefully. Since God is beyond time—He created time, after all--then when we trust Him, when we have faith in Him, that faith transcends time. That is how He is able to take our sins today and apply them to the cross of Jesus 2000 years ago.
A few years ago, I did a paraphrase of Galatians in my devotional time. Here’s Galatians 2:20 in Layne’s paraphrase, and it brings out the timeless dimension:
“The spiritual reality is this: when Christ was crucified, I was crucified with Him. I died there! That is, my sinful nature was dealt with on the cross. What’s left now is no longer the old me, but Christ is living in me. The life I live in this body now I live by faith (not law!) in the Son of God, who loved me and gave up His life for me.”
In faith, we connect up with the timeless dimension of God’s wonders. Faith goes beyond the immediate and the seen to the unseen. In a sense, faith makes visible in our lives the unseen blessings and care of God.
One very tangible way that we experience this is in the realm of God’s provision and finances. One of the lengthiest discussions of faith by Jesus is in the context of trusting God as provider—you’ll find it in Matthew 6, and that will be the last message in this series. I am convinced that trusting God for financial provision is the cutting edge of real faith development for American Christians today. I say American Christians for the simple reason that in many places around the world, where there is so much less, our sisters and brothers in Jesus have mastered this area of faith far better than we rich Americans have.
But in America, the combination of abundance and the emphasis our society places on self-reliance—a good emphasis in many ways—has made us not especially good at this all-important spiritual discipline of relying on God for His provision. I’m hoping to help us all grow in this dimension over these next few weeks.
3. Faith transforms us: by faith, Christ comes to live within us.
Let’s hear the whole verse again to get the idea:
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Now there’s another verse I want to put alongside that one that will help us flesh this out, Galatians 3:11:
Clearly no one is justified before God by the law, because, "The righteous will live by faith."
Both verses have this key expression: “live by faith.” In Galatians 3:11, Paul is quoting the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk (3:4), one of the most quoted passages of the OT cited in the NT—here as well as in Romans and in Hebrews.
Paul is contending with a false notion about how a person is made right with God. Is it by keeping the OT law? No, says Paul. The law was just a tutor, teaching us about God’s holiness, our sin and our need for a savior, the Messiah. Faith is what plugs us into God’s grace.
But more than that. Paul is also telling us how a redeemed person, a follower of Jesus, lives. He lives by faith. Not just at the beginning of the Christian life, but all the way, all the time.
In Galatians 2:20, it’s clear that this kind of faith is not “once-for-all” but a continuing kind of faith. Paul speaks of being “crucified with Christ”—that the old Paul died on the cross, and now Jesus lives in him. That’s past, and that’s a done deal. If you know Christ, this is signed, sealed and delivered.
But that’s not all that Paul says:
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Right now (not in the past, not in the distant future), the life I live is “by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
I want to bring out three aspects of what Paul says here about faith, that’s at the foundation of what Biblical faith is—
1. Real faith is intensely personal.
2. It’s faith in the Son of God—who loved me
3. It’s faith in the Son of God—who gave Himself for me.
1. Real faith is intensely personal.
In this one verse, Paul says “I” or “me” no less than seven times. Real faith grips a person. It’s not cool and collect, but passionate. It digs down deep within you.
John went as a missionary to a British colony, but was completely ineffective. His life was frustrating and he felt he was missing something, but could never put his finger on it. He’d been trained in a fine school of theology, and knew the best techniques, but he ended up washing out and going back home.
Dejected, he went moped around for a few months and then, at the last minute accepted an invitation to a Bible study. When he arrived, someone was reading a long passage from a book. He listened as the writer described a life like his own. Later, he wrote that at that prayer meeting, his heart was “strangely warmed” as he finally got it clear: faith comes from God as a gift from God that each and every person must exercise in joy in what Christ has done for us on the cross. This washed out missionary went on to be one of the most effective evangelists and church planters of his time—John Wesley, the founder of Methodism.
2. It’s faith in the Son of God—who loved me
Love is never passionless or impersonal. Love means an investment of time, money, and emotional commitment.
Faith is never a longing stare at a cold, hard heaven, but a passionate response to a loving God. The way Jesus lives shows us how God’s love works. This is a Jesus who cries at a friend’s tomb, a Jesus who says, “I’m leaving you my joy.” This is the Jesus who touched lepers and who loved the loveless and the outcaste. This is the Jesus who made time for little kids, and was just as pleased to teach Mary of Bethany as the whole crowd on a hillside. This is the Jesus who stripped off his cloak and got down on His knees to wash His disciples’ feet.
Seen this way, faith is just love’s return. It’s the least you can offer in thanks to His love.
But Paul takes it one step further:
3. It’s faith in the Son of God—who gave Himself for me.
This is the center of the bull’s-eye for the faith of a Christian: Jesus’ death on the cross.
He gave Himself—on the cross. That’s the extreme and ultimate expression of love. Paul writes in Romans 5:6-7:
6You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
My faith is not just in gentle, loving Jesus. It’s also—and especially—in Jesus crucified, Jesus the bloody. The cross is in the crosshairs of the faith we profess. We make a huge mistake if we think our faith is centered anywhere else. There He paid for my sins. There’s where I was made right with God. On the cross. That’s where Jesus paid the price and began the rollback of the reign of darkness and sin.
When I trust God, I trust in what He did on the cross, and that what He did there has the power to change me now and change my eternity. And faith is another name for that trust.
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
This is a faith that is always, every time, life changing. Not just once, but continually. Will you journey with me as we explore the dimensions of faith? I hope so. Let’s pray.
Prayer
End
(Galatians 2:20)
January 16, 2005
What is faith? The Bible says—this is my paraphrase of Galatians 3:11--“The person living right before God does so on the basis of faith.” So faith is so very important. It’s not something we exercise once to become part of God’s family and then set on a shelf. If we’re following Jesus, it’s our way of life.
I’ll return to that passage later. What I want to communicate to you is that there’s hardly any more important issue for followers of Jesus to understand than faith. Faith is our way of life. But when we think about faith, we are prone to make two different kinds of errors. One is to think that faith is “believing the unbelievable”—that faith is a blind leap in the dark. The other is to make faith a kind of hollow agreement with certain doctrinal truths. Both miss the point. Let’s take those errors one at a time.
On the one hand, there is a tendency to think of faith as “believing the unbelievable.” It’s like saying, “Nobody in their right mind would believe this stuff, so we prove just how much faith we have by believing it anyway.” I think it was H.L. Menken who said, “There are some ideas so foolish only a theologian could believe them.”
In the 19th century there was a man from Denmark named Soren Kierkegaard. In many ways, Kierkegaard loved God and honored Christ, but he did popularize a phrase pretty that’s misleading: “leap of faith.” It makes it sound like faith is something to get to when you get to the end of your brain, faith means that you just have to jump blindly—a blind leap of faith in the dark.
On the other hand, for a lot of people, faith is simply agreeing to a stated truth. To “have faith” is to say that you agree with what the church teaches, or that you agree with a statement of faith. Faith becomes a kind of nod and a grunt. Millions of Americans think they are Christians based on this pygmy-sized idea of faith, and they aren’t.
Neither of these ideas do justice to what faith is—that is, faith as it’s presented in the Bible. In the Bible, faith is not a leap in the dark, or just an agreement that something is true. In the Bible, faith is immediate, consistent and relational trust in God and in His Son, Jesus Christ. You don’t have faith in a church or in certain doctrines; you have faith in God Himself.
That’s never clearer than in the ministry of Jesus. As we’ll see, Jesus was never shy about calling people to have faith in Him. Faith isn’t something you have about Jesus; faith has to really, truly, rest in Him to be real faith. It’s kind of like a drowning man: real faith in a life preserver means reaching out and holding on for dear life, not just agreement with the idea that life preservers are good things!
Over the next four weeks, we’re going to cover a lot of territory on this subject of faith. This is going to be a very practical study that just may change your life. We’ll talk about different types of faith, how to increase faith, and how faith needs to impact our daily lives.
But we need to build from a firm foundation. To me, a great place to start in one of my favorite passages, Galatians 2:20:
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
For Paul, this is what the life of a follower of Jesus Christ is all about now. This is a key verse. At the heart of it are the words, “I live by faith.” Many of you have memorized this verse. But what does it mean?
Notice how the verse zigzags between the past and the present. It starts with the past:
I have been crucified with Christ…
Then it comes to the present:
…and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God…
Then back to the past:
…who loved me and gave himself for me.
This gives us our first clue on how to live by faith:
1. Faith is grounded in real historical events—when God sent His Son into our world and especially when He went to the cross for us.
We don’t buy the “leap in the dark” approach to faith. There’s a leap, but it’s in the light with the eyes wide open.
On the one hand, the Bible tells us that faith always involves things you can’t see. (If you could see it, it wouldn’t be faith.) For example, 2 Corinthians 5:7 says, “we live by faith, not by sight.” And Hebrews 11 says over and over again that faith involves the unseen. But just because something is unseen doesn’t mean it’s irrational. Most of you have wireless (cellular) telephones. Can you see the sound of the person’s voice flying through the air? No? Does that make it crazy to believe that it does do that? Of course not. Just because you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean that it’s not there.
On the other hand, faith is never described as blind faith. 2 Peter 1:16 says,
We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
We have the firsthand testimony of many of the writers of Scripture for the key events that mark the supernatural intervention of God in our world. Beyond that, we have plenty of historical and archaeological that confirm the accounts of Scripture. Our faith never says, “Just shut up and accept this”—it says, “Go ahead, investigate, check it out.”
And the #1 event worth checking out is the weekend that changed the world—from the gruesome death of Jesus on Good Friday to His resurrection the following Sunday. That’s the event on which our faith stands.
Second,
2. Faith transcends time: by trusting in God and His promises, God takes the benefit of Jesus’ death on the cross 2000 years ago and applies it to us today.
OK—listen carefully. Since God is beyond time—He created time, after all--then when we trust Him, when we have faith in Him, that faith transcends time. That is how He is able to take our sins today and apply them to the cross of Jesus 2000 years ago.
A few years ago, I did a paraphrase of Galatians in my devotional time. Here’s Galatians 2:20 in Layne’s paraphrase, and it brings out the timeless dimension:
“The spiritual reality is this: when Christ was crucified, I was crucified with Him. I died there! That is, my sinful nature was dealt with on the cross. What’s left now is no longer the old me, but Christ is living in me. The life I live in this body now I live by faith (not law!) in the Son of God, who loved me and gave up His life for me.”
In faith, we connect up with the timeless dimension of God’s wonders. Faith goes beyond the immediate and the seen to the unseen. In a sense, faith makes visible in our lives the unseen blessings and care of God.
One very tangible way that we experience this is in the realm of God’s provision and finances. One of the lengthiest discussions of faith by Jesus is in the context of trusting God as provider—you’ll find it in Matthew 6, and that will be the last message in this series. I am convinced that trusting God for financial provision is the cutting edge of real faith development for American Christians today. I say American Christians for the simple reason that in many places around the world, where there is so much less, our sisters and brothers in Jesus have mastered this area of faith far better than we rich Americans have.
But in America, the combination of abundance and the emphasis our society places on self-reliance—a good emphasis in many ways—has made us not especially good at this all-important spiritual discipline of relying on God for His provision. I’m hoping to help us all grow in this dimension over these next few weeks.
3. Faith transforms us: by faith, Christ comes to live within us.
Let’s hear the whole verse again to get the idea:
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Now there’s another verse I want to put alongside that one that will help us flesh this out, Galatians 3:11:
Clearly no one is justified before God by the law, because, "The righteous will live by faith."
Both verses have this key expression: “live by faith.” In Galatians 3:11, Paul is quoting the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk (3:4), one of the most quoted passages of the OT cited in the NT—here as well as in Romans and in Hebrews.
Paul is contending with a false notion about how a person is made right with God. Is it by keeping the OT law? No, says Paul. The law was just a tutor, teaching us about God’s holiness, our sin and our need for a savior, the Messiah. Faith is what plugs us into God’s grace.
But more than that. Paul is also telling us how a redeemed person, a follower of Jesus, lives. He lives by faith. Not just at the beginning of the Christian life, but all the way, all the time.
In Galatians 2:20, it’s clear that this kind of faith is not “once-for-all” but a continuing kind of faith. Paul speaks of being “crucified with Christ”—that the old Paul died on the cross, and now Jesus lives in him. That’s past, and that’s a done deal. If you know Christ, this is signed, sealed and delivered.
But that’s not all that Paul says:
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Right now (not in the past, not in the distant future), the life I live is “by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
I want to bring out three aspects of what Paul says here about faith, that’s at the foundation of what Biblical faith is—
1. Real faith is intensely personal.
2. It’s faith in the Son of God—who loved me
3. It’s faith in the Son of God—who gave Himself for me.
1. Real faith is intensely personal.
In this one verse, Paul says “I” or “me” no less than seven times. Real faith grips a person. It’s not cool and collect, but passionate. It digs down deep within you.
John went as a missionary to a British colony, but was completely ineffective. His life was frustrating and he felt he was missing something, but could never put his finger on it. He’d been trained in a fine school of theology, and knew the best techniques, but he ended up washing out and going back home.
Dejected, he went moped around for a few months and then, at the last minute accepted an invitation to a Bible study. When he arrived, someone was reading a long passage from a book. He listened as the writer described a life like his own. Later, he wrote that at that prayer meeting, his heart was “strangely warmed” as he finally got it clear: faith comes from God as a gift from God that each and every person must exercise in joy in what Christ has done for us on the cross. This washed out missionary went on to be one of the most effective evangelists and church planters of his time—John Wesley, the founder of Methodism.
2. It’s faith in the Son of God—who loved me
Love is never passionless or impersonal. Love means an investment of time, money, and emotional commitment.
Faith is never a longing stare at a cold, hard heaven, but a passionate response to a loving God. The way Jesus lives shows us how God’s love works. This is a Jesus who cries at a friend’s tomb, a Jesus who says, “I’m leaving you my joy.” This is the Jesus who touched lepers and who loved the loveless and the outcaste. This is the Jesus who made time for little kids, and was just as pleased to teach Mary of Bethany as the whole crowd on a hillside. This is the Jesus who stripped off his cloak and got down on His knees to wash His disciples’ feet.
Seen this way, faith is just love’s return. It’s the least you can offer in thanks to His love.
But Paul takes it one step further:
3. It’s faith in the Son of God—who gave Himself for me.
This is the center of the bull’s-eye for the faith of a Christian: Jesus’ death on the cross.
He gave Himself—on the cross. That’s the extreme and ultimate expression of love. Paul writes in Romans 5:6-7:
6You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
My faith is not just in gentle, loving Jesus. It’s also—and especially—in Jesus crucified, Jesus the bloody. The cross is in the crosshairs of the faith we profess. We make a huge mistake if we think our faith is centered anywhere else. There He paid for my sins. There’s where I was made right with God. On the cross. That’s where Jesus paid the price and began the rollback of the reign of darkness and sin.
When I trust God, I trust in what He did on the cross, and that what He did there has the power to change me now and change my eternity. And faith is another name for that trust.
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
This is a faith that is always, every time, life changing. Not just once, but continually. Will you journey with me as we explore the dimensions of faith? I hope so. Let’s pray.
Prayer
End
IF YOU’RE NOT FISHING,
YOU’RE NOT FOLLOWING
(Part One)
Mark 1:16-20
January 2, 2005
Well, Happy New Year! We have a new year, and a new chance to evaluate our priorities. Notice I didn’t say make New Year’s Resolutions, which I personally thing is a waste of time, and 99% of the time, doomed to failure. Let me tell you why. A change of behavior always arises from a change of priorities. I have found that if we become convinced that something is important, then we change our lives in such a way to meet that priority. If we don’t think something’s important, then we never make time for it. It starts with what we think.
And more than that: we have to come to a place were an idea, a priority, slides from our heads to our hearts. How many times have some you know (and maybe it was you) only quit smoking after someone they knew developed lung cancer or had a stroke? It wasn’t as if their friend’s cancer gave them new information: everybody knows that smoking cigarettes is about as the craziest thing you can do if you care about your health. But when it’s Ben from work or your cousin Carlos, then it changes. It’s personal. It hits home.
This week and next week, at the outset of the year, I want to focus like a laser beam and bring into your world the reality that God uses people like you and me to tell others about God’s incredible wonderful love, and that there’s no higher privilege than to be used by God to introduce people to Jesus Christ. Not only that, Jesus told us that looking for ways to share His love with people is inseparable from our identity as followers of Him. Or, to put it in the words I hope to just stamp on your brain and your hearts,
IF YOU’RE NOT FISHING, YOU’RE NOT FOLLOWING!
That’s based on this passage, from Mark’s Gospel, 1:16-20:
16As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 17"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men." 18At once they left their nets and followed him.
19When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. 20Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.
Mark’s account of the story of Jesus tends to tell stories like the ra-ta-tat of a machine gun. He must have had a teacher who said to him, “Mark, get to the point!” because he always does. Earlier in this chapter, Mark tells about John the Baptist, and how he baptized Jesus, and the fact that Jesus went out into the desert. Then in just a few words, he tells us that after John went to prison, Jesus came telling people that “NOW IS THE TIME” and it’s time to “repent and believe the good news!”
Now we see Him at the shore of the Sea of Galilee. What Mark leaves out—John fills us in on this—is that this wasn’t first time Jesus had met these guys. But it was the time to make a decision. They’d gotten some idea of who Jesus is, and what His message is, and now, Jesus shows up and says. “OK guys, what will it be? You in or you out?”
And He says it in a way that both builds on what they were familiar with and tells them that what He was doing was what they’ll be doing:
17"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men."
What Jesus does here is put an equal sign between “following” Him and “fishing for people.” (It is “people,” not just “men”: Mark uses the “generic” word for “human beings” here, anthropos.)
If you Jesus seriously, then you’ll realize that when He calls you to follow Him, He’s calling you to follow in the pattern of His ministry. And He communicated that to these guys, who knew just about everything there is to know about fishing, at least at the Sea of Galilee.
When we were there in ’99, our first night in Galilee, we stayed at a hotel in Tiberius that was right on the shore. The “sea” of Galilee is only about nines miles long, north to south, and maybe five miles wide at the widest point. You can see the whole thing at any given point on the shore. And one thing that I’ll never forget is the sound of fish jumping out of the water then splashing back in that I could hear in the dark of our first night there. The place teems with fish. No wonder so many made their living on fishing it.
These guys lived to fish. Most of them had probably had generations of fishermen in their families. They knew the right time of day to go to the right spots; the right bait for the species they wanted to catch. They knew the right places to use a drag net to catch fish, and the right places to use a casting net.
They knew all about the accessories of fishing as well. They knew all about boats and nets and hooks and tackle. And they knew what to do with a fish once you’ve caught it. They knew how to scale it, how to preserve it and how to market it.
Verses 19-20 tell of Jesus calling the sons of Zebedee to follow Him—James and John. Zebedee and Sons was wealthy enough that they had “hired hands” and there’s some evidence that the Zebedee family has enough wealth for a second home—in Jerusalem! These guys weren’t “subsistence” fishermen: they were real experts with a profit to show for it.
What Jesus wants these guys to do is take them same sense of passion for catching fish and put it toward catching people. He’s saying in a sense, “I want you to think: where’s the best place to ‘catch’ people? What’s the right equipment to use? What’s the right bait? What are the different kinds of people you encounter and how do you adjust to their differences to effectively catch as many of them as possible?”
Paul was an outstanding “fisher of men” and he understood this principle thoroughly. He writes in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23:
19Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. 20To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law.
(In other words, to catch Jewish fish—lox? Kippers? Geflite fish?—he went to Jewish ponds! He hung around Jewish people, talked Jewish talk, dressed as a Jew, and so forth.)
21To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law.
(Among non-Jewish fish, Paul swam a bit differently! He knew the lingo and customs of Greeks and Romans, so, without compromise, he could fit in there and ‘fish’ there with a little intentional effort.)
22To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. 23I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.
My friend Jon Karn says every church should have a Gumby Award it gives out annually. That’s for the most flexible person in the church! Paul was a “Gumby” for Jesus in his flexible approach to sharing what it means to follow Jesus.
To fish, you have to be flexible. If you say, “I only fish Tuesday evenings from 7-9 PM,” guess what? You’re going to miss a lot of fish. If you say, “I only fish exactly 100 yards off the shore due south of the big pine tree,” guess what? You’re going to miss a lot of fish.
The key thing is, you have to go where the fish are. You have to go where the people are. You have to go where the spiritually responsive people are. You have to go with the right frame of mind, the right equipment, the right attitude, and the right plan. Let me take those one at a time.
The right frame of mind: for the glory of God.
To fish for people is not a competition. It’s no for my glory. It’s not to make my church stronger or bigger. It’s not even just for compassion on the fish. It’s so God gets the glory.
John Piper wrote a powerful book on the theology of Christian missions entitled Let the Nations Be Glad! In it, he points out that missions (and missions is just fishing in a pond far from home!) is for the sake of God’s glory. It’s so God will be worshipped now and forever. It is for the purpose gathering more worshippers to God.
The problem is, we don’t really get how glorious God is, and how awesome a role He’s given us—to gather worshippers for Almighty God. God is so glorious that He deserves all the praise His creation can give Him. He is the center of all, not us. That’s God’s own perspective as well. God created us for His glory. Isaiah 43:6b-7 says,
Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth--7everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."
That’s why we evangelize: to maximize the glory God receives. God is worthy of all glory!
You also have to have…
The right equipment: the word of God.
To fish, you need a boat, the right nets, the right lures and so on. The main piece of equipment you need for fish for people is the word of God.
God’s word is not just black marks on white paper. Hebrew 4:12 reminds us
12For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
God’s word—either the written word direct from the pages of the Bible, or the shared word that comes from our lips—is powerful!
Listen: I believe in relational evangelism. I believe that the most effective evangelism takes place in the context of people growing in the mutual knowledge of one another, and in that relationship the reality of the greatness of Jesus is shared naturally. But don’t give me this nonsense about, “I don’t share my faith with my words; I share it with my life.” That’s nonsense. I mean, really, when was the last time someone said to you, “Goodness gracious, you have such a wonderful, happy, fulfilled life; would you kindly share your secret?” I guess it happens sometimes, but I don’t think it happens very often. No, eventually words are needed. The good news about Jesus is conveyed, at the point of decision, but words that make sense of God’s love and plan and our need to respond to that plan.
Next you need…
The right attitude: the patience that comes from the Holy Spirit.
According to Galatians 5:22, patience is part of the fruit of the Spirit. That’s exactly why I’m a lousy fisherman. (And I have to admit that it’s been years since I tried.) The idea of just waiting (plus the fact that I’m a deadly hazard with I’ve tried to cast a line).
But when it comes to fishing for people, patient is more that a virtue: it’s an essential attitude. People want—the need—and they deserve the time needed make a fully informed decision to follow Jesus Christ. In our new member’s class, we talk about the fact that people need time, they need answers, and they need community. I don’t know about you, but whenever a salesman tells me, “You can only get this price if you buy today,” I know it’s time to leave. If he’s trying to rush me into a decision, maybe it’s because there’s something wrong with his product, and he doesn’t want me to have time to figure out what’s wrong.
The attitude we’re to take with people and their relationship to God is clear: tell them that God’s door is open now, but that that door is going to stay open for as long as they need to make an informed, mature decision. We need to stay in the boat with the nets down long enough to make it possible.
Finally, there’s also…
The right plan: to make, mature and mobilize disciples for Jesus Christ.
You not a successful fisherman if you can haul ‘em and then let ‘em rot. In the case of real fish, you have to get them to market, time is off the essence, and you’ve got to sell them.
In the case of the metaphorical fish that Jesus talks about, catching isn’t enough either. There is timely follow-up and long-term discipleship.
You see, Jesus’ intention is to really change people—to transform people. His intention isn’t to have people “make a decision”; it to be transformed, and then make a lifetime of Godward decisions.
My friend Steve Robbins tells the story of being at a Christian concert at Magic Mountain when he was in his late teens. In the middle of the set, they paused and said, “How many of you want to receive Jesus?” Hundreds of hands went up. “Just ask him in,” they said. “Say, come in me, Lord Jesus.” He paused and said, “Did that hurt?” And hundreds of teens said, “NO!” Later he and his friend said, “Did they really become like Jesus? Did they really become followers of Jesus? NO!”
But did those fish get “caught”? Maybe it was more like they grazed the net or at best were left to rot on the deck of the boat. Real evangelism means that the good news is clearly presented, and people make a commitment to follow Christ knowing that that will mean very real changes in the way they live.
To make that happen, you need timely follow-up and long-term discipleship. A caught fish will start to go bad in no time flat. In the spiritual realm, that means that you have to move quickly to make sure that a “decision” is also a commitment.
That means that someone just in the door the Kingdom of God needs some loving guidance to get started well and to move in the right direction. In the near future, I’m going to be challenging all of our study groups to make sure that each one has someone equipped to do one-to-one discipleship tailored for new believers.
Then comes the commitment to long-term discipleship. (Think of that as getting the fish to market, selling it and getting to the consumer’s table.) To “fish for people” means to get them the whole way, into the place God wants them to be, not just to make a one-time, superficial decision.
Our church’s mission statement puts discipleship at the center of what God’s called us to do. The mission statement says—and let’s say together—it’s there on the screen and in your message outline:
As a Spirit-blessed community of worshippers, we have been called by God to MAKE disciples (growing in numbers), MATURE disciples (growing in depth) and MOBILIZE disciples (growing in ministry), who love the Lord our God above all others, and touch people with the greatness of Jesus Christ.
Now next week, we’re going to focus on the word “make” (Mark 1:17):
"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men.”
How does Jesus “make” us “fishers of men”? How did He do that with His first disciples? And then, we’ll get really specific about the “fish” God’s called you to catch. That’s next week.
But for now, let’s prayer…
PRAYER
© Glenn Layne 2005
YOU’RE NOT FOLLOWING
(Part One)
Mark 1:16-20
January 2, 2005
Well, Happy New Year! We have a new year, and a new chance to evaluate our priorities. Notice I didn’t say make New Year’s Resolutions, which I personally thing is a waste of time, and 99% of the time, doomed to failure. Let me tell you why. A change of behavior always arises from a change of priorities. I have found that if we become convinced that something is important, then we change our lives in such a way to meet that priority. If we don’t think something’s important, then we never make time for it. It starts with what we think.
And more than that: we have to come to a place were an idea, a priority, slides from our heads to our hearts. How many times have some you know (and maybe it was you) only quit smoking after someone they knew developed lung cancer or had a stroke? It wasn’t as if their friend’s cancer gave them new information: everybody knows that smoking cigarettes is about as the craziest thing you can do if you care about your health. But when it’s Ben from work or your cousin Carlos, then it changes. It’s personal. It hits home.
This week and next week, at the outset of the year, I want to focus like a laser beam and bring into your world the reality that God uses people like you and me to tell others about God’s incredible wonderful love, and that there’s no higher privilege than to be used by God to introduce people to Jesus Christ. Not only that, Jesus told us that looking for ways to share His love with people is inseparable from our identity as followers of Him. Or, to put it in the words I hope to just stamp on your brain and your hearts,
IF YOU’RE NOT FISHING, YOU’RE NOT FOLLOWING!
That’s based on this passage, from Mark’s Gospel, 1:16-20:
16As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 17"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men." 18At once they left their nets and followed him.
19When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. 20Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.
Mark’s account of the story of Jesus tends to tell stories like the ra-ta-tat of a machine gun. He must have had a teacher who said to him, “Mark, get to the point!” because he always does. Earlier in this chapter, Mark tells about John the Baptist, and how he baptized Jesus, and the fact that Jesus went out into the desert. Then in just a few words, he tells us that after John went to prison, Jesus came telling people that “NOW IS THE TIME” and it’s time to “repent and believe the good news!”
Now we see Him at the shore of the Sea of Galilee. What Mark leaves out—John fills us in on this—is that this wasn’t first time Jesus had met these guys. But it was the time to make a decision. They’d gotten some idea of who Jesus is, and what His message is, and now, Jesus shows up and says. “OK guys, what will it be? You in or you out?”
And He says it in a way that both builds on what they were familiar with and tells them that what He was doing was what they’ll be doing:
17"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men."
What Jesus does here is put an equal sign between “following” Him and “fishing for people.” (It is “people,” not just “men”: Mark uses the “generic” word for “human beings” here, anthropos.)
If you Jesus seriously, then you’ll realize that when He calls you to follow Him, He’s calling you to follow in the pattern of His ministry. And He communicated that to these guys, who knew just about everything there is to know about fishing, at least at the Sea of Galilee.
When we were there in ’99, our first night in Galilee, we stayed at a hotel in Tiberius that was right on the shore. The “sea” of Galilee is only about nines miles long, north to south, and maybe five miles wide at the widest point. You can see the whole thing at any given point on the shore. And one thing that I’ll never forget is the sound of fish jumping out of the water then splashing back in that I could hear in the dark of our first night there. The place teems with fish. No wonder so many made their living on fishing it.
These guys lived to fish. Most of them had probably had generations of fishermen in their families. They knew the right time of day to go to the right spots; the right bait for the species they wanted to catch. They knew the right places to use a drag net to catch fish, and the right places to use a casting net.
They knew all about the accessories of fishing as well. They knew all about boats and nets and hooks and tackle. And they knew what to do with a fish once you’ve caught it. They knew how to scale it, how to preserve it and how to market it.
Verses 19-20 tell of Jesus calling the sons of Zebedee to follow Him—James and John. Zebedee and Sons was wealthy enough that they had “hired hands” and there’s some evidence that the Zebedee family has enough wealth for a second home—in Jerusalem! These guys weren’t “subsistence” fishermen: they were real experts with a profit to show for it.
What Jesus wants these guys to do is take them same sense of passion for catching fish and put it toward catching people. He’s saying in a sense, “I want you to think: where’s the best place to ‘catch’ people? What’s the right equipment to use? What’s the right bait? What are the different kinds of people you encounter and how do you adjust to their differences to effectively catch as many of them as possible?”
Paul was an outstanding “fisher of men” and he understood this principle thoroughly. He writes in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23:
19Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. 20To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law.
(In other words, to catch Jewish fish—lox? Kippers? Geflite fish?—he went to Jewish ponds! He hung around Jewish people, talked Jewish talk, dressed as a Jew, and so forth.)
21To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law.
(Among non-Jewish fish, Paul swam a bit differently! He knew the lingo and customs of Greeks and Romans, so, without compromise, he could fit in there and ‘fish’ there with a little intentional effort.)
22To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. 23I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.
My friend Jon Karn says every church should have a Gumby Award it gives out annually. That’s for the most flexible person in the church! Paul was a “Gumby” for Jesus in his flexible approach to sharing what it means to follow Jesus.
To fish, you have to be flexible. If you say, “I only fish Tuesday evenings from 7-9 PM,” guess what? You’re going to miss a lot of fish. If you say, “I only fish exactly 100 yards off the shore due south of the big pine tree,” guess what? You’re going to miss a lot of fish.
The key thing is, you have to go where the fish are. You have to go where the people are. You have to go where the spiritually responsive people are. You have to go with the right frame of mind, the right equipment, the right attitude, and the right plan. Let me take those one at a time.
The right frame of mind: for the glory of God.
To fish for people is not a competition. It’s no for my glory. It’s not to make my church stronger or bigger. It’s not even just for compassion on the fish. It’s so God gets the glory.
John Piper wrote a powerful book on the theology of Christian missions entitled Let the Nations Be Glad! In it, he points out that missions (and missions is just fishing in a pond far from home!) is for the sake of God’s glory. It’s so God will be worshipped now and forever. It is for the purpose gathering more worshippers to God.
The problem is, we don’t really get how glorious God is, and how awesome a role He’s given us—to gather worshippers for Almighty God. God is so glorious that He deserves all the praise His creation can give Him. He is the center of all, not us. That’s God’s own perspective as well. God created us for His glory. Isaiah 43:6b-7 says,
Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth--7everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."
That’s why we evangelize: to maximize the glory God receives. God is worthy of all glory!
You also have to have…
The right equipment: the word of God.
To fish, you need a boat, the right nets, the right lures and so on. The main piece of equipment you need for fish for people is the word of God.
God’s word is not just black marks on white paper. Hebrew 4:12 reminds us
12For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
God’s word—either the written word direct from the pages of the Bible, or the shared word that comes from our lips—is powerful!
Listen: I believe in relational evangelism. I believe that the most effective evangelism takes place in the context of people growing in the mutual knowledge of one another, and in that relationship the reality of the greatness of Jesus is shared naturally. But don’t give me this nonsense about, “I don’t share my faith with my words; I share it with my life.” That’s nonsense. I mean, really, when was the last time someone said to you, “Goodness gracious, you have such a wonderful, happy, fulfilled life; would you kindly share your secret?” I guess it happens sometimes, but I don’t think it happens very often. No, eventually words are needed. The good news about Jesus is conveyed, at the point of decision, but words that make sense of God’s love and plan and our need to respond to that plan.
Next you need…
The right attitude: the patience that comes from the Holy Spirit.
According to Galatians 5:22, patience is part of the fruit of the Spirit. That’s exactly why I’m a lousy fisherman. (And I have to admit that it’s been years since I tried.) The idea of just waiting (plus the fact that I’m a deadly hazard with I’ve tried to cast a line).
But when it comes to fishing for people, patient is more that a virtue: it’s an essential attitude. People want—the need—and they deserve the time needed make a fully informed decision to follow Jesus Christ. In our new member’s class, we talk about the fact that people need time, they need answers, and they need community. I don’t know about you, but whenever a salesman tells me, “You can only get this price if you buy today,” I know it’s time to leave. If he’s trying to rush me into a decision, maybe it’s because there’s something wrong with his product, and he doesn’t want me to have time to figure out what’s wrong.
The attitude we’re to take with people and their relationship to God is clear: tell them that God’s door is open now, but that that door is going to stay open for as long as they need to make an informed, mature decision. We need to stay in the boat with the nets down long enough to make it possible.
Finally, there’s also…
The right plan: to make, mature and mobilize disciples for Jesus Christ.
You not a successful fisherman if you can haul ‘em and then let ‘em rot. In the case of real fish, you have to get them to market, time is off the essence, and you’ve got to sell them.
In the case of the metaphorical fish that Jesus talks about, catching isn’t enough either. There is timely follow-up and long-term discipleship.
You see, Jesus’ intention is to really change people—to transform people. His intention isn’t to have people “make a decision”; it to be transformed, and then make a lifetime of Godward decisions.
My friend Steve Robbins tells the story of being at a Christian concert at Magic Mountain when he was in his late teens. In the middle of the set, they paused and said, “How many of you want to receive Jesus?” Hundreds of hands went up. “Just ask him in,” they said. “Say, come in me, Lord Jesus.” He paused and said, “Did that hurt?” And hundreds of teens said, “NO!” Later he and his friend said, “Did they really become like Jesus? Did they really become followers of Jesus? NO!”
But did those fish get “caught”? Maybe it was more like they grazed the net or at best were left to rot on the deck of the boat. Real evangelism means that the good news is clearly presented, and people make a commitment to follow Christ knowing that that will mean very real changes in the way they live.
To make that happen, you need timely follow-up and long-term discipleship. A caught fish will start to go bad in no time flat. In the spiritual realm, that means that you have to move quickly to make sure that a “decision” is also a commitment.
That means that someone just in the door the Kingdom of God needs some loving guidance to get started well and to move in the right direction. In the near future, I’m going to be challenging all of our study groups to make sure that each one has someone equipped to do one-to-one discipleship tailored for new believers.
Then comes the commitment to long-term discipleship. (Think of that as getting the fish to market, selling it and getting to the consumer’s table.) To “fish for people” means to get them the whole way, into the place God wants them to be, not just to make a one-time, superficial decision.
Our church’s mission statement puts discipleship at the center of what God’s called us to do. The mission statement says—and let’s say together—it’s there on the screen and in your message outline:
As a Spirit-blessed community of worshippers, we have been called by God to MAKE disciples (growing in numbers), MATURE disciples (growing in depth) and MOBILIZE disciples (growing in ministry), who love the Lord our God above all others, and touch people with the greatness of Jesus Christ.
Now next week, we’re going to focus on the word “make” (Mark 1:17):
"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men.”
How does Jesus “make” us “fishers of men”? How did He do that with His first disciples? And then, we’ll get really specific about the “fish” God’s called you to catch. That’s next week.
But for now, let’s prayer…
PRAYER
© Glenn Layne 2005
Thursday, December 23, 2004
You've got to read this....
Hugh Hewitt's book title (If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat) is being illustrated in Washington State. I picked this up at Powerline and sourced it to www.soundpolitics.com. (They specialize in WA politics.)
Eyewitness Report from Chernobyl
A friend who's been deeply involved in the King (Ukraine) County manual "recount" e-mails:
When the hand count was complete at the Tukwila facility, it was my understanding from talking to the floor managers, that Rossi was still in the lead. At that point the canvas board still had several hundred ballots to review but now they knew how many votes to come up with to give Gregoire a victory. It seems they did just that by assigning overvotes to Gregoire.Initially we were tallying clearly marked overvotes as overvotes and putting them back in the box with the rest of the ballots when we had completed counting a precinct. That changed about half-way through the count of absentee ballots when the canvas board ordered that all overvotes, no matter how clearly marked, be sent to the board for review. There have been reports that the board's criteria - or at least the criteria used by two members of the board - also changed in regard to the overvotes at that time and more were divined to be real votes, and mostly for Gregoire. The infamous "Christine Rossi" decision was one example of many illustrating the nonsense going on with the canvas board when that overvote was decreed to be a valid vote for Gregoire.The other sequence of events that raised questions involved our initial counts and the subsequent search for ballots to recycle. When this process started we first sorted ballots from the polling places into precincts. Then it took just two days to count the some 300,000 ballots from the polls. The observers from both parties watched the data entry process and knew, by the end of the poll ballot count, that the hand count in King County was not going to change the outcome of the governor's race unless something else was done. As we began counting the absentee ballots, it was obvious that the Democrat's counters had new directions and they were noticeably more aggressive in sending ballots to the canvas board. At the same time, someone in the Elections Department obviously initiated a search for ballots that could be recycled. Perhaps the timing was a coincidence but I doubt it. That led to the "discovery" of the 700 - plus ballots that the state supreme court allowed in with this Wednesday's decision.In the last few days of the operation, we were counting the poll ballots again for the second and, in some cases, third and fourth times. The boxes of the "poll" ballots that came to my table all had absentee ballots mixed in with them, which was not suppose to happen. On one hand, having seen what passes for inventory control at the Elections Department, I was not surprised that this, too, was a mess. Yet it also does away with one of the audit trails and provides an excuse as to why the count in any particular precinct may differ from the original. By chance I happened to get my own precinct poll votes to count. I had been a poll watcher on the original election day, and had recorded the poll vote from the tape that ran when the poll was closed. There was a significant difference between what was reported the evening of November 2 for my precinct and what was in that precinct's box on December 19, when I counted the ballots. Gregoire's votes had gone up and Rossi's had gone down. It was obvious that absentee ballots were mixed in with the poll ballots, so changes could be expected, but it raises the question of whether or not those Rossi poll votes are now in the box of absentee ballots for that precinct or "misplaced" in some closet in a warehouse somewhere.I personally have no doubt that the two Democrats on the canvas board made a conscious effort to fix the election in Gregoire's favor. I am also certain they were aided, perhaps unwittingly, in that effort by the incompetence of the top managers within the Elections Department.After discovering Precinct 1823 and hearing the Elections Department's "What Me Worry?" response to it all, I'm wondering whether this is simply incompetence or bona fide criminal negligence.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at 08:37 PM Comments (38) Categories: 2004 Governor's Race
Hugh Hewitt's book title (If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat) is being illustrated in Washington State. I picked this up at Powerline and sourced it to www.soundpolitics.com. (They specialize in WA politics.)
Eyewitness Report from Chernobyl
A friend who's been deeply involved in the King (Ukraine) County manual "recount" e-mails:
When the hand count was complete at the Tukwila facility, it was my understanding from talking to the floor managers, that Rossi was still in the lead. At that point the canvas board still had several hundred ballots to review but now they knew how many votes to come up with to give Gregoire a victory. It seems they did just that by assigning overvotes to Gregoire.Initially we were tallying clearly marked overvotes as overvotes and putting them back in the box with the rest of the ballots when we had completed counting a precinct. That changed about half-way through the count of absentee ballots when the canvas board ordered that all overvotes, no matter how clearly marked, be sent to the board for review. There have been reports that the board's criteria - or at least the criteria used by two members of the board - also changed in regard to the overvotes at that time and more were divined to be real votes, and mostly for Gregoire. The infamous "Christine Rossi" decision was one example of many illustrating the nonsense going on with the canvas board when that overvote was decreed to be a valid vote for Gregoire.The other sequence of events that raised questions involved our initial counts and the subsequent search for ballots to recycle. When this process started we first sorted ballots from the polling places into precincts. Then it took just two days to count the some 300,000 ballots from the polls. The observers from both parties watched the data entry process and knew, by the end of the poll ballot count, that the hand count in King County was not going to change the outcome of the governor's race unless something else was done. As we began counting the absentee ballots, it was obvious that the Democrat's counters had new directions and they were noticeably more aggressive in sending ballots to the canvas board. At the same time, someone in the Elections Department obviously initiated a search for ballots that could be recycled. Perhaps the timing was a coincidence but I doubt it. That led to the "discovery" of the 700 - plus ballots that the state supreme court allowed in with this Wednesday's decision.In the last few days of the operation, we were counting the poll ballots again for the second and, in some cases, third and fourth times. The boxes of the "poll" ballots that came to my table all had absentee ballots mixed in with them, which was not suppose to happen. On one hand, having seen what passes for inventory control at the Elections Department, I was not surprised that this, too, was a mess. Yet it also does away with one of the audit trails and provides an excuse as to why the count in any particular precinct may differ from the original. By chance I happened to get my own precinct poll votes to count. I had been a poll watcher on the original election day, and had recorded the poll vote from the tape that ran when the poll was closed. There was a significant difference between what was reported the evening of November 2 for my precinct and what was in that precinct's box on December 19, when I counted the ballots. Gregoire's votes had gone up and Rossi's had gone down. It was obvious that absentee ballots were mixed in with the poll ballots, so changes could be expected, but it raises the question of whether or not those Rossi poll votes are now in the box of absentee ballots for that precinct or "misplaced" in some closet in a warehouse somewhere.I personally have no doubt that the two Democrats on the canvas board made a conscious effort to fix the election in Gregoire's favor. I am also certain they were aided, perhaps unwittingly, in that effort by the incompetence of the top managers within the Elections Department.After discovering Precinct 1823 and hearing the Elections Department's "What Me Worry?" response to it all, I'm wondering whether this is simply incompetence or bona fide criminal negligence.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at 08:37 PM Comments (38) Categories: 2004 Governor's Race
Monday, December 20, 2004
Don't you hate those year end newsletters people send you. At least this one won't fill your trash can....
The Layne Christmas Newsletter
December 2004
What’s inside:
· The meaning of Christmas
· Colin graduates
· Lynann’s graduate work
· Five years in Temple City
· Lynann’s surgery
· Charis’ world
· What Glenn is up to
· Big anniversary in 2005
The Meaning of Christmas
6While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
8And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ[a] the Lord. 12This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
13Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, 14“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”
(Luke 2:6-14)
Colin Graduates
June 11 saw Colin’s graduation from Arcadia High School. (For those of you not in the area, even though we live in Temple City, we live within the borders of Arcadia School district.) Within a month he had begun colleges at the Art Institute of California/Los Angeles (actually located in Santa Monica). By the end of the term (in September) he’d determined that AI was not the school for him. He will begin classes at Pasadena City College (less than 10 miles from home) in January. Currently he is investigating both architecture and criminal justice as career options.
Lynann continues work on master‘s degree
Lynann is on schedule to finish her MSN in nursing from the University of Phoenix. UOP is based in southern California and operates numerous campuses. Thus far she has been able to take all her classes at the Pasadena campus, which is located minutes from her work at Huntington Hospital. Lynann has been a discharge planner there for nearly two years.
Five years in Temple City
When we realized that this is the first time in our marriage that we had the opportunity to vote for president twice in the same place, we realized just how much the five year mark is a big deal for us. (Note to all our relatives in Ohio: THANK YOU FOR VOTING FOR BUSH. We apologize for not being able to turn California “red.” Give us time!)
Being five years in the same place means that the people at the grocery store and the pharmacy recognize you. It means that you know the back ways to all the places you need to get to.
Lynann’s surgery
Humpty-Dumpty has nothing on Lynann. In January, she had a “great fall” at work that eventually led to surgery on her knee in August. (Can you believe it? She had surgery in the morning, and went to her class at University of Phoenix the same evening!) She was off work for about six weeks and in rehab, but has regained about 95% use of her knee.
Charis’ world
Now a High School junior, Charis has found her niche in stage crafts—on of those people who work behind the scenes to make a play happen. She’s worked on several plays now, and her dream job is working in the movie industry on special effects make-up. She’s starting to consider her college options. She’s also a near fanatic reader with a special love of Edgar Allen Poe. She has also concluded that Johnny Depp is her favorite actor and that anything directed by Tim Burton belongs in her DVD collection.
What Glenn is up to
Glenn continues at Senior Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Temple (www.templecitybaptist.org). This year the big events all seemed to land in the fall: involvement in the Los Angeles Billy Graham Crusade at the Rose Bowl—a mere ten miles from our home. We also did a Forty Days of Purpose campaign at the church. A concerted emphasis on evangelism has paid off—church attendance is up about 10% over this time last year.
Glenn taught a class at Fuller Seminar this fall—part of a class on American Baptist Polity. He is now also a “blogger”! Check out his bog at www.durabledata.blogspot.com.
He continues to serve as well as Moderator of the Foothill Association and on the board of Atherton Baptist Homes (www.abh.org).
Big Anniversary in 2005
Well, 2005 is Glenn and Lynann’s 25th wedding anniversary. We have our sights set on about ten days in Maui, probably in late July or early August (the actual anniversary is June 28).
We would like to close our letter with just a simple wish that each of you have a Merry Christmas and a Blessed and Happy New Year. All our love,
Glenn, Lynann, Colin
and Charis
The Layne Christmas Newsletter
December 2004
What’s inside:
· The meaning of Christmas
· Colin graduates
· Lynann’s graduate work
· Five years in Temple City
· Lynann’s surgery
· Charis’ world
· What Glenn is up to
· Big anniversary in 2005
The Meaning of Christmas
6While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
8And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ[a] the Lord. 12This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
13Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, 14“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”
(Luke 2:6-14)
Colin Graduates
June 11 saw Colin’s graduation from Arcadia High School. (For those of you not in the area, even though we live in Temple City, we live within the borders of Arcadia School district.) Within a month he had begun colleges at the Art Institute of California/Los Angeles (actually located in Santa Monica). By the end of the term (in September) he’d determined that AI was not the school for him. He will begin classes at Pasadena City College (less than 10 miles from home) in January. Currently he is investigating both architecture and criminal justice as career options.
Lynann continues work on master‘s degree
Lynann is on schedule to finish her MSN in nursing from the University of Phoenix. UOP is based in southern California and operates numerous campuses. Thus far she has been able to take all her classes at the Pasadena campus, which is located minutes from her work at Huntington Hospital. Lynann has been a discharge planner there for nearly two years.
Five years in Temple City
When we realized that this is the first time in our marriage that we had the opportunity to vote for president twice in the same place, we realized just how much the five year mark is a big deal for us. (Note to all our relatives in Ohio: THANK YOU FOR VOTING FOR BUSH. We apologize for not being able to turn California “red.” Give us time!)
Being five years in the same place means that the people at the grocery store and the pharmacy recognize you. It means that you know the back ways to all the places you need to get to.
Lynann’s surgery
Humpty-Dumpty has nothing on Lynann. In January, she had a “great fall” at work that eventually led to surgery on her knee in August. (Can you believe it? She had surgery in the morning, and went to her class at University of Phoenix the same evening!) She was off work for about six weeks and in rehab, but has regained about 95% use of her knee.
Charis’ world
Now a High School junior, Charis has found her niche in stage crafts—on of those people who work behind the scenes to make a play happen. She’s worked on several plays now, and her dream job is working in the movie industry on special effects make-up. She’s starting to consider her college options. She’s also a near fanatic reader with a special love of Edgar Allen Poe. She has also concluded that Johnny Depp is her favorite actor and that anything directed by Tim Burton belongs in her DVD collection.
What Glenn is up to
Glenn continues at Senior Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Temple (www.templecitybaptist.org). This year the big events all seemed to land in the fall: involvement in the Los Angeles Billy Graham Crusade at the Rose Bowl—a mere ten miles from our home. We also did a Forty Days of Purpose campaign at the church. A concerted emphasis on evangelism has paid off—church attendance is up about 10% over this time last year.
Glenn taught a class at Fuller Seminar this fall—part of a class on American Baptist Polity. He is now also a “blogger”! Check out his bog at www.durabledata.blogspot.com.
He continues to serve as well as Moderator of the Foothill Association and on the board of Atherton Baptist Homes (www.abh.org).
Big Anniversary in 2005
Well, 2005 is Glenn and Lynann’s 25th wedding anniversary. We have our sights set on about ten days in Maui, probably in late July or early August (the actual anniversary is June 28).
We would like to close our letter with just a simple wish that each of you have a Merry Christmas and a Blessed and Happy New Year. All our love,
Glenn, Lynann, Colin
and Charis
Friday, December 10, 2004
This year, I've read two great books on Celtic Spirituality: How the Irish Saved Civilization by Cahill and The Celtic Way of Evangelism. I did a little seminar on this over the summer and have been asked to do a seminar on this in February for a group of pastors. Here's the text of the seminar, which will be the basis of the seminar I'll do in February.
The Celtic Way of Experiencing God: An Introduction
The story of St. Patrick
· Patricius, a young Romanized, Christian Briton, is captured by Celtic pirates at the age of 16 and sold into slavery to Miliuc
· He is assigned to herding Miliuc’s cattle, and deepens his faith
· He learns Celtic language and culture, and prays for them
· He escapes to Gaul, takes priestly training, and becomes a priest in Britain
· At age 48, he has a dream directing him to return to Ireland
Patrick’s brilliant missionary strategy
· Patrick is ordained as a “missionary bishop”
· Arrives in Ireland with an entourage in 432 AD
· Patrick rejects the Roman model: civilize, Romanize, then Christianize
· Patrick accepted the morally neutral aspects of Irish culture, and patiently tolerated the immoral aspects, knowing that it would take generations to change some things
· Patrick’s team practiced team evangelism. They would move into a village and win people by improving people’s lives and by example, by prayer and by blessing
· From that, a monastic community surrounded by a thriving village/town would develop; Irish were quickly incorporated into places of leadership
· Key elements of Irish culture were embraced as a means to winning people to the gospel: passion, mysticism, a love a symbols and a love of nature. An example is the Celtic cross.
· Patrick fought against the slave trade; some Briton Christians were slaving Irish Celts, and he fought them vigorously
· Patrick dies at age 76, after 28 years of ministry. About 20% of the island had become Christians.
· After Patrick’s death, the remainder of Ireland is evangelized.
· His successors evangelize Scotland, preserve much of ancient learning through the era of the barbarian hoards, and supply leadership to much of the church in Europe
· Later, as Rome reasserted authority, much of the Irish way (especially as it pertains to evangelism) was suppressed in favor of the Roman ideal: the only right way is the Roman way. The idea of respecting and working through the existing culture is abandoned. This was a tragic error.
A distinctive way of experiencing God
· This led to a distinctive Celtic Christian style of spirituality
· In contrast to the violent ways of the Celtic clans, they embraced peace as a virtue
· All aspects of life were embraced as under God’s care
· The spiritual life is to be pursued as a member of a community, not alone
· Contemplative prayer is central to the life of the Spirit
· Prayer permeated all aspects of life
· The Trinity is central in devotion
· Love of nature and celebrating nature as God’s handiwork is also critical in Celtic Christian devotion, as celebrated in the famous Celtic cross and orb
Example of Celtic Prayers and Blessings
PEACE BLESSING
Peace between neighbors, Peace between kindred, Peace between lovers, In love of the King of life.
Peace between person and person, Peace between wife and husband, Peace between woman and children, The peace of Christ above all peace.
Bless, O Christ, my face, Let my face bless everything; Bless O Christ mine eye, Let mine eye bless all it sees.
MORNING PRAYER
I arise todayThrough a mighty strength:
God's power to guide me,God's might to uphold me,God's eyes to watch over me;God's ear to hear me,God's word to give me speech,God's hand to guard me,God's way to lie before me,God's shield to shelter me,God's host to secure me.
PRAYER FOR GUIDANCE
My dearest Lord,Be thou a bright flame before me,Be thou a guiding star above me,Be thou a smooth path beneath me,Be thou a kindly shepherd behind me,Today and for evermore.
-St.Columba of Iona
THANKSGIVING
Thanks to Thee, O God, that I have risen today, To the rising of this life itself;May it be to Thine own glory, O God of every gift, And to the glory, aid Thou my soul
With the aiding of Thine own mercy, Even as I clothe my body with wool, Cover Thou my soul with the shadow of Thy wing.
Help me to avoid every sin, And the source of every sin to forsake, And as the mist scatters on the crest of the hills, May each ill haze clear from my soul, O God.
Contemplative Prayer
Example: Luke 10:38-42
38As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. 39She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. 40But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!" 41"Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, 42but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."
1. Read the passage, seeking a single word or phrase through which that the Spirit highlights for you.
2. Pray about that word or phrase.
3. Share with another why that phrase spoke to you.
4. Read the passage again, preferably aloud.
5. Pray again, asking the Lord to speak to you about a specific action He’s calling you to take based on that word or phrase.
6. Read the passage one more time and close in prayer.
The Celtic Way of Experiencing God: An Introduction
The story of St. Patrick
· Patricius, a young Romanized, Christian Briton, is captured by Celtic pirates at the age of 16 and sold into slavery to Miliuc
· He is assigned to herding Miliuc’s cattle, and deepens his faith
· He learns Celtic language and culture, and prays for them
· He escapes to Gaul, takes priestly training, and becomes a priest in Britain
· At age 48, he has a dream directing him to return to Ireland
Patrick’s brilliant missionary strategy
· Patrick is ordained as a “missionary bishop”
· Arrives in Ireland with an entourage in 432 AD
· Patrick rejects the Roman model: civilize, Romanize, then Christianize
· Patrick accepted the morally neutral aspects of Irish culture, and patiently tolerated the immoral aspects, knowing that it would take generations to change some things
· Patrick’s team practiced team evangelism. They would move into a village and win people by improving people’s lives and by example, by prayer and by blessing
· From that, a monastic community surrounded by a thriving village/town would develop; Irish were quickly incorporated into places of leadership
· Key elements of Irish culture were embraced as a means to winning people to the gospel: passion, mysticism, a love a symbols and a love of nature. An example is the Celtic cross.
· Patrick fought against the slave trade; some Briton Christians were slaving Irish Celts, and he fought them vigorously
· Patrick dies at age 76, after 28 years of ministry. About 20% of the island had become Christians.
· After Patrick’s death, the remainder of Ireland is evangelized.
· His successors evangelize Scotland, preserve much of ancient learning through the era of the barbarian hoards, and supply leadership to much of the church in Europe
· Later, as Rome reasserted authority, much of the Irish way (especially as it pertains to evangelism) was suppressed in favor of the Roman ideal: the only right way is the Roman way. The idea of respecting and working through the existing culture is abandoned. This was a tragic error.
A distinctive way of experiencing God
· This led to a distinctive Celtic Christian style of spirituality
· In contrast to the violent ways of the Celtic clans, they embraced peace as a virtue
· All aspects of life were embraced as under God’s care
· The spiritual life is to be pursued as a member of a community, not alone
· Contemplative prayer is central to the life of the Spirit
· Prayer permeated all aspects of life
· The Trinity is central in devotion
· Love of nature and celebrating nature as God’s handiwork is also critical in Celtic Christian devotion, as celebrated in the famous Celtic cross and orb
Example of Celtic Prayers and Blessings
PEACE BLESSING
Peace between neighbors, Peace between kindred, Peace between lovers, In love of the King of life.
Peace between person and person, Peace between wife and husband, Peace between woman and children, The peace of Christ above all peace.
Bless, O Christ, my face, Let my face bless everything; Bless O Christ mine eye, Let mine eye bless all it sees.
MORNING PRAYER
I arise todayThrough a mighty strength:
God's power to guide me,God's might to uphold me,God's eyes to watch over me;God's ear to hear me,God's word to give me speech,God's hand to guard me,God's way to lie before me,God's shield to shelter me,God's host to secure me.
PRAYER FOR GUIDANCE
My dearest Lord,Be thou a bright flame before me,Be thou a guiding star above me,Be thou a smooth path beneath me,Be thou a kindly shepherd behind me,Today and for evermore.
-St.Columba of Iona
THANKSGIVING
Thanks to Thee, O God, that I have risen today, To the rising of this life itself;May it be to Thine own glory, O God of every gift, And to the glory, aid Thou my soul
With the aiding of Thine own mercy, Even as I clothe my body with wool, Cover Thou my soul with the shadow of Thy wing.
Help me to avoid every sin, And the source of every sin to forsake, And as the mist scatters on the crest of the hills, May each ill haze clear from my soul, O God.
Contemplative Prayer
Example: Luke 10:38-42
38As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. 39She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. 40But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!" 41"Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, 42but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."
1. Read the passage, seeking a single word or phrase through which that the Spirit highlights for you.
2. Pray about that word or phrase.
3. Share with another why that phrase spoke to you.
4. Read the passage again, preferably aloud.
5. Pray again, asking the Lord to speak to you about a specific action He’s calling you to take based on that word or phrase.
6. Read the passage one more time and close in prayer.
Here's my first message for 2005, yes, previewed here on December 10.
IF YOU’RE NOT FISHING,
YOU’RE NOT FOLLOWING
(Part One)
Mark 1:16-20
January 2, 2005
Well, Happy New Year! We have a new year, and a new chance to evaluate our priorities. Notice I didn’t say make New Year’s Resolutions, which I personally thing is a waste of time, and 99% of the time, doomed to failure. Let me tell you why. A change of behavior always arises from a change of priorities. I have found that if we become convinced that something is important, then we change our lives in such a way to meet that priority. If we don’t think something’s important, then we never make time for it. It starts with what we think.
And more than that: we have to come to a place were an idea, a priority, slides from our heads to our hearts. How many times have some you know (and maybe it was you) only quit smoking after someone they knew developed lung cancer or had a stroke? It wasn’t as if their friend’s cancer gave them new information: everybody knows that smoking cigarettes is about as the craziest thing you can do if you care about your health. But when it’s Ben from work or your cousin Carlos, then it changes. It’s personal. It hits home.
This week and next week, at the outset of the year, I want to focus like a laser beam and bring into your world the reality that God uses people like you and me to tell others about God’s incredible wonderful love, and that there’s no higher privilege than to be used by God to introduce people to Jesus Christ. Not only that, Jesus told us that looking for ways to share His love with people is inseparable from our identity as followers of Him. Or, to put it in the words I hope to just stamp on your brain and your hearts,
IF YOU’RE NOT FISHING, YOU’RE NOT FOLLOWING!
That’s based on this passage, from Mark’s Gospel, 1:16-20:
16As Jesus walked beside the
19When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. 20Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.
Mark’s account of the story of Jesus tends to tell stories like the ra-ta-tat of a machine gun. He must have had a teacher who said to him, “Mark, get to the point!” because he always does. Earlier in this chapter, Mark tells about John the Baptist, and how he baptized Jesus, and the fact that Jesus went out into the desert. Then in just a few words, he tells us that after John went to prison, Jesus came telling people that “NOW IS THE TIME” and it’s time to “repent and believe the good news!”
Now we see Him at the shore of the
And He says it in a way that both builds on what they were familiar with and tells them that what He was doing was what they’ll be doing:
17"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men."
What Jesus does here is put an equal sign between “following” Him and “fishing for people.” (It is “people,” not just “men”: Mark uses the “generic” word for “human beings” here, anthropos.)
If you Jesus seriously, then you’ll realize that when He calls you to follow Him, He’s calling you to follow in the pattern of His ministry. And He communicated that to these guys, who knew just about everything there is to know about fishing, at least at the
When we were there in ’99, our first night in
These guys lived to fish. Most of them had probably had generations of fishermen in their families. They knew the right time of day to go to the right spots; the right bait for the species they wanted to catch. They knew the right places to use a drag net to catch fish, and the right places to use a casting net.
They knew all about the accessories of fishing as well. They knew all about boats and nets and hooks and tackle. And they knew what to do with a fish once you’ve caught it. They knew how to scale it, how to preserve it and how to market it.
Verses 19-20 tell of Jesus calling the sons of Zebedee to follow Him—James and John. Zebedee and Sons was wealthy enough that they had “hired hands” and there’s some evidence that the Zebedee family has enough wealth for a second home—in
What Jesus wants these guys to do is take them same sense of passion for catching fish and put it toward catching people. He’s saying in a sense, “I want you to think: where’s the best place to ‘catch’ people? What’s the right equipment to use? What’s the right bait? What are the different kinds of people you encounter and how do you adjust to their differences to effectively catch as many of them as possible?”
Paul was an outstanding “fisher of men” and he understood this principle thoroughly. He writes in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23:
19Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. 20To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law.
(In other words, to catch Jewish fish—lox? Kippers? Geflite fish?—he went to Jewish ponds! He hung around Jewish people, talked Jewish talk, dressed as a Jew, and so forth.)
21To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law.
(Among non-Jewish fish, Paul swam a bit differently! He knew the lingo and customs of Greeks and Romans, so, without compromise, he could fit in there and ‘fish’ there with a little intentional effort.)
22To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. 23I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.
My friend Jon Karn says every church should have a Gumby Award it gives out annually. That’s for the most flexible person in the church! Paul was a “Gumby” for Jesus in his flexible approach to sharing what it means to follow Jesus.
To fish, you have to be flexible. If you say, “I only fish Tuesday evenings from 7-9 PM,” guess what? You’re going to miss a lot of fish. If you say, “I only fish exactly 100 yards off the shore due south of the big pine tree,” guess what? You’re going to miss a lot of fish.
The key thing is, you have to go where the fish are. You have to go where the people are. You have to go where the spiritually responsive people are. You have to go with the right frame of mind, the right equipment, the right attitude, and the right plan. Let me take those one at a time.
The right frame of mind: for the glory of God.
To fish for people is not a competition. It’s no for my glory. It’s not to make my church stronger or bigger. It’s not even just for compassion on the fish. It’s so God gets the glory.
John Piper wrote a powerful book on the theology of Christian missions entitled Let the Nations Be Glad! In it, he points out that missions (and missions is just fishing in a pond far from home!) is for the sake of God’s glory. It’s so God will be worshipped now and forever. It is for the purpose gathering more worshippers to God.
The problem is, we don’t really get how glorious God is, and how awesome a role He’s given us—to gather worshippers for Almighty God. God is so glorious that He deserves all the praise His creation can give Him. He is the center of all, not us. That’s God’s own perspective as well. God created us for His glory. Isaiah 43:6b-7 says,
Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth--7everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."
That’s why we evangelize: to maximize the glory God receives. God is worthy of all glory!
You also have to have…
The right equipment: the word of God.
To fish, you need a boat, the right nets, the right lures and so on. The main piece of equipment you need for fish for people is the word of God.
God’s word is not just black marks on white paper. Hebrew 4:12 reminds us
12For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
God’s word—either the written word direct from the pages of the Bible, or the shared word that comes from our lips—is powerful!
Listen: I believe in relational evangelism. I believe that the most effective evangelism takes place in the context of people growing in the mutual knowledge of one another, and in that relationship the reality of the greatness of Jesus is shared naturally. But don’t give me this nonsense about, “I don’t share my faith with my words; I share it with my life.” That’s nonsense. I mean, really, when was the last time someone said to you, “Goodness gracious, you have such a wonderful, happy, fulfilled life; would you kindly share your secret?” I guess it happens sometimes, but I don’t think it happens very often. No, eventually words are needed. The good news about Jesus is conveyed, at the point of decision, but words that make sense of God’s love and plan and our need to respond to that plan.
Next you need…
The right attitude: the patience that comes from the Holy Spirit.
According to Galatians 5:22, patience is part of the fruit of the Spirit. That’s exactly why I’m a lousy fisherman. (And I have to admit that it’s been years since I tried.) The idea of just waiting (plus the fact that I’m a deadly hazard with I’ve tried to cast a line).
But when it comes to fishing for people, patient is more that a virtue: it’s an essential attitude. People want—the need—and they deserve the time needed make a fully informed decision to follow Jesus Christ. In our new member’s class, we talk about the fact that people need time, they need answers, and they need community. I don’t know about you, but whenever a salesman tells me, “You can only get this price if you buy today,” I know it’s time to leave. If he’s trying to rush me into a decision, maybe it’s because there’s something wrong with his product, and he doesn’t want me to have time to figure out what’s wrong.
The attitude we’re to take with people and their relationship to God is clear: tell them that God’s door is open now, but that that door is going to stay open for as long as they need to make an informed, mature decision. We need to stay in the boat with the nets down long enough to make it possible.
Finally, there’s also…
The right plan: to make, mature and mobilize disciples for Jesus Christ.
You not a successful fisherman if you can haul ‘em and then let ‘em rot. In the case of real fish, you have to get them to market, time is off the essence, and you’ve got to sell them.
In the case of the metaphorical fish that Jesus talks about, catching isn’t enough either. There is timely follow-up and long-term discipleship.
You see, Jesus’ intention is to really change people—to transform people. His intention isn’t to have people “make a decision”; it to be transformed, and then make a lifetime of Godward decisions.
My friend Steve Robbins tells the story of being at a Christian concert at
But did those fish get “caught”? Maybe it was more like they grazed the net or at best were left to rot on the deck of the boat. Real evangelism means that the good news is clearly presented, and people make a commitment to follow Christ knowing that that will mean very real changes in the way they live.
To make that happen, you need timely follow-up and long-term discipleship. A caught fish will start to go bad in no time flat. In the spiritual realm, that means that you have to move quickly to make sure that a “decision” is also a commitment.
That means that someone just in the door the
Then comes the commitment to long-term discipleship. (Think of that as getting the fish to market, selling it and getting to the consumer’s table.) To “fish for people” means to get them the whole way, into the place God wants them to be, not just to make a one-time, superficial decision.
Our church’s mission statement puts discipleship at the center of what God’s called us to do. The mission statement says—and let’s say together—it’s there on the screen and in your message outline:
As a Spirit-blessed community of worshippers, we have been called by God to MAKE disciples (growing in numbers), MATURE disciples (growing in depth) and MOBILIZE disciples (growing in ministry), who love the Lord our God above all others, and touch people with the greatness of Jesus Christ.
Now next week, we’re going to focus on the word “make” (Mark 1:17):
"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men.”
How does Jesus “make” us “fishers of men”? How did He do that with His first disciples? And then, we’ll get really specific about the “fish” God’s called you to catch. That’s next week.
But for now, let’s prayer…
PRAYER
© Glenn Layne 2005
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