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What Happens After We Die?

Dallas Willard wrote about a lady he knew who refused to talk about life beyond death with her children. She claimed she did this because she didn’t want them to be disappointed if it turned out not to be there. “Well now,” Willard wrote, “if there is no afterlife they certainly won’t be disappointed. If there is, they may find themselves badly prepared. The only possible way they could be disappointed is if they do continue to exist.”

Will there be an afterlife? What does the Bible say about those who have died? Where are they now? What are they doing? Would a loving God create us only to consign us to extinction? Did God create us for himself?

I intend to weave together several biblical references which I hope will encourage you and strengthen your faith. They refer to what happens to believers who die.

  1. Believers are with the Lord ( 2 Corinthians 5:6-8). This passage does not elaborate on specific conditions of the intermediate state between death and resurrection. But it is clear enough. It says that for a believer in Jesus to leave the body in death is to be at home with him. Indeed, that is precisely what Jesus told the dying thief who was being crucified next to him: “Today you will be with me in Paradise” ( Luke 23:43).
  2. Believers are alive after they die (Matthew 22:32). Jesus referred to God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then he said that he is not the God of the dead but of the living. He was saying that the three patriarchs were more intensely alive than ever. They were enjoying an enhanced life as it was meant to be. A missionary named Chet Bitterman was martyred by guerrillas in Colombia. His father was quoted as saying, “We have eight children, and they are all living. One’s in heaven and seven are on earth.”
  3. Believers are recognizable after they die (Mark 9:14). When Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus on the holy mount of transfiguration, the disciples knew who they were.  Will we know each other in the next life? Well we certainly won’t be more ignorant than we are here! Our personalities will continue, not in some hazy, dreamlike state. We will know as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12).
  4. Believers are communicative after they die (Revelation 6:10). That verse refers to the souls of martyrs in heaven who spoke to the Lord and asked how much longer the sufferings of the Lord’s people would be allowed to continue. The spirit of the prophet Samuel appeared and spoke to King Saul to tell him about his future (1 Samuel 28:15-20).
  5. Believers are happy after they die (2 Corinthians 12:1-10). The apostle Paul was caught up to Paradise where he witnessed life in a heavenly dimension. He said he heard inexpressible words. Jesus once told a story that illustrates this. It makes us think of the words we all want to hear from him in heaven: “Well done good and faithful servant . . . come and share your Master’s happiness” (Matthew 25:21). For Paul, the desire to go and be with Christ was far better then life on earth (Philippians 1:23). At death, believers enter into close fellowship with the Lord Jesus. This is a state of unspeakable happiness.
  6. Believers are at rest after they die (Revelation 14:13). “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord . . . they will rest from their labor.” Think of those who are persecuted for their faith, who suffer incurable illnesses, for whom life here is a burden. They are promised rest. St. Augustine said that this is peace, a perpetual sabbath.
  7. Believers are loved after they die (Romans 8:37-39).Jesus had a special word for his heavenly Father: Abba. It is a term of close relationship. The scriptures tell us to think of God as Abba, an eternally loving Father. Romans 8:39 says nothing, not even death itself, can separate believers from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

There are some things worse than dying. It would be terrible to face death without the assurance of the presence of Jesus. It would be terrible to contemplate a conscious eternity without salvation. “People are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment” (Hebrews 9;27).

The good news is that Jesus took our judgment when he died on the cross. By believing in him as savior, we may have our sin removed and to be made legally righteous in God’s sight. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

There are some things that are better than living in this world. “To go and be with Christ is far better.”

Pastor Randy Faulkner

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A Truth Both Reassuring and Disturbing

Psalm 15 expresses the desire for fellowship with God. In elegant Hebrew poetry the psalmist asks “who?” . . . and “who?” Who may approach God and who may live in his presence? Anyone who cares enough to ask this, will be concerned with what God expects of us if we are to be in a right relation to him.

For the ancient Hebrews, the answer lay in the covenant God established with his people, He provided a way for them to live righteously. Israel was accepted as righteous when they repented of their sins and put their hope and trust in the Lord. Through faith they could receive God’s gracious forgiveness and the gift of righteousness.

This would be lived out in their behavior toward their neighbors. The psalm lists different kinds of conduct that should describe the people of God as they relate to one another in the context of God’s covenant favor.

“He whose walk is blameless, and who does what is righteous, and who speaks the truth from his heart, and has no slander on his tongue, who does his neighbor no wrong and casts no slur on his fellowman, who despises a vile man but honors those who fear the Lord, who keeps his oath even when it hurts, who lends his money without usury and does not accept a bribe against the innocent” (Psalm 15:2-5).

Reading this description of a life of integrity reminds us of the Ten Commandments, of Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, and of the lists of ethical duties in Paul’s letters. In fact, this is not so much a list of requirements for  a relationship with God, as it is an explanation of how he wants his people to live after they have become his people (Exodus 20:1-2). Frankly, I find that reassuring.

But I also find it disturbing. Can I say that my life has always been above reproach, that I have always lived a life of moral integrity? I cannot. I am a sinful man in great need of God’s grace and forgiveness. Indeed, “There is not a righteous man on earth, who does what is right and never sins” (Ecclesiastes 7:20).

The New Testament puts it this way: “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (James 2:10).

If Psalm 15 is a list of requirements for a righteous life, I am doomed. If it is a description of who I am because of God’s grace, there is hope for me. The writer of this psalm was David. We know quite a bit about how he strayed from the life he describes here. We read his desperate cry for forgiveness in Psalm 51. He knew he had not lived up to this standard. Has anyone?

There is One. The only human who ever lived whose walk was blameless and perfectly righteous, whose every word was truth, whose example was perfect love for others, was Jesus. He practiced what he preached in the Sermon on the Mount. He transfers his righteousness as a gift of grace (Romans 3:22) to every one who believes in him as savior. This is the message of the gospel. In Christ, believers are accepted into fellowship with a holy God.

“Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill?” The answer is Jesus and all who by faith are in him.

Pastor Randy Faulkner

 

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Faith is Not Unreasonable

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” — Hebrews 11:1

The famous skeptic H.L. Mencken has been quoted as saying, “Faith is the illogical belief in the occurrence of the impossible.” The philosopher David Hume said that faith and reason are two different things. To him matters of faith were unsupported by reason.

Anthony Flew once tried to illustrate this with the following parable: Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many  weeds. One explorer said, “There must be a gardener who tends this plot.” The other explorer answered, “There is no gardener.” So they pitched their tents and decided to watch.

No gardener was ever seen. On the assumption that he might be an invisible gardener, they set up an electrified fence, and patrolled the area with bloodhounds. No movement of the fence or cry of the hounds betrayed the existence of an invisible gardener.

Yet still the believer remained unconvinced. “He is an invisible gardener who is insensible to electric shock, he comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.”

The skeptic was exasperated. “How does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener, or no gardener at all?” (It is interesting to note that Flew later renounced atheism.)

John W. Montgomery said that Flew’s parable is a damning judgment on all religious truth claims except those of the Christian faith. In Christianity we do not have merely an allegation that the garden of this world is tended by a loving Gardener; we have the actual entrance of the Gardener into the human scene in the person of Christ.

When the Christian talks about faith he/she is not espousing a blind leap into ignorance, or faith in faith, or believing something known to be false. Faith is an intelligent commitment consistent with reason. The Christian faith is based on solid evidence, “being sure of what we hope for,” and “certain of what we do not see.”

This is telling us that the claims of Christianity are dependable and trustworthy, based on evidence. For example, consider Jesus’ claim to be the truth in himself (John 14:6). This is an absolute claim. If it can be disproven, then the whole Christian position comes crashing down. Does Jesus’ character match his claim?

He claimed to be sinless. His followers claimed he was sinless. Even his enemies were unable to produce any proof of his wrongdoing. His followers were not specialists in public relations. They did not invent extravagant stories to burnish Jesus’ image. They could not have made this up. They were uneducated Galilean working men.

Not only that, they were Jews! No Jew would ever ascribe sinlessness to another human being, no matter how much he was revered. But Jesus’ followers believed that Jesus was perfect, the living embodiment of the truth of God.

They faced persecution for preaching this. If this had been a made-up story there were too many people still living who could have refuted it. Nobody did because nobody could produce evidence that Jesus was anything other than  morally perfect.

A professor in a university announced on the first day of class that, “the first thing you have to learn is that there are no absolutes!” A student asked, “Are you sure of that?” Before he thought better of it the professor replied, “Yes, of course, I am absolutely sure.”

The writer of Hebrews is telling us that we can know some things for sure: Faith in Jesus is “being sure of what we hope for.” If Jesus is without moral imperfection, he can be trusted to tell us the truth about salvation, about God, about things beyond the physical world. We can be “certain of what we do not see.”

Those who have knowledge of physics know that there are sounds which are too high pitched for the human ear and there are light waves which are invisible to the human eye. Yet there are scientific instruments which can detect these invisible phenomena for us even though they are beyond our natural comprehension.

Thus it seems perfectly reasonable to me that there is a super-human wisdom and knowledge that are beyond my natural ability to comprehend. A person like the professor who says that there are no absolutes is limiting himself to a very tiny part of the spectrum of knowledge.

Real faith is not blind faith. It is a simple recognition that we must put our confidence in the only one qualified to lead us into that realm beyond human knowledge, and that one is Jesus Christ.

Pastor Randy Faulkner

 

 

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Jesus Before Pilate

Pontius Pilate appears in the gospels as a cowardly vacillator who was willing to sacrifice justice for political convenience. When the religious leaders of Israel brought Jesus to him, they were accusing him of blasphemy on religious grounds. Since they could not carry out a sentence of death, they wanted the Roman procurator to do it for them. So they based their demand for Jesus’ execution on a charge of treason against Rome.

Jesus’ trial before Pilate, as reported in John’s gospel, has Pilate asking Jesus seven questions. These reveal his conflicted mental state, his contempt for the Jews, his uneasy conscience, his fear of being reported to Caesar, and his amazement at the calm demeanor and other-worldly wisdom of Jesus. One gets the sense that for Pilate, this was the great personal crisis of his life. He was on trial before Jesus!

“Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked this, with emphasis on the word “you,” as if to say, “you, a preacher from Galilee, you, a rival to Caesar? Really?” Jesus answered in the affirmative. But he added that his kingdom is not derived from this world or dependent on worldly power (John 18:33-38).

“Am I a Jew?” Pilate’s unabashed sarcasm reveals his hatred for the Jews. Here they were, clamoring for the death of an innocent man while at the same time scrupulously observing a religious rule (John 18:28). The religious authorities wanted Jesus to die by crucifixion. This meant that he would die under the curse of God (Deuteronomy 21:23). In fact, this is what happened. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree'” (Galatians 3:13).

“What have you done?” Was Pilate asking this so that Jesus would admit to some criminal activity? He was not concerned about the fine points of Jesus’  theology. He was only interested in deeds and their consequences. If only he had pursued an answer to this question! John’s gospel is the record of Jesus’ powerful deeds as signs of his divine authority.

“What is truth?” It has been suggested that this may have been the cry of a tortured soul, that Pilate let slip a brief moment of vulnerability. Or was this question another sarcastic jeer? Or was it offered with a shrug of indifference? He did not know that the very embodiment of truth was standing before him.

“Where do you came from?” There may have been a vague hint of pagan superstition in this question. Jesus had often said that he had come from God, (John 5:37, 8:16-18). Now the religious leaders remind Pilate that Jesus had claimed to be the Son of God (John 19:7). Was there some dim awareness in Pilate that the person standing before him in dignified silence came from another world? Jesus did not answer.

“Do you refuse to speak to me?” Pilate is afraid (John 19:8). He is annoyed. He is offended. Jesus’s silence is his answer now. He has already declared his truth and his kingdom and Pilate has been dismissive. Jesus could see into Pilate’s heart. There was no use in answering.

“Don’t you realize that I have power?” He could say the word and Jesus would be crucified, or set free (John 19:10). He represented the most powerful government on earth. In his mind, there was no greater authority. In Jesus’s mind, however, there is the knowledge of the power of the living God, before whom all nations must bow. Jesus reminds Pilate that human government is a gift from almighty God (John 19:11) and is to be employed in the exercise of justice and righteousness.

Recognizing that Jesus was no threat to Roman civil authority, Pilate wanted to set him free (John 19:12). The fact that he did not is a cautionary tale. His capitulation to religious bigotry and the injustice of mob violence is a warning to us. Pilate killed an innocent man to try to preserve his own position.  Pilate condemned himself.

As for those who turned Jesus over to Pilate, our Lord says they were “guilty of a greater sin” (John 19:11). “‘We have no king but Caesar,’ the chief priests answered” (John 19:15). In saying this, the leaders of Israel renounced their Messiah and turned their back on their national heritage. They condemned themselves.

Pastor Randy Faulkner

 

 

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Where Was God?

I will always remember where I was on this date 25 years ago. I was attending mission board meetings at Glen Eyrie, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Our morning devotional was interrupted by the news of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. As the television news reported the unfolding events throughout the day, we became aware of the four hijacked airliners, the thousands of casualties, the attack on the Pentagon, and the heroic intervention of the passengers on United Airlines flight 93.

As a result of these attacks, the military was on high alert and all commercial flights were grounded. I was unable to get a flight home to Oklahoma City for several days. The staff of Glen Eyrie, headquarters of the Navigators, offered me kind hospitality during that time.

I was in Colorado Springs. Where was God on 9/11?

Where was he when hundreds of office workers were burned to death in stairwells and elevators? When civilians and first responders were crushed to death when the towers collapsed? When passengers on the four planes were killed when they crashed into the buildings? When thousands of families were told that their loved ones would not be coming home? When the deadliest terrorist attack in history challenged the mightiest nation in the world?

President George Bush issued a statement which included these words: “Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security have been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in  Psalm 23: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me.'”

“You are with me.”

A pastor was called to the home where a tragedy had occurred. A teenage boy was killed in a car crash. The embittered father snarled at the pastor, “Where was your God when my son was killed?” The minister sat silently for a moment, then replied, “He was where he was when his own boy was being killed.”

That wise pastor was saying that God is not oblivious to our sorrow. In fact he has entered our world of sorrow and is with us when we grieve. He is with us in the person of Jesus Christ his Son who endured the greatest of all suffering when he died for the sins of the world.

Bruce Milne described it this way: “(Jesus) enters into the full reality of death, not merely walking with us right up to the door only to pull back at the final second, leaving us to walk the dark valley on our own. He comes all the way with us right into the grey, after-death world of funeral parlors and the making of arrangements for the disposing of the body, the world of strained faces, hushed voices and tear-stained eyes.”

Of course that is not all. In his triumphant resurrection, our Lord “is alive forever and hence our contemporary. He still comes to transform broken, sorrowing and fearful lives with the sheer, uninhibited gladness of discovering him, alive and with us.”

Where was God on 9/11? President Bush got it right when he quoted the promise that God is with us when tragedy comes. He was with us on 9/11. If our faith is in Jesus, he will be with us whenever and however our end comes. He will be with us on that great day when he restores creation and there will be no more death, sorrow or crying, and no more 9/11s!

Pastor Randy Faulkner

A Note to Readers: If this blog is helpful to you in any way, I invite you to expand its witness by re-posting it on your favorite media platform.

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Read Your Bible

A young graduate student working in a European university was working on a doctoral dissertation. He was looking for some writings by an obscure Spanish thinker of the 18th century named Hierro.

He unearthed a dusty volume and in turning its pages he found what appeared to be a document in Hierro’s own handwriting. It was written in 1741. It was Hierro’s will, bequeathing all his worldly goods to the first person who would study his book which had apparently been ignored during the philosopher’s lifetime.

Spanish courts determined that the will was legal and that the student was entitled to collect nearly $250,000.

The Bible promises us an even more priceless treasure than that. It offers us the title deed to eternal life, purchased by the blood of Jesus through his death on the cross. We would do well to read and believe the Bible.

Peter the apostle wrote, “We have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it” (2 Peter 1:19). That is Peter’s way of reminding us to read our Bibles.

We should do this, Peter says, because the Bible is truthful and trustworthy. The word Peter uses is “certain.” That means it is sure, reliable, dependable. He refers to prophecy. The Bible is full of predictions that have been fulfilled 100% of the time. For example, if you do a careful study of the prophecies about the coming Messiah, you will discover that they are fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth.

Another reason Peter gives to encourage us to read our Bibles is that the Bible illuminates our lives. It gives light for our darkness. “Pay attention to it as a light shining in a dark place,” Peter says. In this he repeats a theme found throughout the scripture. “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path” (Psalm 119:105). When we are engulfed in the darkness of discouragement or suffering. the promises of God’s word bring the light and hope of his presence.

Peter gives another reason to read the Bible: it is a living message from the living God. In other words his Spirit inspired its writing. Peter says, “No prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20-21).

The Bible did not come into being through the writers’ own personal interpretation of things. The Bible was not the result of human imagining. L.S. Chafer said, “The Bible is not such a book a man would write if he could, or could write if he would.” It is divinely inspired. That is reason enough for us to read it. Its human authors were under the influence of the Spirit of God.

Just as the Lord Jesus was both divine and human, so the Bible is both divine and human. It is amazing in its unity and consistency: 66 books, written over a period of 1600 years, in many different places, by 40 different authors, in three different languages. Yet it all fits together like the pieces of a puzzle with Jesus Christ the savior as its main theme.

In my youth I had a Sunday school teacher who asked the class every week, “Did you read your Bible every day?” That was good advice. He knew the Bible would direct us to Jesus and his promise of eternal life.

What a treasure!

Pastor Randy Faulkner

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Ask, Seek, Knock

I have been privileged to pray with Christians in other countries in a variety of settings. In the Czech Republic I stood with worshippers who prayed with hands folded for an extended time as one person after another led in spontaneous prayer. I witnessed the praying of hundreds of South Korean Christians who gathered at five o’clock in the morning to pray for their nation. They prayed aloud, in unison, a great chorus of intercession. It was my privilege to gather with thousands of Ethiopian believers who met on a mountaintop for an annual prayer retreat. They were there to pray for revival and the spread of the gospel in their nation.

These believers took seriously the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:7-11, when he told his disciples, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.” This is an audacious promise. We are tempted to hesitate, to equivocate, to doubt. After all, we are small and insignificant. God is great, and he has a universe to run!

But our Lord Jesus is repeating a direct command: “Ask, seek, knock.” He goes on to say that every Christian may pray this way, boldly and confidently, whether they live in Europe, Asia, or Africa. I hope my American brothers and sisters are praying as fervently and as passionately for our nation as the believers I observed overseas were praying for theirs.

To illustrate this, the Lord asks us to imagine a child coming to a parent with a request for something to eat. Earthly fathers and mothers, even though they are not perfect people, know how to give good things to their children. If this is true, how much more will our heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him in faith? He wants us to come to him with our needs.

Someone might raise the objection that prayer is unnecessary because God already knows what we need. There is an obvious answer to this. Our praying is not to inform God, or to overcome his reluctance. He wants us to pray because it is a way of acknowledging our dependence on him and our devotion to him.

Another possible objection is that prayer does not always work! God does not always give us what we ask for. “I prayed for a job, and I am still unemployed.” “I prayed for healing, and I am still sick.” The best way to think about this is that God is not a cosmic vending machine. We must come to him on his terms. He may say “no” to a prayer of ours because he has a higher purpose than we can see at first. We can be as thankful for unanswered prayers as for answered prayers.

There are examples in the Bible of famous believers who prayed and did not receive what they asked for. Abraham prayed for the city of Sodom to be spared, but God destroyed it anyway. King David prayed for his baby to live. The child died. The apostle Paul prayed repeatedly for his “thorn in the flesh” (possibly a physical affliction) to be removed, but the Lord said “no.” God had something else in mind. Paul was to learn humility and to rely on God’s grace.

The fact is, our human understanding is so limited, we do not always have the wisdom to know what is best for us (Romans 8:26). If God gave us everything we asked for, that would be a terrible burden to bear. We would be left to our own limited understanding (Proverbs 3:5-6). The best way to pray is the way Jesus prayed: “Your will be done,” the prayer that never fails.

Jesus’ encouragement to us in Matthew 7 is to pray boldly, persistently, with faith, bringing our desires to the Father. His “ask, seek, knock” is a reminder that the Father welcomes our prayers. He is a good Father. He gives only good gifts to his children.

Pastor Randy Faulkner

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Don’t Give Up

A Sunday School teacher was getting discouraged. She went to her pastor and asked to be relieved of her class. “I’m not doing any good,” she said. She told her pastor that she was not seeing any spiritual response in the lives of the young people in her class.

This was during the second world war. Not long after that, she received a letter from a soldier in the U.S. army. He was writing to thank her for being his Sunday School teacher. “Because of you,” he wrote, “I am a Christian. This fact gives me hope and courage in this war. Your life has been a blessing to me.” After she read that letter, she went back to her pastor and asked to be reassigned to her ministry of teaching young people the Bible.

We do not always recognize the good that we are doing as we serve the Lord. He is the one who is keeping the records in heaven. Sometimes he lets us see what our works for him are accomplishing.

If we are tempted to become discouraged and to give up, it is a good idea to remember the promise in Galatians 6:9, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

Most people know who it was who invented the lightbulb. He was Thomas Alva Edison, a self-taught grade school dropout whose inventions revolutionized the American economy. But before he became famous as an inventor and entrepreneur, he had failed many times in business. His laboratory burned down. He was faced with bankruptcy. His wife died at a young age. But Edison did not give up.

He is known for his optimism and persistence. Over a period of sixty years he applied for 1,093 U.S. patents. He is probably America’s most famous inventor. His creations were the result of repeated experiments that led to new ways of looking at problems. Sometimes they led to new inventions and sometimes they did not. For every one of his successes, there were far more failures. When he was asked about this, he replied, “I have not failed ten thousand times. I have successfully found ten thousand ways that will not work.”

Edison’s example is a good reminder that as we serve the Lord, faithfulness is the secret to usefulness. It is always too soon to quit. Paul put it this way in 1 Corinthians 15:58, “Your labor for the Lord is not in vain.”

Pastor Randy Faulkner

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The Gift of Time

For many years it was my practice to meet with men for training in Christian discipleship. Once after an early morning meeting one of the men lingered to talk. Over a last cup of coffee he looked across the table and asked, “Why do you take time for this?” He was a successful businessman. I tried to answer in terms he would understand.

“People are God’s priority,” I said. “I am interested in developing men who will be men of influence for God. I am willing to take time to meet with faithful men who will use their influence to help others know and follow Jesus Christ.”

As I answered I had in mind Paul’s words to his young disciple Timothy: “The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Timothy 2:2).

The apostle was challenging his younger protege to take the spiritual teachings and practices he had learned from him, and re-invest them in others, who could, in turn, pass them on to still others.

I told that businessman that God wanted to use him as a leader in his family, in the church, and in the community. I saw in him the ability to influence others and I hoped he would use those leadership gifts for Christ. He had proven to be a faithful man. He had accepted my invitation to meet for Bible study, to keep a daily appointment with God in the scripture and prayer, to memorize Bible verses, and to learn to be an effective witness. “If I find a man like that,” I said, “it is worth the investment of time for me to meet with him and to encourage him.”

We give our time to what is important to us. If our marriages are important to us, we will give the gift of time to our spouses, pursuing loving relationships and serving them. If our children are important to us, we will not be absent from their lives as they are growing up. If our churches are important to us, we will love the people of the church enough to share life with them, to worship and study with them, and to pray with them.

If Christian discipleship is important to us, then we will want to be faithful disciples of Jesus. And we will want to follow his command to make disciples for him. I have never doubted this investment of time is worthwhile.

It is strategically important. If the future health and strength of the church is important, then it is a good idea to take the time to develop the church’s future leaders. I have found that younger men respond well to this challenge. Their habits of life are still being formed. They want to be good leaders.

This was the method of Jesus. He spent three years with his disciples, teaching them, modeling before them, empowering them, and sending them out to minister in his name. Yes, Jesus preached to large crowds. We know he was concerned about the masses of people. But he spent most of his time developing the few, the seventy, the twelve, and his inner circle, Peter, James, and John.

Time is a precious commodity that we give to what is important to us. Investing time in a small group of fellow believers who are potential leaders is a good way to accomplish God’s priorities. The payoff is spiritual reproduction.

Pastor Randy Faulkner

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If God Is Good . . . Why?

Churches are regularly presented with requests to pray for individuals who face life-threatening circumstances. Church people are usually faithful to pray for their friends who are suffering. They hear about lingering sicknesses, major surgeries, injuries caused by accidents and other tragedies.

Sometimes folks are tempted to ask the question “why?” Why is this happening? Not every Christian asks that question the same way or with the same urgency. But I suspect there are times when all believers ponder the question of undeserved suffering.

The question is often framed this way: if God is good, and if he is all-powerful, why does he allow suffering and evil to continue? Admittedly, it takes faith to affirm the goodness and power of God when we are confronted with the enormity of evil and human suffering. It does no good to deny the reality of evil. And we know that it is un-Christian to deny the goodness and power of God. Is there an answer to this conundrum?

Thomas Oden has offered some constructive thoughts about this vexing issue. I have found them helpful to my own understanding. The following propositions are adapted from his writings.

  1. God does not directly will human suffering. He does not cause it. He himself is good. But we live in a world that has been corrupted and polluted by sin, and sin has consequences.
  2. This is not to say that every instance of suffering is a direct consequence of a victim’s personal sin. In fact, Jesus explicitly refuted this idea when he said of the man born blind that neither his nor his parent’s sins had caused his blindness (John 9:1-3).
  3. God suffers with his people. He feels our suffering. He entered our world of pain in the person of Jesus Christ who was “despised and rejected by mankind, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering” (Isaiah 53:3). Jesus was “tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).
  4. God gave human beings the gift of freedom of choice. They have consciousness, intelligence, conscience, and will. In doing this God was willing to risk the possibility that human beings would abuse their freedom and choose to disobey him. If God had taken away the power of choice, he would have removed human intelligence and moral accountability.
  5. God in his wisdom decided to create a universe in which evil and suffering were a possibility. Had he not done that, there would be no possibility of freedom.
  6. God’s power can draw good out of evil. Adam fell, but that occasioned the greater redemption through Christ. Many biblical examples show how God brought good out of evil (the sufferings of Job, the Babylonian captivity, Paul’s thorn in the flesh). This does not mean that suffering is good in itself. It means that God is able to use it to accomplish his good purpose (Romans 8:28). Oden wrote, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit evil to exist.”
  7. Sometimes suffering occurs because we are connected to the rest of humanity. No one is an island. Paul repeated the maxim that “no one lives to himself.” Therefore, what happened to Adam (sin and death) happened to me. What happens to society happens to me,  Some sufferings are the result of social evils (crime, war, terrorism) or human mistakes (faulty construction, drunken drivers) or natural disasters (earthquakes, storms, contagious diseases).
  8. We grow through trials and suffering, even though we do not like it. Every athlete knows there is no growth and development without pain. Again, God does not cause our suffering, but he may use it for our sanctification. This does not diminish the pain, but it may help us see God’s good purpose in it.
  9. Evil does not limit God’s power. It will not win. Beyond human history, God will renew creation, judge evil and set right what has been ruined by sin.

As I think about these affirmations, I wonder if, instead of asking “why?” I should be asking “how?” How may I respond to my difficulties with faith and courage? How may I see God’s good purpose in my suffering? How may I use these troubles to grow more like Jesus Christ?

Pastor Randy Faulkner