India calls

Here is the latest instalment in my Chronicles of Faith series.  The story starts a long time ago and involves a lot of miracles. If you’re interested, read on! I went to England in 1977 to do a PhD in New Testament studies at Durham University. One of the first friends I made there was a guy called Richard Peach. Richard and I used to have heated theological arguments. They often infuriated me because even though he was a school teacher, not a theologian, he was often right and I was wrong. Richard had an unbending sense of call to India. When he finished his studies, he was hired as a teacher at a school for missionary children in a place called Ootacamund in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. One of the last things I recall him saying was this: “God has called me to India. I don’t care if I ever see England again.” The fact is, he never did. One day Richard took a group of children from the school out swimming and in the process he was caught up in the river current and tragically drowned. When the news reached Durham, many of us grieved. Why would God take such a young life so full of commitment and promise? But God encountered me in the midst of it with a word, and the word was this: one day I also would go to India and do what Richard wanted so badly to do -- to share Christ with the Indian people.

The years went past. I returned to Canada from England. Every time I heard someone talking about India, my ears pricked up. But nothing happened. Until the day a friend in Canada told me he had an Indian leader coming to visit his church, and would I be interested in having him to speak. He casually dropped into the conversation that he had been to India to visit this man and they had visited a small town in south India called.... Ootacamund. Of all the hundreds of thousands of towns and villages in India, this was the one he mentioned. Immediately I knew this was my doorway to India.

And so John Babu, the great apostolic leader of Andhra Pradesh, walked into my life. I use “apostolic” in its simple Biblical form, as function, not title. John extended the boundaries of the kingdom into the regions beyond and the regions unknown, and he did so by the love of God, and by undeniable signs and wonders. Let me tell his story as he told it to me.

John Babu was one of a small group of national security advisors to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. His self-description as a policeman was a gracious understatement. John was a non-practicising Hindu. He drank a lot. He beat his wife up most days. He was not a great dad to his eight children. But he was good at his job. One day his doctor told him he had damaged his liver so badly he had only four months to live.  Distraught, John visited a nearby Hindu temple to plead with the gods. Once inside, he heard an audible voice saying these words, “I am the god you are looking for. My name is Jesus Christ.” The voice instructed him to leave the temple immediately. Stunned and trembling, he sat down on a bench outside. The voice continued to address him. He heard that if he died, his fate would be to be thrown into a lake of fire. He saw the lake in front of his eyes and was terrified. But, the voice continued, if he put his trust in the one who was speaking to him, he would be saved. John immediately surrendered his life to a god he did not know. The Holy Spirit took hold of him. Immediately, he went home to tell his family what had happened. His oldest son later told me it was the first time his dad had not come home and beat somebody up. He was a visibly changed man. As he shared what had happened, his wife Anna and all eight children put their trust in Christ. The next time he visited his doctor, he was told he was completely healed.

But this was only the beginning of the story. A few months later, Jesus spoke again to John. He was to leave the police, move to a town called Armoor and start a church. John obeyed the Lord. He left all his earthly security, his position which gave him many advantages in the city and state, and his government salary and pension. Armoor was the place he had previously gone to arrest Hindu militants, and John was not popular there. He was sold a plot of land with a tin shack in the middle of it. John, Anna and their eight kids took up residence in the middle of what turned out to be a cobra-infested swamp. The militants who sold him the land expected him and his family to perish. But instead, they prayed the cobras out. The locals expected the entire family to die and were perplexed when nothing happened to them (read Acts 28:1-6 for a similar story!).  Before long, a thriving church existed.... with no fewer than two thousand people converted to Christ. John began to travel from town to town and village to village, eventually establishing several hundred congregations throughout the state of Andhra Pradesh.

In his life, John saw six people raised from the dead. I don’t know if the following incident counted as one of the six, as John was not physically present when it happened. Let me tell you a story that would be unbelievable if it were not demonstrably true as it was witnessed by hundreds of people. As the churches grew, outreaches were established not only in the larger towns but also the smaller villages. Andhra Pradesh had a population of over eighty million people and had thousands of towns and villages as well as larger cities such as Hyderabad. A high-caste (Brahmin) Hindu lady died in a village a small group had been started in. The omens were consulted and the cremation was set for the time determined to be the most auspicious for the best hope of a higher form of reincarnation. As the funeral pyre was about to be set alight, the Hindu priest halted the proceedings. In a mocking voice, he said Christians had come to the area and claimed to have a god who could raise the dead. He ordered the small group leader to be brought to the ceremony. “Now we will see,” he declared to the man in front of the assembled crowd, “what your god can do.” Trembling with fear, this ordinary believer held out his hands over the pyre and called out to the Lord for help. The woman lying dead on the pyre was physically resurrected. And no, she was not in a coma, nor had the doctor made a mistake. She had been dead for many hours, and her body was decomposing in the Indian heat. As she rose from the dead, panic spread throughout the crowd of hundreds who eye-witnessed the event. The small group leader began to preach Christ. Half the crowd became Christians, the other half fled in terror.

But the most amazing part of the story is this. When later they asked the lady what had happened to her, this is what she said. She recalled experiencing darkness, but into the darkness stepped a man. The man was dressed in clothes so white they were blinding. As he held out his hands over her, she noticed he had bleeding wounds in both wrists. Then she woke up. But a strange thing occurred. There was another man standing in exactly the same position as the first man. His hands also were stretched out over her in exactly the same way. But his clothes were ordinary and there were no wounds in his wrist. That man was the small group leader.

The militant high-caste Hindus put out the equivalent of a contract on the lady. Her response? “I’m not afraid of death. I’ve already died once!” Many many hundreds of people came to Christ because of her testimony.

How often do we realize that we stand in the place of Christ? That ordinary man represented Christ in a way even he had no concept of. Christ, in one sense, is made flesh in us. An army of theologians trying to explain how Christ is made real in his many-membered body, the church, could not have come up with anything so closely approaching the truth as is illustrated in the experience of this humble, (to us) nameless, and probably illiterate Indian brother.

Have I got your attention? Then read the next instalment!

The real meaning of discipleship

What did Jesus mean when he talked about discipleship?  That was a question the "discipleship movement" of the 1970s sought to answer. In general, the body of Christ, at least on the North American continent, moved on without listening much. But in the New Testament, the word "disciple" is used about 250 times, and mostly in connection with following Jesus, so it's obviously a very important concept. My suggestion is we can't really understand what it means to follow Jesus without understanding more about discipleship than we often do. It was a common practice for educated and well-connected Jewish men to become disciples of leading Rabbis, which in turn would lead to them assuming the same role toward others. They would take in his teaching and pass it on to others. Such a position would be financially and socially rewarding. So when Jesus appeared on the scene, the most natural way people had of understanding him was as a Rabbi, and those following him would become his disciples.

But from the beginning, Jesus changed the entire meaning of discipleship. A fundamental characteristic of New Testament discipleship is that Jesus called the disciples to himself, whereas in Judaism a disciple decided which teacher he was going to follow. Neither were there any particular qualifications (social or educational) needed, other than the willingness to follow Jesus. That is why Jesus called tax gatherers and sinners to be his disciples, and scandalized the religious establishment in the process. And as to earthly benefits, there were certainly few of them involved in following Jesus! The commitment of his followers was to the person of Jesus, whereas in Judaism it was to the teaching of the Rabbi. With Jesus, a person follows his teaching only because he has encountered his person.

People tried to understand Jesus' teaching, but without understanding  who he was or being willing to follow him. That's why even learned teachers could not get what Jesus was saying -- look at the Pharisees or even Nicodemus. In Christian discipleship, the Word of God becomes powerful in someone's life only to the extent that they are willing to follow Jesus in personal commitment. If you try to follow Jesus' teaching without knowing him personally, you will wind up either in utter failure or in legalistic hypocrisy. In Judaism, the relationship of disciple to teacher was determined by the teaching, so that someone would follow a particular Rabbi in order to get his teaching or interpretation of the Bible more than a heart knowledge of God. But without a heart knowledge of God, even the most learned theologian will never understand the Bible or the God who inspired it. And this led directly to the Pharisaical legalism that nailed Jesus to the cross. But the people who followed Jesus did so simply because they were committed to him as a person and to whom they understood him to be.

Discipleship is not about knowledge of doctrine, but about faith in a person. Doctrine (a right understanding of the Bible) is important, but it is birthed in an encounter with Jesus and a revelation from God as to who Jesus is. In Judaism, a disciple's obedience was limited to agreement with the Rabbi's teaching. By contrast, Jesus' disciples are called to obey him in every part of their lives. There is nothing in the life of a disciple independent of Jesus. Everything we have and are is drawn into fellowship with him. But the way of Jesus leads to the cross, and so we also are drawn into the path of sacrifice and suffering with him. Maybe that's why the discipleship movement didn't gain many converts!

The bottom line is this: the reason we often fail to reproduce New Testament Christianity in our culture has something to do with the fact we equally fail to understand the meaning of New Testament discipleship. It's a thought to ponder.

The power of praise

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:46). So opens one of the greatest expressions of thanksgiving recorded in the Bible. Yet it was spoken by a woman whose circumstances were far from ideal. Mary was living in an enormous tension. She was an unwed woman who was pregnant. Her fiance Joseph had contemplated canceling the wedding, and was only stopped by a dream. The comments of the legalistic religious community they were part of must have been intolerable to bear. She was a woman who had done nothing wrong, a woman with a story no one would believe, a woman in disgrace. And in disgrace for the sole reason that she had obeyed God. She had allowed herself to become the handmaiden of the Lord (Luke 1:38). Elizabeth identifies the one and only thing that kept Mary: she had believed what God had spoken to her (verse 45). No matter what the circumstance or crisis, the way to victory is to believe what God has spoken.

God often calls us to believe him in spite of the circumstances. Otherwise faith would hardly be faith! A sad thing sometimes happens when Christians take bold actions of obedient faith: their fellow believers desert them at the very moment they most desperately need their help. Those who do not walk in a deep and abandoned relationship with the Lord will never understand the motivations and actions of radically committed believers. The hardest thing can be to feel alone even among our fellow Christians. But God does help us by sending those who will stand with us, people who also believe what God has said. Surround yourself with people like that. You may need them some day! Mary had Elizabeth even if she had no one else. Elizabeth and Mary were both women who had experienced the supernatural power of God. We need to find people on the same wavelength, people who believe God as we do, people who are on the same page as we are.

Mary’s response to God was, I think, amazing. She did not complain.  She did not ask God why he had done this to her.  We forget how desperate her position was because we have the advantage of hindsight. We know how  how the story turns out. But she did not! At that point, she was in a place of great pressure and enormous need of faith. And by faith, she found the ability to see the present from the perspective of the future -- from God’s perspective. Faith enables us to see beyond the difficulties of the present to the promises of the future.

And so her response to her suffering, as recorded in the verse I quoted at the beginning, was to exalt the Lord -- and it was, as the Greek word aggaliaso indicates, a wild, unrestrained rejoicing!  Mary's response to trial and difficulty was not the first response I usually come up with.  Her response was praise. “In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thess. 5:16). There is power in praise. Praise is not just an emotional response. Praise is an act of our spirit in which we reach deep down into our innermost being where the Spirit of God indwells us to ask God for the resources to release in us an attitude of thanksgiving we could never produce in ourselves. The praise we release toward God can only originate in God.

The decision to offer praise in the midst of suffering releases in us the energy of the Holy Spirit. Somehow, we begin to know deep in our "knower" that even in our present suffering the sovereign refining and loving power of God is at work. Somehow, we know he will keep us. Somehow, we know that suffering that comes as a result of obedience always results in the advance of the kingdom and the manifestation of the glory of God. How and when that happens we must release to God. But happen it will, for God will have his way. Somehow, we know that in the end it will all be worth it.

In the meantime our job, no matter how challenging the circumstances are, is to follow in Mary's footsteps. At a very hard time in his life, David gave you and I an invitation we should be quick to accept: "Oh magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together!" (Ps. 34:3).

Changing history through prayer

When I graduated from seminary in Toronto in 1977, God spoke clearly to me about going to England. The immediate purpose was to do a PhD in New Testament studies, but I knew there was more to it than that. The “more than that” turned out to be more than I thought. This is how it happened. For two years, I worked with students in Durham University in northern England, as well as with my local church while working on my degree. The third and final year of my funding approached, and I was faced with a choice. What was I to do and where was I to go if God wanted me to stay in the United Kingdom?

At the same time, I made a good but sometimes annoying friend -- the kind of friend who, like the widow in Jesus’ parable, pesters her opponent until she gets what she wants. The “widow” in my case came in an unlikely form, a very proper upper class English gentleman called Robert Ward. Robert’s “problem” was he was convinced of the need to rise early and seek God. His early morning prayers occasionally aroused some resentment among the slumbering theological students in adjacent rooms, but he persisted.

Robert got the idea that we should start an early morning prayer meeting on the university campus, and furthermore, that he and I should lead it. That presented a problem for me, as sometimes I didn’t go to bed much before Robert got up! The fact is, and I admit it, I hated getting up in the morning.

But Robert had a plan. I needed a ride from Durham to London, and he was heading that way with space to spare. Once I was aboard, I became captive to a four hour harangue on the necessity of early rising if one was to be in right relationship with the Lord, and that an early morning prayer meeting had to be established, and that he and I had to do it. Like the unjust judge in the parable, I relented. Did I mention that Robert had previously been enjoying his profession as a barrister (a British term for top lawyer!) in London? Now he was also judge and jury. I was placed on the stand, cross-examined, convicted and thrown into the prison of early rising.

At the beginning of the next academic year, we received permission to use the thousand year old Norman chapel deep in the bowels of Durham Castle. It was completely sound proof, and we could pray and sing as loud as we wanted as early as we wanted. What happened astounded me. Within a short time, we had so many young men and women crowding into our meeting at 7 am every morning to seek the face of God, we had to find a second location in another college. The meetings continued six days a week for the entire academic year, with an average of 100 students attending. Many were converted as a result of the change in these students’ lives. God did miracles.

And in the midst of it, something else happened. I began to fast and pray about my own future. And he spoke to me words that changed my life: “I am calling you to stay in this city and found a church.” I can still remember exactly where I was that day in January 1980, when I heard the voice of God so clearly it was like another person speaking to me. What happened after that is another story in itself. Suffice to say that nine months later, Emmanuel Church Durham was born. In the years since, churches all over the world have been planted directly and indirectly from that base. Thousands have come to Christ. Leaders of stature have been raised up. All I did was plant the seed. Through many others, God brought the harvest. I am privileged to visit Emmanuel every year. It is still a dynamic church, for many years led by my good friend Alan Bell, winning people of all types and ages to Christ, and a vital witness in one of the great university cities of England. As this is being written, it is planting out another church just a few miles down the road.  And what about Robert Ward?  He went on to plant a pioneering church called St Luke's at the edge of the university campus in the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where prayer is still a prominent part of all that is happening there.

Have you got the important point in all this? History is changed when men and women begin to seek God. I saw that when I visited the Outer Hebrides (again with Robert, and a second time with Elaine). I heard how a small group of Presbyterian folk sought God through the night hours and vowed to stay in his presence till he brought revival, which he did. I have never felt the presence of God more in a geographical location than I felt it there. The agenda of every prayer meeting and church service we attended included beseeching God to send revival again.

Anything can happen when you begin to pray. Prayer is the most important thing a Christian can do. It is more effective than a thousand ministry programs or strategies. It is the lifeblood of the church. That is the testimony God gave me in 1980, and he hasn’t changed his ways since. The most effective way you can change history is the same way I did.  Pray. Why don’t you try it?

Understanding suffering

James tells us that we are to count it all joy when we encounter trials (James 1:2). Trials are things which put us to the test. By testing us, they bring out what is in us, for better or for worse. We could put it this way: Pressure reveals the person. Trials may be difficulties which come from outside, such as the persecution James’ own readers were probably facing, or they may come from our own inner struggles. The trials he goes on to refer to in verses 2-4 (where the testing of our faith produces endurance) are the first kind, whereas the trials (or “temptations”) of verses 13-15 are the second. Both kinds of trials occur when negative occurrences encounter our weak and imperfect human nature.

This raises some serious questions. For instance, where do trials come from?  James answers by way of a negative. They are not directly from God, he says.  God is the author of every good and perfect gift (1:17).  Sickness and suffering were never in the purpose of God when he placed his creation in the garden. They came as a result of our rejection of God. Our lives and the creation we live in came under a curse from that moment. The curse is lifted in Christ insofar as it pertains to our condemnation as sinners (Galatians 3:13; Romans 8:1), yet both we ourselves and the creation we live in still groan in the reality of the fallenness of this present world (Romans 8:18-23). Trials, in whatever form they come, are a sign of the continuing disorder in the creation. Suffering hits indiscriminately. Jesus said the people on whom the tower of Siloam fell were no more sinful than anyone else (  ). God promises to keep us spiritually in the midst of trial. If we choose to sin, to course, we can bring trouble on ourselves. Smoking causes lung cancer. Yet there are countless people struck by cancer who love the Lord with all their heart. Trials are like nuclear fallout -- they affect everyone. The plagues of Revelation represent the judgments of God on this fallen world throughout the church age, from Christ's resurrection until his return. Christians, along with unbelievers, suffer as a consequence, yet only Christians are spiritually protected in the midst of them. Part of our joy in suffering is the realization that this life is only the doorway to an eternity in God's presence.

But a second question arises. Are trials simply indiscriminate and without meaning? To this the answer is No, certainly for the faithful Christian. James says we are to find joy in affliction because affliction kicks off a process which leads to the perfection of our faith (James 1:2-4). Paul says the same thing. We rejoice in our sufferings, because suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character and character produces hope (Romans 5:3-4). For the unbeliever, affliction becomes a cause of despair, but for the Christian, it leads on to hope. Why? Because God has always has a plan to bring good out of evil and to use everything in a positive, redemptive manner. His ways are always constructive and never destructive. God has the capacity to take the worst possible thing and still bring good out of it. What is wrong is wrong and what is evil and evil, but God can bring good out of anything. Trial in the life of the Christian is often intended to remove the false and unreliable supports of this world. This process can be painful, but in return we gain something far better: the true support that comes with the presence and comfort of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

What should our response to suffering and trial be? We aren't called to rejoice because of the suffering itself. We are called to rejoice because God has a plan to turn our suffering into joy, and in the process draw us closer to himself.  But to see this happen, we must work with Him and not against him. Blaming God is the road to death. Ultimately we have only ourselves and our corporate sin in Adam to blame for any trial. The nuclear fallout of sin may have hit you harder than the next person, and that does not make you any worse than they are. It simply means you still live in a fallen world. But remember this. God himself endured the greatest suffering in all of history in the sending and the death of his Son. Through that suffering, God produced the greatest good -- our eternal salvation.

The fact is God has kept all of us through many difficult circumstances. He has not abandoned us. We have grown through them. I regularly ask people if they have grown spiritually the most in times of suffering or times of ease. The answer is always the same. He who has kept us will bring us safely to his heavenly kingdom, and then our joy will indeed be full.