I recently sat across from a woman I wanted to adopt as a kind of nonna.(1) Originally from Croatia, she spoke with a soft accent and combination of wisdom and kindness. In observing my 5-year-old son with me, she noted, “He has a high sense of injustice.” I nodded in agreement. My little guy has begun that tortured engagement with life—the wrestling of desire to shield our eyes from sorrow with the opportunity to see our part in the larger broken story around us and participate in facets of restoration.

Years ago it was in a broken place where I met Annie. I was nervous as I walked through the streets of Amsterdam’s famous red light district, so different from anything I had seen before. About four hundred windows line cobblestone streets, a person behind each one. There are women of all ages, transgender and transvestite workers as well. Organized by nationality, it is a market of sorts, where the commodity for sale is the body of another. I was with the director of Scharlaken Koord, a Dutch organization that offers assistance to women working in prostitution.

I realized my nervousness was a reflection of my own insecurity. Truth be told, sex workers represented something threatening to me—a reminder of the enough I might never be, a kind of desirable I couldn’t compete with, a kind betrayal I did not want to know. But when we talked with them, I saw them as women. They were girls I would want to be friends with, and what was alike far surpassed our differences. To be sure, if the same things that happened to them had happened to me, I would be standing on their side of the window. They were human beings trying to survive their own choices and those made for them, just like the rest of us.

So it was with Annie. She shared her story with us: a handsome Dutch man often traveled through the airport she worked at in a distant Asian country. He began to bring gifts each time he passed through—attention and interest too. Soon he proposed to her. Her family advised she would be foolish to give up such an opportunity; she would have a much better life than what could be afforded at home. The two married and Annie went to live in his home country with apprehension and hope. Upon arrival, he confiscated her passport, explained he now owned her, and put her up for sale behind a window. She tried to resist, but he only laughed. She didn’t have her documents. She didn’t know the language. Where would she go? Realizing he was right, she succumbed to beatings and abuse and ultimately performed as required.

When Annie learned she was pregnant, she was grateful for this reminder of life inside of her. But after several intentional blows to her belly by her husband, she miscarried. Later came the day she learned her mother had died. Well over her capacity to hold the injustice, Annie spilled over with regret and rage. Only because he was tired of her and had gotten what he wanted, her husband returned the passport and bid her good riddance.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Stepping into the Reality of Suffering →

Amusement parks had always been destinations of choice for my family while I was growing up. It didn’t matter the vacation spot, we would, if there was an amusement park nearby, make it a priority visit. The reason for this priority was that we loved roller-coasters. The Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disney Land, Space Mountain at Disney World, and all the various roller-coasters at Six Flags theme parks called to us to ride them over and over again to our sheer delight.

There was one exception: The free fall ride. I do not know if it is still in existence, but when I knew it at my local Six Flags it was a ride like an elevator without a door. Only a seatbelt harness held us in. Up six stories it climbed while our stomachs fell. Climbing higher and higher, the expanse of the park and the surrounding communities became like miniature-versions of themselves. It seemed the ride would climb as high as the heights of heaven. Then suddenly, the ascent ended. The car would tilt forward ever so slightly, so that all you could see below was the drop back to earth. For maximum thrill or terror, the car wouldn’t plunge down immediately. Riders sat for what seemed to be an eternity of waiting; suddenly, the mechanical support drew back and the elevator-like car would make its free fall back down to the ground at speeds as high as 90 mph. I only ever went on the free fall once. I hated that ride.

“Sometimes suffering feels like a free fall,” writes J. Todd Billings in his book Rejoicing in Lament.(1) It is a free fall away from all that was normal and routine in one’s life down into what seems to be a spiraling abyss of chaos and despair. After receiving the phone call in the early morning hours that my husband had suffered sudden cardiac arrest, I fell into my own free fall. While sitting in the airport waiting for my flight home, I remember saying to my mother “My life will never be the same again.” I would free fall into another world never to return to the world I had inhabited for seventeen years with my husband. There would be no return to what was ‘normal.’ There would only be a steadying of my legs, like I had to do after the free fall ride at the amusement park, landing in the strange new world of grief and loss that was mine.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Space to Fall →

I confess that I have never been a student especially enticed by the subject of history. Whether studying the history of the Peloponnesian War or the history of Jell-O, I associate the work with tedious memorization and an endless anthology of static dates and detail. But this stance toward history, coupled with our cultural obsession with the present moment, is a force to be reckoned with and an outlook I have come to recognize as dangerous. It is a thought to let go, lest it produce a sense of forgetfulness about who I am and from whence I have come.

Richard Weaver is one among many who have warned about the dangers of presentism, the cultural fixation with the current moment and snobbery toward the past. More than fifty years ago, Weaver warned of the discombobulating effects of living with an appetite for the present alone:

“A frank facing of the past is unpleasant to the tender-minded, teaching as it does sharp lessons of limitation and retribution. Yet, the painful lessons we would like to forget are precisely the ones which should be kept for reference. Santayana has reminded us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and not without reason did Plato declare that a philosopher must have a good memory.”(1)

Weaver contends that carelessness about history is in fact a type of amnesia, producing a mindset that is both aimless and confused. For how can we understand the current cultural moment without at least some understanding of the moments that have preceded it? History is not a static bundle of dates and details anymore than our own lives are static bundles of the same. On the contrary, history is the vital form in which we both take account of our past and fathom the present before us.

This point was driven home for me in a church history class full of future pastors. We were studying the fourth century, which was privy to a great influx of believers who left their communities behind and fled to the desert in search of solitude. To a group of people called and passionate about the church as a community, the great lengths some of these pilgrims went to live solitary lives was hard for some to understand. Words like “abandonment” and “responsibility” readily crept into our conversations.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – People With a Past →

“Lamentation” is not a word that is heard very often. Words like sadness, regret, sorrow, or mourning are far more common. But I wonder if something is not lost in the dismissal of lament from our language and our lives.

The Christian hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” is for me a song of lament. Because of certain associations, it is a song that immediately evokes a sense of grief, and yet it is the sort of mourning for me that is somehow both held and expressed in worship. Whether the Christian story is one you embrace or not, the connection of these two ideas—worship and lamentation—may seem even more foreign than the word itself. What could lament possibly have to do with worship? Surely if not opposites, they are words and postures diametrically opposed. While this may be true in many popular applications, which use the word worship to denote passion for something, worship in the Judeo/Christian vision and experience of the world once considered lamentation a significant element. It is a thought worth considering, particularly on behalf of those who dismiss the possibility of God’s existence out of a conviction that a world of so much pain is incompatible with a God worth loving.

In her honest memoir No More Faking Fine, Esther Fleece admits between court hearings, restraining orders, and the harrowing dynamics of a shattered family that it was shaping her suspicions about God. “I was learning a dangerous lesson: that love can end abruptly, that the support that was there in the past can sometimes be swept up suddenly like a rug under your feet, leaving you stumbling. What’s worse, I couldn’t help but worry if God’s love was like this too.”(1) The book recounts her ability to successfully fake being fine; she went from competent student to accomplished professional, all the while reeling with anxiety and battling debilitating despair. But discovering the language of lament offered a kind of merciful undoing. “A lament saves us from staying stuck in grief and rescues us from a faith based on falsehoods,” she writes. “It was a false belief that told me I would always be incapable of being loved. It was a false belief that led me to believe I was the reason for my parents’ divorce. It was a false belief that told me I would never find my way out of despair… While a lament may not change our circumstances, it will help clear up our misunderstandings about God… A lament is a pathway; it serves a purpose. But a lament denied turns into a lie.”(2) Fleece discovered that the God who not only gives permission to lament but considers it worship was far more capable of reaching a crumbling world of pain than she ever imagined.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Case for Lament →

There is a growing interest in new spirituality in our times. With its all-inclusive approach to religion accompanied by its emphasis on the spiritual disciplines, the East has become an object of great attraction. Eastern spirituality offers a wide variety of options from which one can choose depending on inclination. Prominent among them are yoga, astrology, holistic healings, and transcendental meditation, among many others.

The term ‘spirituality’ is sometimes used in a very vague sense. Gordon Wakefield offers a very helpful definition which says that in “all (Christian) traditions, and in many non-Christian faiths and philosophies, the underlying implication is that there is a constituent of human nature which seeks relations with the ground and purpose of existence, however conceived.”(1) The Bible describes this same predicament as a consequence of God’s work in us so that mankind would somehow desire and reach out for the Divine.(2) Over a period of time, this basic truth about human nature has taken different shapes and forms in terms of its expressions.

According to the new spirituality, the diagnosis of the problem of mankind is not moral sin against a Holy God (as diagnosed by the Biblical view) but that mankind suffers from “a type of metaphysical amnesia—an ignorance of their divine nature.”(3) In order to overcome this ‘metaphysical amnesia,’ the new spirituality has introduced several mystical paths as a means of attaining salvation or, in other words, to awaken people from a deep seated ignorance to the realization that they are god. What then lies at the heart of this path to ‘self-realization’ is the “transformation or alteration of consciousness,” which involves the process of “following a mystical path,” which would ultimately aid in the union with the Divine.(4)

These prescribed paths in turn are to be pursued with the sole spiritual objective to acquire the union between the finite and the infinite, wherein the individual in the ultimate sense ought to lose one’s identity by being one with the divine (like a drop of water loses its uniqueness when it merges with the vast ocean). Clearly, one has to strictly follow all that has been prescribed in order to earn one’s salvation. However, despite the labor that this spiritual exercise demands and the length of time that it consumes, there is, in fact, no assurance that one can ever attain success. Most importantly, there is also no way for us to verify if these paths are at all true.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – In Pursuit of Spirituality →

In a world of finger-pointing, Tetsuya Ishikawa paused instead to confess guilt. After seven years at the forefront of the credit markets, he took the idea of a friend to write a book called How I Caused the Credit Crunch because, in the friend’s analysis, “it sounds like you did.”(1) In the form of a novel that discredits the notion of the financial sector as a collaboration of remote, unthinking forces, he admits in flesh and blood that he believes he is guilty, too. Though reviewers note Ishikawa does not remain long with his admission of responsibility, he succeeds in showing the financial markets as a reflection of human choices with real, moral dimensions—and, ultimately, the futility of our ongoing attempts at finding a better scapegoat.

Whenever the subject of blame or fault comes about in any sector of life, whether economic, societal, or individual, scapegoating is a far more common reaction than confession. Most of us are most comfortable when blame is placed as far away from us as possible. Even the word ‘confession,’ the definition of which is concerned with personally owning a fault or belief, is now often associated with the sins of others, which an outspoken soul just happens to be willing to share with the world happily willing to listen: Confessions of a Shopaholic, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Confessions of a Columnist. We are interested in those confessions of a former investment banker/warlord/baseball wife because the ‘owning up’ has nothing to do with owning anything.

Perhaps like many of us in our own confessing, Charles Templeton’s 1996 book, Farewell to God, which offered the confessions of a former Christian leader, is filled with moments of confession in both senses of the word: honest commentary and easy scapegoating. In his thoughts that deal with the Christian church, it is particularly apparent. Pointing near and far and wide, Templeton observes that the church indeed has a speckled past: “Across the centuries and on every continent, Christians—the followers of the Prince of Peace—have been the cause of and involved in strife. The church during the Middle Ages was like a terrorist organization.”(2) He admits that some good has come from Christian belief, but that there is altogether too much bad that has come from it. He then cites the church’s declining numbers as evidence that the world is in agreement; people are losing interest because the church is failing to be relevant. Pews are empty; denominations oppose one another; the church is floundering and its influence waning—except perhaps its negative influence, which he insists is on the rise. Of course, Templeton is by no means alone in these accusations.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Is Wrong With the World? →

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?”(1)

C.S. Lewis, the self-named most reluctant and dejected convert in all England, penned this now famous and oft-quoted account of his conversion. Unlike some who decided to follow Jesus with urgency and willingness of heart, Lewis came kicking and screaming! While some may resonate with Lewis’s dogged reluctance, others gladly pursue the path home.

Lewis’s reluctant conversion fascinates me, but I am even more moved by the glimpse into God’s character his story affords. For Lewis reminds us of the love of God that relentlessly pursues even the reluctant prodigal who would turn and run in the opposite direction in order to try and escape God’s gracious embrace. The God revealed in Lewis’s account is a God in pursuit. Perhaps this God is even particularly enamored with the reluctant prodigal, leaving the ninety-nine sheep, as Jesus insists in Luke’s gospel, to pursue the one lost sheep.

The apostle Paul, who described himself as “the chief of sinners,” often talked about this God in pursuit. In what is perhaps the apex of his letter to the Romans, Paul writes: “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous person; though perhaps for the good someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates God’s own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through him. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of the Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – While We Were Yet Estranged →

In a world of finger-pointing, Tetsuya Ishikawa paused instead to confess guilt. After seven years at the forefront of the credit markets, he took the idea of a friend to write a book called How I Caused the Credit Crunch because, in the friend’s analysis, “it sounds like you did.”(1) In the form of a novel that discredits the notion of the financial sector as a collaboration of remote, unthinking forces, he admits in flesh and blood that he believes he is guilty, too. Though reviewers note Ishikawa does not remain long with his admission of responsibility, he succeeds in showing the financial markets as a reflection of human choices with real, moral dimensions—and, ultimately, the futility of our ongoing attempts at finding a better scapegoat.

Whenever the subject of blame or fault comes about in any sector of life, whether economic, societal, or individual, scapegoating is a far more common reaction than confession. Most of us are most comfortable when blame is placed as far away from us as possible. Even the word ‘confession,’ the definition of which is concerned with personally owning a fault or belief, is now often associated with the sins of others, which an outspoken soul just happens to be willing to share with the world happily willing to listen: Confessions of a Shopaholic, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Confessions of a Columnist. We are interested in those confessions of a former investment banker/warlord/baseball wife because the ‘owning up’ has nothing to do with owning anything.

Perhaps like many of us in our own confessing, Charles Templeton’s 1996 book, Farewell to God, which offered the confessions of a former Christian leader, is filled with moments of confession in both senses of the word: honest commentary and easy scapegoating. In his thoughts that deal with the Christian church, it is particularly apparent. Pointing near and far and wide, Templeton observes that the church indeed has a speckled past: “Across the centuries and on every continent, Christians—the followers of the Prince of Peace—have been the cause of and involved in strife. The church during the Middle Ages was like a terrorist organization.”(2) He admits that some good has come from Christian belief, but that there is altogether too much bad that has come from it. He then cites the church’s declining numbers as evidence that the world is in agreement; people are losing interest because the church is failing to be relevant. Pews are empty; denominations oppose one another; the church is floundering and its influence waning—except perhaps its negative influence, which he insists is on the rise. Of course, Templeton is by no means alone in these accusations.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Is Wrong With the World? →

The pairing of words in Isaiah 61 comes to mind often, poetry to a world of contrasts. Isaiah describes a coming seismic, paradoxical shift in the way the world operates, at the hands of one who will:

bring good news to the oppressed,

and bind up the broken-hearted,

who will proclaim liberty to the captives,

and release to the prisoners;

who will provide for those who mourn

and give them beauty for ashes,

the oil of gladness instead of mourning,

the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

Isaiah’s promising description of life as shalom is not a public relations campaign promising the harder realities of life will soon be forgotten, earlier recollections of despair erased. Isaiah’s promising words and the gospel that later brings these promises to life are not catchy political slogans. Instead, they sing a very unflattering, enigmatic song about a very meek Son of God who appears on the scene of a fairly unimpressive city—not the Jerusalem of royalty and fanfare, but the back streets of Bethlehem—a savior who exits shamefully on a hill out of town, crucified between criminals. My toddler’s ‘Storybook Bible’ tells it this way: “So the wise men followed the star out of the big city, along the road, into the little town of Bethlehem. They followed the star through the streets of Bethlehem, out of the nice part of town, through the not-so-nice part of town, into the really-not-nice-at-all part of town, down a little dirt track, until it stopped right over… a little house. But wait. It wasn’t a palace. And there weren’t any guards. Or servants. Or flags. Or red carpets. Or trumpets. Or anything. Did they get it wrong? Or was this what God meant?”

Was this what God meant? I want to suggest that this is a question for philosophers as much as for two year-olds, a question for the oppressed and the brokenhearted as much as for captives on the verge of being set free, and exiles holding the heartbreaking sensation of home under their feet once again. Was this what God meant? If Isaiah’s glimpsing of shalom is not an image campaign or a political slogan attempting to cover over Israel’s years of loss, what is it then? If beauty doesn’t erase ashes, does it sit with them, does it hold them? Or is it just an exasperating look at a fatalism of opposites?

Was this what God meant? How do we hold these paradoxical times of life—beauty and ashes, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, captivity and release, thankfulness and a faint spirit? Whether we ask as the brokenhearted soul looking out with disillusion or as a beaming bride and groom standing on the promise of new hope, an answer is hard to put into words.

But this is why I love the concept of shalom that Isaiah gives us in words but perhaps even more powerfully in image and substance. Isaiah is not necessarily attempting to explain anything away. Beauty and comfort and release and gladness and joy are indeed proclaimed, but it all comes as the promise of a God who is somehow present in the midst of Israel’s complicated, difficult, dark and beautiful realities. Peering at Jesus in that little house in the less than savory section of Bethlehem, the wise men aren’t attempting to justify the strange or dark realities of Jesus’s birth either. A king without a palace. A mother without a husband. A Light in the midst of the dark streets of Bethlehem. Despite the way it looks, they know they have seen the stars align in this child. And, dark though it is, they are giving thanks.

The promise of God’s shalom is not a thin attempt to distract us from our own darkness or a flimsy pat on the back for the profound brokenness of the world. It is not an image campaign to make us feel better, but the promise of one who can somehow hold it all. It is the promise of one who, somehow, is already about the profound work of our restoration and healing, which also, will one day be complete. Hundreds of years after Isaiah gave us this glimpse of shalom, that child from Bethlehem, where the hopes and fears of all the years intersect, stands up in a local synagogue, reading these very words of Isaiah, and announces that he is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s lyric. Jesus is the promise of shalom, the one who is somehow able to hold ashes and still offer us beauty, who both mourns beside us and who dries our very eyes, who embodies the good news to the oppressed and is even now about the work of restoration in the deepest sense of human flourishing we could never imagine. In the phrase of fifteenth century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, Christ is the very embodiment of the moment of coincidentia oppositorum—the impossible moment when opposites meet. Might our hopes and fears of all the years rest in him tonight.

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

(1) “No Place Like Home,” This American Life, episode 520, March 14, 2014. Ira Glass tells the story from the point of view of Calgary.

(2) See Isaiah 61, particularly 61:1-3.

(3) “Dark though it is” is a line from the W.S. Merwin poem, “Thanks,” written in 1927.

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A shocking story appeared in the Times of India, about a teenager, thirteen years of age, who had taken to prostitution because of her obsessive craze for high-end gadgets and mobile phones. The mother, who runs a grocery shop, did not have any clue of her daughter’s act until the girl spilled the beans abruptly, fearful that she had become pregnant. The shocked mother tried to explain to the teenager that prostitution is illegal and immoral, but the girl refuses to stop or to see anything wrong in the act. She reveals that she had been working independently and booked her clients through a secret secondary phone. The counselor who attended to the teenager noted that she seemed unphased and took quite some time to respond to the counselling, simply repeating in a matter-of-fact tone that, she was strapped for money and unable to buy the latest gizmos and gadgets that her friends used.

This, perhaps, is not an isolated incident but a reflection of a trend among us these days. The young (or, most of us, for that matter), have become so gadget-crazy that they not only draw pleasure, but also their identity from the gadgets that they possess. In his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of virtual reality (in fact, the one who first coined the term “virtual reality”), talks about the reductionist tendencies prevalent in the field of Computer Science—for example, reducing thinking to mere “information processing” and prostrating oneself before machines. He points out further, that every software program embodies a personal philosophy: “[I]t is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering….People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – You Are What You Possess →

For anyone who has ever been troubled by the lone sock left at the end of the laundry, help is on the way, and it comes in the form of indignation: Who ever said socks had to come in pairs anyway? At least that is the rebellious philosophy of one sock manufacturer who is single handedly trying to change the way we see “the sock problem.”(1) “The missing sock is never going to go away,” said one of the company’s founders, insisting that this is a way to have fun with one very small real-world problem: “People lose their socks… Let’s embrace the problem, and run with it.”(2) Currently they have in circulation over six hundred thousand socks, all sold without matches in packages of 1, 3, or 7.

Type A personalities aside, the embracing of mismatched socks actually seems to be catching on. I happen to think the idea is clever, particularly among the target market (girls age 9-13), but I also think it may indeed be one more logical outworking of a current philosophical state of mind. “Imbalance by design—and the studied quirkiness it reveals—is everywhere,” notes one cultural observer.(3) Random is the new order, as Apple insisted a few years ago. Whether selling music or socks, in the constant undertow of marketing, the spirit and mood of the age is keenly, if cleverly, seen. But imbalance by design is still by design.

Physicist and Nobel laureate Leon Lederman once jokingly remarked that the real goal of physics was to come up with an equation that could explain the universe but still be small enough to fit on a T-shirt—or perhaps a twitter feed. With such a challenge in mind, Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins offers up his own one-lined slogan: “Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.” This is to say, as he has said elsewhere, the watchmaker is blind. The universe has neither design nor purpose; it exhibits nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

But if the universe has always been a disordered series of time and matter and chance, I’m not alone in my need to understand how we account for the intricate orderedness to life, the uniformity of nature, even the intricacy of the very mind that asks the question. How is it that we can ever accept the non-random consistency of nature in a random world? And what would it really look like if random was the new order? Even in the nonconforming concept of mismatched socks, the factories making them still exhibit a scrupulous degree of order; each random sock is designed and produced with creativity and intent.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Matchless Wonder →

The trial of Dylann Roof has made national headlines for several months, culminating in his being sentenced to death for the murder of nine African American Christians. Welcomed by the participants of the bible study without question, his sinister intentions were executed as heads bowed in prayer. As the news stories retold the testimony of those who survived, the horror was palpable. And in the aftermath of the horror, the tragedy of lives lost in this way while at a church bible study is overwhelming. It is no wonder that some of the relatives of those murdered were filled with rage.

But the real wonder of the trial coverage is the forgiveness offered to Dylann Roof by the majority of the bereaved. “The hate you possess is beyond human comprehension,” Melvin Graham, a brother of one of the victims, Cynthia Hurd, told the young white supremacist seated across the courtroom. “You wanted people to kill each other. But instead of starting a race war, you started a love war.” One victim’s sister-in-law offered to come and pray with Roof before he went to prison if he wanted her to do so. In fact, five family members offered Mr. Roof a measure of public forgiveness at his bond hearing held just two days after the killings.(1)

As I read these news stories, I am in awe of these who understand—in a way I cannot comprehend—that forgiveness is at the heart of Christian faith. Certainly, I understand how an unwillingness to forgive locks us all up in bitterness, and throws away the key. It enslaves us to ingratitude, and chokes out gratefulness. It prevents us from experiencing the freedom that comes with free-flowing grace—both received and given. And I understand all too well that a desire to punish those who have hurt us can easily arise from a sense of moral superiority that deems punishment as more fitting than grace. And yet, these five family members chose to forgive a young man who appears not to recognize his need for it.

Jesus once told a parable of an unforgiving servant in response to a question from his disciple Peter. This servant owed his master a debt so large it could never be repaid in this lifetime. When his master forgave him the debt, he went out and would not forgive his fellow servants their relatively small debts. Peter had asked the question, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus answers, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.”(2) Jesus taught that forgiveness is unlimited, and forgiveness by nature is something that cannot be measured in its appropriation. When we fail to forgive, we fail to recognize our own debt, and we fail to appreciate the reality of the limitless scope of forgiving grace on our account. Peter wanted to know at what point he could cease from offering forgiveness—he wanted a hard and fast limit. But in the answer to Peter’s question, Jesus reveals that none of us are in the position to withhold forgiveness from each other. In the end, since we are all in need of forgiveness, to withhold it demonstrates a kind of ingratitude for God’s gracious action towards the debt we could never repay to God.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Giving Forgiveness →

Flashing headlines stopped lesser trains of thought that morning, many of us hearing the news for the first time. The busy flow of strangers and hotel employees walking briskly toward their respective conference rooms stopped, and together we stood watching.

The evening before, a young white male had opened fired on members of a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. Eight members died at the scene, a ninth at the hospital. The victims—Cynthia, Susie, Ethel, Depayne, Clementa, Tywanza, Daniel, Sharonda, and Myra—ranged in ages from 26 to 87. Together that evening, they had been studying the parable of the sower when twenty-one year old Dylann entered the church quietly and was welcomed at the table. He sat with them as they considered the Gospel of Mark and prayed, and then he stood up, uttered a hateful racial speech, and killed nine people in a house of worship.

In the days following, the Charleston shooting continued to command headlines, though not merely in reports of the horrific details as they unfolded. Dylann Roof was apprehended, details of his background given, acquaintances interviewed, inquires made into the gun he used, theories posited on the mindset that lead up to his terrible course of action. But the tragically familiar flow of details following US shootings was interspersed this time with less familiar reporting. Relatives of the victims gunned down at the church faced Dylann merely a day after his actions, offering striking, but not easy, words of forgiveness and mercy. That Sunday, just four days after fellow congregants and their senior pastor were left in a pool of blood in their basement, the church came together for services, the building having been released as a crime scene only hours earlier. Worship commenced as the standing congregation sang of Christ: You are the source of our strength; You are the strength of our lives. Across the city, churches in unison rang morning worship bells in solidarity with Emmanuel AME Church and the victims lost for nine full minutes—a minute for every victim. That evening, a unity chain of clasped hands extended across the 13,200-foot-long Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge from Charleston to the town of Mount Pleasant. The words and actions inspired by this Christian community in lament were a far cry from the “race war” Dylann vowed to the nine victims he would incite with their deaths.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Tale of Two Stories →

In a study included in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine children were shown to overwhelmingly prefer the taste of food that comes in McDonald’s wrappers. The study had preschoolers sample identical foods in packaging from McDonald’s and in matched, but unbranded, packaging. The kids were then asked if the food tasted the same or if one tasted better. The unmarked foods lost the taste test every time. Even apple juice, carrots, and milk tasted better to the kids when taken from the familiar wrappings of the Golden Arches. “This study demonstrates simply and elegantly that advertising literally brainwashes young children into a baseless preference for certain food products,” said a physician from Yale’s School of Medicine. “Children, it seems, literally do judge a food by its cover. And they prefer the cover they know.”(1)

The science of advertising is often about convincing the world that books can and should be judged by their covers. These kids were not merely saying they preferred the taste of McDonald’s food. They actually believed the chicken nugget they thought was from McDonald’s tasted better than an identical nugget. From an early age and on through adulthood, branding is directive in telling us what we think and feel, who we are, what we love, what matters.

But lest we blame television and marketing entirely for the wiles of brand recognition, we should recall that advertisers continue to have employment simply because it works. That is, long before marketers were encouraging customers to judge by image, wrapping, and cover, we were judging by these methods anyway. When the ancient Samuel was looking for the person God would ordain as king, he had a particular image in mind. In fact, when he first laid eyes on Eliab, Samuel thought confidently that this was the one God had chosen. But on the contrary, God said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”(2)

The study with the preschoolers is startling because adults can see clearly that a carrot in a McDonald’s bag is still inherently a carrot. Yet how often are we, too, blindsided by mere wrappings, the cultural repetitions that mold us, the images and liturgies that shape our affections? Is the mistake of a child in believing the food tastes better in a yellow wrapper really any different than our own believing we are better people dressed with the right credentials, covered by the latest fashion, repeating the right belief-systems? Covered in whatever comforts us or completely stripped of our many wrappings, we are the same people underneath.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Shape of Affection →

The following essay from Vince Vitale is an excerpt from his newly released Jesus Among Secular Gods, coauthored with Ravi Zacharias.

The first time I met people who encouraged me to consider God, I was in college. I began by reading the gospels, and I found myself attracted to the Christian message. I found myself especially attracted to the person of Jesus and the beautiful life that he lived. But, to be honest, I assumed that belief in God was for people who didn’t think hard enough. I assumed that smart people somewhere had already disproved belief in God. More specifically, I assumed that there was some purely scientific way of understanding the world, and that miracles had no part in it.

I can remember picking up a book in a university bookshop around that time and reading the back cover, which summarized the book as an attempt to hold on to a form of Christianity while explaining away all the supposed miracles of Jesus in scientific terms. And I remember hoping it could be done, because I was longing for the person of Jesus, but I thought the traditional account of Christianity was just too extraordinary to believe.

I had this assumption that the burden of proof for belief in God must be higher, because God is such an extraordinary option. Richard Dawkins puts it this way:

“If you want to believe in…unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh—the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not.”(1)

I bought into that way of thinking—that God is the crazy option, whereas a fully naturalistic and fully scientifically explainable universe is the sober, sensible, rational option. Without ever really reasoning it through, I accepted the cultural myth that we used to need God to miraculously explain thunder and lightning, rainbows and shooting stars. But now that we have scientific explanations for these things, we should stop believing in God.

That’s actually not a very good argument. A good engineer doesn’t need to keep stepping in to override systems and fix malfunctions. If God is a good engineer, isn’t the ability to explain his design in terms of consistently functioning processes exactly what we should expect?

Moreover, we no longer think we need the moon to explain lunacy. (Lunacy comes from the word lunar, because people used to think the position of the moon explained madness.) Does that mean we should no longer believe in the moon? Should we become not only a-theists but a-moonists?(2) Of course not. Even if the moon doesn’t explain madness, there are many other things, such as the tides of the oceans, that it does explain. Likewise, the reasons for believing in God extend far beyond just scientific reasons and include historical, philosophical, moral, aesthetic, experiential, and relational reasons.

Without thinking it through, I jumped from science to scientism—from the fact that science can explain a lot to the assumption that it can explain everything. However, just because the advancement of science has taught us new things about how the universe works, that doesn’t tell us whether there is a who behind the how.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – “Science Has Disproved God” →

We live in a post-truth society—that’s what The Economist claimed two months ago. Two weeks ago, Oxford English Dictionary chose “post-truth” as its Word of the Year. Go back a bit further, and having 11 percent of America believe that you are “honest and trustworthy” was good enough to have a 9 percent lead in the race to be the next President of the United States. But of course even the polls were post-true.

We are very confused about the truth: There’s the truth, and then there’s the naked truth. There’s the truth, and then there’s the gospel truth (though the Gospel is taken to be obviously false). There’s the honest truth, and then there’s the God’s honest truth (but that has nothing to do with God).

We stretch the truth and bend the truth and twist the truth. We bury the truth because the truth hurts. When we want some¬thing to be false, we knock on wood. When we want something to be true, we cross our fingers. Which wooden cross are we trusting in?

Why do we have such a confused relationship with the truth? Fear. We are afraid of truth. Truth has so often been abused that experience has taught us the trajectory of truth—the trajectory of believing you are right and others are wrong—is from truth to disagreement to devaluing to intolerance to extremism to violence to terrorism.

And if that is the trajectory, then those committed to truth are in fact terrorists in the making. If that is the trajectory, then truth is an act of war, and an act of war leaves you with only two options: fight or flee.

Most of Western society is fleeing. Everything around us is structured to avoid disagreement about the truth: We spend most of our time on Facebook and Twitter where we can “like” and “retweet” but there is no option to “dislike.” Sports no longer teach us how to disagree. In professional sports, we replay every call to avoid disagreement. In youth sports, we don’t keep score and everyone gets a trophy.

When it comes to dating, we use online sites that “match” us with someone so similar in beliefs, background, and personality that as much disagreement as possible is avoided. We no longer meet people different from us at coffee shops because we go to drive-thru Starbucks. We no longer meet people while shopping because everything we could ever need or want is delivered to our door. Culturally, everything around us is set up to avoid disagreement.

The alternative to fleeing is fighting. I was walking around Oxford University a few months ago, and two guys walking just ahead of me were having a spirited conversation about how crazy they found certain Christian positions on ethical issues. One of them wondered out loud whether the only solution would be to shame Christians out of their positions.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Truth or Love: What’s Your Choice? →

“What is the good life?” is a question as old as philosophy itself. In fact, it is the question that birthed philosophy as we know it.(1)Posed by ancient Greek thinkers and incorporated into the thought of Socrates through Plato, and then Aristotle, this question gets at the heart of human meaning and purpose. Why are we here, and since we are here, what are we to be doing? What is our meaning and purpose?

Out of the early Greek quest for the answer emerged two schools of thought. From Plato emerged rationalism: the good life consists of ascertaining unchanging ideals—justice, truth, goodness, beauty—those “forms” found in the ideal world. From Aristotle emerged empiricism: the good life consists of ascertaining knowledge through experience—what we can perceive of this world through our senses.(2)

For both Aristotle and Plato, rational thought used in contemplation of ideas is the substance of the good life. Despite the obvious emphasis by both on goodness emerging from the contemplative life of the mind (even though they disagreed on the source of rationality) both philosophers saw the good life as impacting and benefiting society. For Plato, society must emulate justice, truth, goodness, and beauty; so he constructs an ideal society. For Aristotle, virtue lived out in society is the substance of the good life, and well-being arises from well-doing.

Not long ago, I conducted an internet search on the tag “What is the good life?” and I was amazed at what came up as the top results of my search. Most of the entries involved shopping or consumption of one variety or another. Some entries were on locations to live, and still others involved books or other media aimed at helping one construct a good life. Others were the names of stores selling goods to promote “the good life.” There were no immediate entries on Plato, Aristotle, or the philosophical question they raised. There were no results on wisdom or the quest for knowledge lived out in a virtuous life. Instead, most of the entries involved material pursuits and gains. Sadly, this reflects our modern definition of what is good.

Perhaps during tumultuous economic times, it is difficult not to equate material items with the good life, more money, more security, or more opportunity. While it has always been said of every generation that these are times of great crisis and upheaval, we feel this search for meaning anew and afresh today, and perhaps wonder at the practicality or wisdom of looking to the past for insight or understanding into the good life.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Philosophy of the Good →

The ethics of regifting is always a hot discussion at Christmastime and the weeks that follow various office parties and family exchanges. Apparently, there are those who insist that regifting is a tawdry practice, and there are those who have practiced it for years and see no harm. For those who might not be familiar with the concept, Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary offers a helpful definition: To regift is “to give an unwanted gift to someone else” or “to give as a gift something one previously received as a gift.” In any case, two out of three people say they have either regifted or are considering regifting. And while there are no doubt many successful regifters among us, there are also unfortunate stories to show for the less successful, which make the discussion entertaining. Imagine opening the very gift you had given your mother-in-law a year earlier.

The concept of regifting is similar to a word coined by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit. “Anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom,” writes Tolkien. “Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.” Whether Hobbit or human, regifting is evidently nothing new.

Even so, when a colleague of mine referred to Christmas as the “season of regifting,” I was certain he had been the victim of too many unfortunate gift exchanges. Except he wasn’t talking about unwanted scarves or random gift-cards. He was talking about the mysterious gift that is resurrected each Christmas and presented again as if new. Year after year, we reopen the story of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the magi, and the star. “God is a regifter,” he said. The child is the gift.

The season of Advent leading through Christmas to the feast day of Epiphany we celebrate today is a journey the church sets before the world to meet the Christ child… again. Each year the same story is recalled and the same expectant hope is given time to grow. Each Christmas is an opportunity to unwrap the same gift we were given last year and the year before and the year before and the year before. Once more we have before us the choice to set it on a shelf like an unwanted present or to receive the child—the gift of the Father—again as if new. Unlike the many mathoms that fill a Hobbit’s house with purposeless treasure, this gift is not useless; neither is it sent out from hands that let go lightly or half-heartedly.

In a Christmas episode of The Simpsons, the character who was playing one of the three wise men in a nativity scene admits to regifting the myrrh he’s brought for baby Jesus. “Because,” he pleads. “Nobody needs myrrh!” There is actually some truth to this. The uses of myrrh are few, and it is, by far, a strange and unlikely gift to receive. Myrrh is a rare and expensive spice, most notably used in embalming the dead. But this myrrh, as the magi knew and the prophecies foreshadowed, was something this child would use.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Mathoms and Myrrh →

The following excerpt comes from Ravi Zacharias’s newly released book Jesus Among Secular Gods coauthored with Vince Vitale.

It was years ago when I was speaking at an openly and avowedly atheistic institution that I was fascinated by a questioner who asked what on earth I meant by the term God. The city was Moscow; the setting was the Lenin Military Academy. The atmosphere was tense. Never had I been asked before to define the term in a public gathering. And because I was in a country so historically entrenched in atheism, I suspected the question was both hostile and intentional. I asked the questioner if he was an atheist, to which he replied that he was. I asked him what he was denying. That conversation didn’t go very far. So I tried to explain to him what we meant when we spoke of God.

It is fascinating to talk to a strident atheist and try to get beneath the anger or hostility. God is a trigger word for some that concentrates all his or her stored animosity into a projectile of words. But as the layers of their thinking and experience are unpacked, the meaning of atheism to each one becomes narrower and narrower, each term dying the death of a thousand qualifications. Oftentimes, the description is more visceral and is discussed with pent-up anger rather than in a sensible, respectful discussion. More than once I have been amazed at the anger expressed by members of the atheist groups at one or other of the Ivy League schools in the United States to which I have been invited to speak, anger that I was even invited and that I had the temerity to address them.

In theory, the academy has always been a place where dissent serves a valuable purpose in helping thinking students to weigh out ideas and make intelligent choices. And, dare I say, had I been a Muslim speaker, there would have been no such dissent as I faced. Evidently, being able to instill fear in people has a lot to do with how much freedom of speech you are granted. But alas! For some, at least, civil discourse is impossible. To her credit, at the end of a lecture, one senior officer in one club stood up and thanked me, a veiled apology for the resistance vented before the event. I did appreciate that courtesy.

This unfettered anger on the part of some is quite puzzling to me. I was raised in India where I was not a Hindu and, in fact, never once gave it any serious consideration. For that matter, I’m not sure if I even really believed in God. I was a nominal Christian but never gave that much thought, either. Most of my friends were either Hindu or Muslim or Sikh, with a few others of different faiths. I never recall feeling any anger or hostility toward those who believed differently than me, no matter how ludicrous their beliefs may have seemed to me. Nor do I remember ever being on the receiving end of such anger and hostility because I did not have the same belief.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Examining Religions →