It’s a mystery that needs a little digging. Nothing a brown leather jacket and a little sense of adventure can’t solve.

Imagine the scene: The room is abuzz. Ohio State is beating a path to a national championship. Playstation 4 has a number of new features to die for. Pinterest can help you make nutritious salads from Dandelion stems. The new Superman is better than the old one.

Then someone opens a Bible. Immediately the room falls mute, and every head goes down. The leader invites participation. He may as well have asked for bone marrow donors.

What happened? Like I said, it’s a mystery.

There’s a lot of theories to explain this phenomenon. I know because I’ve spent years reading the books that give them. The group is too large or too small. The icebreaker is too lame. The questions are not enticing enough. The snacks aren’t good enough. The activities aren’t fun enough. Every one of these reasons has its point, but they all share one thing in common: They are all externals. Structure related. Addressing any or all of these might help. They might. For a short time. I actually attended a fellowship where some of the youth in the church tried to battle religious stuffiness by putting ping-pong tables in the meeting area for Sunday morning church. It was fun for a couple of weeks. Then it started to feel ridiculous. So they began to cycle in a bunch of other colorful ideas until people got exhausted with that, too. The whole effort was like moving food around on a plate in order to make meal time more compelling. But no dice. The problem was coming from a deeper level.

Time to break out a shovel and dig.

Beneath the surface, one of the things we realize is that some people are quiet by nature. But it’s interesting how these “quiet” people will have many passionate things to say about politics or the best martial arts fighting styles. You’re shocked. It’s like, “Who the heck are you? Never seen you like this.” All of a sudden they are amazingly well spoken…about those things. Their sheer breadth of knowledge, confidence, and willingness to make their opinions heard indicate that the stalled meeting wasn’t merely due to their quiet personalities.

Deeper still.

We Christians love that verse, “Where two or three are gathered…”
Well, try it. Get one or two other folks together with you and see what happens. Deliberately focus on a much smaller test group. If the same listlessness occurs there, you might have isolated a cause. There, at the bottom of the hole you’ve excavated, you may have found the dessicated bones of someone’s spiritual life. Dried up. Neglected. In other words, there may not be anything wrong at the group level. It’s something individual–personal. Take enough people suffering this trouble, put them together in a room, and of course you’re going to be less than inspired. No group band-aid is going to fix the problem. No surface adjustments are going to make those bones start dancing.

Time for some personal care.

I love apologetics–mounting intelligent defenses of the Christian faith. I’ve probably read hundreds of books on the subject and written one myself. Still, at the height of my apologetics feeding frenzy, my attitudes toward people began to change. I started to view encounters with non-Christian souls as potential duels. Worse, I felt myself conforming to
1 Corinthians 8:1, which states that “Knowledge puffs up.” I was bristling with answers and evidences of every kind. Instead of my pursuits enlivening me with spiritual power and inspiring me for confrontations, I began to feel a disgust and impatience for the people I was allegedly preparing myself to meet. The more I learned, the more stupid they seemed.

The Bible tells us to always be “prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15, ESV). Preparation to fulfill this verse was not the problem. But in my bottomless quest for thoughts of evidential value–more and more advanced “wrestling moves”–I neglected the spirit behind “being prepared.” Peter meant that someone should hear a good reason for the hope in me and in turn, it would inspire hope in them toward the Savior as well. Yet my collection of books, thoughts, and arguments had slowly turned into an arsenal that eclipsed any redemptive goals. My interest in winning people’s hearts had morphed into deflating their foolish remarks. In other words, I was actually more concerned with besting them than losing them to the fires of hell.

This loss of love and compassion for men from my apologetic-driven heart was an irony in the order of buying a bottle of fruit juice that says, “Bursting with Natural Fruit Goodness!” Then the label says in micro font, “Contains 3% Juice.” So I went back to the Bible. Back to hunting for the missing component that used to make me care. Back to the beginning when Jesus walked the earth. I went to the Gospel of Luke and camped out in the passages and parables where Jesus interacted with people. I saw patience. I saw love. Yes, some of the encounters were terse. However, all of them were driven with a concern for that soul. I basked in Luke chapter 4, where He defined His ministry as opening eyes through the power of the Spirit upon Him, in chapter 10, where an act of mercy was worth more than religious professionalism, and chapter 15, where Jesus portrays God as the One who relentlessly seeks the lost and wildly celebrates when He finds them (Not when He beats them). I spent a tremendous amount of time in all these and more. Where Jesus rebuked the disciples for wanting to kill their opposition with fire from heaven, and where He put his hands on a putrid leper. Where He forgave sins. Where He healed hundreds, if not thousands of people who did not follow Him and some who did not even thank Him. I spent time basting in those passages, allowing myself to be awed and convicted. Then embarrassed for having not been that way myself.

Something amazing happened. My heart for people slowly warmed again. I can’t say I became a social butterfly, handing out hugs. But by paying closer attention to Christ’s example in the Bible, and engaging Him in ongoing dialogue, a general concern for the human soul came limping back.

As for my apologetics? I kept them, this time not as pepper spray, but more like the inviting fragrance of something somebody might really want…

Here are just a few situations I am aware of among fellow believers. Some I know personally and others I know from a distance. All have been forced into learning the greatness and superhuman power of God’s grace.

A succesful pastor of a large church and bestselling writer who has brain cancer.
An even more succesful pastor whose wife has breast cancer and whose son, in the dregs of depression, committed suicide.
A woman and her three young sons who were left behind when her husband took off for work on his motorcycle one morning and was killed by a truck.
A man who lost his sister, mother, wife, and daughter in a single automobile accident.
A couple whose two children were born with severe mental retardation and who chose to raise them at home, feeding them, changing them, and restraining them all of their lives.
A man with rectal cancer who, after a number of painful surgeries, cannot ever go to the bathroom like a normal person again.
A man with spina bifida who from the time he was a young, has slowly curled into a wheelchair.

With the exception of the first two cases, I know all of them (and more not mentioned) personally. None have “escaped” their situations. It has been a slow burn, with the challenges having started back in the eighties. All of them to this day continue strongly in Christ. Watching them was not some type of human showcase–”A Triumph of the Human Spirit!”–as the movie billboards might say. Instead, it was the mysterious operations of grace in action. More than just surviving, which people must do every day in the face of these things, they flourished, grew, and were filled with a greater sense of divine presence than ever before.

I wonder if Christian confidence, then, is founded on a confidence not only in God’s protection, but in God’s grace. For sure if He can say, “My grace is sufficient for you,” we can say it along with him.

So true. For me, for you, for everybody I know who is willing to be honest. Whatever difficulty you find yourself in, it is the one that has the power to hurt the deepest. It is the only thing that might make you pray. Other things you can manage. This, you can’t, and so maybe you’ll cry out to God for deliverance just like the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12, who prayed multiple times (sound familiar?) for his suffering to be removed. Finally God came through with a reason for not answering earlier. For not answering the way Paul liked.
God said, “My grace is sufficient for you.”

“No it ain’t,” I say back. “The situation is still difficult. Everything is still a mess.”
But I really don’t know what God means.
Yeah, yeah, I know the standard answer. I’ve preached the standard answer, which is pretty awesome.
But when you’ve got the Sumo sitting on you, it’s a little different.
Makes me wonder what is meant by “grace.”
God seems pretty confident about it…that it can do a lot more for Paul than save him from hell…a lot more.

Alright, maybe not that long.  Anyway, my ministry pals have been gently encouraging me to keep this blog up to date, so I’m going to try again. It will be relevant stuff, biblical, short, and as life allows.  So here we go…

A Golden Disclosure

“Jed Harris, producer of Our Town and other plays, became convinced he was losing his hearing.  He went to a specialist, who gave him a thorough checkup.  The doctor pulled out a gold watch and asked, ‘Can you hear this ticking?’ Harris said, ‘Of course.’  The specialist walked to the door and held up the watch again.  ‘Now can you hear it?’  Harris concentrated and said, ‘Yes, I can hear it clearly.’  The doctor walked out the door into the next room and said, ‘Can you hear it now?’  Harris said, ‘Yes.’  The doctor said, ‘Mr. Harris, there is nothing wrong with your hearing.  You just don’t listen.’”¹

If that seems a little funny, it’s because it’s such a common condition.  As with all the rest of us, the problem is usually not with hearing, but listening–the deep, considerate exercise alluded to in 1 Corinthians 14:29 (where it is called judging, discerning, etc.).  Without this kind of focus, we miss game-changing pieces of revelation–something that might have become spiritual food for us in years to come, or even a word of rescue.  Elihu was the source of such a word.  The man literally disclosed to Job God’s operational principle upon mankind.  It would have gone a long way toward making sense of Job’s sufferings.  However, this disclosure was embedded amidst other words, and we don’t know if Job was listening anymore at that point. If he wasn’t, he missed pure gold.

Worth the Price of Admission

The disclosure of how God works in our lives is worth the price of admission.  The details of His work are different from person to person, but the overarching principles are the same.  Once you learn them, you can begin to recognize them even if the names and circumstances are all changed.

First, God speaks.  He does so even as we swear in frustration that He doesn’t.  In fact, He does in multiple ways (33:14).  But we generate a constant level of ambient noise through excuses, evasion, and dismissals that actually silence those words.  That is why “man does not perceive it.”  Our refusal to listen might mean it is all over right there.  God would be fully justified in saying, “I’m done with you; you beg incessantly for answers that you don’t want and direction that you won’t take.”  He could do that, but He doesn’t.  Instead, He tries to open the ear of the heart (33:16).

If Lines Are Out…

If communication continues to be out, God does not stop.  He simply starts speaking another language–that of suffering.  You might claim confusion with His former attempts, but this dialect is understood by all.  The message–”the rebuke”–is pain (33:19).  Ignore words all you want, but you won’t be ignoring this one.  You will pay it a premium of attention.  Sometimes even if you’re listening well, situations come along that teach in a way that words never could.

What’s the Urgency?

What’s with all this divine urgency? For sure God doesn’t speak in order to generate pleasant religious background noise. His words are calculated to save us from “the pit” and “the sword” (v. 18, 24, 28, 30)–dangers that threaten our spirit, soul, and body in various ways.  Things that we are tending toward because of dumb decisions, foolish neglect, and bad attitudes.  Yet there is more at stake than preventing ill-effects.  God’s kind work restores us to a vigor that we did not previously have (33:25).  It stimulates a celebratory joy (33:26-27) and enlightenment (33:28-30) unknown to us before He went to work in our lives. None of His work leaves us the same way as He found us.  None of His children are poorer after encountering His hand.

Elihu’s disclosure is often overlooked as life goes upside down, but without the principles contained in it, we would all be both stuck and doomed.