If You Got To Heaven, Would You Like It?

"What kind of stupid question is that - of course I'd like heaven if I got there. As long as it's got none of that ridiculous stuff like sitting in a cloud and wearing a robe and strumming a harp while a golden halo floats above your head. I'd hate that. But if heaven is a beautiful place of pleasure and bliss and safety, how could anyone not like it?"

I'll tell you. The Bible does not describe heaven as merely a place of endless delight. It is that, yes. But the Bible has other things to say about heaven too - things more important than bliss, things that all of us have despised at some time or other; things that some of us, I'm afraid, will despise for all eternity.

Heaven is a place of virtue. In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus told his disciples to pray, "Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven." That petition reveals that while God's will is not always done here, it is always done in heaven. Here, people treat God's will with contempt and refuse to do it. St. Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:3, "It is God's will that you should be holy," but we resist God's will by being unholy. In heaven, God's will is obeyed and delighted in all the time. For this reason Jesus instructs us to pray that earth will be like heaven in this sense, that God's desires will be carried out rather than rebelled against.

If you dislike virtue you won't like heaven. Here is a list of adjectives that describe unholy behavior and attitudes: "complaining, contemptuous, cruel, dishonest, greedy, hateful, impatient, impure, irresponsible, irritable, lazy, neglectful, promiscuous, proud, racist, rude, selfish, sexist, undisciplined, unfaithful, unforgiving, ungrateful, violent". That list is not exhaustive, but it will do for now. How many of these adjectives describe you, and how many of these vices would you like to sneak into heaven with you? You will have to leave them all behind. You cannot drag sin into heaven. "Nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false" (Revelation 21:27). In fact, any sin that still clings to you will have to be burned off (1 Corinthians 3:13-15). When all your sin is burned away, what will be left of you?

For years I have been trying, and mostly failing, to get people to read C. S. Lewis' short fantasy novel The Great Divorce. I do not understand why I seem to be the only person who regards it as the greatest book ever written outside the Bible. Could you please read it? It will illuminate for you, in compelling and astonishing ways, the truth that heaven is a place of goodness. Evil, in any of its forms, cannot dwell there. No one can contaminate heaven with vice, and no one can receive heaven on his own sinful terms. Many would rather go to hell than admit that they are wrong and must be remade.

Heaven is a place of virtue, and it is also a place of worship. The Greek word that we translate as "worship" means something like bowing the knee or prostrating oneself. It is our declaration - in word, posture, action and thought - that another is greater than we. In worship you declare your inferiority and another's superiority. Worship is submission, surrender, a placing of oneself under the will and authority of another.

In heaven we worship God. This is one of the themes of the book of Revelation. Revelation chapters 4 and 5 depict magnificent images of creatures and angels in heaven saying "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty" (4:8), and “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power,for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (4:11). The worship culminates in 5:13: "And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, 'To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!'"

Does that mean that heaven is like a big church service? If it is, many would rather not go. Maybe they associate worship with stained glass and boring sermons and uncomfortable clothes and slow ponderous songs played on the organ. Or maybe when they think of worship they picture one of those evangelical megachurch extravaganzas that try to duplicate the revved-up atmosphere of a Superbowl halftime show. That style is not everyone's cup of tea either.

But it is important to distinguish between our culture-bound expressions of worship and the essence of worship itself. If we say that we don't like worship, do we just mean that we don't like a certain style of religious music? Nothing wrong with that. But if we mean that we don't want to acknowledge an authority greater than our own, then heaven is not the place for us. We belong in hell. Hell is where you get to clench your fists and say, "I did it my way. I was true to my convictions, and in the face of opposition and obstacle I defended my dignity and self worth." In heaven you bow before God and say, "You alone are good and right and holy. Everything belongs to you. Your will be done. Your name be honored." As the inhabitants of hell cry, "I am worth something!" the citizens of heaven sing, "God is worth everything."

It is not wise to view heaven principally as a place where we get to experience all fun and no pain. That, at best, is putting second things first. It is better to regard heaven as a place where God dwells, and is present to our senses, and at long last grants us freedom to obey and worship him without the hindrance of self-absorption and sin. Would you like that?

Will Getting What You Want Make You Happy?

Malcolm Gladwell opens a delightful and justly famous TED talk by referring to "someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years...Howard Moskowitz."

What Moskowitz did to make us so happy was to persuade Ragu and Prego to give us different kinds of spaghetti sauce. Before 1990 they made only one kind, but thanks to Moskowitz they now make extra chunky, sweet basil, creamy garlic - more than 30 sauces altogether. Dream up a sauce and you can find it or something pretty close to it on your grocer's shelf. Gladwell says, "What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy." Moskowitz's great idea quickly spread from Prego and Ragu to other food companies, which is why Starbucks offers so many different kinds of coffee. The best general coffee you can make gets only about a 60 (out of 100) rating from coffee drinkers. But if you offer three varieties (say, light roast, dark roast, and hazelnut), the consumer rating goes from 60 to 78. Gladwell concludes, "The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is the difference between coffee that makes you wince and coffee that makes you deliriously happy. That is the final and I think most beautiful lesson of Howard Moskowitz, that in embracing the diversity of human beings, you will find a surer way to true happiness."

Gladwell's speech is a light and informative romp through the work of a food industry genius, and is probably not meant to be taken as a serious reflection on the nature of true happiness. But I will take it that way anyway because of the insight it provides into a common notion about what makes us happy. Happiness - popularly regarded - is satisfied desire. You're unhappy because you don't have what you want. If you get it, you'll be happy.

Take for example pop culture treatments of heaven. Heaven is bliss, right? What could be more blissful than getting whatever you want? In the apocalyptic comedy This Is The End, party boys Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel are raptured to heaven and greeted at the Pearly Gates by their friend Craig Robinson, who materializes a marijuana joint between Rogen's lips. Rogen whoops, "That's insane!" and Robinson responds, "No, no, no. That's heaven. Anything you can think of - it's yours." So Rogen imagines himself a Segway scooter, and one pops into existence under his feet. Baruchel goes bigger - he wants the Backstreet Boys in concert. Sure enough, the boy band marches in and rocks the heavenlies with a rousing performance of "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)". The party is on, and presumably all live happily forever after.

But do they? I want to see what that heaven looks like a day or two later. Maybe even 15 minutes later, when all are weary of getting whatever they want and find that they are bored out of their minds.

Alice Sebold seems to understand this. In her 2002 bestseller The Lovely Bones, the young teenage protagonist Suzie Salmon is murdered and goes to heaven. She finds that her heaven overlaps with, but is not identical to, other people's heavens. That is because everyone is getting whatever they want. So, for example, in her heavenly high school Suzie only goes to art class and her textbooks are Seventeen, Glamour and Vogue. The ice cream shop always has her favorite flavor. "Do you like it here?" a friend asks. "No," she answers. "Me either." After five days they complain to their intake counselor that they are bored. In fact, the Gladwellian happiness (if I may call it such) of Suzie's heaven makes it such a crushingly dull place that she spends pretty much the rest of the book just spying on her friends and family back on earth.

Though Sebold perceives that satisfied desires don't make you happy (at least not for long), it seems to me that she is unwilling to abandon the idea entirely. It just needs to be tinkered with, delved into a bit more deeply, extended. The problem is that you don't really know what you want. As Suzie's counselor in heaven explains, "All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why - really know - it will come." That is, your basic notion that satisfied desire will bring you joy is not flawed. It does work, but you will have to go on a pilgrim journey of self-discovery to know what your deepest desires truly are.

C. S. Lewis would have none of that. In his fantasy novel The Great Divorce, he makes the place where departed souls get whatever they want not heaven but hell. Early in the book, a businessman explains to the first-person narrator why Hell-Town is so big. "You see, it's easy here. You've only got to think a house and there it is. That's how the town keeps on growing." He laments this fact. "The trouble is they have no Needs...It's scarcity that enables a society to exist." His plan to remedy the problem involves taking a trip to heaven on the regularly-scheduled flying bus so that he can bring back goodies that even hell can't conjure up. Read the book to see why his scheme must fail. The businessman still regards the granting of desire as an ultimate solution to the problem that he (or society) is facing. But the mere satisfaction of a desire for some New Thing (maybe heaven has it!) will get him no closer to the goal.

Rev. Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan likes to tweak ambitious young professionals regarding their illusion that if they can just make enough money, marry the right person and gain renown in their field that they will be happy. "No you won't," says Keller. He quotes from a 1990 essay written by Village Voice columnist Cynthia Heimel, who knew some major celebrities back when they were busing tables and washing dishes. They thirsted for stardom, and a select few actually got it. She writes, "They worked, they pushed, and the morning after each of them became famous, they wanted to take an overdose. Because that giant thing they were striving for, that something that was going to make everything okay, that was going to make their lives bearable, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment and happiness, had happened. And they were still them. The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable." Heimel's conclusion is one of the darkest zingers you will ever read: "I think when God wants to play a really rotten practical joke on you, he grants you your deepest wish and giggles merrily when you realize you want to kill yourself."

That kind of cynicism is at least 3,000 years old. Much of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes strikes me as a rambling suicide note from a man who got everything he ever wanted. King Solomon had the time and wherewithal to pursue the satisfaction of every desire, and after gratifying all of them, concluded that life was empty.

What I find particularly compelling about Solomon's quest for happiness is that he pursued the fulfillment of different types of desires. Pleasure, for example: “I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired male and female singers, and a harem as well — the delights of a man’s heart.” But he concludes, “Laughter is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?”

So he seeks happiness in the fulfillment of Purpose: “I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.” That does not work either: “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

Realizing that his mistake was in focusing on externals, he decides what he really wants is the life of the mind. “I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,” he writes. But it's another dead end: “The making of many books is endless, and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” and “with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” Solomon drew up a variety of bucket lists, checked off every item, and found that despite everything “I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind." The testimony of the ages seems to be that neither earth nor pop-culture heaven nor Purpose nor the vast resource of our own minds seems to have whatever it is we're looking for.

Here I believe is the reason for the spoiled expectations of Gladwell's coffee, Rogen's and Sebold's heaven, Lewis' hell, Hollywood stardom, and Solomon's riches. In each case, the satisfaction of a desire has been elevated to an Absolute. As such, it is made to do work it can never fulfill. We want the fuel of desire to speed us to the stars when it cannot even burst us free from the gravity of earth.

Note what is conspicuously missing from Rogen's and Sebold's heavens. Neither has a true Absolute. In these wish-fulfillment paradises there is nothing that doesn't change, that cannot be altered by our desires. There is nothing that just Is, that remains forever Itself, that cannot be adjusted or wished into or out of existence. In these popular conceptions of bliss, shape-shifting heaven conforms to us. Essentially, that makes us the God of heaven. And deep within, we know that that is a throne upon which we cannot sit. A satisfied desire is certainly a good thing. But when we elevate it to an Ultimate thing, a thing "greater than which none can be conceived", it is quickly unmasked as an unworthy pretender to Deity, and the sign of that unmasking is existential despair. We become, in Heimel's words, "howling and insufferable".

St. Paul levels an intriguing charge against sinners in Philippians 3:19 when he says, "Their god is their stomach." I don't believe he means they are merely gluttonous. "Stomach" here stands for desire, and "their god" is that which is, to them, their Absolute, their Driving Force, That Which Commands And Must Be Obeyed. These are people who cannot conceive of a happiness greater than getting what they want, and so all their mortal energies are directed toward that end.

It is a dead end. While gratified wishes are not bad, they are not Ultimate, and must never be treated as such. Only when the satisfaction of desire is dethroned as a god can it be embraced as a gift. Happiness is indeed a gift, and, like all gifts, derives from a Giver. Acknowledge him, worship him, give thanks to him, submit your will to his. "Will I be happy then?" you ask. Ah, there's the problem. First things first. You must learn to value something above and beyond your own happiness.

Will God Really Supply Our Needs?

My sister Grace quietly resolved, If I don't have 99 cents by Saturday, I'm not going to church Sunday.

It was the winter of 1973, and she was 24 years old. She and her husband Ron had fallen on hard times. There were weeks when there was so little food in the house that they would hang around church after the worship service to see if anyone would invite them over for lunch.

The humiliation hurt. Grace had one dress, and since it wasn't ok back then to wear slacks to church, she just wore that same dress every Sunday. It got threadbare. When it developed holes in the armpits she patched them with material she cut from the hem.

But the worst of it - at least for her - was the fact that her nylon stockings all had runs. She couldn't bear to be seen in them. A new pair cost 99 cents, which she did not have. But somehow or other she would need to get that 99 cents, otherwise FORGET about CHURCH I'm NOT going to go.

Saturday night came and still no 99 cents. By that point, Grace told me later, she was feeling pretty smug. She had steeled her heart with the grim satisfaction of knowing just how to retaliate against divine unfairness and protect what little dignity she had left. I asked her if she had told Ron of her decision, and she said, "Oh no! I was going to surprise him the next morning with the news that he was going to church alone."

About 8 o'clock Saturday night, there was a knock at the door. It was her friend Joanne. Joanne said, "Grace, this is stupid, I feel silly, but... " and she handed Grace a small package, "could you use a new pair of nylons?"

Somehow Grace held her composure even as she exploded inside with, Oh come on, you have GOT to be KIDDING me. She made it to church the next day, and the week after that, and the week after that, and so on for 42 years.

Twenty years or so after Joanne appeared at her door with the miracle stockings Grace told her what that little gift had meant to her. Joanne had no recollection of the event. She never had a clue that God had used her to rescue my sister from a spiritual meltdown.

I told that story at my home church, Bethany Chapel, on February 1 in a sermon about the Israelites crossing through the Red Sea. Even a month later people were coming up to me and telling me how meaningful that story was to them. Some of them had experienced similar things. So I called my sister Grace and told her that. And she said, "That story, and the incident of the shoes, taught me never to doubt God's provision."

And I said, "Grace, remind me about the shoes."

She said about 30 years ago her 11-year-old son Mark sang in the county children's choir. They had a special concert one Saturday evening, and the dress code for the kids was a white shirt, black pants, and black dress shoes. Mark had the shirt and pants, but all he had for shoes was a pair of sneakers. They couldn't afford dress shoes. So Grace started hunting around. She went to the Salvation Army thrift store and rummaged through the bins at Catholic charities. Nothing. Crestfallen, she told Mark Saturday morning, "I'm sorry Mark. I just couldn't find you any shoes. I'm afraid you can't go to the concert."

Sure enough, another knock at the door. It was a borderline mentally retarded woman in town who had been judged unfit to raise her son. Little Johnny was in foster care where his mother would pay him regular visits. This morning she stood at Grace's door holding a crumpled brown bag. As my sister related the story to me, she mimicked the dear woman's flat Forest Gumpian monotone: "Grace I bought these for Johnny and they don't fit him would they fit one of your boys." And she pulled out of the bag a pair of black dress shoes in Mark's size. Startled, Grace thanked her warmly and took the shoes and raced to her son and said, "Mark! You're going to the concert!"

As it turns out, that's the last time I ever talked to Grace. Two weeks later she was hospitalized with pneumonia, the by-product of a weak immune system compromised by cancer and chemo. Within a few days she was absent of the body and present with the Lord. From the day she was born, July 24, 1948, till the day she died, April 2, 2015, God provided Grace with everything she ever needed. She experienced, and acknowledged before all, the truth of Philippians 4:19: "My God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus."

I can well imagine someone saying, "I'm glad it worked out for your sister Grace. But my story is different. I have had needs that God has not supplied." I would respond with two comments.

First, the promise in Philippians 4:19 is not universal. If you check the context, you will see that it was given to servants of God who had been generous, repeatedly, with what they had. The Apostle Paul first thanked the Philippian Christians for sending him aid while he was in prison (Philippians 4:14-18), and then he said, "And my God will meet all your needs..."

Grace, like the Philippians, qualified on that score. Tales of her generosity are legion. Remember how John the Baptist said, "Whoever has two tunics should share with him who has none" (Luke 3:11)? Grace was so generous that if she had two tunics she would have given you both of them.

Secondly, the promise in Philippians 4:19 is not to supply our wants but our needs. Who is best qualified to determine our needs?

Somewhere around the year 1900 a young Harry Ironside went to do some street preaching in Fresno in response to what he felt was a sudden call from the Lord. He trusted God to supply his need. It didn't seem to happen. Ironside wound up for a time homeless and hungry, trying to sleep on a cold park bench with an empty stomach. What had he done wrong? Nothing. Some weeks later he received a letter from his stepfather, William Watson, which contained the following postscript:

God spoke to me through Philippians 4:19 today. He has promised to supply all our need. Some day He may see that I need a starving. If He does, He will supply that.

Amen. God determines the needs of the faithful, and supplies them. If they need food, he will supply that. If they need a starving, then he will supply that. If they need health, he will give them that. If they need a degenerative ailment that robs them of function and leaves them wholly dependent on the charity of others, he will give them that. Whatever they need.

On April 2, 2015, God determined that Grace Ellen Washburn needed to come home.

Christians Are A Bunch Of Hypocrites

"Are there any real Christians left, or is it all a racket?" the journalist asked.

She was referring to Ken Starr, self-professed Christian and president of Baylor University. Recently it came to light that Starr, former dean of Pepperdine Law school and prosecutor of Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal, was part of the legal team that aggressively advocated on behalf of billionaire sex-trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Starr brought his considerable legal expertise to bear in obtaining a shockingly light penalty for Epstein, who had molested or trafficked in dozens of girls, some reportedly as young as 12. Starr didn't defend Epstein because he was some poor schmuck foisted on the legal profession by fair necessity ("If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you"), but because the predator pervert had a billion dollars. Money talks, and talks at such volume that at times it can shout down a man's conscience. It can enable a certain kind of man calmly to pad his bank account with the stifled cries of mid-teen sex slaves while still making it to church on Sunday.

You can understand how behavior so monstrously corrupt and so grievously incompatible with the word "Christian" might provoke a cynical journalist to ask if the whole religion is just a racket.

Coincidentally, the other day my lovely wife asked me how I might respond to someone who opposed Christianity on the ground that it was a faith full of hypocrites. I thought I'd write out an answer.

I acknowledge that, yes, without a doubt, the Christian church is chock-full of hypocrites. But, as a teacher of mine liked to point out, where else are you going find them?

If I were a villain, I wouldn't want people to regard me as bad (unless I were very callous indeed and heedless of all consequences). I'd want them to think I was a Christian! And the better I could fool people with minimal effort, the more delighted I would be with the deception. That is because if people trust you you can get away with more. But, contrariwise, I don't know any Christians who want people to regard them as criminals. Think about it. Hypocrisy is a vacuum funnel that only sucks in one direction. Wherever goodness truly congregates, evil people will race toward it just so they can camouflage themselves with its appearance. Of course there will be hypocrisy where goodness dwells! How could it be otherwise? Only goodness can provide a foundation for a hypocrite to stand on. Who - except as a joke - ever tries to impersonate evil? Here are some charges of hypocrisy that I bet you have never heard:

"Oh, he claims to be a White Power racist, but I tell you he's a total hypocrite. Secretly he adores Martin Luther King, and under the radar he mentors disadvantaged Black teens."

"He just wants everybody to think he's a pedophile. But he is such a hypocrite. In reality he's been faithful to his wife for years, and he's wonderful with kids."

"I know she portrays herself as a shoplifter, but let me tell you, that woman is a hypocrite. The truth is, she pays for her stuff, and she even gives back change when the clerk makes a mistake! Pffft. What a phony."

Do you see? Hypocrisy, by definition, is evil masquerading as good. It rightly provokes our indignation. But the very charge of hypocrisy ought to lead us to ask, "Why in the world was I expecting to find good - and expecting it so hard that I was outraged to find myself deceived?" In our hearts, I think we know that hypocrisy is a pestilent parasite that, at some level, requires a sound host. If the whole thing were one big parasite there would be nothing for it to feed on. We would never find ourselves angered or disillusioned.

If a person wants to belong to a faith tradition that is guaranteed never to be charged with hypocrisy, I recommend atheism. When an atheist embezzles, rapes or murders, no one ever cries out in shock, "Oh the hypocrisy! How could someone who denies the existence of God ever do such a thing? He can't be a real atheist." Sure he can. Why not? He could be a bad man, but he's not a bad atheist. His denial of a supernaturally imposed morality keeps him immune to the charge of hypocrisy no matter what he does.

You will find hypocrisy among Christians, just as you will find parasites in a living host. If you insist on living in an environment that is parasite-free, you will only be able to fulfill your dream by inhabiting a corpse. That is a cold place to live and die.

Do people who have never heard of Jesus go to hell?

Here is another question somebody passed along to me recently:

Does Christianity teach that people who have never heard of Jesus are going to hell?

I don’t think the Bible teaches that. Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). He also said, “those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned” (John 5:29). In Acts 10:35 the Apostle Peter said that God "accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right."

People who lived before Jesus was born obviously never heard of him, and they didn’t all go to hell. For example it says in Genesis 5:24 that “Enoch walked faithfully with God.” Enoch lived thousands of years before Jesus. He didn't have a Bible, because it had not been written yet. He never heard of the 10 commandments or the covenant with Abraham. He knew nothing about the Old Testament kings and prophets and saints. But somehow he “walked with God,” and in due time God took him home. It has always seemed to me that there could be some modern-day Enoch living, say, in a remote jungle, who, though he knows nothing about Jesus, manages to “walk with God,” and God is merciful to him.

I’ve never met a Christian who said that all babies who die in infancy or all severely mentally retarded people go to hell because they cannot express faith in Jesus. We are saved through faith, the Bible says, but I think we instinctively and correctly understand this to mean that we who have the capacity to express faith are saved through it.

I do believe the Bible teaches that all people who are saved are saved through Jesus – whether they know it or not. Jesus himself said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Peter said, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among people whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

The reason that salvation is only through Jesus is because he is the only one who paid the price for our sins. Even the best among us is still sinful. The Bible says, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). The Bible views sin as a debt that must be paid – and only Jesus, the sinless Son of God, could ever pay that debt. This he did by dying on the cross.

So everyone who is in heaven is there because Jesus paid his or her debt. Some will know all about that during their earthly lives, and others won’t find out who paid their way until they get to heaven.

I think of it kind of like an airplane carrying a load of sick, hungry, abused refugees from a place like Sudan to safety and abundance in the United States. Some of those refugees know that the plane was provided by the Red Cross, and they are grateful and cooperative, and they tell their fellow refugees about the organization that is providing for their deliverance. Other refugees have no clue. Some are babies, some are comatose, some have never heard of any kind of Cross. They just got on a plane that good people directed them to. All the refugees needed deliverance from the wretched conditions in their home country, and all who got to the United States arrived there on a Red Cross plane. But some were aware of their means of deliverance, and others not.

I believe that truly saved people want to do good. It seems to me that it is a good thing to be thankful to the one who provided our deliverance, and to do whatever we can to get to know him better, and to cooperate with him, and even to tell others about him. Many people in this life will never get the opportunities to do all that because they will never hear about Jesus, or they would not be able to understand even if they could hear. But if we do have that opportunity, it seems right to me to take advantage of it. It is kind of like a humble Sudanese refugee telling his fellow passengers, “Let me tell you about the Red Cross.”