TILL HE COMES Blog

Here’s a newsflash: I’m not a girl!

Nevertheless, one book I read this week was A Girl’s Guide to Life by Katie Meier. I now know more about makeup, hairstyles, and clothing selection then ever before. This, of course, is only the beginning of what I will learn.

You see…I have three girls. They’re still young (8, 6, and 4), but I figure that I better get a head start right now on learning about the issues and problems that growing girls face, and how, as a father, I might be able to help.

Fathers, as a tip for Father’s Day, if you have daughters, do yourself a favor and buy and read a copy of this book. It was excellent. I can’t think of anything Katie missed. She dealt with inner issues like self-esteem and emotions, body issues of clothing, hair, makeup, all the transitions of puberty, and moral issues like dating, sex, and religion. And Katie’s style of writing perfectly matched the content of the book. As I read, I often felt I was eavesdropping on a pajama party sleepover conversation where a twenty-something woman answered questions from a roomful of teenage girls.

I will definitely be giving a copy of this book to each of my three girls, and using it as a handy “reference guide” for myself as they get older.

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Disclosure: This book was sent to me by Thomas Nelson publishers for review through their BookSneeze program.

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I recently wrote  that Jim Petersen’s book, Church Without Walls, made it into my list of top ten books. This book shares some of the principles and ideas which guided his ministry among unchurched Brazilian students. I liked the book because the principles he shares encapsulate my thinking from the past five years about the kind of life I want to live among the people at my job and in my neighborhood.

But principles are one thing; stories are quite another. Don Duntch of Quest Ministries recently told me that stories reveal where God is at work, especially stories of people gaining freedom in their lives and in their thinking.

So it was with great excitement that I recently learned about a book by Ken Lottis, who was Jim’s ministry partner in Brazil. The book is entitled Will This Rock in Rio? and is basically the story of what Ken and Jim did in Brazil.

Now that I’ve read both, I can say that the two books go together. While Jim’s book is informative, Ken’s is inspirational. While Jim’s book affirmed my thinking, Ken’s encouraged me to actually start reading John with someone. While Jim’s book answers the “Why” and “How,” Ken’s books says “Go” and “Do.”

I believe that if you read one book, you must read the other also. If you are a person who wants to love and live among the people who will never “come to church” both books are “must reads.”

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Plan B by Pete Wilson is a great book for reviving hope in a person whose life has gone terribly wrong. Through biblical truths and stories, it shows that although life may not turn out the way we planned or imagined, we can trust God to resurrect something good from our shattered dreams.

Part of me wishes I had read this book about two years ago when I was going through a very difficult and trying time in my life. So if you or someone you know is going through the loss of a job, or the death of a loved one, or facing a divorce, this book contains some good ideas for recognizing that God is a God of detours, that He is sovereign over shattered dreams, and He can heal any wounded heart.

However, there seemed to be a glaring omission from the book, which I have come realize in my own path through pain and uncertainty, and it is this: Things don t always work out. Every story in the book pointed to the idea that even though life may take a turn for the worst, in the end, it will all work out. Joseph goes to prison, but becomes the second in command over Egypt. Joshua faces hard times in the wilderness, but leads the people across the Jordan into the Promised Land. A man commits adultery and loses his job as a pastor, and almost loses his wife, but then gets to go on a speaking tour around the country helping others in the same situation.

The message of the book seems to be: Have things gone wrong? Don t worry. It will get better soon.

Sadly, this isn’t always true. Does God redeem and rescue? Yes! A thousand times, yes! But does He always? No. At least, not in this life.

Take John the Baptist. He proclaims the coming of the Messiah, and with Him, the Kingdom of God. But he gets arrested, and instead of getting freed, ends up getting beheaded. This was not the rescue he hoped for.  All the prophets had similar stories. The writer of Hebrews says that many of them were tortured, imprisoned, stoned, and sawn in two. There is no happy ending to being sawn in two.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m glad I read Plan B. It helped me a lot with my own questions and issues. I just think it sometimes painted too rosy of a picture that does not fully fit with either Scripture or reality.

Of course, no one wants to read that sometimes you may lose your job, go into bankruptcy, have your children die,  get divorced, contract terminal cancer, and finish out your days in suffering and despair. And since a book like that will never get published, there’s always Plan B.

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I am reading Will This Rock in Rio by Ken Lottis. It’s a fantastic book, and I will review it on this blog later this week. In it, he explains how he and Jim Peterson invited Brazilian men to read the historical document of the gospel of John and ask two questions as they read: “What does this book say about Jesus?” and “If what it says is true, what should our response be?”

As I read, I began looking for opportunities to do the same thing. On Friday, I met a man named Jamie  just hanging around outside my office. We talked for a few minutes, and then sensing an opening, said, “Hey, do you want to read a book about Jesus with me and talk about it?”

“I would love to!” he said. We read John 1 that day and talked about it for about an hour. Then we ran out of time.

Today he came back and asked to read and talk some more. For the next two hours we read and discussed John 2-4. Below are some of the comments he made as we read. You won’t hear these in any sermon…

John 2: Jesus turning water into wine
When Jamie read that Jesus turned six containers of water into wine, he said, “Hey, Jesus brought a six-pack to the party!” And when he read that each container held 20-30 gallons, he did the math, and when he realized that Jesus just made about 150 gallons of wine, said, “Man! I wish Jesus could come to one of my parties!”

I wanted to weep. Not because I was offended by Jamie’s comment. Far from it. Jamie saw immediately who Jesus is: Someone who was fun to hang out with.

John 4: The woman at the well in Samaria
When he read that Jesus sat down at a well with a woman and asked her to draw some water for him, he remembered what Jesus had done with the water in John 2, and said, “I know what’s coming! It’s going to be a well of wine!” It didn’t turn out that way, of course. But when Jesus said, “Go, call your husband and come here,” he laughed out loud and said, “I see what Jesus is doing! He’s trying to get it on with her!”

It was the best ”Bible study” I have ever been part of. His remarks were so fresh, honest, real…and insightful. And no, I never corrected Jamie’s thinking. To be honest, I didn’t have to. All I did was laugh along with him, then say, “Wow, I’ve never looked at it that way before. Let’s read on to see what happens.” And of course, Jesus doesn’t get drunk, and He doesn’t take the woman off to His hut. He just loves people, has fun with them, and invites them to believe in Him for eternal life. How simple and refreshing.

Bad Christian, Bad!
I must tell you, however, that part way through, a Christian that I work with saw what we were doing and asked if he could join. Inwardly, I groaned, but Jamie cheerfully said, “Yeah! The more the merrier.”

I felt bad as the discussion went on, because I had to keep telling this Christian to stop talking (he went on and on and on…and on). He kept wanting to go off and talk about the baptism of the spirit, and fasting and praying, and the importance of getting water baptized, and how infant baptism was not enough, and how we need to go to church, and pray in faith, really meaning it in our heart, and trusting God, and obeying God, and get on our knees before God, and ask God to do his will in our life, and read the Bible, etc., etc., etc.

At one point, he told some story about how even though the thief on the cross didn’t get baptized before he died, he really did get baptized because it rained on him. WHAT? Every time he started to talk, I wanted to pull my hair out, and I could tell that Jamie was getting more and more confused.

Oh, and he was present when Jamie thought that Jesus was hitting on the woman at the well. He didn’t laugh.

Sigh….

On a completely random way of ending this post, I saw a Hasidic Jew playing an electric guitar tonight while dancing and rapping. He was amazing on that guitar! Watching him rock like Jimi Hendrix while his curled side-burns bounced around as he danced is a sight I never thought I’d see. It’s a crazy world.

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I recently read Charles Foster’s book, The Sacred Journey, which, according to the back cover, is a book about calling Christians to go on a pilgrimage.

Prior to reading it, I imagined it to be a book about going on a metaphorical pilgrimage, a spiritual trip within your mind. You know…recognizing that we are all “on a journey” and how we can take certain “steps” to ”progress” in our life of “following Jesus.”

But it became quickly clear to me that this is not what Foster meant at all. In his book, he calls Christians to go on a literal pilgrimage. Yes, that’s right. Getting off our butts, packing a bag (or just a change of clothes), and setting out (on foot is preferable) to go somewhere.  The destination, he says, doesn’t really matter, because it’s the journey that counts. Foster’s book explains the biblical basis behind this idea, and recounts many of his own pilgrimage stories.

I kept on waiting for him to say, “Now if you can’t go on a literal pilgrimage, you can always stay home and go on a metaphorical, spiritual pilgrimage.” He got close to this in the last chapter, but he never really came out and said any such thing. 

And so I became very uncomfortable with the book. I have a wife and three young kids. I have a job. I can’t go traipsing off  into the wilderness just to see what happens. Sure, I may connect with God, but I may also lose my job, my house, and maybe my family. He didn’t speak about how his own wife and kids handle his frequent journeys other than to say that he leaves them behind and misses them (p. 159). And of course, he writes books as a job, so he can take that with him. If I tried to take my job with me…well, I’d get put in prison. Those of you know what I do understand what I mean.

So while I enjoyed the book, and was challenged by it, I must conclude that most of us do not have the luxury to be a nomad.

But aside from that, is what he is calling for truly biblical? Certainly it is true that the Bible is chock full of examples of nomads, pilgrimages, and journeys. Yes, Jesus and Paul moved about. Yes, followers of Jesus have nowhere to lay their head. I can’t deny it.

But it seems to me that nobody in Scripture ever went somewhere just so they could connect with God, learn something about themselves, or grow on the journey. Whenever God’s people go somewhere in Scripture, it is so they connect with people, or more specifically, to connect people with God. A biblical pilgrim is not one who embarks on a journey to find himself, find God, or visit a holy site. Rather, a biblical pilgrim is one who embarks on a journey to find others.

So our “going” must be with people in mind. Foster did bring this out somewhat. For example, he says, “The purpose is not primarily to ‘inquire,’ but to meet: the ‘wise men’ are all the people you bump into, particularly if they’re on heroin and state benefits” (p. 141). But such statements are rare. I wish he would have elaborated and emphasized this point more.

He said over and over that the destination is not what is important; it was the journey that mattered. However, he seems to have made the journey the destination. To me, the significance of the journey is not the journey itself, but the people on the journey.  It is not “Where are you going?” or even “How are you going?” that matters. Rather, the real questions are ”Who are you going with?” and “Who are you going to?” 

And I think if you answer these questions, you will still go on pilgrimage, but it may not be to Jerusalem, Canterbury, or Rome. Instead, you may find yourself traveling to the next cubicle, the neighbor’s house, or the closest bar.

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Luke 4:16-19 may be my favorite passage in the entire Bible. It is certainly a key text in Luke, and, I would argue, a key text for understanding Scripture.

In it, Jesus explains His mission. He explains what He intends to do in His ministry. If you and I are followers of Jesus, we need to soak our lives in these verses so we can follow these same principles.

Many churches, Christians, and religious leaders “spiritualize” these verses so that they only deal with realities of the Spirit and the afterlife. I believe this is wrong. Jesus was not concerned only with the spiritual side of people, and neither should we. While He did help meet the deep spiritual needs of people, He was also concerned with their physical, psychological, and emotional needs. Luke 4:16-19 deals with all of these.

If we are His followers, we will focus on such things as well.

But it doesn’t mean you have to do exactly the same things Jesus did in exactly the same way. He performed supernatural miracles, whereas, we may perform the same miracles, but through science or technology. We can work to accomplish the same things Jesus accomplished – healing the sick, setting captives free, giving sight to the blind, giving liberty to the captives – but using different methods.

Most Christians are quite uncreative when it comes to “living as Jesus lived.” We see him feed 5000 people and so if we want to “follow Jesus” we think that we have to get five loaves and two fishes, and pray over them until a miracle happens. But that’s not true at all. We can still feed 5000 people, or 50,000, or 500,000 people, simply by living less selfish lives, and being more generous with our money.

For example, let’s say you spend $5 per day on Starbucks coffee and $2 for a scone. Right there you have your five loaves and two fish.

That $7 a day doesn’t seem like much. But over a work week, it comes to $35. Through an organization like Compassion International, you can feed and teach a child in a third world country for $35 per month. So with the money you save, you could give three meals a day (and a biblical education) to four children every month. Over the course of just one year, that is 4320 meals. Jesus fed 5000 people, and we call it a miracle. Each one of us can do almost the same miracle every year for the rest of our lives, simply by giving up our five loaves and two fish (coffee and a danish).

This is just one example. With a little bit of creative thinking and self-sacrifice, we could come up with similar miracles in health, finances, and education. We can accomplish the same things as Jesus did, or even greater things (John 14:12)!

This post is based on the Grace Commentary for Luke 4:16-19.

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Every once in a while I read a book that puts into words what I have been thinking, but couldn’t quite express. These are not so much “Aha!” moments as “Yes! Someone who understands!” moments. This last month, I happened to read two such books. Both put into words what I have been thinking and feeling for two-three years now.

Previously, I wrote about how the average reader can only read about 4000 books in a lifetime. These are two books I am glad are on my list. Both books might have made it into my Top Ten List. Definitely my top twenty.

The first book, Church Without Walls by Jim Petersen, is a book I’ve owned for about ten years, but never got around to reading. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t read it ten years ago, because it wouldn’t have meant much to me back then. Ten years ago, I thought I had church all figured out. I even wrote a book about it (I thank God it never got published…). Jim Petersen bases his book off of some church planting work he did in Brazil in the 1960s. He found that to really reach people who wouldn’t step foot in the typical church, he had to radically change the way the church looked and functioned. In the rest of the book, he summarizes the historical, theological, and biblical insights he came to as he struggled with how to allow this new church of Brazilian Christians be the church in their culture. (I recently learned that this this story is further developed in a new release, Will this Rock in Rio? by Ken Lottis.)

Jim Petersen then takes the lessons he learned in Brazil and applies them to our own time and culture. His basic conclusion is that various traditions have locked us into doing church a certain way, and have ceased to be helpful for many of the people we are trying to reach with the gospel (cf. p. 208). By abandoning some of these traditions, we actually liberate the church to live the gospel in our culture and communities. I’m looking forward to reading this book again.

The second book which got my heart racing is Repenting of Religion by Greg Boyd. Most Christians love to say they have a “relationship” not a “religion.” But the truth is that most of us just have another religion. I see this first hand every day at my job where I get to interact with people of seventeen different religions. Whatever differences they all may have, one thread runs through them all (Christianity included) — judgment and condemnation.

As Christians, we judge gays, lesbians, the rich, the homeless, people of other religions, atheists, heretics, criminals, drunks, drug addicts, prostitutes, pimps, politicians, and anybody else we can think of to point our finger at. Greg Boyd points out that Scripturally, these are not really the sins that God is most concerned about.  God is more concerned with other sins, which happen to be found in the lives of most Christians, especially those of us here in the United States.

But even this not Boyd’s point. He doesn’t just want us to shift our finger pointing from one target to another. He wants us to stop the pointing altogether. Finger pointing – judgmentalism – is a symptom of religion. “But wait!” you say, “Jesus judged. Paul judged. We are even told to judge each other! What about those texts?” Boyd is not ignorant of these texts and deals with all of them. His basic conclusion is that the only judging Jesus and Paul do is to judge the self-righteous, hypocritical, legalistic religious people for committing the sin of judging others.

As with everything Boyd writes, this book challenges your thinking and causes you to see certain Scriptures in a new light. If you want to learn to live out the love of Jesus within this world, you must read this book.

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About six months ago, I sat down and wrote out my “Master Plan” for the next six months of my life. 

My wife and I were facing some tough decisions, and we didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know which route to choose. I needed to get it all out in black and white to see what our options were, so I wrote it down. It was a beautiful, detailed plan arranged in an outlineed flowchart. I thought of all the possible things that could happen, and the best way to respond in each situation, and fit it all on one typed page. It was genius. I had gained, to the best of my human ability, foreknowledge of the next six months of my life.

Then I forgot about it.

This week, as my wife was shuffling through some papers, she found it. As she read through it, I asked, “How are we doing? Are we following the plan?”

She burst out laughing. At the very bottom of the page, after all my plans, I had written, “If XYZ happens, I don’t know what we’ll do. I guess we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.” (I didn’t write XYZ, of course. It was an actual event that I knew was possible, but I won’t write it here on a blog.)

And guess what? The XYZ event happened this past Tuesday. Soooo, after all my planning, thinking, and preparing, we are still right back at not knowing what to do. I guess I just have to trust that Proverbs 16:9 is true: “The mind of man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.”

A friend of Wendy’s told her today: “The only thing you can do is do the next thing.” And she’s right. Very frequently, we don’t know ten steps ahead, or even two. All we can do is take the next step. God seems to give only enough light to take one step at a time. And we have to take it, not knowing exactly where it will lead, but trusting all the same.

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It often happens in the Christian life, that after the blessing comes the battle. After the mountain top comes the valley. After feeling so close to God, there comes a time when you feel so very far away from God. Sometimes, the greatest temptations follows the greatest victories. The greatest trials follow the biggest triumphs. This is true of most of the great leaders of Scripture.

Elijah
Remember Elijah? He went to Mt. Carmel to have a contest of gods. He took on the 450 prophets of Baal. And if you have read the story in 1 Kings 18, you remember that it was a great victory and a great display of power for the Only True God in Heaven, and Elijah was so excited that, on his way back to town, he was able to outrun the horses pulling the chariot. But then, only one chapter later, in 1 Kings 19, we see Elijah as low as he has ever been. He’s hiding out in the desert wishing he could die.

Paul
The Apostle Paul is another example.  He received a revelation from God on the road to Damascus and believed in Jesus for eternal life.

According to Acts 9:20, Paul immediately tried to start a ministry to his Jewish brethren. It says he was winning arguments and debates with them. But even though he was winning debates, he wasn’t winning any people. Instead, he almost got himself killed. So he fled to Arabia for three years, probably to study Scripture in light of his new belief that Jesus was the Messiah (Gal 1:17-18). Then, after three years, he probably decided he was ready for ministry again, and so he returned to Damascus and then went to Jerusalem to see if he could help the apostles in their work. But the disciples there wouldn’t trust him (Acts 9:26). Nevertheless, he went out and tried to start a ministry to the Hellenistic Jews in Jerusalem. But again, the only fruit of his ministry was that he kept making people mad, and he almost got killed again (Acts 9:29). The apostles decided they had to get rid of him, so they sent him off to Tarsus.

The account in Acts 9 is very humorous. It says that after they sent Paul away, the church began to prosper (9:31).

Can you imagine what Paul is feeling? Jesus Christ told him on the road to Damascus that he was going to be used greatly by God, but every time Paul tried to be used by God, all he did was cause problems and make people angry, to the point that even the apostles didn’t want him around. And it is only after he leaves, that the church begins to prosper! And so what did Paul do? Well, he served, quietly, in a church, in the boondocks of Tarsus. For 14 years he was there. He was unknown (Gal 1:22). He was unrecognized. People forgot about him. He probably began to think that God had forgotten about him too.

But God had not forgotten. God sent Paul to Tarsus, I am convinced, to teach him humility. To teach him how to get victory over his temptation of pride. God put Paul on the back burner for 17 years in order to teach Paul how to speak the truth in love. And when, after 17 years, Paul had learned this lesson in the wilderness of Arabia and backwaters of Tarsus, God said to Paul, “OK, now you are ready to be used.” And Paul did turn the world upside down for God. But he had to spend time in the wilderness learning getting molded by God.

Jesus
Even Jesus was not immune to such wilderness refinement and preparation. The first four chapters of Luke are all about Jesus’ preparation for ministry. Chapter 1 contains the events leading up to His birth. Chapter 2 relates His birth and an event during His childhood years. In chapter 3, He was prepared for ministry through the baptism of John and the affirmation of God the Father.

This baptism was a mountaintop experience for Jesus. He came up out of the water after being baptized by John, and God thundered out of heaven, “You is my beloved Son; in You I am well pleased.”

But rather then immediately launch into a successful ministry, the Spirit takes Jesus out into the desert, not to the adoring multitudes. Immediately following the blessing is the battle. Jesus goes from the heights to the depths. From the lush banks of the Jordan and hearing the voice of God, to the barren wasteland of the wilderness, where He is confronted and tested by the devil.

You Too
All of us experience such wilderness times in our own life. And if you haven’t, you will. Your spiritual life and ministry landscape will become hot, barren, and dry. Sometimes, this lasts a day or two, or maybe a month or more. Sometimes it lasts years.

When you find yourself in the wilderness, realize that such periods help you gain strength, maturity, and humility. Use these times to gain victory over temptation and sin. Grow in your knowledge of God and His Word. And wait patiently on God. When the time is right, He will raise you up, restore you to life, and through you, advance the Kingdom of God.

This post is based on the Grace Commentary for Luke 4:1-13.

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I’m sure it’s just me…but I sometimes panic when I realize how few books I will read during my life. There’s so much to read and so little time! Is there a phobia for this…The fear of not being able to read?

Look at it this way: The average reader reads only four books per year. Over the course of a lifetime of 80 years (with reading taking place between the ages 15 and 95), this would be only 320 books!  

But let’s say you read more. Let’s say you are an avid reader, and can read one book a week, or about 50 books per year. Over the 80 years of reading, that is still only 4000 books! That’s about how many books I already have in my personal library! So even if I never buy another book, I will not be able to read all the books I already own. That’s depressing…

And yet, every time the Christian Book Distributor Catalogue comes, I find another book or two that I want to read.

So I guess the lesson for me is that I must carefully select the books I read. Every time I pick up a book, I ask myself, is this a book that I want as one of my 4000? It makes me sad to think of some of the pointless books I’ve read. Maybe I need to become a speed reader so I can read a book in eight minutes…

Anyway, below are some books I am glad I have read, and may even read again, thereby taking up not just one, but two spots on my list of 4000 books. These books have shaped my thinking in amazing ways. In the future, if I read some list-worthy books, I will include them in the comments.

-The Bible…I know, I know. Do I really have to say it? But it should be one of the books you read regularly, which over the course of your life, will take up multiple spots on your list…80 spots or more if you read it annually.

-Reign of the Servant Kings, by Joseph Dillow
-Transforming Mission, by David Bosch
-The Grace Awakening, by Chuck Swindoll
-The Grace NT Commentary on James, by Zane Hodges
-Expository Preaching, by John MacArthur
-All books by CS Lewis
-Orthodoxy, by GK Chesterton
-The Gutter, by Craig Gross
-God at War, by Greg Boyd
-Satan and the Problem of Evil, by Greg Boyd
-The Shaping of Things to Come, by Frost and Hirsch
-The Forgotten Ways, by Alan Hirsch
-The Last Word, by NT Wright
-Jesus, and the Victory of God, by NT Wright
-The Other Side of Calvinism, by Laurence Vance
-Beyond Calvinism and Arminianism, by C. Gordon Olson

That’s all I can think of right now off the top of my head. By including these books on this list, I am not saying I agree with everything written in them. All I am saying is that these books stretched my mind, and brought about paradigm shifts in my life and thinking. A few of them caused earthquakes.

Feel free to post your own suggestions below. Oh, and by the way, novels are okay as well. Novels can sometimes shape your life and theology more than a book on theology. One of the novels I am glad I have read is Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. I’m not really into Sci-fi novels, but it was so good, I read it twice.

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