Reading the Bible, Knowing Jesus (4)

 

 

“Without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He becomes a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him out” (Hebrews 11:6).

 

When we open the Bible, we can open it in the expectation that we will meet God. When we ponder the Scriptures, we can anticipate the appearing of Jesus Christ; we can look for Him, listen for Him, expect to sense Him; we can be assured that we can touch Him and that He will touch us. Now for sure, all of this will be on His terms, at the pace He sets. While we may have questions for Him, we may find that He has many more questions for us, questions that may take us a lifetime to answer.

 

Just what does He want from us? Actually He wants nothing from us, other than ourselves – this is where it must begin, where it always begins and always concludes – Jesus wants us – heart, soul, mind, and strength. Jesus does not want us to simply love Him, He wants us to love Him will all that we are – “all” means “all,” fancy that (Mark 12:29 – 31).

 

O dear friends, like Martha we can be troubled about many things, our minds may rush about with questions, with tasks to be done, with things we think we need to do for the Lord – we can be sitting in a chair, our bodies still, yet our minds may be zooming through life. There may be many things we wish to know about Jesus, but Jesus says, “I am not interested in you knowing about Me, I want you to know Me. You will not know Me unless you stop and pay attention to me. You cannot fool me, I see your mind racing about, I see the things you have set your heart upon. Quiet child, Be quiet. Let us spend time together.” (Luke 10:38 – 42).

 

What would the world be like if the professing church actually knew Jesus Christ? Why if we knew Jesus we would share Him with others. If we knew Jesus we would be Jesus to others. If we knew Jesus then Jesus would speak for Himself through us, as individuals and as His People. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? Rather novel…yes, I think so. Is not a body to express the head? Ought not the Body of Christ express the Head?

 

Jesus was once asked, “What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?” That is a fair question. Give us something to do, just tell us what to do. Is this not our way in congregations? Let us find our skill sets, our “gifts,” our aptitudes – let us put everyone to work. Let us be a people in motion, always in motion.

 

Jesus did not respond by handing out a gift assessment. He did not have the apostles do a needs analysis. Jesus did not perform a demographic study. Jesus did not give everyone a job to do.

 

“This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent” (John 6:28 – 29).

 

Later He will say to His disciples in the Upper Room, “I am the Vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

 

“Nothing?” we ask.

 

This is hard for us to swallow, hard for us to practice. It is so hard to sit still. So hard not to push our agendas! So impossible not to be in control.

 

Well, let us sit in expectation of His appearing as we open the Word, the Bible, the sacred Scriptures. Let us allow the words within the Word to soak our minds and hearts and be planted within our souls (James 1:21). As the words are sown, the Word comes forth, as the Word comes forth, we see Jesus.

 

How do we please God? We are told by faith; we are informed that without faith it is impossible to please Him. What does this faith look like?

 

It is, my friend, pretty simple, basic, and to the point.

 

“He who comes to God must believe that He is.”

 

I knock anticipating that someone on the other side will open the door. I ask, expecting a reply. I seek, in the hope of finding (Matthew 7:7 – 11).

 

How foolish to knock at a house you know is vacant!

 

How delusional to email a defunct address or call a number no longer in service.

 

Why,  O why, seek for something that isn’t there, that doesn’t exist?

 

As I said, this is basic, very basic.

 

We must come to Him believing that He is. Notice that we “come.” In the Bible we have passages in which He comes first and we respond; then we have passages in which we come first and He responds. Perhaps this is like chess, the white side moves first, then the black.

 

My brother Jim and I played chess for many years, first via snail mail and then via the internet. We always played two games at once. I played white in one game, and he played white in the other game. Therefore, when we began two new games they began with me making a white move in the first game, and with Jim making the white move in the second game.

 

Perhaps our Father and Lord Jesus have us playing two games at once; God moves first in one game, and He waits to see if we will move first in the second game. I am too old to worry much about all of this, other than  knowing that we can trust our dear heavenly Father in all things and He is well able to nurture us as His daughters and sons – He is our wise and kind Father and we are the lambs of our Good Shepherd, the Lord Jesus.

 

In our passage “we come to God, believing that He is.”

 

Now, in case you’re wondering, this does not mean that some cannot say, “God, I don’t know about You. I don’t even know if You are real. If You are, please show Yourself to me.”

 

I think our dear God honors honesty and a seeking sincere heart. But our passage is not about this, it is about coming to God believing that He is – our passage is about faith, it is not about where we might be prior to faith. It is wise to engage the passage in front of us.

 

But when we come to God there is more than simply believing that He exists, we come because we also believe that “He becomes a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.”

 

In other words, we come to God believing that God will respond. We believe that God will meet us, that as we come to Him that He will come to us. We do not come to Him to figure Him out, we do not read the Bible to figure the Bible out – we come to Him to meet Him, we enter the Bible and open ourselves to God’s Word so that the Bible will enter into us…so that we will meet God, encounter Him, know Him – so that we can experience friendship and sonship (and daughterhood) with God, that we might live in the koinonia (fellowship!) of the Trinity (John Chapter 17).

 

As we partake of the Scriptures we partake of the Divine Nature (2 Peter 1:4).  

 

What is it to diligently seek Him?

 

Well, among other things, it means that we open the Book. It means that the Book is our primary source for communion, along with prayer (which entails both listening and speaking). As He sees us open the Book today, tomorrow, and the next day…He watches us…He watches to see if we are looking for Him or are seeking something else – perhaps religious knowledge, perhaps to improve ourselves, maybe to be smarter than we were the day before. He waits to see if we will wait for Him, if we will look for Him out of the window of our soul the way we wait for a dear loved one to return home after a long journey.

 

He waits to see if we will wait.

 

He speaks to see if we are listening.

 

He asks a question to see if we will respond.

 

Unlike us, Jesus is in no hurry, time does not matter to Him – you matter, I matter, we matter.

 

He becomes a Rewarder…and as the Holy Spirit opens the Scriptures to us (John 16:12 – 15) we realize something that can hardly be put into words…we realize that the Rewarder is greater than the reward – that He is our Reward…that He is our heart’s desire, the filling up of life, overflowing with joy and peace…and we cry with the psalmist:

 

“Whom have I in heaven but You? And besides You, I desire nothing on earth” (Psalm 73:25).

 

Let us open the Bible and meet God – He is waiting.

 

A concluding thought:

 

When we lived in Richmond I met friends for coffee in coffee shops throughout the metropolitan area. I came to have my regular places for meeting others; it was like a chain of remote offices. With the Bible, you and I have 66 different coffee shops where we can meet Jesus – it is good to get to know all the shops, you may spend more time in some than in others, and there are some that you may take a particular liking to, but Jesus is there in each one to spend time with you…you may be surprised at what He shows you on the menus.

 

Occasionally I’d show up to a coffee shop to meet a friend and the person failed to make it – it is a sad feeling to look for someone, and look, and look again, and then realize that you’ll be having coffee by yourself, that you won’t have the pleasure of your friend’s company. Rest assured, Jesus will always be there – He will always be there ahead of you, waiting for you. The question is, will you keep Him waiting?

 

 

 

The Mysterious Seb'n (3)

 The Mysterious Seb’n (3)

 

My Daddy had an older (by 10 years) first cousin named Thomas Austin Withers, Jr. Thomas left the University of Virginia in 1941, where he was three years into his degree program, to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force. As you know – or as you should know – America didn’t enter the war until it was attacked on December 7, 1941. Until that time most of us, including many of our “leaders”, were content to watch Britain suffer what we thought was a sure process of annihilation. After all, why back a loser? (We also watched Japan destroy China, though destroy is too light a word).

 

Antisemitism was high in the United States, we had Nazi youth groups, Madison Square Garden was the venue for a Nazi rally that began with the American Pledge of Allegiance, our State Department would not (with heroic exceptions) issue visas to Jews facing extermination, and in 1939 we, the Home of the Free and the Land of the Brave, turned away 900 European Jews on the liner St. Louis and sent them back to Europe. You do, of course, remember learning this in your history classes? Of course you do.   

 

In the 1930s our population was about 120 million. It is estimated that about 30 million of us tuned our radios in weekly to hear Father Charles Coughlin spew his antisemitic venom through the airwaves – we haven’t changed, have we? We still love venom. Thank God for Pope Leo, he shows us a better way.

 

When newsreels showed video of Poland being bombed in movie theatres (yes, you could get your news before your movies in those days) some people clapped.

 

Why did this young man from dirt poor Nelson County, VA leave the safety of the University of Virginia to fight for what was surely a losing cause?

 

Not long before his death, in a letter to his parents, he wrote, “If we do not return we will have no regrets.”

 

I wonder what his Nelson County accent sounded like to his Canadian and British mates? I wonder if he pronounced “seven” as “seb’n” or “sem’n”? Or perhaps his UVA environment corrected that for him? I recall reading somewhere that he excelled in English and was considering law school.

 

Why, O why, leave UVA to fight for another people? Why leave the safety of the hills and hollows of Nelson County? Why put aside the aspirations of a degree, the promise of a career, the prospect of home and family, for certain danger and possible death? (Roughly 44% of crew members in Britain’s Bomber Command were killed.) Why not wait and see if America entered the war?

 

What was my second cousin feeling and thinking? How did he arrive at his decision?

 

What do you think?

 

 

The following is from a war memorial:

 

Thomas Austin Withers, Jr. was born on January 5, 1915, in Nelson County, Virginia. He was the son of Thomas Austin Withers Sr and Margaret Scruggs Withers.

 

Thomas served in the 405 Squadron as a Flight Sergeant during World War II. After training in Canada, he was sent to England where he was a tail gunner on a Wellington bomber. On one of the bombing runs over Germany, he was wounded and hospitalized. Upon return to duty, his bombing runs continued until July 27, 1942, when his plane, Halifax W1230, was downed over Germany and crashed into the Elbe River. Withers and two other crewmen were killed.

 

Reading the Bible, Knowing Jesus (3)

 

The first conversation that shocked me occurred at breakfast with another couple. As we were catching up with our friends whom we had not seen since our move a few years ago, they told us about the church they were attending. One of the things that excited them about the church was the way the pastor preached, he taught the Bible verse-by-verse and did “exegesis.” They were quite impressed with exegesis, with a certain way in which to study the Bible and to teach the Bible.

 

Now I’m about to go down a road which you may not understand, but I need to do it. For sure, it is a road that you can understand, but this will be easier for some than for others. And please, remember this, I am writing to myself as well as to you. Believe me when I write that I’d love to go back and do many things over again, I truly would.

 

Over the past few years, I have thought much about what I’m writing in this series, and the clearer it becomes to more, the more angst I have and the more regret wells up within me. The three conversations I’m sharing, and the shock they gave me, have crystalized my vision and thinking, and yet I still have many questions.

 

Our friends at breakfast have been quite active in church for many years – they are not pew warmers. When we first met them, they were leaders in their congregation. They care about people; they care about outreach – both in terms of sharing the Gospel and in terms of helping folks with physical needs.

 

When they spoke of the way the pastor preached it was as if they’d never read the Bible before, it was as if the Bible had been a closed book that only the pastor and his methodology could open – even though they had been Christians for decades, not sit-on-the-bench Christians but a truly engaged husband and wife in the Kingdom of God.

 

That was the first element of my shock.

 

The second element was, “Have I done what this pastor is doing? Have I led people to think that they cannot approach the Bible without doing so in a certain way, with a certain methodology?”

 

Have we so hedged the Biblical text with methodology and tradition and doctrine (which is often imperfect at best) that people can no longer encounter Jesus Christ in the Bible?

 

I think the answer is “Yes.”

 

Have I done so?

 

I know the answer is “Yes.”

 

Now I am not saying that the pastor was doing this deliberately, of course not, anymore than I would have done it deliberately (I hope not). What I am saying is that we can become so enamored with methodology, with the way we approach the Bible, that we make that our focus and forget two things; we forget the Living Jesus Christ, and we forget what the Bible itself says about how we should read it.

 

There is a difference between knowing the Bible and knowing Jesus. There is a difference between believing “the right things,” whatever they may be, and actually knowing Jesus – being in a relationship with Him.

 

I once knew a man who insisted, “Right behavior follows right belief.”  I knew that was a lie because of the way he lived and treated other people – he could be nasty.

 

A dilemma is that if we know the Bible as the revelation of Jesus Christ to our souls, then to know the Bible is indeed to know Jesus and to know Jesus is to know the Bible. If we have “right belief” in the sense that we have entrusted ourselves to Jesus as the Source of our life, then we will live godly lives in Him.

 

Do you see how these things can be difficult to ponder? (At least to me!)

 

Regarding our friends at breakfast; what did their new perspective say about the decades they had been reading the Bible? Was it a waste? How could it have been different? What had other pastors and teachers they had known been doing when they preached and taught? From what I knew of our friends, their previous pastors all believed the Bible to be the Word of God.

 

Was their current perspective healthy? I don’t think so, not if it meant that they were focused on methodology rather than Jesus Christ being revealed by the Holy Spirit in and through Scripture. Not if it meant that they thought there was a superior knowledge required to understand the Bible, a superior intellectual method that required specialized academic training. Not if it meant that they were dependent on “professionals” to teach them the Bible.

 

As with study Bibles, to focus on methodology is to necessarily not focus on the revelation of Jesus Christ because we can only serve one master, only one North Star, we can only have one primary filter. What should be a tool, such as an exegetical approach, can become the alpha and omega, the first and the last – thus replacing Jesus Christ.

 

People talk about what is in their hearts, out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, at least this is what Jesus teaches. When pastors are together, or theologians for that matter, it is not unusual for them not to talk about Jesus. This was a surprise to me as a teenager, today it is a challenge. We can get so caught up in the intellectual side of life, in the business of doing church, in the craft of preaching…in so many things, that it is like a group of KFC franchisees meeting back in the day when Harlan Sanders was still alive; he may have been alive but he was a thousand miles away, he wasn’t in the room with them.

 

If Jesus isn’t in the room with us, we ought to call it a day and go home and play solitaire.

 

I need to wrap this up because this is a blog and you don’t have all day. Before I tell you a story let me say that I am very much thinking out loud in this series. I am saying things I’ve said before, and yet I am also attempting to articulate some things that I haven’t said before – things that are a result of the shock of three conversations over the past year.

 

I hope that you will read and reread and learn two passages of Scripture, John 16:12 – 15 and 1 Corinthians 1:17 – 2:16. These passages, in Christ, can become our center of gravity when we read the Bible, reminding us that in Christ Jesus are “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:1 – 3).

 

A few years ago, Vickie and I were attending a large church in the Richmond, VA. area. At a church dinner it happened that the pastor sat at our table. My conversation with the pastor turned to his background and academic training, at which point he talked about the seminary he attended. The pastor was in his 50s.

 

The pastor spoke of a particular method of education employed by his alma mater, making a point of saying, “Other seminaries don’t do this, but mine did,” implying that his school is far better than other schools. He was quite proud of his seminary and its methodology.

 

Of course, the pastor did not know my background, and I was amused as he went on and on about how his school was superior to other divinity schools.

 

Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have affection for institutions that have been a blessing to us, though we ought to recall the people who blessed us and remember that most (all?) institutions are mythical – often images without substance, and that they change over the years. Also, not everyone experiences an institution the same way. An institution’s “narrative” is often not reality – whether in academia, in business, or within a nation.

 

I am saying that we can become so fixated on things other than Jesus, good things, maybe even “godly” things, that we forget to love Jesus with all that we have and all that we are – and isn’t that our calling? To love Him with all of our heart and soul and mind and strength and to love others as ourselves?

 

And when forget to love Jesus and others, when loving Jesus and others is not our focus, then other things which could be good for us become bad for us – our exegesis, our methodologies, our education and training – all of these things become Nehushtans (Num. 21:9; 2 Kings 18:4).  I have had many Nehushtans in my life, and likely still have them.

 

We are helpless without the Holy Spirit, yes, I think we are helpless.

 

“Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies” (1 Cor. 8:1).