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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Becoming What We Worship

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Ravi Z

The book of Judges poses many interpretive challenges for any student of Scripture. Filled with stories of the grotesque and the tragic—the rape and subsequent division of the Levite’s concubine into twelve pieces in Judges 19, the undoing of mighty Samson, or the story of Jephthah and his vow to offer up one of his own children as a burnt offering in Judges 11—the contents challenge any contemporary reader’s sensibilities.

Despite these interpretive difficulties and challenges, the book of Judges reveals the all-too human story of our propensity towards fashioning gods to our liking, and the consequences that ensue from these misplaced affections.  Perhaps no story is more poignant, in this regard, than the story of Gideon. Born the youngest son of the smallest tribe of Israel, the half-tribe of Mannaseh, Gideon grew up in a land oppressed by the Midianites, the Amalekites and the “sons of the east” (Judges 6:3). The text tells us these enemies were so numerous that they “would come in like locusts…both they and their camels were innumerable; and they came into the land to devastate it” (6:5-6).

It is for this reason that we find Gideon threshing wheat in a wine press, hiding from his innumerable enemy. After all, he is the youngest son of the smallest tribe. Despite his youth and his seeming insignificance, Gideon is visited by an angelic visitor who addresses him as a “valiant warrior.” Gideon is to be the deliverer of Israel. Sure enough, as the text tells us, Gideon and a mere three hundred men defeat the innumerable armies of their enemies. Gideon is the unlikely hero and the Israelites are so impressed by his military leadership that they seek to make him king. “Rule over us, both you and your son, also your son’s son, for you have delivered us from the hand of Midian” (8:22). But Gideon rightly persuades the Israelites that God is their king and deliverer. Had the text ended there, we would never see the clay feet of our story’s hero.

The narrative doesn’t tell the reader why Gideon does what he does next, but rather than be rewarded by becoming king over Israel, he instead opts for a monetary remuneration and exacts a spoil from the men who came to make him their ruler: a gold earring from each one totaling 1,700 shekels of gold. Today, that amount is roughly the equivalent of three million dollars. But these earrings were in addition to all the spoils of war Gideon had already collected from the slain Midianites: crescent ornaments, pendants, purple robes, and even bands from the camels’ necks. And he used this gold to craft a monument of sorts to himself—a golden ephod or decorative vestment—which he then had placed in his home city, Ophrah. While the text is not explicit about the reasons for making this costly and precious vestment, the outcome was disastrous. “Gideon made an ephod, and placed it in his city, Ophrah, and all Israel played the harlot with it there, so that it became a snare to Gideon and his household” (8:27).

While there are many applications to be drawn out of the story of Gideon, one cannot help but see the warning about the perils of misplaced affections; a desire for honor became the snare for all of Israel and perpetuated their propensity towards giving worship and honor to that which was nothing more than an idol. Subtle and seemingly innocuous, human desires can quickly become entities we worship. It is a reminder to ask: What are our desires, and what do they tell us about what we love?

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”  Human beings all have the potential to form ephods, just as Gideon did. But the things we worship and revere are far from innocuous, as Emerson warns. Indeed, long before Emerson, the prophet from Galilee warned that “where our treasure is, there will our hearts be also” (Matthew 6:21). Eventually, what dominates our innermost thoughts and imaginations comes forth as that to which we give our allegiance and devotion. Do we love what ensnares, or what liberates?

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Real World Why

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It was the intention of my high school math teacher to demonstrate exactly what every student wonders when drudging through exercises that challenge motivation and patience to the highest degree: Why on earth is this important for the real world? Interspersed throughout his lessons were statistics that were intended to spur us on to greatness: “Life and trigonometry are in the details,” he would say, followed up by statements like: “Had the position for one of the bases of the St. Louis arch been miscalculated by only a few centimeters, the two arms of the arch would have missed one another completely.” Or, “A 1.3 millimeter spacing error in the assembly of a mirror within the Hubble Telescope, in effect, put blinders on the most powerful telescope ever made (and embarrassed a few former math students).”

There was something freeing about his vow to reveal the significance of the tedious coursework he readily assigned. He didn’t see us as indolent students asking “why bother” in harmonized whines (though our motives were undoubtedly mixed and laziness was easily one of the factors). Instead, he made it okay to ask why—even mandatory. We did well to ask what on earth trigonometry had to do with reality because however the question was asked, there really was an answer. And if we would hear the answer, we would find that trigonometry wasn’t nearly as meaningless as we expected.

I have often wondered what went through the minds of the disciples as Jesus spoke of mustard seeds, wine skins, and thieves in the night. In their three years with Jesus, I am sure the question crossed their minds: “What on earth does this parable have to do with the real world?” More than once the gospels impart the disciples questioning amongst one another, “What is he talking about?” Imagine their excitement when Jesus promised that a time was coming soon when he would “speak plainly”!

As humans we are inclined to ask why. It becomes our favorite question as toddlers and something may well be lost when we forget it. The desire to know simply for the sake of knowing is what separates humans from animals, said C.S. Lewis. We are inclined to ask, inasmuch as we must ask, because there is an answer. As T.S. Eliot penned:

We shall not cease from exploration,

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

As the disciples watched and listened, Jesus told a crowd of people a story about seeds and soil. When he finished, they took him aside and asked what on earth he was talking about and why he just couldn’t say it more clearly. “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”

Jesus replied, “I speak to them in parables because ‘though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.’ In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.’ For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes…But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.”(1)

I’m not sure he answered the question they thought they were asking. It reminds me of the circular discussions we had as children and the why-halting words of a parent, “Because I said so.” In effect, Jesus seems to have said, “I speak to them in stories they don’t understand because they don’t understand.” Yet even after calling the disciples blessed because their eyes and ears were getting it, he still explains the parable to them in detail.

What seed had to do with the real world, I’m not sure the disciples saw clearly before it was explained to them. But that the man before them had something more wonderful to do with reality than they could yet grasp was a mystery that opened their eyes along the journey and made them blessed whether they fully comprehended it or not. It seemed to matter more that they were with him—in body, in will, in spirit—than in complete comprehension. And yet he gave them permission—even incentive—to ask why, again and again.

As my math teacher urged us to see that it was our vision of the “real world” that needed revising, so Jesus compels the world to look again. His parables speak into a world that has somehow grown lackluster and leave us asking not only, “What does this have to do with reality?” but more invasively, “What IS reality?” Or, in fact: Who is reality? However the question is asked—with ears hardly hearing, with eyes opened or closed—there is an answer. The vicarious humanity of the Son suggests he indeed has something to do with it.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Matthew 13:13-16.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Souls in Paraphrase

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“Do you see this woman?” For some reason, the familiar question confronted me this time as if it were aimed as much at me as the guests around the table. Jesus was eating at the house of a religious man who had invited him to dinner. They were reclining at the table when a woman who is very easily remembered for her flaws came stumbling over the dinner guests, making her way to the feet of Jesus. Weeping over them, she broke a costly vial of perfume, wiping his feet dry with her hair. Who didn’t see her? Who didn’t notice her strange commotion? Who among them didn’t immediately recognize how out of place she really was? Yet he asks, “Do you see this woman?”(1) He was either speaking ironically or he saw something the rest did not.

The late seventeenth century poet George Herbert once described prayer in a detailed list of stirring metaphors.  Among the first lines, prayer is described as “the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage.” At those words I cannot help but picture this woman lying prostrate at Christ’s feet. As she poured out the perfume, so she poured out her soul. Her prayer was one without words, her worship spilled out as tears upon his feet. Onlookers saw a fallen and foolish woman, an extravagant waste. Jesus saw a heart in pilgrimage, a prayer understood.

I remember the first time I was unapologetically honest with God. My head was bowed but inwardly I was somewhat closer to pounding fists against a divine chest. In silent reflection, I shouted internally. Everyone around me seemed to be experiencing the still, small voice, the gentle touch of a Father’s hand, the assurance of God’s glory and power, the confirmation of a hope and a future, answered prayers, even dramatic miracles. But I couldn’t feel God’s presence, or hear God’s voice at all. I had more questions and uncertainty than answers and assurance. It seemed as though I was relating to an empty throne. Like an attention-starved child, I yelled at God for existing, for forgetting to love me, for failing to understand or care.

In Herbert’s list of words, my prayer this day was perhaps more fitting “reversed thunder” or “Christ-side-piercing spear.” My words pled for the presence of God, for the love and will of a good creator in my life, for complete access to the loving Father I believed was real but just not to me. But what I was asking for sharply (and probably quite irreverently) required the wedge that stood between us to be obliterated, the chasm crossed—indeed, the human death of the incarnate Son to show how deeply the Father longs to gather us up like a hen gathers her chicks, whether we are willing or not. I likely spoke in ignorance and in anger, making claims like Job without understanding. I was likely not as interested in hearing at that point as I was at shouting. But God heard. Responding to my interrogation, God revealed my true question. I was tired of being the stepchild, and yet I had been keeping the Father in my mind as something more like a distant uncle. Seeing me, God showed me what I did not.

“Do you see this woman?” Jesus asked as the others were questioning her resolve and reputation. “I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she has loved much” (Luke 7:47). In a story that calls hearts and eyes to attention, we find that the woman not only saw God when others did not, but more significantly, God saw her when others did not. Pouring out all she had at the feet of the incarnate Son, weeping at the sight of his genuine presence, his human touch, his countercultural kindness, her silent prayer was interpreted, and answered. Then Jesus lifted her head and said to her, “Your sins are forgiven” (7:48).

Fittingly, George Herbert concludes his grand description of prayer as “something understood.” At the feet of God, broken words and hobbling metaphors are translated. Whether we know what we mean or what we say, the vicarious humanity of the Son of God holds the promise that we are heard and known, lifted to the Father by the Spirit as children understood.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Story told in Luke 7:44.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Something Understood

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In an essay titled “Meditation in a Toolshed,” C.S. Lewis describes a scene from within a darkened shed. The sun was brilliantly shining outside, yet from the inside only a small sunbeam could be seen through a crack at the top of the door. Everything was pitch-black except for the prominent beam of light, by which he could see flecks of dust floating about. Writes Lewis:

“I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving in the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.”(1)

Each time I come to the gospel accounts of the woman with the alabaster jar, I notice something similar. “Do you see this woman?” Jesus asks, as if he is speaking as much to me the reader as he is to the guests around the table. With a jar of costly perfume, she had anointed the feet of Christ with fragrance and tears. She then endured the criticism of those around her because she alone saw the one in front of them. While the dinner crowd was sitting in the dark about Jesus, the woman was peering in the light of understanding. What she saw invoked tears of recognition, sacrifice, and love. Gazing along the beam and at the beam are quite different ways of seeing.

The late seventeenth century poet George Herbert once described prayer as “the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage.” At those words I picture the woman with her broken alabaster jar, wiping the dusty, fragrant feet of Christ with her hair. Pouring out the expensive nard, she seems to pour out her soul. Fittingly, Herbert concludes his grand description of prayer as “something understood.”

The woman with the alabaster jar not only saw the Christ when others did not, Christ saw her when others could not see past her powerless categories. “Do you see this woman?” Jesus asks while the others were questioning her actions past and present. “I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much.”(2) Her soul’s cry was heard; she herself was understood.

There are many ways of looking at Jesus: good man, historical character, interesting teacher, one who sees, one who hears, one who loves. At any point, we could easily walk away feeling like we have seen everything we need to see, when in fact we may have seen very little. The risk of looking again may well change everything.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 212-215.

(2) Luke 7:44-47.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Pictures of a Soul

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In the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde describes an exceptionally handsome young man so captivating that he drew the awe-stricken adulation of a great artist. The artist asked him to be the subject of a portrait for he had never seen a face so attractive and so pure. When the painting was completed, young Dorian became so enraptured by his own looks that he wistfully intoned how wonderful it would be if he could live any way he pleased but that no disfigurement of a lawless lifestyle would mar the picture of his own countenance. If only the portrait would grow old and he himself could remain unscathed by time and way of life. In Faustian style he was willing to trade his soul for that wish.

One day, alone and pensive, Dorian went up to the attic and uncovered the portrait that he had kept hidden for so many years, only to be shocked by what he saw. Horror, hideousness, and blood marred the portrait.

The charade came to an end when the artist himself saw the picture. It told the story. He pled with Dorian to come clean, saying, “Does it not say somewhere, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow’?” But in a fit of rage to silence this voice of conscience, Dorian grabbed a knife and killed the artist.

There was now only one thing left for him to do; he took the knife to remove the only visible reminder of his wicked life. But the moment he thrust the blade into the canvas, the portrait returned to its pristine beauty, while Dorian lay stabbed to death on the floor. The ravages that had marred the picture now so disfigured him that even his servants could no longer recognize him.

What a brilliant illustration of how a soul, though invisible, can nonetheless be tarnished. I wonder, if there were to be a portrait of my soul or your soul, how would it best be depicted? Does not the conscience sting, when we think in these terms? Though we have engineered many ways of avoiding physical consequences, how does one cleanse the soul?

Today we find a limitless capacity to raise the question of evil as we see it outside ourselves, but often hold an equal unwillingness to address the evil within us. I once sat on the top floor of a huge corporate building owned by a very successful businessman. Our entire conversation revolved around his reason for unbelief: that there was so much darkness and corruption in this world and a seemingly silent God. Suddenly interrupting the dialogue, a friend of mine said to him, “Since evil troubles you so much, I would be curious to know what you have done with the evil you see within you.” There was red-faced silence.

We too, face Dorian Gray’s predicament. Sooner or later, a duplicitous life reveals the cost. The soul is not forever invisible. But there is one who can cleanse and restore us. The Christian way gives us extraordinary insight into this subject of our soul-struggle, as God deals with the heart of the issue one life at a time. Indeed, in the words of the prophet Isaiah to which Oscar Wilde alluded: “‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the LORD. ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall be like wool” (1:18).  God upholds the solution asking only that we come “willing and obedient,” ready to “come and wash” (1:19,16). So come, willingly and obediently, and find God’s rejoinder to the marred portraits within. The greatest artist of all speaks even today.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Word and Image

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The first time I remember hearing the metaphor “rain on your parade,” I was at a parade and it was raining. As a nine year old, the disappointment was memorable. To this day, when I hear the metaphor used, it conveys with heightened success all that the phrase is meant to convey—and arguably more. I remember standing in the rain, watching the once-solid crowd dwindling to nothing, the marching bands abandoning their neat rows, the bright floats bleeding in color. The optimistic few remained in their chairs, somehow assured that the show would go on.  But we were not among the faithful few. “I’m sorry that it rained on your parade,” my grandpa said smiling at the perfect metaphor as we piled in the car, soggy and dispirited. With half a parade to remember, we went home, our enthusiasm thoroughly overshadowed by the rain.

We are mistaken when we think of metaphor as an optional device used by poets and writers for fluff and decoration. Much of life is communicated in metaphor. There is so much more to time’s landscape than often can be described plainly. Metaphorical imagery is unavoidable for the plainest of speakers. When I say to my colleague, “Your words hit home” or “I am touched by your message” I don’t mean that her words are reaching out of her book and patting me on the head. And yet, in a way, I do. What she had to say made an impression, opened my mind, and struck a chord; communicating so without metaphor is nearly impossible. It is the case for much of what we have to say: there is no other way to say it.

Language seems to recognize that there is something about life that makes metaphor necessary. Words in and of themselves fall short of conveying certain truths and intended meanings, so instead we draw pictures with language.

At the image of Jesus in his final moments of death, the hymnist inquired, “What language shall I borrow, to thank Thee, dearest friend?” One of the things I find most nourishing about the Christian story is its upholding of this mystery, speaking not in rigid confines but with words that always point beyond themselves, borrowing a language fitting of both the mind and the heart. There is a richness conveyed in page after page of the stories in the Bible that stretches minds and moves emotions. “O Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, how oft I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not have it” (Matthew 23:37). “As far as the east is from the west, so far [God] removes our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12).

Jesus speaks of the profundity of God’s longing using the fierce image of the animal maternal instinct. The psalmist writes of the unimaginable depths of God’s forgiveness using the immeasurable image of east and west on a map. Both paint pictures beyond the words themselves. Both seem to hit as invitations into an intimate, visceral relationship that make any sort of casual encounter seem highly unlikely. God’s own self-revelation in story and flesh vividly indicates that life can’t always be defined plainly, accepted in terms and principles. God is also far beyond the insufficient words we assign. What language can we borrow indeed?

When the Samaritan woman came to draw water at the well, Jesus asked her to give him a drink. The exchange was plainly enough about water but the words were mysteriously about life, though she didn’t realize it at first. Shocked that he, a Jew without a cup, would request a drink from her, a Samaritan without power or position, she asked if he knew what he was doing. And then they had a conversation about thirst that made her so much more aware of own thirst.

“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?”

Jesus not only invited the woman to see her own desire plainly, he pointed her beyond the metaphor, inviting her into the real and unplumbed hospitality of the one who satisfies. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again,” he said, “but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

In this plain and potent exchange of word and image, the woman at the well found someone who told her “everything [she] ever did,” and drew her into everything she ever needed. “Sir,” the woman replied, “Give me this water.”

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Remembering Forward

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For most of us, the act of remembering or revisiting a memory takes us back into the distant past. We remember people, events, cherished locales and details from days long gone. Of course, not all memories are pleasant, and traveling toward the distant past can also resemble something more like a nightmare than a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Nevertheless, even if we have but a few, all of us have cherished memories or times we periodically revisit in daydreams and remembrances.

Nostalgia is one such way of revisiting these times. It can be defined as that bittersweet yearning for things in the past. The hunger it creates in us to return to another time and place lures us away from living in the realities of the present. Nostalgia wears a shade of rose-colored glasses as it envisions days that were always sweeter, richer, and better than the present day. In general, as Frederick Buechner has said, nostalgia takes us “on an excursion from the living present back into the dead past…” or else it summons “the dead past back into the living present.”(1) In either case, nostalgic remembering removes us from the present and tempts us to dwell in the unlivable past. Without finding ways to remember forward—to bring the past as the good, the bad, and the ugly into the present in a way that informs who we are and how we will live here and now—all we are left with is nostalgia.

It is far from a sense of nostalgia that drives the writer of Psalm 78. Instead, the psalmist recalls the history of Israel as a means of remembering forward, bringing the full reality of the past into a place of honest remembrance not just for the present generation, but for the sake of generations to come. The psalmist exhorts the people to listen and incline their ears to the stories of their collective history; the Exodus, the wilderness wanderings, and the entry into the land of promise in which they currently dwell. “We will not conceal them from their children, but tell to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and his strength and his wondrous works that he has done….That the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born, that they may arise and tell them to their children, that they should put their confidence in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep the commandments” (Psalm 78:4-7).

Despite bearing witness to the work of God among them, the people of Israel forgot these crucial aspects of their historical narrative. In so doing, they did not keep the covenant and began to live in ways that went contrary to all that defined them. They forgot the deeds and miraculous signs which bore witness to God’s presence. Moreover, they lost faith and did not trust in God’s salvation. The psalmist acknowledges that they all “grieved God in the desert” (v. 40). There are no rose-colored remembrances here, no bittersweet yearnings to which they can return.  Rather, the darker parts of their story are remembered even as praise is offered up for God’s long-suffering and loving-kindness. The psalmist urges the people to think about this God in the midst of their present circumstances.  What had God done among them in the past in spite of their own failings? And how might they now live in light of that past?

Perhaps it is this collective remembering Jesus has in mind when he instructs those closest to him to remember. Jesus instructs his followers during that last supper together saying “this is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me” he is not calling them to bittersweet yearnings, or simply to remember events lived long ago (Luke 22:19). Rather, he calls them to remember in a way that would shape their living in the present, and for the future. Surely these intimate friends of Jesus could not have understood fully all that was implied in his call to remember him. Yet, they became his witnesses “in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Remembering the death and resurrection of Jesus, was not just a fact they rehearsed, but a lived reality that gave contour and context for their generation, and for generations to come.

In the face of an uncertain future, or perhaps a painful present, we might be tempted to dwell in a nostalgic remembering. We might wish for the comfort of selective memories. Yet, for those who want to follow Jesus we have the opportunity to ask ourselves how we are remembering forward? What stories do our lives tell? How do our lives enact the great narrative of salvation in our present day? As we think about the kind of remembrance that enlivens our present and gives hope for the future, we can join in the song of praise with the psalmist of old: Yes, we your people and the sheep of your pasture give thanks to you forever; to all generations we will tell of your praise!(2)

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Beyond Words: Daily Readings on the ABC’s of Faith (Harper: San Francisco, 2004), 252.

(2) Psalm 79:13.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Ordinary Heroes

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by Margaret Manning on June 20, 2014

The question was asked and the room fell silent: “Does anyone ever feel they’ve lived up to their potential?” It was a loaded question, not only because it was asked in a group of persons struggling with vocation but also because the word “potential” is elusive in its definition. What does “potential” mean in a world that views achievement as athletic prowess, celebrity status, or economic success? If the exceptional is the guide for the achievement of one’s potential, how will those of us who live somewhere between the average and the ordinary ever feel we’ve arrived?

The inherent routine and mundane tasks that fill our days contribute to the struggle to understand our potential. How can one possibly feel substantial when one’s day-in, day-out existence is filled with the tedium of housework, paying bills, pulling weeds, and running endless errands? These tasks are not celebrated or sometimes even noticed. They are the daily details that comprise routine. In fact, for artists and bus drivers, homemakers and neurosurgeons, astronauts and cashiers, the days are often filled with repetitive motion, even if there are moments of great challenge or extraordinary success. It is no surprise then, with our societal standards and our routine-filled lives, that we wonder about our potential. Indeed, does much of what we do even matter when it feels so ordinary? Can the “ordinary” contribute to a sense of meeting potential, or does the preponderance of the ordinary simply serve as a perpetual reminder of a failure to thrive?

The so-called “simple lifestyle” movement attempts to locate potential in exactly the opposite ways of much of Western society. In this movement, simplicity unlocks the key to potential, and not acquisition, or achievement, or recognition. Clearing out what clutters and complicates makes room for finding potential in what is most basic and routine. In the Christian tradition, as well, there are many who see true potential and purpose unlocked by the radical call to simplicity. Some of the earliest Christians, who fled the luxury and security of Rome once Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, believed that one’s “holiness” potential could only be achieved within the radical austerity of a monastic cell. There in the cloistered walls where each and every day presented simple routine, repetitive tasks, and the regular rhythm of prayer and worship, perseverance with the ordinary became the path to one’s potential.

Brother Lawrence is one of the most well-known of this type of monastic. In The Practice of Prayer, Margaret Guenther writes, “Brother Lawrence, our patron of housekeeping, was a hero of the ordinary.”1 As one who found his potential in cultivating a profound awareness of God in the ordinary tasks of his day, Brother Lawrence was an “ordinary hero.” While he attended chapel with the other monks, his true sanctuary was amongst the pots and pans of the monastery kitchen. What we may not realize in the popularized retelling of his story is that he actually began by hating his ordinary work. His abbot wrote about him:

The same thing was true of his work in the kitchen, for which he had a naturally strong aversion; having accustomed himself to doing everything there for the love of God, and asking His grace to do his work, he found he had become quite proficient in the fifteen years he had worked in the kitchen.2

Quite proficient in the kitchen. Could it be that Brother Lawrence was able to fulfill his potential by washing dishes? Despite his strong aversion, he found purpose in the very midst of the most mundane and ordinary tasks of life. He fulfilled his potential by focusing on faithfulness. This is not faithfulness that triumphs over the desire to fulfill one’s potential. Indeed, as Guenther describes it, “Faithfulness rarely feels heroic; it feels much more like showing up and hanging in. It is a matter of going to our cell, whatever form that might take, and letting it teach us what it will.”3 Availing himself to consistent faithfulness yielded the blessing of both proficiency and presence—the presence of God—right there in midst of the costly monotony of dirty pots and pans.

My friend Sylvia is one of my ordinary heroes. Sylvia shows up and hangs in there as a paraplegic. She has not been able to use her legs since she was in high school. A horrible accident, when she was just a teenager, took away her ability to walk or to run, and left her without any discernible feeling in the lower half of her body. Her spine severed, the nerves do not receive the necessary information to register sensation or stimulation.

Prior to her accident, Sylvia was an aspiring athlete. Without the use of her legs, this aspiration would be put on hold, but not permanently. Though she is paralyzed in body, she is not paralyzed in spirit. And she eventually competed in several World Championships and in the Paralympic Games. Her determination to excel at world-class competitions, despite her injury, and her intention to live a full life has been an immense inspiration to me. She drives, works at least a forty hour week, and has traveled the world. She has mastered the art of navigating the world in a wheelchair. She has not defined her “potential” by her disability.

Fulfilling one’s potential has little to do with greatness. And yet, the heroism of the ordinary does not preempt the greatness that the world confers to those who have reached their potential with staggering and dramatic achievement; for even those who achieve greatness have faced the drama of routine and the tidal wave of tedium. But to assign the fulfillment of one’s potential solely to great acts and recognition is to miss the blessing that comes from faithful acts of devotion, often done routinely and heroically in the ordinary of our everyday. Perhaps it might be said of us, as it was of Brother Lawrence: “He was more united with God in his ordinary activities.”4

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

1Margaret Guenther, The Practice of Prayer (Boston: Cowley Press, 1998), 113.

2Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, The Practice of the Presence of God, ed. John J. Delaney (New York: Image, 1977), 41.

3Guenther, 112.

4Brother Lawrence, 47.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Think Again – The Marks of Love

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Ravi Zacharias on June 20, 2014

Years ago I was given the great privilege to be in Shanghai in the home of the famed Chinese evangelist Wang Ming Dao. He told us that he was put in prison for his faith in Jesus Christ, but he soon renounced his faith and was released from his imprisonment. Thereafter, he says, he lived with such torment of his soul that he walked the streets of Beijing saying, “My name is Peter; my name is Peter. I’ve denied my Lord.” Soon, Mao Zedong put him back into prison—this time for eighteen years. Wang Ming Dao said every day in prison he woke up and sang the hymn by the hymn writer Fanny Crosby,

 

All the way my Savior leads me;

What have I to ask beside?

Can I doubt his tender mercy,

Who through life has been my guide?

Heav’nly peace, divinest comfort,

Here by faith in Him to dwell!

For I know whate’er befall me,

Jesus doeth all things well.

 

At first the guards tried to silence him. When they weren’t able to succeed, they resignedly put up with his singing. Gradually, as the years went by, they would gather near the opening to his cell to listen as he sang of God’s faithfulness to him. Eventually, they began to ask him to sing to them and to teach them the words of the song. Such is the impact of one who walks faithfully with God.

Many years earlier as a young man trying to come to terms with God’s call in ministry, I stood by a garbage dump in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam: it was the grave of six missionaries martyred in the Tet Offensive of 1968. All alone, I pondered the price they had paid for following Christ. I asked myself whether any of them would have answered God’s call on their lives if they had known that their lives would end in a garbage dump. God knows our frailties; how loving of Him that He does not allow us to know the future. I prayed there by that grave that God would make me faithful so that I would not focus on the cost, but rather, keep my eyes on the mission to serve Christ with all my heart, soul, and mind, and on the sweetness of the walk with Him, day by day.

The Bible speaks of many who suffered on behalf on the gospel who were unwilling to abandon the precious faith entrusted to them. Consider the apostle Paul, who knew intimately what it was to write, “I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). Think of the stoning of Stephen and the heartache endured by those recorded in Hebrews 11. Furthermore, eleven of Jesus’s twelve disciples died a martyr’s death; not one of them anticipated how they would die when they came to him. If they had known where following Jesus would lead them, one wonders whether any of them would have started on the journey, for as they proved later, they were not particularly brave men.

And yet, faithfulness over the long run is the shining example of what faith is meant to be. The story of the gospel in China is only one recent example. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong burned the seminary libraries, expelled Christians from the country, and declared that the name of Jesus would never be pronounced on Chinese lips again. He tried to bury the Christian faith completely. Today, the Chinese church is the fastest growing church in the world.

Many, many times I have looked back at my own journey. Had I known the cost it would exact, I am absolutely positive that at the very least I would have had grave reservations and trembled at stepping onto the road. What I have concluded is this: The greatest of loves will often come at the greatest of costs. We may never be imprisoned for our faith, but what one deems to be of ultimate value exacts a cost in proportion.

I have a friend who spoke to me of how difficult it was for him when he finally learned the heavy cost of his sin through the forgiveness extended to him. He had betrayed his wife and family and lived through the pain of asking for forgiveness and rebuilding that trust. Somehow over a period of time he assumed that even for them, the hurt was mended and the past expunged from their memory. One day he returned home from work early in the afternoon, just to get a break. Unaware that he was home, his wife was on her knees crying out to God to help her forget the pain she and her children were bearing. It was a rude awakening to him of the cost of his sin and of his family’s sacrificial love. Now multiply that wrong by a limitless number and you will get a glimpse of what Christ bore on the cross for you and for me.

The greatest of loves will never come cheaply. The greatest of loves that you and I can ever experience is an intimate relationship with God, who has given everything for us. And yes, sometimes, it takes everything you’ve got to honor that love and it takes everything you’ve got to honor that trust. Look at any athletes who have succeeded. Discipline and perseverance are indispensable parts of their lives unless they cheat. When you have discipline, you have the marks on the body to demonstrate it.

There is always the temptation to misjudge the cost halfway through the journey. God reminds us again and again that the true measure of gain is only calibrated at the destination. That is why even Moses, when he asked how he would know that God had called him, was told, “When you get there you will know it.” That’s not the answer he wanted but that was the profound lesson he learned.

Fanny Crosby, bearing the marks of blindness in infancy by a traveling doctor’s questionable treatment, sang of God’s faithfulness and love to her dying day—and saw the end with the eyes of her soul:

 

All the way my Savior leads me,

Cheers each winding path I tread;

Gives me grace for every trial,

Feeds me with the living Bread.

Though my weary steps may falter,

And my soul athirst may be,

Gushing from the Rock before me,

Lo! A spring of joy I see.

 

That may be why, even in singing the hymn, the last two lines are repeated: “Gushing from the Rock before me, Lo! A spring of joy I see.”

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Transformed

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If we were to draw out in symbols and timelines the road maps of our lives, we could pencil in both single and crucial moments as well as entire years marked with particular themes of development. In any picture of a life laid out before us, there are abrupt moments of pivotal formation and gradual phases of transformation.  It is a paradox that insight seems to grow gradually and yet it also seems to arrive in overpowering moments of abruptness.

A dramatic example of this comes in the life of Jesus and his disciples. Peter, James, and John found themselves climbing a familiar mountain with Christ, an ordinary event in their lives together. But on this day, they were silenced by the entirely uncommon appearance of Elijah and Moses who started talking with Jesus. It must have seemed a moment of both honor and awe. Peter immediately responded to it. “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah” (Matthew 17:4). But before he had finished speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them and a voice from the heavens thundered, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” The disciples were terrified. And then as suddenly as it all began, they looked up and saw no one but Jesus.

There are transforming moments in our lives that seem isolated in both time and vividness. We remember them as mountaintops or downfalls, points in life lifted above or plummeting below the majority of the map. But are they not also much more than this? Whether distinguished by joy or pain, a transforming moment is always more than a moment. Such moments are no more isolated in the pictures of our lives than they are isolated in the picture of reality. The disciples were never the same after their three years with Jesus, through ordinary meals and extraordinary miracles, distracted crowds and disruptive mountaintops.

Professor and theologian James Loder was on vacation with his family when they noticed a motorist off to the side of the road waving for help. In his book The Transforming Moment, he describes kneeling at the front fender of the broken-down car, his head bent to examine the flat tire, when he was abruptly alerted to the sound of screeching brakes. A motorist who had fallen asleep at the wheel was jarred awake seconds before his vehicle crashed into the disabled car alongside the road and the man who knelt beside it. Loder was left pinned between the car he was trying to repair and his own.

Years later, he was compelled to describe the impact of a moment marked by abrupt pain, and yet unarguably something much more. Writes Loder, “At the hospital, it was not the medical staff, grateful as I was for them, but the crucifixes—in the lobby and in the patients’ rooms—that provided a total account of my condition. In that cruciform image of Christ, the combination of physical pain and the assurance of a life greater than death gave objective expression and meaning to the sense of promise and transcendence that lived within the midst of my suffering.”(1)

This encounter with God, like the Transfiguration of Christ on the mountainside to a small group of frightened disciples, did not merely transform a moment; it was a moment that transformed reality and thus, the whole of life. Writes Loder, “Moments of transforming significance radically reopen the question of reality.”(2)

When the disciples came to the end of their mountaintop encounter and looked up, they saw only Jesus. Moses and Elijah were no longer there; the cloud that enveloped them disappeared and the heavens ceased to speak. But Jesus was fully and humanly present to them, the glimpse of God in that transforming moment on the mountain a radical reality that would shape all of life.

To borrow from Emily Dickinson, there are times when truth must dazzle gradually, until it is given its proper place. Other times we seem to find ourselves moved nearly to blindness as we encounter more than we have eyes yet to see. Sometimes, like Peter, we interpret these moments of transcendence imperfectly at first, and it is in living with the moment that we learn to see it more. The Spirit is at work even in the deciphering, and in the final examination, the content of our transforming moments is Jesus alone, the transfigured one, the transforming one, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishing, 1989), 2.

(2) Ibid., back cover.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Summer in My Heart

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All that is found in the promises of summer has long been a theme on the lips of poets and songwriters. Poet or otherwise, I imagine we have all agreed at some point with Shakespeare: “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”

It is the time of year when we savor the days of summer, and recall what it felt like to run home from the last day of school with three months in our back pocket. For me summer vacations call to mind the shores of Lake Michigan, a scenic reminder of the origin of the word “vacation” itself; the Latin word “vacatio” means freedom.

Even so, we are sadly aware it is a freedom that does not last. Even as children on summer break we knew that vacation would end and summer would fade away. It is, in fact, this quality that makes vacations all the more sought-after; it is time set aside, time that shouts particularly of meaning because of the time with which it so contrasts. Yet regardless of its short lease, there seems a promise within the freeing days of summer that captures our hearts and remains with us through the longest of winters.

A poem by C.S. Lewis suggests that the promise we look for is that the seasons of life will one day come to a grinding halt and death will be no more. It is the hopeful possibility that we were created to know a freedom that endures.  Writes Lewis:

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear

‘This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

‘Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees

This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.

‘This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,

Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

‘This time they will not lead you round and back

To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

‘This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,

We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

‘Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,

Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart.’(1)

What if the changing seasons, the fading of flowers, and the rebirth of summer are all signposts of the eternal? In his wisdom, King Solomon saw that written upon the seasons of time is the signature of the one who made them. “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot… He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2,11). Rising sun and emerging summer declare that the heavens will neither forget nor forsake. Upon each waking flower is written the promise of resurrection.

It is this weighted promise the Christian worldview carries through the seasons: Christ has stopped the cycle of death and is coming back to bring us where he is. The effect of such a promise on the life of a believer is well illustrated in hymnist Fanny Crosby. She wrote:

I know in whom my soul believes,

I know in whom I trust;

The Holy One, the merciful,

the only wise and just.

I know in whom my soul believes,

and all my fears depart;

For though the winter winds may blow,

’tis summer in my heart.

Crosby wrote of the Christian hope she saw written across her life. Though blinded as an infant by a doctor’s error, she spoke of the light of Christ and carrying the promise of summer with her. Every season presents a similar option of holding near the hope of Christ and the promise of resurrection, until a day when summer comes true.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C.S. Lewis, “What the Bird Said Early in the Year,” Poems, (Harcourt: San Diego, 1992), 71.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A NOBLE FOUR LETTER WORD

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by Ravi Zacharias on June 12, 2014

My father-in-law had a great impact on my life. He was father to four daughters and always considered me the son he never had. We were quite close and the world lost a great person when he passed away in 2005.

One of our last few conversations before he died took place as we sat across the dining table from each other at his home in Toronto. He had been diagnosed with cancer and was given no more than a few weeks to live. It came as a shock to him and to us. In this, one of our “farewell” conversations, I’ll never forget a particular word he used because he used it often in moments of reflection.

A little background will help. When the Second World War began, he dutifully enlisted to serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force as a navigator. He navigated brilliantly by the stars. He served his country and a cause for the world with duty and honor at a perilous time in history. His use of that word “duty” epitomized his own life.

I heard him utter it again as he faced death. He was downcast as he worried that he had not left his finances in better shape for his wife. The truth is that he had provided for her, but with his sudden diagnosis, he suddenly felt so uncertain about it all. I said to him, “Please don’t worry about it, Dad…we’ll be there to take care of her.” He paused, overwhelmed by the weight of the limited time left to him, and said in somber tones, “But it was my duty to do so…” and the tears ran down his face.

There was that word: “duty.” In fact, I almost never heard him speak publicly without somehow bringing it in as a reminder to his audience. He would often quote Lord Nelson’s famous call to his countrymen before the battle of Trafalgar, “England expects every man to do his duty.” So prone was my father-in-law to quote that line that when he wrote his first book, about six hundred pages in length, I asked him with an amused expression, “Where in the book is Nelson’s line?” He looked so sheepish and dodged the question, so I opened the book and there it was: the opening line of the first chapter. I smiled and applauded that he had made my search so easy.

Duty. The two extremes towards this call miss the mark. The materially minded don’t like the word because they think it somehow handcuffs us—why place a burden of compliance that is self-made and mere convention, they insinuate. That venting is understandable, because materialists often miss the essence of many things as they go for form rather than substance. The spiritually minded don’t like the word very much either because they think it diminishes a greater demand, the demand of love. They mangle the form by isolating the substance. Their mistake is in putting asunder what God has joined together.

In his conclusion to the Book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon said that “the whole duty of man is to fear God and to keep his commandments.” So I ask, is it one’s duty to keep the commandments? Yes, indeed. Jesus positioned two commandments as the greatest: to love God and to love our fellow human beings. Making the love of God and of man our duty is surely not making them opposite sentiments.

Whatever the reasons, we are discomfited by the multiple illustrations of failure to do one’s duty that are everywhere, from political leadership to academic responsibility, and so often in the place of the arts. Offices of responsibility are more often sought for the power they bring, rather than for love of duty. Educators think character can be ignored in favor of letters against their names. In the world of entertainment, programs are aired with monetary goals in mind rather than for building up that which is good. Perish the thought that television executives might bear a responsibility to society! The living color that brings entertainment to us reflects only the color of green to its purveyors…dollars that can sacrifice sense. But that’s another topic for another day.

The worst effect from the failure to do our duty is evidenced in the home. The situation is dire. I know of those who have walked away from their wives and children and even their grandchildren to pursue selfish ambition. I find that heart-wrenching. I have seen those grandchildren longing to see their grandfather but he’s not there. He has turned his back on the minimal requirement of love: his duty.

Those who walk away with such callousness think duty and love are at odds because they often subsume love under their own personal need and ignore the greater commitment of duty. That misreading has cost our society so much. China flirted with a one-child policy and realized a generation later the costly mistake they had made in raising a whole generation of children with no siblings. How much more costly is it that multitudes are raised with no father?

What is scary about this scenario as I write about it is that to even address the need for a father is to run the risk of being accused of making a veiled attack on the culture of progressive thinking. That is not the point I am making. I am simply acknowledging that many men over the years have opted for selfishness over duty, for professional accolades over nurture, for image rather than substance, for temporal gain over an eternally defined profit, for sitting in the board room rather than standing by a crib. There is the old saying that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. We are seeing now that the cradle is ruling the world as we rock ourselves into the arrogant belief that not only is an earthly father unnecessary, there is no need for a heavenly Father either.

Contrast these two stories: Some years ago, an Air Canada flight from Dallas to Toronto met with an emergency. A fire had broken out in mid-flight in one of the restrooms. The pilot began a dramatic and sudden descent, knowing he had but a few moments to land if any were to survive. He descended at a furious speed and when he touched down emergency crews were on hand. As soon as they opened the door for rescue, the whole aircraft, sucking in the oxygen, turned into an inferno. There were some fatalities and some suffered burns, but because of his skill and the crew’s commitment, many were rescued. The captain was the last one to leave the burning airplane as he was literally pulled through the window with his uniform afire. It was a story of skill and heroism, and the captain deserved the tearful and heart-filled commendation he received as someone who had done his duty.

Switch scenarios. We move to April 2014. A ferry in Seoul, South Korea, capsizes and a large number of passengers are killed, most of them high school students who, waiting for instructions to abandon ship that never came, were swallowed up by the water and drowned.

 

One of the reasons the instructions never came is that the captain himself had fled the sinking ship and made sure he was safe on dry ground. The chorus of condemnation from the loved ones of those lost, tormented because of a captain who betrayed his trust, is not surprising. The teacher who had organized the trip took his own life, feeling that he had no right to be alive while most of his students perished. Even the prime minister of South Korea offered to resign because of the ripple effect of the tragedy. No celebration here, no commendation of a brave man; just a series of wrong decisions that resulted in the ultimate wrong decision of a man who put himself first and failed to do his duty.

Duty is the handmaiden of love and honor. It is doing that which is right rather than that which is convenient. In fact, failure of duty generally amputates somebody else’s right. Duty recognizes a cause greater than one’s self. As men and as fathers we have a duty before God and man to do what is right, honorable, and sacrificial.

On this occasion of Father’s Day, I call upon every man to do his duty: his duty to those who are in his care and his duty toward whatever task is in his trust, regardless of the personal cost. I pause, myself, to reflect upon ways in which I could have served my family better. I wish I had done that in more ways than I did. Watching our children live out their lives for God is a thrill that cannot be gainsaid.

My concern at this stage is for our youth. They live in a world akin to a tantalizing buffet line of seductions. How do they have the wisdom that enables restraint and discipline? Institutions seem accountable to nobody but themselves. That needed wisdom must come from within the home. That’s where instruction and the impartation of love, responsibility, and duty must begin. This will be a far better world if every man would do his duty to our young.

The hymn writer put it well:

Put on the Gospel armor

and watching unto prayer,

When duty calls, or danger,

be never wanting there.

(Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus)

My father-in-law was that kind of man and that’s why his last words at the end of his life were incredible. As he neared death, with his wife and children standing by his bedside, he uttered two statements. Looking toward the heavens he said, “Amazing, just amazing!” Turning to his wife of 62 years, he said, “Jean, I love you.” Those were his last words before meeting his heavenly Father.

Love had at last wedded beauty to duty, the enrichment of the here and the enchantment of the hereafter. It was the finest and the most soul-affirming of farewells. Doing your duty before God and man is ultimately welcomed in the embrace of love and commendation from whom it really matters. What more could a wife and children have asked for?

God places before us a call to the most rewarding service:  to love that knows its responsibility and that will reap the fitting reward of children who honor their parents. Out of such homes society can build a better future. That in itself would truly be amazing. To be sure, the path to that end is fraught with obstacles, perils, disappointments, and heartaches. But we cannot fail in our duty. The first step is defining, that we might know God who sent his Son who, in turn, fulfilled his duty and laid down his life so that you and I might know the love of our heavenly Father. Duty and love came from heaven to earth so that earth might reflect that splendor.

Happy Father’s Day, Gentlemen. And to families that are missing their father today, my prayers are especially for you. May God our heavenly Father be your strength.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Face of Jesus in the Least

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Not long ago, as I was doing research for a paper I had to write, I stumbled upon some statistical data that greatly disturbed me. Researchers estimate that every day 16,000 to 24,000 children die from hunger related causes. In 2004 almost one billion people lived below the international poverty line, earning less than one dollar per day. These impoverished people struggle daily with malnourishment and hunger, and the majority live in what has been called the “developing” world. This developing world has six times the population as the 57 or so countries that comprise the “developed” world.(1)

In the United States, by contrast, over two-thirds of the population are overweight and almost one-third is considered obese according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for the years 2001-2004.(2)  In fact, the Centers for Disease Control shows a steady increase in the number of obese persons in the United States in their data compiled from 1985-2006.(3) Living with an over-abundance, we are barraged by diet fads and quick-fix strategies to shed extra pounds. Despite all the effort to promote healthy eating and lifestyles, the fact remains that in 22 different states 25 to 30 percent of the populations are considered obese.(4)

These statistics became more than facts and figures when I traveled to tiny villages along the Amazon River in Brazil. I saw countless numbers of children searching for food or other treasures among the dirt and filth of garbage piles.  Bloated stomachs were not full; they were ravaged by parasites. With tarps for roofs and water for drinking, bathing, and elimination, these tiny faces had so little, while I had so much. I was fat by comparison.

Jesus’s parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 became a reality to me as I looked into hungry, brown eyes. In this harrowing vision of final judgment, the Son of Man holds court over all the nations. Like a shepherd who separates the sheep from the goats, the Son of Man gathers the nations before him and separates them from one another. The sheep are commended for their righteousness, and the goats are punished for their unrighteousness. Among the many insights one could glean from this passage, one is unescapable: Jesus defines righteous living in terms of acts of justice and kindness done to the least of these. He says to the sheep on his right: “Come, you who are blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you invited me in; naked, and you clothed me; I was sick and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me” (Matthew 25:34-36). The sheep are astonished that they are counted among the righteous based on this definition, for they never saw Jesus hungry or thirsty, as a stranger or naked, sick or in prison.  Yet, Jesus answers them, “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).

Perhaps for the original audience who heard Jesus present this parable, and for those who hear it today, it comes as a surprise to find that righteousness categorically involves acts of mercy, kindness, and protection for the least of these. Indeed, how sobering it is to know that the unrighteous, according to Jesus, are those who neglect opportunities to show mercy, kindness, and protection.

An even more vital insight is found in the opportunity to encounter the living Jesus in the presence of the least of these. Author Paul Janz notes: “Christ does not say that inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, it will be ‘as if’ you had done it unto me; but rather that inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me.”(5) In the bleak, gaunt, ravaged expressions of malnourishment and hunger I witnessed along the Amazon, I glimpsed—indeed I encountered—Christ himself. All those who have eyes to see and ears to hear have the opportunity to recognize, to receive, and to respond to Jesus himself in the plight of the least of these among us.

What do world hunger, poverty, illness and despair have to do with righteousness? What do they have to do with Jesus? According to Matthew’s Gospel, they offer the opportunity to encounter Jesus as acts of mercy, kindness, and justice are embraced and enacted. Indeed, according to Matthew’s Gospel, the opportunity to experience the blessedness of inheriting the kingdom prepared is opened as ministry is done to Jesus in the least of these all around us. The abundance given can be the means of blessing others. Rather than seeing poverty, hunger, homelessness, and imprisonment as pervasive societal ills, statistics, or problems to avoid, blessing is offered as Jesus is served in the least of these. In their faces, his face shines.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Statistics from Bread for the World, http://www.bread.org and the World Food Programme http://www.wfp.org.

(2) Statistics from the Weight Control Information Network http://www.niddk.nih.gov.

(3) Centers for Disease Control, http://www.cdc.gov.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Oliver Davies, Paul Janz, and Clemens Sendak, Transformation Theology: Church in the World (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2008), 115.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God’s Weakness

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“I don’t believe in God,” begins Julian Barnes in his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, “but I miss him.” Though he admits he never had any faith to lose (a “happy atheist” as an Oxford student, Barnes now considers himself an agnostic), he still finds himself dreading the gradual ebbing of Christianity. He misses the sense of purpose that the Christian narrative affords, the sense of wonder and belief that haunts Christian art and architecture. “I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm.” Such are the thoughts that surface as Barnes attempts to confront his fears of death and dying in this memoir. He believes Christianity to be a foolish lie, but insists, “[I]t was a beautiful lie.”(1)

There is certainly room for beauty in the description the apostle Paul gave of the gospel. Like Julian, Paul saw its foolishness clearly as well: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21). He also noted the weakness inherent in the Christian proclamation. At the heart of the Christian religion is one who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and being found in human form” (Philippians 2:7). On this much Paul and Julian agree: however beautiful, foolishness and weakness imbibe the Christian story.

But unlike Julian, Paul saw the foolishness of the gospel as a reason not to disbelieve, but to believe. “For God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27-28). It is indeed difficult to explain why at the heart of the Christian narrative there is a child, why God would answer the dark silence of 400 years with the cry of a displaced and homeless infant, why God would take on the weakness of humanity in an attempt to reach humanity with power, dying as the Messiah. Most of us would know better than to create, or to perpetuate, a story so foolish. However beautiful, the story of Christ is difficult to explain; that is, unless it was not crafted with human wisdom at all.

The story of a Savior coming as an infant in Bethlehem is indeed astonishing, as astonishing an idea as the resurrection. That God chose to come into the world with flesh like ours, flesh that would suffer, is strange and paradoxical, beautiful and foolish. Perhaps it is also wise beyond our comprehension. “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

Though the word incarn is now used infrequently, it was once used medically, describing the flesh that grows over a wound. Applied to healing, the word refers to the recovery of wounded flesh due to the presence of new flesh.(2) The Incarnation, the astonishing event at the center of Christianity, the story that has inspired music, architecture, and hope, is God’s way of doing exactly that: Christ comes in flesh to cover our mortal wound. God comes near in body and in weakness to bring healing to weak and wounded bodies. Indeed, God’s own body is mortally wounded only to rise again in flesh and blood. This may seem a foolish mission, but to the blind who receive their sight, the lame who now walk, the diseased who are cleansed, the deaf who hear, the dead who are raised, and the poor who have good news brought to them, it is the most beautiful foolishness they never suspected.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

(2) Encyclopaedia Perthensis; Or Universal Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences, Literature (Edinburgh: John Brown, 1816), 53.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Face of Victory

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On March 1, 1999, Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones stepped into the gondola of a hot air balloon and lifted off from the Swiss alpine village of Chateau d’Oex. Nineteen days, 21 hours, and 55 minutes later, traveling 28,431 miles, they landed in the Egyptian desert. Their journey successfully marked the first nonstop flight around the world in a balloon, earning them the distinction of a world record, a book deal, and a million dollars from the sponsoring corporation. Their victory photograph now rests in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum beside the “Breitling Orbiter III” itself.

As with all successes in life, the accomplishment of Jones and Piccard’s journey is memorable. Like the trophies on our shelves or the moments we remember as crowning, the successful passage of the Breitling Orbiter III is the story we celebrate—a story that seems to begin at Chateau d’Oex and ends in Egypt. But this trip, like most memorable achievements, was not quite the linear move from start to finish we imagine it to be. In fact, the journey that would end with a world record actually had three hopeful starting points and two frustrated finishes.

The often miry course of personal growth and human development is similar. There is a reason Jesus seems to insult the paralytic with the basic question of desire. We indeed must first want to be well; I have long understood this concept personally. But thinking of this call for help as being inherently present within the human developmental process has only recently entered my perspective. What if every pang of trust or mistrust, every cry for autonomy or cry of shame, was the call of the human spirit to that which is beyond it? What if our cries over mistrust or longings for trust exist explicitly because there is one who is trustworthy? Psychology and theology professor James Loder offers this perspective explicitly: “It is evident that human development is not the answer to anything of ultimate significance. Every answer it does provide only pushes the issue deeper, back to the ultimate question, ‘What is a lifetime?’ and ‘Why do I live it?’”(1)

Such are the questions we wrestle with in the twists and turns, stops and failures through the journey called life.  How incredibly helpful to suspect there is a reason we ask all along. What if God is not merely the God who comes near in the midst of the pain of adolescence or the cries of an adult for understanding, but is the very creator of the spirit that leads us to crisis and guides us through certain pains? What if it is not merely, as one developmental psychologist writes, the “capacities of the human psyche” that “make spirituality possible,” but it is the Spirit of God who makes the human psyche capable of knowing God?(2) “You did not choose me,” said Jesus, “but I chose you” (John 15:16).

As its name suggests, the success of the Breitling Orbiter III was built upon two previous attempts. The original Breitling Orbiter launched in January of 1997. Only a few hours after take off, the balloon was forced to land when the crew was overcome by kerosene fumes from a leaking valve. One year later, the Breitling Orbiter II stayed in the air 9 days longer than its counterpart, managing to navigate from Switzerland to Burma. To the dismay of all, their flight was cut short when they were refused permission to use the airspace over China. Yet from the finish line of 1999, there is little doubt that these early set backs contributed to the development of the system and strategy that would allow Piccard and Jones to finally pilot their balloon across the Pacific.

Whether our days are marked by victory or by crisis, by progress or the call to turn around and try again, the Spirit goes with us, reinforcing that God has been there all along. To discover that there is a face inherently present behind many of the failures we long to forget, a Spirit within the crushed and wounded scenes we try our best to put behind us, and a voice that speaks over and above the cries that have indelibly marked our journey, is to experience the restorative hope of the creator who intended us to discover him all along. The words of the psalmist describe waking to this knowledge:  ”It was not by their sword that they won the land, nor did their arm bring them victory; it was your right hand, your arm, and the light of your face, for you loved them” (Psalm 44:3). What if our days are really marked with the intention of one who loves us? Our winding journeys are a means to the face of God.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) James Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, Inc, 1998), 106.

(2) Ben Campbell Johnson, Pastoral Spirituality (Philadelphia: Westminster Press: 1988), 26.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faith in the Past, Present, and Future

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What is the nature of faith? Is faith simply assenting to rational content? Or is faith an irrational leap into the dark? So often our understanding of the nature of faith swings widely between these two extremes; either faith is solely an assent to certain beliefs or it is ultimately devoid of intellectual content and consists exclusively of feelings of total dependence.

The author of Hebrews grounds faith in the “assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.”(1) The early Christians who received this letter were undergoing tremendous suffering and persecution, and the author reminds them that faith is assurance even in the midst of trouble.

The “assurance of things hoped for” is not merely wishful thinking about a yet to be determined future. Rather, it is a description of what true faith already has: the possession in the present of what God has promised for the future. In other words, faith is the response to the trustworthiness of God for what God has already promised and has brought to pass. So faith is confidence in God’s saving work done in the past, and hence a hopeful assurance that God will act in the future. To illustrate this point, the author recounts those who by faith believed God in the past in order to encourage the beleaguered recipients of this letter. Just like those who walked in faith before, we too may not see every promise fulfilled. The content of faith is in remembering God’s faithfulness in the past, so that we might trust in God’s goodness for our present, and in a future that is yet to come.

The writer of Hebrews even chose a particular word to illustrate this point. The Greek word that is used for “assurance” is hypostasis. This is the same word that is used to describe how Christ is the hypostasis, “the very being” of God. In the same way, faith is the “very being” of things hoped for; it is the reality that God’s promises will be fulfilled ultimately, and they are being fulfilled already, in the present time! While we often focus on the bad things that are happening around us, faith directs our gaze to see God’s work going forward in the midst of crisis and chaos.

Ultimately, the “assurance of things hoped for” is an assurance that comes in Jesus Christ. For Jesus is the promise fulfilled and the very substance of faith. It is to Jesus Christ and to him alone that the writer of Hebrews directs us as we look for the content of faith. We have faith because we look to Jesus “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” We look to Jesus, who endured in faith on our behalf, so that we might not grow fainthearted.

Assurance doesn’t come in well-ordered circumstances or trouble-free living. Nor is assurance found in having a rational answer for every question. Assurance comes in relationship with a trustworthy God who fulfilled promises in the past and who will fulfill them in the future. Faith is grounded on God’s faithfulness demonstrated in Jesus Christ.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Hebrews 11:1.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Dead Don’t Bleed

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For one family in Venezuela, the space between death and life was filled with more shock than usual. After a serious car accident, Carlos Camejo was pronounced dead at the scene. Officials released the body to the morgue and a routine autopsy was ordered. But as soon as examiners began the autopsy, they realized something was gravely amiss: the body was bleeding. They quickly stitched up the wounds to stop the bleeding, a procedure without anesthesia which, in turn, jarred the man to consciousness. “I woke up because the pain was unbearable,” said Camejo.(1) Equally jarred awake was Camejo’s wife, who came to the morgue to identify her husband’s body and instead found him in the hallway—alive.

Enlivened with images from countless forensic television shows, the scene comes vividly to life. Equally vivid is the scientific principle utilized by the doctors in the morgue. Sure, blood is ubiquitous with work in a morgue; but the dead do not bleed. This is a sign of the living.

Thought and practice in Old Testament times revolved around a similar understanding—namely, the life is in the blood. It is this notion that informs the expression that “blood is  on one’s hands” when life has wrongfully been taken. When Cain killed his brother Abel, God confronted him in the field, “Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” For the ancient Hebrew, there was a general understanding that blood is the very substance of our createdness, that in our blood is the essence of what it means to be alive. There is life in the blood; there is energy and power.

This notion of blood and its power can also be seen in the language of sacrifice and offering found throughout Near Eastern culture. “And you shall provide a lamb a year old without blemish for a burnt offering to the LORD daily; morning by morning you shall provide it” (Ezekiel 46:13). Just as it was understood that the force of life exists in the blood, there was a general understanding of human need for the power of perfect blood, a need in our lives for atoning and cleansing. But the blood of Israel’s sacrifices was different in this sense than the blood shed by those attempting to appease and approach the gods they feared and followed. The prophets sent throughout Israel’s history were forever insisting that the God of Israel wanted more than the empty performance of sacrifice. God desired these offerings to exemplify the heart of a worshiper, one who yearns to be fully alive in the presence of the creator. The blood of a living sacrifice made this possible temporarily, but God would provide a better way.

When Christianity speaks of Christ as the Lamb of God, it is meant to be a description that moves well beyond symbol or metaphor. Christ is the Lamb whose blood cries out with enough life and power to reach every sin, every shortfall, every tear, every evil. He is the Lamb who comes to the slaughter alive and aware, on his own accord, and with his blood covers us with life, moving us forever into the presence of God by the Spirit. There is life in the blood of Christ, whose entire life is self-giving love; there is power, and he has freely sacrificed all to bring it near. “I tell you the truth,” Jesus said to a crowd that would understand the concept, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).

Mr. Camejo bled because he was living. His pain was equally a sign of life. The many ways in which we have bled, fragile and mortal, are signs of life, something shared with one who suffered as a human in every way. “When they hurled their insults at him,” writes Peter, “he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he…bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness.” The Christian story tells of a time when we will bow before the slain Lamb who stands very much alive, though bearing the scars of his own death. He is not dead and buried, but beckoning a broken world to his wounded side, offering love and life and power in blood:

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine

Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.(2)

ill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) “‘Dead’ man wakes up under autopsy knife”, Reuters, 14 September 2007.

(2) George Herbert, “The Agony.”

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Mortal Thoughts

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“Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.”(1)

It is a rare gift, in this age of distractions, to have five minutes to rest and reflect. Recently, I had the opportunity to take an entire afternoon and do nothing. I was in the desert Southwest of the United States surrounded by brown, barren mountains, desert scrub and cacti, and a variety of small birds. As I looked out over the contrasting horizon of azure sky and brown earth, I was struck by my own insignificance—something I rarely allow myself to think about as I routinely fill my days with busyness. That topography of sky and soil, bird and flower had been there long before I arrived and would surely remain long after I had departed—both from my visit and upon my departure from this world.

Despite this more sobering thought, the gift of undistracted space nourished me. I could revel in the symphony of songbirds all around me, marvel at the cataclysmic forces of nature that formed the mountains and valleys around me. I could wonder at my place in the vastness of the creation and feel my smallness and my transience. Having this kind of time to sit and to reflect is a rarity, and is just as fleeting as the birds that flew around me.

Though writing hundreds of years ago, Blaise Pascal spoke prophetically about the spirit of our age. With the transience of life and the specter of death facing all, most seek lives of distraction. Whether or not we recognize that the fear of death is an underlying, albeit unconscious motivation, we nevertheless recognize how often we fill our lives in order to obscure these realities. Whether it is in the juggling endless priorities, the relentless busyness of our age, or perpetual media noise, our lives are so full that we rarely find the space or time to reflect honestly about anything. Particularly in Western societies, mindless consumption numbs us to the eventuality of our mortal condition and our finitude. The advertising industry is not unaware of our propensity to consumptive distraction.  Marketers spent over 295 billion dollars in total media advertising in 2007.(2) Perhaps they know that humans mistakenly equate vitality with the ability to consume.

It is easy to understand how the fear of death and suffering would compel human beings to live lives of distraction. Yet, the cost of that distraction is a pervasive and deadening apathy—apathy not simply as the inability to care about anything deeply, but the diminishment for engagement that comes from caring about the wrong things. Kathleen Norris laments:

“It is indeed apathy’s world when we have so many choices that we grow indifferent to them even as we hunger for still more novelty. We discard real relationships in favor of virtual ones and scarcely notice that being overly concerned with the thread count of cotton sheets and the exotic ingredients of gourmet meals can render us less able to care about those who scrounge for food and have no bed but the streets.”(3)

The ancient Hebrew poets, while meditating on the brevity of life, prayed, “So teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). It was the inevitability of death that motivated this prayer for wisdom. This was a wisdom that didn’t try to hide from the realities of life—be they joys or sorrows—but rather sought to keep finitude ever before it. Indeed the poem ends with a cry for God to “confirm the work of our hands.” Numbering life’s days led to meaningful engagement in the world and in human work—and this was the mark of wisdom.

As I pondered the landscape around me, I thought of dear loved ones, both family and friends, who will not look on this earthly horizon any more. I was gripped by the pain of their loss and shaken by the fact that one day my own eyes will cease to behold earthly beauty. Yet rather than disengaging or distracting myself from the pain of these thoughts, I desire to number my own days. In dealing with significant loss and pain it is certainly understandable how one would long for escape, but facing the pain and attending to it is the way to develop a heart of wisdom and a life full of meaning and confirmation.

Sadly, the reminders of our own mortality lead some to distraction. Yet it can lead others to wise engagement.  Jesus, himself, faced his own death with intention and purpose. “I am the Good Shepherd…and I lay down my life for the sheep… No one has taken it away from me, but I lay it down on my own initiative” (John 10:14a-18). The way of wisdom demonstrated in the life of Jesus gives flesh to the ancient psalmist’s exhortation. As he numbered his days, he calls those who would follow to engage mortality as a catalyst for purposeful living. While following Jesus insists on our laying down our lives in his service, it can be done in the hope that abundant life is truly possible even in the darkest of places. For the one who laid his life down is the one who was raised. He is the one who declared, “I am the resurrection and the life; the one who believes in me will live even though he dies.”

 

Margaret Manning is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees, (Penguin Books: New York, 1966), 37.

(2) As referenced by Allan Sloan in “Fuzzy Bush Math” CNN Money, September 4, 2007.

(3) Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life, (Riverhead Books: New York, 2008), 125.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Where Do You Live?

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Like many Generation Xers, I have spent a great deal of my life asking questions. In retrospect, it seems that more than a few of my plaguing inquires were probably the wrong inquiries. In fact, more than a few of my questions were probably even unanswerable. But it took me a while to be able to admit there existed such distinctions. When you are a child and inquiry is your way of gaining a handle on the world around you, you come to believe that every question is right, and every inquiry deserves an answer that satisfies. And there is some truth to that comforting thought: questions are valid and answers should satisfy. Later, when social pressure begins to stress conformity and asking questions carries the risk of embarrassment, we learn to repress our inquisitiveness, even as those who still see the value in inquiring minds offer the ready assurance, “There are no wrong questions!” And this may be true as well, particularly in a classroom. But it does not mean that one cannot ask an unanswerable question or inquire in such a way that simply fails to cohere with reality. Is your idea blue or purple? How much time is in the sky? I imagine a great number of the questions we ask along the way are in fact quite similar.

When it comes to faith, we are actually instructed in the Christian religion to carry into our discipleship some of the qualities we held as children. I suspect a child’s passion for inquiry is one of the traits Jesus intended in his directive: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” But the childlike expectation that every inquiry is capable of being answered to our satisfaction, that every question is capable of being answered now (or even answered at all) is likely not the quality he was encouraging us to keep.

Regardless, Jesus readily received the questions of those around him, whether they were asked with ulterior motive or childlike abandon; no inquiry was turned away. Of course, this is not to say that he always answered, or that he always satisfied the questioner. Actually, more often than not, he replied with a question of his own. “Who gave you the authority to do what you are doing?” the scribes asked. Jesus replied, “I will ask you one question; answer me and I will answer you. Did the baptism of John come from heaven or human origin?” Knowing they were stuck between conceding to Jesus’s authority and risking the wrath of the crowd, they refused to answer. So Jesus refused as well.

Hopefully, beyond learning that questions, like words, can be used as ammunition, we also learn as we grow from inquiring children to questioning adults that questions are not deserving of satisfactory answers simply because they are asked. Most of us can now admit that there are some questions that simply can’t be satisfied. And yet, we scarcely take this wisdom with us into the realms of faith and belief. Standing before a God whose wisdom is said to be many-sided, we somehow feel that God can and must answer our every inquiry. But questioning an all-knowing God does not presuppose that the question itself was even rational. In fact, Jesus’s reactions to the questions around him seem to verify the strong possibility that many of our questions miss the point entirely.

So what does it mean if many of our great questions of ultimate reality and theological inquiry are as unanswerable as the child who wants to know God’s home address? First, the question isn’t wrong in the sense that it has no meaning for the inquirer. Nor does a question’s unanswerability mean we must walk away from the inquiry entirely disheartened. On the contrary, even in questions that cannot be answered there rings the promise of an answerer who satisfies. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.”(1) God may not have a physical address, but the fleshly dwelling of the Incarnate Son of God is nearer and greater than we imagine.

The desire to know, the curiosity that formed the question, and the assumption that someone indeed holds the answer, are all forces that compel a child to ask in the first place. This compulsion to know Jesus encouraged in every questioner, however he chose to answer them. Perhaps he knew that in becoming like children who long to see we would be moved further up and farther into the self-disclosing presence and communion of Father, Son, and Spirit. Inquiry is not in opposition to faith; it is faith’s road to the good answerer.

Interestingly, one of the first questions the disciples asked Jesus was, “Where do you live?” He simply answered, “Come and see.”

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) 1 Corinthians 2:9.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Insult and Injury

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For a moment I was completely confused. Wincing, I bent down to remove what I thought was a thorn between my toes when a wasp crawled out of my sandal. My immediate reaction was one of indignation. I hadn’t done anything to warrant this. But this train of thought was immediately derailed by a second sting on the opposite foot. The next thing I knew wasps were everywhere. They went after my head and continued to chase me regardless of how fast or far I seemed to run. By the time I made it home, I had been stung repeatedly.

I can’t remember the last time I had been stung by a bee. (I was probably five or six years old, and my mom was immediately there to medicate and console me.) By the time the adrenaline stopped rushing, I was overwhelmed with throbbing limbs and digits. I had forgotten how painful a bee sting can be and I had no idea how to soothe the hurt. My husband gave me a bag of ice and set off to the Internet for information. What we discovered was half-helpful, half-maddening.

On every website that offered information on treating bee stings, there inevitably seemed to be a few thoughts on what I should have done to prevent them. The lists were always very similar: Avoid wearing perfume and bright colors. Don’t work or play around beehives or hornet nests. Don’t provoke them or disturb them. Remember that bee stings are painful and can be dangerous. The words almost seemed to make the stinging worse; the burden of fault was unbearable.

Religious people sometimes make use of similar teaching opportunities. When a person is crumbling under the weight of his own failure, crying out over a life of brokenness, or agonizing over a certain sting of consequence, someone inevitably steps in to offer some after-the-fact instruction. This person’s objective may be well-meaning. There may even be nothing wrong with the words or wisdom offered. But there is undoubtedly a wrong a time to offer them. Before we give a lesson on all that makes us bleed, the wounded need to know there is a physician.

Jesus came onto the religious scene of Jerusalem with a method that bothered a great number of people. The experts of the law were proficient in the commandments of Scripture; they wanted people to know that sin bears consequence, that life is full of choices, and that the way to God is straight and narrow. The teaching of Jesus certainly echoed some of these ideas, and yet he called out the religious leaders repeatedly as those whose “teachings are merely human rules” (Matthew 15:9). “And you experts in the law,” he proclaimed, “woe also to you! For you load people down with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them” (Luke 11:46).

Of course, the advice given to me about avoiding bee stings was obviously sound. And on some level, it seems reasonable to include these principles while discussing a treatment plan; prevention is clearly the best treatment. But each time I came across this “guidance” as my entire body throbbed in pain, I naturally wanted to scream. Of course I didn’t mean to disturb the wasps’ nest; I’m still not even sure where the nest was. To be fair, I didn’t see any of it coming. I wasn’t wearing bright colors and I wasn’t wearing perfume. I simply stepped in the wrong place at the wrong time and I was paying for those steps. Yet regardless: all of this was completely irrelevant at the moment I was looking for help.

There are times when sin or a wrong choice or life itself simply comes in and flattens us completely. In hindsight we may be able to see the wrong turns or reckless steps that might have brought us there, or actions that might have prevented the heartache altogether. But in the midst of our brokenness, Jesus isn’t the one pointing this out. To the wounded, he simply says, “Come.”

When we come to Christ asking for help, we are offered a person, not a list that adds insult to injury. To the wounded, he simply offers his own wounds. While Jesus indeed offered instruction that would load down the strongest among us, he was also offering himself up to help us bear the burden. In his presence the stinging may at first seem worse, but the wound, he assures us, will be healed.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.