Life Together
I’m rediscovering an old conviction. What I’ve believed for a long time is coming alive with fresh passion; it’s stirring a low-burning flame into a healthy fire. Paul told Timothy to “continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of…” (2 Tim. 3: 14; italics added).
I’ve been continuing, at times unsteadily, in what I learned as a child and have believed to be true for five decades. But only recently has a sincerely accepted belief become a meaningfully sustaining conviction.
From my earliest days, I’ve sensed that the book Søren Kierkegaard once referred to as sixty-six love letters from God is in a class by itself. More than once, my father would skip watching his favorite comedian, Red Skelton, on his weekly television show and spend the evening reading Leviticus. That made no sense to me as a ten-year old kid.
It does now. After 40 years of exploring the insides of people (including myself) to understand what’s going on that deforms us into self-centered, self-protective, self-enhancing bearers of God’s image, I’m coming to look at the Bible with passionately renewed interest. Here’s why. Here’s the old conviction that has recently come alive. Here’s what I see more clearly than ever before: God speaks into our deformed souls more deeply, with more transforming power, and with more lasting impact through the Bible than through any other means.
To read the rest of this article, you can purchase the entire issue or just this article through our Journal Store.
Father, it happened again earlier this morning. Driving to my favorite coffee shop, I suddenly began talking out loud about Your love. Tears started rolling down my face, and I sang, “Jesus loves me, this I know,” over and over again. I couldn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t stop singing.
Father, what’s happening to me? What have you been asking Me for these past few weeks?
I’ve wanted to know, to really know that You love me. I believe it, but I long to experience Your love in a way I never have.
Don’t quench My Spirit. Receive Him. He’s offering you fellowship with My Son and Me.
Father, that’s what I want more than anything. But I don’t get it—how can I feel so spiritually in tune one moment, as I did this morning, and so out of tune the next? Yesterday morning I woke up feeling flat, utterly indifferent to the story You’re telling.
To read the rest of this article, you can purchase the entire issue or just this article through our Journal Store.
It was a divine coincidence—one of those experiences in life that make you wonder if God likes to play pranks on his children, not to tease us, but to surprise and encourage us with his mysterious workings behind the scenes of our lives.
I received a phone call from a stranger who lived not far from me, telling me he thought he might have a Bible of mine. He said he was about to throw out some books he had kept for years and found my name in one that was an old King James Bible. I had lived in two different states for many years since growing up in Minnesota. And now as an adult I had returned to the area where I grew up, yet had no idea that I had lost the Bible and didn’t miss it. He brought it to me, saying, “I couldn’t throw out a book like the Bible, and something told me I should try to look up the name in the cover.”
Seeing it for the first time was surreal, like a trip back in time. It was my confirmation Bible. I couldn’t believe it. It had my name and the date, 1968, on the title page. It even had my scribbles on the pages where I had drawn during boring church services.
It was given to me in seventh grade, and at about that time I had made several recommitments of my life to Jesus my Savior with no idea of how to serve him as Lord. Looking at that Bible brought to mind my lifelong struggle to make sense of the passages for which my theology didn’t have room.
If you’d like to get in touch with Keith, you can reach him at www.keithmeyer.org. He’d love to hear from you.
To read the rest of this article, you can purchase the entire issue or just this article through our Journal Store.
Would you like to have abiding peace?
Would you like to have a heart that is filled with love?
Would you like to have the kind of faith that sees everything—even your failures and losses—in light of God’s governance for good?
Would you like to have the kind of hope that endures even in discouraging circumstances?
Alot of people want to change and would answer yes to these questions, but many of them do not believe it is possible. After years of trying and failing, they lead a Christian life of quiet desperation, longing for change and yet certain it will never happen. So they sit in their pews each week, sighing silently, resigned to their fate.
When the hope of a friendship extends beyond the fun and enjoyment of companionship into the realm of the soul, the process of self-disclosure often leads naturally to the places of greatest challenge: our areas of struggle. Some would say that women more naturally dwell in this relational territory, but I find that any relationship that truly begins to delve into our spiritual life will necessarily begin to touch on the reality of our struggles.
Whether we struggle with materialism, negativity, resentment, self-acceptance, prejudice, or irresponsibility, our friends become a safe place in which to talk about the challenge as well as the efforts we are making to turn these over to God’s care.
I met Michelle in a refuge for homeless and street people. She stood out from the tired and ragged crowd. Her clothes were colorful and eye-catching, her hair violet and spiked. We shared coffee together as she talked quickly and nervously, enlarging every sentence with circling hand movements while the cigarette in her fingers left swirling trails in the air. Delicate tattooed lines traced up her arms, threads of green and blue punctuated by dark needle marks.
Her conversation meandered around the contours of her life. She told me how she enjoyed spending her days soaking in the warmth of the refuge, sheltering from the cold street corner where by night she turned tricks to earn her daily bread. We talked about Sasha, her three-year-old daughter who moved between playgroups, friends, and grandparents, always under the watchful eye of anxious social workers. Michelle told me a little—but very little—of her own chaotic and troubled childhood and rather more of her unpredictable present, a life sketched out among the hookers, addicts, dealers, crazies, and johns who made up most of her world.
