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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Answer to Prayer

August 6, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Just type the word “prayer” into an internet search engine as I did the other day and you’ll find almost 100 million different articles, sites, books, and periodicals on prayer! Discussions about prayer are as ubiquitous as the praying football player in the end zone after a touchdown. Every major world religion has some form of prayer, and Christians are exhorted to pray “without ceasing” in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians.

And yet if we’re honest, prayer is often a source of confusion and deep mystery. Confusion comes not only with questions concerning what to pray and how to pray unceasingly, but also with wondering whether or not prayers make a difference or are being heard at all. Phillip Yancey’s book Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? attempts to address many of these questions about prayer. Why does God seem silent so much of the time to our prayers? Why does God seem to answer prayers for some and not for others? And when we receive one after another ‘no’ responses to our prayers, how are we to understand both its efficacy, and the God who loves us?(1)

If these questions aren’t difficult enough, Jesus’s own bold statements about prayer make us all the more confused. After all, wasn’t it Jesus who proclaimed, “I say to you, ask, and it shall be given to you; seek and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and the one who knocks, it shall be opened.” Likewise, Jesus promises that like our earthly fathers, God longs to give us what is good in response to the asking, seeking, and knocking of prayer.(2)

Luke’s gospel narrative makes explicit what Matthew’s gospel keeps implicit about God’s gift given in response to prayer. Jesus tells his disciples, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (Luke 11:11-13). According to Jesus, the goal of all prayer is the Holy Spirit at work in our lives and in the world. The Holy Spirit is the ultimate “good gift” that God gives in response to our asking, seeking, and knocking.

So, too, prayer is about relationship with God. The more a relationship grows and develops, the more one wants of it. Hence, God promises to give us more of the Holy Spirit-in and through all the circumstances of life-as the deep answer and the good gift in response to prayer.

The Bible speaks of the Holy Spirit as the “comforter,” and the one who comes alongside. This is the same Spirit the apostle Paul suggests “intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words,” and “intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”(3) Therefore, when difficulties come, when our prayers seemingly go unanswered, there is the assurance that we are not alone. God longs to come near to us and to come alongside us with the comforting presence of God’s Spirit.

M. Craig Barnes former pastor of the National Presbyterian Church adds:

“Sometimes life gets overwhelming, and we realize we could use a little help. So we pray for our health to get better, for our marriage to work out, for success in our work that has taken a turn for the worse. There is nothing wrong in praying for these things, but they are not what our salvation is about. Don’t expect Jesus to save us by teaching us to depend on the things we are afraid of losing! He loves us too much to let our health, marriage, or work become the savior of our lives. He will abandon every crusade that searches for salvation from anything or anyone other than God. So he delays, he watches as we race down dead-end streets, he lets our mission du jour crash and burn. To receive Jesus as Savior means recognizing him as our only help. Not our only help for getting what we want. But our only true help.”(2)

In God’s promise to be present with us through the power of the Holy Spirit, God suggests that God’s presence with us is the deepest answer to prayer. It is God’s “yes” even if God answers our specific requests with “no.” Ultimately, God desires to bring comfort, not from dependence on the things of this world, but in God’s presence with us and alongside us through the Spirit.

Through the power and presence of the Spirit, God longs to be the very answer to our prayers. Ask, and the Holy Spirit will be given to you. Seek, and you will find the Holy Spirit with you. Knock, and the door of God’s kingdom will be opened to you. For how much more will our heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?

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

(1) Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006.

(2) Matthew 7:7-11.

(3) See John 14:16, 26; Romans 8:26b-27.

(4) M. Craig Barnes, When God Interrupts (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 124-125.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Seizing the Present

August 5, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Poets and prophets, ancient and modern, declare that we are profoundly unaware of the present. The here and now, the place that we always are, they duly note, is the place that we are least likely to see for what it fully is. Blaise Pascal, a mathematician living four centuries before multi-tasking was praised and apps helped manage time, keenly diagnosed this peculiar human condition. In his master work, the Pensees, he articulates our seeming lack of interest in the present:

“Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.”

The present is never our end. Living behind cameras and gadgets that record my present, often out of the fear of forgetting it in the future, the thought strikes me as one I ought to consider. Though we hope and toil for life, though I may have captured the moment or smile on camera, I never fully saw it. And moreover, looking back most of us can readily recall a particularly squandered time in our lives, a time we now wish we were more fully attentive, more fully present. Truly, the now of life is far more significant and subtly hidden than we often realize.

In the play Our Town, Thornton Wilder brilliantly depicts the magnitude of the present, the fullness of each moment amidst the fleeting nature of time in our lives. Emily, a young mother who died in childbirth, is given the opportunity to go back and observe a single day in her life. She is advised to choose an “ordinary” day—for even the least important day will be important enough—the dead remind her. True enough, Emily makes her choice and quickly finds herself overwhelmed by it. Her ensuing lines are Wilder’s caution:

“I can’t go on. It goes too fast… I didn’t realize. All that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back—up the hill—to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look.

Goodbye, Goodbye, world… Mama and Papa. Goodbye clocks ticking…and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Upon returning, Emily wonders if anyone ever realizes life while they actually live it—life as it is, “every, every minute.” The response she receives is grim. “No. The saints and poets, maybe they do some.”(1)

Where this may all easily be couched as a saccharine moralism to seize the day and live life to the fullest, carpe diem or yolo, we might inquire why the present brims with significance, lest it lead us merely to the Epicurean’s philosophy, observed by King Solomon, cautioned against by Jesus, noted by cultural prophets, and largely embraced, though we still seem to miss the thing in front of us: “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.”(2) While Epicurus did not have in mind the self-indulgence that this idea would come to bear, the materialist’s call for happiness in the present is heightened only by the sobering impermanence of life that is only material. Or perhaps the present holds much more still.

C.S. Lewis once asked, “Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?” This, he argues, is why the present is so profoundly important. God is always nearest to us “now.” Where Jesus says, “Follow me,” where he pleads, “Come to me,” where he insists the kingdom is present among us, and bids us to come, take, and eat, there is an urgency in his voice that ushers us into time with him now. Now is where he asks us to draw near; now is when we decide again to follow or not to follow; now is where we rejoice in this day he made. So indeed, seize the day, you only live once, and the promises of the one who came in the fullness of time are boldly written upon this very moment.

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

(1) As quoted by Barry Morrow in Heaven Observed (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001), 321.

(2) Cf. Ecclesiastes 8:15, Luke 12:13-21.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Restoring Faith

August 3, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Psychologists have long noted the “Consistency Principle” as a central motivator of human behavior. Research shows that our desire to be consistent with what we have previously done or decided, quietly but powerfully directs our actions. And while consistency is a good and valued trait, our longing for it can just as easily be detrimental. As professor of psychology Robert Cialdini notes, “Sealed within the fortress walls of rigid consistency, we can be impervious to the sieges of reason.”(1)

What might this mean in terms of outlook and belief? It is natural to want to be right. We want to remain unswerving in thought and deed with the things we have already done or said. We want to remain consistent and appear consistent. The fearsome thing is when we want to be consistent more than we want an honest reasoning of truth.

When I look at the agonized questions of Job in his unimaginable suffering, I am reminded of the difficult choice we face when contradicting information comes our way. Every principle and mindset that governed Job’s life was suddenly pulled out from under him by contradicting information. I remember the first time my worldview was challenged by moving outside of the world my teenage mind knew. Living in another country, experiencing a different culture and mindset and religions, the longing to hold on to all that I thought I knew was potent. At times all I wanted was to cling to some sense of consistency in my mind.

Job’s anguish shows his longing for what he thought he knew. The temptation to hold the pieces together was certainly present. Yet, even as the foundations of Job’s worldview cracked and crumbled, he refused to soothe the gaping wounds of his soul with theological fillers or compromising explanations. He remained utterly resistant to the easy answers, turning away from the superficial pieties and formulaic answers of his friends. Despite his pain, maybe even because of it, Job held fast to a sincere reasoning, hoping that God was still with him, longing for faith to be restored, demanding to know why life was crumbling even if it meant challenging notions formerly embraced.

His friends were not so willing. Their only goal was to remain consistent with the knowledge they neatly possessed, which meant countless attempts to argue away Job’s situation. Vigorously driven by their desire for self-exoneration, they overestimated and misused their understanding of the truth, turned a deaf ear to contradicting information, and blinded their eyes from the truth itself—and sadly their friend as well.

The prevalence of great skepticism beside so many explanations for life’s suffering be can also be blinding. For some the Socratic observation begins to sound comforting: All I know is that I know nothing. But this approach can be as unreasonable as clinging to religious formulas if it is simply a way a living with one’s eyes closed.

Job cast the inconsistencies of his experience upon the God he believed he knew—even when it meant shaking his sorrow and anger at God as well. What he found was God remaining in the midst of all of it. In the end, the story reports that Job is restored, mentioning more children and livestock. And while anyone who has suffered the loss of a loved one might cringe at the suggestion that this loss can be restored, perhaps the true miracle of restoration here was that Job would be able to open himself to the possibility of life again.

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

(1) Robert Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2001), 55.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – If Only

August 2, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Hindsight is 20/20. We know the truth of the expression all too painfully. A recent break-in into my car left me full of the tortured exercise. “If only I would have taken my purse into the gym…” “If only I would have been more careful choosing a parking spot…” “If only I had left my jewelry on…” Such thoughts are unending: If I would have paid closer attention, if I would have left a little sooner, if I would have left later… if only I knew then what I know now, things would have turned out differently.

Quite probably in many cases that is true. If we knew beforehand what we know after the fact, things could have very well turned out differently. Yet equally wrapped up somewhere within this “if only” mindset is the thought that things would not only have turned out differently, but that they would also have turned out better. Knowing this would take much more than 20/20 vision. While it is true that a slight variation of events might have saved me from filling out police reports and peering into my broken car window, it is equally true that a slight variation of events might have meant I was in the car when the thief approached—or that my son was with me. Standing on the other side of knowing gives us a different perspective, to be sure. But to assume that because of that perspective we now see perfectly is likely a perilous oversight.

The ancient Israelites often cried out to God in the belief that they were seeing perfectly. The shackles that bound them to Egypt and misery were broken off before their eyes. God moved them from slavery to freedom via the floor of the Red Sea, putting before his people a sign momentous enough to make an impression upon each day ahead of them. Yet walking through the adversities of the desert, they cried out as if never having seen the hand that was leading them. “If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this desert! Why is the LORD bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt?”(1)

It seems the view from hindsight can be as misleading as it is insightful. The Israelite’s mistreatment at the hands of the Egyptians was overlooked in their perception of the other side of the Red Sea. Moreover, their deliverance at the hands of God in hindsight was seen as unremarkable and unrelated to their need for God in the present.

The cry of “if only” is all too often a cry of distrust. The seemingly harmless expression insists that we know best, that we know what is better, that we know what we need. Like the Israelites in their forgetful wailing we are often certain that we not only know what will make our situations better, but what will finally make us content. We always seem to know just the thing our lives are missing. “If only we had meat to eat” the Israelites insisted, “we would be satisfied.” But they were not, and we are no more successful. In reality, what we need is often a far cry from what we think we need. For good reason many Christians can look back to a prayer and thank God that it wasn’t answered.

G.K. Chesterton speaks in a poem of the posture we often forget when the cry to change the past or achieve the perfect future emerges from our lips. He writes,

Thank God the stars are set beyond my power,

If I must travail in a night of wrath,

Thank God my tears will never vex a moth,

Nor any curse of mine cut down a flower.

Instead, the Christian is given the freedom of thankfulness that the one listening to her prayers sits with wisdom far greater than her own. Even Job who despairingly cried with good reason, “If only I had never come into being, or had been carried straight from the womb to the grave” found in the end that he had spoken out of turn. But we can thank God that God’s thoughts are beyond our own, that God knows the longings we express and the ones we do not know to express. We can thank God for the promise and the mystery that things can somehow work for good—our trials, our mistakes, our past, our future.

God is at work even in the moments when we would cry “if only.” And his own “if only’s” are far more sobering. As Christ approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace…”(2)

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

(1) Numbers 14:2-3.

(2) Luke 19:41.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faith and Doubt

August 1, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Agnes Bojaxhiu, who died in 1997, was one of the most influential persons of her time. She was so, because she was so passionate about her beliefs that her life became an articulate expression of her faith. She loved life and so hated abortion; thus even when called to speak to a pre-dominantly American audience, she strongly criticized the policy. When asked to comment on her remarks, President Bill Clinton only noted, “Who can argue with a life so well-lived?”

Yet, Agnes Bojaxhiu was privately racked by an emotional vacuum in her relationship with God. In some of her writings, published posthumously, she is quoted as saying: “The more I want [God], the less I am wanted.” Sometime later she writes again, “Such deep longing for God—and…repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal. [The saving of] souls holds no attraction. Heaven means nothing. Pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything.”(1)

Ordinarily, this would not be anything noteworthy, as many would privately disclose that we, too, have been troubled by doubt. But the world looks back at the legacy of Agnes Bojaxhiu, who was better known as Mother Teresa, and these letters, which are very private expressions of her personal struggles, are publicly analyzed. There are many questions that this honesty about doubt raises. Is it wrong to doubt? What kinds of doubt are acceptable and what is not? And most importantly, how do we deal with it?

We do see in the Bible many who wrestled with doubt. Job who was the midst of suffering said, “If I called and he answered me, I could not believe that he was listening to my voice. For he bruises me with a tempest and multiplies my wounds without cause” (Job 9:16-17). Look at the extent of his struggle—even if he were to hear the voice of God in answer to his plea, he would not believe that it was in response to his prayer. His bruises, which were many, constrained belief and encouraged doubt.

Then there is Jeremiah who cried out to God in the face of persecution. “O LORD, you have deceived me and I was deceived; you have overcome me and prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me” (Jeremiah 20:7). Though this was not a cry of outright unbelief, it was a struggle with a God who seems to be silent in the face of unjust suffering.

In addition to these voices, the list of doubters would not be complete without mention of Thomas, whose name brings to mind the very word. When the disciples recounted to him their encounter with the risen Lord, he refused to blindly believe their words. “Unless I see in his hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25).

Where there is faith, it seems there is also the possibility of doubt. How do we handle doubt? Firstly, we should be honest about our doubt. In the Gospel of Mark there is an account of a father who brought his demon-possessed son to Jesus. He implored him to cast out the demon. Jesus agreed, saying that all things were possible to those who believed. The father of the boy then confessed, “I do believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). While there is no mechanical method or technique to rid ourselves of doubt, we can approach God with honesty, confessing our doubt, and our need for his help.

Secondly, God does not want us to live by simply depending upon our feelings. While feelings are important, they do not tell us what is real. They supplement the other facets of how God has made us as humans. Thus, the oft-quoted verse comes alive with meaning in this context: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Christians are invited to love God with not just their emotions, but also with all their bodily faculties, wills, and minds. As we observe God’s world and reflect on it, there are impressions of the divine formed in the eyes of our heart, which direct us toward the true God. Thus our minds, our emotions, our wills, and all our faculties are complementary components in our relationship, by faith, in Christ.

And finally, while we are often hard on Thomas, he is to be commended because he doubted so that he could believe. It was not a doubt that was destructive, but a doubt that led to a faith that would not fail him. A blind faith may not have held him finally in the face of martyrdom.

Far from a troubling secret that Christians must hide with shame, our doubts must always lead us to investigate, and then to respond like Thomas to the evidence provided by the risen Jesus—with surrender: “My Lord and my God.”

Cyril Georgeson is a member of the speaking team with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Delhi, India.

(1) David Van Biema, “Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith,” Time, August 23, 2007.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Now My Eyes See

July 30, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

A friend of mine lost his father twice. The first time, he was lost through divorce when my friend was just a young child. He grew up without the loving presence of his father. The second time, he lost his father through death, just as his relationship with his father experienced a renaissance. Given just a few opportunities to spend time with his father, my friend has lived the majority of his life in the presence of absence.

In suffering the absence of his earthly father, not by any choice of his own, my friend struggles to understand God’s presence in his life. It is often a struggle not to view God as one views parents and caregivers. And so, even though my friend persistently seeks after God, his experience of God has largely felt like the absence of God. Locked in a cosmic game of hide and seek, he is constantly searching, but feels he rarely finds.

This experience of absence, sadly, is not unique to my friend, but is often a struggle for those who claim faith, and even for those who do not. Blaise Pascal, one of the greatest Christian apologists, described his own experience with the perceived absence of God as a pitiable mystery:

“This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion, if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.”(1)

Those who live in the midst of absence often experience a cruel vacancy; an empty throne room with an empty throne. Feeling as if one is far from the presence or oversight of God is indeed a pitiable state.

The words of Job, ancient in origin, speak the same language of absence experienced by many today:

Behold, I go forward, but He is not there,

And backward, but I cannot perceive Him;

When He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him;

He turns on the right, I cannot see Him.(2)

The story of Job is at least in part a story of God’s absence. While the narrator of the story and the readers of the story know the beginning and the end, Job finds himself in the silent middle struck down by tragedy. His story painfully reminds us of the mystery that in our moments of great need, God seems to go missing. Job’s cry is our cry, “Oh that I knew where I might find Him that I might come to his seat” (Job 23:3). Job clings tenaciously to the hope that he would find God, and find a just God in his case. “I am not silenced by the darkness,” Job proclaims, “nor deep gloom which covers me” (23:17).

Called to “light the light of those in darkness on earth,” Mother Teresa wrote that if she ever became a saint, “I will surely be one of darkness.”(3) The paradoxical and unsuspected reality of her mission to the poorest of the poor in this world would be that she herself would experience the terrible darkness of God’s perceived absence. In the middle of her ministry, she wrote to one of her spiritual directors, “[T]his untold darkness, this loneliness, this continual longing for God which gives me that pain deep down in my heart…is such that I really do not see….[T]he place of God in my soul is blank…I just long for God and then it is that I feel—He does not want me, He is not there….I hear my own heart cry out, ‘My God’ and nothing else comes. The torture and the pain I cannot explain.”(4)

Like my fatherless friend, the pitiable Pascal, and the anguished Job, Mother Teresa experienced the profound pain of the absence of God in her life as she ministered to those largely missing from the radar of compassion and care. She herself was a light, but she experienced little light in her own heart and life. She was indeed a light in the darkness, but she experienced little of the illumination of God’s comforting presence in her own dark existence.

And yet, the paradox of her life reminds us that the experience of God’s absence need not lead us to the darkness of despair, but can propel us to embody God’s presence to others who grope for God in the darkness. As we do, we may experience just what Job did: “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees Thee.”(4)

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

(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees, as cited in Kelly James Clark, When Faith is Not Enough (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 38.

(2) Job 23:8-9.

(3) Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta,” Brian Kolodiejchuk, ed. (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 1.

(4) Ibid., 1-2.

(5) Job 42:5.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – When the Stakes Are Highest

July 26, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There is a place in my Bible that is prone to be frequently revisited. In fact, it is quite often the place I find in front of me when I open the book. And every time it happens, like a scent that uproots a potent memory, I recall the story behind the pages.

Some time ago, between classes in college, I was reading in a park when the skies shifted without warning and the pounding rain left a permanent bookmark on a chapter in John. The pages have long since dried, leaving the paper wavy and wrinkled, and easy to turn to upon opening. But something about the lasting impressions of the rain—no doubt, a fitting metaphor of life—has also impressed that day into my mind. The hardest rains always leave indelible imprints.

In The Problem with Pain, C.S. Lewis refers to pain as God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Convincingly, he presents a careful theodicy, considering the problem of suffering from an entirely theoretical perspective. He presents the things we know to be true of suffering, pain, and evil, what we know of the suffering and death of Christ, and the strength we are given when the peripheral questions of life are answered by a good God. Twenty years later, in the pages of A Grief Observed, Lewis describes watching his beloved wife lose her battle with cancer and wrestling with God through the pain of her death. Here, he writes as a man who bitterly and intimately knows what he knows to be true of God and evil, suffering and Christ, even as his soul is breaking. Writes Lewis, “Your bid—for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity—will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high.”(1) He continues, “Nothing less will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.”(2)

His words seem harsh—and right. The times I seem to have most truly and fearfully looked the object of my faith in the eyes was always while it felt I was pounding my fists against the chest of God, half-demanding, half-pleading. Those days gave new meaning to Paul’s admonition, “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling.” In Christian prayers we cry and in our hymns we sing, “Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer blessed Lord, To the cross where Thou hast died. Draw me nearer, nearer, To Thy precious, bleeding side.” But when the stakes were at their highest, those words ring with a frighteningly real cost.

In fact just before the apostle Paul admonishes the Philippian Church to work out their salvation in fear and trembling, he describes the cost of Christ, “who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross.“(3) In his life, his body, his very attitude, Christians believe that Christ carried the cost of sin; he carried our dire need for hope in life and in sorrow, and our inability to draw near to God ourselves, and not necessarily for a lack of trying. There was a point in his pain from spreading cancer when a friend said soberly, “I had no idea how Christ suffered. I never thought of it.” There is something about our pain that can lead us to the heart–breaking beauty of the cross, to the utmost expression of love wrought with stripes and sorrow in violence. As the hymn continues, “There are depths of love that I cannot know, Till I cross the narrow sea; There are heights of joy that I may not reach, Till I rest in peace with Thee.”

It is fitting, then, that the pages marked by rain in my Bible tell the story of the death and resurrection of Lazarus. As Mary and Martha and Jesus wept, the rain seemed appropriate. But I remember clearly being struck with another thought: Surely, it was Lazarus who got the lesser end of the deal that day. To a crowd of people mourning death and loss, Jesus proclaimed radically, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies” (John 11:25). While Jesus spoke to the mourning crowd about true life, Lazarus himself was one hard step closer to living that mystery. I wondered that day how Lazarus felt about coming back. He was one great step closer to the heights and depths of the joy we know in part, the kingdom Jesus had told him about; he had been drawn, in some sense, nearer to the almighty God. For Lazarus, humanity’s deepest problem and loudest prayer had been answered. And then it began to rain, ever etching that thought into my Bible and my consciousness.

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

(1) C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 49.

(2) Ibid., 49-50.

(3) Philippians 2:6-8.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – At the Border of Faith and Doubt

July 25, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

It seemed like yet another routine border crossing in what was then Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia.(1) The year was 1981; Leonid Brezhnev was the head of the Soviet Union, and half of Europe languished under the Communist vision and control. As a young and eager Christian, I had joined a mission whose primary task was to help the church in Eastern Europe. This involved transporting Bibles, hymn books, and Christian literature to believers behind what Winston Churchill called the “Iron Curtain.”

It was indeed an iron curtain: a vast barrier made of barbed-wire fences, mine fields, exclusion zones, guard towers, heavily armed soldiers, and dogs. Although designed allegedly to keep the West out, it was in actuality a vast system of control to keep those under this tyranny in. On this occasion my task was to transit through Czechoslovakia into Poland to deliver my precious cargo of Bibles and books to a contact there.

The literature was concealed in specially designed compartments, and my colleague and I had gone through our routine preborder procedures. We bowed our heads and prayed that God would protect us. We then proceeded to the border crossing between Austria and Czechoslovakia.

It was a cold, bleak, early winter day. It all seemed normal. We entered Czechoslovakia, and the huge barrier descended behind us. We were now locked in. As usual, the unfriendly border guards took our passports, and then the customs inspector arrived. I had been trained to act casual, to pray silently, and to respond to questions. I sensed this time it was different. The man ignored me, concentrated on the structure of our vehicle, and was soon convinced we had something concealed. I became quite tense. They eventually took the keys from me and locked my colleague and me in separate rooms. The guards broke into the special compartments in our vehicle, where they discovered the Bibles and literature.

My colleague and I were handcuffed, not allowed to speak to each other, and put in separate cells with people who spoke no English. The small rooms smelled of disinfectant and had only two bunk beds and a hole in the floor that served as the toilet. The light was kept on all night and some basic food was brought three times a day. The rules were rigid and enforced: no sitting or lying on the beds during the day. This meant shuffling backward and forward for hours in a highly restricted space, then facing a difficult night as we sought to sleep under the glare of the constant light.

Time became blurred. Was it morning, day, evening? I found myself alone, in a hostile place, without anything to read, without anyone to talk to, without any idea when or if we might be released, and with seeming unlimited (and empty) time on my hands. There is nothing like empty time and constricted space to bring to the surface feelings, questions, and doubts.

Contrary to some of the more starry-eyed testimonies I have read, I did not experience overwhelming grace or a profound sense of God’s presence. I did have the assurance that God was there, that God knew what was going on, and that “my times were in his hands” (see Psalm 31:15). My feelings, however, became a source of torment. For some reason I had an initial impression that we would be released quickly and expelled from the country. As the first few days passed with no communication and I had no idea what was happening, I began to wrestle to some degree with doubt. It was intense, it was real, and it was filling my mind and clouding my thoughts and my heart. My doubts seemed to focus on uncertainty as to what God was doing and whether I could actually trust what I thought was his leading. I also was struggling with how much I might be asked to face.

I can well remember a point of surrender. After several days, I resigned myself to the possibility that my imprisonment could last for years. I might not get out for a long time, so I had to make the best of what was and to rest in God. It is a point where we accept the hardship, where we still believe in greater good, and where we surrender to what seems like inevitability. I think I came to relinquish my sense and need for control (I had none anyway) and simply accept that God would be there as promised, and therefore, to rest in Him.

I had crossed an important point that I subsequently discovered in the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Richard Wurmbrand, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Vaclav Havel. Scholar Roger Lundin remarks:

“To Bonhoeffer, this is the distinctive ‘difference between Christianity and all religions.’ Our suffering, wrote Bonhoeffer only months before his 1943 arrest, teaches us ‘to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless.’ The interpretive key to human experience is to be found not in our preference for Eden but in our power to share in the sufferings of God and the world: ‘We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune.’”(2)

As those raised in comfort and convenience, the very nature of all this may frighten or repel us. If the message we have believed or the model we have been taught has raised false expectations, then we are going to be subject to doubt and fear, and worse, reject the whole thing. But the gospel and Christianity are concerned with reality, and hence with truth. By this I mean what the true nature of life really is and means. Christianity is not an escape system for us to avoid reality, live above it, or be able to redefine it. Christianity is a way that leads us to grasp what reality is and, by God’s grace and help, to navigate through it to our eternal home.

As I sat thinking, praying, and hoping in the custody of the Czechoslovakian authorities, I was surprised one day when the door opened and I was summoned forth, signaled not to speak, and then led out to a waiting car with my colleague. We were driven in silence to the border. We were handed our passports and our severely damaged vehicle, and we were then expelled from the country. We crossed into Austria and were able to talk for the first time in nearly two weeks. We shared our stories, and we stopped and prayed. We heard missing details; we discovered ways that God worked in us. We spoke of our struggles, our doubts, and our overall confidence.

It would be presumptuous to turn our limited experience and insight into a major pattern for all, yet in the midst of it we were able to detect broader strokes, hidden meanings, and real possibilities. Like Joseph so many centuries before, we could look back on all that happened, reflect on it and say, “They meant it for evil, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Excerpted from Stuart McAllister’s chapter “The Role of Doubt and Persecution in Spiritual Transformation” in Ravi Zacharias, ed., Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Ravi Zacharias. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson.

(2) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters, 17, 370, quoted in Roger Lundin, From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 40.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Hell Is Other People

July 23, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre closes his play Huis Clos (“No Exit”) with the pronouncement, “Hell is other people.” The play offers a sardonic vision of hell as the place in which one must spend eternity with individuals one would barely seek to spend five minutes with in real life. As one writer notes, “The most terrible, exasperating torment, in Sartre’s eyes, is the agony of soul caused by having to live forever alongside someone who drives you up the wall. Their annoying habits, their pettiness or cynicism or stupidity, their disposition and tastes that so frustratingly conflict with yours and require, if you are to live in communion with them, some sort of accommodation or concession of your own likes and desires—that, says Sartre, is Hell.”(1) Living in a world in which tolerance is the highest value, most readers find Sartre’s vision highly narcissistic or the logical conclusion of an exclusively individualistic, existentialist philosophy.

For many others, however, Sartre’s sentiments are not so easily dismissed. Living, working, and interacting with other people can indeed create a hellish existence for many. And most of us, if we are honest, can quickly think of the names of individuals whose personal habits or grating personalities makes relating to them very difficult at best. Sartre’s honesty, albeit through a cynical lens, also exposes clear boundaries of human tolerance. On the one hand, the capacity for tolerance is generally based on loving those who are easy to love or who share our own way of living in and viewing the world. On the other hand, the capacity for tolerance easily extends towards external causes, idealism, and abstract principles. These are quickly shattered when we come into contact with the real people who exist not as causes or ideals or principles.

An example from my own life serves to illustrate Sartre’s insight. I am involved in causes working for justice in situations of homelessness, which is a perennial issue where I live. It is easy for me to “love” the broad category of people who are “the homeless” as long as they remain an idea or a concept. Yet, every month when my church holds a dinner for the homeless in our community—the full-range of humanity on display right in front of me—I often feel my “love” is really just thinly veiled patronage. Eating with individuals who have not showered in weeks (or months), who suffer from mental illness, or chemical dependency tests my tolerance in ways that the idea of homelessness never will. This monthly meal highlights how little I truly love those real people seated all around me.

A contemporary of Sartre, C.S. Lewis wrote about this tendency to love causes and ideals more than real people in his novel The Screwtape Letters. He saw this hellish tendency as a carefully constructed diabolical strategy. The demon, Wormwood, was advised to “aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious.”(2) The obvious, Lewis notes through his character Screwtape, is the human capacity for both benevolence and malice. Their misdirection and exploitation is not as obvious to us. Diabolical Uncle Screwtape explains to his nephew Wormwood:

“The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary…but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy.”(3)

If benevolence, tolerance, or love are simply attached to ideals involving people we never have any direct contact with in the day to day, how can that really be benevolence? In the same way, how can we say we love our neighbor when our malice towards particular habits or personality quirks is on full display? How quickly we lose our temper with family members; how easily we show offense at those who do not see it our way; how readily we devise strategies to withhold love, or to punish our ever-present offenders?

Lewis highlights a predominant theme in the teaching of Jesus. Throughout the gospels, Jesus corrects the prevailing notion that the neighbor is one just like me, who agrees with me, and sees the world as I see it. The “neighbor” is other people—not an abstraction, but a living, breathing person with habits, views, and quirks that will not only get on our nerves, but also tempt us toward contempt. And love is only a real virtue when it is lived out among real, human relationships. As Lewis’s character Screwtape notes wryly:

“All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from [Satan’s] house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there.”(4)

Sartre was honest in revealing the often hellish reality of living with other people. We would much rather love an ideal, a concept (the homeless, or starving children across the world) than the people right in front of us, in our lives right now. In the life of Jesus, we see a man who loved those individuals directly in front of him; he gathered around him a group of disparate people from tax-collectors on the left, to zealot revolutionaries on the right. He delayed arrival at a temple official’s home because an unknown woman touched the hem of his garment. He delivered a man so out of his mind that he had been driven from his community to live in desolate caves. In front of the most important religious officials of his day, he allowed a woman of questionable reputation to anoint his feet with perfume and use her tears and to wipe them with her hair.

The love of Jesus is not a pie in the sky ideal for people he never knew; it was tangible, messy, and ultimately cost him his life. In Jesus, we see heaven on display in the hell of individual lives. If we seek to follow him, vague ideals about tolerance must give way to flesh and blood reality—loving the all-too-human in front of us.

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

(1) Lauren Enk, “Hell is Other People; Or is It?” catholicexchange.com, August 12, 2012, accessed July 10, 2013.

(2) C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Rev. ed., (New York: Collier Books, 1982), 16.

(3) Ibid., The Screwtape Letters, 30.

(4) Ibid., 31.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Befriending Wisdom

July 22, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I remember vividly a warm childhood day with my family at a park on Lake Michigan. My youngest sister and I had each been given a granola bar to snack on as we wandered about the grassy park. Most likely I ate mine quickly, with the hope that someone would give me another. My little sister, on the other hand, who has always walked through life with an unhurried way about her, was savoring each crumb as she walked along, charmed by the ducks who were marching along with her. In a manner of minutes, however, her charming procession shifted parade leaders. The next thing I remember was the angry cry of a four year-old who found herself backed up against a wall by a flock of granola bar-stealing ducks.

The book of Proverbs depicts a similarly inescapable scene throughout its pages. One gets the clear sense that we are to live watchfully, that wisdom is something to be guarded carefully, lest it be snatched out of our hands before we have time to object. “The one who guards their way guards their life,” reads one verse. “Do not forsake wisdom,” advises another. Like an animal stalking its prey, folly and wickedness are personified as luring and lurking enemies, often disguised, always vying for our attention, meeting with anyone who will hear, ready to seize all that is not guarded. “Folly is loud,” notes the writer of Proverbs, “she is seductiveand knows nothing. She sits at the door of her house; she takes a seat on the highest places of the town, calling to those who pass by, who are going straight on their way, “‘Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!’” (9:13-16).

In a world where we are saturated with information and ideas, overwhelmed by voices vying for our attention, and bombarded with distractions contending for our allegiance, it is not hard to see why folly and wickedness are voices the writer chooses to personify. It is not a truth preached abstractly, but a reality we know all too well. Foolishness is like a person we can befriend.

But the book of Proverbs also personifies wisdom. Chapter eight asks, “Does not Wisdom call? Does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries aloud: ‘To you, I call’” (8:1-4). In a sea of well-marketed persuasion, it is a comforting truth that is easily forgotten. Just as voices that tempt and fool cry aloud for our attention, so wisdom calls out to us and understanding raises its voice. But who is the voice of wisdom? And do we find it as tangibly as we seem to find the tempting voices of folly?

Scripture makes it clear that God not only speaks and moves the world with words, but that all wisdom and understanding come from the mouth of God. Sadly, however, the voice of God is one voice many are uninterested in hearing. “The tragedy,” writes A.W. Tozer “is that we have trained our ears not to hear.” Through many voices, God has communicated this truth. “For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes.”(1)

As the writer of Proverbs admonishes, we can be as those who make our ears attentive to wisdom, inclining our hearts to understanding. Let us cry out for insight and raise our voices for understanding, guarding our minds lest they be snatched away like the treat in a young child’s hand. Let us seek the source of wisdom as we would hidden treasure. It is God after all, at whose word chaos became order and darkness became light, and who cries out repeatedly for our complete attention: The one who has ears to hear, let them hear!(2)

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

(1) Matthew 13:15, Isaiah 6:9,10.

(2) Matthew 11:15, Mark 4:9, Luke 8:8.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – World of Ordinary

July 19, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Middlemarch is the epic novel by Mary Anne Evans, better known by her male penname George Eliot. The work is considered one of the most significant novels of the Victorian period and a masterpiece of English fiction. Rather than following a grand hero, Eliot explores a number of themes in a series of interlocking narratives, telling the stories of ordinary characters intertwined in the intricate details of life and community. Eliot’s focus is the ordinary, and in fact her lament—in the form of 700 pages of detail—is that we not only so often fail to see it, but fail to see that there is really no such thing. There is neither ordinary human pain nor ordinary human living. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” she writes, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”(1)

The world Eliot saw around her is not unlike our own in its capacity to silence the dissonance of details, the frequency of pain, the roar of life in its most minute and yet extraordinary forms. We silence the wild roar of the ordinary and divert our attention to magnitudes more willing to fit into our control. The largest tasks and decisions are given more credence, the biggest lives and events of history most studied and admired, and the greatest powers and influences feared or revered most. And on the contrary, the ordinary acts we undermine, the most common and chronic angst we manage to mask, and the most simple and monotonous events we silence or stop seeing altogether. But have we judged correctly?

Artists often work at pulling back the curtain on these places we have wadded out of sight and sound, showing glimpses of life easily missed, pulling off the disguises that hide sad or mortal wounds, drawing our attention to all that is deemed mundane and obscure. Their subject is often the ordinary, but it is for the sake of the extraordinary, even the holy. Nowhere does Eliot articulate this more clearly than in her defense of the ordinary scenes depicted in early Dutch painting. “Do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish those old women scrapping carrots with their work-worn hands….It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and flame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.”(2) For the artist, ordinary life, ordinary hardship, ordinary sorrow is precisely the scene of our need for God, and remarkably, the scene of God and miracle.

In this sense, the psalmist and prophets and ancient storytellers are indeed all struggling artists, closing the infinite distance between the grandeur of God and an ordinary humanity. What are human beings that You are mindful of them? Mortals that You care for them?

The parables Jesus told are also richly artistic, theological pauses upon the ordinary. Presented to people who often find themselves beyond the need for stories, whether puffed up with wealth and self-importance, or engorged with religion and knowledge, his stories stop us. He is acutely aware that the religious and the non-religious, the self-assured and the easily distracted often dance around idols of magnitude, diverting their eyes from the ordinary. And yet his very life proclaims the magnitude of the overlooked. The ordinary is precisely the place that God chose to visit—and not as a man of magnitude.

Whatever your philosophy or worldview, your own attention to the ordinary is worth considering. It is far too easy to miss the world as it really is. While Jesus’s own disciples bickered over the most significant seats in the kingdom, they were put off by a unwanted woman at a well, they overlooked a sick woman reaching out for the fringe of Christ’s robe, and they tried to silence a suffering man making noise in an attempt to get Jesus’s attention—all ordinary scenes which became the place of miracle. Even in a religion where the last are proclaimed first, where the servant, the suffering, and the crucified are lifted highest, the story of the widow’s coin is still easily forgotten, the obscure faces Jesus asked the world to remember easily overlooked. But the call to remember the great acts of God in history is equally a call to the many acts of life we see as less great. For the ordinary is filled with a God who chooses to visit.

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

(1) George Eliot, Middlemarch, (London: Penguin, 1994), 194.

(2) George Eliot, Adam Bede (London, Penguin, 1980), 224.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Questioning God

July 18, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Life just doesn’t seem fair.” How often do you find yourself uttering those words? The unscrupulous continue to get richer while the poor continue to be oppressed and victimized. This complaint is especially poignant when family, friends, or leaders whom we expect to act honorably and for our welfare betray our trust. We experience the injustice of people getting away with backstabbing, manipulation, and deception, prospering while those who choose to do what is right are misunderstood and discriminated against. Where is God in the midst of all these? Does God see and judge? If so when and how?

The book of Habakkuk is a very short dialogue between God and the prophet on exactly these questions. Not much is known about this prophet of Judah, but the context of his complaints hint that he prophesied during the declining years of Judah. Judah had over and over again forsaken God and engaged in all kinds of evil—idolatry, corruption, and violence. Like most prophets, Habakkuk was concerned about the wickedness and injustice in Judah. And he wants to know when the Lord will answer his call for help. But unlike other prophets who would direct their message at God’s people, Habakkuk directs his laments at God:

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted.(1)

Habakkuk wrestles with what he knows about God’s character alongside God’s apparent tolerance of the violence and injustice that he witnesses around him. He knows God to be perfectly holy and perfectly just. How is it then that God can idly look on and not punish the guilty? And instead the transgressors are enjoying the fruits of their wrongdoing.

Habakkuk’s experience demonstrates that bewilderment and affliction are not necessarily signs of spiritual immaturity or unfortunate distraction from faith. Instead these cries contribute to the development of strong faith and are the raw materials of prayer and worship. By challenging and questioning God, Habakkuk learns to seek the intentions and purposes of God, becoming a joyful example of one who lives by faith. Doubting God’s fairness or sovereignty does not necessarily mean we have parted from faith or that we are questioning belief itself. Asking God probing questions is very much a part of the life of faith.

And though he doesn’t engage all his questions, God indeed responds to Habakkuk.

As we see the evil around us, often we cannot help but wonder why is it that God hasn’t done anything about it. We remember innocent lives that are taken in the name of religion, we remember friends who are tortured and murdered for the sake of truth, we recall moral evil committed against innocent children.

But nothing escapes God’s attention. God hears every single one of our prayers and is not unaware of the evil and sinfulness around us. And God promises that ultimately those who experience injustice in this world will be comforted. It is against this encouraging hope that the book of Habakkuk closes with a beautiful song that ends with rejoicing at the sovereignty and faithfulness of God.

I’Ching Thomas is associate director of training at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Singapore.

(1) Habakkuk 1:2-4.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Second Naïveté

July 17, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Naïve is generally a description we do not hold proudly. When Jane Austen describes Lydia as the naïve youngest of the Bennet daughters, it is not intended as a compliment: “Lydia was Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless.”(1) We are prone to see naïveté in its unflattering light, not wanting the description to make the shortlist of our character traits (unless perhaps we are under the age of ten). But though we are largely familiar with the unfavorable definition, the word in its original context is not so narrowly characterized. In fact, the word naïve is derived from the Latin word “natural,” a word which remains a synonym many would not recognize. True naïveté can thus describe one who shows absence of artificiality or unaffected simplicity of nature, one who has no hidden agendas or duplicitous motives. At this definition, it seems much less an insult and more a quality to which we might actually aspire.

A professor in seminary used the word “naïve” in this broader sense to describe his relationship with Scripture as he grew from child to theologian. He recounted three stages, the first of which he described as the stage of naiveté in the unencumbered, unaffected sense of the word. Through the trusting eyes and faith of a child, many first hear the stories of creation, flood, and miracles with minds that understand the world and everything in it as God’s. As children absorbing life with uninhibited excitement, the stage of naiveté allows the imagination to hear and see in ways adults often cannot. The result is a deep response to the world within the Bible, which is seen to fit perfectly into the world around us. There is a sense that the Bible is a story in which we are very much participants.

Unfortunately, if naïveté marks a state of unaffected simplicity, the world of a child is quickly marked by that which complicates and pollutes. Thus, a second stage of life with the Bible can be a stage of critical awareness. As we are exposed more and more to a disharmonious world where people disagree, sides are chosen, and things are inconsistent, our minds can grow increasing skeptical. In this stage some become critically attuned to the differences between the world as they know it and the world of the Bible. Others take note of this disharmony when life takes turns in ways that jar childlike stability and leave them unsure of things that once seemed constant. Not knowing how to process, they might feel punished by God. Inconsistencies between stories at school and stories in church may seem irreconcilable. I remember walking with a sense of mourning in this stage, confused that the Bible seemed misleading, angry at the God of false adventures, and guilty for turning my back on the one I thought I had come to know.

Though stages of development are necessary in any formation of lasting faith, stage one and stage two are literally worldviews away from each other. Jesus alludes to the massive difference in his proclamation: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”(2) In the theocentric mindset of a child, God is the great Adventurer and we are participants being led through a story. God is the one who remains at the center, while creation, including you and me, surrounds its creator. But as children grow into adulthood and become more aligned with the culture around them, the center often shifts. Anthropocentric or self-centered minds see themselves at the center, while the world, including God, surrounds them. Sadly, this is the mindset that many of us live out of—with the insistence that the storyteller is “me.”

Yet my professor described a third stage, which, for many comes at the recognition that the story we continue to discover as life happens is far bigger than we know how to tell. Like God’s response from the whirlwind to a questioning, anguished Job—”Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”—we rediscover the one at the center, and it isn’t ourselves. In this stage of second naiveté, the world of the Bible can be engaged with awareness and imagination, and a greater sense of devotion, because we have come once again to see the God to whom it points. God’s Word tells the story that brings us to the Storyteller. Thus, we can come readily to the Bible with our questions, doubts, and inconsistencies because we are approaching not a dusty book, but a Person. While the words of Scripture are always true, so they are always pointing to the Word beyond themselves: “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”(3) In the second naïveté, we can find ourselves before the one who makes it possible to return to the unhindered sincerity of a child. We can discover a God who speaks, the Word who draws near, and a Storyteller who beckons us to participate.

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

(1) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 298.

(2) Matthew 18:3.

(3) Jeremiah 33:3.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Life After Death

July 16, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

While serving in parish ministry, I witnessed the deaths of 15 people in just two and a half years. Fifteen parishioner-friends passed from my sight while I served and lived among them. Watching church members struggle with various illnesses and succumb to death challenged me in ways I could have never expected. Up until this point, I had only lost one set of grandparents. Yet, during this brief time it often seemed a day didn’t go by when I was not receiving news of another hospitalization, another life-threatening illness, or yet another death.

Despite the many emotional, physical, and spiritual challenges I faced during this time of ministry, I was also given incredible gifts. Journeying with someone you know and love through the dying process reminds you of your own mortality and finitude and that life is short and precious. Furthermore, this journey provides the gifts of deepening one’s emotional reservoirs, to growing physical fortitude in the face of wearying grief, and developing a spiritual perspective of both death and life. I do not speak of these gifts as a detached observer, but as one who has lost the life of the one nearest and dearest to me.

Jesus said a good deal about this dying journey. Often, he called his followers to a single-hearted allegiance, and yes, even to death. In Luke’s Gospel, he tells the great multitudes following him that “if anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”(1)

What is often forgotten in a casual reading of the gospels is that the Cross was the instrument of death and disgrace. It was an instrument reserved for the vilest offenders, and as such was an instrument of punishment for the lowest of the low. Yet, whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. There is no “if” in Jesus’s statement, only whether or not we will follow him to death. Far from an encouragement towards an easy road or life, Jesus’s statement sounds far more like a warning to those who might prefer a casual acquaintance with him.

The fact that Jesus makes this kind of statement about the qualifications of a disciple to the “multitudes going along with him” should not be ignored. This would have sounded like very bad news to those who heard it, and perhaps the crowds dissipated after they heard Jesus speak these very difficult statements. Perhaps they were the very ones who later clamored for his death by crucifixion. It was easy to follow Jesus when he focused on the positives. And yet, as sure as babies are born into this world and new life begins every spring, death is inevitable. Not just physical death, but the “little deaths” experienced by every human being every day. Perhaps it is the death of dreams that comes when you realize you won’t go to the moon or marry the King of England. Or perhaps it is the realization that all of one’s labor is not for oneself and will remain unrealized by those in this generation. What about the death that comes when the recognition hits that a great deal of what makes up adulthood is repetitive and mundane?

And yet even in these deaths, is there a gift to be gained or given? Can there be hope for abundant life even as time marches us closer and closer to physical demise? Are there yet gifts of faith, grace, love that will make carrying the cross towards Calvary “a light yoke and an easy burden”?

In speaking of his own death and the gifts it would yield, Jesus said that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it; and he who hates his life in this world shall keep it to life eternal.”(2) In the clamor of voices that shout to grab it all now, or in the all too human inclination to elevate self-fulfillment as the result of a “me first” mentality, Jesus extends the ironic invitation to embrace death in order to truly find life-eternally. This is both a promising and challenging invitation. The challenge Jesus sets before those who would follow is the challenge to “die” to what we think makes for life—and surely this might look differently for each who would answer the call. In order to experience the abundant life Jesus offers, we follow him towards death, so that by faith in the power of resurrection, we might receive the gift of life indeed.

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

(1) Luke 14:26-27.

(2) John 12:24-25.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Divinity and Dirty Hands

July 15, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Dirty hands are quickly given a bad rap. Children are born ready to dig into the mess before them, to experience the sandbox by getting it under their fingernails and in between their toes, and to delight in life by generally getting it all over themselves. But it does not take long before we learn that dirty fingers and messy faces are not acceptable, that jumping into mud puddles to experience the rain will almost always come with a reprimand, and that finger-painting is for the little ones who have not yet graduated to more “refined” utensils. Moving from child to adult seems to involve cleaning up one’s act in more ways than one.

The earliest Christian disciples utilized metaphors of childhood in their letters to newly believing communities. Paul compares one’s knowledge of God to the process of learning: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”(1) Peter similarly encourages new believers to grow in love and knowledge: “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.”(2)

It is easy to read both of these examples and conclude that the ways of children are behaviors we are being told to out grow. It is easy to allow our negative perspectives on what is “childish” to inform the way we receive these exhortations involving what is “childlike.” Yet far from speaking of childhood negatively, Paul is comparing our current understanding and vision of God to that of a child’s, which will encouragingly grow clearer on the day we stand before God face to face. Similarly, Peter is not urging us to grow out of our newborn hunger, but on the contrary is calling us to grow further into it. In other words, there are indeed some things in childhood that God would not have us to abandon with age!

I cannot help but wonder how much of life we forego as we misplace the instinct of getting our hands dirty, and instead learn to perceive the world in detached and more acceptably tidy ways. I believe the same can said of faith. Might we miss out on things of the kingdom, things of God and of Christ, because we have so ossified faith into something that only touches spirit or mind, and not hands, feet, and body? Might we fail to move farther up and further into the kingdom because we see this kingdom as something only distant—a future hope for a future life—instead of something dynamically here and among us, calling us to a fully-engaged, hands-dirtying existence today?

“I tell you the truth,” Jesus told disciples and on-lookers alike, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”(3) Neither Christ nor the kingdom he came to make known is a static entity, something that mattered long ago and might matter once again, but not here and now in this life as we know it. On the contrary, all of history, the stories of salvation and the Incarnation itself, remind us that God is far more hands-on than this. The Lamb of God very physically took away the sins of the world. And with a God who is willing to become flesh and dwell among us, who is willing and able to stand as the gate to another world, what makes us believe that we would be called to a faith that is anything less than hands-on as well? Even in his last days, Christ did not merely leave us with instructions to remember him as a figure in history. He told us to remember him, gave us a meal, and left us with a way to bodily take-in the very kingdom and story he proclaimed again and again.

Christ has truly given the world permission to touch, to experience, to jump completely into the great and wonderful kingdom in which God reigns. In this kingdom, we can be as children who delight in knowing life with dirty hands, who like Thomas need the invitation to touch, and like Paul see the need to give mind, soul, and body to the one who gave us all of himself. The kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

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

(1) 1 Corinthians 13:11-12.

(2) 1 Peter 1:2-3.

(3) Matthew 18:3.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Light Disturbing

July 12, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In a letter dated September 6, 1955, Flannery O’Connor confessed that though the truth “does not change according to our ability to stomach it,” there are periods in the lives of us all, even of the saints, “when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, [even] downright repulsive.”(1)

I take solace in her unapologetic confession—here, a writer who viewed her faith not as a substitute for seeing, but as the light by which she saw. And as I stared recently at a painting of Mary and the infant Jesus by Giovanni Bellini, I knew what she meant. I was suddenly but entirely disturbed by the story of the Incarnation. In my mind the message and mystery of the Incarnation was still a vast and hopeful notion, the character and complexity of a Father who sends a Son into the world an unchanging, unfathomable story still intact. Yet in front of me was suddenly a different side of that story. I was unexpectedly confronted with questions of the Incarnation I had never considered. Would we label a father “loving” who gives a teenage girl a task that devastates her future, destroys her reputation, and in the end, mortally wounds her with grief? What kind of God asks for servants like Mary?

Madeleine L’Engle reflects on faith and art with words O’Connor would affirm and those of us with honest questions embody. She reminds us that in all artful learning “either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure.”(2) Like many, I had recalled and retold the Christmas story for years, but I had never remembered it like this. In the light and shadows of Bellini’s interpretation of this biblical scene, I was startled in the call of Mary to bear the Son of God, the severe cost of obedience and the complete disruption of a life.

In fact, it is fairly easy to rush to the theological implications of the texts that depict the role of Mary in the life of Jesus. We quickly move from Mary’s acceptance of Gabriel’s words to the man who preformed miracles and calmed storms in a way that made him seem motherless. While the song of Mary recorded in Luke 1:47-55 slows readers down and bids them to consider the young mother in her own words, it is easy to assume in the ease of her praise of the Almighty a sense of ease for her situation, to add to her cries of joy the assumption that she never wept. Mary sings: “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Luke depicts an image of Mary that is hard to ignore, and Bellini follows his example. With one hand, Mary holds Jesus securely to her side, while with the other she gently holds his foot in a way that seems to communicate both her willingness to share the child with the world and her suspicion that he will spring from her care to lift the lowly as she herself has been lifted. Mary is seated poised, stoic, and adult-like, which in some ways seems far from the childlike Mary we encounter in Luke, and in other ways seems to reflect the wisdom she was able to express far beyond her years. As one pledged to be married in first century Nazareth, Mary would have been little more than a child herself, a child who was perhaps able to respond to Gabriel the way she did because “she had not lost her child’s creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world.”(3) Bellini’s Mary looks far more weathered, serious, and austere, as if she is somehow aware of the fate of the child in her arms and her utter helplessness to save him. In the face of the girl who was somehow able to see beyond the great risk of being pregnant and unwed, the weight of her decision is here apparent in her tired, helpless expression.

In front of this picture, I could not help but remain at the level of the servant and the severe cost of discipleship. Yet the longer I stared, the more grace seemed to permeate my deepest reservations about the nature of God’s calling and the often unchallenged images of a Father with strange ways of showing love. The longer I considered the song of Mary in light of all she would endure, the more I heard in my disturbance the cry of Christ himself: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? How often it seems that the glimpses of God’s light which stay with us longest are not the glimpses that are blinding and certain in their power, but those which are mysterious and steady in their invitation, emerging out of dark questions and entirely disturbing moments.

In fact, there are far worse things than being disrupted by the one who calls the world to follow, the once-fragile child who now asks that we put our hands on the plow and not look back, let the dead bury the dead, take up our own crosses, and bring with him good news to the poor. It is far worse to be so at ease that we do not receive the graceful disturbance of a Father who would offer his only Son, and a Son who would go willingly. It is far worse to be so familiar with the story that we fail to see the beautiful One disturbing this world, lifting up the lowly, sending the powerful away empty, and filling the hungry with good things.

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

(1) Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1988), 100.

(2) Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: Bantam, 1982), 30.

(3) Ibid., 18.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Side of the Broken

July 11, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

June 2013 will not be long forgotten by the Indian mind for the pain that we experienced as a nation. The tragedy surrounding one of Hinduism’s most sought after pilgrim centers, Uttarkhand, spells a magnitude that is staggering. The region is known for the beauty of the Himalayas and has often been referred to as “the land of gods” on account of the places of worship and pligrim centers that it houses. Some estimate that as many as a few thousand villages were swallowed up by rushing waters and an estimated ten thousand individuals were carried to a watery grave amid flash floods, heavy rains, landslides, and building collapses. Amid the chaos there have also been reports of the heroic efforts by the Indian armed forces and other relief agencies in their rescue efforts in the region. Yet, the horrifying experience of humanity being pitted against the strength of nature’s raw and unbridled power has left us with pictures that cause us to shudder, if not scream, “Why?”

For those who were there and providentially made it out safely, the sense of relief and yet the horror of having been so close to injury or death must take a long time to deal with. For those whose pilgrimage turned into tragedy, in either injury to self or in the death of a loved one, the pain will remain. I watched a video clip of a few pilgrims who made it to what appeared a safe place overlooking a deep waterfall only to be washed away by the rushing waters moments later in full view of others. I had not envisaged the end of the video and may have spared myself of the agony had I known. Tears stream down my face as I write.

At moments like this, the worldviews don’t divide us. The pain unites us. That group of individuals could have been my loved ones in another circumstance. There is something about another’s pain that rattles our insides. As I bow to pray for mercy, I realize that I am far removed from the circumstances of my fellow citizens who have been hurt, injured, traumatized, and bereaved. Yet, I know can pray. I can cry. I can feel the pain.

This is no picture postcard world. As I write, there are images from Syria, Egypt, and other parts of the world that remind us that it is a volatile world of brokenness. It is also troubling to note that while the vagaries of nature have wrought great harm in Uttarkand, the vagaries of humankind have brought great pain in other parts of our globe.

As we think of circumstances like these, we are left with the two-fold challenge of seeking explanations and solutions. The naturalist will be quick to dismiss any notion of the divine. The faithful ones of various faiths will have their pick of explanations. For instance, I read of a survivor from Uttarkhand who believed that what happened there was on account of the wrath of the gods being unfolded on humanity’s careless wrecking of tress, minerals, and natural resources. Others may speak of fate that could not be escaped, that the story had been scripted thus and could only unfold as it did. Still others will struggle and seek solace rather than reason. To them no explanation will be appealing or comforting—and maybe the majority of those who had a personal tryst with the tragedy would come close to that position.

The Christian worldview offers us a view that I dare say can be found nowhere else. It is one worldview which neither callously dismisses the pain on the one hand nor makes the sufferer stand alone in that pain. The Christian worldview presents us the view of a Perfect One who paid the price for the brokenness of an imperfect world. His goal in coming was not to say, “Here is my judgement,” it was rather to say, “I will take your judgement upon myself.” Like a fair judge who does not condone the magnitude of the crime committed but passes the sentence and then moments later offers to take the place of the condemned one, Jesus came to set us free.

The stories from Uttarkhand will continue to haunt our national memory. The pain of those who made their pilgrimage even in the face of physical dangers will not be easily forgotten. But our prayer as God’s people can be that from the valleys and hills of such pain and memories, some would find their hope in lifting their eyes to another hill—the hill upon which a Savior died. A God who stands on the side of the broken.

Arun Andrews is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bangalore, India.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Scene of Miracle

July 10, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The 1748 essay “Of Miracles” by David Hume was influential in leading the charge against the miraculous, thoughts that were later sharpened (though also later recanted) by Antony Flew. Insisting the laws of a natural world incompatible with the supernatural, the new atheists continue to weigh in on the subject today. With them, many Christian philosophers and scientists, who are less willing to define miracle as something that must break the laws of nature, join the conversation with an opposing gusto. Physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, for instance, suggests that miracles are not violations of the laws of nature but rather “exploration of a new regime of physical experience.”(1)

The possibility or impossibility of the miraculous fills books, debates, and lectures. What it does not fill is that moment when a person finds herself—rationally or otherwise—crying out for intervention, for help and assurance, indeed, for the miraculous. “For most of us” writes C.S. Lewis, “the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.”(2) To this I would simply add that often prayer is both: both the anguished cry of Gethsemane—”please, take this from me”—prayed at the foot of an impossible mountain.

Whether this moment comes beside a hospital bed, a failing marriage, a grave injustice, or debilitating struggle, we seem almost naturally inclined in some way to cry out for an intervening factor, something or someone beyond the known laws of A + B that sit defiantly in front of us. For my own family that moment came with cancer, complicated by well-intentioned commands to believe without doubt that God was going to take it away. When death took it away instead, like many others in our situation, our faith in miracles—and the God who gives them—were equally devastated.

In the throes of that heart-wrenching scene, every time I closed my eyes to pray, the vision of an empty throne filled my mind. It was something like the vision of Isaiah in the temple, only there was no robe and no body filling anything.(3) My prayers seemed to be given not a resounding “no,” but a non-answer, a cold, agonizing silence, which was also very much an answer. It was only years after the scene of my failed prayers for the miraculous that I was physically startled, again like Isaiah, at the thought that the throne was empty because the one who fills it had stepped down to sit beside us as we cried.

Such a miracle wasn’t the one we were hoping for and some may scoff at the notion of calling it such, and yet, years now after the sting of death, the incarnational hope of a God who comes near—in life, in suffering, even unto the grave—is inarguably the miracle far more profound. I don’t fully know why in the midst of our pain we felt alone and abandoned. Perhaps our eyes were too focused on the scene of the miracle we wanted, such that no other could be seen. ”God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard,” writes C.S. Lewis. ”Our preparations to receive [God] sometimes have the opposite effect. Doesn’t Charles Williams say somewhere that ‘the altar must often be built in one place in order that the fire from heaven may descend somewhere else‘?”(4)

And this somewhere else, the place that catches us off-guard, is maybe even quite often right in front of us, near but unnoticed, miraculous but missed. In the words of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, “I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”(5)

What if we were to start looking, not for miraculous signs and antepasts from beyond, but for a closer scene of miracle, for invitations to explore that new regime of physical existence brought about by the Incarnation, for foretastes of a banquet to which we are invited even today. Miracle and mystery may well be plainly before our eyes. For of course, Christianity is the story of the great Miracle, the story of the God-Man coming not where we expected, but where we needed him most. Like the kingdom itself and the Christ who came to announce it, the scene of miracle may be nearer than we think.

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

(1) John Polkinghorne, Faith, Science and Understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 59.

(2) C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer (San Diego: Harcourt, 1992), 60.

(3) See Isaiah 6.

(4) Lewis, 117.

(5) Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 243.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Authority for Life

July 9, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

What images come to mind in association with the word “authority”? Typically, I think of government leaders or persons who hold positions of power. Reading the world headlines, I often hear tales of brutality, betrayal, and oppression by those in “authority.” There seems to be no end of warlords and despots, brutal dictatorships, and tyrants siphoning the resources of nations to hoard it for their own malevolent use. Or, there are the recent allegations, and likely realities, concerning the use of classified information; those in authority ‘spying’ on citizens or governments and using this information in ways to bolster power or for leverage in negotiation. All manner of negative images for authority fill the minds and hearts of those who read about them or who suffer under them with feelings of mistrust and contempt.

Sometimes it seems that the corruption of those in authority is endemic to those who are in leadership. Over one hundred years ago, Lord Acton warned: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”(1) While Lord Acton’s sentiment appears thoroughly pessimistic, the requisite power that comes from being put in a position of authority often tempts the one who leads to use power in ways that promote harm, disorder, and injustice. Given the abuse of authority that seems too often on display, it is no wonder that many feel a wary skepticism towards authority figures and institutions of power.

For those who struggle with a more jaded view of power, the attribution of authority applied to Jesus’s teaching ministry might cause even the skeptic to sit up and pay attention; for even someone not familiar with the intricacies of Christian belief or theology would be reticent to compare the authority of Jesus with the way in which authority is often demonstrated in the world today. Jesus never held political office nor did he have a high-ranking leadership position in the temple or synagogues of his day. He would ultimately be crucified by those in authority over him.

Instead, authority is attributed to Jesus at the end of a sermon he preached. The multitudes listening to that sermon “were amazed at his teaching; for he was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.”(2) What was it about Jesus that caused such amazement, and that made his teaching authoritative?

Many commentators note that the scribes cited other teachers and leaders in their teaching, but Jesus cited himself and his own words as a sign of authority. This is borne out in the repeated phrase throughout the Sermon, “You have heard it said…but I say.”(3) Jesus’s authority comes from issuing his own teaching and his seemingly new understanding of the Torah.

But is Jesus’s authority simply attributed to his being smarter or more learned in his interpretive skills than the religious and legal authorities of his own day? Did he use better logic or cleverer argumentation? Or does his authoritative teaching demonstrate something greater than clever turns of phrase and charisma?

Jesus’s authority comes not simply from his teaching, but in the way he revealed God’s authority as he lived his life. Indeed, the Gospel of Matthew sandwiches this great sermon of Jesus in between accounts of miracle stories. In fact, eight miracle stories immediately follow the sermon and give witness to Jesus “as one having authority,” and before he begins to preach, Jesus was healing “every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people.”(4) The authority of Jesus was not simply a demonstration of power or influence in the way we normally think of authority. Rather, the authority of Jesus brought healing and restoration. Illness and disease kept people away from community, away from temple worship—indeed, and away from God. Jesus released individuals from sickness, delivered them from principalities and powers, and thus restored them to their communities and to worship. In his ministry of teaching and healing, he brought those on the outside in.

Indeed, the miracles that Jesus performed demonstrated the nature God’s authority. All who relied on Jesus could enter into the realm and rule of the God who was on full display in his life and ministry. Jesus was not simply acting for God, but acting with God in such a way as to demonstrate that something new had come and had come with real power and authority. Although the word “authority” often conjures images of overlords or dictators for many in our contemporary world, there is an alternative vision on full display in the life and teaching of Jesus. Those who choose to place their lives under his kind of authority are free to live in ways that demonstrate God’s reign.

Regardless of the earthly authorities, anyone can live in light of the authority shown in Jesus. The original language indicates that his kind of authority gives the capability or liberty to enter into God’s new realm more fully and more deeply than ever thought possible. Placed within the kind of rule on display in the life and ministry of Jesus, all those who seek a true leader find the capability and liberty to live in like manner—using authority for healing, for calling powers and principalities to justice, creating order from chaos, and restoring new life to what was dead.

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

(1) John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st Baron Acton (1834?-1902). Letter, April 3, 1887, to Bishop Mandell Creighton. The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, vol. 1, ch. 13, ed. Louise Creighton (1904).

(2) Cf. Matthew 5-7; Matthew 7:28-29.

(3) Cf. Matthew 5:21-22; 5:27-28; 5:31-32, 33, and 34. Lloyd J. Ogilvie, ed., Myron J. Augsburger, The Communicator’s Commentary: Matthew (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1982).

(4) Matthew 8 and 9 present the healing of the leper, the Centurion’s servant, Peter’s mother-in-law, the calming of the Sea of Galilee, the casting out of demons, the healing of the paralytic, the healing of the hemorrhage, and the healing of the two blind men. Matthew 4:23-25 presents Jesus healing those from Syria, Galilee, Decapolis, and Jerusalem. These who are healed likely made up the crowds who listened in amazement to his sermon.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Private Faith and Public Ethics

July 8, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

As a student, I was privileged to sit under an advisor for whom the field of ethics, and particularly medical ethics, was a vibrant passion and sought-after proficiency. With his careful drawl and smiling eyes, my professor slowly and gladly brought me to an understanding of ethics that would never allow me to leave it, as I might have left a stuffy, uninteresting class. He also happened to be Christian, which one readily discovered was not by coincidence. His ethics and his religion were intertwined.

In one of Dr. Verhey’s more recent works, he further describes the connection of his ethics to Scripture. “There is no Christian life that is not shaped somehow by Scripture. There is no Christian moral discernment that is not tied somehow to Scripture. There is no Christian ethic—no Christian medical ethic or sexual ethic or economic ethic or political ethic—that is not formed and informed somehow by Scripture.”(1) That is to say, Christian communities are communities who practice ethics on some real level because they live by a particular identity, because it is who they are.

Now working within the field of Christian apologetics, one of the comments that I hear most often as a reason for rejecting Christianity is that of its followers. In essence, the difficulty many have with Christianity is disappointment with Christians—whether blatant hypocrisy, disheartening unkindness, or gross abuse of power. I try to address these real disappointments, while entreating the repulsed to see the suggestion in their own logic. Christ stands for something more. I try reasoning that the abuse of a religion must never stand in the way of getting at the truth of a religion. But many will not be swayed. I often leave these conversations saddened not merely because the obstacles seem immovable, but because I fully understand the grievance. The letter of recommendation written upon the countenance of professing Christians is far too often a message that deters.

Like ethics, Christian apologetics is a daily activity writ large upon the life of Christians and Christian communities whether they realize it or not. We live in such a world where one’s choice of religion can seemingly be housed in private rooms separated from the daily choices and ethics by which we live, and sadly Christians often attempt to live similarly. And yet the world somehow knows to hold those who profess belief in Christ accountable to something that indeed cannot be locked in private rooms and hidden from the public. This is both a call to the Christian to uncompartmentalize and a call to the disappointed to reconsider the Christ they seem to sense invites us to something transformative—something worth holding accountable in the first place.

The Christian indeed goes about life confessing, commending, defending, and living the gospel, showing the world an ethic and a religion whether they speak of these things or not. Both Christian ethics and the Christian faith are thus inherently Christian activities, disciplines that must take seriously the responsibility the identity imparts. This is not to say the Christian holds every answer or always lives as one transformed. But the Christian is a person of the Book, commanded to remember the movement of God in history, the nearness of the Spirit today, and the promise of Christ’s return—in every word, in every act, in every private space and public square.

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

(1) Allen Verhey, Remembering Jesus: Christian Community, Scripture, and the Moral Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2002), 54.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Divinity and Dirty Hands

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Scene of Miracle

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