Brian Castelli – With His Heart

I received a copy of an “untimely deaths” chain e-mail message today. The message gave examples of people who cursed God, flaunted his laws, and then died an untimely death. The conclusion was obvious: These people got what they deserved. While I agree, I also think that the message isn’t limited to just those who are overtly wicked. All of us, both the wicked and the righteous in man’s eyes, are destined for the same end unless Jesus covers us. That is the great message of the Gospel.

This e-mail arrived at a time when I was doing some heavy thinking about death, wickedness, righteousness and salvation. I am of the opinion that God makes things line up like this once in a while. I have learned over the years *not* to ignore them when I see them. (I am also convinced that many times God lines things up for me and I miss them. Oh, well…)

I have been studying the book of Luke for the last few weeks. The text in Luke has made me think about what it means to be good in God’s eyes. In chapter 18, Jesus meets a rich young man. You can read the story yourself here:

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%2018:18-27&version=HCSB

This guy is holy and righteous, having kept all the commandments since his youth. I mean, he is as holy as any man can be. He’s that guy that everybody talks about being so perfect. He didn’t curse God. He served God. He didn’t disregard God’s laws. He kept the commandments. Yet Jesus said he was lacking. Lacking! Here’s the super-religious guy, and Jesus said it’s not enough. The Bible says the dude walked away sad.

The crowd watching the discussion with the rich young man asked Jesus, “Who, then, can be saved?!!?” I mean, if this guy can’t get in, what hope do the rest of us have? Jesus’ answer is awesome: “What is impossible for man is possible with God.”

Over and over in scripture, we are told there are two paths to hell. One is to live a life disregarding God, cursing him, rejecting his laws, rejecting his offer of salvation in Jesus Christ. The second is to do good things such that (we think) God *must* let us into heaven. If we’re good enough, we think, God *must* let us in! Right? Wrong. Both groups are equally lost, equally wicked in God’s eyes. Both groups are trusting in their own efforts to save them. Under our own power, heaven is impossible. Impossible.

But there is hope. It *is* possible with God. The third path is the one Jesus calls us to. It’s the same path he called the rich young ruler to follow in Luke 18. We’re called to follow Jesus. The righteous and the wicked alike must come to him and say, “I’ve got nothing! Save me!” This applied to John Lennon and Mother Teresa. This applies to Charles Manson and Billy Graham. It applies to all of us.

We recently watched the movie Fireproof. I enjoyed the movie in one sense and didn’t in another.

I enjoyed the movie because of the strong salvation message. I enjoyed the movie because the principle behind the “Love Dare” agrees with my own opinion and experience about how to improve and maintain relationships. It doesn’t matter how hard you work on the other person, it’s only the energy you put into fixing yourself that makes a difference.

I didn’t like the parts of the movie that reminded me of times when I’ve been angry, impatient, or frustrated and ended up being harsh to my wife. Ephesians 4:2 in the NIV starts out with, “Be completely humble and gentle”. (Emphasis mine) The scriptures talk about gentleness and patience and putting the needs of others before our own. Sigh.

I didn’t like those parts that reminded me of my sin, but I appreciated the reminder that my marriage is an area where I haven’t “arrived.” I must continue to work on myself to be the best husband I can be.

I’ve been studying the book of Ephesians. One of the things I’ve noticed about the apostle Paul’s words to the believers in Ephesus is that he gives them the choice to be black or white, alive or dead, slaves or free. He never once urges them to take a middle road. There is no middle ground. Of course, he urges the believers to choose life, to choose Christ. It occurred to me that this is similar to the call made by Jack Bauer, the fictional counter-terrorist character of TV’s 24.

On 24, Jack Bauer is all in. He will do whatever it takes to defend this country. He does not waiver. He does not equivocate. He is on mission and will not be swayed.

We are called to be Jack Bauer’s in the spiritual world. in Ephesians, we are called to take a side, to put on the armor of God, to not delay or debate since the days are  evil. Bauer is successful because he acts swiftly and decisively. When was the last time you acted swiftly and decisively in matters of faith? Did you hold back, failing to speak about Jesus when you had the chance? Have you been decisive for Christ?

We are called to take a stand.

Yeah. I agree. Weird title.

Two notions collided in my head this morning. I was listening to a sermon titled, “The Whole Christmas Story.” One of the strong points that was made was that if we don’t understand the bigger picture – the back story – it’s hard to understand the significance of Jesus’ birth.

Jason, one of our Elders, asked us to consider a contrast. We were invited to compare the joy we feel when we hear the news that a couple we barely know has delivered a child with the incredible joy we feel when we hear the news that a couple we know well, a couple that has struggled with miscarriages, pain, and suffering, has delivered a child. Because we know the back story of the couple we know well, there is greater significance and greater joy when we hear the news.

When we read the accounts of Jesus’ birth in the New Testament, we might feel joy akin to the joy we feel when we hear the news of that couple we barely know. We know it’s a good thing – birth, that is. We might also recall that Jesus is headed for the cross, therefore we know that it’s important. But without knowing the back story we might miss the incredible joy that comes from understanding the significance of that birth.

The reality is that Jesus’ birth was a huge deal. It was a birth long awaited and hoped for by the Jews. As we read through the Old Testament, we find an amazing story of a people that kept going their own way and God who wouldn’t abandon them. The Jews were waiting and hoping for a Messiah who would accomplish that which they were incapable of doing for themselves. In the dark days prior to Jesus’ birth even the prophets had been silent for some 400 years. It was as if God had turned his back on the nation. I’m told that the rabbis writing in those days wondered what God was doing. They worried that Israel had, at last, exceeded God’s patience.

But in the darkness there was hope. Jesus quietly burst onto the scene to begin a journey that would fulfill God’s promises of blessing to the Jews (Israel) and the Gentiles (the rest of us).

How does this fit with the Matrix?

In the movie, the people living in the Matrix don’t know the back story. What they see is a facade, a mere shadow of the reality behind it. I believe that many of us – Christians and non-Christians alike – look at the Christmas story through Matrix-colored glasses. It’s a nice story. It makes us feel good because it means that God loves us. But we don’t understand the back story. We don’t understand the significance.

In The Matrix, when people finally know the back story, their lives are radically changed. It’s not possible to go back to business as usual. This kind of radical change can be yours, too, when you know Jesus’ back story. Read the Old Testament and the gospels. I believe they will open your eyes to the bigger picture.

I shared the “I was wrong” part of the Be Still post with a friend of mine. With all sincerity, he told me, “You can’t discount the leading of the Holy Spirit. Maybe that is the meaning the Holy Spirit wanted you to take from that passage that day.” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to hurt my friend’s feelings, but I believe he was very wrong.

As I’ve recently been learning, scripture is composed of words arranged in sentences and paragraphs. “That’s obvious,” you might say. Yes, but the implications of “words on the page” are sometimes thrown out the window when we look at scripture. A single word in scripture has no meaning on its own. It’s meaning comes from the context of how a word is used along with other words to form the sentence. The sentences (verses in this case) cannot derive their full meaning apart from the larger context of the paragraph, chapter and book.

To take a verse and derive what it means to me without the context of the verses around it is dangerous and often wrong. The words on the page mean something. They meant something when they were written, and they mean the same thing today. Meaning does not change. Truth does not change. Application may change as the culture changes, but I can’t claim that any verse means something different to me that it did to the original author.

Our only clue into the minds of the authors of scripture is what they wrote. Cults have been founded on claiming the right to decide what scripture means apart from that.

I have been wrong!

I have been challenged by the teaching of the leadership of my new church. They are showing me that the casual way I had been interpreting the Bible is error prone and can lead to some crazy interpretations. I am guilty of using some of the misinterpretations that were used as examples. Oh, no!

The best example of my failure is Psalm 46:10a. In the NIV, it reads:

Be still and know that I am God

I love the Steven Curtis Chapman song, “Be still.” The lyrics include the phrase, “Be still; be speechless.” The interpretation of the song, and the interpretation that I had been using, including the interpretation that I have taught in small group Bible study, is that we are to be quiet before God. We are to put aside our busyness, our hustle and bustle, to turn down the volume and just absorb who God is. While all of that is good and true, it isn’t what the verse means!!!!!

If we look at the verse in the local context of the rest of the psalm, it becomes pretty clear what it really means. Psalm 46 is all about God as warrior, God as our refuge and strength. We need not fear even the destruction of the earth because we know God. The imagery is of war and destruction. Then the quote from God in verse 10:

“Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.” (NIV)

“Be still” in this context is really something like, “Stop striving, stop trying to be God, stop worrying over how you’re going to handle the uproar in the world around you.” God is going to exalt himself. We are to get out of the way and let him be God.

This correct interpretation is far from the one I had been using. I am glad to have had the opportunity to learn the truth.

I think non-Christians must be very confused about the many translations of the Bible that are available today. I think I could list 10 without doing any kind of lookup. The uninformed person is probably thinking, “Why can’t these Christians make up their minds?” When some of us make the claim that the Bible is God’s word without error, they probably ask, “Yeah, but which one?”

The truth is, all the popular modern translations of the Bible are translations made directly from the oldest manuscripts available. This isn’t a case where one English translation was created, then another was created based on the first one, and so on. The Bible translations available today at Christian bookstores are the product of years of scholarship in ancient languages and history.

As for the Bible being God’s word without error, it is my opinion that this statement is true of the original documents. The best ancient documents we have are copies of the originals, and the translations themselves contain small differences. This means that the Bible I carry to church on Sunday probably contains small errors. But here’s the deal: Of all the ancient documents under scrutiny in the world, the Bible has the largest number of manuscripts, and many of those documents are of the highest quality. On every score of ancient document scholarship, the Bible scores higher than all other documents. And those thousands of copies and fragments of copies agree with one another on all the fundamental and important aspects of Christianity. The differences we find are regarding minor points upon which salvation and doctrine do not depend.

Bottom line: You can trust the Bibles at the Christian bookstore. NIV, NASB, Living, KJV, NKJV, Holman, etc. can be trusted to tell you the truth about what was said and done. They are reliable and historically accurate. You job, given the evidence in the Bible, is to decide what you’re going to do with this Jesus character. He said and did some things that have affected all of history. How will you respond?

(Originally published May 2007)

I have been solwly working my way through The Pursuit of God, a book written in the 1940’s by A. W. Tozer. Today I came across a very interesting section that I will quote here:

“The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people.”

The point Tozer is trying to make is that unless we believe that God is active in the world around us, speaking to us from his very creation, that the Bible cannot be more than a book of moral principles for us. Tozer goes on to write:

“A silent God suddenly began to speak in a book and when the book was finished lapsed back into silence again forever. He was for a brief time in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our heads how can we believe? The facts are that God is not silent, has never been silent. It is the very nature of God to speak.”

Tozer has hit upon the answer to a problem I routinely run into when talking to people about faith. They don’t want to accept the Bible as God’s word because they don’t perceive God as active in the world around them. And they find it difficult to believe that God, if he exists, would only speak through this one book. The answer, of course, is that God is speaking all the time through the world around us. The Bible is only one of the ways God reveals himself.

I think God is always lining up events to teach us lessons or remind us of things we’re neglecting. Most of the time, I miss them. I’m too blind or preoccupied to notice them. But every so often, my eyes are open just long enough to see the confluence of two or three things in my life that add up to a lesson or a reminder. This is what happened to me on Sunday.

I have been reading a book by John Piper. In it, he sites Romans 3:25. The Holman Christian Standard Bible states the verse this way:

God presented Him as a propitiation through faith in His blood, to
demonstrate His righteousness, because in His restraint God passed over the
sins previously committed.

Propitiation means to substitute as an atonement for or to accept wrath in one’s place. It’s all about the way Jesus took our sins upon himself and paid the price for them. In the book, Piper states that until a person comes to the point at which he or she understands their sinfulness, their need for God, Christ has nothing to offer them. This was stream #1.

Stream #2 was named April. As the service drew to a close at church on Sunday, April came forward at the invitation time to present herself for membership in the church. April stood there at the front, and the pastor talked about how April had gotten saved just a few days before. He talked about how she had finally come to realize her need, that there was an empty place in her heart that needed to be filled, and that Jesus was the one who could fill it for her. As the pastor talked, April nodded and cried tears of joy. It was a touching moment.

So the confluence of these two streams: I remember a day 20+ years ago when I cried, too. Like April, I had come to the point at which I recognized my need and invited Jesus to fill it. My life hasn’t been the same since. The gentle tug, the reminder this brought to me, is that I’ve taken Jesus for granted. I’ve been a Christian for so long that it’s easy for me to gloss over Jesus’ death and resurrection. Been there. Done that. Next subject. But God is telling we to wait a minute. Stop, rest, think. Maybe I need to be more like April. Maybe this is God’s way of gently reminding me that I need to appreciate Jesus again, that I need to take my praise of him up a notch.

Jesus died as my substitute. He died as your substitute, too. Amen.