Tag Archives: Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Debt and Gratitude

December 18, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.” So goes the counsel of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is worth considering, perhaps particularly in the season of gift giving. Do you feel pressure to reciprocate when someone treats you to lunch? Do you find yourself repaying kindness for kindness, compliment for compliment, present for present and so on? You are far from alone if you do. According to sociologists, this sense of obligation, which they refer to as the “Rule of Reciprocation,” is present in every single known human society. And it is as powerful as it is prevalent. Professor of psychology Robert Cialdini notes, “So typical is it for indebtedness to accompany the receipt of [favors, gifts, and the like] that a phrase like ‘much obliged’ has become a synonym for ‘thank you.’”(1)

The implications of that etymological statement perhaps unveil our haste in responding to debt. Indebtedness is uncomfortable, after all; to be rid of it is liberating. Gratitude, on the contrary, asks much more of us. Our sense of indebtedness is not removed, but lingers in a state of being thankful.

Of course, you can return a favor and still experience gratitude for the favor given you. But you can also return a favor simply to reciprocate, to mindlessly remove that feeling of indebtedness. One psychology class carried out a revealing experiment on this subject. The professor sent Christmas cards to a large list of complete strangers to test the Rule of Reciprocation. He found response astounding. Cards came pouring back to him, all from people he had never met, the vast majority never even inquiring into the identity of the unknown sender! They simply received his card, and automatically sent one in return.

The experiment merits inquiry into our own lives. How do we respond to the sense of obligation? Are we uncomfortable with indebtedness? It is worth asking if for no other reason than that there will be times in life for which there is no fitting response to indebtedness. What happens when we discover there is no appropriate response to the gift or the giver? What will happen when we simply cannot reciprocate?

One simple option is that we respond with gratitude. We come into the presence of the giver with thanksgiving and we are changed by the gift.

It is an option favored by the historical church. Faith in some ways is an invitation into the life of gratitude. For when the giver is the human Son of God, approaching humanity as one of us, freely mediating our case before God, submitting to death and sorrow in innocence, holding the world in heart, how then do we respond? The old hymn perhaps offers much wisdom:

Alas! and did my Savior bleed,

And did my Sovereign die?

Would He devote that sacred head,

For such a worm as I?

Thus might I hide my blushing face,

While His dear cross appears,

Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,

And melt my eyes to tears.

But drops of grief can ne’er repay,

The debt of love I owe:

Here, Lord, I give my self away,

‘Tis all that I can do.(2)

It is gratitude that sees this sacred debt for which there is no reciprocating and with devotion says, “Come, Lord Jesus. Here I am.”

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

(1) Robert Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2001), 20.

(2) Isaac Watts, “Alas and Did my Savior Bleed?“

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Earthbound

December 17, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Garrison Keillor’s description of Aunt Marie is one I cannot seem to shake this season. Repeatedly, she has come to mind in discordant moments of Christmas preparation, somewhere between errands at the mall and lyrics that put a stop to them: “Long lay the world in sin and error pining,/ Till he appeared, and the soul felt its worth.” No description of the Incarnation more readily makes the common stressors of Christmas seem less important. And yet, Aunt Marie, with her “fat little legs” and “her heavy, fur-collared coat,” has made a serious attempt to wrestle me back down to a sad, human, earthly reality. Keillor writes:

“She knew that death was only a door to the kingdom where Jesus would welcome her, there would be no crying there, no suffering, but meanwhile she was fat, her heart hurt, and she lived alone with her ill-tempered little dogs, tottering around her dark little house full of Chinese figurines and old Sunday Tribunes. She complained about nobody loving her or wanting her or inviting her to their house for dinner anymore. She sat eating pork roast, mashed potato, creamed asparagus, one Sunday at our house when she said it. We were talking about a trip to the North Shore and suddenly she broke into tears and cried, ‘You don’t care about me. You say you do but you don’t. If I died tomorrow, I don’t know as you’d even go to my funeral.’ I was six. I said, cheerfully, ‘I’d come to your funeral,’ looking at my fat aunt, her blue dress, her string of pearls, her red rouge, the powder on her nose, her mouth full of pork roast, her eyes full of tears.”(1)

Christmas says in color and sentiment what many of us already know: that the world is waiting, groaning for more, longing for redemption, for peace on earth and goodwill to humanity, for release from darkness and sin and loneliness and disillusionment, for God to come near to the world as we know it. Like Aunt Marie, this waiting is sometimes fraught with discomfort; we wait, and we sense a lonely, earthly reality. But Advent forces the experience of waiting into a different light. Our waiting need not be dehumanizing, dispiriting, as waiting often feels.

The New Testament describes it quite differently—not as a difficult means to a better end, but as part of the promise itself. Eugene Peterson writes, “Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.”(2) Waiting itself is, of course, a reminder that we are earthbound.

But so is Christ.

The Christian’s celebration of Christmas is the assurance that we wait with good reason. “The word became flesh,” wrote John, “and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). God did not merely come near, he became flesh that could touch weaknesses, experience loneliness, and encounter the lowest moments of being human. He came to be with us, to move through us, to work within us. He came as small and vulnerable as humans come, getting close enough to bear the scars of our outrage and near enough to prove he would stay regardless. He came far nearer than Aunt Marie—or most of us—are yet able to recognize. “That is what incarnation means,” writes Frederick Buechner. “It is untheological. It is unsophisticated. It is undignified. But according to Christianity, it is the way things are. All religions and philosophies that deny the reality or the significance of the material, the fleshly, the earthbound, are themselves denied.”(3)

God became one of us, not to erase every shadow or to undo the difficulties of our humanity, but to be with us in the midst of it, to transform our spectrum of darkness by bearing a truer depth of light, to enlarge us with the joy of expectancy until the fullness of time when every hope has come to pass.

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

(1) Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home (New York: Viking, 1987), xxi-xxii.

(2) Eugene Peterson, The Message, Romans 8:24-25.

(3) Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 169.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Voice in the Wilderness

December 16, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Amidst all the twinkling lights, decorations, gleeful holiday carols, festive parties, and holiday sales, a more somber spirit resides. In Ferguson, Missouri, Cleveland, Ohio, and Staten Island, New York there is weeping and mourning for lost loved ones. Not places in the thoroughfares, these are towns on the margins. And for many, these are people who appear to be on the margins. Yet here in these marginal places, the cry for justice goes up and interrupts the mainstream revelry and festivity that is the Christmas season.

Traditionally, the season that precedes Christmas, the Advent season, is a somber season. It is a season that calls for repentance and reflection. For during the Advent season, another voice from the margins of society calls for repentance, righteousness and justice. It is the voice of John the Baptizer crying out from the wilderness.

John’s voice, often forgotten in our hurried, holiday preparations, is crucial to our understanding of this season. His is such a crucial message that all four gospel writers include aspects of John’s story. Mark, in particular, begins his gospel this way: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, BEHOLD, I SEND MY MESSENGER BEFORE YOUR FACE, WHO WILL PREPARE YOUR WAY; THE VOICE OF ONE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS, MAKE READY THE WAY OF THE LORD, MAKE HIS PATHS STRAIGHT” (Mark 1:1-3).

For the writer of Mark’s gospel, the beginning of the gospel is not a birth narrative, as in Matthew and Luke, but the one who proclaims the Messiah; proclaims his Advent, and proclaims the Advent of his kingdom. Advent, like John the Baptist, calls for preparation, for reflection, and for repentance in preparation for the coming of God’s anointed one. For all who would declare Jesus the Messiah, preparation involves aligning lives with the values of his kingdom.

Luke’s gospel continues where Mark begins by providing the most detailed portrait of John’s wilderness preaching and message. Here the reader learns of the kingdom values. John exhorts his audience: “Therefore, bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ for I say to you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.’ And the axe is already laid at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Luke 3:8-9). As Luke’s narrative continues, three groups come to John asking him what they should do to prepare for the King and his kingdom, and avoid this terrible and awesome fate. John tells those who have an abundance to share food and clothing with those who have none; he exhorts tax collectors to exercise fair business practices, and he tells soldiers not to take money by force, accuse anyone falsely, and to be content with their wages.(1)

I was surprised, as I read John’s exhortations, at the immense practicality of repentance. To bear good fruit involves the treatment of others, generosity, fair measures, the proper use of wealth and resources, and a sense of contentment. This seems a timely word today, as mistreatment of others, perpetual cycles of violence, fear, and the temptation to hoard resources tempts us to turn this season of repentance into an empty celebration of materialism and mindless consumption.

Instead, I wonder if Advent preparations can be practical provisions—bringing forth fruit “in keeping with repentance”? As repentance has its way—literally understood as “turning around” or “turning toward”—might there be a turning away from that diminishes life, and turn toward the One to whom John pointed—One who provides fullness of life? The life that if offered by Jesus can then be poured out as blessing for others.

John’s message of repentance is the “beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” And his call during the Advent season is a call to join him in the margins. As I listen again to John’s voice in this season of preparation and repentance, I hear his prophetic call to me; he calls me out of my busyness, my own preoccupation with comfort, and my own self-interested desires. He calls to me to “bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance.” Through the din of the all the other voices, I strain to hear his voice calling to me from the wilderness.

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

(1) See Luke 3:1-14; See also Mark 12:28-31 and Matthew 22:34-40.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Christmas Triumph

December 15, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Triumph, this time of year, seems to come in many shades of success in the Western world. Try as we may to keep a perspective of cheer or charity or readiness for the coming of Christ, many of us feel most ready for Christmas when we have met every shipping deadline, reciprocated every Christmas card, or averted every scheduling conflict. Victories that we might otherwise find slight seem to become great feats during the holidays—finding a parking spot, getting the last box of Christmas lights in stock, beating the mailman to the mailbox. Other battles continue to brew over the accepting or rejecting of manger scenes, messiahs, and “Merry Christmases” in the face of less specific holiday tales and greetings. Though we seem to oscillate between who or what we are fighting against—the clock, the perfect hostess, the family stressors, the agendas of others—we seem to work toward Christmas one insignificant feat at a time.

But as I sang the lyrics to a song during the lighting of the second Advent candle, I was silenced by the image of a victory we need do nothing but join.

Joyful, all ye nations rise,

Join the triumph of the skies;

With th’angelic host proclaim,

“Christ is born in Bethlehem!”

The triumph the church worldwide invites the world to join as we celebrate Christmas is far bigger than our best Christmases and more real than our worst. There are generations of believers offering the same cries of victory shouted on the very first Christmas night: Christ was born! God came near. God is with us! The birth of Jesus was orchestrated at the hands of God long before the inn would be full or the shepherds would be in their fields by night, long before my traditions would seem etched in stone, or my culture would remove the Nativity from the public arena.

While there may be some ‘victories’ to rightfully seek this season, many others can likely be forsaken, lost with Herod’s fight for control somewhere along the obscure path to a stable outside of Bethlehem. The triumph of a God who so cares for creation that he joins us within it is a victory already won. God is with us. The triumph the church asks the world to join as we celebrate Christ’s birth is a triumph known from the beginning, foreseen by the prophets, heralded by John the Baptist, and cherished by witnesses whose voices still cry out the incredible news of a Christmas story that will not change no matter what we think we are fighting for:

“And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.’

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.’”

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Both Near and Far from Home

December 12, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In his poem Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot imagines the reminiscent thoughts of one of the Magi who journeyed from afar to witness the birth of Christ. Using the voice of a king far from home, Eliot portrays the weight in the soul of one who has confronted the human Christ, the king who points us home. The poem powerfully concludes:

“Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt I had seen birth and death.

But had thought they were different, this Birth was

hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

with an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.”

Coming in contact with the Christ, proclaims Eliot, setting one’s eyes on the child who was born to die is like dying ourselves, in a sense, and forever changing our sense of ‘home.’ Though the poem seems to strike a somber note, it is a very note echoed triumphantly throughout New Testament Scripture. The apostle Paul readily utilized the words and imagery of death to describe life in Christ, the interplay of both home and homelessness. “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” Jesus uttered similarly, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”(1)

In the season of Advent, Christians profess to be a people watching and waiting—in hope, in lament, in need—remembering and anticipating with those who first watched God step into the world through the mean estate of a dirty stable. We remember those who first set their eyes on the child who was born to die, becoming, in a sense, as Christ was on that first night, homeless and out of place. We remember that we, too, are far from home, longing for a home we know in part. Having truly seen the person of Christ, the Christian sees all the more clearly the reality of a world in need of justice, reconciliation, mercy, and healing. And we are, as Eliot describes, “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods.” The message of Advent awakens a sense that we are both near and far from home, reminding a dark world that a light has indeed been born in our midst, reminding a broken world that we are waiting for the return of this one who shows us what it means to be truly human and whole again.

In one of the most comforting conversations between Jesus and the disciples, Jesus gives a description of this place, which we have seen in part, and he assures us of an invitation to be fully inside. “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”(2) Compounding this hope, his words are followed by one of his most quoted promises. As Thomas replied, “But Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” Jesus answered: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

We find in Christ himself the curious interplay of home and homelessness. This one who so loved creation that he joins us within it is not only the herald of our homelessness but the harbinger of our home. He curiously proclaims this very kingdom among us and he mercifully offers himself as the way inside. Thus, G.K. Chesterton describes our own mysterious place of being both near and far from home:

“For men are homesick in their homes,

and strangers under the sun…

but our homes are under miraculous skies

where the Yule tale was begun.”

The story of Christ’s birth is a certain message of hope and home—with the much needed room for lament over all that is presently missing and the desperately needed foretastes of a table where we will one day come together in healed communion with ourselves, our neighbors, and God. He who took on the fullness of humanity became homeless that we might come fully home. He curiously proclaims a kingdom at home among us and mercifully continues to prepare us for a place within it. Let every heart prepare him room!

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

(1) cf. Galatians 2:20, Matthew 10:39.

(2) John 14:2-4.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God at Terminal Five

December 11, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I wrote one of the last sections of the book Why Suffering? on a plane flight from London to New York.(1) As I came through security at Heathrow Airport, I had about an hour until my departure, and I had it in mind to find a quiet spot and make a start on the writing I had planned.

As I began to walk toward the departure gates, a small sign for the “Multi-Faith Prayer Room” caught my eye, and instantaneously—though I have never before had an urge to visit an airport prayer room—I felt this conviction that there was someone in that room whom I was supposed to talk with. It was as if someone had just told me, “There is someone waiting to speak with you there,” even though I had not audibly heard those words.

d an about-face and walked a good distance away from my departure gate to the arrivals terminal where the prayer room was located. When I walked in, there was one man in the room, sitting in a corner on the floor. He appeared to be about my age. When he saw me looking around the prayer room, he asked, “Are you religious?” We began speaking about what it means to be religious, and he soon shared with me that he was going through the worst suffering of his life.

Mohammed fought back tears as he shared about what no one would ever want to go through. He expressed that he never talks about such things with anyone, but that he just needed to get it out. He told me that he used to pray five times a day, but that now the suffering is too much; he opens his mouth to pray and nothing comes out. Finally, Mohammed challenged me, “If God exists, why is there so much suffering? And where is he amidst it all?”

Now I understood why we were supposed to meet. I told Mohammed that the one person of whom he finally asked “Why suffering?” was currently writing a book by that very title, and in fact was walking in the opposite direction toward the departure gates when God turned him around and led him to this specific room to share that God does care and that he is present.

Sometimes God is most present when our suffering can make God seem most absent. Sometimes when we are in the fog and are unable to see much on our own, we need people by our side to show us where they see God in our lives. Sometimes we mistake God’s respectfulness for absence. Understandably there are times when we want God to be more obvious. But God desires to reveal himself clearly to those who desire him, without revealing himself forcibly to those who do not. God wants us to follow him not because he is overpowering, but because we trust him.

Mohammed was in a place where he couldn’t see God. But God was with him. Mohammed was in a place of tough questions. God crossed his path with someone who could appreciate those questions. Mohammed was in a place where he couldn’t pray. God provided someone to pray with him.

As we parted, Mohammed and I shared an extended hug that spoke deep understanding, deep appreciation, and deep friendship. We had spoken and prayed together at length about what it is to believe in, and to love, and to live with Jesus—the God who knows suffering himself, and who is never absent in our suffering. “He is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:27), even if sometimes we need others to step with us in the direction that leads to relationship with him.

Vince Vitale is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Oxford, England.

(1) For more, see Why Suffering?: Finding Meaning and Comfort When Life Doesn’t Make Sense, co-authored with Ravi Zacharias. Vince Vitale wrote his PhD on the problem of suffering. He now teaches at Wycliffe Hall of Oxford University and is Senior Tutor at The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Bit of Sentimentality?

December 10, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

It is a strange story. There were shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel appeared to them, telling them not to be afraid. A baby had been born, and they could find him wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. To a peasant mother outside of Bethlehem, the Son of God was born.

If we take a step back from the familiar hum of Advent to consider the story Christians are really waiting for, we are thrown off my usual Christmas kilter. This is not really the innocuous historical narrative we imagine. This is not a tame story. The bright lights and colors of our Christmas pageants can easily paint over the stark scenery of a story that startles all of history. Who understands this God who comes as a child, who steps into our world through a dirty stable and the unlikely arms of an unwed mother?

Yet even long before these strange additions to the story of God among his people, the prophets were asking similar questions: “Who has understood the mind of the LORD?”(1) This God who moves among people, touching all of life and history is certainly not the quiet and tame being we often imagine. God’s ways are not our ways. God’s stories are not the kind of stories we would write if the telling were up to us. God’s thoughts are the kind of thoughts that expose deception and shine in darkness, that shatter hearts and rewrite stories.

It is the same with the child born in a stable two thousand years ago. The infant the world remembers lying peacefully in a manger with cattle lowing nearby did not take long to fulfill the words spoken to his young parents: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”(2) Definitely not the sort of thing a stranger typically says to a young mother holding a baby. Is this the child we are anticipating this Advent?

British author Dorothy Sayers once lamented the manner in which Jesus is often remembered: he is the quiet sage full of wisdom, the safe and peaceful one of history. He is, for all practical purposes, somewhat dull, someone we might be interested in at a later time. Yet Sayers writes:

“The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore—on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”(3)

The Christian season of Advent is a time of anticipation not for the harmless baby surrounded by lights and presents, but for the dynamic savior who is born into our midst in a way that must forever change us. “Do you want to be delivered?” asked Dietrich Bonhoeffer in an Advent sermon more than 70 years ago. “That is the only really important and decisive question which Advent poses for us. Does there burn within us some lingering longing to know what deliverance really means? If not, what would Advent then mean to us? A bit of sentimentality. A little lifting of the spirit within us? A little kinder mood? But if there is something in this word Advent which we have not yet known, that strangely warms our heart; if we suspect that it could, once more, once more, mean a turning point in our life, a turning to God, to Christ—why then are we not simply obedient, listening and hearing in our ears the clear call: Your deliverance draws nigh!”(2)

In this season of Advent we hear a strange and drastic story. The church anticipates nothing less than the Lion of Judah wrapped in swaddling cloths; the coming of a human rescuer unhindered. Mystery itself, mercifully, draws nigh.

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

(1) Isaiah 40:13.

(2) Luke 2:34-35.

(3) Dorothy Sayers, The Whimsical Christian, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” (New York: Collier Books, 1978), 14.

(4) Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, Edwin Robertson Ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 93.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Face for the Faceless

December 9, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

It all began with the arrival of a letter. A hand-written note, it was a novel surprise in these days of online texts and emails. The note came from a friend I hadn’t spoken to in many years. We had been college roommates, but our lives had gone in very different directions that took us far apart. Yet, despite many years of relative silence, she wrote to me to ask if something she had done had caused me offense or if she had hurt my feelings. As soon as I read her reason for writing to me, I was right back to those days when we were in college together.

Shame followed me around like my shadow in my early college years. Plagued by insecurity, I compared myself to others and always fell short. By contrast, my friend seemed positively carefree and confident. And while she never deliberately tried to upset me, there were the inevitable squabbles that contributed to hurt feelings because my hidden insecurities were brought right out into the open. I felt that I was not thriving at college, but clearly, she was. So she caused me no offense, but her very presence heightened my sense of shame. I was ashamed of everything I was not in comparison to her.

To suffer shame, psychologists tell us, is to feel that the true self—with all its defects—is exposed, naked and vulnerable before the watchful or superior gaze of others.(1) Shame is the feeling that arises from the core of one’s being. It is the thought that you are not good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, smart enough, or talented enough. It is that horrible thought that you are not enough.

In most Western nations, where the focus is primarily on the individual—and on the internal world of the individual—shame is often completely self-focused. And to experience shame is to experience an internal sense of worthlessness without necessary reference to, or repercussion on, family, community, or society. More often than not, shame points its judgmental finger at one’s core identity and compels those on the other end of its boney prodding to hide who they truly are even from those who love them.

But in many other parts of the world, shame goes far beyond individual experience. The experience of shame includes dishonor to one’s family and one’s community. Shame, therefore, is not just an individual burden to bear, but a collective burden of responsibility for others. Honor killings are stark and sober examples of the consequences of bringing shame on the collective family or social unit; the victim is killed by members of the family or social group because the perpetrators’ believe that the victim has brought shame or dishonor upon the family or community.

The ancient world of the Roman Empire was an environment of honor and shame. For hundreds of years, Greek language and culture had dominated the area, bringing a common language as well as significant foundational cultural schemas. Hierarchy was one such foundational schema in the ancient world. It framed and structured both society and the universe so that clear lines of status and power were drawn. Within this system, one’s status was measured by adherence to one’s role in society. Violation of that cultural role brought collective shame on the group.(2)

Within the Roman Empire, the Jewish world of the first century was strongly guided by an honor and shame code, as well. As a result, issues of honor and shame are recognizable throughout ancient writings, and in fact permeate the writings of the New Testament. Without the strict observance of religious and social norms the consequences were the same: separation from the community, including the worshipping community, which meant separation from God.

The story of the man born blind in John’s gospel is a fitting example of a more collective honor and shame culture: “Who sinned,” the disciples asked Jesus, “This man or his parents that he was born blind?” Here, the belief that someone else’s sins could be borne by another is striking. After Jesus healed this man’s blindness, the religious leaders question the blind man’s parents. His parents didn’t want to speak on his behalf “for fear of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus as Messiah, he was to be put out of the synagogue.”(3) To be put out of the synagogue was to be excommunicated from God, family, and society—and to bear the burden of collective shame and dishonor. The son was already in a dishonorable state because of his blindness. One false move by the parents and they would suffer the same fate.

Having been raised and shaped by this culture, anyone curious about Jesus should be amazed by his challenge to these ideas of honor and shame, just as he challenged many other religious and cultural assumptions of his day. Jesus brought honor to those deemed dishonorable. He extended hospitality to tax collectors and sinners by dining with them. He welcomed ‘sinners’ to touch him, even allowing them to caress his feet with tears and hair, and he brought healing and restoration to those who had been ‘put out’ of their social groups as a result of their physical deformities and limitations. As author David Bentley Hart states it, Jesus restored honor by giving a face to the faceless: “[E]ven Christianity’s most implacable modern critics should be willing to acknowledge that in these texts and others like them, we see something beginning to emerge from darkness into full visibility, arguably for the first time in our history; the human person as such, invested with an intrinsic and inviolable dignity, and possessed of an infinite value.”(4)

Shame, individual or collective, is something Jesus sought to erase. In its place, he offered restoration and healing even for those who were the most tragic and had reason to be most ashamed. To bring to light the beauty of the face for those who feel faceless, Jesus offers the same honor-filled invitation today.

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

(1) Edward Teyber and Faith McClure, Interpersonal Process in Therapy: An Integrative Model, Sixth edition (Belmont, CA, Brooks/Cole Cengage Learning, 2011)137.

(2) Katrina Poetker, “Letters from the Ancient World,” Sojourners, March/April.

(3) See John 9:20-23.

(4) David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 166, emphasis mine.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Breaking In

December 8, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“As for me,” said American writer E.B. White, “I en¬joy liv¬ing among ped¬es¬tri¬ans who have an in¬stinct¬ive and ha¬bitu¬al real¬iz¬a¬tion that there is more to a jour¬ney than the mere fact of ar¬rival.”(1)

Under typical circumstances, the beloved author of Charlotte’s Web would not have presented me with much pause here. The pause of agreement, yes, for this is normally the kind of thought with which I resonate, even though the word ‘journey’ may be overused and prone to sentimentalisms. I think it’s true that we lamentably fail to see the great gift of the collective whole, perhaps particularly in the segments of life where we are comfortable with our divided realms—where the end triumphs over the means, destination over the journey, and heaven is divided from earth, the spiritual from the physical, the present from the eternal. White’s words fit aptly upon any soapbox addressing the paradox of a king who is both present and coming—a mystery Jesus championed again and again, in his storytelling, his living, and his dying. In the kingdom he espoused, the journey is not simply a matter of arriving one distant day at the gates of pearl, but rather in finding the pearl of great price in our midst even now and seizing it with all that is in us. Under typical circumstances, I would have enlisted E.B. White’s voice in one of my favorite sermons.

But I read this quote as I watched the live coverage of 33 Chilean miners emerging from a two-month journey of being trapped beneath the earth. For them, the journey was indeed astounding, but the arrival was everything.

Over seventy years ago from a pulpit in London during the season of Advent, Dietrich Bonhoeffer described the image of a man trapped after a mining disaster: Deep in the earth, dark as night, the man is cut off and alone. The supply of oxygen is frighteningly limited. Food, water, and options are scarce; silence and fear are not. He knows his situation, and he can do nothing but wait. “He knows that up there, the people are moving about, the women and children are crying—but the way to them is blocked. There is no hope.”(2) But what if just then, in the distance, the sounds of tapping are heard—the sound of knocking, the sound of friends, the sound of evidence that your cries have been heard, that your lament had not been silenced? This, said Bonhoeffer in December of 1933, is the hope of the Christian Advent: the coming of one who knows, the drawing near of a human rescuer to humankind, the arrival of Christ for those laboring to breathe. Like the Chilean miners, elated at the arrival of Manuel Gonzalez, the rescuer sent 2,040 feet underground to coordinate the procedure, Christ’s arrival into this dark world matters most profoundly.

Even so, his arrival is not the end of our waiting. It is not the end of our journey.

Advent teaches us how to wait wherever it finds us. “Can and should there be anything else more important for us than the hammers and blows of Jesus Christ coming into our lives?”(3) In our waiting, we are given assent to cry out as the first believers did, Come, Lord Jesus! This is the ancient cry of palpable hope—Maranatha!—Lord, come quickly!—which is at times as much a cry of lament and dire need as it is a cry of hope. Advent teaches us to wait and watch, and to live expectantly regardless, though we sit in the dark, though we find ourselves scared or exhausted and struggling for air. “When these things begin to take place,” instructs Christ, “stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21:28).

The angel’s repeated instruction to “Fear not” beckons the sound of hope drawing near, the sounds of God’s human arrival in dark and unexpected places. There are also the sounds of saints who have gone before and proclaim their rescuer even in death. There are sounds of the heartrending promise: “Because I live, you shall live also” (John 14:19).

The world is still dark. But in it every day a quiet voice breaks in, “I stand at the door and knock.” Christ has come. Christ is here. Christ will come again.

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

(1) “Trapped Aussie Miners Freed After 2 Weeks,” MSNBC, May 9, 2006.

(2) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christmas Sermons (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 89.

(3) Ibid., 96.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Like a Thief

December 5, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The alarm of discovering your house has been broken into is one I imagine stays with you long after the thief has gone home. Though most are not eyewitnesses to the looming figure that wrongfully entered, victims of such crimes often report seeing shadows in every corner and silhouettes peering through their windows. Signs that someone had been there are enough to call them to alertness.

Whether you have experienced the shock of burglary and its lasting effects or the violating despair of personal loss, the portrayal of Christ as one who will come like a thief in the night is a startling image. The description is one that seems uncouth amongst the less taxing images that will soon be sentimentally upon us—a peaceful mother and father beside a quiet baby in a manger, a bright star that guides wise men in the obscurity of night. How can the gospel juxtapose these images of one who comes as a child of hope and yet returns like a looming, unwanted figure? But this is the counsel from Jesus himself: “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”(1)

The cry of the Christian season of Advent, the sounds of which are just starting to stir, is the cry not of sentiment but of disrupted vigilance. One of the key figures in celebrating the season, John the Baptist brings the probing message that continues to cry in urgency: “Are you ready?” Are you ready to discover this infant who came to dwell in the midst of night and suffering? Are you ready to hear his invasive message? Are you ready to discover God among you, the hunter, the thief, the King, the human? During the season of Advent, the church calls the world to look again at stories that have somehow become comfortably innocuous, to rediscover the disruptive signs that someone has been here moving about these places we call home, to stay awake to the startling possibility of his nearness in this place even now. “I say to all: ‘Stay awake,’” says Christ in Mark 13:37.

The owner of a house who has been disturbed once by a thief lives with the wakefulness that this thief will come again, however persuasively she is urged to see otherwise. She remembers the signs of a presence other than her own—prints left behind, a door left open, the memory of life disturbed—and she vows to keep watch, knowing, even against odds, that the thief will be back. In the same way, yet without fear, the season of Advent cries for our alertness to the vicariously human savior whose breaking into our world has charged every ordinary moment with expectation.

The child who was born in Bethlehem came quietly in the night, unbeknownst to many who dwelled near him. Like a thief, he shattered myths that proposed we were autonomous; he disrupted systems and powers and lives we thought were shielded. Yet Jesus came not to steal and destroy, but to dwell in all that overwhelms us, to live in a world groaning in death, fear, injustice, and suffering. His humanity shows us what it means to be truly human, overturning the categories we make for ourselves. Like a whimper in the night, his presence in the ordinary may go unnoticed. But he is near and knocking. Fear not and keep watch.

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

(1) Matthew 24:42-44.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Where God Is

December 4, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In a certain town there lived a cobbler, Martin Avdeitch by name. He lived in a small basement room whose one window looked out onto the street, and all he could see were the feet of people passing by. But since there was hardly a pair of boots that had not been in his hands at one time for repair, Martin recognized each person by his shoes. Day after day, he would work in his shop, watching boots pass by. One day he found himself consumed with the hope of a dream that he would find the Lord’s feet outside his window. Instead, he found a lingering pair of worn boots belonging to an old soldier. Though at first disappointed, Martin realized the old man might be hungry and invited him inside to a warm fire and some tea. He had other visitors that evening, and though sadly none were Christ, he let them in also. Sitting down at the end of day, Martin heard a voice whisper his name as he read the words: “I was hungry and you gave me meat; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in. Inasmuch as you did for the least of these, you did unto me.”(1)

Every Christmas, our family reads the story of Martin the Cobbler as an aid to our celebration. Tolstoy’s words offer something of a creative attempt to capture the wonder of a God who comes near and helps us picture the gift of Christ among us in accessible terms. Notably, the story was originally titled, Where God Is, Love Is.

The Christian story that informs the Christian calendar gives its followers time and opportunity to remember the coming of Christ in a specific context—in Bethlehem, in the Nativity, in the first Christmas. But it also presents repeated opportunities and reminders to prepare for the coming of Christ again and again. Like Martin eagerly waiting at the window, the Christian worldview is one that asks of every day of every year: How will Christ come near today? Will I wait for him? Am I ready for him? Am I even expecting to find him? We are reminded to keep watch, to be prepared, and to continually ready our hearts and minds for the one who is already near. At the same time, the Christian story would also have us to remember how unexpectedly Christ at times appears—as a baby in Bethlehem, a man on a cross, as a woman in need.

In the book of Titus, we read that “the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all people.” How and where will grace show up this week? In order to stay alert to the rich possibilities, perhaps we need to keep before us the radical thought of all that God has offered: a Christ child who comes down to us, a redeemer willing to die for us, a God willing to redefine what is near—all so that we might be where God is. Christianity is not an escape system for us to avoid reality, to live above it, or to be able to redefine it. Christianity is a way that leads the world to grasp what reality is and, by God’s grace and help, to navigate through it to our eternal home in God’s presence.

The story God has given indeed feeds the hungry, takes in the stranger, and orients the resident alien who is ever-looking homeward. The focus of Christ’s coming is the message of Immanuel—God is with us. The focus of Christ’s earthly ministry is the declaration of the cross—God is for us. And the focus of Christ’s resurrection is the promise of a future and his imminent return—God will bring us safely home. Until then, God is among us, even when it seems most unlikely.

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

(1) Story told in Leo Tolstoy’s, Walk in the Light While There Is Light and Twenty-three Tales (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003).

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Season of Enough

December 3, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Black Friday is the name Americans have given the day after Thanksgiving, though the concept has caught on in Canada and Europe. It is called “black” because store-keepers know it as the time of year when sales move further into the black and farther into profit margins. “Cyber Monday” is a clever addition to the frenzied consumer holiday, luring black Friday shoppers and their less adventurous counterparts to continue their purchasing online. Whether in-store or online, steep sales and loud advertisements evoke both buyer and seller competition and make for frenzied scenes. Those who watch as bystanders still sense the fervor that begins on Black Friday and continues in a hectic race until Christmas. When everyone around you seems to be running, standing still is easier said than done.

Each year the commencement of the Christmas shopping season overshadows the commencement of a far quieter season. The season of Advent signals the coming of Christmas for Christians, though not in the way that Black Friday signals the coming of the same. “Advent is about the spirituality of emptiness,” writes Joan Chittister, “of enough-ness, of stripped-down fullness of soul.” It is a far cry from the hustle of the holidays that is a race for storing things up. Speed-hoarding through the days of Christmas preparation, Christmas itself even becomes somewhat anticlimactic. “Long before December 25th everyone is worn out,” said C.S. Lewis more than 50 years ago, “—physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making… They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.”(1) Quite the opposite, Advent is a season meant to slow us down, to open windows of awareness and health, to trigger consciousness. It is about finding the kind of quiet mystery and the sort of expectant emptiness that can offer a place for the fullness of God as an infant among us.

Of course, for even the quietest of hearts, this God who becomes human, the incarnate Christ, is still a disruptive mystery. But mystery, like beauty and truth, is well worth stillness, wonder, and contemplation. And this mystery—the gift of a God who steps into the world he created—is rich enough to make the most distracted souls stop and wait. As H.G. Wells said of Jesus, “He was like some terrible moral huntsman digging mankind out of the snug burrows in which they had lived hitherto.”(2) “Let anyone with ears listen!” said Jesus repeatedly throughout his life on earth. “But to what will I compare this generation?” he added. “It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another, We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’”(3) You and I can open our minds to hear the great and unsearchable things we do not know, things like the Incarnation that we may never fully understand but are always compelled to encounter further. Or we can look for all of Christmas to correspond with societal whims and unconscious distractions, cultural debates about what we call or don’t call the season, arguments about public billboards and private mangers.

Christ will come regardless! The hope of Advent is that it is always possible to make room for him. Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who composed a remarkable series of journals in the darkest years of Nazi occupation before she died in Auschwitz, wrote, “[S]ometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.”(4) Advent can be this simple; the invitation of Christ this simple. Let anyone with ears open them. Contemplating Christmas need not mean Christmas wars or lists and budgets, endless labor, fretful commotion, canned happiness.

Advent, after all, is about the riches of being empty-handed and crying “Enough.” Enough stuff. Enough chaos. Enough injustice and hatred. Enough death and despair. That is a disruptively countercultural posture: empty-handed, so that we can fully hold the mystery before us and nothing less; empty-handed, like the God who came down from heaven without riches or power, but meek and small—full, expectant, and enough.

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

(1) C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 305.

(2) Herbert George Wells, The Outline of History: being a plain history of life and mankind (New york: MacMillan, 1921), 505.

(3) Matthew 11:15-17.

(4) Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries 1941-1943 (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1983), 93.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Courage to Wait

December 2, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In the world of quirky factoids and interesting anecdotes, I have often heard that if one lives to be seventy years old, one will have spent three years of life just waiting. Waiting in line at the grocery store; waiting in the doctor’s office; waiting in traffic; waiting for lunch to be ready; waiting for recess time at school; waiting. In his book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, children’s author Theodor Geisel, or “Dr. Seuss,” describes a place called “the waiting place.” It sounds like the place most of us inhabit. He describes it as a useless place where people are just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go

or a bus to come, or a plane to go

or the mail to come, or the rain to go

or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow

or waiting around for a Yes or No

or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

Sometimes waiting feels useless and futile. We are waiting around for what, exactly? Waiting is an in-between space difficult to inhabit. Patience is tried; restlessness is a constant companion, or a listlessness that comes from the tedium of waiting. Of course, the ability to wait patiently is something we admire in others, but find difficult for ourselves. Patience is something I can admire in the driver behind me, for example, but not in the one ahead of me!

Waiting is counterintuitive in our busy, fast-paced world. When our daily lives are made up of high speed Internet, instant messaging, and fast food, waiting for anything seems like an eternity. Moreover, in a world where so much beckons to us, waiting asks us to be still and this can feel meaningless. The English poet John Milton once wrote that those who serve, stand and wait. Indeed, waiting asks us to be disciplined, self-controlled, and emotionally mature as the world speeds by us. Waiting requires an unshakeable faith, hope, and love that will trump all the action done for the sake of expediency. Waiting is often a good, hard work.

Waiting also comprises a large part of the Christian worldview. But it is not the useless waiting of “the waiting place” that Dr. Seuss writes about, nor is it simply waiting for certain things or events, a trip or a raise, or even fulfillment. Christians await the return of Jesus in glory.

The season of Advent that precedes Christmas is a season of hope-filled, lament-filled, expectant waiting. Advent looks forward in anticipation of Christ’s return, but also remembers all those who awaited his arrival into our world more than 2,000 years ago. Advent is a season of stillness and reflection, and honest longing in the dark, and as such, it is the antithesis of all the busyness and chaos and boxed happiness of the Christmas shopping season.

The consumer mentality overwhelms and demands a fever pitch of activity. Sadly, any waiting one might do is more likely waiting for Christmas to be over. And rather than being filled with hope and joy, we wait in a state of anxiety, or cynicism, or harried indifference toward the miracle that is upon us. In all of our busyness, we miss the gift of waiting with expectation and longing.

Yet, the Advent season extends an invitation to do just this: to watch and wait for the coming of the King, to wait for the Christ who comes in new ways into the very messy stuff of our lives—not just one season a year. But we cannot hope to catch a glimpse of him without the hard waiting for him to show up.

Of course, there are those who feel they have been waiting far too long for God to show up in the messy details of their lives. Giving up on waiting seems to hold the promise of rest, as the work of waiting for God to act is wearisome. Just as there were those in the early days of the Christian movement who began to ask with lament “Where is the promise of his coming?” and those who mocked the divine silence as inactivity, it is not difficult to understand how those who wait for answers—for an end to suffering, for reconciliation, for transformation—are tempted towards cynical despair.

Is there hope in remembering that Advent invites us to wait for the God who does show up? Can encouragement be found in the celebration of Christmas, a celebration proclaiming that God has come and that God will come again in the waiting of today? Is there reason to watch and wait for a God who arrives in ways we could not expect? As a helpless baby born in the dregs of a stable?

Advent invites the world to wait, and that waiting requires great courage. The very act of waiting opens eyes, hands, and hearts to receive this most precious gift.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Being Home

December 1, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In the process of moving and reorganizing some bookshelves in the middle of October, I recovered something long out of place. A small Nativity scene carved out of olive wood had been inadvertently left behind from the previous year’s Christmas. Holding it in my hand, I cowered at the thought of digging through boxes in the garage long buried by post-Christmas storage. At this point, it seemed better to be two months early in setting it up than ten months late in packing it away. I decided to keep the carving out.

Strangely enough, my decision then coincided with a friend’s mentioning of a good Christmas quote. Advent was suddenly all around me. In a Christmas sermon given December 2, 1928, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, who look forward to something greater to come. For these, it is enough to wait in humble fear until the Holy One himself comes down to us, God in the child in the manger. God comes. The Lord Jesus comes. Christmas comes. Christians rejoice!” To be early with my Nativity scene suddenly seemed a wise, but convicting thought. I had kept it around for the sake of convenience, what about the sake of remembering? If Advent reminds us that we are waiting in December, what reminds us that we are waiting in October or February?

The story of the Nativity, though beautiful and familiar, and admittedly far-reaching, is as easily put out of our minds as Christmas decorations are put in boxes. On certain sides of the calendar, a carved Nativity scene looks amiss. Sitting on my mantle in the fall or the spring, it seems somehow away from home, far from lights and greenery, longing for Christmas fanfare. But looking at it with thoughts of Advent near, I am struck by the irony that longing is often precisely my sentiment amidst the burgeoning lights, greens, and fanfare of Christmas.

Bonhoeffer continues, “When once again Christmas comes and we hear the familiar carols and sing the Christmas hymns, something happens to us… The hardest heart is softened. We recall our own childhood. We feel again how we then felt, especially if we were separated from a mother. A kind of homesickness comes over us for past times, distant places, and yes, a blessed longing for a world without violence or hardness of heart. But there is something more—a longing for the safe lodging of the everlasting Father.”(1)

Unlike any other month, December weighs on our souls the gift and the difficulty of waiting. In the cold and in the hymns, I remember that I am troubled in soul and looking for something greater; I remember that I am poor and imperfect and waiting for the God who comes down to us, and I hear again the gentle knock at the door. Like the Nativity scene on my mantle in June or October, I embody a strange hope. I see a home with tears and sorrow, but I also see in this home the signs of a day when tears will be wiped dry. Advent is about waiting for the one who embraced sorrow and body to show us the fullness of being home. It is not December that reminds us we are longing for God to come nearer, but the Nativity of God, the Incarnation of Christ. For each day is touched by the promise that in this very place Jesus has already done so, and that he will again come breaking through, into our world, into our longing, into our sin and deaths.

Every day, despite its location on the calendar, a still, small voice answers our cry persuasively here and now, “Behold. I stand at the door and knock.”

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

(1) Edwin Robertson, Ed., Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Prayer for Bread

November 28, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Huckleberry Finn first heard about prayer from Miss Watson, who told him that prayer was something you did everyday and that you’d get what you asked for. So he tried three or four times praying for hooks to complete his fishing line, but when he still didn’t get what he asked for decided that “No, there ain’t nothing in it.”

Prayer is a curious activity. It is one we seem, at times, regardless of belief or creed, almost inclined naturally toward, while other times, like Huck, almost as naturally conclude we either can’t make it work or conclude there ain’t nothing in it.

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples asked him to teach them how to pray. Jesus said to them, “When you pray, say:

‘Father, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

And forgive us our sins,

for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

And do not bring us to the time of trial.’”(1)

*The Lord’s Prayer, which Christian’s still hold and practice today, comes out of this context—that is, out of a plea for help with prayer and out of the praying of Jesus himself. It is not just the good advice Jesus had to offer about praying; it is his praying. In fact, giving his followers this prayer, Jesus, like John, was following a common rabbinic pattern. When a rabbi taught a prayer, he would use it to teach his disciples the most distinctive, concise, essential elements of his own teachings. Thus, disciples would learn to pray as their teacher prayed, and from then on, when a disciple’s prayer was heard, it would sound like that of his teacher’s prayers, bearing his own mark and posture before God.

As this suggests, when Christians pray the Lord’s Prayer today, it is simultaneously an offering of the voice of Jesus, a declaration of belonging to him, and a pronunciation of the lessons he wanted his followers most to learn.

Somewhat different than fishing hooks, the prayer for daily bread is foundational; a literal need. News of world food shortages, urban food deserts, the prevalence of malnourishment, and volatile food prices remind us with repetition that cries for basic provision are appropriate and necessary. Fifteenth century theologian Martin Luther spoke of the prayer for daily bread as the plea for “everything included in the necessities and nourishment for our bodies such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, farm, fields, livestock, money, property, an upright spouse, upright children, upright members of the household, upright and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, decency, honor, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.”(2) In other words, bread is not merely the private concern of those who need something to eat. It is far broader than this, including far more than bread, and far more than isolated individuals before God. Our daily bread is something friends, neighbors, communities, economic situations, and governments affect collectively. Christ’s prayer for daily bread, then, is a prayer for food and clothing, but also for good neighbors, good rulers, and good conscience as we face need and want and hope together.

As such, a prayer for daily bread can be a reminder that we do not live in a vacuum before God or the world. Rather, we live in communities where we are responsible for one another. So if we pray for daily bread, like Jesus, we pray for God’s care and provision. But subsequently, we are praying against the things in life that prevent God’s provisions. This may well be corruption or systems of social injustice; it may also be our own hardened hearts, fearful dispositions, or a self-consumed and consuming living. When our neighbor prays for daily bread, our neighbor prays for our help.

To pray the words Jesus invited us to pray means we pray out of the same paradox in which Jesus prayed himself. He was both the Son who knew he would need the Father’s provision to get through the days before him and the Son who poured out his life for the crowds and individuals that needed him. Praying for daily bread, we are simultaneously the wealthy who can respond in gratitude for all that God has given us and the impoverished who cry out for the daily bread we need and the God who sustains all things. We are both the rich and the poor, united to our neighbors in ways we are constantly invited to imagine. We join ancient ancestors who prayed for physical nourishment in the desert, and with them know that we are still hungry. In difficult days, in plentiful days, the invitation of Christian prayer is the invitation of the Spirit to join in a united cry—”Give us this day our daily bread”—placed before the bread of life who comes to give life to the world.

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

(1) Luke 11:1-4.

(2) Martin Luther, “The Small Catechism,” The Book of Concord, 357.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Indignity of Giving Thanks

November 27, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The spirit of thanksgiving runs against the temptation we face as human beings to assert our self-sufficiency. Few of us enjoy the feeling of indebtedness; a fact easily demonstrated by our oft-unsolicited readiness to return a favor once someone has expressed kindness to us. I owe you one, I will return the favor, and I am in your debt are some of the ways in which we express this attitude. Such responses, together with the more modest one, please let me know what I can do for you, allow us to express gratitude without acknowledging the chronic shadow of dependence that so rudely dogs our entire threescore and ten.

Not only does this inability to express gratitude without our own autonomy stealing the show sometimes rob of us of the joy of affirming the contribution of others to our wellbeing, it also shrivels up our desire to worship God. An unexamined sense of self-sufficiency instills in us a subtle but false attitude of entitlement, thus making it difficult for us to accept the sense of vulnerability that is part of true gratitude. Ever since the tempter said to Adam and Eve in the Garden, “You will be like God,” human beings have never given up the temptation to either elevate ourselves to the level of God or pull God down to our level, so we can deal with God as equals. We are always looking for a chance to say to God, “I can take it from here.”

Such an attitude of entitlement, I believe, occupies a central role in the story of the ten lepers in Luke 17. While all ten are healed by Jesus, only one of them returns to express gratitude. In his editorial comment, Luke informs us that the one who returned to give thanks was a Samaritan, and Jesus refers to him as a foreigner. Undoubtedly, this implies that the other nine were Jews. Could it be that the Jewish lepers felt entitled to the services of this Jewish prophet and their God? If God were to begin to right wrongs in the world, wouldn’t the most logical place to begin be among his own chosen people? Judging by Jesus’s expression of surprise in the passage, it seems the only words one would have expected from the mouths of the nine lepers would have been, “It’s about time!” Without a clear sense of how little we are entitled to, we cannot really come to terms with the need for gratitude—for an attitude of entitlement is an effective impediment to gratitude.

But everything we know about ourselves and our world speaks loudly against this tendency to self-sufficiency. As human babies, we all begin our lives at the highest level of dependence, and none of us really outgrows all degrees of dependence. We depend on parents, teachers, peers, coaches, and others to open doors for us in life. Even in places where commitment to personal autonomy is likely to produce more martyrs than religious conviction, dependence on others is still a living reality whose attempted concealment is gradually unveiled by the onset of old age. From the inventions that give us comfort in this world to the young soldiers who give their lives in the battlefields to protect our livelihoods, an unobstructed view of our lives reveals the fact that we all owe debts that we can never repay. We will never begin to worship God until we recognize that we are bankrupt debtors, for an attitude of gratitude is an indispensable impetus to worship.

Like skilled gourmet chefs spicing up their delicacies, Scripture writers sprinkle their words with admonitions and exaltations regarding gratitude, frequently tying it together with worship. For example, in the midst of a dark catalogue of humanity’s journey away from God, the apostle Paul lays the blame on our unwillingness to glorify God or give thanks to God. Similarly, the author of Hebrews grounds our worship of God in gratitude. He writes, “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe” (Hebrews 12:28). It is impossible to worship God without gratitude, and it is impossible to be grateful while clinging to self-sufficiency and entitlement at the same time. Yes, there is some vulnerability in gratitude sincerely expressed, but that is because we are relational beings whose deepest needs can only be met in partnership with others and ultimately with God. While an attitude of entitlement is an impediment to gratitude, an attitude of gratitude is an indispensable impetus to worship. Show me a person whose life is characterized by gratitude, and I will show you a person whose soul is poised to worship God.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Embodied Song of Lament

November 26, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

A sales receipt long tucked between the pages of a book can tell a story of its own. I am known for using the receipt handed to me at checkout as a bookmark for the purchase I don’t wait long to read. Discovered years later, it often seems like a clue, giving away a snapshot of a former day—the date of the transaction, the location of the store, the other books I bought along with the one I chose to read first. Something more seems to be said about the book itself and the thoughts going through my head at the time—a memoir chosen on a road-trip far from home, a hardback on spirituality acquired during a transition in college majors. It is a glimpse at myself in time, a day in the past speaking to the present one: I was here. I was searching. I was alive.

A receipt fell out of a book I was rereading not too long ago. It was tucked in the pages of a small book depicting the fragmented thoughts of a grieving father. Written by a professor of philosophical theology, Lament for a Son relays the beating heart and exasperated soul of a man forced by a tragic accident to bury his son at 25. The sales receipt that marked the pages furthered the illustration of grief therein. The book was purchased exactly a year after my father died.

There is a language of loss that we share as humans, though many of us need help remembering how to speak it. Rediscovering the memory of sitting in a bookstore on an anniversary that almost seemed offensive, I am struck with this thought. We need the language of lament–not a language that simply tries to transport us elsewhere. We need permission to voice the broken hope within our wary bodies.. We need to know lament is a song we are allowed to sing presently, as is.

In the preface of Lament for a Son, author Nicholas Wolterstorff relays a brief interchange with a friend who told him that he had given copies of the book to all of his children. Confused, Wolterstorff asked why he would want to give away a book of so much despair and pain. “Because it is a love-song,” came the reply. Returning to the preface, the author writes, “Yes, it is a love-song. Every human lament is a love-song.” And then he asks a question that begins not the escape, but the outpouring that is the entire book: “Will love-songs one day no longer be laments?”

I remember a story recounted by a Christian counselor that utters a similar sentiment. A woman who had a history of abuse and a difficult past had been coming for treatment and had been showing signs of healing. Yet one day the woman came in and announced what she felt was another sign of her brokenness that needed to be worked on. She described her recent tendency to cry in the presence of her physician as he showed concern for her as a person with significant health problems. She felt her tears were an indication of something more that needed to be examined.

The counselor immediately thought of the woman in the gospels who responded to Jesus with weeping, even washing his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. Luke writes, “[A]s she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them” (Luke 7:38). Her tears seem at once an expression of life, marking in gratitude the feet of the one who gave voice to the lament within her—in the context of a love-song. The woman in counseling identified immediately with this physical reaction to Christ, eventually learning to see her own tears as a lament of a world that is marked by suffering, and a sign of the God who knows all too well this sting.

The message of a human and wounded Jesus Christ is powerfully relevant to a hurting world. We live before a God who gives us reason to utter the words of loss in the pits of our stomachs, even as we are given the gift a God who physically bore our sorrow. If every human lament is a love-song, Jesus is the embodied hope that God is singing in the midst of it, perhaps at times using our own tears to call us toward his own broken body and the stripes that mercifully, thankfully heal.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Gifts and Giver

November 25, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Over two hundred years ago during the heart of the Methodist revival in England, Christian minister John Wesley recorded his deep reservations about the movement’s ability to sustain itself. Even as thousands and thousands were responding to Christ, he wrote about the inevitable decline and dissolution of this Christian revival. What would prompt his despairing prediction in the throes of revival’s raging fires? His journal records his answer:

“I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore, I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger and love of the world in all its branches.”(1)

Contemporary reports of declining numbers of those who identify as “Christian” and a parallel decline in church attendance seem to affirm Wesley’s worst fears. Indeed, Christian leaders speculate that if current trends continue in England, for example, Methodists will cease to exist in that country in less than thirty years.(2) And while Wesley’s identification of wealth might be only one factor of many that has contributed to a decline in a robust Christianity, the decline has happened and is happening nevertheless. Corroborating the seemingly inverse relationship between wealth and faith, historian Philip Jenkins documents the rapid rise of Christianity in the Global South where material wealth is often much less in comparison to Western nations.(3) In light of Wesley’s fear, it seems reasonable to ask if the growth of Christianity in the Global South is related to relative poverty, and the decline of Christianity in the Global North is related to relative wealth?

Of course, Wesley’s concern was firmly rooted in the teaching ministry of Jesus. Long before Wesley issued his warning, Jesus warned his own followers: “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and riches” (Luke 16:13). Jesus leaves little room for interpretative maneuvering or middle ground. There is always a choice, but one master will prevail.

In fact, Jesus had more to say about money than almost any other subject. Prior to issuing this warning about the inability to serve two masters, he tells a story about a shrewd money manager having to account for his use of money before his very wealthy boss. Initially, he is squandering what has been entrusted to him, and it is his careless ways that prompt the call to account for his use of another’s possessions. He quickly goes and collects a portion of what is owed by those who were in debt to the wealthy owner. And the wealthy owner, even though he does not collect all of what is owed to him, praises this man for his shrewd action.

So how do the hearers and readers of these stories connect a story of commendation for shrewd action on the part of the steward and this warning of not being able to serve two masters? Perhaps it is in the message to utilize resources—regardless of whether or not we feel we are in the relatively wealthy or relatively poor category—in a way that is wise. And what is that wisdom? We are entrusted with gifts and opportunities by someone else. Whether one comes to these stories through the eyes of faith or not, all who work were given a first opportunity, or that first open door by someone else. We might think we are making our own way in the world, but someone has provided an opportunity for us whether directly or indirectly. And that opportunity can be squandered or stewarded. Whatever one might count as personal ‘wealth’ is never something that is possessed, but something that is entrusted for good use in this world.

For Christians, the stewardship of our lives is a gift and a responsibility from God. The temptation to serve the gift, rather than the Giver is ever-present. Wesley’s words are haunting: As riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches. The riches of life, when not viewed from the perspective of a steward can ensnare one in the worst vices. Sadly, as Wesley understood, the very blessing of wealth grown and nourished through frugality and diligence could equally become a curse. Our own individual lives are often microcosms of this struggle. We far too often worship wealth rather than the God who gave it.

For those who live in the United States, the season of Thanksgiving can prompt us to ask: how might rich, Western Christians escape the perils of loving money more than God? The answer is not necessarily in the abolition of wealth, but rather in wealth’s proper stewardship in our world as a blessing for others. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”(4)

John Wesley understood this, and in the spirit of Jesus re-iterates the same idea: “If those who gain all they can, and save all they can, will likewise give all they can, then the more they gain, the more they will grow in grace, and the more treasure they will lay up in heaven.”(5)

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

(1) Cited in an article by Philip Yancey, “Traveling with Wesley” Christianity Today, November 2007, vol 51, No. 11.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

(4) Cited from The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. XV (London: Thomas Cordeux, 1786).

(5) Luke 12:33-34.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Blind or the Liars

November 24, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In Atlanta, the blind are leading the blind, quite literally. In an exhibit that hopes to promote understanding between people with and without eyesight, Dialog in the Dark takes small tour groups through a variety of environments in complete darkness, inviting them to rely on senses they are far less used to trusting. For approximately one hour, visitors are led by visually impaired guides like George Pinon, who has been blind since age 3. Along the way, visitors can ask questions of their visually impaired guide, whose face remains unseen until the end.(1)

Such a scenario challenges every negative connotation associated with this turn of phrase, “the blind leading the blind.” The idiom is, of course, not meant to depict actual visual impairment like Pinon’s, but rather the far more common impairment of insight, knowledge, and vision of reality. Typically, the saying is applied in situations where the person (or people) in charge knows no more than those whom he is leading. The phrase is one used in antiquity, most notably used by Jesus in Matthew 15:14 and Luke 6:39. “Let them alone,” Jesus said of the Pharisees; “they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.”

Like Jesus seems to do of the scribes and Pharisees of his day, the non-religious sometime describe every religious person in such terms. They reason that the anatomy of faith in general promotes a culture of the blind leading the blind. Moreover, Christianity in particular, they argue, is founded on such a blindness. The deluded disciples, blind by their love for Jesus or perhaps simply their need to be right, perpetuated a story that continues to delude the world. In his Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris writes that nonbelievers like himself are thoroughly dumbstruck by the pervasiveness of Christian blindness, by the Christian “denial of tangible reality,” by the suffering these Christians create “in service to religious myths” and their wholehearted “attachment to an imaginary God.”(2)

While blindness to reality is a common accusation among the nonreligious, their accusations typically extend well beyond the charge of blindness. Charles Templeton, for instance, describes the resurrection story as a fable put forward by followers hoping to keep the dream alive. He insists that resurrection is first of all implausible, and that the story must be false because there are no secular histories which mention it. What’s more, he describes the discrepancies within the gospel accounts themselves as evidence of dishonesty or tampering of the storyline. Like many, he ends with the sharp conclusion that though Christians embrace it with blind eyes: “The entire resurrection story is not credible.”(3) In such a scenario, however, it would be far more accurate to accuse Christians of being “the deluded following the liars” than “the blind following the blind.”

In fact, I think most Christians would vigorously agree that the resurrection is indeed unfathomable. In the same way that Mary and Joseph understood that pregnancy among the virginal does not make sense, the resurrection flies in the face of what we know to be true of dead bodies: they do not rise. On this point, no one is blind. If by some way a body did happen to rise, it would have been a miracle unparalleled in history. On these details, I think most Christians and atheists can, in fact, agree!

But the claim that resurrection is implausible cannot be accurately bolstered by the claim that secular histories make no mention of it. Secular writers of the time, including Pliny, Josephus, and the Roman historian Tacitus, in fact affirm the biblical accounts in matters of historic detail. Christ’s life, his reported miracles, his sentence under the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, his crucifixion, and his reported resurrection are all well documented by the historians of the era. Templeton’s insistence that a miracle of resurrection proportions would have convinced the entire population in a matter of hours is optimistic at best; there are far too many who prefer to watch from afar or to keep their eyes closed entirely.

Further, the oft-mentioned claim of discrepancies in the biblical accounts of the resurrection story cannot be used to logically discount the story itself. First, error must not be confused with imprecision. It makes sense that Paul mentions men as the first witnesses of the risen Christ because in that historical context women (who are named as the first witnesses in other accounts) were not considered valid witnesses. Second, falsity must not be confused with perspective. The minimal differences between the gospel accounts actually assure there was legitimate conveying of perspective going on and not simply a memorized story they needed to keep straight.

Finally, the theory that the story was conjured up by disciples who simply believed what they wanted to believe is not quite plausible. If the disciples had agreed to propagate a story, it serves to follow that they would have known to conceive something far less remarkable, a story that would accommodate the arguments they would undoubtedly face. With even the slightest bit of intelligence, one could see the claim that Jesus had only “spiritually” or “figuratively” risen again could not be proven false by antagonists. Furthermore, when standing up for these falsified claims was a matter of life or death, it seems likely that at least one of them would have buckled; far more likely than an entire group—and many others—being willing to die for a lie. A far cry from “the blind leading the blind,” such a scenario would call for “the liars following the liars.”

On the contrary, the disciples took the dangerous and difficult road—the inconceivable road—and they went to great lengths to proclaim it. Unlike those who might call them “blind” for conceding to the unfathomable, I find it far more difficult to examine the bigger picture and yet refuse to see.

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

(1) Elizabeth Landau, “Being blind, ‘You Have to Be Adventurous,’” http://CNN.com, May 12, 2009, accessed May 12, 2009.

(2) Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 91.

(3) Charles Templeton, Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996), 122.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What’s the fuss about Zeitgeist?

November 22, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Questions and Answers seeks to address today’s frequently asked apologetic and theological questions. RZIM staff writers will present resources for further study, and concise responses for specific questions. RZIM envisions Questions and Answers as a first step in pursuing further study, resources, and responses to many challenging questions concerning the Christian faith.

Zeitgeist, The Movie is one of the latest installments of internet media out to debunk Christianity. Zeitgeist has created a furor with over one million viewers tuning in on Google. The movie claims that Christianity is simply one among many of the “dying god” myths.

In addition, the book Shattering the Christ Myth deals specifically with the “dying god” myths on which Zeitgeist is based. An online apologetics site, Tektonics, provides additional bibliographic resources for further study, as well.

With regards to the claim that all religious systems essentially believe the same thing or have the same origin, one simply needs to examine world religions to know that is not true. World religions make very different claims about the nature of reality, why we are here, where we are going, and what is the nature of all the evil in the world. For a comprehensive look at World Religions, you may want to take a look at any or all of the following resources:

Winfried Corduan, Neighboring Faiths (InterVarsity Press).
2. Dean Halverson, Compact Guide to World Religions (Bethany House).
3. Stephen Neill, The Christian Faith and Other Faiths (InterVarsity Press)
4. Harold Netland, Dissonant Voices (Eerdmans)

Finally, if you want to explore more, some have found Nicholas Perrin’s book, Lost In Transmission: What We Can and Cannot Know about the Words of Jesus, to be a helpful resource. Perrin discusses the “Christ myths,” and provides an excellent defense of the New Testament as a trustworthy and reliable source for knowing the real Jesus.

An excellent critique of the Zeitgeist movie can be found on Dr. John Stackhouse’s blog and at the Centre for Public Christianity

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Tag Archives: Zacharias

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Earthbound

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Both Near and Far from Home

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Face for the Faceless

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Breaking In

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Like a Thief

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Where God Is

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Season of Enough

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Courage to Wait

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Being Home

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Prayer for Bread

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Indignity of Giving Thanks

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Embodied Song of Lament

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Gifts and Giver

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Blind or the Liars

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What’s the fuss about Zeitgeist?

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