A story...

An 80 year old man was sitting on the sofa in his house along with his 45 years old highly educated son. Suddenly a crow perched on their window.

The Father asked his Son, “What is this?”
The Son replied “It is a crow”.
After a few minutes, the Father asked his Son the 2nd time, “What is this?”
The Son said “Father, I have just now told you “It’s a crow”.
After a little while, the old Father again asked his Son the 3rd time,
What is this?”

At this time some expression of irritation was felt in the Son’s tone when he said to his Father with a rebuff. “It’s a crow, a crow”.
A little after, the Father again asked his Son the 4th time, “What is this?”

This time the Son shouted at his Father, “Why do you keep asking me the same question again and again, although I have told you so many times ‘IT IS A CROW’. Are you not able to understand this?”

A little later the Father went to his room and came back with an old tattered diary, which he had maintained since his Son was born. On opening a page, he asked his Son to read that page. When the son read it, the following words were written in the diary :-

“Today my little son aged three was sitting with me on the sofa, when a crow was sitting on the window. My Son asked me 23 times what it was, and I replied to him all 23 times that it was a Crow. I hugged him lovingly each time he asked me the same question again and again for 23 times. I did not at all feel irritated I rather felt affection for my innocent child”.

Life's toughest questions

People to people ministries recently conducted a survey among its broadcast listeners about the life's toughest questions. They have received hundreds of questions (I have included the top 10 here) and now answering the top ten on the radio everyday.

1. What is salvation and how can I know with full assurance that I'm saved?
2. After I've come to Jesus, why do I still sin?
3. In light of all the end-times verses in the Bible, how can I not be afraid of the future?
4. How do I love my husband / wife / kids more? How do I raise my children?
5. How do I find a good church?
6. Why do I feel the way I do, and how do I deal with my emotions?
7. How can I really know that I'm forgiven, and how do I forgive someone who has hurt me so badly?
8. What is God's will for my life?
9. What is the purpose of the 10 Commandments?
10. Can I really believe the Bible is true?

As you can see the No. 1 in the list is about the assurance of salvation. I am not quite surprised to see this because of the vast teachings going on in Christendom about the performance based holiness. This is one thing that I have struggled a lot in my Christian life. While I have been under the teaching of 'confessing yours sins keeps you saved', 'God is happy with you as long as you keep yourself holy', 'when you sin you go out of fellowship with God' etc, I was under tremendous pressure to 'keep up'. It was a miserable life as I was trying to live the life only Christ can live. God, by His grace revealed to me why the life he gives us is eternal not temporary. It is because of the eternal consequence of His cross. He took away ALL the sins on the cross and cried out it is finished. And when He said 'it is finished', he meant it. He finished the purpose of His incarnation. What was His purpose? John the Baptist told us what Messiah's purpose was when he introduced Him to us by saying, 'Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!'

The wages of sin is death; it is not going out of fellowship or being afflicted with sickness etc. While I was dead in my transgressions (enemy of God) he died for me and took all my sins away. He didn't 'cover' it, He took it away from the eyes of God, never to see them again. I can either believe Him or reject Him by trying to obtain forgiveness by my good works, confessions etc. Why my salvation is eternal? The only thing which can cause spiritual death (losing salvation) is sin and it is an impossibility that sin can cause my spiritual death because He eternally dealt with it on the cross once and for all. There is not even a single sin which he didn't take away at the cross. He left absolutely nothing for me to confess in order to obtain forgiveness. Who am I to think that my confession can obtain forgiveness when Bible says, 'without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness'?

There is absolutely no condemnation for those who are in Christ.

I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Apologetics and me

I have had a great interest in Apologetics in the early days of my Christian life. At some point, I wanted to be an Apologist myself. Many great apologists attracted me such as Hank Hanegraaff, Ravi Zacharia, and Matt of carm.org. I think I have read pretty much everything on carm.org. It helped me to understand different cults, bad theologies etc. I have to admit that my primary intention of learning these stuff was to use my knowledge to bash others who belong to such groups and to win the argument with others who don't believe what I believe(Wrong motive!).

Later, I learned something the FBI does to identify counterfeit dollar currencies. They won’t spend time studying all the counterfeits in the world, but they study the real currency thoroughly so that the moment they see a counterfeit they can easily identify that it is a fake. There are always going to be new counterfeits, new cults, new theologies, new philosophies etc. The trick to identify the ‘the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming’ is knowing the real thing.

I gained a lot of knowledge and I think I was more of a student of religion than the follower of Jesus.

There is this verse in 2 Thimothy 3:

always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.

Or in another translation it says,

always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth

That was me! I wouldn’t say the knowledge did not help at all. In fact it did help a great way but I did not come (arrive) to the knowledge of truth. I didn't come to a conclusion. I was still in the 'seeking' mode.

I Corinthians 2:9-10 says,

However, as it is written:
"No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him"

I have seen people stop that verse there and use it to make points such as ‘it is impossible to know the things of God’. But the verse continues as follows,

but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.

I think every ‘but’ in the scripture comes with some kind of surprise. BUT God has revealed it to us by His Spirit. From my life experience, I would be able to boldly say that UNLESS it is revealed to us by His Spirit, all our knowledge stays in our head. When the Spirit start to reveal the things of God, the ‘head’ slowly goes out of the picture and heart comes in to the picture.

One of the questions I always struggle with is, what is the point in sharing the Gospel to a person who doesn’t even believe Bible is the word of God and Jesus is God or even doubt the existence of God. I have tried to use Apologetics, Scientific evidences of creation such as Newton's first law of thermodynamics, etc to convince such people but so far I haven’t seen anybody who has really convinced just by the logical reasoning based on these facts. I still value the genuine work some people do in this regard. I would highly recommend books like ‘More than a Carpenter’ to any skeptics. But the point is, UNLESS and UNTIL the Spirit reveals the truth they wouldn’t come to a conclusion of the reality of Christ's love and His salvation. The only 'problem' I see in those who come to believe in Jesus through Apologetics is that they believe because of the compulsion of their intelligence. If we think, it is pretty easy to rule out any possibilities of evolution, Big Bang etc with a little intellect, logic, history and science.

I think apologetics can be a starting point of any skeptic's faith journey but the true faith is beyond the intellectual capabilities of our finite mind. True faith (not just belief) sees the 'unseen' and start walking in that reality. They not only knows that the chair can hold them (belief) but they go and sit in the chair (faith). It is not enough to believe that Jesus is the way but there requires a response of faith which lead to us to resting (sitting in the chair). This is possible only when it is supernaturally revealed to us by the Spirit of God. I think it was Joel once said, the love and grace of God cannot be taught but it has to be caught. When it is revealed to us by God, we will catch it and it usually is a big 'AHA' moment; then as we start the journey, there will be a lot more 'AHA' moments. And thats where the fun starts!

A mind on earthly things

Living with a light attitude towards the 'earthly things' in this post modern competitive world is becoming an increasing struggle for me. The compulsion to be competitive is unavoidable in career, education, money etc. I think I am on a run all the time. Running from my bed in the morning to drop the kids at school, then running to the office, sitting in front of the computer 8 hrs, most of the time with the pressure building up in the head to meet certain deadlines. In the evening running back to pick my kids, running to home, rushing through many things including shower, dinner etc to get to the final point of the day – the bed. Next day continues the same journey. Week-ends are no different and in fact week-ends are much busier than week days. Is this a common phenomenon in this century? I feel like I am running to keep up with everyone else. If I drive 60 miles/hr on a 70 miles zone freeway, I feel like I am failing to keep up. On top of all these, the worries of a regular parent, giving good education to the kids, learning new skills to keep up with the competitive job industry, having enough money for the retirement...

I have relatives and friends who talk about money/business/career all the time. They read ‘how to become a millionaire’ while on vacation. They look down to us, if we don’t plan, save and invest smartly. And I am poor in all these, so I sometimes feel insecure for not having a great financial plan or a career goal.

On the other hand, sometimes I think I need to really slow down but don’t know how. It appears that there is not even a single thing I can take off from the list of things I do everyday. I really want to spend more time reading, thinking and writing.

Philippians 3 is one my favorite anti-legalistic chapters in the Bible. But when I read it yesterday I read the whole chapter and something stuck out to me towards the end of the chapter.
There Apostle Paul is making a statement such as ‘as I have often told you before and now say again even with tears’. I am not sure if there is any other passage among all the Pauline Epistles where he says something with tears in his eyes. That to me is a sign of great importance of the thing he is talking here. He is talking about the people who lives as the enemies of the cross of Christ whose god is their stomach and their mind is on earthly things. It brought a shiver to my body. Though a child of God, how much I think about the things of this world. How much I am concerned about my well being on this earth, which is destined to ‘pass away’. The psalmist reminds us of some thing about our life here which is worth remembering all the time:

As for man, his days are like grass,
he flourishes like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.

Going back to the passage in Philippians, Apostle Paul concludes that chapter like this:

But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

I wish I lived with Apostle Paul in first century. I need somebody to keep on reminding me this all the time. It is not that I want to run away from my responsibilities as a husband, parent or an employee, but I simply want to grow in the grace of God. And often times materialism comes on my way so I keep forgetting that my citizenship is in heaven and I can think more about the things above and of eternal value rather than temporary things on this temporary earth. I keep forgetting the Jesus who said, 'do not be anxious about tomorrow'. It is so easy to tell someone to 'live one day at a time', but it is so hard to do it. Unless I am constantly reminded about the love and grace of God, I will easily drift away from the things of God, to the things of the world. I want to encourage everybody to keep on writing their blogs to encourage each other because people like me desperately needs to be reminded all the time. I like what C.S. Lewis said: 'People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed'.