Tag Archives: faith

Whether Good or Bad…

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freely-10163“Whether it is good or bad, we will obey the voice of the LORD our God to whom we are sending you, that it may be well with us when we obey the voice of the LORD our God.” (Jeremiah 42:6)

How often have you made promises like that? Usually they come out in the hard times—illness, unemployment, battles. When God seems distant, silent, even uncaring, and we’re desperate for something—anything—to let us know He hasn’t abandoned us.

Lord, if you'll just get us out of this mess, we'll do whatever you say.
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But the promise made in the desert is always harder to keep in the lush, green meadow. Especially when the message we hear back isn’t quite what we had in mind. When God says to the suddenly-unemployed businessman, “don’t send out anymore resumes.” When He says to the couple desperate for children, “don’t adopt.” When He says to the cancer patient, “don’t try another treatment.”

Not long after Nebuchadnezzar had ransacked Jerusalem and deported the best and the brightest, those who remained sought God’s voice. We’ll do whatever He says, they vowed. It wasn’t an easy promise for the people of Israel, especially in light of what God had usually said through his prophet. And the message that came back was no different than before: Don’t be afraid. Don’t fight. Don’t run away.

But with the Babylonian king still on their doorstep, they didn’t like that message. And they didn’t keep their promise. But God did.

If they had just listened and obeyed, all would have been well. “I will build you up and not pull you down;” God said, “I will plant you, and not pluck you up; for I relent of the disaster that I did to you.” Instead, they ran away to Egypt—and Nebuchadnezzar followed. To borrow a line from The Phantom of the Opera, “disaster beyond your wildest imagination will occur!”

When I was in Liberia several years ago, many of the Christians shared a litany:

God is good—all the time!
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In that West African nation ravaged by a 14-year civil war, it was as much a statement of faith as of experienced reality; it didn’t feel like God was good all the time. But sometimes, faith is all we can cling to.

Sometimes, what God says doesn’t make sense. Sometimes, it seems to work against the very thing we want. Those are the times that faith is tested. That’s when faith gets real. That’s when we need to cry out in desperation, faith, and hope: God is good—all the time!

The Year of Perhaps

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My social media pages yesterday were filled with New Year’s greetings and wishes, most of which expressed, in one way or another, the hope that 2016 would be the best year yet. Such hopes and wishes are an annual event, of course…though seldom realized as true.

Life—like the economy and the landscape—is filled with ups and downs, hills and valleys, good days and bad.

I wanted to ask God this morning to let me know what 2016 would hold, but then I checked myself. What if he had done that three years ago? The year we made a decision that would lead to a major job change, a major move, and major upheaval; the year my sister-in-law was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Would we have made the same decision if the diagnosis had come first?

What about two years ago? Would I have left my pastoral role if I’d known that six months later I’d be delivering mail and Christmas packages instead of a Christmas Eve sermon?

Or last year: Death. Conflict. Depression. Unemployment. Would I really have wanted to know on January 2nd that those lay ahead of me?

The God of Perhaps

Jonathan was the king’s son, a brave warrior, and a trusted friend and leader. At a time when the Israelite army was decimated and weaponless—only the king and his son had swords—the Philistines came prepared for battle, expecting a rout. But Jonathan said to his armor-bearer, “Let’s you and I go launch a surprise attack on those godless heathens; perhaps the LORD will be with us.” Two men, one sword…and maybe?! They did, He was, and the Israelites won the battle. (Well, the LORD won the battle for them. Read this account in First Samuel 13 and 14.)

Or consider the three Hebrews who in VeggieTales are called Rack, Shack, and Benny. (The Bible calls them by their Babylonian-given names, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.) They refused to worship a statue of the pagan king, and the punishment for their crime was death in the fiery furnace. Given one last chance to bow down or barbecue, the boys answered the king: “Dumb question, Nezzie. Throw us on the barbie and call us done; perhaps God will save us and perhaps not, but we’re not going to worship you. Period.” They didn’t, He did, and Nebuchadnezzar made the change of his life. (Read about it in Daniel 3.)

Perhaps God will be with us. Perhaps God will save us.

Maybe 2016 will be the best year yet. Maybe not.

Perhaps God will give you an impossible victory this year.

Maybe God will keep you out of the furnace, or maybe He’ll just keep you from being burned when you’re in it.

Perhaps God will heal you, or perhaps He won’t. Perhaps someone you love more than life itself will meet God in your illness.

Perhaps 2016 will be the year of a perhaps faith in a certain God. 

Perhaps.

In the Face of Evil

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Terror Headline Collage

Courtesy of Huffington Post.

Suicide bombings in Beirut kill 43, wound 239. Terrorist attacks in Paris kill 130, wound 368. Ten dead at an Oregon college, fourteen in San Bernardino. And those are just in the past two months.

Gun control. Prayer shaming. Closing borders. Fear.

These are the responses to the evil and violence that seem to be growing in intensity and frequency not only in our nation, but around the world. Politicians on one side call for gun control; on the other side, for border walls. The news media calls for solutions while reveling in the business; fear—like sex—sells.

Christians divide: some call for war, some for peace, all for prayer. Some want to reject Muslim refugees, some want to eradicate Islam altogether. Others want to win Muslims through love and service, a la the Good Samaritan in one of Jesus’ more well-known parables.

This morning I read these familiar words in a new light:

Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday. (Psalm 37:3-6, ESV)

It is a passage often quoted by Christians, offering hope and encouragement through trust in a good and faithful God. What struck me this morning, though, was the broader context in which these verses lie. Far from being a simple call to faith in the midst of the normal challenges of everyday life, the backdrop to Psalm 37 is a time of great strife, enmity, and threats from surrounding nations. The aging David’s reign over Israel has been marked by war and bloodshed; his victories on the battlefield have left behind jealous, hate-filled enemies. Even before ascending the throne, David’s life since youth was spent running from his own king, fearing for his own life.

This warrior-king’s call is to place faith over fear; to trust in God even in the face of threats and imminent danger. When David uses words like evil and wicked and wrongdoers, he is not talking primarily about swindlers or cheaters, but about bloodthirsty adversaries bent on killing. If he were writing today, perhaps he would use the word “terrorists.”

And how does David say we should live in the face of this great evil? Not in fear or hatred, which “tends only to evil” (v. 8), but in goodness and trust, in worship and faithfulness, in righteousness and justice.

We should live with great trust in the Lord who “laughs at the wicked, for He sees that his day his coming” (verse 13).

Today, will you live in fear or—worse—in hatred? Or will you trust in the God who sees…and who will one day act to end all violence and fear and hatred? …the God who laughs in the face of evil.

Legacy

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Cru logoOver the past week, I have been enjoying a vacation reminiscent of summer trips my family took when I was young, but unlike any that my wife and I have taken with our own kids. Starting out in San Diego, we have visited the Grand Canyon and Mesa Verde National Parks, stopped briefly to walk through Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico at Four Corners National Monument, watched as the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad train began its slow trek into the mountains, and rode the newly-rebuilt Royal Gorge Aerial Tram a thousand feet above the Arkansas River in Colorado.

For the past few days we have been with my parents, a treat that only happens every couple years. Many of our conversations have been about church ministry, family, current events, and the staff conference from which they’d just returned. There has also been plenty of catching up on old friends (“do you remember…?” or “have you heard from…?”) and reminiscing about the adventures we had as a family or that my parents have had in the thirty-plus years since I (their youngest) left home. And the adventures have been many, but far more than mere adventure….

Next year, my parents will celebrate fifty years on staff with Cru (known until four years ago as Campus Crusade for Christ). Those years have taken them from their childhood homes in Michigan to live in California, Minnesota, Texas, British Columbia, Germany, and Colorado. But they have served even more broadly on four of the world’s seven continents: Africa (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, and North Africa, to name a few), Asia (Mongolia, Siberia, and China), Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, England, the Netherlands, and Russia), North & Central America (Canada, U.S., Mexico, Haiti, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, and Cuba).

And they have shared their faith in Jesus Christ more broadly still, with global ambassadors and diplomats, national presidents and prime ministers, business executives, college students, athletes, and military leaders. They have trained thousands of men, women, and children, whether through a Sunday School class with six teenagers or a Dallas Cotton Bowl stadium with 85,000; in a church with a few hundred adults or a dinner with dozens of international diplomats. Mom has taught hundreds in an international women’s Bible study and Dad has talked about Jesus one skier at a time as he rode chair lifts with strangers for forty years.

During many of the conversations with my parents the past few days, our daughters have read books or played games on their phones. But they have also heard the stories, the names, the challenges and blessings. And as they’ve walked through Oma and Opa’s condo, they’ve seen the evidences of these lives lived for God: memorabilia from their travels, gifts from friends, photos of family. And I think my girls have caught something of the legacy they are inheriting—a legacy of faith and faithfulness, of devotion and obedience, of love for God and people. My prayer is that they will see a similar legacy in my wife and me, even if it will look different than their globe-trotting grandparents.

The Faith of Community

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Directly across from me, leaning back against a tree, sat the family patriarch. He looked 75 but was likely 15-20 years younger. Around us sat his family – young children, teenagers, and a few perhaps in their early 20s. My hosts brought me a small stool on which to sit, and for the next 30 or 40 minutes we talked about my faith and theirs, the Bible and the Q’ran, about Jesus and Islam. Several times, the patriarch – I never got his name – told me, “What you say is good.” As we concluded our conversation he invited us to return the next day to talk more, but with regret I explained that this was our last day in the area. Repeating his affirmation, “what you say is good,” he added, “We will believe, me and my family. Not today, but probably in two or three days, we will believe.”

This encounter took place ten years ago this past week, in a village in southern Ethiopia. Two days later, the team I was with flew home, spending Easter morning on a layover at Frankfurt International Airport in Germany. My mind often returns to that village and the twice-translated conversation with the family. Did the life-giving resurrection of Jesus Christ take place in their hearts? If I were to return to the village today, would it still be dominated by Islam, or would the patriarch—or one of the children sitting with us in the shade of the tree—be leading a ten-year-old church? For a decade I have longed to return and to meet this man and his family again. Maybe someday I will.

Across the barriers of language, I learned something under that tree that has shaped my life, my faith, and my ministry as a pastor: faith is not a do-it-yourself encounter. We do not come to faith, profess faith, walk in faith, grow in faith, or live in faith alone. Faith is a community affair. It is conceived, born, and nurtured in community. It grows and matures in community. It lives and thrives in community.

This challenges much of what I was taught growing up, which centered on making a personal decision for Christ, a personal confession of faith. This notion of individualized faith, while not theologically incorrect, is at best incomplete. Scripture is filled with stories of households and communities that believed in Jesus…apparently as one, at one time. When Jesus met the Samaritan woman at a well and told her everything about her, she believed; then she went back to her village and told them about Him, and they believed. (Read the encounter in John 4.) When Peter and a Roman centurion named Cornelius each had a vision directing them to meet, Peter shared the good news of Jesus and “the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word” (Acts 10). Or read of the conversion of Lydia in Philippi (Acts 16) or Crispus in Corinth (Acts 18).

I don’t know all the implications of this community faith idea. It certainly doesn’t absolve any individual of confessing Jesus for himself or herself. Nor, I think, does it mean that children raised by Christian parents get a free pass into heaven. (These concepts of “fire insurance,” “ticket to heaven,” “get out of hell free” … they’re all really bad theology, anyway; they completely miss the point of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. But that’s a subject for another post.) Maybe this would be a good opportunity for you to share some thoughts. What implications do you see for yourself, your family, your church, your work, other people in your circles of influence?