Hope for the Hopeless

Several years ago a lady in the church I was serving suggested to a young woman that she come and speak with me.  The young woman who came to my office that day was one of the most despondent individuals I have ever met.  She was in fact suicidal.  Unfortunately she left much as she came and soon disappeared from sight.  As I think about her today I can only pray that wherever she may be that life is very different than that day she idled into my office.

Among the reasons why I will never forget my meeting with this hopeless young woman was her name.  You guessed it!  Yes, her name was Hope.  Her name was Hope bur she was utterly hopeless.  Her name suggested a life spring of forward facing faith but alas she was plowing the dust with her chin.  The name her parents gave her seemed now only a cruel joke played on an unsuspecting child.  Hope was hopeless with no expectation that anything would ever be different.

My young friend is a parable of sorts.  Our planet is crowded with many a hopeless individual.  Some bear all the tell tale signs of deep depression.  The sagging eyes, drooped head, bowed posture, whispered tones and pale colors testify to hopelessness.   For most however one must be much more observant.  Heads held high, confident if not cocky voices, bold colors and fast paced lives mask a quiet but real hopelessness.  Eating away at the core of the soul like an ever growing family of termites is the gnawing question, “Is there anything more to life than this?”

Never forget that men in Brooks Brothers suits commit suicide as often as the forgotten souls on skid row.  And yes, ladies living in posh homes in tony neighborhoods end it all with a bottle of pills just like their counterparts in the trailer park or housing project.  Let’s face it – hopelessness is an equal opportunity offender stalking people in all walks of life.  Maybe you’ve been to that dreary country.  Maybe you’re there now.  Certainly you know those who wander aimlessly in the wasteland of weariness.

This rampant hopelessness gave birth to the motto for Union Baptist Church: “Where hearts and homes find hope!”  Hope is a magnet drawing the metal in the rich and poor, literate and illiterate, known and unknown to Christ and His church.  People are not looking for another set of rules and regulations nor do they need more places to be and deadlines to meet.  But hope – well, they’re searching passionately for that.  Hope is fresh bread for the famished and living water for the spiritually dehydrated.  Hold out hope and people will come!

Now when they come they come with all the attendant baggage of those who have no hope.  Hopeless folk have sexual bondages, beverage breath, too many pill bottles and a boat load of secrets but they also come in the more socially acceptable wrappings of materialism and self-centeredness.  Houses of hope quickly fill up with the hopeless and all their stuff!  Isn’t this what church is supposed to be?  “Where hearts and homes find hope!” – may it be more than a slogan here, now and forever!

The Couple that Prays Together

“The couple that prays together stays together.”  It’s a well know cliché to most of us but is it true?  Was it ever true?  Is it still true?  Can it ever be true?  The divorce rate in our nation has many of us wondering if anything can stem the tide of the tsunami of marital breakup in our land.  Our disillusionment is furthered by the numerous divorces within the churches across the fruited plain.  Are Christian couples just as much at risk for divorce as non-Christian couples?  Some would suggest so.

Three decades observing couples whose marriages withstand or fail to withstand the often fierce winds of contemporary culture has provided me some insight into the permanence and impermanence of marriage.  Like most of my readers I have witnessed the dissolution of the marriages of close friends; many of whom were actively involved in church.  Most of them continued to express strong, if not robust theological convictions throughout and after the divorce.  Quite a number of them continued to attend church with about the same frequency after the marriage ended as before.  Many report their spiritual activities to be similar to the time prior to the divorce.

I mention these spiritual and theological markers to highlight the fact that all of these things and more failed on occasion to preclude a divorce.  Each of these practices certainly increases the likelihood that a marriage will not end in divorce as an ever expanding body of evidence shows but in the end divorce manages to penetrate each of these veils.  (A number of these factors and studies are cited in a recent op/ed column by Glenn Stanton at http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=34656 ).

As a pastor for sometime in multiple states and cultures, I am surprised by two things when it comes to divorce.  I am shocked that more non-Christian marriages do not end in divorce and I am shocked even more that so many Christian marriages do end in divorce.  Perhaps the reader is asking if I am some sort of fatalist who does not believe that there is any reliable force to keep divorce away from your door.  Let me assure you I am no fatalist.  I am a man of faith.

In my years of experience, I have noted one predictor of marital permanence which significantly supersedes all others.  It is collapsed into a single line: “The couple that prays together stays together.”  I’m not omniscient and have done no elaborate longitudinal studies on the subject but I cannot never recall a couple who consistently prayed with each other coming to my office to discuss divorce.  While I have conducted no empirical studies on this subject others have.  (A recent study, “The Couple that Prays Together: Race and Ethnicity, Religion, and Relationship Quality among Working-Age Adults” can be found at http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/pdfs/coupleprays.pdf )

If, indeed, praying couples keep the preying claws of divorce away why then do so few Christian couples consistently pray together.  As a man who failed miserably in this regard for years, I think I can offer some clues.  For one most of us never saw it modeled growing up.  Two, men often feel more vulnerable when praying with their wife than they are accustomed to.  Poor scheduling and discipline would be a third problem.  And no doubt the sins we refuse to forfeit would be a major reason why we don’t pray alone or with our mate.

I can offer no wiser counsel to any couple than to begin to pray together if you do not and if you do, keep it up!

This article originally appeared in The Daily Press.

Peniel Preaching

Sermons should bear scars of the Savior’s surgery of our soul.  Paul humbly boasted, “I carry the marks of Jesus on my body” (Gal. 6: 17).  As every good New Testament student knows “marks” translates the Greek stigmata.  Most of us will probably never be body marked by wounds received in the service of Christ but at least our sermons can be.

The remarkable Scotsman, Robert Murray McCheyne opined, “The greatest need of my people is my personal holiness.”[i]  Paul instructed Timothy, “Be conscientious about yourself and your teaching; persevere in these things, for by doing this you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim. 4: 16).  If we take pains to know the message but overlook the messenger in the process we have made a fatal mistake.

The reality remains that one can only impart what he has experienced.  You cannot give away what you do not possess but you must give away what possesses you.  “What I live by I impart,” declared the transformed North African Bishop Augustine.[ii]  Character and communication are forever inextricably linked.  Sermonizing should be the outflow and the overflow of the inflow of what the Holy Spirit has accomplished in our life.

Like ancient Jacob we approach a text thinking our battle is with the men and women – or with a specific man or woman – to be seated before us.  In reality we face a more pressing foe – God Himself Who subdues us by His Word.  God waited patiently for twenty years to break Jacob and He waits with divinely determined mercy to break us.  Let us be done with the nonsense that we are preachers who require no such breaking!  Jacob was a patriarch of the promise and had experienced revelations we will only be exposed to in heaven and yet he needed breaking.  Such breaking is often required to confirm us in the truth we are called to proclaim.

Summing up Jacob’s nighttime struggle and surrender G. Campbell Morgan says:

            The story is indeed old, and yet ever new.  There are very few who have not in the course of the life of faith, spent a night of loneliness, in which they have risen through defeat into new power.  The crippling of such occasions are the crowning of men.  The limp of Jacob was a life-long disability, but it was the patent of his nobility.[iii]                                                                              

The story is told of a young man preparing to preach his first sermon.  He studied long and hard and arrived at the church swashbuckling style.  At the appointed time he rose with extreme confidence and almost defiantly strode to the pulpit but alas within moments his first sermon began to sound like a lot of other first sermons.  He got his points confused and his tongue tangled and shortly folded up his notes and walked sheepishly back to the front pew.  A wise, old, godly preacher who patiently watched the embarrassing ordeal caught him afterward and said, “If you had gone up to the pulpit the way you came down from the pulpit then you could have came down from the pulpit the way you went up to the pulpit!”

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[i] Quoted in Steven J. Lawson, The Ten How-to’s of Expository Preaching, The Tie, July 1997, 10.

[ii] Quoted in James S. Stewart, Heralds of God, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd. 1946; reprint  ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1972),  10.

[iii] G. Campbell Morgan, The Analyzed Bible: Genesis (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1911; reprint ed., Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1983),  199.