JESUS

Please tell me why God allowed over 6000 innocent people to be murdered on September 11, 2001?

Answer?

I don’t know.

Where was God?

I don’t know.

When Leslie Weatherhead, a minister in London during the Second World War, was asked by a member in his congregation where God was when his son was killed in a bombing raid, Weatherhead replied, »I guess he was where he was when his son was killed.«

And where was that?

I don’t know.

Isn’t »I don’t know« too ambiguous? Isn’t »I don’t know« an unconvincing way to convince young people Christianity is true?

Actually, »I don’t know« confirms one critical truth about Christianity…it’s a mystery!

Jesus loves us, right?

Of course.

So if he loves us, he protects us, right?

If he loves us…he is with us.

Jesus can heal, can’t he? And perform miracles?

Of course. Just not very often.

Why?

I don’t know.

What about God’s will?

My youth director says we’re supposed to seek God’s will. There are lots of verses in the Bible that tell us to do God’s will, aren’t there? God does have a will, right?

Absolutely.

Trouble is God’s will is not like a to-do list. It’s more like an undecipherable code. The Bible definitely gives us some clues about the code of God’s will, which means we can figure out part of it; but, because it’s God, we will never crack the code.

Clues?

Yeah, like, follow me, serve me, love me, live by my commandments, point people to me.

That’s it? Just follow me, serve me, love me and trust me?

That’s about it.

What do you mean »that’s about it?«

You don’t want to know.

Yes I do.

We get a cross.

Cross????? What does that mean?

I don’t know.

But God does heal people, doesn’t he?

Certainly.

And miracles do happen, don’t they.

Right.

So we can count on God helping us, can’t we?

We can count on God being God.

Which means…??

I don’t know.

And what does that mean?

It means we can trust God if we lost someone in the WTC or if they survived.

It means we can trust God when we have cancer and when we’re healed.

We can trust God if we survive a natural disaster or if we don’t.

We can trust God when we get a glimpse of Divine will and when we don’t.

We can trust God in the answers and the questions, in the good and the bad, in the light and the dark, when we’re winning and when we’re losing.

We can trust God even when the Truth doesn’t answer all our questions or leaves us with even more questions.

And, most importantly, just beyond our »I don’t know’s,« Jesus is waiting with open arms to snuggle us in the mystery of his love.

What characterizes Christianity in the modern world is its odd-ness. Christianity is home for people who are out of step, unfashionable, unconventional and counter-cultural. As Peter says, »strangers and aliens.«

I pastor the slowest growing church in America. We started twelve years ago with 90 members and have un-grown to 30. We’re about as far as you can get from a »user friendly« church—not because our congregation is unfriendly, but because our services are unpredictable, unpolished and inconsistent.

We’re an »odd-friendly« church, attracting unique and different followers of Christ who make every service a surprise. We refuse to edit oddness and incompetence from our services. We believe our oddness matters. We want our service filled with mistakes and surprises, because life is full of mistakes and surprises.

One Sunday morning, during the time for prayer requests, a member began describing the critical illness of her father. Because she was close to her father, her request for prayer was frequently interrupted by tears. Those around her reached out a hand or nodded with sadness. Some found their eyes filling with tears as well. The woman finished her request as best as she could.

Seated in the front row was Sadie—a young woman with Down’s syndrome. Sadie stood and walked up the aisle until she saw the woman in the middle of her row. Stepping over the feet of other people in the aisle, Sadie reached the woman, bent down on her knees, laid her head on the woman’s lap, and cried with her.

Sadie »inconvenienced« an entire row of people, stepped on their shoes, and forced them to make room for her … but none of us will ever forget that moment. Sadie is still teaching the rest of us what the odd compassion of Christ’s church looks like.

Someone said »you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.« Whoever made that statement understood what it means to be a follower of Christ. Followers of Christ are odd. Oddness is important because it’s the quality that adds color, texture, variety, and beauty to the human condition. Christ doesn’t make us the same. What He does is affirm our differentness.

Oddness is important because the most dangerous word in Western culture is »sameness.« Sameness is a virus that infects members of industrialized nations and causes an allergic reaction to anyone who’s different. This virus affects the decision-making part of our brain, resulting in an obsession with making the identical choices that everyone else is making.

Sameness is a disease with disastrous consequences—differences are ignored, uniqueness is not listened to, our gifts are cancelled out, and the place where life, passion, and joy reside are snuffed out.

Sameness is the result of sin. Sin does much more than infect us with lust and greed; it flattens the human race, franchises us, attempts to make us all homogenous. Sameness is the cemetery where our distinctiveness dies. In a sea of sameness, no one has an identity.

But Christians do have an identity. Aliens! We’re the odd ones, the strange ones, the misfits, the outsiders, the incompatibles. Oddness is a gift of God that sits dormant until God’s spirit gives it life and shape. Oddness is the consequence of following the One who made us unique, different … and in His image!

Isn't Christianity just a crutch for weak people? I don't think I need that.
Yes, Christianity is a crutch for weak people, but its being a crutch doesn't make it untrue. People who have broken legs need crutches, and no one is silly enough to call them foolish for using crutches. Well, people with broken hearts need a spiritual crutch, something to get them up and walking again. They're not silly for using the crutch, they're smart!

Fine. Some people need that crutch. But I don't.

Then you're in a class by yourself. I don't think you really believe that. You agreed earlier that you sin, doing what you know you shouldn't and not doing what you know you should. Sure, sometimes you do what's right, and not what's wrong. But not all the time.

When God gave His moral law to the Israelites through Moses, He said that perfect obedience to every part of it was necessary to please Him. »Cursed is he who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them,« God said (Deuteronomy 27:26). The Apostle Paul made the same point when he paraphrased those words: »Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, to perform them« (Galatians 3:10). God requires perfection‑and, my friend, no matter how good you are, even you don't believe you're perfect. So you do need this crutch just as much as anyone else does.


Don't my good works count for anything? Won't God accept me if I've lived a good life?


Only if your good works were without exception would they count anything for you. The Bible admits that whoever would live a sinless life would be accepted by God on that basis. If everything you did conformed absolutely to God's law, then you would be accepted on that basis.


But God doesn't just weigh the good against the bad and decide your case that way. God's standard Is perfection. If you fall short of perfection, you fail to satisfy God's requirements. “…..all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," wrote the Apostle Paul (Romans 3:23). It's not a question of how much or how terribly we have sinned; it's merely the fact that we have sinned at all that makes us fall short of God's standards.


But it's not fair for God to require perfection of us!

As our Creator, He can require whatever He pleases, and we aren't in any position to complain about it. But the Bible assures us that God is just‑so perfectly just, in fact, that none can measure up to Him in justice. »The LORD is righteous.... He will do no injustice. Every morning He brings His justice to light; He does not fail« (Zephaniah 3:5).

God has, in fact, provided the way for us to stand perfectly before Him, to meet the requirements of perfection that He has set up. The way He has provided is for us to believe in Jesus.

That's not fair either. Why should I have to believe in Jesus in order to meet God's requirements?

Why should you have to follow the instructions in assembling a machine to make it work? Why should you have to use the right codes to make a computer work? Are these things unfair? Of course not. You have to follow the instructions and use the right codes because the designer of the machine or the computer designed them to function only with those conditions.

God is your Designer. He has told you what you have to do to »work right,« to meet His requirements. It's not unfair for Him to have told you so, so long as what He demands is possible. He gives you two options: you may either be perfect in yourself, or you may gain your perfection by believing in Jesus. If you don't think the former is possible, you are free to choose the latter. There's nothing unjust about that.

The Bible assures you that you are a sinner who cannot meet God's standards of perfection. It assures you that you cannot earn your way to heaven, that good works have nothing to do with restoring a friendly relationship with God. Friendship with God isn't earned, it is given to us freely by God‑freely except that really Jesus paid for it by giving His life for us.

Look, I know I admitted earlier that I sin. But I’m not all that bad. Really evil people like Hitler I can understand God rejecting, but I’m just not that bad. My sins are small things, they're not serious.

You may not take them seriously, but God does. You see, God doesn't consider how much damage an act causes to you or others, He considers what your sins say about your attitude toward Him. As your Creator, God deserves your absolute obedience. Your disobedience indicates that you don't honor Him as you ought, and that's something much more serious than simply telling a lie or cheating or stealing. That's why James, one of the Apostles, wrote, »....whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all. For He who said,' Do not commit adultery' also said, 'Do not commit murder«' (James 2: 10‑11).

But I don't disrespect God.

To the extent that you sin, you do. But if you really mean what you say in claiming not to disrespect God, then you should believe and obey Him when He tells you that your only way to come to Him is to believe in Jesus.

Does God really say that?

Earlier, you remember, we saw that Jesus claimed to be God, and that He proved that claim by rising from the dead. Remember what He said? “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me» (John 14:6). This is why the Apostle Peter told people, “there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved« (Acts 4:12).

God offers salvation to everyone through Jesus. But He offers it in no other way. »For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes In Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God« (John 3:16‑18).

Jesus Himself claimed to be God and others recognized Him as Deity. He said, »I and the Father are one.« (John 10:30) The Greek language, in which the New Testament was originally written, is explicit. Literally, Jesus said, »I and the Father, we are one.« Jesus also claimed that He was the only way to God: »I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me.« (John 14:6) Again, the Greek language is very clear. Jesus used the words ‘the way’ and not ‘a way’.

The question is, can we accept as true what Jesus [God the Son], claimed? The most conclusive evidence establishing the deity of Christ is the historically verifiable resurrection. The apostle Paul wrote that Jesus »was declared with power to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead.« (Romans 1:4) If the resurrection of Christ is true, then it is possible and, indeed, logical to believe all His claims and miracles including His assertion of the complete validity of the Old Testament. They would be what one would expect from God.

The primary reason that Jesus is the only way to God is that He forgives sin and offers eternal life, (John 10:28) something that the founder of no other major religion has claimed to do. Think about that!

Every person is separated from a perfect, holy God by sin. According to God’s requirement, either the individual must pay the penalty for sin – death – or he must find someone who is willing and able – who has no sin – to pay the penalty for him. (Hebrews 9:14, 22) Jesus Christ was both able and willing to do this, as demonstrated by His death on the cross. That is why Jesus is the only way to God.

The idea of a virgin birth wasn't easy for people in Jesus' day to swallow, either. When God communicated to Mary that she was to bear a Son‑Jesus‑she responded, »How can this be, since I am a virgin?« (Luke 1:34). Mary wasn't any more ready to accept the idea than you are. But Mary believed miracles were possible. Once acknowledge God exists, and there's no way to ensure that they can't right?

Right.

That's just the attitude the Bible takes. It says that with God all things are possible (Luke 18:27). So the messenger from God explained to Mary, »The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy offspring shall be called the Son of God ... For nothing will be impossible with God« (Luke 1: 35,37).

Okay, so the virgin birth was possible because of a miracle by God. But it seems silly to me. Why would God have done that?

In the Old Testament God revealed to the Jews that they should sacrifice physically spotless lambs to symbolize the sacrifice of the Savior God had promised. Only perfection would be acceptable to God as a sacrifice, and so the Savior who died for our sins had to be perfect. The Bible teaches that man's sinfulness is in part passed on through natural birth, particularly through men, not through women (Romans 5:12‑17). When the sperm of a man and the egg of woman combine, that natural sinfulness of mankind is ingrained in the offspring. But the Bible teaches that Jesus Christ was without sin (Hebrews 4:15). For this reason He could not have been conceived by male sperm, since natural conception like that passes on the sinful nature. It was necessary, then, if the Savior were to be truly human, that He be born; but it was also necessary that He be born unnaturally, without the man's sperm. Hence the virgin birth

What happens when people like you and me no longer believe in God? When the reality of God is not reality in our everyday lives? When the decisions I make are not affected by the presence of God? Does my practical atheism cause me to become an alcoholic, drug-soaked, pornographic, adulterous leacher? Or does the absence of God cause something far more sinister, far more frightening? Does God’s absence make me sin, or does it make me...dull, lifeless, passionless? Does it rob me of the joy and wonder of meaningful work?

I would like to suggest that what a pagan culture does first is steal the wonder and mystery from life. A pagan culture methodically takes away risk, danger, spontaneity, intuition, passion, chance, threat, and peril. We become the slaves of predictability, rules, policies, uniformity, and sameness. We learn how to teach, but we are not really teachers. We learn how to be ministers, but we are not really ministers. We train ourselves to be manicurists, doctors, engineers, athletes, but we are not any of those things. We have the training. We have the title. We have the credentials. But what is gone is the passion, the sense of belonging, the pleasure, the joy that comes from knowing you are called.

Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sin, sure. But I would suggest that more than Jesus saving us from our sins, He saved us from meaningless, boring, predictable, shallow, empty, dehumanizing work. I am convinced that what characterizes people who know Jesus is not their lack of sin, but the presence of a radical, wild, mysterious calling from God.

I am embarrassed to say that until a couple of years ago, I had never seen a book by Arthur Gordon, A Touch Of Wonder. From the moment it was given to me, it has been a rare friend, a lingual mentor—a treasure I keep returning to. (I hope we all have books like that—cover faded and worn, the pages brown and cluttered with markings and hilighter, sprinkled with folded corners to mark those passages that have marked our souls.)

Where was I? Oh, yes. In A Touch of Wonder, there is a wonderful dialogue between Arthur Gordon and an old man he meets on the tawny marshes of the Georgia coast. The man is somewhat mysterious, shaman-like. There is magnetism about him, a gentle authority, an attractive strangeness, a holy knowledge about life. The old man is a teacher, and Gordon asks him what he teaches. »In the school catalog they call it English,« the old man says. »But I like to think of it as a course in magic—in the mystery and magic of words...Words—just little black marks on paper. Just sounds in the empty air. But think of the power they have! They can make you laugh or cry, love or hate, fight or run away. They can heal or hurt.«

Oh, for an English teacher for whom words are magic, filled with mystery and power—an English teacher whose love of words overflows into his or her heart and soul, and whose students are not taught, they are caught, captured by words, intrigued by syntax, entranced by grammar, seduced into the mysterious land of sounds and meanings.

Arthur Gordon’s teacher/friend had found his calling. Teaching, for this teacher, was not a job. He was doing what he was made to do, what he was born to do—the only thing he could do.

The mission of the church in America is not only saving souls, it is saving people from a life without calling. The Church, through Jesus, must save its people from a life of meaningless, unfulfilling empty work.

A member of my church does women’s nails. I doubt if there are many manicurists better than Elaine. Elaine recently told me, »Mike, I don’t do nails. Doing nails is nothing more than putting stuff on the ends of women’s fingers and painting it. What I do is listen to women talk. I cry. I laugh. I share in their pain. And I talk, too. After all, the women can’t go anywhere. Their hands are stuck in front of me for two hours. In fact, if I have a customer who doesn’t like to talk, I suggest that she go somewhere else, because I don’t just do nails.« Elaine is a minister—ministering with acrylic and polish—becoming a friend, confidant, listener, affirmer, counselor, advice-giver, evangelist. Elaine is the Minister of Manicures. What a calling!

The Door’s accountant is also a Vice President of Youth Specialties. Steve is a CPA with a master’s degree in accounting from UCLA. Most accountants have allowed what they do to shape who they are. As a result, most accountants look like accountants: glasses, suit and tie, conservative, afraid to move outside the world of numbers, taxes, and financial policies.

Not Steve. He looks more like a camp counsellor. Steve may be a CPA, but he is not like any CPA you’ve ever met. Steve is a Tamer Of Numbers. He doesn’t allow numbers to control and frighten all the employees. Rather than net profits and account payables being allowed to run wild, Steve captures them and tames them, so that the employees feel comfortable around them. Steve has managed to make the numbers of our company an adventure—a story that he tells with wonder and excitement. He is the Storyteller Of Numbers.

A friend of mine spends his weekends and summers directing a junior high camp in the mountains. I asked him one day to describe his job. He replied, »I am a Memory Maker. I make memories for kids. In a world where good memories for children—memories that will live with them the rest of their lives.« A Memory Maker. You won’t find that on any list of approved classes for recreation majors. But that is because this friend doesn’t have a »job.« Rather, he is living in the calling of God.

I am always amazed when I read the story of Matthew, the wealthy tax collector—a man who had it made. Sure, Matthew was hated and feared by many, but he had it all—power, great wealth, and the support of the state. Jesus walked by and casually said to Matthew, »Follow me.« Ridiculous. Who in Matthew’s position would respond to some vagabond? But Matthew does exactly that! He immediately left his wealth and power and followed Jesus. What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Matthew was called. Every bone in his body, every part of his being stood on tiptoe when the master spoke those words. »Follow Me!« Matthew’s ears tingled with excitement, his heart thundered with anticipation, his mind was filled with electricity. He had been called. He didn’t know it until that moment, but he had been waiting all his life to hear those words.

May God capture our unspoken dreams. May Jesus speak those words that cause our souls to stand on tiptoe. May each of us find our calling in Jesus.