Is it just me?????

There is something exceedingly irritating about seeing a President get off of a helicopter coddling his pampered and expensively groomed dog and smiling while the economy tanks. I sure hope the President-elect doesn’t fall into the Zha Zha Gabor mode. Sorry, but I just had to write this. It’s not an image that communicates identification with people who are having to put their pets in shelters because they no longer have a home.

Insane for the light – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
Because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling come over you
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and  a desire for higher love-making
seeips you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

The night no one came to prayer meeting

John Piper’s recent email message is titled “Read Jack.” Jack, now deceased, was my professor at Westminster Theological Seminary. He was an evangelist like none I have ever known. He did not have an evangelistic pesonality (you know the type!!), nor was he in any way an extrovert. He was a man who had encountered grace.

Jack’s venture into evangelism began when he was a “failed” pastor. He spoke often of the night no one showed up for prayer meeting. That was the night he finally faced the reality of his ministry – powerless. He made a big decision. He was going to face head on whether or not the gospel had a coverting power. As he told the story, he decided to choose a group of people whom he considered least likely to respond to the gospel and target that group with the message of grace through Christ. He chose a motorcycle gang!!! Imagine – an aging suburban pastor  in a small church who had a PhD in English literature seeking to make Christ known among leather jackets and chains. Jack was out of place, but the gospel had found a home. And conversions multiplied.

Jack was one of the few men who taught evangelism in whom I felt the deepness of converting grace. The gospel was no three, four or five point outline. It was an encounter with the grace of Jesus through the Bible. Jack was a Calvinist. He never backed off the hard truths of predestination, election, limited atonement, etc. In fact, those truths were part of his evangelistic encounters. He was not a salesman pushing a product but a weak man who had found mercy and forgiveness and deeply believed that God was most glorified by the “hard cases” coming to Christ. Let the suburban church have the rich, the satisfied, the stable, the solid citizens. Jack, pastoring a church in the suburbs, built a ministry on his belief that the church should be filled with those who had run out of worldly hope. One of his favorite slogans was “ardor before order.” Churches are very good at constitutions, by-laws and Roberts Rule of Order. But there is no fire. Fire, first!!!!

Jack wrote a book that Piper does not refer to titled “Come Home, Barbara.” It is a book for parents whose child has strayed far from God and from home. It is a retracing of his child’s return to grace. The book is a dialogue between herself and her parents looking back on the years of wandering and how they each saw what was going on and how they viewed one another. It is a book I always recommend to parents whose hearts have been broken by prodigal sons and daughters.

So I agree with Piper. Read Jack. I got to do one better than that. Jack was a friend.