Defining Moment: Good Samaritan Freefall (Part 2)

Lee was hailed as a “Good Samaritan” in the local press for putting his life on the line to help motorists in need. If he landed as a believer in Christ, then He fell into the loving hands of the Father, where there is no more sadness, no more sickness, sin, or pain, forevermore.

If he was not a believer in Jesus Christ by the time he hit the ground, however, no amount of do-gooding during his lifetime could save him when his ice-blue eyes beheld the Lord face to face, even in sacrificing his life for another! For those who do not believe and rely on Jesus Christ as Savior, “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God!”   Hebrews 10:31.

God has used Lee’s death to change my life, and I pray that God will use this as a wake-up call to people everywhere.  (If you haven’t read “Defining Moment: Good Samaritan Freefall (Part 1)”, you should read that post first, detailing the Lee’s story).  One day, every one of us will fall into the hands of the Living God.  Will you land as a friend, welcomed into eternal glory, or will you land in permanent unbelief and denial?

To the unbeliever, this is another reminder that you just don’t know how long you have left. God knows, and if you think about it, every second brings you closer to the moment when your soul leaves your physical body at your death. I think it would be sobering if we each carried a clock around with us that counted down the years, months, hours, days, and seconds to our own deaths. I once saw a short Christian film called “Clocks” that illustrated that idea.

I suppose many people would take advantage of this, however, and put off dealing with the Jesus question until perhaps a few days before death. Many people imagine they can have fun all life-long until right before their death, when they suppose that they’ll finally “make peace” with God.

Perhaps the knowledge that you only had 18 years to live would cause you to want to “live life to the hilt” and engage in risky and sinful behaviors or thrill-seeking. Imagine the irony of finding out that one of your risk-taking adventures was actually the cause of your death.

What a short-sighted way of looking at things! This view totally overlooks the fact that one is spiritually dead until Jesus makes us spiritually alive! Would you really want to live your whole life spiritually dead and miss living what Jesus calls “life more abundantly?”

And what if you had confidence to put God off because your clock said that you still had 10 years, 5 months, 2 days, 14 hours, and 21 seconds left? You assume that you have 10 more years of sentient health, and miss the possibility that you will step outside in a few minutes and be involved in a car accident that puts you into a coma, where you will spend the rest of your clock time until your body finally succumbs… You ended up consciously putting off the Lord in the “now” because you were sure that you still had time and a coming “then,” when in fact your “no” in the “now” is really your final answer!

All you can be sure of is right NOW!

2 Corinthians 6:2. “For He says, ‘In the time of My favor I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you.” I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation.’”

Do not wait to truly live, but receive the Truth, accept Him, and begin to live truly this very moment what you believe!

And if you believe, and you have received Truth and Life in Jesus Christ and the promised Holy Spirit, the fall of the Good Samaritan underscores how precious every opportunity is to help people on their journey to understanding Christ and His love for them.

When Lee and I talked that afternoon in November on the sidewalk, neither of us knew that he had so little time left. I had no idea that I might be the last person to ever speak with him about Jesus. I had no idea how important it was that God spoke at that time and in that way through me to someone who desperately needed to hear the truth one more time!

Perhaps the greatest gift to me through this surreal experience was the personal epiphany of the “surrendered moment.” Though I’ve never read it phrased this way, this idea is not new to mankind. God’s people have written in times past about being filled with the Spirit moment-by-moment. But God made a timeless truth new and fresh to me.

This is a reminder and an exhortation that there is an urgency to each moment, and a fullness of His eternal power, that God chooses to deploy through the surrendered thoughts, words, and actions of His people. This is GOOD NEWS! We are not limited in the NOW by our failings and our past. The fullness of God is available to EVERY believer, and He WILL exert His eternal power within our moments when we set our hearts to honor Him and prepare the way for the Living God to live out Christ in us!

It is true: every single person who ever lived will surrender to the Living God at the moment we see Him face to face. It will be, for most people, the first moment of complete and utter surrender. At that moment, there will be no choice, and it will be too late for them to surrender to Him in such a way to be saved for all eternity. This is what God says about that moment:

“For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Philippians 2:9-11. NASB.

Surrender to Jesus is inevitable—unavoidable—sooner or later. Perhaps it is easier for us to comprehend a surrender to an overwhelming presence in that awesome moment on some future date, but we resist the idea of surrendering in the NOW when there is nothing to shock and awe our senses, and the call and activity of God seems more a whisper than a supernova.

God’s arm is not too short to reach from His throne into our momentary troubles, and His power is not diminished in any way by being less visible now than on that great and terrible future day. His desire is to use the broken and foolish things of this world to display His power. Those who know that they can do nothing apart from Him—and in their desperate weakness and desire to see God’s salvation in their moments—they are the ones who will see His wonders from day to day!

Wendy and I didn’t go downtown on that day in November trusting in our own intellect or talents or even spiritual gifts. In fact, we were way out of our comfort zones whenever we would go to be with the homeless people of our city. Every time we went, we would feel so empty and inadequate on the way downtown, and we would pray that God would prepare the hearts of those we would talk with, and that He would give us words to say, and that He would love others through us, because in and of ourselves we had nothing of lasting value to give. We were desperate for God to do something, feeling that we were being poured out like a drink offering, and that there was nothing in our broken cups for us to offer.

But it is precisely the emptiness of the cup that God is looking for in the hearts of His people. He wants those who understand their impotence and emptiness to look to Him, and those are the cups He loves to fill up with Himself and His power, that the glory of the Lord accomplishes what He will because His people made room for the Lord Himself to pour out and to work as He desires!

“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.” Psalm 126:5,6.

We surrendered the moment to God, knowing that we cannot make any heart believe, but trusting that God will do something supernatural with that moment that is beyond our reach. And He always does! If you doubt this, refer to Romans 8:28. When you surrender a moment, and it goes by, it may seem like nothing eternal really happened. It may seem like things get worse when we surrender a moment, or that God is not paying attention. We likely will forget more surrendered moments than we remember, thinking nothing significant happened.

But we are measuring with our human yardsticks! Throw away your measuring tape that looks to quantify something that can’t be measured. Why are we so concerned with a specific result? It is God working and not we ourselves, so if God does this or that thing through us in a certain moment, or if He doesn’t, we should never be disappointed with His presence or embarrassed by a lack of specific results looked for! The fact is, God LOVES those surrendered moments. He is most glorified in the times when His children cry out for Him as their only hope; when we acknowledge that without Him, we can do nothing! (John 15:5). And we ask Him to do what in reality we cannot do on our own.

2 Chronicles 16:9, “For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to Him.” God is actively looking to prove Himself strong through those who are surrendered.

Surrender is not something that was meant for people only after they die—surrender is meant for God’s people constantly while they are living, and surrender reveals in those moments the promised “Christ in me.” (Galatians 2:19-20, and Philippians 1:21). As we string together a surrendered moment with another one, we begin to see and understand the abundant life, and to discern the supernova within each whisper, to realize a crumb of a moment might feed thousands, and to take a step of faith—ruby red slippers or not—trusting only in the strength and love of our Scintillating Savior.

Defining Moment: Good Samaritan Freefall (Part 1)

At a particular moment on a sunny-but-brisk Saturday morning in November 2009, I was about to be shaken to the core by a man I had never met and might never see again.

I had been serving monthly at that time among the homeless people of our city with my wife, Wendy, not because we felt gifted for or attracted to this kind of ministry, but because we had a growing hunger for God, and a willingness for Him to use us however He desired. I can see looking back that God led us with little bread crumbs of “yeses” to a land that might as well have been Oz to us, where its people struggle to meet basic needs between skyscraper shadows. We emerged from our cocoon in the suburbs, fresh and rested from a night in our warm bed, spreading our wings to meet with stranger-friends of the inner city.  In the meantime, they had slept on cardboard or under bridges, or not at all, huddled against life storms, derailed and forgotten like boxcars left to rust.

Before I go on about how my world shifted on its axis, I think it important to say that the LORD puts out little bread crumbs each day, disguised as “almost nothing” moments. Jesus linked the sustenance of bread to action when He said His food is to do the will of the Father. He would take a little nothing moment, a leftover crumb, like talking to a woman at the well, (John, Chapter 4), and turn it into something very significant, so that within hours, many believed in Him because of that woman’s testimony about Him in that moment, and many more believed after seeking Him out and hearing for themselves. And the half-life of that moment of simple conversation echoes throughout eternity, not just because it was written down in the Bible, but because Jesus followed the Father’s lead, and lives were changed when He asked for water. I suspect that we miss the opportunity to do the big things that we imagine we’re going to do because we ignored the little crumbs that would have opened the gates to it. We ignore the seeds of trees while looking for the forest.

The crumb that opened the gates to Oz for us happened months before that fateful Saturday—such a little thing, really. Wendy and I used to meet regularly with friends over coffee for fellowship and encouragement in the LORD at a Borders Bookstore, and we noticed a group of Christians that would come and have a Bible study together at one of the long tables there on the same nights that we would go. One evening, I had a notion to go and introduce myself and encourage them. These people were warm and exuberant about God—we were friends instantly—and my little “yes” to go and speak led to another little “yes,” to sit with them on their next study. That’s where we learned about their “Matthew Ministry,” patterned after Matthew 25:31-46. They served the poor on Saturday mornings in our downtown, distributing clothing, toiletries, food, water, and other necessities to whomever walked up. And with another “yes,” we agreed to go and see how we could serve, too.

The deep intention of this ministry is to go the extra mile to connect in a personal way and minister spiritually with each of the people who come. We often had a chance to support, encourage, share truth, and pray with our new homeless or drifting friends, sharing the love and truth of Jesus. We shared bread crumb moments, and trusted that God could take them and accomplish more than physically feeding 5,000+ people with bread and fish, just as Jesus did more in speaking to the crowd than He did in giving them physical nourishment.

On a Saturday in early November, at Moore Square in downtown Raleigh, I was approached by “Mankind.” Lee was his name, but his friends called him “Mankind,” since he was about 6’4” in height, built like an NFL lineman, and because they thought he resembled the wrestler, “Mankind.” His blonde-dyed hair set off his steely blue eyes—cold in color, but rendered warm by the gentleness of his face. He explained that he was going through some rough times, living out of a car, holding down a new job—but there was hope in his eyes that we didn’t often see out on the sidewalk hardscape… he was reuniting with his ex-wife and daughter.  For about forty five minutes, he was an open book, sharing pages of his life with me as we talked about his past, present, and future. Neither of us knew the secret that he only had a few more days to live.

I asked him if he knew the Lord. He didn’t put an exclamation mark on it when he answered, “I’m  an atheist.” We talked about Jesus Christ. I asked him, “What makes it difficult for you to believe in Jesus?”

His eyes got that far-off look, as if he was looking back through time, and he said church people he had known were so hurtful and hypocritical.  As I listened to Lee open up his wounds for inspection, I was asking God to give me ears to hear him, and to give me words that were true and right that would speak to his heart’s cry.

I heard myself say that Lee should ignore the bad behavior of self-proclaimed Christians in forming a true picture of Christ. Many who call themselves Christians don’t actually know Jesus themselves, believing in “Churchianity” instead. Many believers are not following Jesus in their daily lives, or are ignoring or misunderstanding the life that Jesus is calling them to live.  We uphold a standard of thought and behavior, and righteousness, that is higher than we are able to reach ourselves. But there is grace and acceptance for those who recognize their need for the Savior, and who receive Him and HIS righteousness. And God loves all people, whether we receive or rebuff Him. And God loved Lee; He wanted Lee, “Mankind,” to turn to Him.

I encouraged Lee to re-form his opinion about Jesus by going to His Word, and reading for himself what Jesus said and did.  The Bible is the most accurate picture of the Savior.  His image burns true and bright on the pages of scripture, no matter how imperfectly we, as Christians, reflect that light.

Toward the end of our time together, I gave him a Gospel of John booklet from the Pocket Testament League, and I challenged him to read it and learn about Jesus in His own words and actions. If only he and I could hear the secret whispers, “Mankind will die in 21 DAYS!” He listened to me intently and earnestly, and at the end, he let me pray for him, that God would reveal truth to him, and he actually asked me to pray for his ex-wife and his daughter and her other child.

We gave him a warm winter coat that fit perfectly; clothes and other items for his family. I felt that I had made a new friend, and that here was a man close to turning toward God in Heaven. I couldn’t help wondering if he had met the LORD before, when he was young, and then run from him? I looked forward to seeing him in the coming weeks.

When he turned to go, I didn’t realize he was close to the end of a skydiving free fall, and he needed to pull the rip cord fast. I had told him about believing in Jesus, even helped him put his hands on the truth with the Gospel of John, and gave him instructions on pulling the rip cord through talking with God and repenting—turning to God and placing his full trust in Jesus and what He has already done for him—but he put it off. I watched him walk away, his new burnt-orange colored coat falling back into the milling Saturday morning crowd. That jacket wasn’t padded enough to save him, and the ground was rushing up at him faster than any of us could imagine.

John and Linda, our friends in Matthew Ministry, broke it to me at Bible Study. “Did you see Lee on the news?”

“No! What happened?”

Night had fallen on November 29th. Lee was driving on the I-440 Belt-line on his way to pick up a Christmas present for his daughter when cars up ahead collided at high speed next to the concrete median barriers. Lee put the brakes on his home-on-wheels, jumped out into the time-ticking fray in split-second sacrifice, and ran to a crash victim by the barrier. Oncoming traffic deflected and scattered at speed, dodging cars and people, and one car peeled pell-mell through an opening toward the barrier where Lee was helping a young motorist. Like deer in the headlights, pinned in place by fear with nowhere safe to run, they did what probably most would do in the situation: they hopped behind the waist-high concrete barrier, assuming in the darkness that there was solid ground in the median beyond it. At that one spot, however, the beltline is actually a bridge, and the safe and solid ground they sought was 70 feet below the road level. They fell.

The 18 year old landed in the water and miraculously had no major injuries, but Lee landed on the rocks and probably died instantly.

I was stunned to hear it. He had been so full of this life and hope, and suddenly he had neither.

Lee knew all of the essentials about Jesus from our previous conversation. I had prayed for him that he would come to know Jesus, and he had been given the Gospel of John. Did he read it? Was he changed by the truth? Was he a believer when he went over that railing? I don’t know.  No matter what belief Lee held when he hopped over the railing, there is still a chance that Lee is with God in heaven! As long as there was still life and breath and conscious thought, Lee still had the chance to turn and believe.

How long does it take for belief to happen? It’s instantaneous, isn’t it? Belief in Christ is instantaneous. One moment, you’re not believing, but then, you believe! And at that moment of belief, God forgives you of all your sins (past, present, and future) and puts the Holy Spirit within you to seal you as His own child, and to empower you to live in Christ as a new creation. All that happens instantaneously, at the moment of faith, because Jesus Himself has done the work to provide salvation already. A simple agreement in the soul confirms the efficacy of the work He did for us.

Lee had two seconds of falling before he hit. Maybe he pulled the rip cord at the last second and called out a believing “JESUS!” in his heart and was saved? (He didn’t have to recite the “Sinner’s Prayer” as many suppose; the thief on the cross didn’t say the “Sinner’s Prayer,” either, and yet Jesus recognized his saving faith). A physical parachute deployed at 70 feet from the ground is useless. There isn’t time for the chute to open and slow the fall. But a spiritual parachute deploys immediately and is 100% effective. Even if he was a still a stone cold atheist when he hopped over the barrier, it is possible he landed a 100% believer in Jesus Christ, falling from the jaws of death at the gates of Hell into the hands of THE WONDERFUL—the LIVING GOD!

If only it is so!

Be sure to read the continuation of this post:  “Defining Moment: Good Samaritan Freefall (Part 2).

A Challenge to “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do)? – PART 2

In Part B, I outline three practical ways to surrender that run counterpoint to the three rational WWJD mistakes I wrote about previously. We can pray in surrender within the moment, or ahead of an upcoming situation, for God to work in at least three key ways.

(If you missed Part 1, please read that first:    A Challenge to “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do)? – PART 1 .   In that post, I revealed three problems with using a rational perspective to determine WWJD, and presented the solution of The Surrendered Moment).

Surrender Solution #1:  Give me your eyes to see what you are seeing.

This is a surrender to God of my own viewpoint, (which is myopic, tainted, and biased), and a plea for God Himself to give light to my eyes that I may have vision that transcends human perspective and perception. In asking this, I don’t expect God to give me perfect spiritual eyesight, but I do expect Him to give me corrective or enhanced sight so that I can experience the moment or the crisis with Him and rely on Him to show me what I need to know.

I must rely on the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 2:10-16 (NIV).

“The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”

Seeing with spiritual eyesight is essential to walking by faith, as we must continually filter our human experience through a recognition of God as sovereign and through a reliance on Him to save us in every way and correct our vision.

John 5:19: “So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.” ESV. (Italics and boldface, mine).

Even Jesus, who has the “mind of Christ” in a way that no one else can, chooses to look to the Father in order to see what the Father is doing, and to do in the moment what He sees the Father doing. You and I can’t see perfectly what God is doing, nor do we have the mind of Christ in the same way that He has it, but we can look for God to inspire our vision and to reveal truth to us that we can’t find on our own.

When we pray for God’s perspective, we may not consciously recognize or understand anything different, but the most important aspect of this is that we have an eye that looks for God spiritually in the moment; an eye that honors God and acknowledges His presence, and that desires to see Him moving.

In the New Testament, we see that God, the Father, gives Jesus, the Son, special insight into a person’s past or private thinking so that He can directly address something very specific. The Spirit is able to cut through outward appearances to reveal truth directly and powerfully. When I’m asked for counsel, my best first response is to silently ask God to give me insight so that I may hear from Him and speak truth that is most needed. This prayer of surrender can be as simple as one heartfelt sentence or even an instantaneous acknowledgment that God is with me to help me help someone else. With a spiritual glance toward God in the room, or a nod in His direction, He catches my meaning and the setting of my heart on Him.

Sometimes I am surprised by the truth that comes out of my mouth in my response, because I am often convicted, instructed, and challenged by it, just as much as the person to whom I am speaking. The content sometimes is more than I could know or understand, and the manner of expression is far better than I could compose on the spot. I marvel when this happens, not at my own thoughts and words, but at God’s wisdom and power, and His expression of mercy and grace to me that He would use such a broken vessel in a redemptive way!

I’m not always cognizant of anything special in my surrendered responses, by the way, and sometimes I may go away thinking that God didn’t show up like what I had hoped, or it might seem that my answer was inadequate. When I catch myself thinking like this, I have to remember God will accomplish what He desires through such moments, and that God’s timing and His ways are better than my own. God can provide another opportunity for that person to hear truth clarified, and it doesn’t have to be through me. It’s actually a relief that the results are up to Him.

How can the LORD help us see more clearly in these situations, to know how to think, or speak, or act? Ask Him, yourself!

Surrender Solution #2:  Teach me your ways.  Psalm 25:4-5: “Show me your ways, O Lord, guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.” NIV.

God’s ways are not our ways, but He wants to show us His ways, and we can know more and more of His ways if we are looking for Him. Jeremiah 33:3: “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.”

Sometimes, in my desperation to see God move, I become aware that I have left God behind, and that I have forged ahead to obtain results that I can see immediately. Coasting on my own gifts and talents, I can become too attached to a particular mode of ministry, too presumptuous as to what needs to happen, or too focused on meeting particular goals. Success in ministry can become its own end, and the craving for continued or increased impact can draw us to rely on those methods or gifts that brought results before. It’s a blessing to come to the realization that we have been trusting the trappings of ministry more than we have been trusting God Himself, so that we can make a change in course.

The line is a fine one, and easily danced across and moved around, where we leave off relying on the Spirit to move us and correct us, and instead pick up the work to establish our own heritage within a certain sphere of influence or mode of working. The larger the ministry, the more difficult it is to stay responsive to the Spirit. Each person should look to God to follow Him, and collectively the Church needs to be responsive at a grass roots (down to the individual!) level to the move of the Spirit.

When I look at the movements of Jesus with eyes of flesh, I scratch my head and think that He was often very impulsive, or even wishy-washy. At the wedding of Cana in John 2, His first reaction to His mother’s insistence that He do something about the wine that had run out was to indicate that it was not the right time to reveal Himself by doing miracles publicly. A few moments later, He seems to contradict Himself, and turns the water into wine.

In Mark 7, Jesus at first resists the request of the Syrophoenician woman to heal her daughter of demon possession, and then reversed Himself and healed the daughter after a single repartee from the mother.

I don’t point out these instances to suggest that following God must look impulsive, but we should all recognize that God’s ways are not our ways, and also that God is not limited to acting through prescribed methods nor traditional channels nor historical precedence. We must set our ways aside and make straight paths for the Lord to move when and how He will, and we should seek to be open to God’s leading, even if it looks like we are being detoured from a more well-planned, excellent, or expedient way.

Oftentimes, the Spirit calls us from the path of comfort into unfamiliar, uncharted, (and unplanned) routes and territories. Here, outside of our careful plans, we realize that we can’t control anything, and are wholly dependent on Him. God is not against planning, but if we plan to do anything, let us first plan to follow Him wherever He leads, and over all other plans, remain responsive to His call and command.

Surrender Solution #3:  Instruct me what to say and do, and give me your strength to accomplish your will.”

Jesus says in John 12:49-50: “For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it. I know that His command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.” NIV 1984, (Boldface and italics, mine).

Jesus obeys the Father in WHAT to say and HOW to speak!

There are whole aspects of Jesus’s communication that we are not privy to… His tone of voice, His gestures and body language, His eye contact. Everything He said was commanded by the Father, and every aspect of His delivery was ordered by the Father.

Other translations express these verses more like what is in the ESV: “For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told me.” Jesus seems to be redundant in this version, saying that the Father gives Him the specific words to “say” and to “speak.”

Speaking goes beyond mere content, however, and indeed we understand that we can speak the exact same sentence and change its meaning by emphasizing certain words. If I were to say, “Please give that to me,” my meaning can change based upon my inflection and body language.

If I say, “PLEASE give that to me?” then I’m politely asking you to give that to me. If I say, like my children do sometimes, “PLEEEEEEEEEASE give that to me?”, then I’m begging you to give that to me. If I say, “Please GIVE that to me?” then I’m asking that you would make it a gift with no strings attached, or otherwise differentiating the mode of delivery from another mode (like loaning). If I say, “Please give THAT to me?” then I’m emphasizing that you give me that thing instead of the other things. If I say, “Please give that TO ME,” then I’m emphasizing that you give the thing to me instead of to the other people. The content of what we say is modulated by our manner of speaking and the context of the situation.

Jesus didn’t speak like a robot, but instead, with emotion and body language and inflection, He communicated not only the content that the Father gave Him, (the specific words in order), but He also expressed that content as the Father directed, within the specific context, and to certain people.

Paul describes how we can do this same thing, in Ephesians 6:19-20. He asked for the Ephesians to pray “that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. ESV.

Paul asks that God will give Him the specific words when he opens his mouth, and for a manner of delivery that is bold, so that He can speak without fear of saying the wrong thing or being afraid of what the hearers may think. Surprisingly, Paul admits that fear is often with him when he speaks. In 1 Corinthians 2:3-5, Paul emphasizes the mode of expression in which he spoke to the Corinthians in person:

And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” ESV.

He mentions here that his message is not of rational human wisdom, and God speaks through Him in the power of the Spirit even though he himself is weak and trembling with fear.

This is what is available to us no matter our personal limitations—any time! God can communicate His Truth through the power and expression of the Spirit! In fact, Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the “Spirit of truth,” in John 14:16-17: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” ESV.

Jesus said, in Luke 12:11-12: “When you are brought before synagogues, rulers and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say.” NIV. This kind of promise is scary, because God tells of a deliverance that happens “at that time.” We are not to expect in these situations that God is going to give us a speech ahead of time to practice, and to perfect the delivery. In an interview or cross-examination, anything prepared could be derailed or redirected, and if our confidence rests on a specific sequence of thought and phrase, we may take our eyes off of the Lord in worry over the performance.

The LORD told Moses in Exodus 4:12, “Now then go, and I, even I, will be with your mouth, and teach you what you are to say.” Nevertheless, Moses had no confidence that he would be able to say the right thing when the time came, even with the promise from God, and so he asked for God to send someone else. This fear of faltering in speech at an important moment—I know it well, myself. One of my biggest fears in college was the fear of public speaking. God has given me numerous opportunities to trust Him, standing before a crowd to speak, and, though I see that He has come through, time and again, this fear threatens me at every occasion. As I get older, I notice that I’m not as sharp or quick in memory as I was even last year, and I have fear that, if I am put in the spotlight, and many eyes are on me, I will not be strong or persuasive in speech. I may falter, and may not be able to pull up the words that would show themselves as true and bring honor to the LORD. However, GOD Himself is with me. I must rest in HIM. Jesus rested in the Father, Himself, and gave His own mouth to the Father:

John 14:10-11. NIV. “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.”

Jesus Himself did not take credit for His words and His actions, but testified that it is God the Father living in Him!

As we surrender our eyes to see what He is seeing, as we submit ourselves to be taught His ways, and as we yield our bodies to speak His words and do His works, we will experience the truly abundant life, and the world will get to see that God the Father is still at work.

A Challenge to “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do)?- PART 1

In the 1990’s, bracelets started appearing on teenage wrists with an acronym, “WWJD?” (“What Would Jesus Do?”). Have you ever tried to answer this question on the way to deciding something? If so, you understand the idea behind the question is to consider how Jesus would think, speak, or act in your situation, and then do likewise. The question is very useful on one hand, as a reminder that God’s perspective should be sought in any and every situation and considered above our own. Doubtless, many people in response to “WWJD?” have been driven to the Bible to study Jesus, which is a good thing! After all, you can’t know what Jesus would do in your situation if you aren’t familiar with what He did. God has blessed the question and the questioners down through the years as they have made choices to follow Jesus.

On the other hand, I often have—and I suspect we all have, at times—a tragic temptation to rationalize what Jesus would do through indirect study without consulting Him directly.

This tendency to work things through in our minds rationally, and leave God out of it, relationally, is a pattern that goes all the way back to the fall in Eden. Beguiled by Satan, Adam and Eve believed the serpent’s assertion that they could be like God, and, instead of engaging God Himself to subdue their illicit desires for knowledge and authority, they turned away from the Living God to obey the snake and taste the forbidden fruit. They weighed the whispered words of the Slitherer, dripping with half-truth, against the word of the Lord, and decided to risk everything for the chance to be God. In aspiring to rise to equality with God, Adam and Eve actually debased themselves and brought the sentence of death to all living things. It was the most precipitous reversal of fortune ever experienced by mankind, initiating a moral free fall that claims all, and, (if we continue our descent apart from Christ, denying the parachute He packed, and ignoring the rip cord), our bodies will slam the ground, pounding on the gates of Hell with the gravitational force of sin, releasing our souls into unending terror—a solitary eternity without God.

Denying the Living God and turning to pure human reasoning was disastrous then—now, it is second nature. Even after we see the light, pull the rip cord, and receive Jesus as our Savior, our fallen thinking strives for answers and achievement through personal research and experience. “Self-help” is an apt moniker for our best efforts, and “autopilot” an excuse for less than best—just doing what feels natural and good.

King Solomon WARNED, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5. Such a simple directive, but it is hard to maintain, as Solomon knows.

By asking “WWJD?,” and even through searching the scriptures diligently, we can deceive ourselves into thinking that we are engaging God because we are studying the way Jesus would handle such a situation. Taking no notice of God Himself in the room, we study and talk to ourselves, dressing rationalization in the spiritual wrapper of biblical study! We’re certainly better off searching the scriptures than not, but how we search makes all the difference. If we merely try to understand the truth we’re reading through our fallen eyes of flesh and then take action through our own strength to accomplish our own goals, then we are leaning on our own understanding. When we don’t talk to or listen to God in our moments, nor trust in His deliverance, we make several mistakes through rational human thinking. I’ll introduce three of the mistakes in rational thinking, and then follow up with three spiritual solutions.

Rational Mistake #1: Employing Human Vision

From the outset, we all suffer from a serious and constant nearsightedness—we rely only on what can be seen or perceived within our own range of vision—under the delusion that we are seeing everything that comes to bear on a problem or situation very clearly.

This is a huge mistake. We are NEVER seeing the whole picture. Walking by sight, we fail to see the trip wires and traps, the cloaks disguising darkness that fool the eye and seduce the soul. We are often unwilling to bend our personal biases, or let go of our fears, to take certain factors into account, and so skew the truth. Consequently, we often misjudge the motives, subtleties, and alternatives in our situations, and, in turn, we misrepresent ourselves to others.

Often, we think we have a problem with “x,” when instead, there’s something deeper going on with “y.” We might look up all the verses in the Bible that have to do with “x,” (which is not a bad thing), but as long as we believe we can fix the problem by figuring out what Jesus would do with “x,” then we are completely blind to the “y.”

Leaning on our own understanding, walking by sight, we will consistently miss the opportunity to rely on God in our spiritual blindness, and we will judge all things through a heuristic of self-preservation and salvation, or even pseudo-spirituality, rather than through faith—by engaging God Himself—and depending on Him for insight, divine guidance, power through the Holy Spirit, and deliverance.

Let’s pretend for the moment that we can see our problems perfectly and know the layers of the onion that make up the stink in the present pickle. Even so, do we have enough knowledge of Jesus to be able to choose to act or respond as Jesus would in every situation? This brings me to another key mistake that we make in rationalizing to solve our dilemmas.

Rational Mistake #2: Employing deficient minds with limited understanding of Jesus Christ.

Do the accounts of Jesus ever surprise you? Jesus continually surprises me in scripture.

If I were reading through the gospels for the first time, I couldn’t tell you how Jesus would react in the next chapter to a given situation based on His reactions in an earlier chapter, and there isn’t a way to reduce His specific actions and reactions into a systematic matrix of behavior to refer to whenever I have a situation, no matter how many times I read the gospels. Sometimes He heals people and admonishes them to keep quiet about it, and other times He tells them to present themselves to the priests or to go and tell others what God has done for them. Sometimes He wants to be incognito, and other times He allows a reception of great fanfare. Sometimes He is quiet as a lamb before the shearers when confronted by his enemies, or gentle, even tender, and other times He speaks forcefully, even scornfully, or turns tables over in righteous indignation. Sometimes He heals with just a word or a thought, and sometimes He uses mud and spit. Sometimes He walks on water, but most often He rode in a boat.

While we may have good reason to think we understand why Jesus did what He did at certain times, there is an uncertainty when reading that defies complete understanding. There is no “Jesus Code” that we can decipher and then employ in a systematic fashion, (much as we may desire one), to make it easy to know what to do in any situation. GOD says it is impossible to pin Him down with our minds of flesh:

Isaiah 55:8,9. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.ESV.

No one has complete and perfect knowledge of scripture and the nuances of Jesus’ actions and words in a given situation and with a specific person. Since I’m not the Son of God, the idea that I can come up with the divine response in my present dilemma using only my reason and my knowledge of Jesus in scripture is presumptuous, at best. When Adam bit the forbidden fruit, he thought his eyes would be opened so that he could see clearly and judge rightly, like God, but instead he closed his eyes to God and began to see evil as a valid and attractive option. When we hide our eyes, our ears, and our hearts from God Himself in trying to figure out how to do the right thing, we take pride in our own understanding and believe that we can think and act like Jesus. To the degree that we believe this, we buy into a self-determinism and a false ownership of our results, which is a third fatal flaw.

Rational Mistake #3: Self-Determinism…Assuming the Results are Up to Us.

Oftentimes we feel like we’ve got to “crack the code” in order to get the results that we’re after: the solution to the problem, the cessation of negative consequences, getting that raise or new job, winning the respect and love we deserve. And so we try this and we try that, we kiss up, cajole and manipulate, we dramatize and threaten, we bait and bribe, we advertise our strengths, show off, blame-shift, and downplay our shortcomings.

In a broken world, seemingly driven by cause and effect, we adopt a self-salvation modus operandi summed up in the adage, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” The spiritualized version, though still unscriptural, is: “God helps those who help themselves,” or even, “Pray as though everything depended on God and act as if everything depended on you.” — St. Augustine.

Through common experience, we learn a a reliance on self to “make things happen” to ensure good results. We assume that we’ve got to pick the right principle to emphasize or prioritize if we’re to please God. I’ve got to believe and not doubt in just the right way, or obey as close to perfectly as I can… otherwise, God will not be pleased and He will not want to bless me with the successful result that I am looking for. Perhaps more often, we just act the way we want to, and ask God to bless us or save us afterward.

These three pragmatic approaches are very human, but spiritually misleading. Rationalizing “What Would Jesus Do?” puts us in the place of God, judging Jesus Himself in our own eyes and subjecting recorded scripture to our analysis of cause and effect. If we merely try to imitate what we think Jesus did in order to obtain similar results, then we reduce the power of God down to humanly achievable action and reaction, or, just as bad, we try to manipulate God into doing what we want by using the right words or behaviors, (which is akin to witchcraft). These errors of perception, understanding, and performance are serious impediments to the abundant life to which Jesus calls us. Thankfully, God offers the solution to all three aspects of leaning on our own understanding and walking by sight.

Do What Jesus Did… SURRENDER the Moment

Proverbs 3:5-6. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”

If we really desire to do what Jesus would do, we first need to step back from analyzing individual cases and actions, and look at the big picture. Sometimes we can get lost in the details and lose something very important, and I’m suggesting here that we often do this when we pick apart the scriptures. We must ask God for inspiration in our studies, or we’ll become fixated on some minor aspects of behavior management so that the whole of our sanctification begins to be summed up as “try harder” or “do more.”

Let me give a metaphor as an example of myopic scholarship with an instance from the study of art. If you examine a small 2 inch square sample of the pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” you will find a collection of multiple colored dots of paint that don’t appear to have any relationship to each other that suggests any larger form. Pointillism is an impressionist style of painting that presents form and light through the juxtaposition of colored dots. We might admire the intensity and hue of the colored dots in the small sample, and even the spacing and size differences of the dots themselves, but we would be hard pressed to discern any recognizable form.

Small dots of pigment viewed up close seem randomly placed. http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/jatte.html

However, when we step back from the painting to take in the whole artwork, we can still see that small collection of dots that we were examining, but now we see that those dots were describing the profile of a woman who is standing on the shore with her beau or husband, enjoying a beautiful sunny day from the cool of the shade by the lake. We may begin to understand more of the painter’s intention and the meaning of the organized dots as we examine the relationship of the figures to each other, the formality of the fashion, the dogs at the figures’ feet, the presence of others at leisure, and so on. The painting expresses a captured moment in the lives of a certain class of people on a Sunday afternoon, from the perspective and intention of a talented artist.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1864-1866. Art Institute of Chicago. Public Domain.

When we examine the Bible, we can’t see the whole picture that the words describe, which is as infinite as eternity, but we can understand more and more as we examine the details in each verse within the context of the whole.

I want to expose something here which is evident in every dot of colored paint in the portrait of Jesus and holds up as one of the main truths of the big picture, and which has the potential to increase the brilliance and impact of the hues in our own self-portraits:

Jesus Christ lives an entire eternity of surrendered moments to the Father.

While He was here in the flesh, He surrendered to the Father in every moment, a feat never to be duplicated by any man. I will delve into the depths of His surrender in subsequent posts, but I would like to point out now that we have the same opportunity as Jesus did on earth, to surrender ourselves in our moments to God.

While we’re not able to live a lifetime completely made up of surrendered moments, we can surrender a moment… and another one… and another one. As we do, as we look for God to teach us what we need to know, give us thoughts that are higher than our own, words that are better than we can dream up, and actions that are inspired, we will be doing what Paul is talking about when he says, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Philippians 1:21. ESV.

When we ask God to do through us what we cannot do on our own, we do the opposite of leaning on our own understanding: we fall upon the Savior Himself so that Christ stands up in us through the power of the Holy Spirit and accomplishes what He desires.

You may wonder, “how can I surrender?”

Engage God Himself and invite Him to use you as He will. This in itself is the highest form of worship, when you count God as supreme and sovereign over this moment, and yield yourself within it to His desires. I may not ever (in this body of flesh) be able to yield every fiber of my being completely to God as Jesus did—there is some resistance to God inherent in the fallen flesh itself—but God is glorified in the essential submission of my will, imperfect as it is.

In Part B, I will outline three practical ways to surrender that are counterpoint to the three rational WWJD mistakes previously outlined.  Jump to:  A Challenge to “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do)? – PART B