The Garden

It was a warm October afternoon in Hong Kong, where I sat around a table with eleven other men. All of us were wiping tears from our eyes. Some of us had our head buried in our hands and were sobbing. The reason for our tears was because of a song being sung to us by a Chinese Christian named George Chen. Friends from The Bible League had encouraged this stopover on the way to Beijing so that we could meet with George and hear his story.

George began to preach immediately when he became a Christian. Over the next few years, he was arrested numerous times for preaching. As the cultural revolution in China intensified, houses were searched and Bibles were seized and burned. Many pastors died and the lives of the rest were in constant jeopardy. However, this didn’t stop George from proclaiming the gospel.

He continued to preach until the day came when he was arrested and thrown into prison. When the iron gate slammed shut behind him, it was to be eighteen years before he would know freedom again. His notoriety as a pastor didn’t serve George well in prison. To make Pastor Chen an example, the communist guards assigned him to work in the prison sewer. Pots filled with human waste from all the prison barracks were emptied into this giant cesspool.

George’s job was to spend every day in the cesspool, shoveling the human waste onto wagons, where it was taken to fields and used as fertilizer. Yet by the divine enablement of the life of Jesus Christ within George, he didn’t mind. In fact, he came to enjoy his time in the cesspool. George explained to us:

“In prison, you’re never alone. You work beside other prisoners all day, sleep close to them at night and the guards are always watching. This is why I came to enjoy my assignment in the prison cesspool. There I could be alone. The stench of the filth on my clothing and body kept everyone away from me. Nobody wanted to come near me. Not the prisoners, not the guards. Nobody! They all kept their distance.”

George continued, “Since working in the cesspool allowed me to be alone, I was able to pray, lifting up my voice loudly to the Lord. I was able to recite the Scripture verses I had memorized before they took away my Bible. Oh, I would sing! I would sing boldly to the Lord. God’s grace sustained me. The living presence and power of the Holy Spirit encouraged and blessed me.”

As we sat listening to George’s story, one of the men seated at the table asked, “George, what did you sing?”
He answered, “I’ll sing it for you now.” He closed his eyes, tilted his head toward heaven, opened his hands with palms facing upward, and with a smile on his face, George began to sing in Chinese a hymn we all recognized by the melody.

“I come to the garden alone, While the dew is still on the roses,
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me; and He talks with me; and tells me I am His own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.”

As George sang, God’s presence in the room became powerfully evident and grown men began to weep. It wasn’t difficult to imagine George in that cesspool, singing praises to God as he shoveled human excrement. George had come to know that when one has Jesus Christ, he has everything he needs. Our God can turn a cesspool into Paradise by His very presence.

I'll Apologize In Heaven

If I have overstated my Father’s love; if there is a dark side of His character of which I’ve lost sight; a Judicial Temperament that will hold me in account for a distorted proclamation of who He is and what He wants us to know; an incomplete or polluted aspect of my understanding and declaration of what I sincerely have come to believe is the true gospel . . . if I have become confused, misled, beguiled or misguided in what I wholeheartedly believe has been a revelation of the meaning of “the finished work of Jesus Christ,” then I will apologize from the bottom of my heart when I get there. I will plead that where I have been wrong, I have been sincerely wrong. Wrong after much Bible study and prayer and soul searching and agonizing with The Truth. I will humbly and earnestly ask to be forgiven for exaggerating His goodness and grace. But I do not believe that will ever happen. My Father’s grace will always exceed anything you or I can imagine. I’m gambling everything on that and it’s a gamble I am confident I will not regret…not in this life or the next. Let the critics say what they will. Let the like-minded stand with me. Eternity will render The Verdict. Let us each be fully persuaded in our own minds and act on that persuasion with boldness. Lay down your life for it, because if it's true, it's worth it.

The Power of Love

What would happen if we showed affectionate love to everybody???? If a person like this finds healing in the expression of love, what would it do if we loved the people we meet in our daily lives? "Love never fails." - The Apostle Paul
(Watch this to the end to understand the point)

Hand Me The Scapel, I'm Going In

Many of you know that, my wife, Melanie has had serious back problems for several years now. She has had multiple operations. The last one was when she fractured vertebrae when she vomited after eating spoiled food in a restaurant. It hasn’t been easy.

Well, the good news is that I think her troubles are soon over. I’ve been reading about a surgery that I think I can do myself. I read on Wikipedia that a doctor in Switzerland developed it. I won’t try to explain it here but it involves making an incision in her back three inched wide and two inches deep. Then there’s tapping the vertebrae back in place with a small hammer, sort of like a geological tool. I read on another medical (well, actually holisitic health) site that there’s a special bone adhesive you use. I can buy the glue from that site. I don’t have every single detail figured out but I think I’ve got the idea well enough that once we’ve bought the necessary supplies, I’m going to take the scalpel and go in! We’d appreciate your prayers.

Are you okay with that? Well, relax. It’s not true. I’d be an idiot to think I can understand back surgery by reading Wikipedia and a few web sites by people who are generally opposed to surgery. Everybody would see through that it in second.

On the other hand, the same can’t be said about theology. I’m amazed by the number of blogs, Facebook posts and comments I read in which somebody professes to be solving problems and giving exact answers about theology that have been debated from the very beginning of the early church. How’d they come up with their definitive answers to age-old questions? Wikipedia. Or their favorite preacher’s blog. Or their next door neighbor’s nephew’s pastor, who reputedly told the nephew the answer before it was passed back up line to them.

And the amazing thing? People buy it. In fact, they repeat it. Like parrots in a pet store, they all start screeching the same thing. They haven’t studied the Bible to come to an answer. Why should they? They learned what Trinitarianism is from Wikipedia! They understand the whole issue of hell because they read online where (insert name) explained it. They heard a guy say that he knew a guy who saw a guy embrace that doctrine and it wrecked his family’s life!

In today’s religious climate there are two dangers, coming from opposite extremes. The first is rejecting something we hear because it is new to us. The other is embracing something we hear because it is new to us. Some people seek to preserve tradition and are threatened by ideas that contradict what they’ve always believed. Others, who’ve been burned in the religious world, impulsively jump on any new idea they believe is a slap in the face to the tradition they have heartily renounced.

Paul commended the Berean Christians by saying, “These people were more receptive than those in Thessalonica. They were very willing to receive the message, and every day they carefully examined the Scriptures to see if those things were so” (Acts 17:11) Listen to those you respect. Read the blogs. Check out the Facebook posts, but at the end of the day, study the Bible for yourself. None of us are 100% right on everything we say. We’re all in process. We certainly can learn from each other but we each have the duty to study the Scripture and see what The Teacher says to us about the things we’ve heard and read.

I need to go now. Melanie’s back hurts and I have a knife, hammer and glue to purchase.

Standing On My Own Grave

Nothing bridges the imagined chasm of distance between time and eternity like standing on your own grave. I did it today. I stood on the plot I purchased for myself a few years ago and, right there, in Magnolia Cemetery, over the empty ground where I stood and gazed at my parents occupied graves, I remembered again that we were not created for this world. We truly are just sojourners – temporary visitors in a place we sense within is not our true home.

I felt it . . . *the desire* . . . not in a morbid sort of way, but in a way that C.S. Lewis knew:

“In speaking of this desire, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you – the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.”  (*Surprised By Joy*, p. 16)

Have you ever felt it?  I did today. And I have no fear. None. Only the anticipation that one who recognizes his origin in The Eternal can understand. I think I’ll have a blank stone placed on that plot, for it is a sacred portal. No, better still, it is a promise.  “Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!”

From "The Secret of Grace"

From the manuscript I just sent to Harvest House this week: The Secret of Grace - Release date: April 1, 2014 Harvest House Publishers

Our adoption in Him was the eternal purpose our Triune God had in mind all along. The coming of Jesus into this world wasn’t a reaction to what Adam did in the Garden of Eden when he sinned. The story of redemption doesn’t begin with Adam. It predates Adam all the way back to a time when there was no date! It was our God’s plan to bring us into His family before the first second existed in the human dimension we call “time” When there was no “space” there was already Grace. You were in His heart before the first molecule was spoken into being.

Before Adam sinned, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world had assured your safe delivery into His arms. As numerous theologians have said: “You were found before you were lost.” Your adoption in Jesus Christ is the result of a love set on you long before the first ray of light exploded out of the mouth of Christ and started its race across the universe. The gospel is the good news that you are included in the victory Jesus accomplished over sin and death. You were included even before you knew or believed you were included. Even when you stood in the darkness of unbelief there was a “true light that enlightens every person by his coming into the world” (John 1:9) and you blindly stood in that Light of Love. People without sight can’t see the light but it shines on them nonetheless. You may have lived all eternity with a darkened mind and never have known the Light but He knows you. The light of His love has always shone on you.

Your faith in Christ isn’t the tipping point that causes the efficacy of His finished work to be real. Your faith is a response to a Reality that existed while you didn’t even know what you didn’t know. “I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness,” God says to you. (See Jeremiah 31:3) Speaking of His crucifixion, Jesus promised, “And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself" (John 12:32, NLT). “Everyone” includes you.

In Jesus Christ you have been adopted – given the full standing of a son – by the Father Himself. “It is by His doing that you are in Christ Jesus,” Paul told the Corinthians. (See 1 Corinthians 1:30). It’s not because of anything you do. Nothing you do has caused you to be placed into Christ Jesus. That happened as a result of a divine act of grace.

With baited breath, all of heaven watched until the fullness of time came and, in the person of Jesus, the eternal plan our Triune God had held in His heart forever came bursting into time and space like bright rays of sunshine penetrating dark clouds. “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons,” Paul proclaimed in Galatians 4:5. How could such a thing happen to us? “He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,” Paul explains in Ephesians 1:5.

Does that include you? Jesus died once for all, according to the Scriptures. The Apostle Peter said, “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit” (1 Peter 3:18).