A Bias That Shows
Did you read about the little boy who returned home after his first Sunday school class? His mother asked, “Who was your teacher?” and the little boy answered, “I don’t remember her name, but she must have been Jesus’ grandmother because she didn’t talk about anyone else.”
Does our conversation reflect our love of Jesus? Would our words give away our relationship with Him?
C.S.Lewis—Cost of a Public Faith
C.S. Lewis fell into grace. But instead of simply entering a monastery, he did worse. He ended up publicly explaining and openly defending his personal God to millions of listeners and readers. Such undignified behavior embarrassed the hierarchy at his college at Oxford and cost Lewis his chance of ever advancing to a higher position on the faculty there. Lewis learned that if you speak about beauty, truth or goodness, and about God as a great spiritual force of some kind, people will remain friendly. But he found that the temperature drops when you discuss a God Who give definite commands, Who does definite acts, Who has definite ideas and character.
Good News Is for Sharing
I recall one night very late in the evening when I was called to the hospital. As I was walking down the semidark hall, with no people around, a man suddenly ran out of one of the patient rooms. He ran up to me—I had never seen him before—and he said to me with joy in his face, “She going to make it. She’s better. She is going to make it,” and then he made his way on down the hall. I have not seen the man since. I do not know who he was talking about. I assume it was someone very near and dear to him, and he had just received good news. He could not wait to share it. He did not even have to know the person with whom he shared it; it just flowed from him because he had received good news, and good news is to be shared.
The Power of a Smile
One day as a woman was crossing a street at London station, an old man stopped her. He said to her, “Excuse me, ma’am, but I want to thank you.”
She looked up and exclaimed, “Thank me?”
He replied, “Yes’m, I used to be a ticket collector, and whenever you went by you always gave me a cheerful smile and a good morning. I knew that smile must come from inside somewhere. Then one morning I saw a little Bible in your hand. So I bought one, too, and I found Jesus.”
Presenting the Glory of God
Speakers and writers must present the glory of God as clearly and compellingly as human language will permit. Otherwise both preacher and people will be reduced to dreaming little dreams and attempting for God only little things, when they could be doing so much more. Otherwise they will succumb to what Annie Dillard terms “the enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.” The trouble with that, says Dillard, is that God and “the world is wider than that in all directions, more dangerous and more bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”
Silent Violins
Luigi Tarisio was found dead one morning with scarce a comfort in his home, but with 246 exquisite violins, which he had been collecting all his life, crammed into an attic, the best in the bottom drawer of an old rickety bureau. In his very devotion to the violin, he had robbed the world of all that music all the time he treasured them; others before him had done the same, so that when the greatest of his collection, a Stradivarius, was first played it had had 147 speechless years. Yet, how many of Christ’s people are like old Tarisio? In our very love of the church, we fail to give the glad tidings to the world; in our zeal for the truth, we forget to publish it. When shall we all learn that the Good News needs not just to be cherished, but needs to be told? All people need to hear it.