The making of a man of God

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, christian faith, missionaries, learning the hard way

Those who heed God's call learn by experience that we are called to death and resurrection, not only in the future for our body, but in this life for our soul and spirit. One Christian writer wrote, to paraphrase a little, "At the Gate of heaven stands the Cross. Only what can pass through the Cross and arise is permitted to pass through the Gate and enter in."

The experiences of four men in the Bible illustrate this.

• Firstly, Moses is the prototypical Man of God of the Old Testament. He was educated and prepared for 40 years according to the Egyptian way, though he had secret contact with his Hebrew family. Then, in Stephen's words "he decided to visit his own people, the Israelites" (Acts 7:23). Thinking to help them, he ended up killing an Egyptian and was soon an exile. We recognize the next 40 years as a time of God's preparation, but all the while he thought he would always be a shepherd in Midian. Then God called him openly, and so began the third 40 years in which he served God and God's people.
• Secondly, David, the one God chose to be king over Israel (1 Samuel 16), was at first modest and retiring, but once he tangled with the ambitions of king Saul, he was forced to flee to the surrounding lands, where he was hardened into the man of war needed to defend the kingdom after he was crowned. It seems he lived for some time as the leader of a gang of bandits. As a well-versed Jewish women told me once, "David was a scoundrel!" Indeed he was. But he was God's scoundrel, one who was always willing to repent once shown his fault (see Psalm 51).
• In the New Testament, we will skip over the obvious choice of Jesus for the moment, and look at Saul of Tarsus. As a zealous young man he sought to serve God by imprisoning Christians and even voting in favor of their killing. Once God called him as he neared Damascus, his preaching at first caused lots of trouble. He had to be smuggled out of Damascus to save his life, and later had to be smuggled out of Jerusalem. We don't know how long he was in Tarsus, where he'd been taken. He wrote that he spent some time in Arabia, returned to Damascus, then spent 15 days with Peter in Jerusalem. Only after this, about three years later, did the Holy Spirit designate Barnabas and Saul to go out preaching as apostles.
• Now we come to the case of Jesus, the prototype of a Man of God for New Testament believers. What happened right after his baptism? He spent not 40 years, but just 40 days in the wilderness, where he confronted Satan and overcame his temptations. The difference between Jesus and Moses? The indwelling Holy Spirit in Jesus, and his own divine nature, so that his human nature could be fully and quickly conformed to God's will. As we find it written to the Hebrews (vv 5:7-9), "During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him."

Any who would serve God will spend time in a wilderness, one of God's choosing. Jesus "learned obedience", not just in the wilderness overcoming the Devil, but continually over time, so that at Gethsemane, just before he was arrested, he had already passed through death and resurrection in his heart and was made ready for what was to come next.

Though none living today can compare with Moses, David or Saul/Paul, let alone Jesus, yet even a minor servant of God such as myself cannot serve effectively until the elements of the natural life die with Jesus and we are then raised in Jesus into newness of life. In my own case, there came a time that I said, more than once over a period of months, "All my dreams have died." Eventually, I heard the tiny, quiet voice ("gentle whisper" in NIV) of the Spirit, "What about My dream?" A church I—with others—had raised up a few years before, that crashed and burned, became a "learning experience". Two churches raised up in subsequent years remain healthy.

Whatever is our concept of serving Jesus, it is OUR concept, and matches HIS concept very loosely, if at all. It is His business to correct us, and we are unlikely to enjoy the experience. This is a lesson young Jonathan Hollingsworth learned, as we all do, the hard way, as recorded in the book Runaway Radical: A Young Man's Reckless Journey to Save the World, co-written with his mother Amy Hollingsworth. In the case of young brother Jonathan, the lesson came harder than most, for God was dealing with a most deadly enemy within him, his Legalism. This he tells us clearly.

Jonathan had a few experiences that cemented his faith from an early age. By the time he finished high school he was quite enamored of a "radical obedience" model of putting faith into action. He decided to attend no more than two years of college before going to Africa to serve God among the people there. With the help of his family and some fellow believers, and later the leaders of the church he attended, he set off for Cameroon, under the aegis of a missionary organization led by a man known in the book only as Peter.

By day three he was in love with the Cameroonians. By day six he knew he was in trouble with the organization, but a slippery slope once stepped on has a way of sending you careening out of control as you watch, helpless. Within a couple of months he was, effectively, a slave to an organization that was legalistic in the extreme. A key word here is "organization"; we will return to it. Once he was able to admit to himself, and then to his parents, that he was in real trouble, on a road to destruction, it took his parents and some of their friends another couple of months to extricate him from Africa.

If anyone ever had a right to say, "My dreams have died", it is Jonathan. Everything he hoped to accomplish in Cameroon became impossible. The organization had its own agenda for him, and would brook no interference from his puny will. No contact with "the wrong kind of Christians," that is, anyone not of that organization's network of "churches", was permitted; hardly any contact with his family was allowed to go "unsupervised"; at one point, he took badly sick, but because a meeting was scheduled, he was dragged there, and not allowed to hold his head in his hands, but his hands were forcibly raised in "the African way" of worship. Only after that was he taken to a doctor. No matter what was really going on with him, everything about him had to look good, even triumphant.

He suffered "house arrest" and near-total isolation for more than two months. It is God's grace that he had any sanity remaining by the time he returned home. Yet this was not enough. The "senior pastor" (who deserves not the title) coerced silence of him, wishing to continue working with Peter, the Devil in disguise. Jonathan was victimized yet again. But two years have passed since then, plus a good part of another in which the therapeutic effect of co-authoring the book did its work. He realized God never left him, and worked in the background, to open his eyes to the judgmental, legalistic youth he had been, and showed him what Grace really means: you don't need to earn God's approval by working yourself to death, because you begin with God's approval. You do not attain holiness by working for it, but are made holy by the Holy Spirit, and then gradually learn to live in spirit until that holiness shows when others observe you.

A word about organizations. A watchword I have learned is, "the church is organic, but is not organized." An organization cannot tolerate someone who makes it look bad; by visiting a couple who were "the wrong kind of Christian," but whose medical outreach was more effective than that of Peter's organization, Jonathan shamed it and suffered dearly for it. By learning the deep hypocrisy of that organization, he threatened to embarrass his family "church" (it is not!), and so he was, for a time, silenced.

Learn this well. A local church is not an organization. If you find an organization, you have not found a church. No organization can be a genuine church, no matter what they put on the sign board. One brother with whom I've worked fruitfully speaks of "the kitchen church-life", meaning a hot, messy place, just the antithesis of organized and political bodies by whatever emptily holy name they might use. But it is a place of feeding. Kitchens are for preparing food.

I reckon Jonathan is 23 or 24 years old now. That is about the age at which I began to learn how to serve God, or so I thought. I was about 30 when my wife and I went out to join a few to establish a church, and 38 when I began to say, "All my dreams have died." Now 29 more years have passed, and I am still learning obedience, but I have learned to leave the dreaming to God! I think I am learning the lesson that Moses learned at the outset (but also over time): the Burning Bush.

Jonathan was a burning young brother, but what fuel was being burned? His own reserves. He burned out rather quickly, for which we thank God; how sorry a state would he be in if he were still struggling to heap materials onto his "strange fire" on God's behalf? Moses saw a thorn bush that was full of fire, but not consumed. God was saying to him, "You (and Israel) are just thorns, full of the curse upon Adam. Do not presume to help Me. I will use you to do My work, but I Myself will be the fuel for the fire." The words God spoke to him are even more telling: "Do not come any closer," God said. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." (Exodus 3:5) God was saying, "Don't insulate yourself from My holiness. Get in contact with this holy ground and become holy."

And so God calls His servants today. Our own dreams must die, because they are not God's dream. We come to him an earthen vessel, but already full of "stuff" that God must remove so he can fill us with Himself. I will close with verses from two favorite hymns that express, to me, an excellent spirituality:

How much can we do for our Savior?
  How much for our dear fellow man?
The way to do more than we’re able
Is Jesus within to enable;
  Thus we can do more than we can.
—(v.1 of No. 906 at hymnal.net, where you can also hear the tune and see 3 more verses)

———

I take Thy promise, Lord, in all its length,
And breadth and fulness, as my daily strength;
Into life’s future fearless I may gaze,
For, Savior, Thou art with me all the days.

And all the other days that make my life,
Marked by no special joy or grief or strife,
Days filled with quiet duties, trivial care,
Burdens too small for other hearts to share.
—(vv. 1 and 5 of 6, of No. 575; we call this "The Days Song")

Christ finds an Amish heart

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, autobiographies, memoirs, christian faith, religion

Ira Wagler was not a bad boy; neither was he an exceptionally good boy. He was an ordinary boy. If he was different in any way, it was that his heart was larger than the box of his upbringing, and that he longed to believe, but not blindly or unthinkingly. He has something of the soul of a Renaissance man, a keenly inquiring mind, and it is hard to keep such a person bound to unthinking tradition for long.

In Ira's case, it was impossible. Born and raised Old Order Amish, the culture to which he became accustomed is one of the most traditional, conservative and restrictive that Western life has to offer. His Amish community was not the tightest of the tight, not quite. The Amish that moved to Aylmer, Ontario, his parents among them, were seeking to found a colony that would be more pure, more tradition-bound than where they had been. Curiously, there are Amish who think the Aylmer community is too "loose" and "worldly", and will not take the bread and wine of communion with them. I wonder what Ira's life would have been like among them. Likely even shorter than his 26 years among his family's church in Aylmer, and later in Bloomfield, Iowa, and still later in other places.

Ira's book Growing Up Amish: A Memoir is a chronicle that begins in Ira's seventeenth year, when he first left to live among "the English", and ends in his twenty-sixth year, when he left for the fourth and last time, no longer to be an Amishman. You could call it a "life and hard times" book, and it surely is. You could call it a Quest, and it surely was. I find it most akin to The Girl Nobody Loved by Dorie Van Stone or The Woman at the Well by Dale Evans. It is a story of a lost soul being watched over by a loving God, finally to find God in grateful acceptance of His sacrifice for sins and His grace to live in His presence.

The book also provides a much-needed window into the lifestyle and ways of the Amish, which are a great mystery to most Americans, even those who live among them. I confess, though I live just over an hour from the "Amish capitol" of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and buy produce from Amish people at a local farmer's market; even though I have sat and talked with a few now and then, I have known little but that they were an ultra-conservative splinter from the Anabaptists known as Mennonites.

Because of their ultra-traditional way of life, I find in the Amish an exaggerated reflection of the experiences of my own, quite conservative Christian congregation. Christian communities everywhere that attempt to maintain a standard of purity while surrounded by "people of lower standards" experience quite a bit of contrarian activity among their children as they grow towards adulthood. The impulse to test boundaries is built into the human character, as illustrated by the story of Adam and Eve in the garden: There was but one rule, and only one, to not eat the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Of course, Genesis 3 begins with Eve hanging around near that tree, wondering why. The serpent is simply allegorical; she needed no prompting other than her own (slightly) rebellious thoughts. How bad could "just a taste" really be, after all? The rest of the Bible provides the answer: tragically bad, but God has a way of redemption.

How do we keep the youngsters from "impurity" and "worldliness"? One way is to eschew contact with that world. The communal Hutterites try to do so. But in some parts of Western North America, there are lots of ex-Hutterites. The Amish at least engage with the English, trading with us, getting jobs among us (if you want a deck built quickly and well, hire an Amish crew. Just be sure to provide transportation!). In the same way, I know quite a few folks who formerly followed a church life such as mine, that they have now left, either for a different "Christian brand" (denomination) or for a non-church kind of Christianity.

An old 1960s byword says it well: Different strokes for different folks. Or the French proverb: Chacun à son goût – each to his own taste. As much as any portion the "body of Christ" may attempt to be all-inclusive, it is not possible. What is liberating to some is stifling to others. Some are quite bored with others' greatest and most precious experiences. And sometimes, when a religious husk has replaced spiritual experience with mindless adherence to tradition, only the most mindless and dull folk will tolerate it. This is what Ira found.

Curiously, although the Amish are considered a Christian sect, the name Jesus never appears in the book, and it is only in the closing chapters that the title Christ is used in a personal way. In 25 years among Amish folk in several localities, Ira Wagler never heard anything remotely close to the Christian Gospel of salvation by receiving Jesus Christ's sacrifice for our sins. He was confronted, again and again, thousands of times, with rigid demands to conform, to perform, to, effectively, save himself by his own efforts. The only time he heard the Christian Gospel was from a friend he calls Sam, whom he met in the last Amish community in which he dwelt. And Sam was not born Amish.

The Amish do not take converts. They prefer to outbreed everyone else (Ira has ten siblings). If a person insists on joining them, they make it hard, very hard, almost damnably hard. You have to learn their dialect of German, memorize tons of their prayers, and go through a process that strongly resembles hazing. It takes years, before one is considered eligible for baptism. Sam had done so. It is obvious that he knew Christ beforehand. He sure didn't attain Christian faith among the Indiana Amish he had joined.

He was exactly what Ira needed. Why did Ira leave, and then return, three times? Primarily, though he wanted greater freedom, he did not want to be a lost soul. He was convinced that only the Amish could be saved. One who left after being baptized was excommunicated, consigned to the Devil, and bound for Hell. During his third return, Ira went through a process almost as tough as Sam's had been, to be reinstated a "member" of the Amish church. Yet he still felt lost, until Sam showed him the way of God's forgiveness in Christ. Only once Ira knew Christ for himself, and knew that it is God who forgives and God alone, did he leave his Amish past behind, his heart at peace.

This does not mean that one must leave the Amish to be saved. Far from it. They do have the Bible, and they do read it, though there is no mention in Ira's experiences of Bible reading for oneself. The Bible alone can lead a person to God. But Ira's experiences limn for us most clearly the difference between faith and religion. He was raised in the bosom of one of the most restrictive and traditional religions found on American soil. It was primarily fear that drove him back to it again and again. Once he attained faith, he was free of religion. He could have remained an Amishman, but the scars were too deep for that. He is a man in Christ now. He lives in Lancaster, a Mennonite, but not an Amishman.

If the best books make us think deeply about ourselves and our experiences, this may just be the best book I have read all year.

The preacher is at fault

kw: christian faith, faith healing, false prophets

I purposely avoid most matters of politics and faith in this blog. The Schaible case must be an exception.

The facts of the case are simple. Herbert and Catherine Schaible of Philadelphia had seven children. When the two-year-old caught a cold, they prayed. When the cold got worse, they had church leaders come pray with them. They had been taught, at the First Century Gospel Church, that obtaining medical help is a sin; that they must rely on God alone. I suppose they have since been told, "God answered, 'No.'," because the child died of pneumonia. They were found guilty of manslaughter and have been sentenced to about ten years in prison.

This unfortunate couple is innocent of the criminal charge. They are only guilty of following a false prophet. Most Christians regard medical treatments as gifts of God. I am sure glad a surgeon was available to cure me of my cancer ten years ago. Luke was a physician. Paul advised Timothy to settle an upset stomach with "a little wine", rather than with prayer alone. If you break a bone, it makes sense to set it with a splint. Then pray for faster healing, but prayer alone won't make you able to walk on an unsplinted broken leg.

I serve a small congregation as one of the elders. A family came several years ago, and as it happened, the man had been a surgeon, but gave it up when he came to have the opinion that medicine is sinful. We let him know that we would not allow such teaching in our church. Naturally, they went elsewhere.

The one who is most at fault is the false teacher who misinformed the Schaibles.

What price Jesus?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, devotional, exhortation, christian faith

Having reviewed nearly 600 books in this web log, it is rare that I encounter a new genre. A family friend has given me a book she wrote and self-published, which is a combination of devotional and exhortation, with the emphasis on exhortation. Is Jesus Your Pearl? by Karen Knoettner is published by Xulon Press, which helps new Christian authors print their first books. We know Karen because she taught piano to both our son and myself, beginning seven or eight years ago. She is a dear Christian woman about midway in age between numba-one-son and me.

First, let's get a doctrinal quibble out of the way. Matthew 13:44-46 reads (NIV), "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it."

Strictly speaking, in the context of this chapter on the Kingdom of Heaven, the treasure, composed primarily of gemstones, refers to the transformation of the people of God, even though they are living in the world (the field); the pearl refers to the church as the composition of redeemed persons. For the church, represented by these two valuable things, Christ gave his life (everything he had) and poured out His Spirit (on Pentecost).

There is, however, a significant interpretive principle, that those who follow Jesus walk in His footsteps and experience what He experienced. In particular, Paul wrote (Colossians 1:24, NIV), "Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church." Does this sound like heresy? What could be lacking of the afflictions of Christ? He was afflicted for our redemption, and we cannot share in that, but he was also afflicted for the sake of building the Body, and we do share in that. This is a strong aspect of our purchasing the Pearl of great price. That Pearl is not just Christ singly, but Christ corporately, Christ in His Body the church.

In her book, Mrs. Knoettner relates her own experiences of learning to hold Jesus as that most precious Pearl, her "first love." Near the end of the book, she recalls the second epistle to Ephesus (Revelation 2:1-7), in which the Lord complains that the church as lost her first love (for Him). This is very relevant for us today, as the author makes plain throughout the book.

I confess that the level of devotion she expresses made me uncomfortable. It reminded me of what I have gradually lost as I have "mellowed" with age. Oh, we are not supposed to age in our love for the Lord! My early Christian experience was among people who delighted to be "crazy lovers of Jesus". I am a quieter person now, and sometimes that's simply not good.

Though the book is not large, the author packs a lot in. Chapter 8, "Lessons from the Oyster ... A Pearl is Born!!", is particularly precious. A pearl grows because of an injury or irritant to the oyster (The irritant is often a small parasite, a point she doesn't mention, but it is telling!). The oyster uses nacre to overlay the irritant, layer after layer, very slowly. This represents, first, God's longsuffering, culminating in the cross to redeem His people; then, it represents our longsuffering as we "take up the cross", bearing all things for the sake of loving God and His people. Paradoxically, this brings us closer and closer to Jesus.

Yet, obtaining this Pearl is not all about suffering, by no means. Pearls are beautiful. We gain much grace from continual contact with God, and grace is enjoyable. Simply put, we enjoy God. I like to call grace, "God's anesthetic." When we enjoy God, day after day, many things that may once have seemed great sufferings pass almost unnoticed. Further, relations among fellow church members improve in measure, which pleases our Lord, who paid so much to obtain that church.

I do hope many of my Christian friends will enjoy this book as much as I did. Simply search for "knoettner pearl" to locate a source.

Will the real Messiah please arise

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, religion, christian faith

The apostle Paul, speaking on Mars' Hill in Athens, was just warming to his subject: "...For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead." When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject." (Acts 17:31-32)

Every message the Apostles spoke, as recorded in Acts, refers to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It is a constant theme mentioned in nearly every Epistle, and the Gospels record that Jesus told his disciples beforehand, on at least three occasions, that he would die and be raised.

Many years ago, I shared many things with a classmate in graduate school, an atheist. We could discuss anything with relative equanimity, but when I spoke of the resurrection, his outraged response was, "Do you really believe that?!?" In time, he also believed, and is an active Christian to this day.

Nothing has changed in about 1,975 years. Huge amounts of energy are being spent, in the form of scholarship, publishing, public speaking and debates, in an effort to dissuade people from believing the Bible, or Jesus, or His resurrection. The resurrection gets the most attention, because, as Paul said, it is God's proof that Jesus is our redeemer and is to be our Judge.

Stripped down to essentials, the conclusion of the Gospel message is this: In yourself, you know you cannot afford the penalty for sin. You need a redeemer. Jesus is the redeemer. He died to pay the penalty for you. He resurrected to prove the power of His redemption. He is also the Judge, and his resurrection also indicates his appointment to judge all who have not accepted His redemption.

Some may think, if they stand before God one day, they can say, "You don't know how it is, being human. Life is hard. Temptation is strong. You can't hold me to your standard." But when they look at the Judge, they will see the Son of Man, with the wounds still visible in his hands, and know that He can say, "I am as human as you are. I was tempted in every way that you were, and more besides. These wounds paid for your sin, and bought you forgiveness, which you rejected. Now it it too late."

When it comes down to it, "atheists" are actually "anti-theists". They know that any righteous God will not agree with many things in their life; they know that morality is not relative, and that they are sinful (Those who have no such feeling are psychopaths). Preferring to run their own life, they deny the existence of any god. Their unbelief does not make God nonexistent, and the anger they exhibit when reminded of God shows that their conscience disagrees with their conclusion.

Lee Strobel was once an atheist. Educated in journalism and law, working as a journalist and legal editor, he embarked on an investigative journalism project, to determine what is the objective evidence for Jesus and His claims to be the Christ and the Redeemer. In 1981 he became a believer, and his studies eventually led to The Case for Christ.

Now, as a new tide of anti-Jesus publishing and rhetoric grows, he has investigated the worth of the attacks against Christian beliefs. In The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ, he focuses on six challenges to faith.

It should come as no surprise that he concludes these challenges are without merit. Given his character and educational background, however, he didn't simply set up straw men to be napalmed at leisure. Rather, he gathered the strongest and best arguments made in each area, and in interviews with the most renowned scholars in each area, he has challenged them with the anti-faith material and reported their responses. It is compelling reading, indeed.

The book closes with a summary, wrapping up the six facets of the case. I could cop out and copy those two pages here, but instead, I'll present a shorter summary. After all, it really is best that you read Strobel for yourself.

• Challenge #1 Scholars are uncovering a radically different Jesus in ancient documents just as credible as the four Gospels. Actually, I've read most of this "credible" material; it is incredible. The Gospels by Matthew and John were written by men who traveled with Jesus for more than three years and witnessed him in resurrection. Luke was written from interviews with eyewitnesses, and Mark was written from messages and stories told by Peter to Mark or in his presence. All the other "Gospels" (of Thomas or Mary or Judas) were written at least two or three generations later, and attributed falsely to people already dead for fifty to 150 years. If the attribution is a lie, what about the content?
• Challenge #2 The Bible's portrait of Jesus can't be trusted because the church tampered with the text. I have on my desk A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament by Bruce M. Metzger. This 775-page volume discusses every textual point of controversy encountered by those who produced the Third Edition of the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament. I got it at the recommendation of Bart Ehrman, a "former evangelical", now an apostate. He claims there are hundreds of thousands of variations between New Testament manuscripts, a product of inflated attribution: If 500 manuscripts record "He said" and 400 record "He says", Bart counts 400 "differences", where a manuscript scholar would count one. Nearly all experts in Bible manuscripts, believer and skeptic alike, agree that all but a very few manuscript variations are minor and don't alter the sense of the passage. Not even the more major variations produce a text that denies the divinity of Jesus, His resurrection, or the effectiveness of His redemption. My own studies bear this out. The fact is, we have better manuscript support for the New Testament than we have for any of the Greek plays or biographies. We have documents produced by people who saw Jesus, alive, dead, and alive again. The oldest biography of Alexander the Great was written 300 years after he died (and stayed dead).
• Challenge #3 New Explanations have refuted Jesus' resurrection. What explanations? If God exists, He is able to do things none of our science can account for. If He does not, then there could not have been a resurrection. There are five facts that go together on this subject, that are among the most well-established facts of history: Jesus died by crucifixion; his disciples believed that he rose and appeared to them (note, this belief is the historical fact here); Saul the persecutor of the church was converted and became Paul the apostle by encountering the risen Christ; Jesus' half brother James, initially a skeptic, was also converted by meeting Christ in resurrection; and all, friendly and hostile witness alike, attested that His tomb was empty (the religious leaders paid a high bribe to persuade the guards of the tomb to testify that they'd fallen asleep, which was a capital offense).
• Challenge #4 Christianity's beliefs about Jesus were copied from pagan religions.It was shown a century ago that the pagan religions had no elements resembling the redemption and resurrection of Jesus, until the second Century AD or later; if anything, they were the plagiarists. Now that those books are out of print, ignorant scholars are reincarnating old, discredited news.
• Challenge #5 Jesus was an imposter who failed to fulfill the Messianic prophecies. This again hinges on the resurrection. If Jesus is still dead, he is a shameful failure. By rising from the dead, he turned a supposed failure into the greatest of triumphs, proving that He and He alone is the Redeemer and Judge. There are a couple hundred statements in the Old Testament that are considered to be Messianic prophecies by the Jewish scholars who wrote the Talmud. Of those which had to be fulfilled while the temple was in existence, every one is shown to be fulfilled by Jesus. A somewhat smaller number remain to be fulfilled, and much of the New Testament contains supporting predictions that they will be fulfilled when Jesus returns in a "second coming" to Christians, and as "the one whom they pierced" to the Jews.
• Challenge #6 People should be fre to pick and choose what to believe about Jesus. This is as good a definition as any of syncretism, which I call "Adding a nicey-nice Jesus to your bag of tricks." Jesus in the Bible spoke of sin and judgment, and warned of hell, about as often as he spoke of love and compassion. He is no milquetoast! Yet it is quite strange that the "Jesus" believed in by syncretists would never do or say something so gauche. Moral relativism and historical revisionism have been around for thousands of years. I once said to someone who said sex should be 'totally free', "OK, will you send your little daughter to my house to spend the night? I'd like a 'comfort companion'." His reaction proved that morality isn't relative. I suspect he was equally uninterested in anyone taking "comfort" from his older, adult daughter, or his wife.

The multitudes that are taken in by the sloppy historical thinking embodied in these challenges simply points up the educational crisis. If people were simply educated—a single day would do it—in the basic criteria of historical credibility, they would be harder to deceive, whether by clever politicians or amoral apologists.

Lee Strobel is an effective apologist for Christian faith. See his web site for a video-rich perusal of these issues and more.

Living the Kingdom of God in the 21st Century

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, christian faith, spirituality

About a hundred years ago, God began moving among young Chinese, many with a British or American missionary upbringing. Some, like Henry Nee (later Watchman Nee), were from third or fourth-generation Christian families. Once they began to follow Christ as teenagers and young adults, they asked, as young Christians do everywhere, "Why are there so many competing 'churches'?" and "Why are God's people so inert?"

Nee and his coworkers, primarily Witness Lee by the late 1930s, were used of God to recover a church life and practice that was nearly unknown among Western Christians, and remains very little known today. The local church life, based on oneness in any locality, on the indwelling Spirit of Christ, and on the vital actions of every member, produce a revolution among Christians in China and throughout the Far East since the 1920s, and in America and Western Europe since the 1950s.

Historically, the difficulty with retaining the freshness of any move of God centers on the lukewarmness that enters with the third or fourth generation. The first generation can often gain their children in large numbers, but the generations following gradually lose the first love, and the sad history of Ephesus is repeated: God warned them in "Second Ephesians", found in Revelation 2, that they were at risk of losing the lampstand, the testimony. God's testimony requires love. Ephesus did lose their testimony, and the city exists no longer.

I entered the local church life in 1972, and have since participated in the second, third, and fourth generations of its expression in the United States. That fourth generation is embodied in the grandchildren of my generation, and their condition is very sad. Fresh love for the Lord is very scarce. They find "church" boring. We are at risk of becoming just another denomination.

We once thought we would be the generation that saw the Lord's return. Now we are not so sure. I have sometimes asked myself and others, "If the Lord sets us aside and turns to others, what will it look like, and how will we know?" Privately (and now publicly, since you are reading this), I believe that from our side it looks like what we see around us in the local churches I know. There are wonderful things happening in a few localities, and there is much joy among us who have known one another for so many years, but we see the darkness falling.

From others' side, what it looks like just may be the experiences presented by Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution: living as an ordinary radical. These people are at a stage similar to the young Chinese brothers in the 1920s, and the church life I experienced in the 1970s in California. At that same time, however, there was a lot of activity called at the time "The Jesus Movement," which came to nothing. I hope these folks do better than that.

When I got the book, I didn't notice the Zondervan imprint. I wasn't actually expecting a Christian testimony, it was just strange enough to be my "wild card" book this time around. What I got was a breath of fresh air. People of God everywhere are casting deadness aside and trying out the dangerous freshess of living what they see in Acts and the Epistles. God likes that.

Oh, I could quibble with some of the author's interpretations. I'll just mention one, because this understanding and the vision that accompanied it were largely responsible for the turn I made in 1972. Most believers think the parables in Matthew about the mustard tree and about the leaven in the dough are positive, something to do with the growth of the faith. The saints in L.A. helped me see, by showing me the mustard on the hillsides, and its use as a salad herb, that the great tree grows contrary to its nature. The "fowls" nesting in it represent evil things coming in as a result. Thus, this parable and the one following, of the leaven, predict the damage the so-called Church will do as it grows in power rather than life. The evil birds and the sinful rebellion and pride (leaven) contaminate the testimony of Christ (the gentle herb and the fine flour). This is important to me, but God can use someone regardless how they interpret these particular parables.

Author Claiborne and his companions in Christ are, as my companions and I did thirty years ago, "being the church" and "doing the church". Read the book, then read more at the simple way. If you dare, visit the Kensington area of Philadelphia and see for yourself.