Three people outside of my family have deeply influenced my thinking about the gospel. I met one of them two days ago, N.T. Wright. He’s as kind, as he is astute. My friend Sunny Bishop invited me to hear him speak about his new book at Belmont Church, something the publishers had arranged a while back. The crowd was surprisingly small and during the Q & A time, I asked him about my struggle in talking about Jesus to nonChristians.
I prefaced my question with this: “Thank you for coming tonight. I’ve read your commentary on Romans and Jesus and the Victory of God, which kind of threw a wrench in my Bible college experience. But it opened up my eyes to the fact that using the ‘Roman’s Road’ is not necessary the best way to articulate our faith, but we still need to share our faith. I show people my faith through actions and tell people about Jesus, but we still struggle with it because relationships are so fragile.” (Here’s a post on why I struggle with talking about my faith in Jesus: http://goo.gl/ODj4h)
This is easy to write about but hard to deal with. One thing is that I’m an external processor. (Don’t worry, this is about how I process ideas, not about how I’m like a computer operating system.) I don’t really know what I think about a topic until I talk about it or write it down or do something with it externally. This also means that I like to talk. Recently, I had a conversation with my Dad about the word and deed aspects of the gospel. I told him that if bifurcated, they represent a false dichotomy. He told me that at the end of the day my generation simply doesn’t share our faith. We were both right, I think. I just hated that he was righter. So here’s my confession:
- I hesitate to share my faith in Jesus because I don’t want to be that guy.
- I want to maintain relationships with my friends who don’t believe in Jesus, so I like to keep my mouth so I can keep my friends.
- I don’t want to say the word Jesus, because it makes things awkward.
That’s why I struggle to talk about Jesus, but occasionally I do it anyway. He’s just too awesome not to talk about. (Here’s what N.T. Wright told me to do with my struggle: http://goo.gl/VgwMr.)
Few times in my life have I been more out of place than when I played basketball in North Nashville two weeks ago. First, please understand:
1. I sprained my right wrist, with which I normally dribble the ball
2. I’m Canadian and we don’t play basketball
3. Simply as a member of the human race, I’m an awful basketball player
I’ve worked for Nations Ministry serving as the youth coordinator for about a year, and one of our long-time volunteers asked me to spend time with an eight-year-old Congolese refugee. He loves basketball and needs more positive male role models, so I said yes. I needed to register his sisters for summer camp, too, so I could go play basketball with him and take care of that. It started out as a good idea.
This apartment complex is the place out of which we help out clients move. It’s government substidized housing. Drugs, guns, and gangs are a problem. In fact, one of our refugee families expedited their move to habitat homes because their van received two bullet holes right outside their door. That happened at night, mind you.
Eventually, I found this boy’s apartment and learned all his family members’ names. Then, it was time to play basketball. Now or never, eh? I step outside my comfort-zone and onto the basketball court with the hopes that shooting hoops would mean something to this boy.
It seemed uncomfortable every step of the way. Even walking to the basketball court felt awkward—as we threw the basketball back and forth along the way, I could feel the eyes following me. “Who is this white guy?” | “What does he think he’s doing?” I could not have been more out of place if I was Rudolf trying to join in the reindeer games.
Everyone in the neighborhood stood outside and all the kids were playing on the court. At least there were two sides of the court, so I tried to hide on the less obvious side with David. I showed him a move or two, we passed the ball, and then the biggest kid—he was still small, just the biggest of those kids—challenged me to a round of one-on-one. “You and me,” he said. He started at me with the ball, and instead of telling him about my “inabilities with the basketball”, I took the challenge—citizenship, sprained wrist, and all. (To an injury to insult, I had a wrist brace on.) He sensed victory after just a few rounds. I got schooled, for sure, but it didn’t matter. I had taken the challenge, and that was enough for them, more than enough for me. He moved onto something else.
Eventually we started our way back home and I continued feeling out of place. The look on David’s face was worth all the discomfort and awkwardness. Despite my feelings, I was definitely in the right place.
I started worked out a few months ago. Again. After only my second trip to the YMCA and lifting weights, I weighed myself. I had noticed I looked thinner, so I stepped on the scale.
174 lbs.
My mouth gapped in shock. Last time I stood on that same scale, it said 184 lbs.—that was two and half months before. In between, I never set out to intentionally loose weight. God used a significant event in my life to change my mind, which impacted my eating habits, not the other way around.
On January 2nd I spent a day confessing and renouncing all major (and many minor) sins in my life. It’s something I had been planning on doing for over a year, but had a hard time finally doing. He gave me strength to admit that I idolize food sometimes. When I’m having a rough day, I don’t always go to God; sometimes I eat. God gave me freedom from that through Christ and he’s still teaching me what that freedom looks like. This week it looked like 174 lbs. on the sliding scale. The change of weight doesn’t really matter, at least not compared to the change in my heart.
God has opened up the door in my life to spend time with refugees who live in Nashville by working for Nations Ministry and living near refugees. One of my neighbors is Najah, a refugee from Iraqi and father of five. His family left Bahgdad to come to America over a year ago after his wife had died, their house was bombed and burned on two separate occasion from religious persecution, and they couldn’t afford the bribes for being a non-Islamic worker. They fled their country because of persecution.
This is part of a sermon at Harpeth Community Church that I gave 1 January 2012 (link or download).
Two important truths come from the story of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus (which you can listen to or read here).
1. Eternal life begins now, not when you die.In Christ, we no longer have to wait until the end of the world to experience life. Jesus says,
I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. (John 5)
It’s clear: if you’re a Christian, then life starts now.
In our culture, we generally tend to relegate things until later. We’re all waiting until we retire or when we die to really live. Later. The truth is that we often wait until we’re on our deathbed to start living. I think many Christians believe that after we receive salvation, our job is to grab a drink, watch the game, and wait till Jesus comes back. And we find ourselves depressed, unsatisfied, and wanting. But Jesus is clear—eternal life begins when you believe.
2. Eternal life is found in Jesus, and nowhere else. Jesus didn’t just tell us when eternal life starts, he also altered the place where it’s found. No longer is it someplace off in the clouds that you cannot access. It’s not in people, things, or ideas. It’s not your career, your spouse, or your bank account. It’s Jesus. I understand that he was talking metaphorically in part, but he was also talking in a very real sense. As real as the incarnation and resurrection are to Christianity in general.
The idea that eternal life starts now is not my idea. It’s a very dominant theme in the New Testament—eternal life begins now, while we’re on earth, while we’re living between two trees. The author that speaks the most about eternal life in the Bible is John. One of, if not the major theme, in John is that by believing in Jesus Christ, we have eternal life that begins now. He mentions it from the very beginning of the gospel:
The Search for Life. Humanity has struggled ever since we were blocked off from the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. We are looking for life, and we’re looking for it everyday. New Years day is a sort of in-between time when we look for new things and new life. We make new years resolutions to make our lives better.
*I’m posting a series about eternal life using multimedia—pictures, video, audio, and infographics. The series is based off a sermon I preached on 1 January 2012 (link or download).
A Life of In-betweens. The Twilight Zone TV series was based off the premise that there’s this middle ground in life. Twilight is the time in between sunset and sundown. Life is full of in-betweens—kind of like Middle School. I spend half of my workweek tutoring middle school kids with Nations Ministry Center, and it’s a constant reminder what it’s like to live between childhood and adulthood. We live in different kinds of limbos like this all the time, though. I love summer breaks between school years growing up. I remember the time between walking across the stage to receive my diploma at Ozark Christian College and getting my first job—shredding paper. Then, there’s exciting time between when a couple gets engaged and when they get married. And there’s the time between pregnancy and birth. Life is full of other in-betweens: the time between when your alarm clock goes off and when you get up, between when you have coffee and when the coffee kicks in. We’re in constant limbo. On a more serious note, there are serious tensions like the time between diagnosis and death, between divorce papers and final separation, and then between when we say goodbye and see someone again.
Living In-between Two Trees. As Christians, we’re in a state of limbo between when Jesus left and when he’s coming back again. We’re living in between the now and then, the here and the hereafter, the already and the not-yet. One way to think of it is that we’re living in between the trees of life.
The first tree is in Genesis 2 and the second is in Revelation 2. When God put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he let them eat from the tree of life. Genesis 2:9 says, “In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” When they sinned and were blocked off from the garden, they could no longer eat from the tree of life.
Then, we get this amazing picture in Revelation 2:7 of being allowed back into paradise, not just metaphorically, but in a very real sense, we’ll fully experience the same kind of life that Adam and Eve experienced. Jesus speaks these words to the church in Ephesus and John records them: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.” We hear those words and we long for life. We’ll do anything for it. We want to be in the place that gives life and life to the full.
It won’t take long.
You might miss out, unless you hurry up and read this. Hurry off to work, that is. But before your lunch break is over, make sure to say a prayer real quick. Get busy doing your busy work because you don’t have time for slow work. Drive home to get a quick bite to eat, then go off to the gym for a bit. Stop by the gas station, pay at the pump, and get some fast food real quick before you’re fast asleep from moving so quick. Get some sleep real quick before you wake up and realize that it wasn’t you who was quick.
It was your life that was quick and it passed you by. Real quick.
