Facts

There is a point at which we know something about God is true and it percolates there in our heart.  It is not a matter of being convinced; we just realize it is so.  As we begin to think about it, we lose our certainty and come to a different conclusion.  In the Spiritual realm this is called "unbelief".  As Jesus opened the Scriptures during His first sermon, there was widespread happiness in what our Savior was saying.  All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. (Luke 4:22 NIV)  But then they began to think about the ramifications of what they had decided.   "Isn't this Joseph's son?" they asked. (NIV)  Collectively the group began to talk themselves out of what they knew was true.  How could God be speaking to them through Joseph's son?  What good can come of His teaching?  We do this a thousand different ways when it comes to faith, giving to the poor, forgiveness, complaining, gratitude, anger.  We know it is God dealing with us and then we talk ourselves out of it.  Our cunning gets the best of us and like the people of Nazareth who decided it made sense to just chuck Christ off the cliff, we turn aside from what our Lord has shown us and pretend we never saw it.  What did Jesus' neighbors and relatives lose by convincing themselves their hearts were wrong about Jesus?  Healing?  Peace and Joy?  Comfort in times of trouble?  Insight into the decisions they had to make?  It is impossible to estimate the damage they brought to themselves by turning away from Him!  We must rethink our relationship with God and how the Holy Spirit is dealing with us.  Do we believe God is right when He tells us how to live or are we a bit concerned that He is out of touch with the "real world"?  Have we got that adventurous spirit of Peter; willing to go out upon the real water before us and trust God to guide us through whatever comes our way or are we afraid to rely on Him?  Facing facts does not mean we talk ourselves out of what God says to us in Scripture or in our heart.  The opposite is actually the case.  Satan got Adam and Eve to "face the facts" and it turned out they wound up turning away from the "true facts".  Not all facts are the same.   Be careful when the lawyer in your head puts on trial what God has already declared in your heart.

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this.  They got up, drove him (Jesus) out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff.    Luke 4:28-29 NIV

Championship Pedigree

Have we caught a glimpse yet of just how monstrous our sins are and how monumental God's forgiveness is?  Perhaps a small bit of perspective is needed.  For one hundred years, Noah and his family worked on the ark that would protect them from the coming flood.  Apparently, no one thought much about the impending rain storm.  They were busy with cooking and hunting and farming and making a life for themselves.  But the most important thing, the approaching deluge was never pondered seriously by anyone except maybe Noah's family.  It was preposterous perhaps; insignificant certainly.  When the forty-two boys ridiculed Elisha and called him an "old baldhead", they were completely unprepared for what followed.  The two female bears that mauled them were the furthest things from their minds.  That is because they had no respect for the prophet of God and were oblivious to the power he possessed.  We can be thoroughly unaware of the immense iceberg before us because we are not scanning the horizon for danger.  The danger we face currently is the gross neglect of contemplation of Sin and its relationship to us.  We pass it off as a mistake or two, as an error in judgment and God declares it much worse than that.  Sin is the complete corruption and ruin of humanity and it is due to a mind saturated in rebellion against God.  When once we grab hold of the realization that Sin is far more horrific than we can conceive and that for God to overlook it is as idiotic as putting a loaded gun in the hands of a toddler, we will begin to hold to a rational view of life as it is.  Our Lord , by dying upon the Cross, evaluated the condition of humanity and determined that if He loved us, He must save us from our sins.  Save, we must use in the sense of pulling a drowning child out of the water or giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to a heart attack victim.  God has saved you out of mercy, not pity, not necessity, not obligation but out of real kindness and love for you.  You are not a victim, God was the victim.  So now you are the victor and He the champion of the world.  Consider what was accomplished when our Savior poured out His blood upon the Cross.

Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha).         John 19:17 NIV

Something More

It is presumption to make it out that we can convince anyone of the reasonableness of Christianity .  We can point out that Christianity is reasonable to the believer but that is as far as we can go.  The facts are the facts.  The universe is before us to explore and examine and any atheist or pagan is just as free to look at it closely as the most holy of Christians.  Our task is not to talk people into following Christ.  Jesus never went out of His way to convince anyone of anything.  He showed the disciples his hands and side, gave the congregation on the hillside food to eat but he didn't talk a single unbeliever into going after Him.  Herod and Pilate were classic examples of the bait Satan puts out there.  Neither of the splendid trophies of "churchianity" were offered a solitary nibble of rational evidence.  Christ left both crawling in the dust of their unbelief because each remained in rebellion against the clear facts of his sinfulness.  We must do two things if we want to be evangelists.  We must present the Gospel clearly and simply and we must let Christ rule over us as we walk about.  We are not to "do something" to get the world to believe; we are to be witnesses.  Yet our overriding call as a witness is not to be witnesses of the rationale behind our faith, we are to be witnesses of the faith itself.  You sow the seed of the Gospel at a point where humanity is alerted and it may very well lie there dormant for an unbearable length of time.  At once however, in a blink, that seed may come alive and sprout but we cannot initiate the work of it.  God Himself does it.  He brings a crisis, a despair, a spotlight upon the ugliness of sins and when He does, like lightning, the Gospel will awaken where it was buried and that one soul will choose to give the Cross a go in him and come alive or walk away from it and wither.  What makes baptism such an amazing event is that we witness the power of the Cross worked out in the physicality of faith.  Nothing should so vivify our joy as the sight of one soul socked up in sin released from her bonds and free to be completely given over to Christ.  Let the Lord live through you and when He gives you the word, say the Gospel clearly and without reticence.  God did not fill you up with the fullness of Christ so that you might be a useless bump on a log.  He has given you the opportunity to be a fisher of men.  Get after it!

"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men."   Matthew  4:19-20 NIV