Tag Archives: Ravi

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Logic and Laughter

Leave a comment

 

In August of 1963, due to his ailing health and increasing responsibilities, C.S. Lewis announced his retirement from Cambridge. His stepson Douglas Gresham and friend Walter Hooper were sent to the university to sort out his affairs and bring home the two thousand or so books that lined the walls of his Magdalene College office. Knowing the house was already filled to its bursting point with books, the pair wondered all the way home where on earth they would find the space to put them. But Lewis had already contrived an intricate plan for their use.

A nurse named Alec had been hired to stay up nights in case Lewis fell ill and needed his assistance. As the men returned with the enormous load of books, Alec laid asleep in his room on the ground floor. As the truck pulled into the driveway, Lewis appeared, cautioning them to silence. “Where’ll we store the books?” Hooper whispered, to which Lewis responded with a wink. Carrying each stack with tedious concern so as not to wake the sleeping victim, the three men piled the works around the nurse’s bed, sealing him in a cocoon of manuscript and literature. When they were finished, the books were stacked nearly to the ceiling, filling every square inch of the room where the snoring nurse still slept.

Much to the relief of the anxious culprits who were waiting outside, Alex finally awoke. From within the insulated tomb, first came sounds of bellowing, and finally the tumbling of the great literary wall. An amused nurse emerged from within the wreckage.

 

The characters in this story are every bit as spirited as some of the playful personalities from Lewis’s imaginary worlds. These are the whimsical scenes—fiction and non-fiction—that seal in my mind the many weighty lessons I have wrought from C.S. Lewis. Christianity is a religion with room—and reason—for laughter.

Much of the thought and work of C.S. Lewis, who died fifty years ago this year, wrestles with the existential evidences of the existence of God and the winsome invitations around us that beckon us to see more. I am not alone in saying it was Lewis who first taught me to move toward the questions that reappear though we bury them and to at least be honest about the logical outworkings of the philosophies we hold, even loosely. It was Lewis who taught me to search after God with both heart and mind and energy, but with the wonder and imagination of a child who is able to be startled by the very thing she is looking for. A former atheist, Lewis came to believe with everything in him that Christianity gives an explanation—and a face—to the joy we stumble across, joy that “flickers on the razor-edge of the present and is gone.”

On the one hand, if life is but time and happenstance, why do we laugh or wonder, or experience a desire to play, however fleetingly at all? What good is joy, what purpose is humor or laughter or beauty, if life is but a series of instincts to survive and the universe at a cosmic level is meaningless? But on the other hand, if we are made in the image of a holy, loving, imaginative God, how wonderful that God has made us with both logic and laughter, with intrinsic worth and immortal wonder.

Nearing the end of one of his most remarkable lectures, in which he spoke hauntingly of the glory of the God and the immortality of the soul made in God’s image, Lewis added a word of warning: “This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously.”(1)

The gospel invites us in to such a story, presenting a creative God who made us for joy, sending the Son that we might know what that very word means. What if the door on which we have been knocking all our lives will one day open at last? Seeking and playing and finding may well be among our lives’ greatest efforts.

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

(1) C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory (New York: Harper, 1980), 46.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Setting Up Camp

Leave a comment

 

I know what the Corinthians were thinking when they fought over theological allegiances. Paul describes the discordant sounds of the Christian community in Corinth: One was saying, “I follow Paul” and another, “I follow Apollos” and another, “I follow Cephas” and still another, “I follow Christ.” I remember a time when these words seemed so strange, and with Paul, I agreed the Corinthians were in need of reprimand. But I know how this happens; I have seen it happening in me.

The more I study theology and its varying schools of thought, the more I realize how much I do not know. Mapping all of the types and categories, trends in thought and history, and the emerging theologies today seems nearly impossible. And even if it was possible to make sense of every school of thought, it would hardly mean that every theologian today and in history would fit neatly into one such school. The more I study theology, the more I fear being able to soundly navigate through the noisy choruses. I fear the blind spots that I likely have—and nurture. And so I find myself wanting to stand behind one trustworthy theologian in particular, drawing a line between us and all the rest, declaring myself a follower of his or her theological camp, and following my safe theological leader through the labyrinth of good and bad theologies. Apparently, the Corinthian mindset is not so different from my own.

During his tenure as a professor at Magdalen College in Oxford, C.S. Lewis delivered a memorial oration to the students of King’s College, the University of London. It was titled, “The Inner Ring.” Addressing his young audience as “the middle-aged moralist,” Lewis warned of the natural desire to find ourselves a part of the right inner circles, which exist endlessly and tauntingly throughout life. He cautioned about the consuming ambition to be an insider and not an outsider, on the right side of the right camp, though the lines that distinguish the camps are invisible, and the circle is never as perfect from within as it looks from without. Like the taunting mirage a weary traveler chases through the desert, noted Lewis, the quest for the Inner Ring will break your heart unless you break it.(1)

Of course, the desire to be seen inside the right camp is a desire that reaches well beyond the bounds of theology.  The longing to belong and belong to the right group is an intense motivator of human behavior. It is how we make sense of the world around us; it is how we navigate through the recesses of conflicting thoughts, ideas, and worldviews. But it is also misleading. Membership can lead to blind allegiance, thoughtlessness, and persecution of those deemed outside. One only has to watch a group of kids to see how easily our desire to belong can be corrupted by our need to exclude. The inner circle is not inner if there are no outsiders. Choosing to follow Cephas is just as often about not choosing to follow Apollos or associate with his followers. My choice of theological leaders bears similar qualities. And thus, Paul’s question rings in my ears the same way it did for the Corinthians:  “Is Christ divided? Was Paul [or C.S. Lewis or your seminary professor] crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul [or John Calvin or Frederick Buechner]?” (1 Corinthians 1:13).

The kingdom in which Christ invites us to participate is in fact far greater than any one theologian pretends to describe, and it is not one of these, but Christ himself who reigns within it. “We go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle—and Greeks pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself—both Jews and Greeks—Christ is God’s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. Human wisdom is so tiny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can’t begin to compete with God’s ‘weakness.’…But everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.”(2) The camp to which we want most to belong is his.

Following anyone other than Christ, we may find words of human wisdom, but we have emptied the cross of its power. Likewise, we find not the kingdom of God, but an inner circle with which we will eventually grow weary. Following Christ Jesus is something else entirely. Following Christ, we find a wisdom that is foolishness to many and a kingdom whose very description continues to crumble the walls we neatly build. Following Christ, we are repeatedly jarred awake to the realities of God’s reign, the inadequacy of our circles, and one far worthier of our boasting.

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

(1) C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1980), 154.

(2) The Message, 1 Corinthians 1:22-31.

 

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Making Laughter

Leave a comment

 

All of us, at one time or another, have experienced the strange physiological reaction of zygomatic stimulation and subsequent larynx strain. This strain upsets the respiratory system, which results in deep, noisy gasps. The mouth opens and closes as the lungs struggle for oxygen. The struggle for oxygen causes the face to turn various shades of red and strange, unique noises emerge from deep within. What is this strange, physiological reaction I am describing?(1) It is laughter!

We normally associate laughter with humor. But gelotology, the study of laughter, suggests another trigger for laughter that has been called “the incongruity theory.” This theory suggests that laughter arises when logic and familiarity are replaced by things that don’t normally go together—when we expect one outcome and another happens. Generally speaking, our minds and bodies anticipate what’s going to happen and how it’s going to end based on logical thought, emotion, and our past experience. But when circumstances go in unexpected directions, our thoughts and emotions suddenly have to switch gears and laughter often emerges out of the tension between what we expect—and what actually happens.

Recently, I was struck by how the incongruity theory of laughter may shed light on the nature of faith, particularly as it relates to Sarah and her laughter at God’s promise of children in Genesis 18:11-15. In general, I read the account of her laughter at God’s promise that she would indeed bear a child as a lack of faith. Yet, the writer of the letter to the Hebrews counts Sarah among the faithful. Sarah, we are told by the author, is one of the faithful witnesses because she “received the ability to conceive by faith, even beyond the proper time of life since she considered God faithful who had promised” (Hebrews 11:11).

It is not difficult to see why many see a lack of faith as they read this story. For many have difficulty believing that faith can be found in the gap between what we expect and what actually happens. Or we believe that faith never doubts, nor questions, nor struggles with the seeming incongruities of life. We certainly don’t see a faith that laughs!

Perhaps Sarah’s laughter indicates a level of disbelief. And, frankly, who can blame her? Who wouldn’t laugh at the promise of a child to someone barren and long beyond the childbearing years? But, this is where the incongruity theory of laughter is so helpful. For Sarah’s laughter contains a glimmer of faith; faith that is really found in incongruity—holding together belief and disbelief in the face of incongruent circumstances and situations.

For those who read the narrative, God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah that they would indeed have a child and that from that child they would become “a great nation” seems too good to be true. The promise of children was made so long ago, and still there was no child. Sarah’s experience tells her another: age made it physically impossible to bear children at this point. It seemed then that God told them one thing, but in the end could not or would not deliver. And so Sarah laughed when God came calling that day.  She laughed out loud! And I believe her laughter was filled with the tension stemming from disbelief, incredulity, doubt, and that tiny glimmer of hope beyond hope that what God was saying, despite all she experienced to the contrary, was still the truth.

Sarah’s story helps both those who claim faith, and those who struggle to believe. For her faith is found right in the tension between belief and unbelief. For long before, when the Lord first made this promise to Abraham, the text tells us that Abraham “believed God and it was counted as righteousness.” Twenty-five years transpire after this initial declaration of faith; twenty-five years of barrenness, and futile attempts to have children in other ways, and twenty-five years of God seeming silent, of not making good on what was promised. So when one looks at what it meant for Abraham and Sarah to believe God, it meant taking a journey of following God with faith that was hard won; faith that hung on even when God did not clearly show them the way.

Abraham and Sarah believed God, but that belief was not absolute certainty. It was a journey filled with tension between what was expected, and what actually happened! Sarah’s laughter reveals a faith that fills the gap between what is often expected and what actually comes to be, and a faith that grows trust in a God who would show up in the most unexpected ways.

Sarah’s story presents a living portrait of the laughter of faith as the laughter of incongruity. But ultimately, like Sarah and Abraham, real faith casts us wholeheartedly upon the God who is free to act and to do as God wants, in God’s time, and in God’s way. Faith is the ability to answer “yes” to the God for whom nothing is impossible, even when our lives tell us the answer is “no.” More than this, faith is not dependent on us but is rooted in the God who time and time again proves faithful. The apostle Paul affirms this idea as he retells the Abraham and Sarah story in his letter to the Romans: “That promise God gave Abraham and Sarah…was not given because of something they did or didn’t do….it was based on God’s decision to put everything together for them. As we throw open our doors to God, we discover at the same moment that God has already thrown open the door for us.”(2)

And just like that, the doors open and God gets the last laugh. Isaac is born. Isaac’s name means “one who laughs” (Genesis 21:6). Sarah declares in the laughter of faith, “God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me!”

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

(1) Research on laughter from http://people.howstuffworks.com/laughter4.htm

(2) Romans 4, The Message.

 

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Many Splendored Thing

Leave a comment

 

Flannery O’Connor could not explain her fascination with peacocks. But she loved them. In fact, the southern writer of short stories lived on a farm where she raised some 100 of them. She adopted her first peacock at the age of 25, around the time she was diagnosed with a debilitating disease, and she could not stop looking at him. It was for her a sign of grace, and an image that silenced her. In an essay focusing on her fascination, she describes the bird’s transfiguration from fledgling to finery. “[T]he peacock starts life with an inauspicious appearance….the color of those large objectionable moths that flutter about light bulbs on summer nights.” But after two years, when the bird has fully attained its pattern, “for the rest of his life this chicken will act as if he designed it himself… With his tail spread, he inspires a range of emotions, but I have yet to hear laughter. The usual reaction is silence, at least for a time.”(1)

It is thus without coincidence that O’Connor used the peacock as a symbol for the transfigured Christ in many of her stories. Often cited is her use of the bird in The Displaced Person. In this story, the peacock is a main character of sorts, functioning for everyone else in the story as something of a spiritual test. Some never notice him; another sees the bird only as “another mouth to feed.”  Still another liked to have peacocks around simply to signify his wealth; another is altogether besieged by the peacock’s splendor. With eyes locked on the regal bird poised in color and majesty, he says, overwhelmed, “Christ will come like that.”(2)

I appreciate stories that remind me to keep my eyes opened for all that can be seen but can just as easily be missed. Encounters with the sacred can be like this. As Peter, James, and John climbed a mountain with Jesus, they were startled when Elijah and Moses appeared before them. It must have seemed a moment of both honor and awe. Peter immediately responded to it; “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” (Matthew 17:4). But before he had finished speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them and a voice from the heavens thundered, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” The disciples were terrified. And then as suddenly as it all began, they looked up and saw no one but Jesus. On this mountain, they were nearly blinded by holiness, standing before prophets and patriarchs they had studied since birth. But had God not spoken, and Elijah and Moses not disappeared, the disciples may not have fully seen the significance of the transfigured one before them. They may have seen without really seeing.

Sometimes holiness comes and unmistakably transforms time and place. Other times we fail to see the sacred in our midst simply because we do not want to see. Like the rich man who failed to notice Lazarus begging and bleeding outside of his house until the tides were turned and he needed Lazarus to do him a favor, we miss the face of God when we turn away from the things of God—our neighbors, justice, love, or mercy. It is always possible to pass over what God has extended, whether a sign of grace, a moment of transcendence, or a lifetime of knowing God’s presence. But often, we fail to see these things because we fail to see each other; we miss the images of God all around us within a world made in God’s image. As Francis Thompson wrote in his poem “In No Strange Land”:

The angels keep their ancient places:-

Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces,

That miss the many-splendour’d thing

There are times when God seems to woo us slowly with beauty, truth, and mercy. Other times we seem to find ourselves moved nearly to blindness as we are brought before God’s holiness like Moses or Isaiah. Sometimes, like Peter, we interpret the sacred in our midst imperfectly, or our estranged faces miss the signs of a many-splendored God entirely. Still other times, the scales of self-absorption drop from our eyes, God comes down Jacob’s ladder to wrestle with us, we discover something sacred in the Lazarus we refuse to overlook again, or else, we see in a peacock or in a bright cloud the unchanging promise of Christ’s identity and imminent return.

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

(1) Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works (New York, Library of America, 1988), 834-835.

(2) Ibid., 317.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Why Christian?

Leave a comment

 

“Why Christian?” was a question put before Professor Douglas John Hall by one of the many students who end up in his office asking more about the theology he teaches. He notes the possibility that the question was asked rhetorically, maybe even a bit sarcastically, like those near Jesus who threw questions more like daggers than candid inquiries. But it is also possible the student just wanted to hear an honest explanation: In a world of so many spiritual options, in a world of reasons to reject religion altogether, Why Christianity? Regardless of tone or motive, the seasoned professor of theology decided to answer the question, laying aside the responses that could be given easily after so many years of teaching. “I confess, I [am answering] as much for myself as for you,” he writes to the student who asked the question. “You made me realize that after all these years I needed to face that question in the quite basic and personal way you put it to me.”(1)

On a typical day, my own answer to the question of Christianity might be steeped in the signs and realities of the uniqueness of Christ. Thankfully this answer is not my own. With many who have gone before me, I cannot explain Jesus of Nazareth without concluding his uniqueness:

“Surely this man was the Son of God!”

“Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” “Come and see the man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”(2)

Christianity is not a matter of preference or pedigree, but pilgrimage chosen specifically because a follower has found one worth following. “[Jesus] was the meekest and lowliest of all the sons of men,” wrote Scottish nobleman James Stewart, “yet he spoke of coming on the clouds of heaven with the glory of God… No one was half so kind or compassionate to sinners yet no one ever spoke such red-hot scorching words about sin… His whole life was love. Yet on one occasion he demanded of the Pharisees how they ever expected to escape the damnation of hell… He saved others but at the last, Himself He did not save. There is nothing in history like the union of contrasts which confront us in the Gospels.” Why Christian? Because there is none other like Christ.

The incomparability of Jesus Christ answers the questions of a world of spiritual options and religious hostility. Like professor Hall, facing the question “Why Christian?” is typically a matter of confessing the things I know, even as I know I now see but a reflection and will one day see face to face. Still, there are less typical days when the question comes not with hostility or sarcasm or curiosity, but from somewhere within, and the answers are somewhere caught up in despair or injustice or death. When standing over a casket or holding the hand of one whose body is riddled with cancer, “Why Christian?” takes on a different flesh—or else it wavers cold and corpselike. Christ’s uniqueness is suddenly a matter of urgency, needing to be spoken in words that have meaning in valleys of death and shadow. Standing before this body that once breathed, what does it really mean that Christ was unique? Though with a far different kind of trembling certainty, here too Christ’s incomparability is ultimately what matters.

The apologetic of the apostle Paul was always spoken starring life’s “last enemy” dead in the eyes. Whether answering the question “Why Christian?” or standing in jail having been beaten to silence, Paul kept before him the hope of the resurrection as both the proof of Christ’s uniqueness and the assurance that this uniqueness inherently matters. He spoke of the resurrection of Christ and his hope in the resurrection of the dead before the assembled Sanhedrin, before the Roman procurator Felix, and again before Felix’s successor, Festus, who conceded that Paul’s arrest was due to his proclamation “about a dead man named Jesus who Paul claimed was alive.”(3) Even before king Agrippa, Paul’s answer to the first acrimonious signs of the question “Why Christian?” was an appeal to Christ’s uniqueness in the hope of the resurrection. He asked, “Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?…I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen–that the Christ would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to his own people and to the Gentiles” (Acts 26:8, 22). For Paul, and for all who claim the inimitableness of Jesus, if Christ has not been raised, there is no answer to the question “Why Christian?”

Instead, the uniqueness of Christ is an answer for questions that come with sarcasm or sincerity. But so it is an answer with flesh when life’s typical comforts fall by the wayside and the valley of shadows is long and lonely.

“He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.”(4) There is none other like Christ. I know of no other god who weeps with us at gravesides and then shows us in his own dying and rising that death no more holds its sting.

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

(1) Douglas John Hall, Why Christian: For Those on the Edge of Faith (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1998), 11.

(2) Mark 15:39, John 9:32-33, John 4:29.

(3) Acts 23:6, Acts 24:15, 21, Acts 25:19.

(4) Matthew 28:6.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Why the Rules Make Sense

Leave a comment

 

Christianity is nothing more than a set of rules! Have you ever heard this before? The question or objection, depending on how it is phrased, comes from both Christians and skeptics. So what does Christianity have to say to this?

It is helpful first to acknowledge that the Bible is indeed full of commands and instructions. But the role that the rules play is often misunderstood. Rules, even going back to the Ten Commandments, were not meant simply to tell us what to do and what not to do. They were intended to be a means by which humanity could come close to God and relate to God. If we think of how rules are applied in other areas of life, it is quite easy to understand how this works. Discipline, guidelines or putting deadlines in place are not an end in themselves; they are the means by which we achieve what we want to accomplish.

While I was doing undergraduate studies in Toronto I worked for the Toronto Blue Jays ground crew. While working there I noticed that the elite players would always be the ones to arrive at the ballpark early and leave late. They would come in early for strength and conditioning purposes, then perhaps look over strategies or game plans. Then they would join the rest of the team once the normal daily routines began. This was hard work and made for long days. Here is the point: the discipline of getting to the stadium early, doing an extra work out, working over game plans were not the goal. These were the means by which this player would attain the ultimate goal: victory.

The rules set out in Scripture were never meant to inhibit pleasure or desire, but to do the exact opposite. Desire gave birth to commands, but somehow we have understood it the other way around, as if the commands were meant to create desire.

There is actually a moment documented in the Old Testament in which the people of Israel say that they would like to follow God’s commandments. However, Joshua, their leader at the time, turns them down. Effectively, he says, ‘You don’t have what it takes. You will turn away from God. So, please, don’t commit to it.’ They push back and insist that they truly want to follow God. Joshua reluctantly gives in and grants them their desire to form a covenant binding them to follow God’s rules.

The rules and statutes implemented into the life of Israel stemmed from a desire to serve the Lord. Rules were not put in place to prevent desire from finding its fulfillment. Rather, the rules were put in place to fulfill desire and avoid destruction.

A question that we need to ask ourselves is, ‘Where do rules find their starting point?’ In the Christian sense, does obedience come from a sense of duty or from a desire for God? If the drive to live for God comes from a sense of duty, our faith will become one long arduous journey. But duty is not where the gospel asks us to begin. We begin with a love and desire for God.

Imagine that I have just been away from home on a long business trip. When I return home I decide to stop off at the florist’s near my home because I want to get flowers for my wife. I purchase the flowers, then walk up to the door with flowers behind my back and knock on the door. My wife opens the door and I reveal the flowers to her. She says, ‘Nathan, you shouldn’t have done this! Why did you get me these flowers?’ I reply, ‘Because it is my duty!’

What do you think her response will be after she hears this? What if I respond to her question by saying that I got her those flowers because I love her—that there is nothing more I love than the sweet relationship I have with her.(1)

This gets at the heart of Christian discipleship. Christianity does not start with rules, but the rules do make sense. They are put in place to fulfill our desire for God; not to coerce us into loving God.

Nathan Betts is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Toronto, Canada.

(1) Story as told by Michael Ramsden, director for the European office of RZIM.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Public, the Private, and the Practical

Leave a comment

 

There is no mistaking the presence of unique challenges to belief in our modern day world. Our secularist, privatized, consumerist worldview has wielded a religion (indeed many religions) that has little or nothing to do with life itself. Coupled with secularism’s privatizing of religion from the public realm, consumerism’s pull creates a context whereby the choice of belief is not only a personal matter, but a matter entirely divorced from the history and communities that inform these beliefs. As professor David Wells notes, “God has been evacuated from the center of our collective life, pushed to the edges of our public square to become an irrelevance to how our world does its business. Marxism rested on a theoretical atheism; our secularized world rests on a practical atheism in the public domain, though one that coexists with private religiosity.”(1) This chasm between public and private, sacred and secular, forces a theology whereby God is largely absent, unknown in the public arena, and silent unless spoken to.

Meanwhile, in conjunction with our evacuation of God and subsequent practical atheism, we live within an understanding of unbounded freedom to pursue and consume whatsoever we will. While we may recognize secularism for what it is, Wells warns: “[W]e do not recognize the corrupting power of our affluence for what it is…. We consider our abundance as essentially harmless and, what is just as important, we have come to need it. The extraordinary and dazzling benefits of our modernized world, benefits that are now indispensable to our way of life, hide the values which accompany them, values which have the power to wrench around our lives in very damaging ways.”(2) Far more than a matter of wealth, our sheer appetites, which we readily appease as if angry gods, bring us to the conclusion that we ourselves are the center of collective life, echoing the call of secularism that God is exactly where God belongs—in quiet, private corners. Even within the church, this outlook is often practically lived if not publicly admitted.

Yet, this dichotomy that is now readily accepted between matters of private faith and public life belies a betrayal of the very identity Jesus sets forth for his followers. The hope within the Christian is not something we are able to keep private—for if the very public act of Christ’s resurrection from the dead was not real, then the very faith our culture would have us keep in private is futile. The events of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, and the faith that upholds them, do not allow for the dichotomies of public and private, spiritual and physical, sacred and secular. The call of Christ is one that encompasses every possible realm, thus making “private faith” an unintelligible distinction.

Nonetheless, while the challenges of “practical atheism” may indeed be the outworking of a unique cultural moment, it is hardly a new way of life. Though the causes and contexts are certainly different, our current cultural mood is in some ways comparable to the scene Paul discovered in Athens. Standing before these men and women, Paul gently bid them to see that their philosophy amounted to little more than practical atheism. Where there was belief that amounted to very little, where gods were acknowledged but unknown, and worship was offered in ritual, fear, and apathy, Paul set before them the God who is there, the God who is known. While the cultural challenges before us are intricate and unyielding, Christ brings the countercultural hope of a life touched by the God who is there. Practical atheism is unlivable when it is placed beside the one who is known.

Thus we might be encouraged in any attempt to believe, for regardless of the risks and opportunities that fill the world around us, so it is filled of the unfailing love of a present God. And it is this reality that despite ourselves or our obstacles compels the blind to see. On such matters of the Spirit, 18th-century preacher Jonathan Edwards once noted, “Though great use may be made of external arguments…for they may be greatly serviceable to awaken unbelievers, and bring them to serious consideration, and to confirm the faith of true saints… [T]here is no spiritual conviction…but what arises from an apprehension of the spiritual beauty and glory of divine things. And such a direct apprehension is a gift mediated only by the Holy Spirit of God.”(3) In our pluralistic, privatized, and practically atheistic culture this Spirit indeed continues to move.

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

(1) David Wells, “This Unique Moment: The Changing of the Guard and What It Means For Christians Today,” Modern Reformation, Sept./Oct. Vol. 4, No. 5, 1995, 10.

(2) Ibid., 11.

(3) Jonathon Edwards, Treatise on the Religious Affections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 307.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Public Relations

Leave a comment

 

All of us have had experiences of hushed whispers in huddled groups as we pass, or quiet conversations from the office next door, people suddenly becoming quiet whenever you come near, memories from childhood of school-yard whisper sessions between you and your best friend about your ex-best friend, or scenes of whispering classmates pointing and laughing in your direction. Telling secrets can be painful when you aren’t in on the game.

On the other hand, haven’t you also experienced the joy of surprise as a result of the whispering? Perhaps those two friends in the next office were planning to take you to lunch because they remembered it was your birthday. Or you arrive home at your house to find a secret gift left on your doorstep—perhaps these whispers were plans to extend kindness to you without you knowing. Maybe whispering in secret is a way to do good deeds in secret without the very human desire to be publicly rewarded for that good. Telling secrets can be good when the motivation is to practice the discipline of secrecy.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks a great deal about keeping things secret. “But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing…but when you pray, go into your inner room, and pray to your Father who is in secret… [B]ut you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face so that you may not be seen fasting by men, but by your Father who is in secret” (Matthew 6:3, 6, 17-18). In Jesus’s kingdom, there is something to be said for keeping secrets, especially when those secrets nurture humility and protect us from the pride that comes from public lives of righteous living.

Dallas Willard, writing about the spiritual discipline of secrecy Jesus espouses in the Sermon on the Mount, says, “[O]ne of the greatest fallacies of our faith, and actually one of the greatest acts of unbelief, is the thought that our spiritual acts and virtues need to be advertised to be known… [S]ecrecy, rightly practiced enables us to place our public relations department entirely in the hands of God… [W]e allow him to decide when our deeds will be known and when our light will be noticed.”(1) When we desire godly secrecy, Willard goes on to suggest that love and humility before God will develop to the point that we’ll not only see our friends, family, and associates in a better light, but we’ll also develop the very Christian virtue of desiring their good above our own.(2) Paul expressed this very truth to the Philippian church when he told them to “do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3-4).

Perhaps this practice of secrecy is why Jesus urged many who he healed not to reveal his identity. Perhaps this practice of secrecy is why Jesus avoided the crowds and would often go off to “lonely places” to pray. Whatever the case, we can follow Jesus more closely as his disciples by keeping secrets: secret piety, secret prayer, and secret giving. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you (Matthew 6:18).

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

(1) Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines, (HarperCollins: New York, 1988), 172-173.

(2) Ibid., 173-174.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Pendulum and a Cross

Leave a comment

 

The average cell phone user would likely now claim that life without one would be more than inconvenient. Upon its invention, in more ways than one, we became untethered. There are entire generations that cannot remember getting tangled up in phone cords while trying to make dinner or reach for the passing toddler, while finishing that conversation with the loquacious friend. The thought of dashing home from work in order to make an important phone call now seems ridiculous. We make it on the way, sitting in traffic, driving to the next appointment, making a stop at the grocery store, or all three. For those who remember that phones used to have cords, it is with great appreciation that we are no longer operating with a five-foot radius. Yet, this is not to say that we don’t feel a tethering of a different sort. Owning a cell phone can foster the attitude that its owner is always available, always working, always obtainable. While there is no cord to which we are confined, the phone itself can seem the tether.

Ironically, these kinds of shifting dilemmas are not all that uncommon. Just as the pendulum swings in one direction offering some kind of correction, so we often find that the other side introduces a new set of problems or the same problem in a new form. Major and minor movements of history possess a similar, corrective rhythm, swinging from one extreme to another and finding trouble with both. The pendulum swings from one direction, often to an opposite error, or at best, to a new set of challenges.

Within and without the walls of religious institutions, people of faith, too, are continually responding to what we perceive needs correction. When the need to get away from dead, religious worship initiated certain shifts, it was an observation wisely discerned. But what this meant for many was unfortunately a shifting away from history, shared liturgies, and our own past—in some cases contributing to a different set of problems. While breaking away from the “religiosity” of history, many now find themselves tethered in a sense to all things contemporary and individual, unable to draw on the riches of the history from which we have isolated ourselves. While the intent may have been good, and in the case of the church, the shifts did separate us from certain problems within church history, it also seems to have separated us from all of history. As a result, many Christians now seem more divorced from history than ever, having swung so far in one direction that we can no longer see from whence we have come. Coupled with our culture’s general devaluing of anything that is “outdated,” the risk of seeing the church’s identity more in terms of today’s form than its enduring essence seems both high and hazardous.

Something in the image of the ever-oscillating pendulum reminds me of the counterculture professions and practices that are meant to root followers of Christ in an identity beyond the one that might exist at any given time or changing mood. In this ever-moving world, where technological improvements and ideological corrections come more quickly than we often have time to process, the Christian lives not in fear of the future or disdain of the past. Instead he prays for daily sustenance “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). Jesus professes a community ‘upon whom the end of the ages have come’” (1 Corinthians 10:11). And in the midst of a culture consumed with the new, the contemporary, and the progressive, the church roots its very identity in this man who lived 2000 years ago, one who proclaimed the reign of God on earth here and now, but whose future return he also asked we look to expectantly.

Moreover, beside this spirit of awe for the next up and coming thing as a path to meaning, the church instead professes something Christ left behind as a means to understanding ourselves and our purpose today. Before going to the cross, Jesus imparted that the disciples were to continue breaking bread together, as they had done so often before, but that now these common meals would also hold new meaning. They could not go where Jesus was going, but they were to be partners in what was about to be done. The bread was to be his body which would be broken; the cup they shared was to be his own blood poured out and offered to all. And their repeated sharing in this common meal was to continually move them to participation in his dying, rising, and victorious life. In this, the disciples were to be united with Christ in an event that would inform all past, present, and future. Lesslie Newbigin explains, “[W]hen they are still far from beginning to understand what ‘the reign of God’ means, Jesus does a deed and gives a command that will bind them to him in a continually renewed and deepened participation in the mystery of his own being….The disciples will thus themselves become part of the revealed secret of the presence of the kingdom.”(1) So, too, Christians participate in this revealed secret today.

Counterculturally then, the church holds a natural gift in this communion, a means of participating across time and space, history and the present, in which we discover again and again the one who nourishes body, soul, history, and present. Though the pendulum swings, we can live both here and now, and with an understanding of all that is impending and at hand. We can live as those who mysteriously participate in the death and life of Christ, and those who proclaim the reign of God presently. We can live expectantly, as we live further into the fullness of the kingdom, untethered to the whims and preferences of an ever-changing culture. Such partaking and participating unites us with Jesus in history, roots us into a tradition beyond the swing of any pendulum, and sends us out into the world within a culture ever-restless for the change that will finally make a difference.

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

(1) Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 45.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Finding Faces

Leave a comment

 

C.S. Lewis once asked thoughtfully, “How can we see God until we have faces?” It strikes me as a question innately at hand in the process and crises of human development. As one theologian and developmental psychologist has noted, “It is evident that human development is not the answer to anything of ultimate significance. [But] every answer it does provide only pushes the issue deeper, back to the ultimate question, ‘What is a lifetime?’ and ‘Why do I live it?’”(1)

Working amidst the often miry course of human development, author Margaret Kornfeld speaks of the “mysterious healing process” that has already begun at the point when a call for help is verbalized. I have long understood the need for the will and volition in the healing process of our personal histories. There is good reason why Jesus asks the paralytic by the pool if he wants to be well. But thinking of this call for help as being inherently present within the human developmental process has only recently entered my perspective. What if every pang of trust or mistrust, every cry for autonomy or cry of shame is the call of the spirit to that which is beyond it? In the words of James Loder, “In its bewildered, blundering, brilliance, [the human spirit] cries out for wisdom to an ‘unknown God.’ But it is the personal Author of the universe whose Spirit alone can set the human spirit free from its proclivity to self-inflation, self-doubt, self-absorption, and self-destruction, and free for its ‘magnificent obsession’ to participate in the Spirit of God and to know the mind of God.”(2)

What if God is not merely the God who comes near in the midst of the pain of adolescence or the cries of an adult for understanding, but is the creator of the spirit that leads us to that crisis and guides us through—maybe even to—certain pains? What if the stages and crises of development that most transform us are stages that inherently seem to bid us to ask the existential questions we were somehow meant to ask? It is not merely, as one author notes, the “capacities of the human psyche” that “make spirituality possible.”(2)It is the Spirit of God who makes the human psyche capable of knowing God. “You did not choose me,” said Jesus, “but I chose you” (John 15:16).

Whether distinguished by joy or pain, a transforming moment of human development is always more than a moment, and each moment carries this implausible potential. In the deepened discovery of our own faces, the face of God is somehow revealed—the face of a God who promises never to leave or forsake us, even in the rawest stages of deciphering. It is this presence that powerfully reminds us there are existential questions we were always meant to ask because there is one in whose image we were fearfully and wonderfully made, because there is one who knows us far better than we know ourselves. Thus, viewing our own pains and longings, the moments of insight and the events that indelibly shape us, we can begin to discover the intimacy and knowledge, power and proximity of a God who not only shows us his face, but shows us our own.

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

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

(2) Ibid., 4.

(3) Ben Campbell Johnson, Pastoral Spirituality: A Focus for Ministry (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1988), 26.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Poverty of Words

Leave a comment

 

I remember the time when my son had to go through a very simple surgery when he was five years old. He was not able to breathe properly, so the doctors had to remove some extra tissue surrounding his nostril and nasal passages.

During the hours and days after his surgery, my once-a-chatterbox son had become completely quiet. Because of the fear of being hurt if he spoke, he quit using words for his way of communication. It was overwhelming to see my boy struggling to express himself in that condition.

As I assisted my son get back to talking, I could not help but think of how unexpectedly Zechariah lost his speech after he questioned the angel who brought him such good news about a long-waited child in his old age.(1) In Zechariah’s case, the temporary loss of words was something of an acknowledgement of the promised child he doubted, a child who would prepare the way for the Messiah. Though he knew why he was made silent, I am sure he felt restless until he held his son in his arms and was finally able to describe his emotions properly.

There are spiritual retreat centers in various locations around the world, which offer “Silent Weeks” to those who are over-exhausted from excessive communication. During these weeks, individuals are banned from verbal communication in order to quiet themselves internally. The goal is simply to bring back the core purpose of real interaction: meaning to what is being said in reality.

When the words are taken from us either because of the inability to speak or the lack of verbal direction, we become strangely poor, almost incomplete. There are two sides of this poverty: one is internal, losing the comfort of one’s capability to express oneself fully. The other is external, as one finds no real guidance to turn to for wisdom. In my opinion, the latter has eternal ramifications if not satisfied in a timely manner.

Similar to these weeks, there once was a time in biblical history when God stopped talking. Between the periods from the prophet Malachi until the first written words of Matthew’s gospel, we do not read any account of God communicating to his people through words. Humankind experienced a poverty of words, a lack of communication and intervention from the creator. It was a long pause before the grand entrance of God into this silence, fully revealing God’s essence by identifying who God is, as the ultimate Word, Jesus Christ.

Once we hear this Word then we truly comprehend the fact that we have been poor, living in the poverty of words over our lives’ direction. Once we hear and know this Word, this is when we discover that only the living Word can quench our thirst for meaning.

Those who have heard are eternally grateful to the Spirit who reveals Christ, the Word, to us. I also think of Jesus’s humility by limiting himself, becoming poor himself for a time, just so we would not stay in a poverty of words.

It did hurt him being on the cross, similar to my son’s feeling after the surgery. But one big difference: This did not stop Jesus from talking and declaring the fullness of our salvation by saying: “It is finished!”

Our poverty of words can be a distant memory for humankind, since God has spoken with the ultimate Word. Once this Person is fully internalized and lived by, from then on, both the creator and the created enjoy the pleasure of a mutual, ongoing conversation.

Senem Ekener is regional director for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Istanbul, Turkey.

(1) Cf. Luke 1:18-20

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Kingdom of Light

Leave a comment

 

“You are the light of the world,” said Jesus. But what on earth did he mean?

There is a certain quality within the mission of Jesus that he seems to expect his followers to duplicate. In the approach of Christ to the world, the implications of the Trinity are always at play. Where he says of himself, “those who have seen me have seen the Father,” he says similarly of his disciples; we are to love one another “so that the world may believe” (John 14:9, 17:21). “As you sent me into the world,” Jesus tells the Father, “So I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). Evidently, conceding to the truth of Christ’s identity is never a static decision, a confession that can be made only in private; it is one that immediately moves the conceder into new realms. “Do you love me?” Jesus asked of Peter. “Lord, you know that I love you.” “Then feed my lambs” came the reply (cf. John 21:15-18).

Wherever claims are made of Christ, a community inherently follows. For the Christian, we are ushered into a kingdom with a vastly different order, with a vastly new authority.  The private confession “Jesus is Lord” is simultaneously made into the communal confession—both in the sense that upon confessing we join in the proclamations of a great cloud of witnesses, but also in the sense that we are ushered into a missional community by design. “When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me. And you also must testify” (John 15:26).  In other words, the universal invitation to believe the gospel is simultaneously an invitation to enter into the missional community and confession of the Trinity.

In this community, even what Christ calls us to claim about ourselves is far more than most feel comfortable claiming as true or real—or even possible—about themselves: You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth. I am the vine and you are the branches. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you. Yet it is specifically these claims that Christ makes on our very identities which compel us to become these people, to receive his words, and to make real the promises of the God we profess. Confessing Christ, we have entered a kingdom marked by nothing short of the reign of God among us. Confessing Christ, we continue to be moved further into this good news even as we become representations of the very kingdom we proclaim.

This identity, though it is Christ who offers to clothe us, is not always an easy one to wear. As light that shines and branches that extend from the vine of Christ, we are ourselves to be the signs of God’s reign on earth, working for peace and justice here and now, showing the world that the God of peace and justice is near and also coming. We are those who confess the reign of God is at hand and then work hands-on as a means of that confession. As one author notes, “By its very existence, then, the church brings what is hidden into view as a sign and into experience as a foretaste.”(1) This is how we are able to be the light of the world; we are millions of mirrors reflecting the God of light.

Such reflection means there will be times when we ourselves are the light in the darkness, the hands that must deliver the cup of cold water or invite inside the one who has been deemed an outsider. There will also be times when the reflection of God’s reign calls for something more: light that refuses to be hidden though it would be easier, hands that work in opposition to injustice, confessions that fall in opposition to the world, lives that challenge the very systems that foster oppression and counter the hope of God. The identity Christ offers, like the identity of the kingdom he came to announce, precludes us from living as lone confessors, independent and unaffected by the cries of the world around us. Our mission to the world is our hope in action.

In a lecture on the nature of the church, given just a few years before he would stand in formal opposition to the Nazi influence on the church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer proclaimed: “No one can pray for the kingdom…who thinks up a kingdom for himself…who lives for his own worldview and knows a thousand programs and prescriptions by which he would like to cure the world…”(2) On the contrary, the kingdom Christians foster and for which we pray is one we profess with the whole of our lives because it is God who reigns within it. We are thus able to reflect the God of light amidst the troubling darkness of the world because the reign of God is real, because we could no sooner have invented this kingdom then we could have invented this God, and because we know of no other kingdom that is worth confessing. We are the light of the world because of this hope we are sure: The kingdom of God is near.

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

(1) George Hunsberger, “Called and Sent to represent the Reign of God,” in Darrell Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 102.

(2) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thy Kingdom Come: The Prayer of the Church for the Kingdom of God on Earth,” in A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 34.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – One and Only

Leave a comment

 

I shut my eyes in order to see, said French painter, sculptor, and artist Paul Gauguin. As a little girl, though completely unaware of this insightful quote on imagination, I lived this maxim. Nothing was more exhilarating to me than closing my eyes in order to imagine far away exotic lands, a handsome prince, or a climbing down a deep enough hole leading straight to China!

In fact, like many, imagination fueled my young heart and mind. After reading C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, I would walk into dark closets filled with warm winter coats fully expecting to be transported like the Pevensie children into strange and wonderful land. Charlotte’s Web took me to a farm where I could talk to my dog, like Fern talked to Wilbur, or to the spiders that hung from intricate webs in my garage. Pictures on the wall came to life and danced before me; ordinary objects became extraordinary tools enabling me to defeat all those imaginary giants and inspiring me toward powerful possibilities fueled by vivid imagination.

Sadly, as happens to many adults, my imagination has changed.  I don’t often view my closet as a doorway to unseen worlds, nor do I pretend that my dogs understand one word of my verbal affection towards them.  Pictures don’t come to life, and I no-longer pretend my garden rake or broom is a secret weapon against fantastical foes.  Often, I feel that my imagination has become nothing more than wishful thinking.  Rather than thinking creatively about the life I’ve been given, I day-dream about what my life might be like if… I lived in Holland, for example, or could back-pack across Europe, or lived on a kibbutz, or was a famous actress, or a world-renowned tennis player, or any number of alternative lives to the one I currently occupy.

Sadly, the imagination so vital in my youth doesn’t usually infuse my life with creative possibility, but rather leads me only to wonder if the grass is greener on the other side.  Mid-life regrets reduce imagination to restlessness and shrivel creative thinking to nothing more than unsettled daydreams. Rather than allowing my imagination to be animated with creative ideas about living in my life now, I allow it to be tethered to worldly dreams of more, or better, or simply other.

The psalmist was not in a mid-life imaginative crisis when he penned Psalm 90. Nevertheless, this psalm attributed to Moses, was a prayer to the God who inspires imagination for our one life to live. Perhaps Moses wrote this psalm after an endless day of complaint from wilderness-weary Israelites. Perhaps it was written with regret that his violent outburst against the rock would bar him from entry into the Promised Land. Whatever event prompted its writing, it is a song sung in a minor key, with regret so great he feels consumed by God’s anger and dismayed by God’s seeming wrath towards him (Psalm 90:7-8).

Whether prompted by deep regret, disillusionment, or a simple admitting of reality, Moses reflects on the brevity of life. He compares it to the grass “which sprouts anew. In the morning, it flourishes; toward evening it fades, and withers away” (Psalm 90:6). Indeed, he concedes that “a thousand years in God’s sight are like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night” (90:4). Before we know it, our lives are past, and what do we have to show for them?  ]Have we lived creatively?  Have we used our imagination to infuse our fleeting, one-and-only lives to bring forth offerings of beauty and blessing?

Imagination, like any other gift, has the potential for good or for ill. It has power to fill my one and only life with creative possibility, or it has the potential to become nothing more than wishful thinking. As the psalmist suggests, our lives can be full of creative possibility when we seek to live wisely, live joyfully, and live gladly before the God of infinite imagination and creativity.

Imagination built upon a foundation of gratitude invites us to live our lives with hope and with possibility to imagine great things for our God-given lives. “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard….all that God has prepared for those who love him” (Isaiah 64:4; 65:17).  Can we imagine it?

In light of our transience, we have the choice to live creatively and imaginatively or wishfully longing for another life. We can choose to dwell in the present creatively engaging all that our lives can be, or we can choose to waste our time peering over to the other side. Yet we only have one life to live, “so, teach us to number our days, that we may present to you a heart of wisdom….that we may sing for joy and be glad all of our days….and confirm the work of our hands” (90:12, 14b, 15a, 17).

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

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Foreign and Belonging

Leave a comment

 

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

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

And yet, while Ruth was undoubtedly as aware of being the foreigner as much as those around her were aware of it, she did nothing to suggest a longing to return to Moab. Her words and actions in Judah are as steadfast as her initial vow to Naomi: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried” (Ruth 1:16-17a). This is Ruth’s pledge to her mother-in-law, repeatedly.

In these early pages of the story, little is known about Naomi’s God or her people. The brief mention of each comes as a distant report: “Then she arose with her daughters-in-law to return from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the fields of Moab that the LORD had visited his people and given them food” (1:6). Moreover, Naomi’s first mention of the God of her people holds a similar sense of detachment. Though she recognizes God’s sovereignty over her situation, it is blurred with bitterness: “The Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. For I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty” (1:20-21). Her description was hardly a compelling glimpse for the outsider looking in.

And yet, Ruth clearly embraces all of Naomi: the people who would only see her as the foreigner and the God who was not her own. In fact, ironically, it is Ruth the Moabite whose voice is the first in the story to call on the divine name. After her resolute declaration of loyalty to her mother-in-law, Ruth adds the plea, “May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me” (1:17b). It is the foreigner who has taken Yahweh to be her God and calls on this God accordingly. In fact, it is this foreigner whose adoption into God’s presence can be traced in blood all the way to the throne of King David and to the reign of Christ. Ruth the Moabite is forever remembered an outsider. But at the same time, she is remembered a woman with a crucial link to the Son of God.

In moments when I am feeling most isolated, displaced with pain or even playfully reminded that I am out of place, I am also most conscious of my belonging somewhere else. The psalmist cries with the identity of one who belongs in another country, “Hear my prayer, O LORD, listen to my cry for help; be not deaf to my weeping. For I dwell with you as an alien, a stranger, as all my fathers were” (39:12). The stories of Scripture give voice to both a nagging sense of homelessness and a compelling call of welcome, reminding in comfort and in pain that we are both strangers and welcomed guests in countries not our own. We are men and women moving toward a greater kingdom. And the life of a foreigner named Ruth illustrates how great is the longing of God to see each of us enter in and fully belong.

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

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Language of Remembrance

Leave a comment

 

In Ayapan, Tabasco, a village in southern Mexico, a tragedy is on the horizon. As in any other city on any given day, two men have stopped talking to each other; they say they have drifted apart and no longer wish to speak. But unlike other cities and other feuding men, the elderly men of Ayapan are the last two remaining speakers of the local Zoque language. Without their attempts to keep the language alive, many fear the language will soon become extinct.  While the hope is that others will learn Ayapan Zoque or that the men will choose to pass down the knowledge to their families, those who study indigenous languages are all too aware of the statistics. Across the world, the United Nations calculates, one language disappears every two weeks.

Language specialists remind us that the loss of any language, however few once spoke it, is no small loss.  “Language death is symptomatic of cultural death: a way of life disappears with the death of a language,” note authors Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine. “The fortunes of languages are bound up with those of its speakers.”(1) When the critical insight contained within a language is forgotten, an irreplaceable resource has vanished from the world and its future generations, leaving in its place a certain void. The cry to remember is often voiced by those who foresee the darkened glimpse of a world that has forgotten. Such a description is reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth at the onset on the story. “The world is changed,” says Galadriel. “I feel it in the water.  I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.”

Since the biblical story is uttered simultaneously with a cry to remember, it is not surprising that we should find the same quality in the prayers of its characters. When Jehoshaphat stood up in the temple to pray in front of the entire assembly, he was speaking a language that sought desperately to remember the character of God. “O LORD, God of our fathers, are you not the God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hand, and no one can withstand you. O our God, did you not drive out the inhabitants of this land before your people Israel and give it forever to the descendants of Abraham your friend?” His prayer was perhaps even a cry for God too to remember, to bear in mind the Lord they had come to know, the relationship God had sought with them, the history that existed between them. Speaking this common language and story, bringing the acts of God in history to the forefronts of their minds, Jehoshaphat then cried to God to act among them in the present. “O our God, will you not judge…the vast army that is attacking us?  We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon you” (2 Chronicles 20:6-12).  Prayer is a language of remembrance.  It is taught by those who have gone before us, those who have witnessed the power of God in history, those who were commanded to remember and now call us to do the same.

Speaking this language, teaching our children the fortunes bound within it, Christlans remember the person of God, and the people we are before the throne of heaven.  Standing before a religious crowd, Jesus offered a parable about prayer. “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner’” (Luke 18:10-13). To the shock of the crowd, Jesus then revealed the one who spoke the language of heaven: “I tell you that this tax collector, rather than the other, went home justified before God” (14).

Prayer is a language whose fortunes keep before us the person and character of God, even as it keeps before us our own need for the kingdom and its mercies. So too, it is a language that helps us remember the whole story.

On the night before he was placed in the hands of those who would lead him to death, Jesus prayed that God would take away the task that stood before him. In prayer, Jesus pled with God to spare him; in prayer he sought the Father’s intervention; yet in prayer he remembered the entire story, such that even on the Cross he was able to pray for those who had no idea what they were doing. On his knees in Gethsemane, Jesus remembered our desperate need for his sacrifice. He concluded his prayer to the Father, “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36). At these words, Christ forever bound within the biblical language a fortune we ought never to forget.

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

(1) Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7.

 

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God and Good People

Leave a comment

 

“People are basically good,” writes one poet. “It is only their behavior that lets them down.”

It is remarkable today that despite religion, creed, or practice, many believe they are good enough to get into heaven. Perhaps there is so much bad news about others that they conclude by comparison they are superior, and thus, deserving of a place in eternity. But then it is even more remarkable that when Christians claim they know they are going to heaven, they are regarded as being conceited, boastful, and arrogant. People immediately ask: How can they think that they are better than everyone else?

The fact that the same person can think of himself as superior to others, while at the same time criticizing Christians for arrogance, underlines one of the effects of living in a world comfortable with inconsistency. Though the contradiction is frustrating, we all need to be able to respond coherently to the questions at hand: Why can’t I just be a good person? Isn’t it unfair of God to say that you can’t get into heaven unless you believe, even though you have been a good person? Who does God think He is?

Jesus was once asked a similar question by a group of inquirers: “What must we do to do the works God requires?” (John 6:28). Interestingly, the question was posed in plural form; it seems they were looking for a list of good things to do. But Jesus replied in the singular, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one God has sent” (6:29).

Of course, in the minds of those who feel they have lived a good life, Christ’s answer will not go unchallenged. What makes belief so special? Surely what we do is far more important than what we believe. How can a good person, who is not a Christian, be denied access to eternal life on the basis of belief?

The difficulty here lies in the assumption that is being made in each of these questions—namely, that there is such a thing as a good person. Jesus again offers further clarification in the form of question and answer. He was once asked, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 18:18). The theory of the questioner was clear: Jesus is a good person; good people inherit eternal life, so what must I do to be in the same group? But Jesus’s reply was surprising. “Why do you call me good?” he asked (18:19). He then answered his own question: “No one is good—except God alone.”

The simple truth is that the issue is not about good people not inheriting eternity. Alas, the problem is much worse! Jesus seems to define goodness in terms of being like God, and on that basis there are no good people anywhere. Thus, the real question is not about who is good enough to get in to heaven. The real question is how God makes it possible for anyone to know and follow and be transformed by an eternal God at all. The answer is that we need to be forgiven, and that forgiveness is won for us through the Cross.(1)

In fact, this is precisely why the Gospel is called Good News, and why Christians do well to declare it. The good news is that knowing and following God is first and foremost about forgiveness. And thus, the Christian testimony is, in fact, far from arrogant! If a Christian is sure that he is forgiven it is not because he is good, but because he has received that forgiveness by believing in Christ.

In other words, if we will trust in and rely on Jesus—his promises, his person, his life, death, and resurrection—we can be sure that we are saved and living in his presence. Christians are not good people because they live morally superior lives to everyone else. They have been made “good” in God’s eyes because Christ has made forgiveness possible—because Christ has extended his own righteousness to those who will believe.

Good people will certainly inherit eternal life. However, the path to real and eternal life today lies not in religious observances or respectable acts, but in the forgiveness of a good God, given to us through the Cross of Christ.

Michael Ramsden is European director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in the United Kingdom.

(1) For further reading on this subject, I recommend The Cross of Christ by John Stott.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Cross and Tragedy

Leave a comment

 

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

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

For the Christian, the crucifixion is the center of the whole; the event that gives voice to a broken, dark, and dying world, and the paradoxical suggestion of life somehow within it. The Christian marks steeples and graves in memory of the crucifixion. He wears its reminder in silver, binds it on Bibles in gold, smears it in ashes on foreheads. The death of Christ is the occasion that makes way for the last to be first, the guilty to be pardoned, Christians to be Christian. His death is the universal sacrament that stands in the center of the history of the world and changes everything. “I have been crucified with Christ,” said one of his most transformed followers. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

The suffering and death of Christ is indeed an image that gives expression to inexplicable tragedy, unnecessary suffering, and perplexing darkness. But the Cross is also the event that jarringly marks that suffering, death, tragedy, and sorrow as qualities to which the Son of God willingly submitted himself. It is thus that the broken and bleeding Loder could sense his condition understood in the image of a broken and bleeding Christ. “For surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases.” In the cruciform image of Christ on the Cross, our own sense of tragedy is not only affirmed, it is mysteriously chosen. Christ has left the glory of heaven behind and gone into the dark world where we stand.

It might be common to think of Christ’s death as a gift of forgiveness and assurance, a radical attempt of God to reach the world in person, a comforting depiction of the depth of divine mercy and hope. It is all these things for the Christian indeed, and on most days this is enough to quiet restless thoughts and ease unanswered questions. But like life itself, which can lay us low with tragedy, seize our hope and leave despair in its wake, the Cross is also more. And Christ speaks into this darkness as only one who is acquainted with it can.

In his essay “Tragedy and Christian Faith,” Hans Urs von Balthasar describes Christ as answering the despair of humanity not by dissolving or disregarding it, “but by bearing that affirmation of the human condition as it is, through still deeper darknesses in finem, ‘to the end’ as love…”(2) That is to say, Christ’s is a love that bears our brokenness as his own, moving though still deeper darknesses, and bearing it to the end. At the center of the Christian faith is a Cross that is not alien to tragedy, and a savior not complacent in the face of suffering. Christ is neither blind to the pains of the world nor passive aggressive in the face of despair. On the contrary, the Cross is a portrayal of passion, not passivity. Christ willingly carried defeat, thirst, and emptiness through the end of the darkness to the ends of himself and the ends of the world. For those who labor in circumstances that affirm the human condition of brokenness, this divine act makes sense of the struggle, brings meaning to our suffering, and makes further accessible the peace of the Cross Paul described: “[T]hrough him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

Christ does not refuse our sense of tragedy or awareness of pain. He bears it in love, affirming our condition, carrying our sorrows to the end, all the way to the heart of God.

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

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

(2) The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, Eds. Edward T. Oakes, David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 217.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Greatest of These

Leave a comment

 

Oft quoted at weddings, preeminent celebrations of romantic love, a poem is read extolling the virtue of love:

Love is patient and kind

Love is not jealous or boastful…

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, love never ends.

What many may not realize is that this is a poem from the pen of the apostle Paul. And while this poem is used to paint a picture of young love at weddings, its intent far transcends the romance of the occasion, and a fairly limited understanding of this virtue.

Romantic love was not in the apostle’s mind when he penned this verse. Instead, tremendous conflict in the fledgling Corinthian church caused Paul great grief. There were dissensions and quarrels over all kinds of issues in this community; quarrels over leadership and allegiance, over moral standards, over marriage and singleness, over theology, and quarrels so extreme that lawsuits were being filed!(1)

So, after reminding the Corinthian followers of Jesus that they represented his body—a body with many members and unique gifts and functions—Paul lifts up love as the height of what it means to be a mature human being:

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing….Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away….but now abide faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love (13:1-3, 8, 13).

Often, as I survey various communities in our world today, I see the same kind of division and derision. More often than not, I am bombarded by a war of information, bombs of argumentation lobbed against ‘enemies’ based on this book or that claim, this person’s authority or that person’s expertise. I hear noisy gongs and clanging cymbals of purported knowledge and insight, but rarely do I see love prevail.

Perhaps part of the reason why there is so little love is that there is a fear that to love is somehow to compromise. Many feel the strong need to disassociate love with the way we perceive it to be defined; as unthinking acceptance, an anything goes, an “I’m ok you’re ok” easy love as bland and undefined as jello. Surely, the apostle Paul’s understanding goes far beyond this flabby view of love. After all, he spends the majority of his first letter to the Corinthians exhorting their bad behavior by virtue of their lack of love.

Yet, I sometimes worry that a reticence to extend love to others without condition belies a forgetfulness about the conditions of our acceptance by God. Paul writes to the Romans, “But God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (5:8).  If God loved us while we were yet sinners, why do we find it so hard to love others?

In a world that largely perceives Christians to be in-fighters, hypocritical, argumentative, and judgmental naysayers, Paul’s words about love show a very different picture.

It is a picture that might include creating seminaries in the prisons, as has been done at Louisiana’s maximum security prison at Angola. Or might it include the cooperation of Christian fellowships despite denominational differences or theological disagreements? Or proactive movements to engage the culture rather than reactive retreat? Might it be a picture that includes growing into mature human beings? Paul continues,

When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.

Since Jesus himself taught that love was the summary of all that had gone before, and fulfillment of the entire law and the message of the prophets—love God and love your neighbor as yourself—shouldn’t and couldn’t communities of those who follow Jesus make love their chief responsibility and goal?(2) The greatest of these is love.

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

(1) See 1 Corinthians 1:10-14; 3:1-10; 4:14-21; 5:1-13; 6:1-11; 7; 8:1-4 as examples.

(2) Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34.

 

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Night of Fire

Leave a comment

 

Shortly after the death of Blaise Pascal in 1662, a housekeeper was sorting through closets and clothing and happened to notice something sewn into Pascal’s coat. Beneath the cloth was a parchment and inside this was another faded piece of paper. In Pascal’s handwriting, on both the parchment and the paper were nearly the same words. Beside hand-drawn crosses, Pascal had carefully written:

The year of grace 1654.

Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement…

From about half-past ten in the evening

until about half-past midnight.

Fire.

The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob…

The God of Jesus Christ…

Your God will be my God.

More than 30 descriptive lines tell the story (unbeknownst to friends and family) of Pascal’s conversion to Christ. He is said to have been reading of the crucifixion when he was suddenly overwhelmed with the nearness of Christ. Pascal then meticulously transcribed the night of his conversion, his “night of fire,” as he called it thereafter, sewing it into his jacket where it would remain beside him until his death eight years later. Though the details of the story and the parchment were unknown to those around him, the change in his life could have scarcely gone unnoticed. Whatever else it marked, November 23, 1654 marked both death and life for Pascal. He reoriented all his activities (including his unparalleled work in the field of mathematics) to further serve a life of worship and service to God. He retired to the monastery at Port Royal and set to writing his Pensees, a collection of thoughts on life and theology.

 

There are many who house similar awakenings to faith before the person of Christ, if not kept in coat linings, then perhaps tucked protectively somewhere else. Whether, like Pascal, there is a specific night of “fire” that can be cited, conversion is not always easy to put into words. How does one explain what it is like to come out of a deep sleep, to rise from a night of fire, or to find oneself somehow newly born? The blind man could not articulate every detail of his encounter with Christ, but neither could he deny the startling evidence of his presence: “One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see,” he said in John 9:25. Nicodemus, too, had trouble getting his mind around the language and the metaphor of new life. “How can a man be born when he is old?” His question voices a reluctance common of all newborns, even as it harbors a resistance reflective of the sort of change Jesus implies with his invitation.

Whatever else Nicodemus and Pascal have in common in their nighttime encounters with Christ, one thing is certain. Whether a dramatic encounter or a subtle introduction, Christ has in mind more than an evening or an instance. A beloved professor of mine spoke of Christian conversion as a verb that arrives in several tenses. We have been justified, we are being sanctified, and we will be glorified. That is to say, on the Cross, Christ became our sacrifice, and the work is finished for all. God has declared his children righteous because we are united to his Son. But Christ is also our moral influence, the message of the gospel is transformational, and the believer is continually being sanctified through the Holy Spirit. To the one who has been united with the Son, the daily indwelling of Christ is a gift and a sign of the message that is presently being worked within us. Furthermore, what a person will be in Christ through the process of sanctification and the promise of justification has not yet been fully revealed, but there are signs all around of the hope and glory that is to come in Christ Jesus.

The Incarnation boldly assures us that Christ is always near. The Cross assures that he can come nearer still and forgive you completely and instantaneously. He will also walk with you over a lifetime, transforming and shaping you according to the will of God. Whether by fire, water, or Spirit, in an instance of spiritual certainty or a lifetime of wordless mystery, Christ comes near not to beckon better children but to make his creations entirely new.

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

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The God of the Old Testament

Leave a comment

 

One currently fashionable pretext for repudiating the God of the Bible is to question God’s character, especially as God portrays Himself in the Old Testament. In contrast to the allegedly irresistible meek-and-mild New Testament deity depicted by Jesus, the God of the Old Testament is assumed to be a capricious, vindictive, and insatiable Being who exerts prompt reprisals on his enemies upon the slightest of provocations.

Such a reading of the biblical text betrays discomfort with the fact that God is God and that human autonomy must be recognized to lie somewhere beneath God’s sovereignty. That is to say, whereas a human being cannot rightfully determine the length of time allotted for another in this world, the Creator has the sovereign prerogative to number our days—a fact we implicitly recognize whenever we accuse others of “playing God.” Moreover, without a morally perfect Being responsible for the creation of the universe, we have no grounds for recognizing any act as immoral, so any such pronouncements must be made on the basis of God’s moral nature and commands.

Apart from the misconceptions inherent in the above claim, one could also assess the testimony of those who were closely associated with God in the Old Testament itself. Did they think of God as a vindictive Being? The answer is a resounding no. Examples abound, but let us highlight just a few. Given the choice whether to be punished by God or by his enemies after sinning against God, David replied, “Let us fall into the hands of the LORD, for his mercy is great; but do not let me fall into the hands of men” (2 Samuel 24:14). Jonah preferred to end his life in a treacherous sea rather than take the message of judgment to the Ninevites. His reason? He knew that God is “a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (Jonah 4:2). In other words, he feared that God might be too nice to his enemies should they choose to repent.

But Moses provides one of the most striking examples of what those who knew God in the Old Testament really thought of this God. In Exodus 33, God threatens to abandon his plans of accompanying the Israelites to the Promised Land. Since God is faithful, He vows to keep his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by giving the land to their descendents. He would send an angel before them to drive out their enemies and the land would still be flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 33:1-3). Did you catch that? They would not even have to fight for the land, and its provisions would still be available. The catch? God Himself would not be among them. Now there’s a real jackpot! Imagine the possibilities—having all of God’s blessings without God telling you what to do with them! Many popular expressions of Christianity today rarely rise above the attempt to manipulate God into relinquishing his blessings without much regard for God Himself.

But Moses goes into the tent of meeting and says to God, “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here” (Exodus 33:15). Is Moses under the spell of a vindictive, malevolent spirit, or has he learned that God is worthy of being loved with all of one’s heart, soul, and mind—the Absolute Object of infinite delight? C.S. Lewis was right when he said that he who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God alone. Nothing short of chronological snobbery would make us think that in contrast to God’s biblical followers we are better placed to judge the character of God. Biblical saints expected God, the judge of all the earth, to do what is right (Genesis 18:25), and it was not out of delusion that their hearts panted for God as the deer pants for water.

God, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, is worthy of all our devotion and love. We must also remember that God executes perfect justice, as both the Old as well as the New Testaments demonstrate. Not only is the innocent, sinless Son of God sacrificed for the sake of humanity, but the just reward of eternal separation from God incessantly sought by those who reject God is also affirmed in the New Testament. Until the Spirit and truth of the gospel strips us of all our fleeting fortitude, presenting us before God bereft of any hope outside his mercy and grace, we will never lack excuses for resisting Him.

J.M. Njoroge is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.