"Do Not Fear. Only Believe."

Luke 8:49-50, While he was still speaking, someone from the ruler's house came and said, “Your daughter is dead; do not trouble the Teacher any more.” But Jesus on hearing this answered him, “Do not fear; only believe, and she will be well.”

“Do not fear, only believe…” Our Savior is so tender to those whose worlds have collapsed. These words were all Jairus had to cling to in the whirling chaos of fear and grief. Yet they proved true because He who spoke them is true. His word never fails because He has the necessary power to perform whatever He declares.

The Lord's timing is perfect, though in his flood of anguish Jairus no doubt wondered why Jesus had delayed so. However, this ruler of the synagogue had just witnessed the Lord heal a woman with a disease no physician could cure. Jairus's daughter too had succumbed to a fate from which no man could relieve her. The men who came to Jairus had given up hope, thinking Jesus was only of use to the living. Yet it was God’s plan that the girl should die so that the world would know of the power of Christ even on behalf of the dead. So perhaps it was a gracious act of God that this woman with the flow of blood interrupted the progression to Jairus's home for whether they had arrived earlier or later, the girl would have been dead. But through seeing what Christ had accomplished for this poor woman beyond the aid of any man but Jesus, Jairus had reason to hope this Man before him was the only One who could avail for his daughter, now beyond the help of any human.

We fear so readily. We fear the future and uncertainty. Yet the God who led Jairus through his greatest moments of uncertainty also leads us. Lord, remove our fear by teaching us to believe and by reminding us how capable You are. Oh God, help us believe!

Oh for Zeal and an Open Mouth

Luke 8:38b-39, But Jesus sent him away saying, "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." And he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done.

What an example the Gerasene is to us of an unabashed witness of God’s great power at work in his life. The delivered demoniac knew the glorious heights of salvation having first been drawn into the darkest recesses of hell, and he could not keep silent! He proclaimed the work of God not only in his city, as Jesus instructed him in Luke, but throughout the ten Grecian cities in his around his home, according to Mark 5:20.

Herein lies the beauty of our call as witnesses of God's redeeming power at work in human lives: God does not expect every Christian to defend His existence with sophisticated arguments but He does instruct us to proclaim what He has done in our lives. I am not slighting apologetics and very much believe in its importance. However, I am persuaded that what catches the attention of today's pluralistic world isn't reasoned arguments in favor of God but testimony's of lives renewed by the power of God. People can find scores of objections to counter Christian thinking but they cannot ultimately dispute a transformed life. Throughout Scripture and the Church's history, the gospel appears to have spread best when Christ-followers unabashedly celebrated God's work of redemption and daily deliverance in their lives. And the best part of it is this: You don't need a MDiv to tell your testimony.

May we repent that we are not ecstatic about God's great work in our life. May our Lord grant us an ever growing awareness of the perilousness of the foul pit from which He has saved us and the pricelessness of the precious kingdom to which He has saved us. And may He open our mouths like He did that of our Gerasene brother so all who hear of Jesus' doings may marvel as they did at the former demoniac's testimony (Mark 5:20).

I Would Follow Jesus: The Testimony of a Demoniac

Luke 8:38, The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him, but Jesus sent him away...

The Gerasene demoniac knew what liberation in Christ meant and he would not return to his enslavement. Having known the sweetness of Christ’s work within him, he refused to be separated from his mighty Deliverer.

Such should be our attitude, we who have known salvation from our cruel master, the devil, who sought only our harm. How we return so readily to our old ways is unfathomable. Unlike the delivered demoniac, we are called to follow Christ with unswerving devotion yet we are too readily waylaid by the pretty trinkets the devil places along the heavenly highway. Our eyes too quickly lose their wonder with Jesus and are led astray after Satan’s shiny bobbles.

The saved Gerasene would never have understood why we so easily abandon the same Savior he was desperate to follow to the end. He stands as a testimony against our whoring hearts: “I would have followed him to the ends of the earth, for He was my mighty Deliverer. Yet I was told to remain behind. But you! You are called to plant your feet in His footsteps, yet you scamper after the fleeting vapors that once so blinded and bound me! Come to your senses, Christ-follower! Cling to the King who has ransomed you and claims lordship of your life!”

If It Doesn't Change You, It Didn't Save You

Luke 8:16, No one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light.

Those in whom the good word has taken root (see preceding verses on the Parable of the Sower) cannot hide it. Who would dare hide the wonderful work God is doing in his life? If the faith is genuine, it will work its way outward for “there is nothing covered that will not be revealed” (v. 17). Those who hear and take God’s word to heart, living out what they know of His revelation, will receive more illumination while those who ignore the heart of the Father revealed them by the person of Christ through the illumination of the Spirit will lose even the little revelation they have received (v. 18). Such was God's judgment of the Pharisees, the best biblical scholars of their day.

There are many who insist they have a branch in God's family tree, but only those who hear God’s word and live it out, or bear fruit, can claim a genuine connection with the life-giving Vine of John 15. For how could one who claims to have been grafted into the tree of life Himself fail to produce the fruit that naturally comes from fusion with such potent power? Any who have been joined to Christ will bear fruit and live as He lived (I John 2:4-6).

All who call themselves Christians should take Paul's advice in II Corinthians 13:5 and look for evidence of Christ in our lives. Christians are not simply those who choose to bear Christ name; rather they are those who resemble the God-man after whom they are named. Is Christ's light shining in us? If so, it should be visible to those around us just like Jesus' was.

The Widow of Nain: Compassion's Gifts

Luke 7:11-15, As he drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a considerable crowd from the town was with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” Then he came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.

How I love Your tenderness here, Lord. You felt the anguish of this one lowly widow who had none to provide for her now that her only son had died. She was alone in the world and terrified. No one would have given her much thought, but You did. And You not only pitied her, You acted on Your compassion and became her Champion, giving her what no other human could––the life of her son!

Thank You, Jesus, that this is Your heart, Your nature! You alone give us those gifts we do not deserve yet need so desperately. I wonder if, as You returned this young man to his grieving mother, if Your thoughts turned to the fast approaching day when Your Father would see His own Son stretched out to die––and none would be there to restore the unity of the Trinity and return the Son to His own grieving Father. Yet though You, my Triune God, knew the anguish in store for You, You were not deterred for You knew that only through giving Yourself (even to the point of death) on our behalf could we humans know redemption.

Savior, You are He who wept so You could say to us "Do not weep." You are He whose tears wipe away our own. You are He whose death overcomes our death. You are He whose life restores us from our spiritual and physical graves. You are He who gave Himself to give us back to our Father.

Thank You for Your birth, Lord, though for You it was the first step to Your death. Thank You for acting in Your compassion, for becoming our Champion when we had no other, and for giving as no other can.

Tolerance, Judgmentalism, and the Christian Balance

Luke 6:37, Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven.

Wow, this would be the verse for the pluralistic society we live in: “Hey bro, don’t judge! Haters gonna hate.” Today, the only sin is judgmentalism. There is a sense in which all of this is true and has a Christian ring to it, but as usual the world has missed the train of truth and boarded another at the right station but headed in the wrong direction.

Our world tells us not to judge another’s sin, unless it directly violates our own rights. This is completely backwards to the ways of God! As Christ-followers and Sonseekers, we are called to stand up against unrighteousness (for God hates sin), but we are not to judge others for offense committed against us for we have been forgiven and are therefore called to forgive in turn. Our task isn't "not judging" or "condemning" but rather judging appropriately; for examples, see passages like John 7:24 and Matthew 7:15-20 where we are instructed to exercise proper discernment.

We too often judge people according to our standards (what they wear, what they listen to, etc.) and not God's (why they where what they wear and why they listen to what they listen to). We stand ready to condemn those who commit offenses against us yet are lenient when people sin against those we're not particularly fond of. Even worse we are far more ready to take offense at a slight to us and are far less grieved when we see people disrespecting or "hating on" God, the kinds of things that led Jesus to His most violent actions committed on earth (see John 2:13-17).

American society promotes a strange synthesis: toleration of people's life choices and murderous vindictiveness when these choices affect us negatively. These are evident in the entertainment industry where, for example, homosexual couples are increasingly promoted as normal or at least funny (as in ABC's Modern Family) yet "BA" characters like John McClane in the Die Hard movies or Jack Bauer in 24 feel justified taking the lives of those who have crossed them and their loved ones. These trends in American culture are hardly biblical and Christians must beware lest the same attitudes seep into the church and make it as morally reprobate as the Corinthian church that prided itself in its toleration of sexual immorality among its members yet sanctioned vicious protection of individual rights in secular courts (see I Corinthians 5 and 6)––all things Paul bemoaned as tarnishing to the name of Christ we all bear as Christians.

Schaeffer's Final Apologetic

Since Christian love seems to be the theme of the last few posts...

For class I read a biography on Francis Schaeffer, the man most known for putting forth a reasoned, coherent Christian worldview as an alternative to the existentialism of the 1960s and 70s. Many thousands of Christians have since been influence by him and persuaded to pursue a more intellectual form of Christianity that engages culture around them and speaks its language in an attempt to show that Christians do have something to say about cultural trends and can offer reasoned justifications for God's way of living life.

I've seen Schaeffer's philosophy play out particularly in the Christian circles I form part of, and I agree that Christians need to take their God-given responsibility as culture-shapers seriously and not dishonor our faith by treating it as anti-intellectual or something that can only be felt and not thought through seriously. However, I would also call us Christian scholars back from our deep preoccupation with being taken seriously by a world that denies the very presuppositions we must embrace if we are to live Christianly. After all the reasoned arguments have been proffered by Christians, ultimately we must return to Schaeffer's final apologetic––Christian love.

In his book Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America, Barry Hankins makes the observation that for all the intellectual answers Schaeffer provided for nihilistic and despairing college students, they were less convinced by his arguments than they were by the love they felt at L'Abri where Schaeffer and his wife welcomed all with Christlike hospitality. They could see the love Christians had for each other, God, and outsiders and this tenderness stood in stark contrast to both the existentialism and the "free love" advocated in the Cold War decades.

Let us not forget, in our intellectual Christianity, to keep as our highest priority the love Christ calls us to, love for God, love for our brethren, and especially love for the unloveable. Not everyone can debate the merits of Christianity in a reasoned fashion, but all of us can love––and this is what God calls us to. The world cannot be reasoned into heaven, especially because many today are abandoning reason and making their peace with a universe they cannot comprehend. People become convinced of the effectiveness of God's way when they see Christians living in love as God has called us to. Our love for God gives us a foundation. Our love for other Christians gives us a family. Our love for the lost gives us a function (or mission for life). The final apologetic for the Christian faith is God-given love.

The Challenge of/to Love

Luke 6:35-36, But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

I would be a son of the Most High. But that means learning to show kindness toward the ungrateful (so hard!) and evil (even harder!). Mercy–the withholding of a judgment rightfully due–is so unnatural to human beings who engage in tits for tats all in the name of fairness! How mean and lowly we are! If God Himself could be merciful to us and spare us our rightful place in hellfire, how shall we not show mercy to a brother who offends us even in the most unspeakable ways? Sons of the Most High know just how much they have been forgiven and, living in the constant reality of God’s never ending mercy, must themselves relinquish their claims to the pounds of flesh due them. And not only do they forgive, they give as God does!

This Christian life is impossible to live if we do not have our eyes fixed on Christ who only demands of us that which He Himself first demonstrated toward us. Only by keeping in mind Jesus and His kindness to us do we find the impetus to live out this example before others who are not naturally lovable.

Love and Acceptance

Luke 6:22-23, 26, Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets... Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.

An important and easily forgotten principle here. We humans so crave acceptance. To be cast out is for many of us worse than death. This is natural because in the perfect world, we were made for intimate communion with each other and God, so that’s just the way our bodies are wired. But in a fallen world, such deep heart-connections are hard to find and often must endure the roughest of sin-storms that sunder fellowship. It is almost a law in the relationship game–the closer you are to someone, the more their sin jabs its painful spines under your skin, the more you must learn forgiveness and the greater your selfless love must grow if your friendship is to survive.

But what to do with a world that spurns us, for as a slave to the devil it cannot accept a friend of God? How does Jesus expect us to “rejoice and leap for joy” when rejection is incredibly painful? Those shunned on this earth for proclaiming the unpopular truth will find their acceptance in heaven, while those accepted on earth (like the false prophets) have failed to live as witnesses to an offensive gospel but have tried to present others with a word that pleased them in order to remain accepted and even popular.

May our love of God be such that we crave His smile more than the embrace of the world. May we strive to "present ourselves to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed" (II Timothy 2:15) though those around us ridicule our devotion to "fantasies" and passé morals.

Those Who Laugh Last

6:21b, 25b, "Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh... Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep."

Just as our longings shall be met one day, so too shall our tears be dried, and we will no longer mourn for persecution, for opposition, for this world’s self-destructive sinfulness, for family and friends who do not believe, for personal sinfulness and perfection that is never attained. One day, we shall trade our tears for joyful laughter when we see our Bridegroom and enter His bountiful, beautiful kingdom. But those who laugh now, whose delight is aroused by sin and the transient pleasures it offers, who rejoice in the suffering of others and the breaking of God’s law–these will know mourning deeper than any human to this day has experienced. They who laughed for a lifetime (and that with its own shares of misery) will weep for an eternity. What a horrible fate!

Heaven Will Taste the Sweeter

Luke 6:21a, 25a, "Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied... Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry."

Those who believe themselves to have all they need in life today will only find out in the end that they missed “the one thing necessary” (Luke 10:42). Those who yearn in this world, those who long for restoration, vindication, and Christ’s exaltation will be filled one day with the sweet and full presence of God. These will look upon their enemies in triumph, as the psalmists insist, and will see the restoration of the earth. We who hunger and thirst may feel our misery now most painfully, but one day heaven will taste the sweeter for our near starvation on earth. One day, we shall know the full bliss of a word we use on earth but will never experience while here–satisfaction. We will never again have longing but know endless, soul-filling delight, bathed in the light of our Savior's smiling countenance.