Leave the Door Open
There would have been no way to have persuaded the prodigal son to return home the day he walked away. He wasn’t ready. In the pigsty, broke and abandoned by his fair-weather friends, he needed no persuading. God sees where the path of sin and rebellion takes prodigals, and He sees their way back home. All the Father could do was patiently wait. At times, that is all we can do.
Augustine advised, when dealing with false ideas and values to which others cling, to let them develop to their disappointing end. It is difficult for us to do that, but sometimes that is our only option – to momentarily ‘give them over,’ praying, trusting God.
C. S. Lewis was more radical. He advised, “Push them to the logic of their presuppositions.” Ask them, “And what then? And then?” Most have not clearly thought through the implications of their actions. Francis Schaeffer called human varieties of unbelief halfway houses. The unbeliever, he argued, usually stopped just short of the cliff of destruction. There, Schaeffer said, they end up in the halfway house of unbelief, momentarily too ashamed or confused to come home. Those are unbelievers that can be helped.
Augustine, the great church father, would acknowledge, looking back on his life of sin, “You [God] were always present, angry and merciful at once, strewing the pangs of bitterness over all my lawless pleasures to lead me to look for others unallied with pain. You meant me to find them nowhere but in yourself, O Lord, for … you smite so that you might heal.”
Os Guinness tells the story of lecturing at a university north of London. When he finished, a professor from the university lingered to have a word with him. He confessed that neither he nor his wife, 15 years younger, had ever had an interest in faith. He had been quite liberal in his thinking and the two had agreed to an open marriage which had been marked over their years together by multiple affairs by them both.
Occasionally, the professor noted, a student emerged with a passion to witness and win him to Christ. He met such students with a cool indifference, enough to quiet and muzzle them. Now in his mid-fifties and his wife at the late stage where the probability of childbearing was minimal, they were surprised to discover that she was pregnant. They were expecting a child. Something they had never had in their plans. Immediately, they both realized that they did not want a child raised in the atmosphere they had created, not with the morals with which they had lived.
The idea of being a parent shocked their sensibilities. “We have always had an open marriage,” the professor told Guinness, “but the younger generation has taken the openness further, to the point of chaos. We don’t want that for our daughter.” Suddenly, always closed to faith and to God in the past, they were now wide open. Perhaps around us are more people ready for a radical decision to follow Christ that we realize. There are, as in the case of this couple, windows of time when there is an openness. Earlier, they would not have considered such a decision. And later, their heart may grow cold again. Our job is to discern, by the leading of the Spirit, inside a covenant of friendship, the Kairos time when their hearts are open to the gospel.
Augustine’s mother approached Ambrose, the Bishop, encouraging him to talk to Augustine. The Bishop resisted. Augustine would write, “My mother asked him, as a favor, to have a talk with me, so that he might refute my errors, drive the evil out of my mind, and replace it with good… but he refused… a wise decision, as I afterward realized. He told her that I was still unripe for instruction because, as she told him, I was brimming over with the novelty of heresy… ‘Leave him alone,’ he said. ‘Just pray to God for him. From his own reading he will discover his mistakes.’”
We stand ready to give answers when the people we want to win don’t know the questions. Sometimes people need questions more than they need answers. This is one of the functions of the apologist. You use questions to raise questions. You want to arouse the desire in them to find truth, to know God.
When Issa, the 18th century Haiku poet of Japan lost his wife and all five children, he was grief stricken. With each loss, he went to the Zen Master for comfort and was given the same counsel. “Remember the world is dew.” Dew, like the early morning fog, is transient. It is there – then gone, ephemeral. So too, Buddhist believe, is the suffering of this world and its end, death – all an illusion.
Detachment, they argue, is the answer. Don’t get attached to anyone or anything and then losses will not matter. Detachment, Buddhism advocates, lets one transcend the mourning that prolongs the grief. In truth, it is a stoic, self-protecting and loveless way to live. It is cold detachment, the conditioning of oneself to be uncaring. It is not life at all. It can know no meaningful, sacrificial relationships. It is designed to be self-protecting.
Issa went home, but he was not consoled. “The world is dew; the world is dew,” he would write, “And yet; and yet.” It is this “and yet” to which Buddhism has no answer, nor does secular humanism or Marxism. Only in the resurrection of Jesus Christ do we find the answer to the “and yet” of living in a painful, disappointing world. And that “and yet” is found in the radical identification of God with men, the incarnation. And in the radical sacrifice, the cross. And in the “and yet” of the resurrection from the dead, as well as the “and yet” of the Second Advent. As Corrie ten Boom would say after her ordeal in a Nazi concentration camp where she lost her sister, Betsy, and saw so much suffering and senseless cruelty, “There is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.”
• C. S. Lewis encountered the joy of the Lord, and that was the trigger that moved him toward Christianity.
• W. H. Auden, a philosophical atheist, was moved by a passion for justice.
• Dean Jones, the actor, perplexed and empty, knelt at a bed in a hotel room and prayed. He recalled the moment, saying it was if he was in the middle of a Disney movie where Bambi had walked across the set.
Peace flooded into his heart as never before.
• Chuck Colson retreated to his car after an evening with peers who had worked with him in the Nixon Administration. They informed him of their newfound faith in Christ. Colson was shaken. His hands were trembling so badly that he could not insert the car key into the ignition. All the while he argued with himself, “How could they believe? They are intellectuals. They are bright folks.” With an arm load of books, he retreated the following weekend to a place to read and reflect. He came back a believer hooked by the rational claims of the gospel. A gospel he had never seriously considered before.
• For Constantine, it was a vision of the cross.
• For Nicky Cruz, the New York gang leader, into witchcraft and street wars, it was the challenge by David Wilkerson to be a true man, free, and bold enough to differentiate oneself by following Christ.
Each person responds to a different trigger and is drawn by a different desire. Every conversion will be different in that sense. Only the Holy Spirit can orchestrate such a diverse score, each of us singing a part of the same song.
Clark Williamson speaks of the “music of a passage,” which one cannot hear if they are tone deaf. It is this music to which we respond in conversion. We are invited to join the song – heaven’s song, to sing here on the earth as an echo of what we have heard in heaven. We resonate – we vibrate with the sounds of heaven, life-giving language, set to music. This is the essence of worship. Writings, words, are in monochrome; but speech, sound, music are in color. It is completely different – because in hearing speech, in hearing the sound, something in us is awakened. We hear in the nuances of other voices emphases that would have been missed by the letters and symbols of the written word. Augustine believed that to understand a text, one must decide how to “pronounce” it. This is called “tone of voice exegesis.”
Jesus is the “Word, made flesh.” God did not give us a book, but a Himself, a person, in Jesus, the Christ, the Lord. Have you heard him sing? Zephaniah 3:17 says that God rejoices over us with loud singing. The word rejoice in the passage can be translated as dance. Here is a dancing, singing, rejoicing God – when He thinks of you.