Archive: June, 2012

Jun
27
2012

This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

There is every excuse for blun­der­ing in the dark, but in the light there is no cover from real­ity. It is because we strongly sense this, and not merely because we feel that the evi­dence is ancient and scanty, that we shrink from com­mit­ting our­selves to such a far-reaching belief that Jesus Christ was really God. J. B. Phillips

God doesn’t want some­thing from us. He sim­ply wants us. C.S. Lewis

One of the more inter­est­ing ways in which a friend of mine began his life as a Chris­t­ian was through an excep­tional dream. Back when I was in col­lege, I met Shun­yuan; he was from Tai­wan and was in his res­i­dency to become a physi­cian at the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois in Chicago. Shun­yuan began attend­ing our lit­tle Bible study that we held into the wee hours of a Fri­day night—just a cou­ple of 20-somes who were hang­ing out and talk­ing about the Scrip­tures as it per­tained to our mot­ley lives. Shun­yuan had grown up Bud­dhist and I wasn’t ever quite sure why he would show up each time we met—if you aren’t a Chris­t­ian, tak­ing your Fri­day night to study the Bible I would guess isn’t on too many people’s lists. Shunyuan’s beliefs were dif­fer­ent than ours and he let us know that, and yet each Fri­day he would show up and be ready to share his own thoughts, often ask­ing us really good ques­tions on why we fol­lowed this per­son Jesus. Even though he had grown up reli­gious, at the heart of it, he was an athe­ist. He really did not believe any­thing. That was okay for us; we needed some­one to chal­lenge our own thoughts and ideas, and he would often have some good stuff for us to think about.

How­ever, this unbe­lief all changed one night. One morn­ing he woke up out of a beau­ti­ful and ter­ri­ble sleep, and his life was entirely altered. Shun­yuan had a dream one fall night that dra­mat­i­cally changed him and altered his life. He recounted a cou­ple of days later to us that in this dream he was swim­ming in the ocean with his daugh­ter who was about six at the time. Shunyuan’s daugh­ter meant every­thing to him and was the one thing that did bring him great joy and mean­ing to his life. When we would openly share about our lives, a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent times, Shun­yuan would tell us that he would not know what to do if some­thing ever hap­pened to her. His daugh­ter was the cen­ter of his life.

In this dream, his daugh­ter and him were swim­ming in the ocean, and out of nowhere, a shark attacks his daugh­ter, tear­ing at her right arm. Shun­yuan pulls her ashore and as he sees the blood pour­ing from her arm, as a doc­tor he knows that if he does not tend to her quickly, she will bleed to death. He sees how dire the sit­u­a­tion is and he grows pale because there is no way to stop the bleed­ing. The love of his life is going to die and he begins to weep. As he looks up, he sees a man walk­ing toward them. A strange thing hap­pens: imme­di­ately, he rec­og­nizes that this per­son is Jesus and as he fixes his eyes on him, Shun­yuan real­izes imme­di­ately that Jesus knows his true heart—that Shun­yuan does not want to have any­thing to do with him. Again, because of this, he becomes hope­less because he believes that Jesus will not heal his daugh­ter, which now he believes and knows that he can do. In the dream, Shun­yuan envi­sions that Jesus will just con­tinue to walk down the beach and do noth­ing to help him.

How­ever, Jesus does the oppo­site of every­thing that Shun­yuan believes and he walks up to his daugh­ter and kneels next to her. Jesus touches her arm and every­thing is restored, heal­ing her com­pletely. With­out look­ing back at Shun­yuan, Jesus then wan­ders off down the beach with­out a word.

As we were on the edge of our seats lis­ten­ing to his story, Shun­yuan told us that right after this he woke from his dream. As he was wak­ing from his sleep, he was taken aback from the dream—at that moment, in the early morn­ing, he decided to give his life to this Jesus. Shun­yuan began to “believe” that Jesus was the Sav­ior, his Sav­ior and that he really could do remark­able things.

This is often how believ­ing begins, we see that God is good and we begin to trust him just a lit­tle bit. No dif­fer­ent than what hap­pened to Shun­yuan, this is how God moves into our lives—he whis­pers to us who he really is.

In: Friend to Jesus
Jun
14
2012

This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

In the space between yes and no, there’s a life­time. It’s the dif­fer­ence between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it’s the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you’ll tell your­self in the future. Jodi Picoult

In any jour­ney, you have to start some­where. Believ­ing in God also has a begin­ning. What­ever you want to call it—giving your life to God, being born-again, find­ing Jesus—the Chris­t­ian jour­ney starts off by believ­ing. A believer is someone…well…who believes. How does a dic­tio­nary describe belief? It defines the word as sim­ply the men­tal act, con­di­tion or habit of plac­ing trust or con­fi­dence in a per­son or thing. Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it? I like to think of it as a change of mind. I once thought this; now I see it this way. This is what believ­ing is—it’s a lit­tle more than chang­ing your mind.

As an exam­ple, a case in point of this occurred in our home many years ago when we intro­duced our two sons to Thai food. It is by far the food that Julie and I enjoy the most. When we lived in Chicago, we would have it deliv­ered every Fri­day night—an order of Pad Thai and Pad See Ew. Up to that point, the most risqué thing our boys had eaten was some­thing called the Ultradog—a unique and messy hot dog from a place here in Grand Rapids called Yes­ter­dog. It’s coated with onions, chili, cucum­ber shav­ings, and ketchup and mus­tard (yeah, I know it sounds gross, but you’ve got to try one). So one Sat­ur­day evening, we decided to intro­duce some Thai dishes to our sons. Micah, at the time was prob­a­bly five, and imme­di­ately and emphat­i­cally expressed his dis­ap­proval. “Yuck, no way! Gross!” After finally get­ting him to the restau­rant (yank­ing and pulling and brib­ing) and then finally mak­ing him take a bite, he bel­lowed, “Hmmm…This Thai food doesn’t taste half bad!” His mind and taste buds had been trans­formed. He changed his mind about how good Thai food actu­ally was. Put sim­ply, he began to believe in the good­ness of Thai food.

Believ­ing in God on one level is sim­i­lar and is a pretty sim­ple process if you think about it. Whether you are a thir­teen year old at a Bible camp or the chief of some long-lost tribe in Kenya who’s never even seen a book, let alone a Bible, the process is no different:

  • You under­stand that God exists.
  • Your life is con­fronted about who you are through the story of the cross.
  • You acknowl­edge who you are as a sin­ner and who God is as a Redeemer.
  • You begin to believe in God and begin to believe that He can take away your sins.

God made it easy and straight for­ward in start­ing a rela­tion­ship with him. For some of us, it hap­pened when mom came in our room when we were six and prayed for us at our bed­time and then asked us if we wanted “Jesus to come into our heart.” For some oth­ers, it hap­pened in high school or col­lege, an ardu­ous intel­lec­tual process in which we needed all the facts lined up, and all the apolo­get­ics made straight in our mind, and we then made a men­tal trans­for­ma­tion in our belief sys­tem. And then, for some of us, we were deep in our own bro­ken world, had made a total mess of our lives, maybe we were going from bed to bed or from drink to drink, and saw only one way out and that was the way of Jesus. Believ­ers come in all dif­fer­ent shapes and sizes; per­haps they have been Chris­tians for forty days or as long as forty years.

There are many ways in which God reaches out to each of us. He is often imag­i­na­tive in his approach. Jesus is so in love with us that he will do what­ever it takes to be near us, close to us, in rela­tion­ship with us. There are many ways in which he cap­ti­vates us and I have heard count­less sto­ries and the many dif­fer­ent ways in which peo­ple come to faith.

  1. A camp coun­selor tells you about this cap­ti­vat­ing Per­son and you want to know him.
  2. A guy hands you a tract on the subway.
  3. It’s late at night, you can’t sleep because of a head cold, and you’re flip­ping through the chan­nels and you come upon some tele­vi­sion preacher.
  4. You are all alone in another town on a busi­ness trip for three days and on the sec­ond day you open up the bed stand table and begin flip­ping through the book that lies there.
  5. A friend opens up their life to you about Some­one who has made a dra­matic dif­fer­ence in their life.

As I once heard Joseph Stow­ell com­ment, “God is like the Royal Cana­dian Mounted Police…He always get his man (or woman).” And in doing so, God comes up with some of the most nor­mal and some of the most odd ways in bridg­ing that gap—from not believ­ing at all in him, to at least believ­ing just a lit­tle bit.

Stay tuned: next week I will share a unique story in how God reached out to some­one…

In: Friend to Jesus, Spiritual Formation
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Jun
07
2012

This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

This is a fic­ti­tious short story writ­ten about a moment in the life of Judas from the per­spec­tive of one of the twelve dis­ci­ples, Bartholomew. It exem­pli­fies the real­ity of what Judas maybe was like—just fol­low­ing Jesus at a distance.

Granted, it had been a long day. There hadn’t been rain for weeks and it was very dusty. We were coated with dirt. It was in our hair, under our fin­ger­nails and we needed to wash, but that wasn’t going to hap­pen for many more days. We had been on the road for a long time and many of us were weary and rest­less. In par­tic­u­lar, Judas seemed to be more defen­sive, short, even angry, espe­cially toward Jesus and for some rea­son, toward Peter as well. Judas was usu­ally quiet, hang­ing in the back­ground and only really speak­ing up when it had to do with some­thing that per­tained to the money or where we would go next. This was different.

You see, Judas took care of the coin that we got and Jesus trusted him. When we would go into the towns, Judas would seek out our lodg­ing, fig­ure out where we would eat, and take care of the prac­ti­cal things that needed to be done. He would only on occa­sion be there when Jesus would be teach­ing at the syn­a­gogue or at the dif­fer­ent times we would spend with the peo­ple teach­ing them or help­ing them. It was odd though, because now look­ing back in hind­sight, Judas didn’t really spend very much time with us at all. He was most of the time off doing his own thing.

That day though I knew some­thing was up. Again, we were dirty and tired and the peo­ple were just wear­ing on most of us. They wanted so much; they thronged around us all the time; they were always in your face. On some days that could give you strength and excite­ment for what was hap­pen­ing, but on that day, I think we were all just plain tired. We went back to the place where we were stay­ing, which that night meant that we were sleep­ing out­side. The last few days Jesus would go to Judas and ask him if we had enough money to sleep under a roof. Each time, early in the day when Jesus would ask him about this, Judas said that we would either stay dry or go hun­gry. We had to choose if we wanted to eat or sleep. At those time, we won­dered where was all of the money going. Was Judas just giv­ing it away?

On that day, it wasn’t until early evening that Jesus went to Judas again and asked him about the money and where we might stay. Like I said, it’d been a long day and we were all aching from our trav­els. Judas though lost his tem­per. Jesus didn’t have but a few words out of his mouth, and Judas threw the money pouch at him and the money struck Jesus in the face and then it all fell to the ground—just a few sil­ver coins star­ing back at him. Then, this was the remark­able thing—Judas who was quite a bit smaller than Jesus, went at him as if he was going to strike him with his fist. We stood amazed. Right before his fist was about to land, he pulled back and uttered some­thing which none of us could hear. Later that night, as we were all sit­ting around the fire and most every­one else had gone to sleep, those of us who were still awake asked one another if they had heard what Judas had said. None of us did. After Judas did pull back his fist and said what he had to say, he walked off mum­bling down the road toward Bethlehem.

No one had spo­ken to Jesus like that, even those who detested him like some of the syn­a­gogue lead­ers just said things behind his back. They never con­fronted him to his face. A lot of us were con­fused. And what was going on? Did oth­ers have the same feel­ings as Judas? We didn’t believe that Judas would come back; and that he was gone for good. But the next morn­ing, very early, he was trot­ting down the road as we had just fin­ished eat­ing. Noth­ing was said. Jesus didn’t bring it up and Judas acted like noth­ing had hap­pened. I remem­ber that day well, because I finally began to fig­ure out who Judas really was. As usual, at about mid-day, there was another great throng of peo­ple eager to hear what Jesus had to say and to see what he would do. There were peo­ple everywhere—pushing and shov­ing to get close to him. How­ever, as I looked through the crowd, this is what I saw—Judas was mix­ing among the peo­ple, col­lect­ing coins from them, and push­ing the change into his pock­ets. For the first time, things became clear to me, and when I looked over to Jesus, he sim­ply nod­ded to me—that’s when I knew he had seen what I had seen.

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In: Friend to Jesus
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