Pastor's Page: August 11, 2009

Greetings, friends! This is my last Pastor's Page for Faith Bible Church, where I no longer serve as pastor. It has been a privilege to write out for you my thoughts and meditations over these past six and a half years. Trust in Jesus Christ with living and enduring faith, and some day you and I will rejoice together forever in the paradise that I utterly fail to describe below. Grace and Peace to you, Paul Lundquist "He must become greater; I must become less." (John 3:30). ---

Imagining Heaven (Part 3)

Suppose that you and I were twin fetuses waiting to be born, and we could talk, and you got a chance to see the outside world for a while, and then returned and tried to tell me what you experienced.

What would you say? How would you describe things to me?

Keep in mind that I have never seen anything, never breathed air, never felt a mother's touch, never heard anything but muffled, indistinct sounds, never crawled, never tasted milk, never smelled anything. While accounting for all my limitations, describe to me what it is like to ride a horse galloping through a field of wildflowers while gazing at snowcapped mountains in the distance.

You can't even describe the horse! "What's a horse?" I ask. You say, "It's an animal that-" and I interrupt, "What's an animal?" You reply, "An animal is a being that breathes and eats and reproduces-" "Hold on!" I say, because now I'm really confused. "What is 'breathe'? What is 'eat'? What is 'reproduce'? And what is a 'being'?"

You quickly give up trying to describe anything to me, so I try to help you out with the simplest questions I can think of. "What kind of nutrition do we get through our umbilical cords out there? What's the temperature of the amniotic fluid that we float in? Do we float in any position at all, or only right-side up? Do we get to kick each other a bit (because that's my favorite thing in the world!)." And, of course, you find that you are not able to give a satisfactory answer even to the most basic questions that I can come up with.

I think that describing heavenly reality to earthly mortals is like that. One of the most common questions I get about heaven, for example, is whether our pets will be there. I suspect the answer is neither yes nor no, but, "That's kind of like a fetus asking about the function of his umbilical cord after he's born." The vital lifelines of our present existence - things we can't imagine doing without - will be superceded by the glorious and the unimaginable.

Speaking of glorious and unimaginable: Lisa my bride took my name on Saturday, and, like the blessed fetus above, I'm completely at a loss to express what it's like to be married to her. This is about the best I can do: have you ever been dead, and got to go to heaven, and then they revived you and brought you back here? It's like the part just before they revive you and bring you back here.

Pastor's Page: July 26, 2009

Imagining Heaven (Part 2)

When I compared Alice Sebold's and C. S. Lewis' visions of heaven last week, I wonder if any readers thought, "Why bother imagining heaven at all? Can't we just go by what the Bible says about it?" And that might seem like a simple and obvious thing to do. But the problem is that the Bible never gives a single coherent view of the blessed afterlife. What it gives instead is a variety of images that are hard to put together in a single frame. I would go as far as to say that our finite minds cannot assemble all the images meaningfully.

Sometimes heaven is viewed as a city (Revelation 21:2). Sometimes it is a country comprised of cities (Luke 19:11-19). Sometimes the scale is reduced, and it is viewed as a many-roomed mansion (John 14:2). Sometimes it is a serene countryside (Isaiah 11:6-9).

What will we be doing there? In Matthew 25:1-13 and Revelation 19:9 it looks like we're having a party in a wedding reception hall. In Revelation 4 and 5 it looks like we're worshipping in a great throne room. In Hebrews 4:1-11, I think we're just relaxing in a hammock under a shade tree.

So, which is it? Are we relaxing, dancing, or bowing? Are we in a room, or a great hall, or an open space? Are we in a city with a huge throng, or are we walking along grassy hills with lion on our left and a lamb on our right? And is Jesus at our side speaking words of love - or is he off in the distance, seated on a throne before which we lie prostrate?

Yes.

I suppose if you wanted to insist on a literal fulfillment of all the images you could gerrymander a way to do it. Like this: on Tuesdays in heaven we exit our condo units at the mansion and walk over to the big worship center for some angel-led praise. Wednesdays we drink and dance and stuff ourselves at a party. Thursdays we tour the cities we've been assigned to govern and take care of administrative duties that have piled up during the week. Fridays we frolic with wolves and lions by a viper's pit (and give thanks they're all vegetarians now). Saturday, hammock. Sunday your choice. Then Monday is the day everybody looks forward to, because, since Matthew 22:30 says we are like genderless unmarried angels, we get to indulge in that mysterious thing God has prepared for us that we all find better than sex.

Or we can let the literalisms go and recognize that the images given to us are just that - images. They are word pictures designed to communicate the incommunicable. None of the pictures are false - they are simply inadequate for the task of conveying even a little bit of heavenly reality to us.

For a while it intrigued me (I'm not sure I could say it bothered me) that, while I preferred to see heaven as beautiful open countryside - the Rocky Mountains! - the Bible more often saw it as a city. I don't like cities, especially crowded ones. Why does the Bible give me such an inferior picture?

Then a couple things occurred to me. First, the "wilderness" known by ancient Israelites simply wasn't all that beautiful. They didn't have a Glacier National Park, or a Grand Canyon, or even Smokey Mountains. (Of course, I must confess I've never been to Israel and have not been able to evaluate the scenery there. But I have seen pictures. Meh.)

Secondly, Israelite wilderness was not a lush vacationland but a barren, hostile threat. Their wilderness was the place where you could die of thirst, find no food, maybe be set upon by thieves or foreign soldiers. It was the city, your city, where you found refuge, safety, food, comfort, fellowship. So of course, to such a people, heaven must be pictured as a city. That is the best place they knew. But I wonder, had Revelation been written in 21st century America, if urban terminology would have been used at all. To me, at least, the very word "city" conjures up no thoughts of heavenly delight but rather of crime, noise, blight, honking horns, crowded subways, unpleasantly overwhelmed senses, and the smell of car exhaust.

I think the main thing we need to understand about heaven is that we will be with Christ and we will like it. Beyond that, it's a little hard to see. Paul said once, "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). And when he caught sight of heaven, he wasn't even allowed to talk about it (2 Corinthians 12:2-4). Some things about heaven will remain unseeable and unknowable until we get there.

I'm getting married in 11 days. That's pretty heavenly.

Pastor's Page: July 21, 2009

Imagining Heaven (Part 1)

A friend loaned me Alice Sebold's best-selling novel "The Lovely Bones" and asked me to comment on the author's view of heaven.

The book is narrated from heaven by Susie, a 14-year-old girl who was murdered on earth. In the afterlife, Susie finds an adjustable reality that is personalized to her wishes. It takes her a while to understand this. "When I first entered heaven," she writes, "I thought everyone saw what I saw." They don't. There's some overlap, but the people there, like her friend Holly, are all adjusting to their own heavens. Susie explains, "We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams. There were no teachers in the school. We never had to go inside except for art class for me and jazz band for Holly...; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue." Holly, a Vietnamese girl, spoke perfect English because, in her heaven, "she wanted no trace of an accent".

After five days in this paradise, Susie and Holly tell their intake counselor, Franny, "We're bored." Franny asks, "What do you want?" and Susie says, "I don't know." Then Franny helpfully explains how heaven works. "All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why - really know - it will come." So Susie and Holly imagine themselves a duplex and get one.

What stunned me in reading these pages was the similarity to the afterlife depicted in C. S. Lewis' novel The Great Divorce. But there is a key difference. Lewis perceives that the post-death place where you get whatever you want is not heaven but hell! That's one reason why hell seems so big to those inside it. "You see, it's easy here," a damned soul explains to the narrator of TGD. "You've only got to think a house and there it is. That's how this town keeps growing."

Sebold's heaven grows the same way. Commenting on her friendship with Holly, Susie writes, "Our heavens expanded as our relationship grew. We wanted many of the same things." Wants, desires, are what dictate the size both of Sebold's heaven and Lewis' hell.

The residents of Lewis' hell don't have to remain in their ever-expanding world of met desires. They can tour heaven if they like, and some do. They can even move there and stay permanently. But most, finding they cannot own, change or contaminate heaven - cannot adjust heaven to their personal satisfaction - wind up taking the bus back to hell.

Heaven in TGD is astonishingly beautiful, but it won't budge an inch to the efforts of hellish souls to manipulate it. Lewis symbolizes this idea by representing the heavenly nature as perfectly hard. His narrator wanders about beautiful scenery, and writes, "Moved by a sudden thought, I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy which was growing at my feet. The stalk wouldn't break. I tried to twist it, but it wouldn't twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like a diamond." The beautiful river into which he longs to dive has a surface like glass. He can walk on it, but cannot swim in it.

But if he stays, he is told, he will eventually become more solid. The grass will bend under his feet, and he will bathe in rushing waterfalls, and he will eat the golden apples that trees joyously shed. A mighty angel tells him, "The very leaves and the blades of grass in the wood will delight to teach you."

Why would anyone turn away from such bliss? Because it requires yielding to God and his desires rather than to oneself and one's own desires. As the narrator's guide and mentor explains, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done."

While I don't believe that the real heaven bends at all to our wishes (if we go there, we must bend to its reality!), I certainly believe that descriptions of heaven accommodate - necessarily - our limited understanding of the perfect and the good. My favorite imaginative depictions of heaven are in TGD, and the last few chapters of The Last Battle (book 7 of The Chronicles of Narnia), and the penultimate chapter of Leif Enger's modern classic Peace Like A River. I hope Lewis and Enger got it right. I hope heaven looks like Grand Teton National Park. But if it doesn't, I know it will be because it is so much better, and I trust by God's grace to adjust to that. Heaven forbid that I should expect it to adjust to me.

VBS: Wildwood Forest!

Calling all families!
Join in on a high energy week of vacation bible school with Faith Bible Church!
Learn about God's creations by going on a journey through the Wildwood Forest with crafts, snacks, singing, and fun.

Date:
July 27th to 31st,
6:30pm to 9:30pm

Who can come?
Everyone!
Children before kindergarden all the way to those in highschool are able to participate.
Adults are free to drop by during the week and watch the excitement.

Pastor's Page: July 14, 2009

Maybe I'll Get To Recant Something!

A friend told me how a friend told her that she had read something in one of my Pastor's Pages that she disagreed with, and that got me very excited. Experience has taught me that great things result from disagreements between thinking Christians. I may soon have to refine, correct or disambiguate something I wrote, and I relish that opportunity. Or maybe I'll stand my ground with holy zeal and persuade this friend to see something differently. Or, maybe - it could happen! - I'll find that I'm wrong and need to recant.

I do recant from time to time. Back in 2004 I wrote a Pastor's Page that turned out to be based on bad information - I've deleted that essay and have kept it out of bound volumes. About 10 years ago I foolishly said in a Bible study that, while the Old Testament forbids slander and false testimony and oath breaking, Scripture does not forbid lying per se until you get to the New Testament. Then somebody showed me Leviticus 19:11: "Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another." Oops. My bad. You're right. Forget what I just said. A year ago in a sermon I made some idiotic point about St. Paul being a servant of God, not the church. Then a few days later I remembered 2 Corinthians 4:5: "ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake," and so the next Sunday I had to spend a few minutes retracting that observation. And I can think of two Scriptural interpretations my mother espoused 25 years ago where I strongly disagreed with her until I got older, and wiser, and discovered that best evangelical scholarship confirmed what she knew instinctively. Mom 2, Paul 0.

Thankfully we Christians have a ground for settling disputes: Scripture. Scripture Scripture Scripture Scripture Scripture. When Martin Luther was threatened with nasty things by the church of Rome (which had burned his predecessor John Hus), he said, "Show me in Scripture where I'm wrong." In a memorable exchange with his opponent John Eck, Luther said, "When Christ stood before Annas, he said, 'Produce witnesses.' If our Lord, who could not err, made this demand, why may not a worm like me ask to be convicted of error from the prophets and the Gospels?" Eck blustered hopelessly: "Your plea to be heard from Scripture is the one always made by heretics." Luther responded,

"Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason...my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen." Words to carve in stone.

Some time ago I was - at least in my own mind - cruelly wronged by a fellow minister. In my wounded fantasy I marched into his office with a Bible - several Bibles, including a Greek New Testament - dumped them on his desk and challenged him with, "Here, make your case against me with these, you miserable twit!"

Right ground, wrong attitude. The Holy Scriptures are indeed our guide and arbiter in all disputes. But we make our appeal to them with calm humility, careful thought and gentle admonition. When Eck debated Luther, he wanted stenographers out of the room because "taking them into account would chill the passionate heat of the debate." Luther's colleague Philip Melanchthon responded, persuasively, "The truth might fare better at a lower temperature." The stenographers stayed, and Melanchthon was proved right. Cool Scriptural truth prevailed over hot unscriptural rhetoric. May it always do so.

Pastor's Page: July 7, 2009

A Man Of Substance

There's a story I've shared from the pulpit but never on this page, and today I'd like to write it out.

Sometime around the year I was born my father painted the church basement. He donated his labor. Mr. Lemm, a wealthy man, gave money to buy the paint, and dad did the work. After painting all day on Saturday dad was exhausted and so naturally fell asleep during the sermon on Sunday. (Which is why, to this day, I don't mind it if people fall asleep during my messages. Dad did it: it must be ok.)

Dad was snoozing away when the offering plate was passed, and the usher foolishly nudged my 13-year-old brother Dave and chuckled as he pointed to the slumberer, inviting my brother to share in the joke at his father's expense. Dave wasn't amused. He was still seething over the fact that Mr. Lemm had been publicly thanked from the pulpit for his generous gift while dad's contribution of labor had gone unnoticed.

Afterward Dave spoke to dad and unleashed some of his anger. He asked dad if it bothered him that Mr. Lemm was thanked and honored while all his hard work was ignored. Dad said simply, "Dave, my reward is not here."

After my father passed away suddenly when I was 17 (and began immediately to enjoy his great reward), my brother took me aside and told me that and several other stories that illustrated dad's wisdom and faith and integrity. Though I had known, for example, that dad lost his job in his mid-fifties, I hadn't known that it was because he refused to defraud clients as his corrupt boss insisted. Nor had I known about his boss's deliberate attempts to humiliate him, nor how dad not only endured that disrespect but kept amazingly quiet as he covered for the fool's mistakes behind the scenes.

About 20 years later my niece happened to meet a man who had known dad, and when he learned who her grandfather was he sat down and teared up and said, "Lowell Lundquist was the most honest man I ever knew." I told that story at our church's recent graduation banquet, and concluded by imploring our young people to maintain absolute integrity at all times, so that, 80 years from now, maybe long after they're dead, somebody will tear up at the mention of their name and say, "Jonathan Luk was the most honest man I ever knew."

I selected Jonathan's name at random - he was one of our 8th grade graduates - but afterward found out that the pick was providential. A few minutes later Jonathan came up to me and told me that earlier that day when he picked up some Baker's Square pies, he gave the cashier a $20 and a $5 for a $24.95 bill and received $15.05 in change - as though he had paid with two $20s. He returned the $15 to the cashier, telling him, "You gave me too much." The stunned cashier explained that he could lose his job for mistakes like that, and said to Jonathan, "You're my hero." I rejoiced too with Jonathan and told him, "That's the man you want to be for the rest of your life."

In the film "Almost Famous" there's a great scene where a mom played by Frances McDormand confronts a rock star, Russell Hammond, who has befriended her 15-year-old journalist son. She challenges the musician's lax moral code and flexible ethics with angry vigor, and warns him not to corrupt her boy. But then she relents and says, "Now go do your best. It's not too late for you to be a person of substance, Russell."

Those words appeal to me: "It's not too late for you to be a person of substance." That is a message I want to get across to the younger generation as I find myself plodding through middle age. These days in particular I'm wondering how to get that message across to a couple young men whose mother is a lying, faithless, perverted soul who made them her sworn confidants as she plotted secret betrayals of those who loved her dearly. How, after being morally abused like that, will they not grow cynical of the values of faithfulness, honesty, self-denial and purity? Only by God's grace. This morning the contrast hit me with the force of a thrown rock: my father - his memory be blessed! - humbly hid his virtue from his sons; whereas the mother of these boys coldly employed them as shields under which she hid her vice.

But it is not too late, I choose to believe it is not too late, for them to be men of substance still.

A prayer for all who waver between honesty and lies, faithfulness and betrayal, purity and perversion: "God, grant by the power of your Spirit that we be men of women of substance whose characters will be found to be full of solid light rather than weightless darkness. Thank you for the blessed example of moral giants who went before us and never compromised their integrity. Give us grace both to honor their memory and walk in their steps, for the glory of your Son Jesus. Amen."

Pastor's Page: June 30, 2009

What If You're Not Being Fed?

A couple days ago I explained to some young people that it is the duty of all Christian believers to attend church services regularly. To refuse to do so is to defy God, reject his commandment to assemble together, and deny him the worship that is his due.

I dared to set myself forth as an example. On Saturday August 8 - by God's grace - I will be wed to my beloved, and on Sunday, August 9, my bride and I will rise from the marriage bed and go to a church and worship the Lord in the company of his people. Why not? Why should the Lord's Day following our wedding be a day when God is less worthy of praise? Will we really be that tired?

One of the youths asked me, "But what if, at the church you're attending, you're not being fed?" That is an excellent question and I'm afraid I flubbed the answer, so I thought I'd take some time to think it over and craft a better response. Here's what I think:

It is definitely the duty of every minister to feed his congregation. Jesus said to Peter, "Feed my sheep," and pressed that obligation onto him by repeating it three times (John 21:15-17). Peter himself passed it along to the elders he trained: "Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care" (1 Peter 5:2). Shepherds must see to it that their sheep are fed with all that's good for them.

What's good for Christians is the Word of God. As a minister I have no other food to give. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4). "I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word" (Psalm 119:16). "Like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation" (1 Peter 2:2 - NASB).

So I would urge Christians to flee churches where the Word of God is not on the menu very much. This would include churches on the far left and the far right that pursue political agendas more than the Word; it would include large swatches of the trendy middle that base sermon series off of hit TV shows and current movies; and it definitely would include an abomination like the church of Joel Osteen, who manages occasionally to drop a Bible verse into his message like it was a bay leaf in a tub of spaghetti sauce.

A long-standing frustration of mine is that widespread biblical ignorance on the part of evangelicals means that, whenever I point out that some favorite Christian phrase is not in Scripture (e.g. "God's unconditional love"; "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ"; "forgiving yourself"; "affair-proofing your marriage"; "pre-trib rapture of the church"; "the five love languages"; "forgive [rather than discipline or shun] the unrepentant") - and why I believe that such sloppy phrases lead to sloppy thinking and bad doctrine - you would think, by the look on the faces of my dear Christian brothers and sisters, that I had just stomped on their puppies. You have no idea how many times I've contemplated how much easier my job as a shepherd would be if the preachers my flock had been listening to had just preached the Word, fed them the same old boring Word, on its own terms, rather than invent evangelical catch-phrases and perform inspiring riffs on them.

But if your minister is faithfully preaching the Word of God Sunday by Sunday, verse by verse, then you are being fed. You may not like it, and it may not excite you, and you may not even realize that you are being nourished. But the Word faithfully proclaimed is what you need to chew on and swallow and digest. Jeremiah 15:16: "When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart's delight."

Having said that, there are still two important points to make:

First, keep in mind that you don't go to church mainly to get fed. You go to worship God. Sunday morning worship is not about you getting your spiritual sustenance (we must get our eyes off ourselves!), but about God getting the glory, honor, praise and thanks that all creatures must render to him. You can do that, you can honor God, even when there are no morsels for your starving soul to feed on, and even if you leave the service hungrier than when you began. You go to church for God's sake, not yours.

Secondly, I believe the only Christian believers who have a right to "complain" about not being fed are new Christians, those who have only known Christ for a few months at most. The rest should not only be able to feed themselves, but should be doing what they can to feed others. The writer of Hebrews admonishes veteran believers on this point, saying "by this time you ought to be teachers" (Hebrews 5:12). A baby Christian might legitimately ask, "What if I'm not being fed?", but the better question for the older Christian is, "What if, at the church I'm going to, I'm not feeding anybody?"

Pastor's Page: June 23, 2009

What It Means To Thank God

Have you ever thought about just exactly what it is we're doing when we thank God?

Bible translators have to think about this when they're putting the Scriptures into languages that have no word for "thank" or "thanksgiving". It's a challenge. Suppose English had no such word - how would you express St. Paul's thought in Romans 1:8: "I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you," or his commandment in Philippians 4:6: "In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God"?

If I recall correctly from my Bible translator days, what we do when we thank God (or thank anyone, really) is acknowledge that he is the one responsible for some good thing that made us happy. So, "Thank you for this gift" comes out, "It makes me happy that you gave me this gift," or perhaps, "It is good that you gave me this gift."

The other day I went for a long walk at dawn, and, for a while, before my attention-deficit brain wandered to other stuff, focused on telling God about things he was responsible for that made me happy. Simple things, like the scent of wildflowers or the sight of the reddening sky in the east. I tried to make the effort to express thankfulness without my usual lazy reliance on that word "thanks," or the phrase, "thank you."

Someone wrote to me recently asking, "Do you delight in God?" and I wrote back, "Absolutely! Every time I delight in anything I am delighting in God. He made everything, including the ingredients that go into a French Silk pie, and the skillful hands that prepared it, and the taste buds in my mouth that savor it, and the endorphins in my brain that get released even before I have begun to swallow it, and the kind company with which I share it. Where, in any delight, is God not? What delight can we possibly experience that he should not get credit for?"

These days I'm giving God a lot of credit for a lot of delight. Most of that just spills out of my mouth in an inarticulate and repetitive (but heartfelt!) "Oh, God, thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. Thank you. I mean, really, thank you! Thanks, God. Thank you. Thank you so very, very much." Because the person who wrote to me asking, "Do you delight in God?" is, herself, the most delightful person I have ever met, and she loves me, and, by God's inscrutable work within her blessed heart, has found it possible to delight in me (seriously!!!), and has agreed to marry me on August 8.

If English had no word for thanks, then I would still tell God how happy I am that he did this, and how he, and he alone, gets all the credit for it.

Rejoice, all of you, rejoice in the Lord, with me and Lisa Krausfeldt.

Pastor's Page: June 16, 2009

The Problem With Prophetic Utterances Today

I want to begin by defining the term "eschatological orthodoxy". "Eschatological" means having to do with the end times. "Orthodoxy" means right belief. So eschatological orthodoxy is the right belief about end times. If you are eschatologically orthodox, you believe what is true (or at least acceptable, church-sanctioned) about the end of days.

Now, a story:

In 1995 my friend John received a prophetic word from a charismatic pastor. "John," the pastor said, "I have a word from God for you concerning your future spouse." The pastor shared what he felt God had put on his heart about John's wife-to-be.

John was excited and figured he would be meeting that special someone in the next day or two. But he didn't. Thirteen years of singleness followed, during which, he said, he felt that that pastor "should have been stoned, or at least rebuked." Last year, however, John finally met, courted, engaged and married the woman of his dreams. Joy is evident on both his and his beloved's face. He still puzzles, though, over why it took so many years for the prophecy to be fulfilled.

I do not share John's puzzlement, because I do not believe that the prophecy in 1995 and the marriage in 2008 had anything to do with each other. My reason for this disbelief springs from my zealous, unwavering commitment to eschatological orthodoxy.

By eschatological orthodoxy I don't mean anything like the nature and duration of the gap (if any) between the rapture and the second coming of Christ. Nor do I think that any of the competing views of the millennium, pre-, post-, a- or pan-, are unorthodox. (If you are unfamiliar with pan-millennialism, it's the view that punts the question away and says everything will pan out all right.)

To be eschatologically orthodox you must embrace by faith two very simple core doctrines:
1) Jesus will return, and
2) You must be ready for it, because it can occur at any time.

Christians may differ about what signs may precede his arrival, and whether those signs have already been fulfilled - but there is no mistaking the biblical urgency to be ready now, right now, for the appearing of Christ. He may arrive before the sun sets tonight, or before I have finished typing this page. 1 Thessalonians 5:2 says "for you know very well the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night." Jesus concluded a parable that contrasted those who are prepared and those who are unready by saying "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour" (Matthew 25:13). In 1 Corinthians 15:52 Paul says it will take place "in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye". Our constant state of readiness for this moment must stir us to holiness: we are to live "self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope - the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:12-13).

I do not know if Christ will return today or 100,000 years from now, but my orthodox faith insists that I be spiritually prepared should it occur just seconds from now. I know nothing that would prevent it from happening that soon.

And that is the problem with confident prophetic utterances today. When a man says, for example, "God has told me such-and-such about the woman you will some day marry," he is necessarily (though of course unintentionally) saying "God has revealed to me that Jesus will not return any time soon." Think about it. Jesus taught that marriage is for this age only: "those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage" (Luke 20:35). Therefore, in order for my friend John to have believed that his pastor's prophecy had to be true, he would necessarily have had to believe that the possibility of a sudden return of Christ could not be true. Any time a prophet today proclaims a "thus says the Lord" about some future event that necessarily pertains to the conditions of this present age, he or she is - in effect - denying the doctrine of the imminent (that is, "possible-at-any-time") return of Christ.

Just a couple days ago I was asked about what I was discerning of the voice of the Lord in circumstances pertaining both to my personal life and that of Faith Bible Church. In answering I clung doggedly to my eschatological orthodoxy, saying that, while it sure looked to me like things were lining up beautifully under the hand of God for A, B and C to happen, it was impossible to know for sure. How could anyone know that? How dare anyone pronounce a "Thus says the Lord" over such possible future events? After all, Jesus could return before I finish this senten

Pastor's Page: June 9, 2009

"Do It Again Just The Same Way, God"

Nine-year-old Michelle wanted a bicycle very badly, though it seemed unlikely that her father, a struggling dairy farmer, could afford one. She decided one night to pray for a bike with all the spiritual effort she could muster. At church she had heard about fasting, and also that Jesus said that when you prayed you weren't supposed to tell anyone about it, but go to your closet and shut the door and pray there. (Our newer translations of Matthew 6:6 say "your room", but the old King James Version said "thy closet".) So she dismissed herself from the dinner table without eating, went to her room, shut herself in the closet, and prayed for a bike as long and as hard as she could. Then she went to bed.

The next afternoon her father called her and her two sisters out to the barn where - Hallelujah! - there stood three shiny new bikes. The kindness of God gave her more than she asked for, because it even included her sisters in the bounty of joy.

But the climax of that story was not revealed till a quarter of a century later, when Michelle told her father for the first time that he had gotten those bikes right after she had prayed so hard for one. He teared up and told her, "You don't know the half of it." He explained that that morning when he checked the mailbox there was a blank envelope with three one-hundred dollar bills in it. He did not know, and does not know to this day, who put them there. He thought about paying bills with the money, and maybe a wise steward would have done just that. But he loved his longsuffering daughters, and wanted to do something special for them, and so he went to town and bought the bikes. I know this story is true, because I heard it from my sister Grace, Michelle's aunt.

Thirty-five-year-old Jennie's desperate prayer was starker than Michelle's. Jennie was deathly ill with what was later diagnosed as tularemia. She had prayed for healing but only got worse; now she just wanted to know whether she would live or die. She put a "fleece" before the Lord, like Gideon in Judges chapter 6. She prayed, "Lord, if I'm going to live, please let Laverne come over today." Laverne, Jennie's sister, occasionally stopped by to help with housework and take care of Jennie's four children.

Laverne, however, didn't come. Jennie did receive one kind visitor that day, old Mrs. Foster from church, but her sister never knocked on the door. Jennie went to bed that night thinking that if the Lord honored her request, she would need to put her affairs in order and prepare to die.

But, lying in bed, a sudden thought struck her with the force of a lightning bolt. She cried out to her husband, "Honey! Do you know what Mrs. Foster's first name is?" "Of course," he said, "Laverne." That was the only day, ever, that Laverne Foster stopped by to visit the mother of four who, three years later, became my mother too.

When my sister told me about Michelle and the miracle bike, I said, after recovering from gooseflesh, "I wonder what Michelle asked for the next week: 'Oh God! Now make it a car! I want a car this time!'." But Grace corrected me. "No, Michelle never asked like that again."

Good for her. Maybe Michelle understood that a holy moment like that was not the kind of thing that she should expect to be repeated. "Upping the ante" of a prayer like that would not be a sign of faith, but a sign of greed coupled with an effort to manipulate God.

My mother understood that too. Though she received a stunning answer to her prayer, she never again put a fleece before the Lord. She told me, "I should have just received whatever God would have chosen to give me, whether life or death. But in my weakness I had to know, and he graciously responded. I would never test him like that again though." And she advised that I never do it either.

In "Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer" C. S. Lewis writes, "It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore." That gets it exactly right. Christians must develop a sense of gratitude for those things that God chooses to do only once - without expecting (or, heaven forbid, demanding) that he repeat the pattern of yesterday. Look for new and different graces from the Lord.

I've been reading through the gospel of John lately, and several examples from that book come to mind. In John 6 Jesus miraculously feeds 5,000 men, but when the crowd follows him the next day looking for another meal, he refuses to give it to them, and even rebukes them. In John 11 Jesus resurrects Lazarus, who was probably killed soon afterward (see John 12:10). If Lazarus was indeed killed later, it is hard to imagine his sisters sending word to Jesus, "He's dead again. You need to come back!" Or take John 13, where Jesus assumes the role of a slave and washes his disciples' feet. How perfectly awful it would have been if, during one of his resurrection appearances, some idiot disciple approached him and said, "Hey, Jesus, glad to see you! Here's a bucket, go get yourself a towel. I'm afraid I stepped in it outside, and could really use a good cleaning."

There are some things, of course, that God does repeat. He repeats his pardon. His mercies are new every morning. I'll not test him on a one-and-done, but, for my daily offering of sin, I'll trust his daily supply of grace.

Pastor's Page: June 2, 2009

The Dearest Idol I Have Known

It is possible for a human being to become an idol for us.

Probably not in the literal sense, where we would actually render worship to the individual, or pray to him, or ascribe to him qualities unique to God. You see that in the Bible sometimes. In Daniel 6 King Darius, pressured by lackeys, wrote idolatry of himself into law, insisting that for 30 days no prayers be offered to any god but him. (Daniel disobeyed and got thrown to providentially meek lions.) And Herod Agrippa received worship in Acts 12:22 when a crowd heard him and cried, "The voice of a god and not a man!" He died soon afterward - it turns out he had the body of a man and not a god.

I don't think we worship people like that any more - though perhaps it is worth noting that that is one of the complaints Protestantism lays at the feet of Catholicism. Protestants detect in Catholic worship a tendency to treat Mary and other saints as gods whenever petitions are offered to them rather than through them. (And a good Protestant won't even ask a departed saint to pray on his behalf for the simple reason that the Bible forbids communication with the dead.)

But even a conscientious Protestant can find that he has made an idol of somebody. Colossians 3:5 is instructive here: it says that greed is idolatry. Just as a greedy person puts gold in the place of God, so also someone might be tempted to put a person in the place of God. I believe that is what Jesus warned about in Luke 14:26 when he said that a man must "hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters - yes, even his own life" in order to be his disciple. Of course "hate" is not literal (we are commanded to love our enemies - how much more our family members!), but serves to underscore the priority of Jesus first, and all earthly attachments - even family - after him.

A few months after my father died we sang at church the great William Cowper hymn, "Oh For A Closer Walk With God". I recall my mother confessing to me how hard it was for her to sing the 4th stanza:

The dearest idol I have known,
Whate'er that idol be
Help me to tear it from thy throne
And worship only thee.

Her eyes filled with tears as she said, "But my dearest idol was Dad!" It seemed cruel to her to have to rip him from the throne - as though he were some godless usurper of affection - when she knew him to be kind and worthy and a lover of God himself. I can't remember if I was able to say anything helpful to her, or anything at all.

A wise widow wrote to me saying that she was asking God what she could do to keep his good gifts from becoming idols to her. Her conscience likewise afflicted her about having idolized her husband, of having allowed him to take the place of God in her heart.

But I'm not convinced that either my mother or this widow were really guilty of shunting God aside and giving their husbands the honor that is due God alone. Wives are supposed to honor their husbands (Ephesians 5:33) and train younger women to love theirs (Titus 2:4). In the two churches I have pastored, I have yet to see even one woman who adored her husband the way my mom adored my dad - and I can't say I view that as a positive thing. It is not, "Good for them! See how well they resist the temptation to idolize their husbands!" but rather, "Why so little respect, deference, and spontaneous affection? Are all their men really so hard to love?"

I believe the better test of whether we have idolized someone is when we see that we have granted him or her the power to make us sin. It is not so much when we love, respect and delight in them but when we have let them lead us into wrongdoing that we have made an idol of them, and must rip them away from the throne of God. I know one man - I'm not making this up - whose young wife beguiled him away from a Sunday worship service by doing a striptease in front of him just before he was about to leave for church! She became his "golden calf" that day, standing provocatively between him and the appointed hour of worshipping the Lord.

Other forms of human idolatry will be more subtle, but I think that that spicy example illustrates the main idea. Human idols are not merely people whom we treasure - however highly - but people whom we permit to hinder our glad submission to God.

Pastor's Page: May 26, 2009:

On Discerning The Will Of God (Part 2)

Just to cover a few things left unsaid in last week's essay. And some personal testimony.

I believe the strong, sincere desire on the part of many Christians to "discern the will of God" actually tends to reflect a bit of a mismatch between something we want from God and something he wants from us. We are desperate to be guided in matters that are unclear, while he desires that we simply obey in matters that are already abundantly clear.

Christians are commanded to trust that God will direct our paths - not fear that he won't. I have known cases of Christians obsessing so badly about knowing God's will that it developed into a kind of neurosis for them. They feared missing the subtlest of clues, worried about not having said the right prayers or fasted long enough. Maybe they sinned and they figured that just ruined everything, irreparably, and made it impossible to get back on track. Sometimes they even got mad at God (how dumb is that?) when they tried everything they could think of to discover his will and things still turned out badly.

They need to relax, and learn wisdom from the prophet Jonah. I am indebted to Erwin Lutzer for pointing out a lesson from Jonah's story: if God will go to such extreme measures to re-direct a man who knows his will but chooses to disobey, how much more will he direct the person who longs to do his will, but is momentarily confused as to what it is?

Part of our problem I think is that we tend to assume we know what will be the end result of our having discovered and obeyed God's will for our life. If we get it exactly right, then of course we'll have inner peace, enjoy happy and exemplary marriages, serve God in productive ministries, etc. But how do we really know that any of that is God's will for us?

Jesus, Peter and Paul all lacked peace at times while serving faithfully in the center of God's will: see Luke 22:44; John 21:18; 2 Corinthians 11:28-29; 1 Thessalonians 3:5

It was God's will for the prophet Hosea to have a perfectly rotten marriage - the poor man was wed to a whore who cheated on him! (I think of a woman who complained about God "tricking" her into a bad marriage when she had done everything right - prayer, fasting, seeking good counsel, everything! - and her husband turned out to be a foul wretch of deep darkness. But how could she know that it was not precisely God's will for her to marry such a beast?)

I've never known a minister or missionary who did not pray for a thriving ministry. "So, if I'm stuck in a ministerial dead end, is that a sign that I have misread God's will?" No, not necessarily. It was God's will that Noah, Isaiah and John the Baptist - biblical titans all - wind up preaching to audiences of seven, zero, and one respectively. See 1 Peter 3:20; Isaiah 6:11-12; Mark 6:20.

I have had opportunity to reflect at great length on the topic of God's will concerning whom we should marry. My past marital woes are no secret, but to this day I neither doubt the leading of God in that area, nor regret having taken the path down which he led me. It is true that, almost certainly, had I married someone else, I would have been a much happier man all these years - but does that mean I would have been a better man? No. What could a person like me have learned from uninterrupted bliss, and how could that have shaped my character for the purposes to which God called me? It was by the severe mercy of God that I was kept from experiencing the kind of happiness that every man craves. So be it. Not my will but his be done. I praise him for his good leading.

And he will continue to lead, and do so with such deft care and a loving touch that I really don't need to worry or lose sleep over it. The analogy that suggests itself to me is that of being on one of those water rides in an amusement park. The raft will careen and bounce all over and jerk me from side to side, and it might even send me directly under that waterfall up ahead. But the course is safe, and pre-selected, and I can't go over the side if I just obey the posted rules. All I really have to worry about is keeping my arms in the vehicle at all times, remaining seated, with my safety belt fastened and my loose items secured. That kind of thing.

Pastor's Page: May 19, 2009

On Discerning The Will Of God

I was recently asked if I had any old Pastor's Pages on discerning God's will. I didn't, so here's one.

"Discerning God's will" is a favorite topic of some preachers (Charles Stanley in particular, I've noticed), but one that I ignore. The reason is because I think we already know the will of God in areas where it matters. Regarding doctrine, we know it is God's will that we believe the gospel of his Son Jesus Christ. Regarding behavior, we know it is his will that we be kind, just, fair, honest, compassionate, sober, diligent, faithful, loving, generous and pure, and that we avoid malice, lust, drunkenness, greed, slander, impurity, sloth, rebellion, dishonesty, theft and negligence. We could expound a bit more on the meaning of the gospel of Christ, and we could add a few things to the lists of virtues and vices - but we've already got the general idea. Believe what is true and do what is right. This is God's will for you.

But when Christian evangelicals talk about discerning the will of God (or, perhaps, "hearing his voice" or "following the Holy Spirit's leading"), they are usually not referring to things that have a clear moral or doctrinal component. They are usually thinking of choices between amoral alternatives. [Usage note: "amoral" does not mean "bad", it just means having nothing to do with morality.] These would involve questions like, "Should I take that job in Spokane or the one in Raleigh?" "Should I attend Illinois State or Northern Illinois?" "Should I marry Alice or Barbara?" "Boxers or briefs?"

I would not say that God is aloof, uninvolved in such decisions. He guides. But he does not play a shell game with us, hiding his true will behind a fast-moving blur of opaque shields that demand our utmost concentration in order to guess which one holds the peanut. I have seen long lists of "clues" for discerning God's will, and they turn me off when they wander into Da Vinci Code complexity. The Bible tends to present the will of God as something that may be hard to do but never hard to know. In fact, there are repeated reminders of its simplicity against those who are making it too complicated. Three examples below:

Deuteronomy 30:11-14:
Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, "Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?" Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, "Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?" No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.

Micah 6:8:
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Luke 10:25-28:
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
"What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you read it?"
He answered: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"
"You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live."

A few months ago I referred to a minister who obsessed over the will of God concerning a job opportunity, but who somehow missed the resounding clarity of the 7th commandment, "You shall not commit adultery." Talk about straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! Maybe one of the reasons I don't preach those "How to discover God's will for your life" sermons is because I perceive that they focus on all the wrong things, encouraging believers to guess at the unfathomable instead of just doing the good thing (or avoiding the bad thing) that is right in front of them.

Augustine famously said, "Love God, and do as you please," and he was exactly right. If you love God - which necessarily means obeying his commandments - you can go to Spokane or Raleigh, attend Northern or State, marry Alice or Barbara. Again, granting that there is no moral difference between the two. If, for example, Alice is a stunningly attractive, razor-tongued tart while Barbara is a gentle and sincere servant of God, then the moral component makes it obvious whom you should marry. You should marry Alice because you're not good enough for Barbara. For the sake of Barbara's happiness, you must leave her to a better man than yourself!

Pastor's Page: May 5, 2009

Cover Up

Summer approaches, when we all wear less clothing, so I thought this a good time to remind you (young people in particular) to be sure to wear enough clothing.

I'll set an example at church, as I do every summer. Though I shed my suit jacket around Memorial Day and don't put it on till September, I never go as far as to appear in the pulpit wearing shorts and a T shirt. That is because it would not be right of me to distract you with my finely sculpted calf muscles. And though I have 6-pack abs, I dutifully keep them covered at all times with a thick layer of subcutaneous fat. It is just one of those things that mature people do.

In the wake of the recent brouhaha about Miss California in the Miss USA pageant, I asked a couple friends if they would mind if their daughters participated in such a contest. One said "I'm not sure" and the other said "No way!". I said, "I'm just glad I don't have daughters." (It's the same thing I say at high school basketball half-time shows where the dancing squads not only wear inappropriate tights but gyrate suggestively in them, making me wonder why none of these girls have parents who say to them, "Young lady, you are not going out of this house dressed like that!")

Way back in 1996 I was teaching a Sunday School class to a group of about 20 senior citizens, and happened to ask if any of them had a problem with a Christian woman parading around onstage in a bikini so that spectators could ogle and grade her body in the swimsuit competition of a Miss America contest. None of them objected to that - they all thought I was prudish. Then, afterward, the oldest person in the class, a dear wizened widow who had never said a word, came up to me and quietly whispered, "I agree with you." So there it was, just me and a 93-year-old saint holding down the lonely fort of modesty in the face of a permissive onslaught within the church!

Another widow recently wrote to me saying, "The Bible says that women make themselves beautiful with a gentle and quiet spirit [1 Peter 3:4]. Is this something that is attractive to all men do you think?" I wrote back that it was certainly attractive to me! A gentle and quiet spirit is downright sexy - and sexy in the right way. An aggressive, public flaunting of flesh in tight or skimpy clothing only attracts the wrong kind of man - or attracts only the reptilian part of the brain of a good man.

Let the reptile have his rightful place in the marriage bed. Elsewhere, in public settings - especially church! - let your behavior be governed by modesty in spirit, speech, demeanor and dress.

Pastor's Page: April 28, 2009

Against Cheap Manipulation In Sermons This one is for my fellow preachers: Don't be a manipulative jerk in the pulpit. I suppose a stronger word than "jerk" could be applied to those who do the things I condemn below, but as a man of the cloth myself I will tame my tongue as I call to account some colleagues who irritate the living snot out of me. A pastor I'll call "Will Bibles" recently (according to a Christian journal) "challenged members of the congregation to raise their hands if they were willing to surrender their possessions and lifestyles fully to God and actually decide to use their resources to serve the poor and honor God...Then Will said he wanted to have a word with all the folks who did not raise their hands: 'I hope you have a terrible afternoon. And then I hope you have a terrible evening. I hope the Holy Spirit keeps after you, and you have to keep thinking this one through until you're able to raise your hand as well.'" What a cheap shot. First of all, Will doesn't have the moral authority to summon heaven's rebuke of the greedy. (I read one of his books where he wrote - guiltlessly - of tooling around in a sports car that costs more than double my annual salary, and about all the friends he made at his yacht club. Yes, his yacht club.) Second, it is so easy to turn the "I-pray-you-have-a-bad-afternoon" mantra against anyone - Will included - who falls afoul of the conviction you're harping on at the moment. For example, at my former church I hosted an organizational event for the Hike For Life, and the representative from Will's church explained that she couldn't make any announcements there because the church had a policy against public pro-life statements which might offend pro-choice seekers. (Grrrr. They have no policy of refusing to condemn racism just because that might offend seekers from the Klu Klux Klan.) A man of my convictions might want to thunder from the pulpit, "RAISE YOUR HAND if you are willing to take a public, uncompromising stand against the slaughter of the innocents," and, if Will were present and did not raise his hand, stare him straight in the eye and say, "I'll keep praying that you be miserable, miserable, until you repent." But that would be wrong. It is never right to try to influence behavior by calling for a show of hands and then browbeating, cursing, those who keep their hands down. A preacher I listen to on the radio was troubled that some in his congregation did not applaud one of his rhetorical flourishes, and at the conclusion of his message he actually prayed for all those who did not clap. I'm not kidding. I had noticed in the preceding months that he was developing the bad habit of crafting emotionally laden crescendo lines, slowly biting off the words of paper-thin monstrosities like "I...Will Not...Bow...To Satan...Even...If...He...CAN raise the dead!" and then stopping to wait for the applause. Sometimes he'd provoke up to five ovations in 20 minutes, and it always made me groan. I suppose that if he thought that non-applauders needed prayer, then eye-rollers like me needed exorcisms! But I maintain he was just being manipulative and should cut it out. One pulpit manipulation trick is to treat your audience like ventriloquist dolls. At both a Promise Keepers convention and at a mega-church service I was instructed to "Turn to the person next to you and say" something really inane. I did it, like a lemming, but if it happens again I'm not going to bother. That kind of thing needs to be discouraged. Some manipulations have heart-breaking effects. Years ago I talked with a sweet-spirited woman, a school teacher in her early 50s, who had recently experienced the sorrow of losing her husband-to-be to a sudden heart attack just before their wedding. In the course of our conversation she mentioned that she had gone to a large church where a multi-part "invitation" was given. If you were willing to give your heart to Jesus you were supposed to stand. Then if were already a Christian you should stand too. Then if you weren't in either of those categories but were "on the way" as a seeker and willing to respond to God's call, you should stand as well. She was left as the only person sitting surrounded by a sea of the standing, and she felt conspicuous and awful and never wanted to go back. I apologized to her on behalf of my Christian brothers. (Is this how we call people to Christ - through peer pressure and social embarrassment? For shame.) Thankfully she read and responded well to a copy of C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed that I gave her. Say no to homiletic pressure tactics. Gospel truth conveyed with conviction, reverence, earnestness and love has a power all its own and needs no manipulative gimmick to support it. You cannot straighten a soul by twisting an arm.

Pastor's Page: April 21, 2009

Graciousness 4: The Assist

Philadelphia 76s point guard Maurice Cheeks dished out 7,392 assists in the course of his basketball career, but his best one came 10 years after he retired. On April 28, 2003, Cheeks, then coach of the Trailblazers, stood on the sideline as 13-year-old Natalie Gilbert began singing the national anthem before a game with the Mavericks. Natalie got as far as "the twilight's last gleaming" when she froze, forgetting the words. In her silence the crowd began to whoop it up, and she buried her face in the microphone as though trying to hide. But Cheeks quickly went over to her and began singing, "Whose broad stripes and bright stars...". He draped his arm around her, and they finished the song together as the whole crowd joined in. Watch it on YouTube, and you can see for yourself why Cheeks is rightly regarded in basketball circles as a great class act.

A gracious person stands ready at a moment's notice to provide an assist like that for someone stuck in a bad situation. It can be very simple. The other day as I finished a transaction at the bank, the guy behind me said, "Excuse me, sir?" and apologetically noted that my collar was up in back. I had neglected to fold it down over my tie. I thanked him and fixed it, and told him I never would have known the collar was amiss if he had not alerted me. I was reminded of the quick work of a friend of mine who, when sitting in a high school physics class, saw that his teacher's fly was open. Rather than embarrassing him with "Mr. Johnson, your zipper!", he hastily scribbled a note and placed it atop an assignment he was handing in. The teacher soon found an excuse to leave the room and came back adjusted.

The classroom is one of those settings that provides daily opportunities for gracious assists on the part of both teacher and student. When I was at Trinity I was very impressed by the way several professors managed to respond thoughtfully to the tangled verbiage of over-caffeinated seminarians. Had I been more gracious myself, I might have gone up to them afterward and said, "Thank you, Professor. I like how you were able to make sense of that question!" I can only imagine how many times they had to resist the temptation to stare at a student and mutter, Snape-ishly, "Go regroup your fuddled thoughts and come back with something coherent."

I believe most students probably don't realize that their teachers need assists too. Scholar and author Scot McKnight used to tell us that when he first started teaching he was afraid to go to class. Professors realize that they will get evaluated. They probably look themselves up on RateMyTeacher, and know very well when they are bombing. By the time I got to graduate school I learned the trick of raising my hand and posing lots of questions to struggling teachers, and that always seemed to energize them. It was a matter of helping out a teacher whose brain was good but needed picking.

Look for opportunities to give an assist. Jesus will some day say to the righteous, "I was hungry and you gave me to eat, thirsty and you gave me to drink, in prison and you visited me," etc. He might also say, "I was a 13-year-old who forgot the national anthem, and you came to my side and helped me to finish it."

Pastor's Page: April 7, 2009

Graciousness 3: Just Paying Attention

When I was 14 I was reprimanded by a teacher for something very rude I had done. While other freshmen were giving oral presentations I took out a book and started reading it. Believe it or not, my motive for ignoring my classmates was good. I myself hated, hated, pathologically hated giving speeches - the thought of talking publicly made me so nervous I'd want to crawl in a hole. What a horror to have everyone looking at you while you perspired and sputtered and turned red! So, in the spirit of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," I deliberately paid no attention to the speakers, even as (so I thought) I wanted them to pay no attention to me.

Boy was that dumb. The teacher was right to insist that I put the book away. And so I learned, by means of rebuke, what naturally gracious people know without being taught: Generally, people don't like being ignored when they're speaking. They like being listened to. Even I like being listened to now. I get flummoxed if someone reads a newspaper during Sunday School, or goes out for coffee as soon as the sermon starts. But who am I to complain? It is probably karma for my own rudeness!

Back in the early 70s my mother celebrated my father's gracious spirit with an essay she wrote about the things he did to make her happy, shaping his deeds into words of counsel for husbands who had "more love to offer than money." One of the bullet points was: "Listen patiently, try not to yawn, while one of her loquacious relatives rambles endlessly on." It is a mark of a man's character that he can listen patiently to a woman's boring relative, not merely when he is trying to woo her, but when he has been married to her for 25 years and no longer stands to gain anything by it!

Of course there are limits to how long even a polite individual can listen to some people. When my sister feared calling an acquaintance because she knew the woman would monopolize her time for a whole afternoon, I said, "I can help! Just let me know when you are about to call. Then I'll call you 15 minutes later, say that I need to talk to you right away [to help you end the call on the other line, but we'll leave that unsaid], so you can get back to your friend and say, 'Hey, that's my brother, he wants to talk to me right now.'" She declined my offer, and, instead, patiently endured a long listen.

D. L. Moody once spared some congregants a long listen by boldly interrupting a droner. At an evangelistic rally a guest minister was praying an impossibly long prayer and people were getting restless. A physician in the audience, W. T. Grenfell, was so bored he was about to walk out. But Moody, sensing the problem, sprang to his feet and announced, "As our brother finishes his prayer, let us sing a hymn!" (Grenfell, relieved, stayed, made a profession of faith in Christ that night, and eventually became a medical missionary to Canada.)

Within limits set by prudence, it is usually a good and gracious thing to let others say their piece. The Bible says that God extends the grace of focused attention to witless mortal sinners like us. It is a fact about him that amazed King David, who asked in Psalm 8:4, "What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?" (Or, as Eugene Petersen put it, "Why do you bother with us? Why take a second look our way?"). But he does pay attention to us somehow, and the Holy Spirit even intercedes on our behalf "with groans that words cannot express" (Romans 8:26).

I don't know why he "groans". Maybe it is because so many of our prayers are such a tedious test of his patience!

Pastor's Page: March 31, 2009

Graciousness 2: The Art Of Cover

When I studied linguistics I learned that speech errors can be an interesting source of data, because it turns out that even our mispronunciations and grammatical screw-ups follow certain rules embedded in our minds. If I garble the word "shrug" in rapid speech, for example, I might say "shug", "sug", or "shruk", but probably not "srug" because "sr" does not exist in English as a word-initial consonant cluster, and so my brain does not have easy access to it.

I heard about a professor who captured on tape a fascinating error from a native speaker of some foreign language, and he played it over and over for his students so they could hear the crucial mistake and see the point it illustrated. But about the 5th time he pressed the "play" button, the native speaker, who was present, jumped up and ran out of the room crying. What was for others a mere linguistic novelty was for her a grievous shame, and hearing it again and again in front of everybody was unbearable. We were all warned from that incident, "Be careful not to replay people's mistakes in front of others."

There is a principle of graciousness to be gleaned from that warning. We all have things that cause us shame - stupid comments we make, sins we commit, errors in judgment we manifest. Graceless people call attention to those things and replay them in front of everybody, while gracious people cover them up for us. Gracious people master the appropriate use of the passive voice, saying things like, "I'm afraid this got broken" rather than, "Lundquist dropped this." They can speak in exquisite generalities, explaining, "There may have been some confusion about directions" rather than, "Paul got lost again." They plant us in the protection of the plural, saying, "Our team shooting percentage was a little low" rather than, "Preacher bricked a bunch of shots."

St. Peter wrote, "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins" (1 Peter 4:8). It also covers over (by declining to mention) our lisp, our limp, our lack of height or surplus of weight, the ravages of our advancing years, or any of those bodily features of ours (we know them already!) that the opposite sex might find unappealing.

A heartbreaking scene from The Elephant Man shows Doctor Frederick Treves displaying the misshapen Joseph Merrick before his medical colleagues, outlining in detail every ghastly bulge of bone and warp of flesh. Only later does Treves come to understand that Merrick is a man of sensitivity and not a lab specimen, and that the manner in which he had put him on display was cruel. It brings to mind something my brother once said - though I'm afraid I can only remember five words of it, and I forget completely the context and story they were attached to. They are good words, and can be attached to many stories, and those who want to be gracious will often find them useful. They are, "Let him have his dignity."

Pastor's Page: March 24, 2009

Graciousness 1: Putting A Stranger At Ease

A friend suggested that I write a few words about graciousness, and I will try to oblige. It happens to be one of my favorite virtues. When I see someone practicing it I feel like Salieri listening to the music of Mozart, because I think, "Oh, that's good, very good - I wish I could do that!" Lord willing, I'll spend the next few weeks outlining some features of gracious behavior.

One thing that gracious people do is put guests and strangers at ease. Jerks of course do the opposite - they make them uncomfortable. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader C. S. Lewis writes that the bully Eustace Scrubb was glad to hear that his cousins were coming, because "he knew that there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time if you are in your own home and they are only visitors." This is true. When you are on your own turf - home, school, church, basketball court - you get to set all the terms and guests can't do anything about it, which makes it easy to be mean to them. Like at the University of Iowa stadium, where school officials painted everything in the visitors' locker room - walls, carpet, shower stalls, urinals, everything - an unmanly hue of pink just to annoy visiting teams.

But ungracious people find that they do not need to be actively hostile when simple negligence will do the job. Some churches are masters of this. I like to tell the story of the time I visited a church in North Dakota 25 years ago. I arrived early, went to Sunday School and the worship service, stayed afterwards, and literally not one person said hello to me. Shortly before I left, a man greeted me and we spoke briefly - and it turned out to be a first-time visitor like myself! So I never went back. By contrast, I recall the thoughtful practice of a gracious pastor I knew in college. He said that at church events he always went to the bulletin board to see if anyone was hanging out there. He explained that when new people couldn't find anyone to talk to, they tended to go read notices and missionary letters on the bulletin board because it was so awkward to stand around doing nothing when everyone else was talking to people they already knew.

A new friend helped me like that once. Shortly before my wedding I was taken out to dinner by friends of my wife who had all known each other for years. At the restaurant they spoke, at length, and exclusively to each other, about friends of theirs from high school. I sat silently of course with nothing to contribute. But when Clark Hawley arrived he started talking to me and deliberately turned the conversation toward mutual interests. (Afterward he mentioned how displeased he was that his friends would invite me to dinner and do nothing but talk about people I had never heard of!) Clark's technique was flawless, and I have tried to imitate it and teach it to my sons. A gracious man at dinner tailors his conversation to include everyone - especially the guest who lacks the common experience of old friends.

In The Last Battle C. S. Lewis illustrates the graciousness of Jewel the Unicorn by the way the kind creature treats Puzzle, a slow-witted donkey: "Jewel, being a Unicorn and therefore one of the noblest and most delicate of beasts, had been very kind to [Puzzle], talking to him about things of the sort they could both understand like grass and sugar and the care of one's hoofs."

God grant us all that graciousness of spirit that welcomes the stranger, seeks common ground with him, and does everything possible to put him at ease.

Pastor's Page: March 17, 2009

Anger With God

When my father passed away suddenly my mother was asked if she was angry with God, and she said no. She wasn't denying her inner feelings, or giving some pious answer for fear of being thought wicked. She was simply stating a fact. Though distraught and grief-stricken and inconsolable, she wasn't angry. Sadness is not anger.

I can't remember her words - this was 29 years ago - but I do remember the gist of her reply concerning those who thought she was "holding something back," that it would be healthier if she "let it out" and told God what she thought about what he had done to her. She explained, "Billions of women have been widowed, many tragically. Who am I to say it should never happen to me? Everyone dies. How dare I celebrate God's goodness while others suffer, but challenge him as soon as it's my turn?"

Somehow, over the years, it became "authentic" to rail against God - like when the preacher played by Robert Duvall in The Apostle shouted, "I love you Lord, I love you, but I'm mad at you!" If you type "angry with God" into a search engine you will find advice like this: "We can be completely honest toward God with our thoughts and feelings. And God is big enough to take it all. God won't punish us for being hurt and angry, even hurt and angry at God." I found a pastor graciously trying to answer a letter that read: "Back in April I got a little basset hound pup, that pup became my life, my only friend. He got sick June the fifth and died June the twelfth. Night and day I prayed and prayed believing and knowing that Christ could have saved him, but he didn't...I tried to make the death a sweet smell to the Lord, but as the hours pass I grow more and more angry. I feel horrible saying this, but I am angry at God." The pastor did not respond (nor would I, though I'd be tempted): "You jackass. Repent. Have you never contemplated other people's grief? Between April when you got your puppy and June when it passed away, do you know how many children died of starvation and cancer? Your grief over your loss is perfectly understandable; your anger is not. How is it that you were perfectly ok with God while all those children were dying, but now that your puppy is gone, you think you got a raw deal? Oh - you say you never thought of that. Well think about it, you self-absorbed wretch."

Anger with God often results from frustrated expectations - expectations we never had a right to cherish in the first place. We thought (assumed? demanded?) that our children would not die before us, that our spouses would remain faithful, that we would not succumb to degenerative disease, that God would certainly not plant some desire in our heart (say, to have children, or make homosexual love, or grow a church) and then actively frustrate it through infertility, his law, or life's contrary circumstances. In the play Amadeus, Antonio Salieri explains to a priest how he came to rage against the Almighty: "All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing - and then made me mute! Why? Tell me that. If he didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire (like a lust in my body!), and then deny me the talent?"

I do not claim to be able to answer that, but I do know enough to say that anger with God is always senseless and wrong. It is senseless because, whenever I am inclined to think that God has been unfair, I always come back to the question, "Where did I get this idea of fairness? Who taught my mind to distinguish between fair and unfair?" The answer is God himself - through the means of conscience and tradition and law. In railing against him I'd be railing against the very source of the moral instinct within me that despises injustice! I'd be sawing away at the trunk of the branch I'm sitting on. Even if we think of the issue merely in organic terms, a complaint against God can only be formulated by using the brain cells he gives us, with the lungs and larynx and tongue he provides, through the air he supplies for breath. We are not independent of him. He made us and everything else. Therefore, the only thing with which we could strike at him would be a weapon that he himself placed in our hands. And he made the hands!

So anger with God seems senseless to me for philosophical reasons; it is also morally wrong for reasons articulated by John Piper: "Anger at a person always implies strong disapproval. If you are angry at me, you think I have done something I should not have done. This is why being angry at God is never right. It is wrong - always wrong - to disapprove of God for what he does and permits...We may weep over the pain. We may be angry at sin and Satan. But God does only what is right." Correct. Just as the truly Honorable must never provoke our contempt, and the truly Pure must never provoke our disdain, so also the truly Good must never call forth our wrath. It isn't right.

Pastor's Page: March 10, 2009

In Praise Of Duty

The other day I was listening to a radio program that played hits from the 30s and 40s, and heard an interesting song where "Jazz Singer" Al Jolson extolled his beloved's good looks. At one point he croons,

If...I'm faithful to you 
It's not through a sense of duty 
You are too beautiful 
And I am too drunk on beauty

I told my son Ben, "Listen to this! He thinks he's paying her a compliment by telling her it's her beauty that inspires his faithfulness. He's not being true to her because he has to, because it's his duty, because there is something inside him that forces him to be faithful no matter who she is or how she behaves or what she looks like - but because she's so beautiful!" And Ben answered, smartly of course, "What happens then when she is no longer beautiful?" Exactly. Maybe then she would appreciate it if his motivation had been duty all along.

Duty is a good thing, and there is no shame in being motivated by it. Duty stands strong when other motivations weaken and fall. But there are reasons why we are suspicious of it and would prefer not to reveal that it is the efficient cause of our behavior. It seems so prosaic and unromantic. We even feel insulted (certainly not complimented!) when we learn that someone did right by us not because we inspired it but because he was simply "doing his job". He would have done the same even if we weren't worthy or handsome or smart or kind. "Oh. I thought I was special. I guess whether I am or not is beside the point - that's just the kind of man he is."

About six weeks ago (see the January 27 essay, "Wait, Seriously?") I argued with a respondent who seemed to object to the holy status I gave to duty. He (She?) wrote that while many of us are tempted to promiscuity, "we choose not to pursue that not out of some religiously ascetic sense of self-denial, but because we've found something better." I find danger lurking in those innocuous words. If we can give to "duty" the pejorative label "religiously ascetic sense of self-denial", and persuade ourselves that there is a higher motive to be embraced while this lower one is dismissed, we may find that that exalted "something better" (say a warm, loving, mutually respectful give-and-take relationship) is quite unable to sustain a man's ability to care for his wife when she is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's.

Monday I heard a WMBI preacher tell us, "'The Word of the Lord is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword' - but be honest, is it like that for you when you read it? Don't you sometimes just read it out of duty? Well today we'll tell you how to change that..." and I started shouting at the radio "No! No! Not that stupid line of rhetoric again! Stop it!" Never make people feel sheepish or guilty or inadequate about submitting to the call of duty. Without it, lots of Christians would never read their Bibles at all. Duty is a good thing. Like the weird guy on that viral internet video who lamented the public abuse of poor Brittany Spears, I say, "LEAVE DUTY ALONE!"

Pastor's Page: March 3, 2009

Now It Means Something To Me

My son Ben once asked me if I had ever changed my mind about anything big. He knew I was mystified by people who managed to dismiss convictions they once held dear even though they could not be bothered to articulate reasons for the change. I think he also perceived me as one who did not move easily from one spot to another.
But I have changed, everyone has, and though I had no good answer for him then I have been able to think of one now. Over the years I have done a U-turn on the value of participating in the Lord's Supper. Once it meant nothing to me; now it has become the centerpiece for my worship of God.
When I was very young, Communion annoyed me. In the church our family attended we celebrated it once a month after the service. When the sermon ended, I just wanted to go home and eat lunch and watch a game on TV. Communion stretched out the time spent sitting in that pew a whole 15 minutes as we waited for the plates to be passed: "Come on, let's chew the cracker and drink the thimble of grape juice so we can go already." Then we moved to a church where Communion was served just four times a year, and that seemed like an improvement.
But then in college I was blessed to attend a Brethren fellowship where we partook of the bread and the cup every Sunday. Communion there was not "tacked on" to the worship hour: it was part of a separate 45-minute service before Sunday School. We prayed quietly, sang a few hymns a cappella, listened to Scripture, confessed our faults, contemplated Christ, and ate and drank the symbols of him.
That was the start of my change in attitude. Now more than 25 years later I'm positively thankful for regular opportunities to partake of the Lord's Supper. Some reasons:
(1) It is an act of obedience that I can actually do without too much difficulty. I am one who finds the Christian life hard, who wishes it were easier to submit to God, whose conscience rightly reprimands both active iniquities and countless sins of omission. It is a relief for someone like me to see a commandment like "Do this in remembrance of me" and realize that it is an absolute piece of cake, a walk in the park, a fat pitch down the middle. Even I can obey this one! All I have to do is show up on Sunday and thank Jesus as I take the bread and drink the cup. Given that so many commandments are hard, isn't it a joy to have one that's a gimme, a two-inch putt?
(2) The Lord's Supper is a time when I am compelled to think of Jesus and honor him and thank him. Do I do that with appropriate regularity and discipline on my own? Probably not. Every day my head fills with thoughts that I know are vapid, mundane and insignificant. But by regularly participating in the Lord's Supper I guarantee that, at least once a month, a worthy thought will hold my attention: "Jesus Christ, righteous Son of God, died for me, unrighteous sinner. Praise be to him."
(3) It connects me to other believers like nothing else. Perhaps the most meaningful times of Communion I ever celebrated were in the home of an elderly Rumanian couple. The wife was blind, wheelchair-bound, diseased and soon to die. But how her face lit up when she heard my voice! And what an honor to share with her and her husband the tangible reminders of Christ! Outside of Christ it is hard to see how we would ever meet or have any connection at all. But in Holy Communion, when we directed our hearts not toward each other but toward Jesus, we found the Lord creating between us a mystic bond of fellowship that no earthly tie could mimic. I have also been privileged to find and revel in that same oneness of spirit in larger settings ranging from "High Church" Episcopal to "Low Church" Brethren to "Loud Church" Pentecostal.
If you are a Christian believer but somehow lack (as I once did) a "taste" for the Lord's Supper, then work to acquire it. May the Lord grant you grace to know the joy of remembering him in the bread and the cup.

Pastor's Page: February 24, 2009

"God Told Me..."

Christians ought not to say that God has spoken to them when what they really mean is that they have a strong gut feeling. This common evangelical practice of interpreting an emotional tug as the voice of God is sinful and shameful and must stop.

Case in point: the resignation four weeks ago of Willow Creek's Chicago Campus pastor, Steve Wu. Wu came to WC Chicago in 2006 after being tabbed by WC's Senior Pastor Bill Hybels. As reported in a church press release at the time, "As soon as Hybels met Wu, he said he knew God had spoken." Interim pastor Jeff Small concurred: "There's this huge confirmation in my spirit that not only is he the right guy, he's God's man for the job." Wu himself agreed: "Wu said he felt the tap of the Holy Spirit and knew God was calling him to Chicago."

Now that Wu has resigned because of sexual sin, joining that foul host of disgraced clergymen who have devastated their churches and brought shame on the name of Christ, what are we to make of Hybel's, Small's and Wu's statements just three years ago to the effect that "God had spoken"? Simply this: they were all wrong. God had not spoken. Wu was not God's man for the job. There was no tap of the Holy Spirit.

Back in the mid-90s a church that I attended hired an associate pastor, and there was plenty of "God-talk" at his installation too. God had directed the church to call him, God had moved in his heart to accept the call, God had brought him to the church to accomplish great things. Then he got fired 18 months later. I wondered at the time, "Hey, what happened to all those things God assured us of when we hired him?"

Our problem in the evangelical sub-culture is that we have a sinful, scandalous, seldom-acknowledged habit of speaking presumptuously in the name of the Lord. This is an abomination that many sincere believers fall into, in part because they have been trained to think (in unbiblical terms) of "having a relationship with Jesus Christ," and have learned the simple trick of crafting a dialogue in their heads and labeling one of the voices "God". When such people tell us what God has told them, I believe it becomes our duty to remember it, and apply when applicable the test of Deuteronomy 18:21-22: "You may say to yourselves, 'How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?' If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him." Not only ought we not fear those whose God-talk proves false, we probably should not waste a lot of time listening to them either.

Back in 2003 a sincere fellow pastor wrote some God-talk into my installation vows, and I respectfully insisted that he take it out. I can't remember exactly what the words were - something about knowing that God was going to use me to serve the church. I explained to him that I didn't even know for sure that I would be alive, or that Jesus wouldn't return, 10 minutes from now! Since God hadn't told me or promised me that much, how dare I make confident pronouncements about things in a more distant personal future that God had not seen fit to reveal?

Something very instructive may be learned from the tragic case of pastor and author Gordon MacDonald. In 1984 MacDonald was contacted by an international Christian organization and asked if he would be willing to be a candidate for its presidency. He agreed, and soon both he and his wife Gail were feeling the call of God. Years later he wrote, "The books we read, the conversations we held, the prayers we prayed, the voice of God we heard in our souls - everything pointed to my getting this position. We felt God was saying, 'This is going to happen.'"

Then it didn't happen. MacDonald didn't get the job, and the ground came out from under his feet. He wrote, "At a subterranean level, I told God, 'You've made a perfect fool out of me. You drew me to the finish line and said, 'I'm sorry.' I no longer know your language. You speak a different language than I've been trained to understand.' I was questioning God, something I had never really done. I doubted whether it was possible to hear God speak."

In the aftermath of his meltdown MacDonald cheated on his wife, likewise joining that foul host of disgraced clergymen who have devastated their churches and brought shame on the name of Christ.

Though MacDonald came to doubt whether it was possible to hear God speak, in fact this is something none of us must ever doubt. God does speak. He says things like "Do not commit adultery," and "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman." It's all there in our readily-accessible Bible. As for whether God might also speak to us directly, outside the Bible, well, I don't deny that it is possible. I think it even happened to me once. Just once. But people who think it happens to them all the time, every day, might do well to consider the fact that the Bible records God giving a direct message to the Apostle Paul only four times in his whole life! (Acts 9:4-6; 18:9-10; 22:17-21; and 27:23-26.) Elsewhere Paul speaks humbly, saying for example to Philemon: "Perhaps the reason he [Onesimus] was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back for good" (Philemon 15). Note the "perhaps" in that sentence - not "God has said" or "God told me" - but very quietly, tentatively, "perhaps". Only God knows for sure.

Many Christians need to learn to start saying "perhaps" when their gut and their training and their evangelical culture are all tempting them to say, "Listen to what God told me."

Pastor's Page: February 17, 2009

"Men Are Jerks!" And Other Valid Complaints And How To Deal With Them

As I fretted last week about what to say in a seminar for single parents, a friend sent me an encouraging note. He said that in the Divorce Recovery class he leads he saw two unlikely women help out a third. The two were dumped by their alcoholic husbands after more than 25 years of marriage. "Of course, they're mad and complain about a lot of things," my friend said. But when a quiet newcomer, also in her 50s - also abandoned by a drunken beast - spoke up, floundering, saying she was not certain what she should do or how she should feel, the two veterans went into action. They comforted her, assuring her that things would get better, that her emotions would stabilize, that the group would be there for her.

My friend noted, "These two 'once-complainers' now saw someone experiencing a pain similar to their own, and suddenly they're jolted out of their self-pity, and began to reach out to another."

I enjoyed hearing that. It prompted me to think that even if what I had to say at the upcoming seminar was not all that compelling or helpful, it would still be worthwhile if it could just serve to bring together people who might help each other.

It also prompted me to consider a prayer request that I think I'll recommend now to people who complain. It's this: "Lord, give me somebody to minister to." That might be better than asking the Lord to resolve whatever problem is causing the complaint. Because even if God removed the source of our trouble, all that would do is bring us back to zero. If the Lord had taken the "thorn" out of St. Paul's side (2 Corinthians 12:7-9), Paul would simply have been thornlessly normal. But his thorny aggravation (about which he complained to the Lord just three times!) became a source of great ministry. May the Lord do the same for all those thorns of ours that he refuses to take out. If the only thing they're accomplishing now is making us complain, they're not doing their job.

King Lemuel wrote, "Give...wine to those who are in anguish" (Proverbs 31:6). I've got another idea. Give to those who are in anguish other people who are also in anguish. Maybe they'll stop groaning long enough to help out. That would be nice for everybody.

Pastor's Page: February 3, 2009

"I Need Somebody To Thank"

The other day I read of a most intriguing ritual practiced by a nonreligious person. A parent wrote, "We are an atheist family, but having grown up with a prayer before each meal, I started to miss the ritual, especially once we had kids. It felt as if there was something missing, and I wanted to commence the meal with something, so now we do "thankfuls." Everyone (including children) states something for which they are thankful. This custom is very well received and enjoyed by all types of guests, and seems to satisfy the need to begin a meal giving "thanks."

Remarkable! It seems that even a professing atheist can't stifle the urge to thank somebody. I wonder what will happen in that home when some small child finally asks, "Just who are we thanking here?", because true thankfulness always demands a personal object. When you thank, you are not merely expressing a delight, but honoring someone for having given it to you. "Thanking" is the mirror image of "forgiving" in this regard: when you forgive, you release someone from a grievance; when you thank, you credit someone for a joy.

When the child in the nonreligious home dares to ask who is being thanked, maybe there will be an awkward pause before the parent explains, "Uh, well, no one in particular, dear - but we are still very appreciative of the blessings of Nonentity. It is altogether fitting and proper that we show gratitude to the Nothingness that provided this meal and all other joys."

We have to thank Somebody. It is in our nature, and it will even bubble out of us when we forget to suppress it. Remember what Augustine said about our hearts being "restless" until they find their rest in God? It is also the case that our hearts are grateful, and feel uneasy until they can release heavenward some expression of thanksgiving.

Charles Colson found that out in 1966, seven full years before he became a Christian. In his book Born Again he tells the story of taking his sons out on a sailboat he had just bought. He writes,

As [my son] realized that he was controlling the boat, the most marvelous look came over his cherubic face, the joy of new discovery in his eyes, the thrill of feeling the wind's power in his hands. I found myself in that one unforgettable moment quietly talking to God. I could even recall the precise words: "Thank You, God, for giving me this son, for giving us this one wonderful moment. Just looking now into this boy's eyes fulfills my life. Whatever happens in the future, even if I die tomorrow, my life is complete and full. Thank You."
Afterwards, I had been startled when I realized that I had spoken to God, since my mind did not assent to His existence as a Person. It had been a spontaneous expression of gratitude that simply bypassed the mind and took for granted what reason had never shown me.

I know I've had plenty of those Colsonic moments of gratitude, and suppose everyone gets them. Don't you? So, so many times as a young man, enjoying the company of my wife, I said in my heart, "Oh thank you God." Or now, when the house is cold and I'm exhausted and I slip under the cover a thick sleeping-bag and know that slumber is moments away, I say, "Thank you God for this warm bed." (What a delight is simple sleep!). Or a big pile of chocolate cake and ice cream. "Mmmm. Thanks, God."

I feel sorry for appreciative atheists, because it seems to me that they are like an athlete who has no game to play, a reader with no books, a lover with no partner. When I want to give thanks, I know exactly where to send it: I thank the Creator of all things, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of Jesus Christ, the Giver of the Holy Spirit, the One for whom, through whom and to whom are all things, blessed be he forever.

I hope the thankful atheist family keep up their habit of saying ironic grace before every meal. Someday, to their shock and joy, they may come to believe that all along there has been Someone listening to their thanks, and responding, "Oh, you're welcome."