WHAT KIND OF WITNESS ARE WE?

Jesus said to His disciples, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are My disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34-35 NIV)

Sheldon Vanauken (1914–1996) wrote that the strongest argument for Christianity is Christians, when they are drawing life from God. The strongest argument against Christianity? Also Christians, when they become exclusive, self-righteous, and complacent.

Dallas Willard (1925-2013) [in his book “The Spirit of the Disciplines”] wrote, "How many people are radically and permanently repelled from The Way by Christians who are unfeeling, stiff, unapproachable, boringly lifeless, obsessive, and dissatisfied? Yet such Christians are everywhere, and what they are missing is the wholesome liveliness springing from a balanced vitality with the freedom of God's loving rule…. Spirituality wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God."

-- John Ortberg in “The Life You've Always Wanted”

#6414

A CHILD-LIKE SPIRIT

Jesus said, "Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."  (Matthew 19:14 NIV)

Faith is sometimes equated with credulity, but it can be so equated only when the profound mistake is made of thinking of faith as primarily a matter of intellectual assent.  As the New Testament uses the word, faith is trust, acceptance, commitment, vision.  It is not a belief in this or that creed, it is a quality which lies rather in the realm of intuition than the intellect. Faith has indeed an element of true simplicity; it is one of the qualities -- perhaps the fundamental quality -- of the child-like spirit without which no one can enter the Kingdom of God. 

-- Anonymous, attributed to Charles Wesley, from “Christian Quotation of the Day” 

#6413

OUR HOPE IS IN THE LORD

“Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail.  They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for Him.’  The Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks Him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.”  (Lamentations 3:21-26 NIV)

At a time when I thought my world had all but ended, when the realization was hammering at my heart that my daughter's death was not some nightmare from which I would recover but was for all time, a friend came into the room, put her arms around my neck, and said, "Everything's going to be all right."

I thought she was crazy.  And yet.... and yet.... was it possible that she was right?

I had occasion, some years later, to be the consoler of a young woman whose son had lapsed into a coma from which he would not recover, and my words to her were the same.  "Everything's going to be all right." And I felt my friend from that earlier time standing beside me, nodding - See, that's what I told you.

Improbably though it seems when grief first assaults us we do come to learn, though the surface of our life will often be in turmoil, that on a deep and unshakable level there is indeed a confidence that all is well. 

Until that happens, we cling to the testimony of others and take hope: if for them, why not for us, too? 

-- Martha Whitmore Hickman in “Healing After Loss”

#6412

THE BITTER END

“‘Don’t call me Naomi,’ she told them. ‘Instead, call me Mara, for the Almighty has made life very bitter for me.’”  (Ruth 1:20 NLT)

Naomi’s making a pun here that gets a little lost in the translation, unless you read your Bible notes. Her name means “pleasant,” but since life hadn’t been very good for her for a long time, she asks her people to call her Mara, or “bitter,” instead.

Naomi and her family moved out of Israel, when a famine threatened, and went to Moab. After more than ten years, her husband and sons died. Naomi returned to Bethlehem with nothing but one of her daughters-in-law, Ruth. It wasn’t a happy return, so when people asked, “Is this really Naomi?” she responded with the above sentences.

Like Naomi, we may have bitter days. Everything that surrounds our lives seems unpalatable. Perhaps we see no hope for the future and could respond as she did. But like Naomi, when we feel that way, we are not looking at the end of the story. As long as we live, God is not finished writing our tale. This bitter patch may be the dark part of the story that just precedes the happiest parts of our lives. If we give up, we’ll never reach the best part of the story.

When we hold on til’ the bitter end, like Naomi, we may find it isn’t bitter at all. She found herself the center of a loving family, with a grandson to carry on the family name. Best of all, God used that infant to create something of eternal value – he became a forebearer of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. Could anything that created the Light of the World remain bitter for long? 

-- Pamela McQuade, from “Daily Wisdom to Satisfy the Soul,” published by Barbour Publishing, Inc. Used by permission.

#6411

THE GOSPEL MEASURES US

“For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”  (Hebrews 4:12 NIV)

Every now and then someone comes up with a phrase which leaves you thinking, "I wish I'd said it that way." Prof. G.L. Carter did it to me this week when he responded to one point in last Sunday's sermon by commenting, "It seemed to me that you were saying, 'Instead of asking whether the Gospel is relevant to us, we ought to be asking if we are relevant to the Gospel'." I felt that G.L. had summarized the matter perfectly; I wish I had done as well.

You see, this is the forgotten mood in much current theological chatter: not whether Christianity is relevant to us, but whether we are relevant to Christianity. We are not the measuring stick of the Gospel; the Gospel measures us. We do not set a standard for the faith; faith has set the standard, and the only really relevant question is this, do we meet the standard?

There is a certain inherent arrogance in all the talk about relevance. I suppose, in the end, that this is why I usually find the word not only trite but distasteful. We seem to think that we can treat the Gospel the way we treat the television screen, switching to another channel when the theme doesn't please us.

Without a doubt the church sometimes misshapes the Gospel until it ceases to be relevant. But I'm sure that sometimes modern man accuses the Gospel of being irrelevant when in truth it is only discomfiting. He needs then to remember that the Gospel judges him, and it is his own relevancy which is at stake. 

-- Ellsworth Kalas (1923-2015), originally published on December 15, 1966 in the newsletter of First Methodist Church of Madison, Wisconsin. Source https://ellsworthkalas.com/blog.

#6410