Glad to Have Waited

Around 12:30pm today, Cindi called during a meeting to tell me that Judah’s custody papers are on their way from Uganda!  Lord-willing they’ll arrive in Texas sometime before the weekend or on Monday, and from there they’ll be overnighted to Santa Clarita where we and the other families will turn them in to INS.  We hope this is the final piece of the puzzle that INS wants in place in order for them to approve our application.  If they do, the last major step is getting a court date prepared and scheduled in Uganda.

Getting the custody papers signed has been the biggest hurdle we’ve faced so far.  Waiting for Judah’s birth certificate took a little bit longer than waiting for his custody papers, but walking the labyrinth of the custody papers situation has been much more painstaking and much less predictable.  Over the past month or two Cindi and I had gotten to the point of acknowledging the possibility that we might never get Judah, and if we did, it could take months or even years.  This was simply a realistic possibility that had to be considered.

It made no human sense why the custody papers weren’t getting signed.  I won’t go into the details, but there simply was no reasonable explanation.  The effect this had on us was to turn our hearts to the God who promises that He has reasons for all that He does and all that He does not do and all that He waits to do.  His reasons are often invisible, but His promises are always clear as day.

And just as it made no human sense why the custody papers took so long to get signed, there also was no human rationale for why they are now signed and in the mail.  What caused the official to simply sign his name now instead of three months ago?  If someone in the process wanted a bribe, why the change of heart now?  Why did God not cause us to wait another three months?  Was God waiting to teach us some specific things before giving us our heart’s desire?  If so, what are those things?  How many other people was He teaching through this process, and what was He teaching them?  How will He use what they learned in the future?  Is God preparing us for harder situations down the road by building endurance in us now?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, and although I would like to know, I don’t need to know.  What I do know, though, is that sovereignty is not a book to be read but a foundation to stand upon.  My responsibility is not to decipher the eternal language of providence but to grow in my appreciation of its beauty and intricacy and trustworthiness.

God has taught us and many others to pray and to trust and to wait throughout this situation.  We would not have learned this to the same extent if everything had gone “smoothly.”  Had God simply orchestrated events in such a way that every part of the process happened in predictable, time-sensitive, culturally-acceptable, desired ways, I would have assumed His goodness and presumed upon His power instead of learning and embracing them.  Had He walked us down a straight, paved path, I would not have felt like I needed His guidance.  Had He directed events according to my expectations, I would have felt like the process was natural.  As it is, I have no doubt that it was supernatural.

Our son is one step closer to us, but he is not here yet.  And I dare not presume upon God to do what we want Him to do when we want Him to do it.  We are not His counselors.  He has not recently asked us for our recommendations.  He has asked for our faith and our joy and our perseverance and our believing prayers and our patient waiting.  And I trust that He will not give us what we want from Him until He gets what He wants from us.  Even more, He will not immediately give us what we want from Him so that we will learn to want the most important things from Him.  Finally, He will not give us what we want from Him so that we learn to want Him.  Then everything that we want, we will want because of Him and for His sake.

I am overjoyed to know that Judah’s custody papers are in the mail.  This is a day of celebration.  But the foundation of our happiness is not that we have what we’ve been waiting for, but that God has been faithful to multiply our joy by teaching us to wait and to find our rest in Him.  I am glad that Judah’s custody papers are in the mail.  But I am also glad to have waited.

Lessons in Evangelism

Kirk Cameron was the guest speaker in my Apologetics & Evangelism seminary class yesterday.  He’s one of the leaders of The Way of the Master, a ministry that does evangelism and trains Christians to evangelize by using the law (specifically the Ten Commandments) to show people their need for the gospel.  There are theological questions I have about this method, but there’s no question that Kirk and his partners are preaching the pure gospel of Jesus Christ more than most people out there.  Here are a few highlights from class:

1. Kirk began the class by asking for a volunteer who would come up and share the gospel with him for a couple minutes as though he (Kirk) were a classic atheist.  Out of sixty-plus seminary students who know the gospel backward and forward, zero volunteered (including me).  I don’t know if Kirk planned on this, but he used it as an object lesson to show us a simple point: We’re scared to share the gospel.  Think about that for a minute: We’re scared to share the gospel.

2. Our main obstacle to sharing the gospel (whether it be door-to-door or in a relationship or to a family member or on a missions trip) is not lack of knowledge but fear.  And I actually think that fear is not even the main obstacle.  I think the main obstacle (at least for me) is even uglier and more frightening.  But fear is shameful enough. 

3. Kirk asked this question: If Bill Gates were to offer you $1,000 for every time you shared the gospel tomorrow, how many people do you think you’d try to talk to?  He then made this point: We could deal with our fear of people for the love of money but we can’t seem to do it for the love of God.

4. Nothing energizes your walk with God like sharing the wonderful news of salvation with others.  This isn’t the main motivation for sharing the gospel, and I would never talk about evangelism as a tool for personal spiritual growth, but it may be one reason why many people are spiritual stagnant.

5. The main way to overcome fear in evangelism is compassion.  There are other ways of overcoming fear that Kirk mentioned, and there are some other essential ones that I would emphasize, too, but I think that compassion is fundamental.  Compassion implies self-forgetfulness, and self-forgetfulness eliminates selfish fear.

I don’t necessarily agree with every emphasis in the above points.  But I do think that all of them have a lot of truth to them.  And I’ve realized that when I start to criticize someone who’s active in pure-gospel evangelism because I don’t agree with his methodology, I need to shut up and ask myself if I have a deep enough love for God and for Christ and for the hell-bound lost that I’m doing anything about it.  Because the reality is that Kirk Cameron is sharing the gospel constantly with the lost because he understands God’s heartbeat and God’s purpose in the world.  So I may agree or disagree with some of his wisdom principles or his methodology or his emphasis, but he puts me to shame with his activity.

(Last night I got to hear a missionary from France talk about evangelism, too, and he had some insights that came from a different and very good angle.  I hope to have time to share those soon, as well.)

Welcome to Raw Christianity

Welcome to Raw Christianity.  This site is new in that it’s freshly designed and newly launched.  But it’s really just a continuation of my old blog.  I’ve taken everything I ever posted at the old site and transferred it here, so this blog looks like it’s been around since 2004.

I’ve been working on this site since July but have been waiting until it was finished to announce it.  I’ve realized over time that it’s never going to be finished, though, so I’m scrapping that perfectionistic plan and making the change.

You’ll notice that there are no links or recent articles or archives or categories on the sidebar.  That’s because this template doesn’t have that option, and despite that lack, I liked this template a little better than the others I saw.  You can find a few recommended links by clicking on “Blogroll” at the top of the page.  You can get to the archives the same way, or you can scroll down to the very bottom of the page.  As if my long-winded verbosity needed archiving so you can have something else not to read.

I’ve included some poems that I’ve written along with a brief background for each one.  I do this not because I consider myself a burgeoning poet and want you to be aware of that, but because I believe that poetry is one of the most beautiful ways to communicate truth and one of the most powerful ways to inspire the soul and one of the most uplifting ways to encourage the faint-hearted.  I think it’s too easy to be self-conscious about one’s writing, to keep it hidden away, and perhaps even to indulge in private, finger-licking pride about a secret gift or a hidden hobby.  I don’t want to think like that.  I just want to do my best to encourage, exhort, and challenge my brothers and sisters towards living for and finishing the radical mission of Jesus.  Poetry is simply one way I try to do that.  I don’t try mainly to be profound but to write things that are (1) true, (2) clear, and (3) striking.

Some of you may have already guessed where the title picture is from.  If you haven’t yet, take a look at it and give it a shot before you read the next few sentences.  I took it at sunset on a striking evening in June 2005.  I was standing with Cindi on the Mount of Olives overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem and I zoomed all the way in to the flaming oranges and reds that were backlighting the city.  This picture has always reminded me of the jagged, rugged, burning, enduring passion of Jesus which was seen most clearly in this dark city where He wept and bled and died for the sins of the world.  It always reminds me that Christianity is raw because Jesus was no joke.

Raw Christianity is a phrase that the Lord emblazoned on my mind a few years ago in my 2nd or 3rd year as a Resident Director at The Master’s College (where I’m still ministering).  I remember exactly where I was and who I was with when it came to mind.  I was sharing in an RD meeting at Erin Johnston’s house (now Erin Klang) about my own battle with spiritual hypocrisy and externally-driven Christianity.  I felt like I clearly saw this whitewashed religiosity in my own life, and I didn’t like it.  I still don’t.

I said that what I’ve always wanted to be is someone who doesn’t seek to be a polished disciple or a smooth Christian but who is authentic and on-edge and full of faith and biblical risk-taking.  I don’t want my life to be full of monotone prayers and programmed evangelism and dull worship and bland confessions and dutiful quiet times and shallow relationships and American comforts and spineless choices.  I want to be aggressively Christian.  I want to have a Bible-soaked mind and an unwavering endurance and a tireless passion and a trembling fear of God.  I want prophetic boldness and relentless love and an unstoppable drive to obey the commands of Christ.  I want an unmistakable compassion for God-rejectors, a piercing sense of the reality of heaven and hell, and an unceasing desire to see the glory of God fill the earth like the waters fill the sea.

Jesus didn’t do status quo obedience or spiritual mediocrity or political correctness.  He wasn’t even religiously correct.  What He did was the will of His Father, with a rugged and unfailing commitment to turn neither to the right nor to the left.  From His affections to His actions, from His practice to His preaching, from His life to His death, He was for real.  And I want, so badly, to be like Him.

I don’t want polished Christianity.  I don’t want social Christianity.  I don’t want cosmetic Christianity.  I want Raw Christianity.  I have been realizing that since a few months after I became a believer, I shared about it in that memorable RD meeting a few years ago, and I feel no differently tonight.

This blog is not a therapeutic exercise for me.  I don’t write to get things off my chest or to rant or to criticize.  I’ve always thought those were very empty and destructive reasons for blogging.  Rather, I hope to encourage a genuine pursuit of Christ that’s defined by what He did and said, not by cultural trends or religious traditions.  I don’t know how well I’ll do that, but that’s my aim.

So welcome to Raw Christianity.  I pray that what’s written here will always represent the teaching and the passion of our Savior.

Personal Thoughts about Jesus from John Piper

During his recent sabbatical in Cambridge, John Piper wrote a new book entitled What Jesus Demands from the World.  He spent almost three months huddling under the interrogating light of Jesus’ commands in the gospels, and then wrote what he learned.  This past Friday night at the DesiringGod National Conference, he was asked how this process affected him (the complete Q&A session is here).  I’ve transcribed the interchange:

Justin Taylor to John Piper:  Pastor John, I wanted to start with you… You spent two months this summer looking at the commands of Jesus in the gospels and poring over every word that Jesus said, and I want to ask you:  In this postmodern climate, in today’s culture, what did that do for your own soul, spending that much time with the words of Christ; anything personally that you learned, that you took away from that time, or were you changed by doing that exercise?

John Piper:  It’s a devastating thing, first, to expose yourself to five hundred imperatives in the gospels and dozens and dozens of demands from the one who has all authority in heaven and on earth, because His standards are so radical, meaning they go to the root of all your behaviors.  He’s not concerned primarily with what’s on the outside, but He’s always pressing down into the bottom—“unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees” (and their problem was that they were whitewashed tombs).  And so, it was always going deep.  So it was eleven weeks or so of having my heart exposed to its anger or its impatience or its unforgiveness, and clamoring then for the second impression, namely, “the Son of Man came into the world not to be served but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many;” “I didn’t come to call the righteous, but sinners.”  So you have this radical demand running side by side with these spectacular offers of mercy for those who will be the publican and despair of [their] own righteousness instead of the Pharisee who’s thanking God that he’s worked any righteousness and is going to bank on it in the judgment day.  So there was hope and there was desolation, and if I understand the gospels right, that’s the way it’s supposed to happen.

I think the personal effect was to intensify my desire to be in the face of a pluralistic world and say as publicly and as provocatively as I can that all authority in the universe belongs to Jesus Christ.  It doesn’t belong to Mohammed and it doesn’t belong to any Hindu god and it doesn’t belong to Moses.  It belongs to Jesus Christ, and if you don’t bow the knee to Him, you will perish.  And so we need to proclaim that God is angry at the whole world—if you don’t obey the Son, the wrath of God rests on you.  And so there was just a sense that there’s so much mealy-mouthed hesitancy to talk about the most important things in the world, namely, getting right with a holy God who will crush you forever if you don’t go to the Son that He provided.

I just came away feeling like I just don’t want to play games anymore.  Life is short; I don’t know how long I have.

Jesus, as He stands forth in the gospels, is spectacularly supreme and beautiful and glorious and tough and tender and worthy and attractive and satisfying—why wouldn’t you want to give your life to this?

Quotes are from Matthew 5:20, 20:28, and 9:13.