Dear Cell, yesterday’s discussion was about false beliefs about our faith. We have selected a few of them for discussion and these false and toxic beliefs were taken from the book, Toxic Faith, by prolific author and founder of the New Life Ministries, Stephen Arterburn, and ordained minister, Jack Felton.
Here are just a few that we had discussed in the presence of Pastor Sam yesterday.
1) God uses only spiritual giants. We know this is far from the truth. Many great evangelists and Christian revivalists were largely unknown during their days before they attained “celebrity status” for doing great things for God. In the Bible, Joseph and Moses were nobody before they became somebody: one became the second in command in Pharaoh’s empire and the other became the revered leader of the Jewish nation. Boyish David was tending to sheep before he became royalty and Joshua was a humble assistant before he led the people of God into the Promised Land.
So, if we take spiritual giants to mean people like Martin Luther King, John Wesley and Billy Graham as we know them today, then this is clearly not God’s modus operandi. But if spiritual giants refer to a surrendered heart or a heart that pants after God’s, then the equation changes quite a fair bit. Unlike us, God sees the heart. He deals with the issue that matters. It is the heart that springs forth the tissues and issues of life. The path to greatness starts with the heart.
In God’s vernacular, spiritual giants are not defined by how well they are known (fame) or how big their fan-base is (popularity). Neither are they defined by their possession (wealth) nor their circle of influence (power). These are merely the effects or results of a man or woman who surrenders to God wholeheartedly. They don’t define him or her. Peter was a common fisherman when Jesus chose him. He was clearly a nobody and later even demonstrated cowardice by thrice denying Christ. In fact, the famous writer, Umberto Eco once wrote, “The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.”
One comedian, Jason Alexander, of the Seinfeld fame was asked to give a commencement address at Boston University’s School of Arts and this was what he had to say – and it is rather insightful and illuminating:-
“I am famous. That is a large part of why I was asked to speak here today…It is a large part of the reason I received an honorary doctorate today when in fact I don’t even have a bachelor’s degree – because I’m famous. I would like to think that it’s also because I’m pretty good guy, and I’m passionate about my craft and my business, but it’s not. It’s because I’m famous, and the funny thing is that my fame is a complete accident…Fame, this thing that I have, is very rare, very strange, and very meaningless. It’s a poor measure of success…Look beyond the veneer of what you consider success, I would like you to try to focus now and for the rest of your lives not on glory, but on greatness.”
There you have it, words to live by, “focus now and for the rest of your lives not on glory (fame), but on greatness.” In this post-modern world (a world where truth is no truer than what the next celebrity says it is), greatness is defined as being as popular as possible. Your greatness barometer is determined by your popularity. But in God’s world, greatness is class of a different measure. No doubt, greatness is invariably to be known by others. But this recognition comes first from one and not thousands or millions like the insufferable fame of the late Michael Jackson. This recognition invariably comes from God.
To be known by Him and to know Him is the power of greatness personified. Beloved, in your life, seek after that which cannot disappoint and when you find it, you will have come face to face with greatness embodied in our Creator; such greatness is beyond corruption and disillusionment. Let these words from Job 29:2-3 minister to your heart, “Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me; when his lamp shone upon my head, and by his light I walked through darkness.”
2) Having true faith means waiting for God to help me and doing nothing until he does. This is clearly a false belief in our faith. I know the Bible tells us to wait upon the Lord and He shall renew our strength. But this waiting is active waiting. It is not passive. We are called to put our faith into action and doing nothing is a direct affront to this calling. On this, Stephen Arterburn wrote, “Sometimes we wait for God to do what God is waiting for us to do.” We know that faith without deed is dead. Faith does not sit on its hands and wait for manna to fall from the sky. Faith is in fact reason gone courageous. It pushes us to act on what we profess and believe in and only by doing so can we live out an overcomer’s life.
Eugene Peterson puts it this way in his book, Traveling Light, “The word Christian means different things to different people. To one person it means a stiff, upright, inflexible way of life, colorless and unbending. To another, it means a risky, surprise-filled venture, lived tiptoe at the edge of expectation…If we get our information from biblical material, there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.”
Are we missing anything here? Is our Christian walk a geriatric one, arthritic and annoyingly painful? Are our Christian walk just that…a slow, grinding walk, burdensome and weary-filled? Or is it a dance of joy, leaping from one adventure to another, climbing cliffs and surmounting obstacles life or nature throws at us? Beloved, the Christian apologist and writer, Lee Strobel, once wrote, “Simply put, our role is this: to be ready and willing – because God is always able.” Are we ready and willing? Because if the equation is merely for us to be ready and willing to take the plunge with God in faith, God will fulfill His side of the bargain and enable us to work through our problems and personal crisis and come out of them renewed and victorious.
But here’s the catch.
Don’t expect the road to be easy, smooth and straight. Like what Mark said in our cell, trials should, in the eyes of faith, be seen as our ally, not our foe. This is of course easier said than done. But truth is often taken like bitter medicine; it’s hard to swallow at first but its beneficial effects come later. Going through trials, or bad times, sometimes with no end in sight, is indeed both nerve- and faith-wrecking. When we are in the dark tunnel of life, the claustrophobic fear and dread of failure, disappointment and disillusionment always conspire to sink us deeper into depression and hopelessness.
At our lowest point, Jesus weeps with us just like he wept with Mary and Martha for Lazarus. Jesus of course knew that the end would be one celebrative and joyous reunion when he would eventually raise Lazarus from his grave. But, despite this future warranty, Jesus still wept with Mary and Martha. Beloved,
I think Jesus has an important message here.
I think Jesus is telling us that trials and sorrow are inevitable. Pain and disappointments are unavoidable. And they cannot be truncated or cut short. But where there are trials and sorrow, pain and disappointment, there is also a comfort that is readily available from a God that is readily reachable. I think Jesus is trying to tell us that grief has a trusted companion and that companion is God. And because God is our comfort and shelter in times of personal crisis, we can rest assured that, like Lazarus, we will see our deliverance in due course.
Beloved, through all our personal anguish and crisis, our greatest enemy is not the cause of our affliction, be it ourselves or the devil. It is, in fact, time. If we hold on to our faith and hope, and brave through each moment of pain, resting in the comfort of God’s compassion and strength, we will inevitable come out of it stronger with a renewed perspective of life. Jesus is telling us to work through our grief and instead of being changed by it for the worse, we become better as a result.
Beloved, God sees what we do not yet see. In the dark tunnel of life, God sees the end of it when the end is hidden from us. God also sees something we sometimes refuse to see. God sees our potential to overcome it. Believe it or not, in times of grief, we often underestimate our potential. Because of doubts and disillusionment, we only see the hopelessness in the situation and our disability in relation to it. We are blindsided by pain and anger to see trials as opportunity for growth.
Let me ask you: Can you count the number of seeds in a fruit? I am sure you can. But, can you count the number of fruits in a seed? Well, that is a feat in the realm of pure speculation. We cannot count the number of fruits in a seed. But God can. And if we plunge our roots deep in God’s fertile soil of faith, we can blossom in a personal crisis and not be defeated by it. I believe that there is an immeasurable, mysterious power of faith in a hope that endures with time and this hope is in a God that fails us not. And our focus should always be on this hope because this hope will ultimately carry us through life’s most trying times. Beloved, in our personal crisis, we only need to ask ourselves this question; “Is our God big enough?” If He is, then please step aside and let Him do His job.
3) Lastly, God will find me a perfect mate. This false belief carries a cryptic message regarding our marital relationships. In order to decipher it, we must first accept that God is not a divine matchmaker. God’s role in your search for a life partner is not to deliver to your door step a catalogue of potentially flawless candidates with outstanding virtues or qualities for your cherry picking. The truth is, we will never find a perfect mate; because the one and only good catch had risen two thousand years ago! What is therefore left on earth are “works in progress”.
I believe that the secret to a good and lasting marriage, at least one of them, is to focus not on perfection but on the relationship. The key thus is for us to work on our relationship and not on expecting the sky from our spouse. Don’t be surprise to find that each of us brings into our marriage more flaws than “perfection” or idealism. I am sure that by now this fact is patently clear to most of you guys.
Most of us do not marry into perfection. We don’t even settle for second best. We marry into imperfection and it is multiplied manifold when two imperfect lives are joined as one. We therefore have to work on our relationship and we do so by managing our expectations.
I have learned this the hard way. I have written about our marital relationship to you guys on numerous occasions. I have even told you some of our misadventures together as a couple of nearly ten years. These are of course private revelations entrusted to you guys as a lesson in managing expectations in a sometimes rocky relationship. I have my flaws, sometimes too many to enumerate. Anna has hers. But all these years, our differences (or imperfections) have not kept us apart. It has in fact, and quite magically, kept us even closer.
This brings me to what I had read this week about the marital struggles and victories of this lovely and wonderful couple whose first name would sound off alarm bells in the religious circle. They are Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgewood. I know Charles Darwin is a controversial figure. But if we divorce him from his theory of evolution and just focus on his love life with his wife, Emma, we will be able to see a life not at all different from ours and sometimes even more encouraging and inspiring than we can imagine.
The book is entitled Charles and Emma – the Darwins’ Leap of Faith, by Deborah Heiligman. This is a very personal book with a heartwarming narration of how Charles and Emma overcame personal differences and imperfections to build a love affair that lasted until their deaths.
Their marriage endured many deaths and heartaches. They married on 29 January 1839 and their marriage lasted for more than forty years when Charles passed away in 1882 and Emma in 1896. By any conventional standards, this is a very long marriage and a very loving one. What so admirable about their marriage is that they were far from being “peas in the same pod”.
You see, Emma, was a staunch believer, a Christian. She attended Church regularly and made sure her children attended with her. Her favorite passage in the Bible is in John thirteen when Jesus bade farewell to his disciples by washing their feet. It was an act of great love, devotion and humility that touched Emma deeply.
However, thanks to his groundbreaking book, The Origin of Species, Charles was the direct opposite. Of course, Charles did not start out as an agnostic (someone who held no belief in God’s existence because his existence cannot be proved). He had in fact attended Cambridge to study theology. But along the way, in his famous Beagle voyages, he turned away from the faith.
You would expect such fundamental differences to have wrecked a perfectly sound marital partnership. But on the contrary, their love grew by leaps and bounds despite of it. Reading about their lives together, you sense the mental and emotional tension between them due to their different beliefs with Emma praying for her husband to experience a change of mind and Charles trying hard to avoid the subject as a result of his undying devotion to his beloved wife.
If anything, despite her beliefs in God and heaven, all of Charles’ books, including the Origin of Species, were edited by Emma. She commented, critiqued and amended them. She corrected his grammar and spellings, which was to her atrocious. She rewrote awkward sentences and talked it through with him so that he could write them in a more lucid manner.
Imagine this paradoxical irony in the eyes of a Christian fundamentalist: a firm believer in the Bible helping Charles Darwin to write a book that directly attacks it. But however wide their differences in this area, their love for each other were never threatened.
In fact, it thrived because of it. It even thrived notwithstanding the death of three of their ten children. Two of them died just after birth and the most heartbreaking of them all was the passing away of their third and beloved child, Annie. She died at ten. Her death took a lot away from the Darwins and they missed her dearly. Charles and Emma never really fully recovered from Annie’s painful death. But they sought solace in the arms of each other and their love became the unshakeable refuge during such times of personal grief.
One of their secrets is that they communicated with each other regularly. They shared everything with each other, holding nothing back. They shared their joy, their pain and their hopes. Everything was written like love letters and the touching and beautiful words in these letters kept their love alive, fresh and real. In fact, Charles once wrote to Emma, “I wish you knew how I value you; and what an inexpressible blessing it is to have one whom one can always trust, one always the same, always ready to give comfort, sympathy and the best advice. God bless you, my dear, you are too good for me.”
In his autobiography, Charles told his children that their mother was his greatest blessing and continued, “I marvel at my good fortune, that she, so infinitely my superior in every single moral quality consented to be my wife…She has been my wise adviser and cheerful comforter…She has earned my love and admiration of every soul near her.”
What wondrous love can one find, a love that devotes unconditionally, a love that gives and not take, a love that flourishes in divisive differences, a love that defies all to stay together even unto death…
Beloved, we have a lot to learn about loving, especially loving our spouse, as it is said by one, “The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.” Indeed, the hardest part of a relationship is to love just one and to love her (or him) so deeply, consistently and completely that you lose yourself in her and your life cannot be complete without her. This kind of love takes a lifetime and it usually lasts a lifetime.
Have a good week ahead; be a student to your spouse and discover love all over again.
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