by Steve | Jan 4, 1981 | Archive - 1981
Archive: Some Helps to Meditation
by J. W Mahood
Reprinted from his book “The Lost Art of Meditation” ©Fleming H. Revell, 1911. Used by permission.
The art of meditation must be learned. There is no possibility of stumbling upon it by chance. There is no royal course of ease to its gateway. Its blessed paths are trodden only by those who have toiled along many a tiresome road. But God, in His goodness, has provided so many helps for him who seeks this way that all who want to know its joy may do so.
There is one Companion and only one for the pathway of meditation, and that is the Holy Spirit. His company is indispensable. He knows the way and is ever willing to guide us. “Some place their religion in books,” says Thomas a Kempis, “some in images, some in the pomp and splendour of external worship, but some with illuminated understandings heareth what the Holy Spirit speaketh in their hearts.”
His mission is to reveal Christ and so open the eyes of our understanding that the crucified and risen Savior shall be all in all to us. He makes us sensible, too, of the nearness and reality of the spiritual world. The more we have of the Spirit’s companionship the more responsive we are to spiritual things. The eye sees more clearly the deep things of God, and the ear is more sensitive to the voice of God.
It is said that at the siege of Lucknow [India] the first person to know of the near approach of the British troops marching to the rescue of the city was a little girl whose senses had become so keen through long illness that she heard the highland pipers while they were yet miles away. And he whose spiritual senses have been made keen by companionship with the Holy Spirit in hours of meditation and prayer will have such keenness of spiritual sight and hearing that he will sense victory from a distance, and will always recognize the earliest signs of Gospel triumph.
The Holy Spirit makes use of the Bible in the hour of meditation. “Behold, I will pour out My Spirit unto you, I will make known My words unto you.” “But when the Comforter is come,” said Jesus, “which is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”
George Matheson, in his inimitable and devout way, says: “There are words lying in thy memory which are not yet revealed to thee—holy words, sacred words, words learned at a mother’s knee, but whose beauty is by thee as yet unfelt, unseen. When the Spirit comes the old words will come to thee as something new. Thou shalt marvel at what thou hast passed by unnoticed on the way. Thou shalt wonder at the richness of the Lord’s Prayer, at the power of the Sermon on the Mount, at the tenderness of the story of a prodigal son. Thou shalt be surprised at the melody of old psalms, thrilled by the novelty of familiar incidents, stirred by the freshness of well-known passages. To him who is a new creature, old things are all made new; the mind that was empty to the eye of sense, to the spirit reveals gold.”
The Holy Spirit makes use of good books to enrich the hour of meditation. There are a number of spiritual classics which should be in the home of every growing Christian. Prominent among these is “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas a Kempis. In spite of its deep note of pessimism and its dark pictures of this world, yet, outside the Bible, perhaps no other book has been such a permanent inspiration to real spiritual worship and heart devotion. …
Every Christian home should have, if possible, a supply of [good] devotional books … and a part of the quiet hour should be given to their perusal. It is to the shame of many Christian homes that one finds in the home library so much of the sentimental and trashy fiction of the day, and so little of the great classical spiritual literature.
The Holy Spirit uses the biographies of godly men and women to make helpful the hour of meditation. In Auguste Comte’s calendar he proposes that each day we should meditate on the life of some benefactor of humanity to whom that day’s thoughts should be devoted. Here and there on the mountain peaks of Christian history have stood men and women of mighty faith in God, and to whom God has revealed Himself in wonderful power and blessing. To study these lives and meditate on their devotion and heroism will almost surely steady wavering feet and lift up hands that hang down.
Take, for instance, the life of John the Scot, who wrote, “There are as many unveilings of God as there are saintly souls.” Living in the days of the Norse invaders, and when European civilization was at low ebb, this Irish scholar was “one of the torch bearers in the long line of teachers of mystical religion.” His Christian polemics might be studied with great spiritual profit in our own day. Some things will be found that have upon them the mustiness of the darkened age in which he lived. But in many things he was far in advance of his time. His voice was lifted against the encroaching materialism and the corruption of the church. He was condemned by church councils, and his writings confiscated, but he was one of God’s own heroes. …
And the history of the Christian Church will be found to contain the record of many a noble life, the study of which will greatly enrich the hours of meditation, and leave its permanent spiritual impress on the life.
And now, O Blessed Spirit, teach me the way of holy meditation! Then shall I have the open vision. I seem now so often to have to feel my way in the dark. Give me the undimmed eye of faith.
I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
No sudden rending of this veil of clay;
No angel visitant, no opening skies
But take the dimness of my soul away.
Too often spiritual things appear as mere shadows. May I begin to see that they are the great realities of life. Show me, O Lord, how to open the door of heavenly contemplation, and then, in the “secret of His presence,” I shall come to know better the reality and authority of the spiritual. Make me a mystic in the highest and best sense of that much misunderstood word. May I come to know the hidden things of God. Thou hast said that “the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him.” Thou knowest, O Lord, that I fear Thee and love Thee. But I want to know Thee better and love Thee more. Therefore I wait at Thy feet, and plead for Thy mercy. Be gracious, Lord, even unto me, and “let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.” Amen.
by Steve | Jan 3, 1981 | Archive - 1981
Archive: Preach Yourself a Sermon
Taken from Talking About Prayer
by Richard Bewes@1979 and used by permission of lnterVarsity Press.
Ever tried preparing a sermon? Perhaps not. But have you ever tried preparing a sermon for your own consumption? This is roughly what Christian meditation is. It is allied to prayer, but distinct from it. In the words of Archbishop Anthony Bloom, ‘Meditation is an activity of thought, while prayer is the rejection of every [distracting] thought.’ Which, when you think about it, is true. When praying, you are engaged in a battle against the intrusion of outside thoughts, so that full concentration may be given to God.
But in meditation, thought plays a very full part. Most of us westerners don’t really know how to use silence. There is a constant clattering around us for much of the day. We find ourselves chattering and talking, as though life were one great cocktail party. Indeed there are many who, one suspects, are such compulsive and opinionated talkers that by their very garrulity they shut themselves out of God’s Kingdom, never giving themselves a chance to stop, listen, and think.
We are so conditioned that for much of the time our thoughts are knocking haphazardly around, like bumper cars at a funfair. Meditation is the art of channeling thought in a single direction. Is it productive? Very. Back in the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton, when praised for his great contribution to our understanding of the universe, remarked, “I had no special sagacity—only the power of patient thought.” He made his discoveries, he said, “by keeping a subject constantly before me until the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.”
The Kikuyu people of Kenya have a good word to describe this activity. It is the word meciria (mesh-eeria). By it is meant more than simply thoughts. It means thoughts with a difference, directed, powerful, original thoughts.
Bring this into the Christian context, and we’re talking of a kind of applied thinking which has changed and shaped society repeatedly in the last 2,000 years. For by Christian meditation we mean reflection and thought which is channeled and guided by God.
Malcolm Muggeridge once made the point that the most vital elements in the Christian story are those which, over the centuries, have stemmed from dissidence rather than agreement. Luther and Wesley are prime examples of this phenomenon. Here were men—and there have been many of them—who were able to pick up a seed thought, absorb it, study it, and then communicate it—even against the established thinking of the time—and society was changed as a result.
How can we ensure that the seed thought is truly from God? We are right to be wary of the many meditation groups that have mushroomed around the world in the last few years. It is possible to lose your own identity and to fall prey to strange and even demonic powers by the thoughtless opening of your mind. And the technique, advocated in Transcendental Meditation, of reciting a meaningless word to oneself, implies the absence of true relationship, the absence of any real personality in God Himself. Christ’s way is to resist the technique of reciting mantras as a way to God. “When you pray,” He urged, “do not use a lot of meaningless words, as the pagans do” (Matthew 6:7). Meditation ought not to take place in a vacuum.
Your thinking is like your radio listening. Tuning is required. And while technique is not of the essence, nevertheless we value a few familiar landmarks on the radio dial—even if only the X of Luxembourg, or the Y of Sony! Similarly in meditation, we need a few handles to grab hold of. Without those handles our thoughts are undisciplined, untuned, and unproductive. One married couple I knew, both fresh to the Christian faith, began with Bible page numbers. “That was a nice bit, Brian, on page 240 of the Good News Bible!” It was only later that they got into the swing of books, chapters, and verses.
How then do you meditate?
You take a thought from the Bible. It may have occurred in a passage from your regular reading of the Bible. It stands out somewhat from the page. You take it and begin to “chew” it over in your mind. It may not be a hefty chunk, perhaps only a sentence, a word sometimes.
“I thirst.” I remember meditating on this phrase one Good Friday. It was spoken by our Lord, while He was dying on the cross. I tried to let my mind revolve around these words, much as one might walk round a chandelier, picking out first one shaft of color and then another as a different facet presented itself. The agony of dying in a sun-baked city in the Middle East, exposed to the crowd, the hostility, the flies. The reflection that He had chosen this way, in accordance with the Father’s will, so that the Scripture from Psalm 22 might be fulfilled:
My strength is gone,
Gone like water spilt on the ground.
All my bones are out of joint;
My heart is like melted wax.
My throat is as dry as dust
And my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
Anything else about Christ, and thirst? Yes, He had come to satisfy people’s thirst. Wasn’t it somewhere in John’s Gospel? Hadn’t I heard a sermon on it? … The woman at the well! Jesus had said to her, “Whoever drinks the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again ” (John 4:13). And now here He was … thirsty. Then, Good Friday’s message is that by His dying thirst, Christ provides a way of satisfying the thirst of the world. Thirst … for what?
I remembered a biography I’d once read about the evangelist George Whitefield. As a young man, searching desperately for peace of mind and soul, he’d recalled the words “I thirst,” and reflected that they were uttered just before Christ’s own anguish came to an end. Whitefield himself had cried out in helpless despair, “I thirst!”—and peace, forgiveness, and integration had flooded in.
Thirst. … Do Christians thirst? I remembered reading another biography—about D.L. Moody who, although committed as a Christian leader, was thirsting for more of Christ’s Spirit and filling in his life. Had he found fulfillment at the hands of Christ? A sentence from the biography floated hazily back into my mind: “The dead dry days were gone. I was all the time tugging and carrying water. But now I have a river that carries me.” Lord, if you can do that for the woman you met at the well, if you can do it for Whitefield and for Moody, then you can do it today. Thank you for the thirst you endured—for me.
What was I doing? Preaching a sermon on two words only, just to myself. And now it was beginning to turn into prayer. I find that a helpful pattern of Christian meditation. It need not be a prolonged activity at all. Two, perhaps three minutes are enough, initially. These can grow naturally into something rather longer as progress is made. Such seed thoughts can be taken into the day, and meditated upon yet again at different moments. Indeed, they can help to shape the very day itself—and the life.
I once heard an eminent psychiatrist give a lecture. Some 70 of us were listening to him. He told us that the therapy he suggests for many of his patients is an exercise in Christian meditation last thing at night before dropping off to sleep. A seed thought, something to reflect on, something that can, even during sleep, get to work upon the subconscious.
“You know the uncanny way in which you can so often will yourself to wake up early, simply by instructing yourself the night before?” he challenged. “It’s the same principle here. I tell my patients to chew over the selected phrase from the Bible as they drift off to sleep. First thing in the morning—there it is again. It’s been with them all night. I wouldn’t claim that they all turned into devout Christians. But one thing I’ve noticed in countless instances. If they kept up the pattern night after night, their whole disposition and outlook at the end of a month was radically, even magically, improved.”
But it’s not magic really. James 1:21 states the principle clearly. “Accept the word that He plants in your hearts, which is able to save you.” The King James version uses the phrase—”the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.” Engrafted—that’s precisely it. It becomes a part of our life and character. Meciria. Deep thoughts, life-changing thoughts. It’s the same thing.
by Steve | Jan 2, 1981 | Archive - 1981
Archive: Is Jesus the Only Way?
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” – John 14:6
by Ralph Martin
Originally published in New Covenant, P.O. Box 8617, Ann Arbor, MI 48107
Reprinted with permission.
One of the central claims of Christianity is that Jesus is the only way by which men and women can find salvation and be reconciled with God. “This Jesus is ‘the stone rejected by you the builders which has become the cornerstone.’ There is no salvation in anyone else, for there is no other name in the whole world given to men by which we are to be saved” (Acts 4:11-12, NAB).
Yet today this claim is questioned, directly and indirectly, by many even in the Christian churches. The result of this questioning is that many Christians are confused about the whole missionary dimension of the Christian church and the grounds on which missionary work is based. Many have begun to think it unreasonable, even unfair, to believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation. Some have begun to think that missionary work should now be focused on helping people live better human lives, rather than on helping them come to repentance, faith in Christ, and baptism.
In a recently published survey of attitudes among Catholic missionaries, one priest in Latin America said that his goal in working with prostitutes and their children was simply human betterment, not conversion. A nun working in Asia said her goal was to awaken people to the benefits of education and to stop the bickering that has prevented them from improving their lives.
Others believe that missionary work should simply help people to live more fully their present beliefs and religion without imposing the Christian view of the world. In Africa last year I met a nun who told me that her goal in working with Muslim people was no longer to invite them to become Christian, but to help them be better Muslims “since there are many ways to God.”
The claim that Jesus is the only way to salvation remains, at least officially in the churches, a central Christian claim. Is this an unreasonable claim to make?
In order to understand whether Jesus is “the answer,” we must first understand the “question.” Precisely what is the need that the human race has for salvation?
One of the primary facts Scripture tells us is that God’s ways are quite different from man’s ways, and that God’s view of man’s situation is quite different from man’s view of his situation. Furthermore, it tells us that God’s ways are the right ways and His views are the accurate ones. So the appropriate attitude for us to take before God is one of silence, of listening, so that we might hear His word and be informed about the truth of our situation and His provisions for it.
As we are quiet before Him and hear His word, we hear Him speak to us about the nature of our situation, our need for salvation, and the way we receive that salvation.
God’s Word tells us that the entire human race is in a state of fundamental rebellion against Him and His ways, a state called sin. This rebellion, this sin, has evil consequences of vast scope. Through this sin and rebellion the human race is now living a cursed existence, subject to disease and, ultimately, death. Through this sin and rebellion, we continue to commit abominations against God Himself and against our fellow humans. Through this sin and rebellion, a host of evil powers, led by a supremely evil genius, Satan, has gained access to the human race and a hold over it. The situation is no longer one of simply human evil, but a much more complex and potent mixture.
Human history is, typically, the history of our greed and fear, anger and hostility: the story of murder on a mass scale, of unfaithfulness, theft, treachery, fornication, homosexuality, adultery, oppression, war, brutality, and all manners of evil. From under the veneer of civilization and of human solutions to problems, the horror of our fallen existence leaps out and makes us ask fundamental questions: What would it take to overcome the evil that allowed civilized Germany to send six million Jews to their deaths? What kind of new humanity has modern, progressive Russia created through the starvation and execution of 60 million of her citizens? What could be offered to the creator as reparation, as recompense, for the hundreds of millions of infants murdered in the womb or strangled on the birth bed through the history of the human race?
How can that race continue to be proud of its progress in the power and subtlety of its abominations throughout the centuries? Even if some men and women, at some times and places, have led somewhat moral lives, what of the rest of us? What of the worship due to God, which many moral men and women withhold? What of the disease that strikes even moral men and women, and the death that takes us all?
It is clear through God’s Word, as we reflect on the situation of our race, that the salvation we are in need of has a number of precise elements.
- The salvation that the human race requires must include pardon for the enormity of its sin, for its fundamental and continued rebellion. This can come only from the One primarily offended, God Himself.
- Repentance, with subsequent forgiveness, must always be accompanied by restitution. The wrong that is done must be made up for, be recompensed for. The human race must somehow make atonement for the weight of its sin.
- The power of Satan and his infernal legions over the human race must be broken.
- Justice must be established; justice that is somehow able to reach backwards in time, beyond death, to right the balance of millennia of oppression and injustice.
- Death and disease must be conquered.
- Men and women must undergo a fundamental change in their natures so that they can live in a way pleasing to God.
The claim of Christianity is that in Jesus Christ all that is required is provided. All the needs are met. God’s Word tells us that through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus sin is forgiven, atonement made, the power of Satan overcome, justice reestablished, death and disease conquered, and men and women born again by the Spirit of God.
Between His first coming and His second coming some of these results of the redemption are experienced only in an initial way. With His second coming all will be fully realized. Already His resurrection and our experience of Pentecost validate His claims as the One sent by God and confirm the truth of His message and mission.
Because Jesus is the Son of Man, fully and truly man, He is able to be our representative and to live, die, and rise on our behalf. Because Jesus is the Son of God, fully and truly God, His life, death, and resurrection have overwhelming value, value to atone for the Auschwitzes and abortion clinics of all the ages, value and power to accomplish all that is required and more.
When we are asked then if there is another way to salvation or reconciliation with God besides Jesus, we ought to ask some questions in return. Does this “other way” truly attempt to deal with the actual requirements of our fallen situation? Does this “other way” effectively deal with the requirements of the situation? Does it make atonement for sin, win pardon, overcome death and Satan, establish justice, recreate the human race? Most importantly, we need to ask on whose authority this “other way” has been established, and who has sent its messengers.
If Jesus is God’s appointed Messiah, then should we not justly call all others who claim this role false messiahs? If Jesus is truly the Prophet sent from God, should we not justly call others who make that claim false prophets? The story of the good shepherd gives us Jesus’ approach to the problem. “Truly I assure you: Whoever does not enter the sheepfold through the gate but climbs in some other way is a thief and a marauder. … I am the gate” (John 10: 1,9).
Jesus is the light of the world. All true light and enlightenment comes from Him and reveals Him. If so-called light does not lead to the perception of Jesus as the Savior of the world, it is either trivial, irrelevant, or not light at all. Jesus thought that light which did not lead people to see Him was better described as darkness. …
The New Testament is clear that all nations and cultures, all human beings, indeed, all of creation, is to submit to Christ, to come under His rule, become part of His body, and be presented by Him to the Father (I Corinthians 15:24-28; Ephesians 1:9-10; Colossians 1:15-20). Scripture is equally clear that in Jesus one finds the full, definitive, and final revelation of God. Jesus, in other words, is presented as the last chance for the human race, as God’s final offer. …
Of course, legitimate questions can be raised about certain situations and cases. For example, how are those saved who lived before Christ? How are those saved who have never heard the gospel? (There is not space to comment on them in this brief article.) But the faith is shipwrecked when people surrender to theological speculation about such questions—which do not need to be answered in order for us to get on with our work—rather than heeding the direct and clear commands of Christ and the unbroken tradition of the church. A mentality which views Christian missionary work as primarily helping people improve their lot as human beings or helping them become better Muslims or whatever, and which does not aim at conversion, is a travesty of the Gospel message. This mentality betrays an incredible blindness to the core of the message of salvation.
Rather than being unreasonable or unfair, the claim that Jesus is the only way to salvation is the merciful truth which, if properly understood, will be greeted with joy, or rejected with murderous, damning hostility. It is the overwhelming mercy of God that provides in Jesus a Savior able to fulfill all that is required for the salvation of the human race.
To complain that God did not provide us with another savior or with a dozen saviors or with a choice of ways of salvation is to miss the point of our actual situation. To rebel at the claim that Jesus is the sole means by which the human race can be saved is simply to stand in jeopardy of rejecting the last chance of a new beginning, just as the first chance of a blessed existence was rejected in the garden. The same attitudes are apparent in both. That we place our sense of what is fitting and fair against God’s sense of what is fitting and fair is a sign of rebellion that needs to be repented of, of the sickness that needs to be healed. It is precisely for this that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and offered His life as an atonement of our sins.
And because the gift of God in Christ Jesus is so great, and the redemption offered so exquisitely and powerfully appropriate, the consequences of accepting or rejecting it are also great. “Then he told them: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the good news to all creation. The man who believes in it and accepts baptism will be saved; the man who refuses to believe in it will be condemned’ ” (Mark 16:15-16).
We don’t know all we might like to know about how God will deal with situations not clearly addressed in Scripture or in the tradition of the church; those are His affair. We do know that it is completely true that Jesus is the only way of being reconciled with God, and that our responsibility is to proclaim this clearly and confidently.
by Steve | Jan 1, 1981 | Archive - 1981
Archive: How God Found Me in a Methodist* Church
A personal testimony by Marion S. Byers, Lexington, Kentucky
In the fall of my seventeenth year I really didn’t think I was looking for God. And I knew the Methodist Church I sat in every Sunday morning was not the place to find Him. But God surprised me: He found me there anyway!
Our church had a liberal bent. It emphasized Jesus the good example, and lived out this philosophy with pep talk sermons, church bazaars, social dinners, and drives. I never heard the phrase “born again” or the words “accept the Lord Jesus Christ in your heart.”
God could have let me hear Billy Graham on television, find a tract, or meet a real Christian. But He didn’t choose any of these ways to channel His love and life to me. Instead, during an ordinary Sunday morning worship service in a liberal church, God reached me through the Scripture reading. Later that day, I had an insatiable desire to read my untouched Bible. It had been given to me five years ago by the church at my confirmation.
From my earliest memory, church and Methodist were synonymous. Every Sunday morning my mother would dress us in our Sunday clothes and take my brothers and me to Sunday school and church. Sunday after Sunday, year after year, a fuzzy image of God emerged.
He was up there and out there; and church people spent a lot of time smiling and trying to be good. Church filled time with colorful, noisy bazaars, dinners, and clothing and missionary drives. Jesus was someone good, who lived a long time ago. He was kind to everyone, especially little children. I remember singing the hymn, “Tell Me the Story of Jesus” in Sunday school. That is what Jesus was to me. A story and an ideal I was supposed to act like. Gradually, I discovered that to be like Jesus was an impossible, heartbreaking goal when one tried to accomplish it by human effort alone.
As I grew older, sappy Sunday school quarterlies replaced coloring pages. I attended dull M.Y.F. meetings where we sang a few hymns and listened to a devotional someone read to us. The rest of what went on was so boring, I can’t remember any of it. The redeeming part of each meeting was the refreshments. Cookies didn’t lift our spirits much, but the night we had strawberry shortcake was one of our best M.Y.F. meetings.
At one point Sunday school became so irrelevant that our class decided to vote on whether to use the Bible or something more racy like human interest stories. Even our teacher voted down the Bible, and the Bible lost.
In this desert of irrelevance, my teenage life was in desperate turmoil. Nagging questions rolled around in the back of my brain. What is life? Why are we here? Is there any purpose in living?
I remember asking our minister if anyone really was a Christian and he said, “We are all trying.” Trying? I was so tired of trying! Trying to be good. Trying to do right. Trying to climb out of bed in the morning. Trying to make any sense at all out of a world and life that seemed absurd.
My reasoning traveled this logic: If everyone, including me, dies eventually, then why struggle to learn, go to school, and work—if it all ended buried in the ground? I flirted with the idea: Why drop dead later, why not drop dead now? I could find no purpose in my life that could stand against the finality of my death. In despair, I realized that life, after the struggle of days upon days falling into years, was terminal.
In an effort to find a rock in the midst of all this sand, I read and read and read: Ernest Hemmingway, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Albert Camus. Surely there were answers to the puzzle of existence somewhere! Unfortunately, all this reading packed my mind full of facts and emptied my heart of all hope, leaving mountains of despair.
I continued going to church and I heard the sermons say, “Let’s try to be good people, kind people, loving people.” Church was a performance that was always the same. I read it in the bulletin: the invocation, the number by the choir (maybe a solo today?), the children’s sermon, the hymn singing by the congregation, the offering, the Bible reading, the sermon, the closing prayer, and the final hymn. Most of us left church the same way we came in, untouched by the reality of the presence of Jesus Christ.
But God had a surprise for me. His ways are not our ways and He is not limited by His creation, man. One Sunday I dutifully went to church, settled in my pew and looked around. I saw people all around me. I saw stained glass windows, the great center altar, the lighted candles, flowers, the choir. I heard organ music and people talking. And I vowed somewhere deep in my heart that this was the last Sunday I would ever come to church. I thought church was phony, unreal, and such a dull show. Life here? No way.
But something happened in the middle of the script, between the offering and the sermon. The minister stood up and read from
Hosea 11: 1-4, 8:
When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. But the more I called Israel, the further they went from me. They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images. It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love; I lifted the yoke from their neck and bent down to feed them …. How can I give you up, Ephraim?
Something began to stir in me. The words were weighted, heavy with life and absolutely directed to me, as if God was alive now, talking to me now, with the voice of love! God was not talking about a long-ago-Israel. He was talking to me! This particular Scripture had my name on it at this particular point in time. I was held in His arms and I was held by bands of His love. The reading ended with the words, “How can I give you up, Ephraim?” but in my soul it was the question, “How can I give you up, Marion?”
I don’t remember the sermon. I don’t remember what we ate for Sunday dinner. But I do remember that as the Bible was being read aloud, there was birthed in me a desire to know God, whoever He was.
I needed a Bible. Did I have a Bible? Yes, in the foreknowledge of God, the United Methodist Church gave Bibles to each person at confirmation. My confirmation had been five years ago. Where was that Bible? I spent hours that Sunday afternoon looking for it. I searched my room, all the bookcases in our home and through boxes and boxes in our basement.
Finally, I found it—on my brother’s closet shelf. I carried my Bible back to my room, shut the door, and began to read the four Gospels. I underlined as I read. I wrote in the margins all the questions that spilled from my mind. Why did Jesus heal the blind, the crippled? What did He mean He was the life and the truth? What was living water? What did it mean to know Him or to hear His voice? What did it mean to follow Him? Was He really God, and was He alive right now?
I grew weary with all the questions. But a rising certainty grew in me: this was a different Book. It was miles away from Hemmingway, Camus, Wolfe, and all the others. This was not a story; there was some kind of reality here I didn’t understand with my mind. I began to see Jesus, as He said He was—not someone to be like, but Someone who said He was God and could live in me. He was Someone who is alive forever.
Was He my answer to my desperate questions about the meaning and purpose of my life? At that point my mind began mental doubletalk. God could not be real and I really couldn‘t know Him. The book is only a story after all. So grit your teeth, Marion, and keep going as usual. But one verse kept pulling at my heart: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” I realized my physical ears were not the ears referred to here.
What was I hearing from this different book, this Bible? I kept hoping the Bible was true, that Jesus was alive, that He could save me from all my meaninglessness and death, and that He could live in me. In desperation and abandonment, with all the truth and honesty I knew, I remember audibly talking to the air in my bedroom, “Jesus, if You really are alive, and I can really know You in reality, then I commit my life to You right now. Do with me as You want.”
At the end of that only real prayer I had ever prayed, I was not talking to the air anymore, but to a real Person. I knew with a certainty, which can’t be physically demonstrated, that Jesus was real—and that He was alive in me. I knew that I knew, and I was conscious of the presence of Jesus in me and in my room.
I continued to read my Bible and found answers to many of my questions. The biggest question of my life had been answered forever. I do have a place in the universe! I am in relationship with the Creator of everything! With eternal life, knowing Jesus, there IS meaning and purpose in life, in my struggles, in my trying, in my growing, and someday in my dying.
Perhaps, because I couldn’t go back to my church and say, “I have accepted Christ as Lord of my life,” God led me in another direction. Previously, I told half a dozen people that I didn’t believe in God. I sensed the need to return to each of these people and tell them I now believed in God and that His name was Jesus. Two of these people had moved away, so I wrote them letters. That was easy. The other four were close by and this meant face-to-face confrontation.
This was hard, but I did it. Their reactions ranged from hostile to happy. For example, a teacher doubted my sanity and hoped I would give up this fairy tale. A casual friend was overjoyed when I told her, because she had been praying for a Christian friend. We became close friends and remain so today. I told our minister one Sunday after church, while he was standing at the door shaking everyone’s hand as they filed by. When my turn came, I blurted out, “I have accepted Christ into my life.” His reaction surprised me: He grabbed both my hands, and I noticed there were tears in his eyes.
I wish I could tell you my United Methodist church became evangelical or that I never had any more struggles. But I can’t. I know there is life and purpose for me with the living Christ, who began a mutual journey with me when I was 17 years old. Now, many years later, I am still struggling and learning and failing and succeeding with Jesus. I know that God is truly sovereign and that He can move in any situation. There is power in His Word, as written, and it does not return to Him void. It will accomplish His purposes.
*METHODIST: This term is used to refer to the name of a church as it existed before the United Methodist Church was created by merger in 1968.
