An Act of Kindness

 I saw a quote the other day attributed to the actor, Morgan Freeman.

He reportedly said, “How do we change the world? One random act of kindness at a time.”

Great quote. I don’t know if he really said it or if it’s one of those things attributed to him by somebody. But my guess is, whether or not Freeman actually said it, he doesn’t mind getting credit.

There are all kinds of sayings about doing random acts of kindness. Who can object to an act of kindness?

Well …

I was reading in the Acts of the Apostles, that great history of the early church written by Dr. Luke, the historian.

In Acts 3, he tells us that Peter and John were going up to the temple in Jerusalem at the time of prayer (three in the afternoon), and they came upon a man who was lame from birth, who had people carry him every day to the temple where he would beg. The man sees Peter and John and asks them for money. Peter and John tell him they don’t have any money, but (in verse 7) “taking him by the right hand, he helped him up, and instantly the man’s feet and ankles became strong. 8 He jumped to his feet and began to walk.”

You might expect everyone to be thrilled.

But in Chapter 4, we see Peter and John have been arrested by the Temple guards because of what they did, and are called to appear before “the rulers, the elders and the teachers of the law … Annas the high priest was there, and so were Caiaphas, John, Alexander and others of the high priest’s family.”

They demand to know in whose name Peter and John healed this man.

Clearly, they’re not happy. But when asked, Peter gives this wonderful reply: “If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a man who was lame …”

It struck me that, for all the theological implications behind the arrest and interrogation of Peter and John, Peter himself describes what he did as “an act of kindness.”

I love thinking about the other people in these stories. While the Acts story focuses on Peter and John and the conflict with religious leaders, I can’t help but wonder about the man lame from birth.

He might object to being referred to as a secondary character in this story. To him, I’m sure this was all about him. After all, he’s the one who was lame from birth. He’s the one who went to beg every day at the temple. He’s the one who was healed.

It’s a great reminder that while the stories we tell center on us or the person we are focusing on, there are other people with different perspectives, who would remember that same story as being about them, and tell if from their perspective.

My wife was involved in an automobile accident quite a few years ago, from which she is still recovering. From our perspective, she is the central character in that story. Maybe our family or maybe the guy that hit her are key figures. But she, to us, is the focal point.

But there were other people involved. There were the witnesses to the accident. There were the first responders, the police and EMTs. There were the emergency room staff. And so on … each with their own perspective of that day; each perhaps changed in some way by what they witnessed or did or thought as a result. I have heard from a few of them over the years.

Recently, I was stopped by a Mountain Brook police officer for going a little bit over the speed limit. He saw my driver’s license and said, “Was your wife involved in an accident about 10 years ago, right down the road?” Mind you, this was 14 years after the incident.

I said yes, and he said, “I was the first one to arrive at the scene. How is she?” Fortunately, my wife was sitting in the passenger’s seat and we could say, “She’s all right. Thank you for your care.” He told us he’d never forgotten that day.

My point – in this case – is that the policeman had his reaction to that day, and the story he would have told about it would be different than mine, even though it was about the same event. He didn’t know about all that had happened afterward to us. He just knows how it affected him.

God works on a lot of levels, simultaneously.

There is a lot I could unpack just in that.

But I think of the man in Acts, lame from birth. All he wanted was some money. He had friends who brought him to this spot at the temple every day, I guess, where he begged for whatever people going into and out of the temple would give him. Seems like a good place to hit people up for money.

That was, for lack of a better word, his job. Maybe he shared what he got with his friends. Maybe it was all for him.

We learn later in the story that he was over 40 years old. He’d been at this a long time. He didn’t start that day expecting to be healed. When he saw Peter and John, all he was hoping for was some money to get him through another day.

Then he gets healed. He can suddenly walk. He’s no doubt excited. He can’t wait to tell his friends.

Then … this is my imagination, of course, but here is a guy with no apparent skill other than begging. My guess is he’d never had a job. He didn’t have a skill or a trade. He’d been cared for all his life. It might not have been a great life, but it was his. He had his routine.

And now – what do his friends say? They celebrate the miracle, of course. But now, do they expect him to take care of himself? Does he have to find his own place to live? How does he go about earning money to live on? Who teaches him the skills he needs to survive now? People treat him differently – what does that look like?

There are people he will meet, and he’ll tell them the story of the miracle, but they won’t care. They weren’t part of the miracle. They didn’t know him before, when he was lame. Maybe they just ask, “What do you do now?’’ And indeed, what does he do?

Then, take the religious leaders. They don’t seem to care that the man was healed. They are angry that it occurred. They would have preferred the man keep showing up, every day, year after year, begging on the temple steps. Maybe it made them feel good about themselves that they’d give him a few coins every day, that these beggars offered the religious people a chance to show generosity and perhaps do some good. Maybe they were proud that they allowed these beggars a spot on the temple steps every day.

As a side note, I always wondered why someone didn’t say to Jesus or to the Disciples, “Can you heal everyone else that sits out here?” Wouldn’t that be a great thing? Fix these broken, hurting people, and get them off the temple steps? Do away with all this mess? Instead, the leaders of the day always seemed angry over these “acts of kindness.”

There are ramifications to this story that seem almost endless.

But here is where I want to go, to perhaps the simplest lesson that I see here.

When God comes into your life, He doesn’t always give you what you want. The lame man wanted a handful of coins. He’d have no doubt loved it if Peter and John had given him a sack full and gone on about their way. That’s what this man thought would make his life better, solve his problems.

Instead, God (through Peter and John) changed the direction of his life. With it came a whole host of other issues the man had never had to consider before. The lame man was given a new life, in a sense. I assume he had to leave the other beggars that he’d been gathering with for years. He had to figure out a new way to relate to his friends who had taken care of him for his whole life. And of course there is the question, what does he do now?

Was his life better? We’d have to say the potential was there for it to be much better.

But was his life easier?

God doesn’t promise easy. He promises to heal, to restore, to make whole, not to give us what we want but what we need – for His Glory.

Doesn’t loving us mean God wants our lives to be easy and comfortable? Unfortunately, no. The Bible teaches over and over that God “works all things together for good” (Romans 8:28), which must mean that the difficulties are part of that working together for good. They must have a purpose. There are any number of verses that tell us that.

God’s ultimate purpose is for us to become more and more like Jesus. Peter writes about this in the letter we call 1 Peter (1:6-7) when he says, “In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which perishes, even though tested by fire, maybe found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

In other words, one day we’ll look back at our lives - how we lived, the decisions we made. Will we look back and be proud? Or ashamed? (Probably, for most of us, some of both). Did we honor and bring glory to God? Or did we do what was easy, or cut corners, or take a short cut even though we knew it might not be the best way to handle what we were going through.

I don’t know what the rest of the lame man’s life was like. But I know thousands, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have read about it, and perhaps been brought closer to God as a result. However difficult the rest of his life may have been (and maybe it wasn’t, we don’t know), truly on this day, he was healed for the Glory of God. And the impact of his story on other people has never stopped.

The irony of life – if it can be called irony – is that the very things we instinctively don’t want are often the things that shape us most deeply; not because suffering is good in itself, but because God refuses to waste it.

It says in Acts, “After further threats they let them (Peter and John) go. They could not decide how to punish them, because all the people were praising God for what had happened.”

Isn’t it amazing, what can result from one act of kindness?

Speaking the truth about God (He apparently doesn't like it when we don't!)

 Do you want God to know you?

Or do you want to know God?

In today’s church and among particularly younger Christians, I often hear people talk about having a “relationship” with God – which is absolutely correct. However, most of our culture seems to think of “relationship” as something that is casual and doesn’t take any real work. Too many of our relationships end when one party gets dissatisfied, usually because they feel the other party in the relationship has quit caring about their feelings, or “just doesn’t understand me.”

I read this quote from a student at Calvin College, a Christian college in Michigan, who said, “When I realize that my faith wasn’t necessarily about the Christian Reformed church and it wasn’t even necessarily about the Bible, but about my relationship with God and that God is all-compassing and loving, I felt very free.”

See what I mean? “My faith wasn’t necessarily about the Bible, but about my relationship with God.”

But how does this young person know God? By his emotion, by what makes him feel loved and affirmed and even approved? It’s like we think the important thing is that God knows us, as if we’re some kind of mystery to the God who, according to Scripture, knows the very hairs on our head (Luke 12:7).

The issue isn’t God knowing me. He knows me; heck, He created me.

The issue is, how well do I know God?

Occasionally I like to ask the following trick question: How many stories are in the Bible? The answer, really, is just one – the story of God. All Scripture is designed to reveal God to us, through many mini stories, if you will.

And how do we get to know God? It’s rather old-fashioned, of course, but the best way is to read His Word.

I know, I know. That’s what your fundamentalist grandfather always said. But where is the emotion in reading Scripture? Where is the “feel good?”

Oh, it’s not that folks are against a structured, daily reading of The Bible, but there sometimes seems to be a “feeling” that it isn’t critical, because, they argue, God only cares about our heart.

I was going through the book of Job – again – and something in the last chapter hit me in a way that I hadn’t thought about before. It’s pretty simple and straightforward, but maybe because the book is so long (42 chapters), with so much dialogue, I was ready to simply skip through the resolution and hadn’t given the last chapter the complete study it deserves.

But right there after God finishes his long monologue where he reminds Job that He is God and no one else – least of all Job – is, God turns to Job’s friends and “After the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.”

We get so caught up in God talking to Job that we sometimes forget that Jobs’ friends could apparently hear God, or that God actually talks to the three friends and says, in essence, “You thought you were speaking about me and on my behalf to Job, but you were only speaking from your own wisdom and foolishness.” And God says to them, “You better ask Job for forgiveness, and if Job forgives you, I will forgive you.” There is a whole chapter’s worth of implications in that passage, but I’m not going there right now.

No, what struck me is God getting angry because these three well-meaning and pretty knowledgeable men did not speak the truth about God, and God didn’t (doesn’t) like being spoken of incorrectly.

For some reason, I started reading the book of Ezekiel the other day.

And if you want to know what makes God unhappy, read Ezekiel. It’s pretty brutal. More specifically, in the context I’m trying to make, read Ezekiel 13 from The Message, the passage that says (and I’ve edited for space), “Son of man, preach against the prophets of Israel who are making things up out of their own heads and calling it ‘prophesying.’ Preach to them the real thing. Tell them, ‘Listen to God’s Message!’ God, the Master, pronounces doom on the empty-headed prophets who do their own thing and know nothing of what’s going on! …. All they do is fantasize comforting illusions and preach lying sermons. They say ‘God says . . .’ when God hasn’t so much as breathed in their direction. … Aren’t your sermons tissues of lies, saying ‘God says . . .’ when I’ve done nothing of the kind? Therefore—and this is the Message of God, the Master, remember—I’m dead set against prophets who substitute illusions for visions and use sermons to tell lies. The fact is that they’ve lied to my people. They’ve said, ‘No problem; everything’s just fine,’ when things are not at all fine. …”

If that doesn’t put some fear into you, I don’t know what does.

I write about God, my faith, and even teach a bit when asked. There are all kinds of passages warning people who teach about the extra burden put on them, but these two – the reaction of God at the end of Job and God’s reaction in Ezekiel – really hit me. Because the truth is, I have talked about God my whole life, and I know that things I taught and believed to be true about God 15, 20, 30 years ago were not the complete story. It was how I understood God at that time. In some cases, maybe I was even wrong! I am afraid I’ll have to answer for not telling the truth about God, even if I meant well (as I believe Job’s friends meant well).

So how do we know about God?

Now we get to the point.

We hear a lot of people claim to speak for God, to say they know what He wants from us. I have heard some people even claim to have a “new revelation” from God.

How do we test what these people say to know if it’s true?

By comparing it to what God says.

The primary way we get to understand God is by reading the Bible. God’s Word. Holy Scripture. As Luther would say, “Sola scriptura,” which means that Scripture alone is authoritative for the faith and practice of the Christian. The Bible is complete, authoritative, and true.

I’m talking about is just reading. Not with the intent of finding support for what you believe. Just letting the words seep into your brain, your heart, your soul. It’s reading with a purpose – not to make ourselves smarter, but to know God better.

Jesus, in Matthew 22:37-38, said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.”

All your heart, soul and mind, which is pretty thorough. And as we have seen in Job and Ezekiel, wrong thoughts about God produce wrong belief about God. You can’t really love what you don’t really know.

Paul writes in Philippians 1, “It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” Love “abounds” with knowledge and discernment.

Paul, again, in 2 Corinthians 3:18, “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

We become what we behold. When I was a kid, I wanted to be like the characters John Wayne played in the movies. I watched and studied them and tried to walk and talk like John Wayne (which conjures up a pretty funny image, I know).

Likewise, when we read and study God’s Word, we find it transforms us. We start to see things from a different perspective. We view people and the world around us differently. We aren’t looking for justification for what we think as much as we get a better idea of what God thinks. And we discover that better person that reflects the image of God that resides in us. We start to actually look more like Christ! (Paul even says we should be “imitators” of Christ in Ephesians 5).

Paul, in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, writes, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

Most of us want to do “good works.” When you’re young, in particular, sometimes it feels like making the world a better place to live is more important than having a career. Many people honestly desire to do something for God. But what Paul said seems clear: you can’t be equipped to really do good work until you are immersed in the word of God.

The Bible shows us God’s priorities, His values, His mission, His heart. It shows us what he has been doing in the world, and what He is doing. It shows us, as one writer said, how to love “the forgotten and the misfit. It shows us the value of shepherding our families. It introduces us to the generosity of other Christians (2 Corinthians 8:1–7) and calls us to be openhanded with what God gives us. It heralds the sanctity of every human life and inspires us to fight for the unborn. It declares that race should not be a barrier to Christian unity, but a beautiful occasion for it.”

But along the way, we must know how to speak correctly about God. And that only comes from knowing God’s Word.

When I find myself in those times when I struggle with prayer or reading Scripture, I know down in my soul that I must continue.

It’s like talking to my wife – sometimes I have to stay with the communication process even when it seems we’re on totally different levels. And eventually, because of our commitment, we get back on the same page.

I like the way John Piper put it when addressing the loss of joy in your relationship with God: “… I am reminding you (1) that God is present in the darkness, (2) that he is holding on to his people when they feel barely able to hold on to him, and (3) that though you may feel unsure of your salvation in this struggle, you may be totally sure you will not have salvation if you give up the struggle and walk away.”

It’s much easier to have a relationship with God when you have His Word to hear from Him. It’s much more difficult to grow in your relationship with God without reading the Bible.

The good news (quite literally) is that we do indeed have access to the Bible - and, therefore, to being able to speak truthfully about God.

Is God Speaking?

 “God has something He wants me to tell you.”

I was in a restaurant with a friend, a college basketball coach. We were talking about working together on a business opportunity involving – what else? – sports and had been hashing through some details and how we could make it happen and so forth.

A man neither of us knew, and who didn’t know us, walked up and said, “I’ve been sitting over there, and I just want you to know God has something He wants me to tell you. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but God has told me that you will be successful in this.”

Now, I must admit, any time someone – particularly someone I don’t know – comes up to me and tells me they have a message from God, my first reaction is, “Uh-oh.”

But also, if I’m honest, down deep I kind of hope he’s right.

Honestly, most of the time I hear people say something like, “God spoke to me” I’m suspicious and can’t help wondering if this person isn’t a bit of a nut, particularly when I don’t know this person and they come up to me out of nowhere.

That’s not to say it can’t be truly a message from God. I am in no position to put parameters on how God works.

I do wonder about “hearing” from God.

I wonder what Jesus means when he says, according to John 14:21, “Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”

He will show Himself to them.

That concerns me. It would seem we have a legitimate right to say, “God, it says in the Bible that you will show yourself to me. So, show yourself!”

Of course, even as I write that, I’m aware of the times when God did indeed show himself, and the reaction was usually one of terror or utter humility. I think of Job (those of you who know me would say “of course!”), who was so full of indignation over what God has allowed to happen to him that he demanded to speak to God, and then when God showed up, Job was so awed he could only say, “Forgive me. I don’t know what I was thinking. Shut my mouth.” (Or words to that effect).

But we also know that God does reveal himself to humanity, in many ways.

One is through His Creation. Psalms 19 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech; they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.” And in Romans, Paul writes, “They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So, they have no excuse for not knowing God” (Romans 1:19-20).

The very fact that you hear people say, “If only God would show up and talk to me’’ indicates a desire to know God – which the Bible says God’s message has been implanted in our hearts -maybe like an innate sense of right and wrong - even before we hear the Gospel message. “Even Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it. They demonstrate that God’s law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right” (Romans 2:14–15).

Which leads us to what we call The Bible, what most Christians believe to be the inspired Word of God. God has had a desire to reveal Himself through the written word from the time of Moses, whom He commanded to write down what He was doing in order that these things would be remembered. Jesus said (in John again – 5:39), “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me …” Of course the Scriptures Jesus referred to were what we call the Old Testament, but I believe the New Testament qualifies now as well.

The ultimate communication is through The Word, Jesus - the living, breathing, flesh-and-blood, human presentation of God, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Or as Paul told the Colossians, “Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation.”

Still, like the prophet Isaiah, sometimes I think, “Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down,” (Isaiah 59:1). You know – “God, I know you’re up there. Show yourself!”

And yet …

I think about the times I’m feeling sorry for myself and someone from church “just happens” to call and say, “I was just thinking we haven’t gotten together in a while. Let’s go to lunch.”

Or the times I have been worried about something, and when I turn on the radio it “just happens” to be to a station playing Christian music and the song is something that “just happens” to cause me to be reminded of God’s care for me.

Or when I was wondering if my life has meant anything to anyone, and I “just happen” to get a note, out of the blue, that “just happens” to say something like, “Just wanted you to know that that thing you said all those years ago I have written down and keep on a card over my desk and read it every day.”

Maybe you meet someone for the first time and they say something totally unexpected that is the exact thing you needed to hear … or you walk outside consumed with thoughts on one thing and hear a laugh or a voice or the wind blowing through trees and it just takes you to another place and suddenly your mood changes.

You know those things that happen, those “just happens” happenings, coincidences.

Recently I was talking to a guy who told me that he was having to make a business decision and wanted some advice and his mind when to an older man whom he had not spoken with in years but was such a mentor to him when he was starting out. His phone rang, and as the conversation went on, the caller said, “Uh, I’m having lunch with so-and-so tomorrow,” and “so-and-so” just happened to be the older man my friend was thinking of. My friend said, “Can you see if he remembers me, and if I could talk to him?” And the next afternoon, he was talking to this man he hadn’t spoken to in over a decade. Exactly what he needed, at exactly the right time. Who would have imagined?

It’s night and you’re bogged down doing something like your taxes and your little girl runs in to throw her arms around you and say, “Daddy, I love you.” It changes everything for you.

I have a sneaky suspicion that God is talking to us all the time, but we’re just not as tuned in as we need to be to hear. It’s like the Old Testament book of Esther, where events just scream “God is working!” yet God is never mentioned, once, throughout the entire story.

And there have been times when something pops into my brain that I have no idea where that thought came from. I don’t want to sound mystical, but I have had moments where I’m thinking something and another thought – sometimes corrective, sometimes just a better way of thinking – comes through so loud and clear it’s as if someone else has spoken to me. There have been times in discussing something with someone, I hear myself saying something that is exactly the right thing and afterward I think, “Where did that come from? How did I come up with that? That’s not what I was thinking at all.” I’ve felt compelled to share a verse of Scripture with someone and not known exactly why (which is as close as I’ve ever come to saying, “God gave me a message for you;” It’s always a verse though, never a direct “message” per se).

There have been unexplainable moments like a voice or, at the very least, a thought that I honestly wonder where it came from.

What if God is showing Himself to us every day, speaking to us, and we just don’t see or hear?

By the way – that man who came up and at that restaurant and told my friend and I that what God had told him that what we were planning was going to be successful? It never happened. It never got past that lunch discussion.

That’s not to say it couldn’t happen.

But what is clear to me is, God is speaking. We just need to learn how to listen.