The Moment of Discovery

John 20:8 NIV

 Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed.

What Did You Just See?

When I was young, maybe five years old, I heard on our porch a loud stomping and a male voice calling out, “Ho, Ho, Ho!”  I was in shock.  It was night time and Christmas Eve and the thought that Santa Claus was actually tramping around on our porch was astounding to me.  Was it possible that Santa Claus was out there?  Had he come to my home?  What did this mean?  I stood there dumbfounded in front of the door trying to decide if I would go outside and see if it was him.  I must have looked over at my mom to see what she thought.  Was it safe to go out on the porch?  What should I do?  Finally I opened the door and there before me was a brand new tricycle.  I was astonished.  So it was true!  Santa Claus did exist and he left me the grandest of all presents.  How could I ever have doubted Santa Claus?  Of course I later discovered that it was my dad who made all the noise, left the tricycle on the porch and slipped in the house through the back door but in my childhood, seeing was believing for me!

There is a moment when you stand in the gap between belief and disbelief, when you are not certain of what you just saw or heard.  It could be good news like that you were “lucky caller number ten” or that your cancer is gone.  It could be something dreadfully horrible like that a close friend just died in a car accident or that you have been let go from your job of twenty years.  You cannot anticipate such moments.  They come like a bolt of lightning and shatter whatever comfortable plans you had for the day or the week or your life.  You have seen pictures of people who stand in dumbfounded shock with their eyes blinking wildly as they try to process what just happened.  Maybe you have been like that.  Your boyfriend just asked you to marry him.  Your dad just handed you the keys to a new car.  Your mother just told you she was divorcing your father.  Most of your days are pretty normal but then all of a sudden it isn’t normal.  It is shocking.

The account of Jacob found in the Bible is just that sort of matter.  He was fleeing for his life.  Jacob had just tricked his dad into giving him the blessing intended for his twin brother and now that older brother was plotting his murder back at home.  Exhausted from his panicked flight, Jacob found a boulder and put his head down on it as if it were a cushy pillow and fell asleep.  Jacob could not have predicted what happened that night.

Like all of us each and every night, Jacob had a dream.  Most of our dreams we never remember when we get up out of bed.  Some keep us thinking for a while.  Most are completely forgettable.  Jacob had a dream that made its way into the Bible.  He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.  There above it stood the Lord, and he said: "I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying.  Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.  I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." (Genesis 28:12-15 NIV)

Jacob was so convinced that he had just met God in His sleep that he created a monument to honor the Lord and named the place where he was, “House of God”. Jacob even made a vow at the spot to give God a tenth of all he gained if the Lord took care of him and brought him back to his father’s house.  Most of us never give much thought to our dreams and rarely do even the most ardent of Christians think their dreams are sent to them by God.  Dreams are just too chaotic, too bizarre to take seriously.  Yet Jacob believed his dream was a God moment; that the Lord met with Him that night, the actual and real Lord.

If you had the exact same dream, would you have taken it seriously?  Would you have worshiped the Lord as soon as you climbed out of bed?  Would you have been convinced God had spoken directly to you?  Don’t misrepresent what happened with Jacob.  It was in the end just a dream.  It was no less a dream than you might have had, seeing yourself standing in front of a group without any pants or meeting in some restaurant with a long gone relative or having a raccoon talk to you on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  It was a dream but Jacob knew it was not just something that sprang up from his own unconscious; it was from beyond him, it was God coming to him within his heart.

It is hard to believe that God is really real and that He speaks to people like you and me.  Great intellects like Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan insist God does not exist.  You have friends and neighbors that pay no attention to God.  People you respect ignore Him.  The popular movies do not mention Him or include God in the plot lines.  Even “deep and meaningful” song lyrics have no place for God in them.  The anticipation of God making His way into the normal day you have is nearly dead.  Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we have lost our way and don’t know how we can get back to our place of real life with God.

What do you make of this casually mentioned moment in the Apostle Paul’s normal life?  He was on one of his missionary trips and needed to know where he and his companions should go after they left the region of Galatia, just north of Paul’s hometown.  The book of Acts has an interesting comment on this.   Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. (Acts 16:6 NIV)  How did Paul know the Holy Spirit did not want him and his partners in the province of Asia?  We aren’t told!  It is not clear how God got this across to them.  It could have been through a dream or a prophet or a sign of some sort or just an impression they had that God was directing them.  What we do know though is that Paul and the others all were prepared for God to guide them and ready to believe He was.  This is no small matter, believing that God can and does direct your steps.  It is in fact for many an insurmountable barrier.  They do not accept this to be so and live without any thought given to what God wants them to do.

Imagine what it would be like if you took seriously Jesus’ statement in John 15: 5.  "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. (NIV)  The “if” of this proclamation indicates that you may or may not remain in Him.  That is completely up to you.  No one including God will force you to remain connected to Christ.  You can cut yourself off from Him like an angry daughter who refuses to talk with her parents.  A famous porn star who has been in the news recently has for twenty years refused to have anything to do with either of her parents.  You can do that, ignoring Christ and making no effort at being connected to Him.  But the consequence of that is that you can do nothing.  You don’t matter, what you do, how you think, what you accomplish does not matter.  You go nowhere, do nothing, make nothing of your life.  That is an option that you can take and many are completely satisfied doing this.  They are thoroughly disconnected from Christ and happy living that way.

To be connected to Christ, you must pay attention to Him.  Look for Him to guide you.  Ask Him to direct you.  Listen for Him to speak to you.  There are a thousand different ways Christ can show you something and make your life matter.  Who can know what it will be next?  Was Moses expecting a burning bush?  Did David expect the high priest of Israel to come to his house?  Could Elijah have anticipated the small still voice?  Was Nathaniel prepared for someone from Nazareth to be the Messiah?  God does not announce His presence with trumpets and does not shake you out of your sleep to get you to notice Him.  He will come to you at any moment with any sort of way of getting through to you that He chooses.  One thing though is clear.  If you do not keep your mind on Christ and set your heart on being directed by Him, nothing you do will matter.  That is certain.

Don’t be embarrassed that you haven’t been paying attention to Christ.  Admit it.  Start over.  Pray and ask the Lord to guide you, to show you what to do next.  Perhaps you are lost and don’t know how to find your way.  Turn to Christ and ask Him what to do.  He will guide you.  Somehow, you will know what to do and it will be the Lord who will make it clear.  Just like the sparrow knows somehow where to look for food, Christ will direct you too.  You must trust Him though to guide you perfectly and as you follow Him, everything you do will matter, whether it is how you make your bed or the way you respond at a board meeting or what you say to your kids at home.  With Christ in you directing your life, you are no ordinary mortal; you have all the glory of God living through you!

Unmasking Christ

Isaiah 48: 6 NIV

"From now on I will tell you of new things, of hidden things unknown to you.”

What Do You Know About Jesus?

The other day I stood at the door while eighth graders filed past me as they entered the classroom where I was to be their substitute teacher.  I heard one say, “Oh, we have a sub!”  I don’t know if that was good or bad.  Was she happy there was a substitute teacher or disappointed?  I wasn’t greeted.  Eye contact was not made with me.  The girl just walked past me and made the declaration, “We have a sub!”  She did not know me and I did not know her and it seems unlikely we would ever come across each other again in this life unless of course I was a substitute teacher in another class of hers.  What struck me was that I was a category, not a person.  The only characteristic I possessed that this young teen cared about was that I was a sub.  She was not wondering about me at all.  It did not matter if I was young or old, married or single, a father, a Raiders or a Patriots fan, a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu, an intellectual or a high school dropout, a nice guy or mean and disinterested in what I did.  The girl did not even worry herself over whether I was a human being or some creature from another galaxy.  I was a sub and that was all that mattered.  This girl did not have any interest in knowing anything else about me.

When someone like the famous atheist Carl Sagan makes clear that he has no interest in finding out anything about God, no one is surprised.  It seems normal for him to not even have a bit of curiosity about the Creator.  When someone who is Hindu or Buddhist makes no effort to learn about Christ, we aren’t shocked.  But if a person who claimed to have an interest in Christianity did not care about finding out what God was like or how Christ thought about things, we might wonder about that.  It would maybe be odd if you did not show interest in knowing more about God; if you were in fact satisfied that you knew all you cared about knowing when it came to Christ.  Now we come against a rather stunning discovery.  Many Christians without saying it have decided they know all they need to know about Christ; that they have come far enough in their understanding of Him to be satisfied.  What about you?  Have you gone as far as you care to go in your familiarity of God and what He is like?  What is your true interest level in God and how He is personally?

When we think of heaven and eternal life and the rewards of God, we don’t generally think along the right lines of all this.  Jesus defined the chief characteristic of eternal life when He was praying in front of the disciples just before being arrested and crucified.  He declared, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3 NIV)  Eternal life is knowing God; knowing Jesus Christ.  That is all there is to it.  Nothing about streets of gold or great food or new bodies!  The most crucial aspect of eternal life is knowing God.  The verb translated “know”, has two qualities to it.  It is intimate knowledge, not hearsay, not proclaimed and overheard but personal knowledge that is experienced.  Second, it is a knowledge that keeps developing, keeps happening.  It is not the knowledge of a moment but the knowledge of everlasting, of never-ending.  Eternal life is God and more God and more God.  It is like falling in love and never wanting to back away or take a break but being so head over heels in love that you cannot get enough of the one you love.  There is always something more wonderful and beautiful to discover, always something more fascinating and electrifying to learn.  That is eternal life.  Getting to know God more and more and never being bored of it, never getting weary of it because it is too good to quench.

Here is the problem we face.  We have the heritage of Adam and Eve as our own.  Before Adam sinned, he walked with God and enjoyed Him continuously but as soon as he sinned, Adam hid from God and did not want to be seen by Him, did not want to talk with Him or be with Him.  That is the heritage of the human race.  Sin has made God irrelevant in us; unattractive to us and uninteresting.  We certainly want Him to give us something but the interest is more in what He gives than who He is.  It is like Jacob, who when he found out his father Isaac was going to bestow a blessing on Jacob’s older brother Esau, he dressed up as Esau to fool his blind father into giving him the blessing rather than who his father wanted to have it, Esau.  Jacob did not care how it hurt his father to be fooled.  He did not love his father enough to let him do what made him happy.  He did not want to know why his father felt strongly about giving the blessing to Esau. Jacob just wanted the blessing…but…and we are not being too judgmental to see it…Jacob was not very interested in the father behind the blessing.  That is the curse of sin in us.  It makes God less inviting and less desirable than whatever He might give us.

There is a fascinating case study in the Bible of just what it is like to begin the journey of eternal life and it is a mirror of our own experience.  When Jesus invited Peter to follow Jesus, he knew enough about Christ to do so.  What information he had, we cannot say exactly but it was enough for Peter. As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.  "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men."   At once they left their nets and followed him. (Matthew 4:18-20 NIV)  Sometime later, after having seen some of Jesus’ miraculous deeds and listened to Him teach, Peter made a most surprising decision.  When a great storm arose on the Sea of Galilee and Peter was with the other disciples, off in the distance came someone walking toward them on the water and everyone in the boat thought it was a ghost.  It was of course Jesus and when the Lord reassured them that it was Him, Peter asked if he could climb out of the boat and walk on the water too and Jesus told him to come on out and join him.  But after just a few steps, Peter looked at the waves and his faith in Christ sank.  Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus.  But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, "Lord, save me!"  Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. "You of little faith," he said, "why did you doubt?" (Matthew 14:29-31 NIV) Now Peter knew by experience, personal experience, something about Jesus he did not know before.  He could trust Jesus to take care of him in even the worst of circumstances.  That is eternal life; knowing more of Christ.

Later, Peter was on a hill with James and John and Jesus when something wild happened.  About eight days after Jesus said this, he took Peter, John and James with him and went up onto a mountain to pray.  As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.  Two men, Moses and Elijah, appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus. They spoke about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem.  Peter and his companions were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him.  As the men were leaving Jesus, Peter said to him, "Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters — one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah." (He did not know what he was saying.)  While he was speaking, a cloud appeared and enveloped them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud.  A voice came from the cloud, saying, "This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him." (Luke 9:28-36 NIV)  What an amazing experience.  Peter got to meet the legends Moses and Elijah.  What he did not know until then was that Jesus was not on a par with Moses and Elijah.  He was not their equal, not their peer.  He was the Son, He was their God.  He did not know this before.  He thought he knew who Jesus was but He was much more than Peter realized.  He was the Son.  This was eternal life.  He knew more about Christ than he did before.

A fourth experience of Peter gives us an even better idea of what eternal life is.  Boldly, before Jesus died, Peter announced to everyone including Jesus that he was far more brave and loyal to Jesus than any of the others.  Jesus was not very encouraging.  He told Peter that Peter would in fact deny that he was one of Jesus’ followers three times in the next few hours and that of course is what happened.  Peter was heartbroken later when it came to pass and he felt like an absolute failure.  But after Jesus returned to life and began meeting with the disciples and others, Christ pulled Peter aside and three times asked Peter if Peter loved Him, the exact same number of times, Peter cowardly denied knowing Jesus.  In the end the Lord gave Peter a special mission one that required great courage and dedication.  Jesus said, "Feed my sheep. I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go."   Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, "Follow me!" (John 21:17-19 NIV)  Here, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Peter found out how merciful Jesus is.  Christ did not hold Peter’s cowardice against him.  He did not lose confidence in Peter.  He gave Peter a mission, to take care of the new community of Christians who would soon join them and He did so without any sort of warnings against failing.  Jesus, Peter learned does not hold our sins and failures against us but builds up our lives and gives us honorable work to do.  Peter learned something new about Jesus and that is eternal life.  He discovered how kind and generous Jesus is.

One more moment we can consider about Peter’s life.  After Jesus went back to heaven and physically left the disciples, now known as Apostles, they all were gathered together praying when the Holy Spirit came upon them and they began to speak in all sorts of foreign languages that were supernaturally given to them.  A crowd was nearby made up of people from various parts of the world.  As the Apostles preached to the mass of people, each one understood perfectly in his or her own language what the Apostles were saying.  This was a miracle and one that was stupendous but that was not the greatest miracle that day.  What the Apostles discovered and Peter in particular was that God took them all in, regardless of race or national origin; gave each of them salvation.  Peter saw, and more fully than he had ever seen before, that Jesus is Savior no matter who you might be or what you have done or where you have been.  Christ takes the sin out of you and makes you perfect in every way.  All the heartache, all the anger and bitterness, all the hard feelings and held grudges, all corrupt lusts and selfishness and wrecked parts, Christ saves you from them.  There is not a part of you that Jesus will not make perfect and completely good and lovely.  He will do this for every person who comes to Him for salvation.  He is Savior.

This week, become attentive to Christ.  Think about Him.  Let your thoughts turn to Him again and again.  Assume He will talk to you.  There is so much for you to learn about Christ.  So much you don’t know.  You and I are like little children.  We have just begun to begin to get to know Jesus and to find out what He is like.  If the Bible is true, and we say it is, then God is love and the more you know the love of God, the more joyous and peaceful and full of hope your life will be.  Make Christ the center of your thinking this week and every time He comes to mind, be prepared for our Lord to show you something you have never seen before.