Not All Believing Is The Same

Have you made a decision to believe in Jesus?  Are you ready to commit yourself to Him?  This is very different than believing in a good outcome, a certain view you hold about Him or the way He should deal with your circumstances.  Jesus Christ is not a doctrine or a weaver of fairy tales put together in our minds.  He is the real Son of God and Son of Man and He is completely free to be precisely who He is and not who we think He should be.  Our disappointments come when we believe in something about Christ rather than Christ.  We get discombobulated spiritually if we try to make a pet thought about Christ and how we think He should do things what we believe.    Even great men and women of God waste much time trying to prove some doctrine they hold rather than build the bond with Christ and let Him "show the doctrines" to us.  Leaders throughout the ages have broken with God to pursue a "work of God".  Rather than operating out of Christ and His life coming through them, they live with the strength and wisdom of the flesh, not realizing how far they have strayed from the Lord.  Christ is never less than what we have revealed of Him to us in Scripture and what He shows us of Himself for all time will never contradict what has been said of Him in the Bible.  We may misunderstand what we find in Scripture and believe something we shouldn't about Christ but we are never wrong in believing in Christ.  He is forever our Savior and the keeper of our souls and that very love of Christ we see in Him dying for us on the Cross will never be less than that and later we will discover  in fits and starts just how much grander His love for us is than we have realized.  You may need to give up your beliefs about Christ but do not give up an ounce of your belief in Christ.   Believe in Him during the bleak and dreary nights and as the sun rises at the break of day, continue to believe in Him.

"My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.   John 17:20-21 NIV

Certainty

2 Timothy 1:12

Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.

How Do You Know That You Know?

Twenty five years ago our family packed up all we had and moved from New Orleans to

Northern California.  It was a dreadfully long trip but on the way we decided to take some educational side trips.  One of our stops was at the world famous Carlsbad Caverns.  As a child I had looked seen pictures of it in National Geographic and had dreamed of one day going to it.  I had been to a number of caves before; seen stalactites and stalagmites, explored creepy caves and stood in caves with all the lights out deep below the earth.  What intrigued me most about the Carlsbad Caverns were the stories I had read of all the bats in the cave.  I had seen pictures of bats flooding out of the cave but I couldn’t imagine so many bats coming all at once.  When we had the opportunity to stand at the entrance to the cave when the bats all came out to feed in the evening, I was not prepared for what took place.  As if shot from a cannon, just as the sun was setting, without warning, millions of bats in a great cloud of flapping fury exploded out of the cave, covering the sky as if a thunderstorm had come upon us.  For several minutes it was nothing but bats whizzing past until the great host was gone.  It was far more bats than I imagined existed in the entire world came out of that cave and I was struck by how inadequate were the descriptions I had read of the bat exodus from Carlsbad Cavern.  The experience of it went far beyond my imagining.  I was no longer a “doubting Thomas” that something so spectacular was possible as millions of bats flooding out of a cave all at once was possible.

Have you ever had a hard time believing something you were told could be true?  Perhaps a movie everyone is talking about can’t possibly be as good as they say.  Maybe a book your friend is raving about won’t live up to the expectations.  It could be a TV show that you have been told is “so funny” won’t be.  A speaker you have been told to catch on a podcast won’t keep your attention.  A college that has been recommended to you is not going to be as good as you have been told.  It could be that someone told you to move to a certain town because it is such a wonderful place but you don’t think you will like living there.  Maybe you don’t believe that someone’s story about what they did is true.  Have you been skeptical of the hype about a political candidate or of a religious teacher or perhaps all that is promised about Christianity?  Do you have some doubts about what you believe?

Of all the people described in the Old Testament, I am most intrigued by Moses.  He was one of only two people who met with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration and he is known by many as the “Great Deliverer” because of his role in Israel being freed from slavery.  He was a man of great passions and yet described as a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. (Numbers 12:3 NIV)  He most likely had a troubled marriage, was a bit self-righteous and like many of us, blamed others for some of his biggest mistakes.  Most importantly, for the sake of our discussion, Moses was not always certain he could trust God.

We are not sure how he came to this conclusion but Moses at some point, before he turned forty, believed God would use him to help his fellow Israelites escape the bondage they were under in Egypt.  His childhood was unusual.  He was born during a tempestuous time in his nation’s history.  The Israelites had settled in Egypt some four hundred years earlier and now were a persecuted people in their adopted land. The king of Egypt became afraid the Israelites would revolt if they continued to increase in number so he ordered that all male Israelite babies be killed.  Moses’s mother put her baby boy in a water-tight basket to try and keep him from being discovered by the Egyptian soldiers and the daughter of the king of Egypt found him floating in the Nile River while she was bathing.  As soon as she saw baby Moses, the Egyptian princess decided to adopt the boy, thus saving him.  Now was this a coincidence that Moses survived the pogrom of Hebrew babies this way?   Was it just luck Pharaoh’s daughter found Moses floating in the basket and when she saw him, loved him and wanted to save him, raising him in her own house and making sure he was educated by the best teachers of the land?  Or was this a miracle and it was God who saved him through Pharaoh’s daughter?  Your interpretation of this fortunate circumstance depends on your point of view.  Those who don’t believe in God would call it a random fluke of life; those who believe in a personal God who operates within our world might say it was God who rescued Moses and prepared him for leadership. 

Certainly Moses had decided something about his survival as a baby and how it came about and by the time he was forty, he had an opinion about God’s existence.  We know he believed God was working through people in normal circumstances of life because when he was forty he was convinced that God wanted him to kill an Egyptian who was beating an Israelite.  The prophet Stephen, in his last sermon lets us in on Moses’s thinking when he came upon the maltreatment of the Israelite.  "When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his fellow Israelites.  He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian.  Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. (Acts 7:23-26 NIV)  It did not turn out well for Moses though.  The Israelites did not rally to Moses as their deliverer; in fact they rejected him and it was reported to Pharaoh what he had done.  Pharaoh was furious and word got back to Moses that he would be executed for his crime.  Moses escaped to Midian where he lived forty years as a fugitive.

What is intriguing about this biographical account is the shift in Moses’s thinking about God and God’s presence in the world.  We can understand how Moses could have thought God wanted him to kill the Egyptian.  It was just as sensible for Moses to think the Lord wanted to use him to lead a rebellion against Egyptian domination as it was for him to decide that God saved him as a baby from the fate suffered by other baby boys of his generation.  An atheist might come to another conclusion.  The fact that Moses lived when other’s died was just a quirk of chance and his belief that he was to lead Israel was something he concocted himself or through the influence of friends or family members but there was no God involved in any of it.  This may very well have been the evolution of Moses’s thinking as he developed a new life far from his fellow Israelites and the Egyptian oppressors.   He fell into a very ordinary existence.  He got married.  He had children.  He raised sheep.  He watched his children move through the normal stages of growth.  He looked for watering spots for his sheep and fought off bears or lions that tried to attack the flock.  Moses kept moving his flocks about in search of pastures.  He fought with his wife and made love to her, had interesting conversations with his father-in-law and the other men of the village.  Slowly he gave up on the idea that God wanted him to help rescue his fellow Israelites from slavery.  Thoughts of God may have continued and he might have even led his family in prayers but any vibrant expectancy that the Lord was personally involved in his life gradually faded.  He had bills to pay and mouths to feed and you can’t look to God to do those things for you.  Forty years without any sign of God makes you more of an atheist than you might care to admit.  Not all atheism is created equal.  Some forms of it are casual and incidental; not a well thought through view of life…more a developed disregard for anything personal about God.  Atheism can be a way of life; it doesn’t have to be a philosophy.

As the silence of God continues, our faith in Him wanes and we pay less attention to Him operating in our world.  Disappointment may be the biggest cause of atheism.  Why didn’t God help me with this problem?  How come God doesn’t change my circumstances?  I thought God would get me a job, make my daughter well, save my marriage, stop me from drinking, grant me a pardon.  We don’t intend to stop believing in God.  It just happens as our disappointments and busy lifestyles deconstruct our faith in a personal and interactive Lord.  I am pretty certain it happened with Moses.  His reaction to the burning bush is a snapshot of practical atheism.  God let him down back in Egypt, why should he trust the Lord now forty years later when God clearly was meeting him out in the hills of Midian.

Imagine if Moses continued to sulk when he met God at the burning bush.  What if he had turned around and walked away when the first sign of God appeared to him?  How different our history would be.  How different would have been everything for Moses?  It is a most amazing moment when God comes to us and it really is God.  We can’t perhaps put our finger on how we are so certain it is God but it is God and the moment we know it is God we are either going to respond with anger and disgust over all the wrong we feel He has done us or we are going to awaken, like a child opening her eyes to the morning light, and recognize the love in His call to us.

The Lord told us to watch for Him to come to us.  He means for us to be ready to see Him.  He won’t prepare us for His entrance.  There will be no trumpets blaring to warn us He is near.  He will simply come.  And when He comes it will be as certain to you as a friend entering into your house that He is there.  His entrance may not be logical…it may make no sense to you at all but He will be with you and you will know He is with you and nothing will be the same from then onward.  Micah the prophet recognized that no one else may watch and wait for the Lord to come to them but he would.  But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me.  Do not gloat over me, my enemy!  Though I have fallen, I will rise.  Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light. (Micah 7: 7-8 NIV) When the Lord comes, you will be surprised by Him and you won’t be prepared for what He does next with you.  He might speak through you or love someone through you or heal through you.  His presence will be most wonderful and although you may have fallen, like Micah, you will rise.  You will rise above your sin and rise above your hurt and rise above your disappointment and rise above your failure and the Great God of All will be there with you.  Nothing can stop the Lord from coming to you.  You will be amazed and in your heart cry, “That is the Lord.”  Watch for Him!  Look for Him.  Listen for Him.  The Lord will come to you.  Be prepared to meet Him! 

Today See God

Is it a crazy assumption that God will do now as has been described of Him doing in the past?  Nothing unsettles our sensibilities quite like the long wait for God to act today as we have heard He did before.  Every rational thought argues against willful  anticipation of supernatural entries into our fussy world.  It seems absurd to the common mind that the Lord still operates within the same paradigm as records indicate He once did.  And yet that is precisely what we are expected to believe when we take even the most casual glance at the Scriptures.  The" Fairy Tale" motif swirls about within the interpretive dance steps of  the normal Christian's take on life lived out daily.  In fact what is "Christian" today is generally not what once was Christian when everything said about God in Scripture was believed.  The Church assumed rightly God acted in their today as He had during the today of Moses or Elijah.  They realized the Lord would grip them relentlessly "now" even when they went through the fire, even when they fell into the water.  It did not come easily.  Peter had to first get wet and Silas had to wait in twitching pain for his prison midnight but eventually they came around.  Personal experience made the difference for them just as it does here for us.  The prayer had to be uttered, the cry bellowed, the worship to the God of heaven offered.  It was only then that Elijah saw things just as Moses had, Peter saw things as Elijah had and Paul saw things as Peter had.  The skeptic does not die peacefully but in fits and starts and with loud moans and lusty screams.  The man without God is a hollow shell.  But add the Lord Jesus Christ to him and He lives vivaciously, vividly, like a bright beam of sunlight piercing the night sky.  You, joined with the Lord will see all that Elijah did, all that James did and not feebly either but decidedly, firmly.    We stumble over little unseen miracles because we live with meager faith; we grip the majesty of God with the loosest of holds because we are  more content to hear about God than we are to know Him.  "Taste and see that the Lord is good", implies that you must do something about your hunger and thirst if you are ever to gain the smallest sense of God.  The historical documents have been given us not that we might dream of days gone by but that we might do the very things the saints of the past did.  Stay in the shallows of common faith and you will merely read the tales of God; go out of the harbor where storms threaten to dump you in the sea and the Majesty of the Almighty will find you .  You will no longer make your way through the shadow lands of legendary ghosts;  you will instead enter the actual world where Christ reigns and you join with Him in His Glory.  Stop making so much of the God of ancient times if you don't intend on taking hold of the Christ who today stands before you and whispers, "Come".

Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked, "You of little faith, why are you talking among yourselves about having no bread?  Matthew 16: 8 NIV

Zeros and the Great Beyond

I was once asked by one of my children what would happen if everyone in the world jumped at the same time? Would it crack the earth apart? Would it send our planet spinning off course? Certainly not. We are far too little, even all of us combined to pitch our earth one way or another. The insignificance of man in the swirl of the cosmos is a common philosophic thread running through the neo-ecocentric academic community. Man is less than a zero in the bigger scheme of things…if the bigger scheme of things means mother universe and Grandpa Darwin. It is funny that mankind either gets blamed for scorching the earth and wrecking the established order of eco-equilibrium or he is a shadow slipping about in the random bliss of the circle of life. He is not good though whatever may be said of him and his influence in the universe is either revolting or negligible for the philosopher duped into a Godless myopia.


Christianity is so different from the current philosophic view of man. Elijah was big enough to start a regional famine and then end it, Moses big enough to split a sea apart and Joshua big enough to stop the spin of the earth. Paul raised the dead. Adam infected the universe with sin and death. We may not be super nova large but people have been dramatically impacting universal outcomes since the beginning of time.

We are no small things when we pray. The entire universe is within our grasp both today and tomorrow. We can rework cultural systems, rebuild social structures and reboot generational links. Lions and Zebras and miniature plankton cannot change the course of history…at least not intentionally. We are, as people, artists of change. God hears us pray. He makes changes in what is happening in response to us. We are magnificent when it comes to altering the universe. We stop crimes. We put together marriages. We cure diseases. We halt floods. We heal wounds. God is with us and because of our prayers, He changes the way the universe is going.

Belief is not a theological proposition. It is a way of life. If you do not believe, you do not pray constantly for God to guide you, help you, rescue others, change the universe. God is with us and so we pray and God answers our prayers and makes it different. You became a Christian when you first believed God. So, why did you stop? Because God is bigger than the universe, there is not a bit of it we cannot reach and alter through Him. The only way you become a zero is if somehow you lost God and somehow He lost you. The philosophers may have lost God…but you haven’t. So pray. Change the world.

An Open Letter To My Daughter

The other night you asked your mom how we know that God exists. You wondered if maybe someone made up all the stories. How can you at six ask such questions? You are growing up much too quickly!

Probably the most fascinating story of them all is the one about the peasant family that gave birth to a baby boy in a dusty cave. Yet we are told this was the birth of God...at least as a human. What do you make of this one? It seems like it could have been made up but there are some details about the story we can be certain happened. This Jesus was born. How could that have been made up? There were shepherds and Magi and priests and plenty of others who saw the baby. He was born in a stable and that couldn't have been concocted out of air because there was an inn keeper who knew about it. The birth registry of the Romans would have documented his birth and anyone wanting to prove he never was could easily have looked that up. Of course the question about Joseph being the father is a bit of an oddity in the story but there is no reason to make that part of the account up. It would look too bad for the family of God to have the child not have the father who should have been his father his. How do you explain that to normal religious people anyway that you want to be your friends except that it is what happened. Make up the story that God was the baby's real father and you become a nutcase in a small town with enough gossip already in it to fill a stable. Either Joseph was the father (which obviously was not the case) or someone else was (which would have been the most reasonable conclusion except they never say it--because to their complete humiliation there wasn't another father). The story is a bizarre myth (which nothing about it except the virgin birth sounds like one)or it is what it is. God born the only way He could be born. To a mother normal like you and me but with God as His real Father.

The angels in the sky seem a bit weird too and that is understandable that you think it sounds like something from The Lion King. But again, it was real, filthy, dirt poor shepherds who saw it all and the story was never refuted...and could easily have been proven because the shepherds were there. No one questions a car wreck if seven people saw it. The fact that we haven't had many angel sightings lately doesn't prove they haven't occurred any more than a lack of George Washington sightings make the George Washington legend unbelievable too.

Now I realize that I haven't proven God exists but the other stories about Jesus are just as reasonable. The death of Jesus was witnessed by Romans, Jews, friends and enemies and no one refuted His death when the stories started circulating.

Oh, but the big story, the one of Jesus climbing out of His tomb after he died is certainly up for disbelief. But can we really question it just because we don't have dead grandfathers popping out of their coffins or dead aunts slipping back to us after they have been cremated. Just because I haven't seen such a thing can't always disprove it's something true. Again, I did not follow the Apollo rocket up to the moon and although it hadn't happened before, I am not one to doubt that shocking turn of events didn't happen. I believe the hundreds of NASA workers who tracked the thing and followed its progress through the skies. More than five hundred people saw Jesus alive after He died and they couldn't have all been a bunch of quackers with duck brains. There believability packed the Temple grounds of Jerusalem with normal souls like me and you who were too convinced to shy away from the most hated and purged "myth" to come along. No one made a movement of killing off Aphrodite lovers or Isis lovers. Those myths were just silly little tales. But the one of Jesus coming back to life was right there for all to see and prove right or wrong. And more than that, the myth cost you everything you had if you held to it too tightly...including little girls like you. You had to be certain you were right. Your world depended upon it.

The stories of God are a strange collection it is true my child but strange doesn't mean false. How do you explain a rag-tag band of one million slaves marching away from the greatest and most imposing army of its time if not by means of the sea splitting apart and the first borns of the slave owning nation all dying at once. The legend was too big for myth-hood. It was the most easily of all little stories to refute but the entire nation of Israel held to it not because it made them something special (psychotically special is what I really mean)but because every last grandfather of them and grandmother too (who are certainly more believable)said it happened. To top it off, the Egyptians all knew it happened and never made mincemeat (I know you have never heard of mincemeat--it is an ancient myth of still more ancient peoples than your own)of the crazy reports...because it happened just like Michael Jackson happened.

Myths that are really myths are just foolish but the myths that are true are only too good to believe. But then, I could say the same of you. Too good to be true!