Leviathan

As I turned the car to make another left and heard the loose rocks crunching under my tires I saw through the trees that the gravel road had brought me to the top of the mountain. I was finally at the house. I pulled in and took a deep breath. I was a bit nervous about what the next few days would hold, and the first few moments are always the hardest. I knew David Nicholas was a man of passion and intensity.  He had a legacy of faithfulness to Jesus and the Gospel and decades of fruitful ministry that spoke for themselves. I also knew he was just flat out tall, an imposing presence that at that point I didn’t know very well. Was I going to be asked to give the Bad News and Good News while doing push-ups and sit-ups? I was here for Gospel Boot Camp.

I will always treasure what took place over the next few days after I finally got out of the car. Nori and David welcomed me into their home in Ellijay, GA and we began several days of conversation. We talked about Jesus, we talked about how to share the Gospel clearly, we talked about how to keep a marriage strong and faithful for the long haul. We talked about the hard work and details of starting a church. David told story after story of leading men and women to Christ sharing the Bad News and the Good News. He guided me through his story of life in ministry, sharing victories and honest accounts of hard lessons he had learned. David’s passion for Christ was all over him. He oozed enthusiasm for clearly communicating the most important message on earth. We worked in the basement and right about the time my brain was beginning to overload Nori would call down and tell us to take a break and have some ice cream.

I was grateful for those breaks not just because I needed a mental breather, but because it was in those breaks that I got to hear the story of David and Nori’s marriage. Their love was evident. It was strong and inspiring. They laughed and told stories of years past. I remember thinking, if I can get to the place these two are at and still have the energy, love, and passion that they have for Christ and each other it will have been a great life.

David Nicholas’s life was a great one. He led thousands to Christ. He helped plant churches all over the world. He inspired hundreds of church leaders to lead with faith, and to preach the Gospel clearly. He loved his wife and children well. Yet, in all of it he seemed so close to that night when he was 27 years old and prayed to surrender his life to Jesus and believe the Gospel. In all his success he never got far from the deep abiding reality that he was a sinner who has been dramatically rescued by a Savior. He had humility that sprung from years of meditating on that Gospel hope. He knew what it was to be rooted in Jesus.

Sometimes on the phone after he heard a sermon of mine he would give feedback saying, “Caleb, don’t forget your past, your wild days. You have to speak to people like that, not just in church language. Make it clear. You can do better.”

I want to spend my life making the Gospel of Jesus clear for people and that passion grew in intensity whenever I talked to David. Here in Brooklyn there is a new church that was begun in September of 2009 with great help from David, Spanish River, and The Church Planting Network. It is one of five churches in our city that I know David helped to start. People are hearing the message of Jesus all over NYC in part because of David’s faithfulness and our city is just one of hundreds of cities where that is the case.

David has now received a “rich welcome into the Kingdom of God” certainly hearing “well done, my good and faithful servant.” I am sad to have lost David as a friend and mentor, but his legacy certainly lives on. Many of us will miss him deeply for years, but it is not hard to imagine that he would call us to get busy making the Gospel clear so many more can know the great rescue of Jesus’ salvation.

My trip up the mountain began a short but meaningful friendship with a great man. I hope later in life to be there for a young man in my position the way David was there for me. Whoever he is, I plan to make him do push-ups.

Below is a quote from David Benner’s book Surrender to Love. I have found this book deeply helpful for my heart in the past few weeks. Feel free to respond with comments.

“The great distinctive of the love of the Christian God is that there are no strings attached to it. God simply loves humans. He created us for a love relationship with himself, and nothing we can do – or not do – changes the love he bears us.

The notion of God’s loving us unconditionally is absolutely radical. As Phillip Yancey has written, “The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law – each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional.”  The God Christians worship loves sinners, redeems failures, delights in second chances and fresh starts, and never tires of pursuing lost sheep, waiting for prodigal children, or rescuing those damaged by life and left on the sides of its paths.

The Christian God of grace stands in stark contrast to the vindictive, whimsical, threatening, and often capricious gods of other religions. Only the Lord God unconditionally cherishes human beings. Only the Lord God forgives all our offenses and teaches us how to forgive ourselves. Only the Lord God provides everything he demands. Only the Lord God offers the life of his own Son for the salvation of His people. The Lord God’s persistent habit of relating to humans with grace is the best news the human race has ever received.

The good news of Christianity is something that we would have never discovered if Jesus had not come and shown us the character of God. Everything within us tells us that the universe must be organized according to a principle wherein we get what we deserve. But quite unbelievably, God is not simply the projection of our own image on the cosmos; he is different from anything we could have ever imagined. He offers us something we could never deserve – forgiveness of our sins and embrace of his love.

What makes grace amazing is that it alone can free us form our fears and make us truly whole and free. Surrender to God’s love offers us the possibility of freedom from guilt, freedom from effort to earn God’s approval, and freedom to genuinely love God and others as the Father loves us.”

from a later section of the book Benner adds…

“Jesus invites us to relinquish the control of our life. He invites us to give up the desperate and illusory striving after autonomy. He invites us to abandon the isolation and rigidity associated with our egocentricity.  And in their place he offers rest, fulfillment, and the discovery of our true and deepest self in Christ. When we take this step of surrender, we discover the place for which we have been unconsciously longing. Like a tool seized by a strong hand, we are at last where we belong; we know we have been found.

Paradoxically, the abundant life promised in Christ comes not from grasping but from releasing. It comes not form striving but from relinquishing. It comes not so much from taking as from giving. Surrender is the foundational dynamic of Christian freedom – surrender of my efforts to live my life outside the grasp of God’s love and surrender to God’s will and gracious Spirit. Surrender is being willing rather than willful. It is a readiness to trust that is based in love. It is relaxing and letting go.”

An actor read an essay, or I should say a section of an essay at our church this week. It was from Fredrick Buechner’s collection on the birth of Jesus. The section was called “The Inn-Keeper”. You may have read it. It is an imagined account of the now infamous man in the ancient middle eastern hospitality industry, trying to explain why God was made to be born into a barn the one time He had to be born. Despite his bad reputation for thousands of years now, the Inn-Keeper does have some things to say for himself. It’s a reasonable explanation by a reasonable man in a position where one can be often overwhelmed with many details, like any of us.

I was reminded as the actor read why we need actors. There are probably far too many of them, and so a lot of them will have to continue working at the restaurant, but we need actors, especially good ones. We need spirited storytellers who can carry texts out from the pages where they are constrained and into the full light of day. We need people who are good at embodying characters because there are some stories for which a bland or stammering reading will not suffice. We need someone who can find the subtlety, who at the right moment can choke you with passion, who is not afraid to whisper, and who has taken enough risks on stage to learn discernment.

Good writing needs good reading by good readers. I was reminded last evening. I heard a story better than if I’d just pulled the words close to my face in a chair alone. I heard them performed aloud in a room full of listeners. So at once many hearings were happening; there was the reader, and the hearers, and the space in between where they mixed. There was laughter, and acknowledgement, and rabbit-trails of thought, and new sides brought to light in our collective listening. The story, as good as it was, became an event, and that transcended the process of writing and reading alone.

Because of the fall, most of our hopes experience either great or small delays. It is in these delays where we are faced with the opportunity for faith. This need not be a plastic, one-sided sentimental summary sort of faith that fits nicely on a holiday card. It can be an agonizing sort of longing that clings to the hope that though we are walking in great darkness, we are have seen and are going to see again a Great Light! We can wait for this Great Light. Let us not come out of the night of longing into the false glow of lesser visions put to us so convincingly at every turn during this season. Expectations that are delayed lead to longing. Longing carries the temptation to settle for less in order to escape the pains of waiting. But waiting well prepares our heart and soul to receive properly the greatest things that God gives.

Last night I sat in a small black box theatre in Midtown Manhattan to take in the experience of my friend Isaac’s show. He wrote, produced, and is performing in an abstract theatre piece called We Are But Dust. The show is about…

Well its abstract so what its about is not exactly spelled out. However, its a patchwork of sights and sounds and characters and images and sawdust and angels names and a machine from the future that makes bottles of water and some cereal boxes and there is the sound of clocks and a phone that rings at the wrong time.

There are characters from the middle and end of life in the play that help you remember the exuberant way that children live: immediate and with great feeling. There is also a through line of considering that we all have a span of time to pass from dust to dust. We do not determine the measure of this time. We have a chance though for making it good or responding with enthusiasm to what is already good.

The play made me laugh and think and consider God and the bit of space we get. It was strange in a good way. So my response is…

If you have a vision of something you want to see happen, then begin. No one is going to make it for you. Do not let that thing God has given to you stay in the desperately narrow corridor of good intentions. Work on it today some.

Sections of life may feel meaningless, but life is not meaningless. The process of sharing that you feel like something is meaningless begins to fill that interaction with meaning. Now you are talking or listening to someone about something you both share and that is helpful.

The parts of the world that are bent against God have a stake in you imagining things a certain way. There is profit to be made in you imagining your self and imagining the world along some certain lines. A child-like approach to believing in God and listening to Him is helpful to re-imagining the world along other lines. We need to spend time listening to God and re-imagining our world. Then I repeat. If you have a vision of something you want to see happen, especially something from God, then begin.

Thanks for the play Isaac.

There is a fella named Zach Williams and we work together. He was telling me about his other friend who has a kid and the kid was asked to pray at dinner time and did not want to. So the kid, a small girl child, said with some amount of defiance “Jesus God Amen.”

Having met her parents requirement she began eating her food with enthusiasm.

I think this girl who did not want to pray said a pretty great prayer. I made a blog to point stuff like this out.

I am gonna write some more stuff here later.

Come back then.