A Foolproof Wish? (November 28, 2004)

I was intrigued by a question posed to Marilyn Vos Savant, columnist
for Parade magazine and holder of the Guinness record for "Highest IQ." A reader sent her the following poser: "In stories, a wish granted by a genie never turns out as expected. The request always backfires. Can you think of any wish that couldn't possibly go wrong?"

She responded: "One answer appears at the end of the column. But before you look at it, readers, exercise your mind and think of your own answers. The question isn't as easy as it seems. For example, you could wish for youth but find that it ruins your marriage. Or you could be granted a fortune only to see your children drop their career goals. What wish is foolproof?"

What do you think - is there such a thing as a foolproof wish?

I was surprised by Marilyn's answer - surprised, I mean, that she thought it was a good one. She said, "One could wish for happiness." This does not work at all. What if you are a serial killer, and your happiness consists of carrying out lethal desires and never getting caught? Or what if you are the kind of person who could be a perfectly contented slave trader, and the fulfillment of your wish plunged society into despicable 18th century practice with regard to Africans? You might be happy enough, but at the cost of being wicked, and at the cost of doing unspeakable harm to others.

Solomon got closer to a foolproof wish when he asked for wisdom. (The story is in 1 Kings 3:5-15.) The Lord was pleased with Solomon's request, because he had not asked for something selfish like long life or wealth or the death of his enemies (or, for that matter, happiness.) He wanted to benefit the nation that had made him king, and so asked for a gift that would help him rule well. The best wishes are like that: selfless, seeking the good of others, more concerned with how to bless than how to be blessed.

This focus on benefiting others is what guided the Apostle Paul's wish list. In 1 Corinthians 14, for example, he contrasts the gifts of tongues and prophecy and says, "I would rather have you prophesy" (verse 5). Why? Because "He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself, but he who prophesies edifies the church" (verse 4). Better to build up the church (or one's family, community or world) than oneself. Even when it came to the most delightful thing that Paul could think of - enjoying the presence of Jesus - he subordinated that wish for the good of the church. While facing possible execution, he wrote, "I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far" (Philippians 1:23). But he decided "it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith" (verses 24-25). He was telling his readers that he would do his best to stay alive strictly for their sakes!

No genie will ever grant you a wish, but God might grant you a few. Wish for the best things. Wish to benefit others. That is the closest you'll come to a wish you will never regret.

Invite A Friend. Do it. (November 21, 2004)

Have you invited anyone to church lately?

If you haven't, I encourage you to feel guilty about that, and let godly guilt spur you to ask someone to attend with you.

Please don't wait for a special event, or a religious holiday, or "Invite-a-Friend" Sunday. I think those are the worst times to invite a newcomer. It sends the message that a worship service is something you go to just when there is special music, or it's Christmas, or we've set aside a particular day for first- (and usually only-) time visitors. No, invite your friend for a Sunday when everything is ordinary - weekly prayer, Scripture, congregational singing, preaching of the Word. That way they'll know what to expect if they come back next week. Also, on a regular Sunday, they will be less likely to be lost in a crowd of other first-time visitors.

But do invite them. What have you lost if they say no? What might you gain if they say yes? Some people, whom you invite as a mere courtesy, or because you feel guilty, or just because your pastor asked you to, might shock you by actually showing up this Sunday. I read once that a high percentage (can't remember what) of unchurched people responded "Yes" to the poll question, "Would you visit a church if a friend invited you?" Of course, saying "Yes" to that question does not mean that they would follow through. But at least the majority did not say, "Are you kidding me?" And you never know what person has been so thoroughly prepped by the Holy Spirit that he responds with, "Funny you should ask! Just this week I was just thinking about going to church for the first time in years."

Non-Devotional Bible Reading (November 14, 2004)

As you read through the Bible, don't worry about whether you are getting anything out of it. Just keep reading.

It seems to me that some well-meaning preachers burden us unnecessarily when they insist that we discern God's special message to us in our daily Scripture reading. There may not be a special message for us - at least not right then and there. There is no need to get frustrated over that. Don't worry if the story of the Amalekites getting crushed has not touched your heart in a special way. Just read it, try to understand, and go on to the next chapter tomorrow.

I think daily Bible reading is kind of like physical exercise. If you keep exercising, it gradually transforms who you are (or maintains who you are, if you are already in good shape.) This happens even if the exercise session itself is neither ecstatic nor pleasant. I jog (believe it or not). I don't like to. But I like the long-term effects of lower blood pressure, lower heart rate, higher energy, etc. Now the thing to notice is that these effects take time to manifest, and they certainly are not part of the exercise experience. Your heart rate and blood pressure actually go up when you exercise, and your energy level goes down (way down, in my case, and fast). Does that mean that my jogging is a failure, that I'm doing something wrong? Of course not. The whole idea is to pant and feel miserable during exercise so that you won't pant and feel miserable when you're just walking up stairs.

Read the Bible, and if you feel that on any particular day you have learned nothing, accomplished nothing, drawn no closer to God, felt no touch of his Spirit - do not fret about that. And for heaven's sake don't let such feelings discourage you from regular study of the Word. Sometimes we can no more discern what God is teaching us than we can detect precisely that moment when diligent exercise has dissolved a bit of artery gludge. Ultimately, of course, we will learn if we read (as we will be healthier if we jog), but to expect that the process itself be uplifting and the payoff immediate is too much to hope for. Be released from that spiritual burden.

Ministering Out Of Weakness (November 7, 2004)

I saw a video clip the other day of an Oklahoma Sooners football player giving a loud and raucous pep talk to his teammates who were gathered in a tight circle around him. After he finished, the other players left but the camera stayed fixed on him as he stood alone for a few seconds. Then he began to wobble like a hypoglycemic who has stood up too fast. He collapsed in a faint so sudden I don't think he had time to buckle his legs.

It was pretty funny. It turned out he was all right, and he even went back into the game later and made a big play.

The fainting defensive tackle struck me as a metaphor of many good Christian servants. These saints do not always look like warriors animated by our Lord's holy energy. Sometimes they look more like sick goofs lying flat on their backs with their eyes rolling back in their heads.

I suppose John Wesley looked that way when a friend came to visit him and found the great evangelist's bad wife dragging him across the floor by his hair. Mother Theresa did not look so strong when she confided to her priest that she doubted her faith and felt no connection to God. In his youth, C. S. Lewis was subjected to impulses which, though not homoerotic, were clearly perverse. The two greatest preachers of the 19th century, Charles Spurgeon and Alexander Maclaren, trudged through crippling psychological depressions - Maclaren even had to leave the pulpit for a year.

My favorite pastor in Colombia was Hernando Cubillos, a quiet man of real depth and humble good cheer. Once when a guest speaker did not show up at church Hernando took the pulpit and spontaneously gave his testimony. He said that he had been fired from his missionary job some years before because he was scared and had not been getting anything done. His supervisor said, "He's useless! Get rid of him!" Hernando told us that that firing "todavia deja sus huellas" - it still leaves its marks (on me).

But, thanks be to God, Hernando was restored. Like the football player who fainted and returned to the game, Hernando came back to the ministry. His role model was John Mark, a missionary who was also fired for just cause (Acts 15:37-38; see 12:13) but who later proved useful to the very apostle who fired him (2 Timothy 4:11).

Listen, any of you who are discouraged. Let us say you are divorced. Or you've spent time in a psych ward. You thought you taught your children well but they treat you and your faith with contempt. The pep talk you gave that so encouraged others has had no such effect on yourself. Spiritually, psychologically or even physically you are lying flat on your back and feeling a mixture of shame, embarrassment and hopelessness.

You may need to lie there for a while to get your bearings. That happens to just about everybody who has tried something hard. But you will get up in due time and continue. Take as your own the great words of 16th century Scottish naval captain Sir Andrew Barton, immortalized in ballad:

"Fight on my men," says Sir Andrew Barton,
"I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I'll lay me down and bleed a while,
And then I'll rise and fight again."

Knowledge Is Good (October 24, 2004)

Learn things.

God built into our nature the thirst of inquiry and the joy of discovery. These instincts are generally to be encouraged - though, like any instinct, they can be indulged wrongly. Eve wanted to know what it would be like if she ate the wrong fruit, and Saul wanted to get military advice from a dead man's spirit. Those forays into forbidden knowledge were disasters. But the general rule remains: ask, seek, and knock, and you will receive, find out, and walk through open doors.

I believe that God deliberately created an insanely complex universe so that we could never get to the bottom of interesting things. We are his guppies, his goldfish, and I suppose he could have poured us into a featureless glass bowl with no place to go and not much to look at. But he dumped us in an ocean - an endless expanse of scientific, historical, philosophical and spiritual complexities that beckon us to swim around in them and marvel.

I confess I sometimes wish things were simpler. I wish there were an elegant formula that produced all and only the prime numbers. I wish I knew why head injuries affect morals. I'm so flummoxed by an exegetical/spiritual issue that I toyed with calling Pastor Cole on WMBI's Open Line this week (but what if people who know me recognized my voice? It would be so embarrassing).

Things aren't simple, and everywhere the mind looks it finds problems to wrestle with and puzzles to wrangle over. The good news is, some things are actually comprehendible. The search for wisdom does in fact yields results. In Luke 11, where Jesus is condemning people who have clogged their brains with hostility, he pauses to commemorate the example of Sheba, "Queen of the South," who came from the ends of the earth to learn from Solomon. 1 Kings 10 tells how she tested Solomon with hard questions, and came away saying (I paraphrase), "Wow! You're smart!" She made the effort to learn, and was rewarded.

Preachers have always liked pointing out that St. Paul, who knew he was about to die (see 2 Timothy 4:6) still asked Timothy to bring him his scrolls, especially the parchments (2 Timothy 4:13). The aged missionary on his deathbed still wanted to study!

You're busy, I know, but take time to learn stuff. Researchers are telling us that active learning can stave off the effects of age-induced senility, and they may be right. (You can't be sure because they seem to keep coming out with new studies that contradict the old ones.) Learn good stuff. As I tell my boys, it does not count if you can expertly recite the dialogue of a 1000 edgy cartoons. It does count if you can quote C. S. Lewis on a 1000 subjects because you've read everything he's written at least twice.

Brain-Damaged Believer (October 17, 2004)

Sam Kinison may have helped me solve a problem I've always had with Phineas Gage.

Kinison was a preacher-turned-comedian who flourished in the 1980s and was killed in a car accident in 1991. If you ever heard one of his stand-up routines, you would not believe that he had once been a minister. He was the most profane, vulgar, blasphemous comic of his (or maybe any) generation. He also drank, did drugs and cheated on his wife - deeds which all became grist for his comedy.

Until last week that was all I knew about Kinison. He was a creep (though a funny one) who fled the Lord and did ungodly things with manic energy. But then I saw a documentary which brought out some facts that made his life story very interesting. In the year before he died, Kinison started cleaning up his life, quitting the drugs and drinking and carrying on. A week before he died, he said to his best friend, Carl LaBove, "I don't know why I'm supposed to tell you this, but I feel I should tell you - get things right with God." LaBove answered, "Sam, if anybody needs to get it right with God, you do!" He agreed.

LaBove and Kinison's brother Bill were following Sam's car a few days later when it was involved in the head-on collision that took his life. When they raced to where Sam lay they heard him saying, "I don't want to die! Why now? Why? Why?" And he kept repeating, "Why? Why now?" Then, as Labove held him in his arms, Sam looked up and spoke as though to someone unseen. He said, "Oh. O.K...O.K...O.K," and, appearing to accept his fate peacefully, passed away. His brother said, "I don't think anybody could be there and not believe in an afterlife - not believe that he wasn't communicating with somebody." LaBove said, "Somebody said the right thing, and Sam heard it, and he left with them."

One more detail: when he was three years old Kinison had nearly been killed in another accident. A truck hit him, causing severe head trauma. He went into a coma and experienced grand mal seizures. His brother said that when they brought Sam home from the hospital, his personality had changed so much that he thought it was a different kid. Quiet, peaceful Sam suddenly became aggressive, impulsive and uncontrollable. He pretty much stayed that way for 35 years.

Why do I connect Kinison with Phineas Gage? Because Gage is the world's best known head-injury case. He was working as a railroad foreman in 1848 when a tamping iron, nearly 4 feet long and over an inch in diameter, shot right through his head. It entered below his left cheekbone, came out the top of his skull and landed 25 yards away, having blasted out a chunk of his brain. Amazingly, he remained conscious and alert. He rested a few weeks and went back to work.

But, in the words of his coworkers, he was "no longer Gage." Though still strong and intelligent, his personality degraded. His doctor wrote, "He is fitful, irreverent, indulging in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires."

So - a good man lost a piece of his brain and turned bad. What does my Christian faith have to say about that? I'll admit that this problem has long nagged at me. I'd prefer to think that any man's kind and steady disposition is due to the moral choices he makes, or, if he is a Christian, to the presence of the Holy Spirit within him. But doesn't Phineas Gage (and others like him) give the lie to spiritual explanations of goodness? Do responsible behavior and calm temper turn out to be nothing more than the products of a well-ordered brain? I myself do not cuss, cheat, make lewd comments or rage out of control. But hit me hard enough in the head and it looks like I might do just that for the rest of my life. I cannot deny that the thought unsettles me.

But Sam Kinison's story may shed a little light. Because I'd like to think that, for all Sam's iniquities, and whatever their source, God had mercy on his soul. God knew more precisely than we ever could what percentage of Sam's immoral behavior came from his choices and what came from a truck-battered cerebrum. I think God kept working with Sam. His brother said that even through all the years of careening profanely through life, Sam still considered himself a Christian. If God abandoned Sam, then why toward the end of his life did Sam come stumbling back to God as well as his warped and impulsive nature would permit him? And if Sam were irredeemably reprobate, why would the Lord comfort him during his final breaths? (Assuming we accept his friend's and brother's interpretation of what happened in those final moments. I do.)

The Bible says that God "knows how we are formed. He remembers that we are dust."(Psalm 103:14). I'm thankful for that. I will assume that God's perfect justice takes into account all the blows that pound and buffet the dust we are made of. At the same time, I'll not forget that some us are made of perfectly serviceable dust, and suffer no great hindrance to choosing good. In my case, I can't say that I'm aware of any bone chip pressing against my brain that inclines me toward evil. It would be nice to have that excuse, but I don't. So I would do well to remember that the same Bible that assures us of God's understanding and mercy also warns, "To whom much is given, much will be required." (Luke 12:48).

Humility And Success (October 10, 2004)

To fulfill a noble purpose you must first kill pride.

As I read Shelby Foote's classic history of the Civil War, I am amazed at how often grown men squabbled over petty differences as their nation teetered on the brink of ruin. With thousands of lives at stake, generals and statesmen (on the same side!) snapped at each other over insults and snubs and the issue of who would get glory or whose career would be advanced.

Much of Abraham Lincoln's greatness can be found in his ability to keep above that fray. One November night in 1861 he went to visit General George McClellan at his home in Washington. Informed by a servant that McClellan was at a wedding, Lincoln, along with Secretary of State William Seward and undersecretary John Hay, waited for him to get back. When the general returned, the servant told him that Lincoln was there to see him. McClellan walked right past the room where Lincoln and his associates sat. A half hour later, wondering about the delay, they sent the servant to fetch him and were told that he had gone to bed!

As the three trudged back to the White House, Hay angrily denounced McClellan's rudeness. But Lincoln, Foote writes, "quietly remarked that this was no time for concern over points of etiquette and personal dignity. 'I will hold McClellan's horse if he will only bring us success,' he said soon afterward."

You could almost say that Lincoln won the war right there. Lincoln had his priorities right. What mattered was winning, not worrying about little things like whether people treated him with respect. In
wartime, a leader must dismiss insults like an athlete dismissing minor injuries during a game. Stuff your ego. Take the pain. Play on.

(As it turns out, Lincoln was dead wrong about McClellan, whose ineptitude soon revealed him as maybe the worst general in the history of the United States. The vain fool couldn't win a game of tiddlywinks against children, much less secure victory for the Union. But no one knew that in 1861.)

In today's Chicago Tribune, I read that Joe Tinker and Johnny Evers, famed double-play infielders for the World Champion 1908 Chicago Cubs, hated each other. They had some falling out and didn't even speak to each other until the 1930s. But, as baseball historian Gabriel Schechter writes, "Their overriding desire to win overcame any personal problems." That “overriding desire to win” is exactly what basketball teammates Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant did not have this past season. The two best players in the game went down to defeat because neither could squelch personal pride for the sake of a higher purpose: another NBA championship.

Pastor Rick Warren has been reminding us all in recent years of the need to lead "purpose-driven" lives. Grab hold of a good purpose, like the glory of God, the evangelization of the lost, the edification of the church, or the pursuit of holiness - and don't let pride screw up your attainment of it. Be prepared, like Lincoln, to march right through the slings and arrows of outrageous offenses to your dignity. Don't let such piddly things deter you. You're big enough (that is, humble enough) to take it.