Category Archives: Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Too Good to Be True?

You may have heard it said that religion only survives because people desperately want it to be true, because they can’t come to terms with their own mortality (or that of loved ones). It was Sigmund Freud who helped to popularize this idea, as he suggested that the concept of a loving Creator was simply a psychological projection of a person’s innermost wishes:

“We tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there was a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is the very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”(1)

This kind of argument would seem to ring true, at least on a superficial level. You would expect it to be more likely for people to believe in something that they like than something that they don’t, and it is clear that Christianity is powerfully compelling. In fact, the argument itself is an admission of this, as it acknowledges the innate desire in us all that is fulfilled by God. Who wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with a loving deity who not only wants the best for those he has created, but who is offering eternity in a place that is more wonderful than can be imagined? Yet the Bible also contains some very hard-hitting passages, which would seem to contradict the notion that religious belief is simply a projection of our wishes. C. S. Lewis pointed out that scripture also teaches that believers should fear the Lord, but you would not then suggest that this meant faith was some kind of “fear fulfillment”!(2)

The problem with the argument is that it cuts both ways. If you suggest that people only believe because they want it to be true, then the counter-claim is that atheists are only non-believers because they don’t want it to be true. Some people have expressly stated this, such as Aldous Huxley who wrote:

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Journey into Shadow

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, the young hobbit, has been given the burden of bearing the one ring of power. It is a ring that has the potential to put all of Middle Earth under terror and shadow, and the darkness is already spreading. With a fellowship of friends, Frodo determines he must start the long, dark journey to destroy the ring by throwing it into the volcano from which it was forged. It is a journey that will take him on fearful paths through enemy territory and overwhelming temptation to the ends of himself. Seeing the road ahead of him, he laments to Gandalf the Wise that the burden of the ring should have come to him in the first place.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”(1)

A fan of Tolkien’s epic fantasy once wrote the author to say that he preferred to read The Lord of the Rings particularly during the season of Lent. Though I don’t know all this reader had in mind with such a statement, Tolkien’s portrayal of a journey into darkness with the weight of a great burden and a motley fellowship of companions certainly holds similarities to the journey of the church toward the cross. The forty-day period that leads to Easter is both an invitation and a quest for any who would be willing, albeit a difficult one. The deliberate and wearisome journey with Christ to the cross is a crushing burden, even with the jarring recognition that we are not the one carrying it. On the path to Holy Week, the fellowship of the church far and wide is given time to focus in detail on what it means that Jesus came into this world that he might go the fearful way of the Cross. It is time set apart for pilgrimage and preparation, forty days with which we decide what to do with the time that is given us.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Question and Answer

“What do you want me to do for you?” is a common enough question. Used in multiple personal exchanges, it could be asked by a clerk of a patron or between colleagues in dialogue. It could be used casually between friends or spoken harshly in retort for misunderstanding. Whatever the context or mood, it is a question of clarification. On the one hand, it seeks to clarify the expectations of the one to whom it is directed. On the other hand, it seeks to clarify what action is required of the one who asks.

“What do you want me to do for you?” is a seemingly ordinary question Jesus asks more than once. In the Gospel of Mark, it is posed both to a blind beggar and to the disciples of Jesus.(1) The writer places the two instances right beside one another in a way that reveals the questioner as much as the expectations of the men being asked. Mark tells the story of the blind man, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, immediately following a revealing exchange between Jesus and his disciples. For the disciples, the question would no doubt have rung familiarly in their ears. But their answers to this question could not have been more discordant.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – My Messy House

Kathleen Norris tells a story of a little boy who wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” The poem begins with a confession: he doesn’t like it when his father yells at him. The monster’s response is to throw his sister down the stairs, then to destroy his room, and finally to destroy the whole town. The poem concludes: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’”(1)

The confession of Saint Paul bears a fine resemblance. “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but I do what I hate.” Regret indeed has a way of shining the floodlights on the mess within us. Norris narrows in on the faithful candor of this child describing his own muddled story: “‘My messy house’ says it all,” she writes. “With more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance.”(2)

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – When Forgiveness Is Suffering

When Forgiveness Is Suffering

In four horrific months in 1994, at the urging of the Rwandan government, the poorer Hutu majority took up bayonets and machetes and committed genocide against the wealthier Tutsi minority. In the wake of this unspeakable tragedy, nearly a million people had been murdered.

In August of 2003, driven by overcrowded prisons and backlogged court systems, 50,000 genocide criminals, people who had already confessed to killing their neighbors, were released again into society. Murderers were sent back to their homes, back to neighborhoods literally destroyed at their own hands, to live beside the few surviving relatives of the very men, women, and children they killed.

Now more than twenty years later, with eyes still bloodshot at visions of a genocide it failed to see, the world continues to watch Rwanda with a sense of foreboding, wondering what happens when a killer comes home; what happens when victims, widows, orphans, and murderers look each other in the eyes again; what happens when the neighbor who killed your family asks to be forgiven. For the people of Rwanda, the description of the Hebrew prophet is a reality with which they live: “And if anyone asks them, ‘What are these wounds on your chest?’ the answer will be, ‘The wounds I received in the house of my friends.’”(1)

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Forgettable Power of Empathy

Perched above the altar in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice hang the ciborium columns.(1) The artist is unknown. Constructed in the early 1300s from alabaster, the columns hold numerous carvings depicting various stories, among them, the life of Jesus. There are so many stories—108 in fact—that one can easily lose track of all that is displayed.

On one particular panel, apparently, Jesus talks to Zacchaeus, who reaches out of some tree branches to participate in what must have been a truly entertaining conversation. After all, it was a conversation that resulted in a divine home-visit, a meal, and a turnaround in Zacchaeus’s life profound enough to warrant its recording and retelling.(2) Over the last twenty-five years, I’ve seen the ciborium columns and, presumably, this panel a few times. But I remember nothing about it.

Some of us remember the story of Zacchaeus for various reasons described to us as young children. He was a “wee” little man. He climbed up in a sycamore tree. He was a despised tax collector. But like this work of art, is there also a piece of this story that is forgettable?

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leafs a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.(1)

One of my most cherished memories is of the New England landscape in the fall. The vibrant colors from dogwood, sassafras, sumac, red oak, and maples can only be described as the finest artist’s palette of paints—crimsons and scarlets, purples, oranges and yellows splashed across the canvas. Making our pilgrimage each year to the local fair, the route transported my husband and me into that world of color, as the road would bend through picturesque towns and take us deeper and deeper into that fall canvas. Sadly, this beauty was transient. Fall rains and wind would come to fade and to muddle those colors. All that would remain were the dull browns melding and making their home in the dark soil that encompassed them.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Flattered Selfies of MeWorld

There is something about a smart phone that subtly (and not so subtly) conveys the notion that we are important. With three missed calls, 18 unread e-mails, and 32 notifications between twitter, facebook, instagram, we are pelted with the enticing idea: “Someone needs my attention!” The immediate ring, buzz, or pop-up note proclaiming the arrival of these new messages is somehow complimentary, even as it demands our attention—”Check now! Something somewhere is happening!”

The language of technology seems to further our sense of importance by bidding us to claim and personalize these worlds. I am only one click away from “my documents,” “my calendar,” “my favorites,” “my music,” “my pictures,” and “my shopping cart.” Anthropologist Thomas de Zengotita calls it “MeWorld.” In a book that examines the ways in which the world of media shapes our lives, de Zengotita portrays the technologically advanced, media-saturated West as a world filled with millions of individual “flattered selves,” each living in its own insulated, personalized world.(1) He believes the narcissism that comes from living in MeWorld has been fashioned and is constantly being fed by media representations in all areas of our lives, from those private self-representations that purport us the star to public advertisements, television, and magazines that ever address us personally.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Servant Like This

For his fluency with words and unrivaled poetic voice, Isaiah has been called the “Shakespeare of the prophets.” His words are assuredly lyrical; they were also political and prophetic, enduring well beyond his life.

The 53rd chapter of the book of Isaiah offers the image of a servant who embodies a severe faithfulness despite unjust opposition. “He was oppressed and he was afflicted,” writes Isaiah, “but he did not open his mouth” (53:7a). The prophet describes a sufferer of flint-like submission in the face of extreme violence. “He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth” (v.7b). He describes a servant who is crushed and anguished, stricken, and yet somehow satisfied. “As a result of the anguish of his soul,” writes Isaiah, “he will see it and be satisfied; by his knowledge the righteous one, my servant, will justify the many, and he will bear their iniquities” (v.11). Whether Isaiah had in mind someone who fit the description or merely longed to see God’s words come to fruition, the prophet offers an image of one who changes all the rules.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – An Experimental Fellowship

“The Bible was not given for our information, but for our transformation.” —D. L. Moody

The Bible may be one of the best-selling books of all time, but it is a resource that polarises opinion. Some atheists are strongly opposed to it, as they maintain that scripture contains unhelpful, ill-informed, and incorrect teaching that is positively harmful for today’s society. Others take a more disinterested view of it, as they see it as a largely irrelevant piece of literature from a more primitive time, which inevitably contains an eclectic mixture of both good and bad instruction. By contrast, Christians believe the Bible is not only the word of God, but it is completely indispensable for all of humanity.

In truth, of course, many believers find parts of scripture difficult. Some of it is hard to understand or relate to, and the teaching doesn’t always have a lasting or deep impact. One obvious reason for this is that people have busy lives and whilst they often invest a great deal of energy developing their professional skills or taking part in hobbies or leisure activities, they simply don’t spend much time reading the Bible. Another reason is that often Christians only engage with scripture in a fairly surface-level way, like a sportsperson preparing for a contest by training in a manner that provides only limited improvement.

RZIM Chaplain, Tom Tarrants, suggests that people should look to the example of George Müller (1805-1898) for guidance in this area. The latter was an evangelist who achieved fame not only for helping hundreds of thousands of British children in his orphanages and schools, but also for his steadfast faith that the providence of God would meet the considerable needs of his many ventures. Yet he is less known for the life-changing discovery he made in 1841, which lay behind the deep joy and faith that defined and drove his ministry.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Journey of Dust

The sun bore down on my neck as I walked through neatly laid stones, each row like another line in a massive book. My eyes strained to take in all of the information—name, age, rank, country—and perhaps also death itself, the fragility of life, the harsh reality of war. In that field of graves, a war memorial for men lost as prisoners of war, slaves laboring to construct the Burma-Siam railway, I felt as the psalmist: “laid low in the dust.” Or like Job, sitting among the dust and ashes of a great tragedy. Then one stone stopped my wandering and said what I could not. On an epitaph in the middle of the cemetery was written: “There shall be in that great earth, a richer dust concealed.”(1)

It is helpful, I think, to be reminded that we are dust. We are material; when we die, we  remain material. It is a reminder to hold as we move through life—through successes, disappointments, questions, and  answers. For the Christian, it is also a truth to help us approach the vast and terrible circumstances leading up to the crucifixion of the human son of God. Beginning with the ashes of Ash Wednesday, the journey through Lent into the light and darkness of Holy Week is for those made in dust who will return to dust, those willing to trace the breath that began all of life to the place where Christ breathed his last. It is a journey that expends everything within us.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Paradoxical Call

For Christians around the world, the life and ministry of Jesus—his birth, his life and death, his resurrection and ascension—are enacted and re-told through the celebrations and seasons of the church year. The Christian church prepares for his coming during the season of Advent. Anticipation grows for the triumphant entry of God into the world in Jesus on Christmas Day, while the season of Epiphany, that follows Advent, invites all to see God at work in the life and ministry of Jesus. Each season of the church year is filled with expectation, discovery, and hope.

Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent. And unlike the celebration of Christmas day or the expectation of the season of Epiphany, Lent is a solemn season for the Christian. As part of the Ash Wednesday worship service, ashes are imposed on one’s forehead in the pattern of a cross. The imposed ashes are the remains of the Palm Sunday fronds from the previous year—fronds reminiscent of those waved triumphantly as Jesus entered Jerusalem on his way to Golgotha—but that now serve as a reminder of death and mortality. The Jews of Jesus’s day believed he entered the city as the coming King; they could not see how his reign would be from a Roman cross.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Do You See?

They told me to give it three weeks. “Your eyes and your brain are getting reacquainted again,” he said. “Your eyesight will fluctuate for the next few days.” Less than a week after eye surgery, I was tired of fluctuating. At times my vision was so crisp that it was almost too much for me—like I was somehow seeing more than I should. But this clarity came and went; I was sometimes far-sighted, sometimes near-sighted, sometimes neither very well. Perfect sight was not as immediate as I anticipated.

My inhabiting of faith and belief is not so far from this. Fittingly, I was given the charge of writing about my meandering path toward Christian belief the same week of my eye surgery. The reflective task of peering into my life, looking at patterns and history with the hope of illumination seemed ironic as I squinted to see my computer screen. But it served as a helpful metaphor. My vision of Jesus has been far from immediate. It has been much closer to a fluctuating timeline of beholding and squinting, seeing, not-seeing, and straining to see. My experience has been something more like the blind man’s from Bethsaida:

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – In This Place

 

To the people of ancient Israel, the image of God’s house was the center of the world. It was a house reaching from the heavens to the places on earth where God caused his name to be remembered. God’s house was seen in experiences like Jacob’s, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”(1) It was experienced in the tabernacle that once moved among them as pilgrims, and later in their pilgrimages to the temple. Ever-expanding their vision of God’s house, altars were built over the places where God had appeared to them, marking the reach of its walls. Though at times as prodigals, their longing for home was a part of their identity as children of the house of God: “One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.”(2) The house of God as it reached from heaven to earth was occupied by the Creator. As the people of God, they had been invited inside, where they longed to remain.

As with any group with a clear vision of inside and outside, belonging and not belonging, the Israelite’s understanding of the house of God could have easily become the very rationale for excluding foreigners, neighbors, and outsiders. Yet not long after God had called the people of Israel his own, God instructed them very specifically on the treatment of such people: “Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt.”(3) “The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.”(4) The house of God was to be a house of hospitality, for such a spirit reflected the God within it: “For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.”(5) Called to ever-remember their own status as foreigners, the people who were invited into the care of God’s house were to become a sign of that care themselves.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Problem of Proximity

When was the last time that you saw the Milky Way? We live on a planet that has a stellar view of the night sky. Our historical records show us that from our earliest drawings and writings humans have been gazing into the infinite expanse above our heads and pondering our own significance. Even though we all should be able to peer into the depths above us, there is actually a good chance that you have not clearly seen the night sky for quite some time. There are reasons for this. The first is that many people live in places that have enough smog to block our view of anything beyond what we have made. The second reason is that most of our time is spent bent forward consuming digital material on our devices rather than leaning back to enjoy the grandeur that transcends us. The third and final reason is the problem of proximity. The reason that most of us do not have a clear view of the stars is light pollution. We simply cannot see into the heavens because of all of the light that is constantly around us. Very few of us are ever in total darkness because there is always a light somewhere nearby or in our pocket.

This is all a bit silly. Just think, there are thousands of visible stars above my head that are incomprehensibly bright, and yet, I cannot see them because of a streetlamp 18 feet above my head that is a negligible fraction of a single star’s brilliance. There is a world of untold splendor twinkling above my head that the ancients stared into for years, and yet I can’t see the reflection of this beauty in my hand because of the dim glow of my phone. My inability to see this beauty is not a problem with the brilliance of their lights; rather it is the problem of my proximity to lesser lights.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Foreign and Belonging

I have not spent much of my life as a foreigner, though my short bouts with being a cultural outsider remind me of the difficulty of always feeling on the outside of the circle. Just as the distance between outside and inside seems to be closing, something happens or something is said and you are reminded again that you do not really belong. On a visit with Wellspring International to Northern Uganda some years ago, the thought never left us. Everywhere the director and I went, children seemed to sing of “munos,” a term essentially (and affectionately) meaning “whiteys.” It made us smile every time we heard it. But even when communicated playfully, it can be both humbling and humiliating to always carry with you the sober thought: I am out of place.

The book of Ruth scarcely neglects an opportunity to point out this reality. Long after hearers of the story are well acquainted with who Ruth is and where she is from, long after she is living in Judah, she continues to be referred to as “Ruth the Moabite” or even merely “the Moabite woman.” Her perpetual status as an outsider brings to mind the vision of Keats and the “song that found a path/ through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home/ She stood in tears amid the alien corn.”

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Space for Questions

Returning to graduate school in mid-life has re-introduced to me the importance of asking questions. There are the all-important pragmatic questions that involve the mechanics and the specifics of various assignments. Should one use a particular style guide in writing papers, for example, or what material will be covered on the next exam? There are the questions of curiosity about a particular topic or subject, and there are research questions intended to take a student more deeply into the minutiae of her course of study. I often find that questions beget other questions, and many are not as easily answered as when I first began “formal” education. Instead, I am often led from one question to another on this journey of inquiry that is often only tangentially related to the original question.

When this happens, I wonder whether or not I am in fact asking the “right” questions which would generate answers. Perhaps inquiring into the motivation behind the questions is an even more important task. Do I simply ask out of curiosity? Or am I asking in order to fill my head with as many possible answers as there are question? Or do I continually ask questions as a way of blocking answers—answers that I may not want to hear, or to receive. Of course, asking questions is one of the wonderful qualities of being human. And anyone who has spent even a small amount of time around young children knows that asking questions about every possible subject preoccupies their early verbal expressions.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Presence and Absence

The deep-seated impression of a parent in the life of a child is a subject well traversed. From pop psychology to history to anthropology, the giant place parents occupy from birth to death is as plain as the life they initiated. Of course, the massive giant which occupies this place may well be the absence of that person, inasmuch as the person him or herself. “It doesn’t matter who my father was,” Anne Sexton once wrote, “it matters who I remember he was.”(1) The looming memory of an absent parent is every bit as big as a present one, maybe bigger. For me, it was a spiritual revelation: Absence itself can become something of a presence.

It is little wonder that the deepest struggle many of us have with faith is in the absence of God. We learn early that absence is a characteristic connected to despair, wrought from disconnectedness, or born of devastation. We do not see our experience of God’s absence as a subject for lament—like the psalmist’s “Rise up, O Lord; O God, lift up your hand; do not forget the oppressed”—but as a sign of doubt. And so, we often do not know how to reconcile the God who appears in burning bushes and dirty stables, who descends ladders and rends the heavens, but whose crushing silence feels every bit as profound. We don’t know what to do with the ruinous sensation of neglect when God comes so close to some but remains far off from others. We hold in mind the one who came near to the rejected Samaritan woman, but we uncomfortably suspect that we might have been given something else, or worse, that God has for some reason simply withdrawn. The sting of abandonment is overwhelming; with Gerard Manley Hopkins, our prayers seem “lost in desert ways/ Our hymn in the vast silence dies.”

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Call to Maladjustment

What does it mean to be “maladjusted”? In much of psychological literature, maladjustment implies some level of psychopathology. A pathology implies an underlying illness or disease in the body. Psychopathology, therefore, implies mental illness. Unlike other diseases of the body that have biological markers, however, psychopathology does not have a biological test, like a blood test, for diagnosis. Instead, psychopathology is manifested in cognitions, emotions, and/or social behaviors that are considered maladaptive because they cause distress, danger, dysfunction, and disruption both to the individual and to those around her/him.

But are there any conditions under which it would be “abnormal” not to experience maladjustment? This is the question taken up by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his speech given at Western Michigan University in 1963, five years before he was assassinated. In this speech, he suggested that there are specific conditions when maladjustment is called for:

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Cello in the Rush

Dale Henderson gives cello concerts in New York City subway stations because he fears the day when classical music will be no more. He plays for free, focusing primarily on Bach Solo Cello Suites because their “power and beauty unfailingly inspire great appreciation, joy and deep emotion in those who hear them.”(1) Some commuters stop and stare, curious or captivated, many having never heard a cello or Bach concerto before. For Henderson, the music is an offering of something meaningful, seeds for future generations of classical music admirers who would not otherwise know it, beauty well worth lugging his heavy cello down into the subways to protect.

It is not always easy to talk about beauty without a minefield of objections or at best complicating list of qualifiers. Its modern place in the “eye of the beholder” gives it a tenuous feel at best. While Henderson describes a world without classical music as soul-less, others may not miss it so much. And yet it is hard not to talk about beauty in a broken and breaking world that makes its distinctive encounters increasingly stand out.

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