How Difficult is it to Become a Christian?

Is becoming a Christian just a matter of raising one’s hand or going forward at a massed rally? These are useful devices to help seekers after God to declare themselves, and there are many Christians who made their initial response by one of these signals.

But, such gestures may turn out to be impulsive responses without a true inner spiritual renewal that begins the transformed life.

The question — when is it real and when is it not? — surfaced in my mind as I read Charles Wesley’s journal leading up to his evangelical conversion on Pentecost Sunday, May 21, 1738. In that event, he moved from being an earnest, clergyman to becoming a transformed believer in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.

As mentioned last week, Moravian Peter Bohler had come into Charles Wesley’s life when he was seriously ill with excruciating pleurisy. Bohler asked him that searching question: What is your hope of salvation? At first, Charles was offended by the question. It pricked his pride. But later he confessed to Bohler that unbelief was in his heart.

Into the picture came Mr. Bray. Charles moved from Oxford to London, still a sick man, and stayed in the home of Bray, whom he calls, “a poor ignorant mechanic who knows nothing but Christ, yet by knowing him, knows and discerns all things.” He was carried to Bray’s home in a chair.

His journaling during this period shows that his desire for saving faith sometimes melts him to tears. He becomes unabashedly open about his lack of faith and he was generally miserable in being without Christ.

What he is experiencing was like the breaking up of a fully formed life to be supplanted by the beginnings of a new life.

The goal became clear for, on Sunday, May 14, 1738, he writes, “I longed to find Christ, that I might show him to all mankind; that I might praise; that I might love him.”

Then, entered Mrs. Turner, Mr. Bray’s sister. She was also a devout and humble follower to whom Christ was very real. On May 19th Charles notes that in the evening, “she came and told me, I should not rise from that bed till I believed.” In the midst of all this he was still a sick man, attended by the doctors.

Then came May 21, 1738, Pentecost Sunday.

At nine in the morning his brother, John, and some friends came by and sang a hymn to the Holy Spirit. They left in about half an hour. Charles prayed a prayer to Jesus inviting him to take up residence in him in a living way. Then he composed himself to sleep.

But, someone entered his room and commanded, “In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, arise, and believe, and thou shalt be healed of all thy infirmities.”

He wrote, “The words struck me to the heart.”

In his journal he notes that he felt “a strange palpitation of heart. “I said, yet feared to say, ‘I believe, I believe!’”

Mrs. Turner returned again and confessed, “It was I, a weak, sinful creature (who) spoke; but the words were Christ’s: he commanded me to say them, and so constrained me that I could not forbear.”

In this awakening process there was one final struggle for Charles Wesley. He writes, “Still I felt a violent opposition and reluctance to believe; yet still the Spirit of God strove with my own, and the evil spirit till by degrees he chased away the darkness of my unbelief. I found myself convinced, I knew not how, nor when; and immediately fell to intercession.”

Not all such conversions to Christ are so drawn out and dramatic. And no two conversions are alike. But real ones all have the same two ingredients: a radical turning of the heart from self to Christ which may involve time and struggle, plus a Spirit-prompted faith in Jesus Christ. This very much resembles a new birth. The Apostle Paul refers to its ingredients as “repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.”

If there is any question about the authenticity of Charles Wesley’s evangelical conversion, read his hymns in the hymn book. They throb with confidence in the fullness of God’s redemption and the Lordship of Jesus Christ as Savior and coming King. This kind of general awakening is the foremost need of the modern church.

Good News/Bad News: It’s No Joke

Good news/bad news jokes have a way of popping up unexpectedly and adding a touch of lightness to our lives. Like this one:

The pastor reports on Sunday morning that the news is both good and bad. Then he tells his flock:

“The wind blew shingles off the roof last night, and the choir room is drenched.

“The good news is that we have the money to repair the damage.”

“However, the bad news is that the money is in your pockets.”

Stories like this may bring a chuckle, but they also reflect the way life often unfolds. Good news and bad news seem to descend on us, often nearly at the same time.

This thought came to me when I read a recent interview with Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback church in California. Not long ago he made news over his runaway best seller, The Purpose-Driven Life. The book had brought him fame and great wealth almost overnight. Great! Wonderful news!

But he is now in the news again, this time because his wife, Kay, is dying from an incurable cancer. After much prayer, the two have come to terms with what they are facing.

In his interview about this he says, “Life is a series of problems: either you are in one now, or you’re just coming out of one, or you’re getting ready to go into another one.” He also says, “I believe that [life] is kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and that at all times you have something good and something bad in your life.”

In saying this, Pastor Warren speaks from poignant experience. One day brings surprising news of great wealth to the family; the next brings notice of a great oncoming loss to the family. Both good and bad news come upon him on the parallel rails of life.

Can we draw lessons from this metaphor on how we should live? We are enabled to face both good and bad that come so startlingly close together with a measure of equilibrium when we see our lives in the context of eternity.

Rick Warren points this out when he says, “In a nutshell, life is preparation for eternity….This [brief life] is the warm-up act -– the dress rehearsal. God wants us to practice on earth what we will do forever in eternity” — which is to let nothing dim our view of him in all his glory.

This is in complete agreement with what the Apostle Peter teaches Christians who apparently had been routed from their homes and “scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bythinia” (1 Peter 1:1).

We are born again “into a living hope,” he writes (1Peter 1:3). We have “an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade – kept in heaven for you” (1 Peter 1:4). We know that “our salvation will be fully revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:5). All this is a treasure trove and will sustain us even while we “may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials” (1 Peter 1:6).

When the bad news comes, we also have God’s word through Paul: “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor. 4:17-18).

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Marriage and Money

On June 9, 1947, When Kathleen and I agreed to marry, we hadn’t even talked about money. There really wasn’t much of it to talk about. She would be leaving a teaching position that paid $100 a month and I was a student and part time staff at Lorne Park College near Toronto.

For us, it was not love at first sight – but close. We both seemed to know from the beginning that we were meant for each other. We were committed Christians and had a strong sense of providence in the matter. But there were questions to be faced.

I had left high school at 16-years-of-age to attend and later graduate from Moose Jaw Bible College. Afterwards, I had traveled in Canada and parts of the Eastern United States as a singer and song leader. Now, as an adult I was doubling back to make up the deficit.

Because Kathleen knew that I was on my way to the ordained ministry she knew that if she married me there would be several years of post-secondary education ahead. There would be the completion of a college program and possibly three full years in seminary. Because she was from a family that valued education, in her mind she was prepared for that sacrifice.

Kathleen had begun a teaching career two years earlier at the age of 19. At that time, five years in high school and one year in Normal School were sufficient for her to begin to teach in the public school system. But back in the forties of the last century it was not so common for a wife to support her husband financially in school. When children came along the husband would have to be the sole bread winner.

So, there was the financial question to be answered: Where would the money come from to keep us afloat if I were in school through college and possibly through three years of seminary?

The question of how we would survive was not a big issue with me because I was adventuresome and entrepreneurial. I was increasingly getting modest financial returns for singing and speaking and I had sold books door-to-door. I was sure I could provide for both of us.

We married on December 20 of that year in the home of Kathleen’s brother-in-law and sister, Wes and Muriel Smith, in Niagara Falls, Ontario. It was a modest event. The day of elaborate twenty-to thirty-thousand-dollar weddings had not yet dawned.

There was also no pre-marital counsel for us except that one older minister took me aside and warned me grimly that “marriage isn’t all roses.” As I recall, counseling as an expected pastoral service to engaged couples came much later in the century. Back then, it was generally assumed that if two were getting married they were expected to know what they were doing.

In the first weeks of our marriage, I carried the money, as my father had done. He had a roll of bills in his left front pocket, held tightly together by an elastic band. I began our marriage taking the same responsibility for our cash.

But about two months into our marriage I became ill and was in bed for several days. Kathleen had to do the grocery and any other shopping on her own. During that period I discovered that she could make money stretch further than I.

In grocery shopping she was much more deliberate and selective; she was slower to decide on a purchase; she compared costs. In a word, I learned that she was a shrewd shopper. Money restraints in her family while she was growing up — though in many respects unpleasant and confining — had been disciplines to train her for life.

That revelation set us on a new course. We decided that she would take over the primary money management, which she continued to do throughout my years of active ministry. For example, in the early months of our marriage she set -– and adhered to — a grocery budget of $7.00 a week for many months. Only after I retired did it fall back on me to participate significantly in the keeping of our finances.

What were the circumstances I referred to that had trained Kathleen for this responsibility? She and her six siblings had been raised by a widowed mother on very limited means.

In 1933 her father had died unexpectedly after a surgical procedure. She was seven-years-old at the time. The oldest of the seven children was 13 and the youngest three months from birth. Their Saskatchewan farm was heavily mortgaged and that year the Great Depression dipped to its severest level. They were a family in crisis.

After one year her mother moved the seven children to Niagara Falls, Ontario, to come under the care of an unmarried brother, Uncle Oswald. Three years later when he died of cancer, she moved the family to a more modest dwelling across town and continued to raise this family on a widow’s pension of $60 a month.

The house where I visited Kathleen during our courtship was small for eight people but always well-kept and appealing. Though poverty was real, I detected no sense of it there. That is probably where I learned that poverty is first of all a state of mind.

Growing up, the financial limitations had made Kathleen resourceful. There was no money to buy clothes off the rack so Kathleen learned to make her own. She also made clothes for her mother and three sisters. If a room needed to be painted or papered there was no money for professionals so she and an older brother tackled the job, learning as they went. When she was 13 she began to baby sit, and on Saturdays to scrub and wax floors for a wealthy family across town.

Later, in her teens, one summer she worked on a production line for canning peaches and another summer for assembling batteries. This money she saved to finance her upcoming one year of Normal School. Her masterful skill in stretching what a dollar would buy was just what we needed when we married.

So we launched our shared lifetime together. She was supportive of me as I studied to prepare for a life of ministry. We welcomed four children into our union, Carolyn (the teacher), Don (the editor and publisher), Robert (the doctor) and John David (our severely retarded son).

We happily provided what the children needed. There were piano lessons for all three and a flute for one and a French horn for another. We settled their squabbles and held before them high standards of achievement. In the process we made our parenting mistakes for which the children freely forgave us.

After our first three-and-a-half years, we left Lorne Park College, and during our two years at Greenville College I began going out weekends as a singer and speaker. Then, during three years at Asbury Seminary I served a student pastorate in the north end of Lexington. The denomination covered the cost of seminary tuition.

We closed out the eight years of educational effort and left Kentucky for our first full time assignment in Western Canada — with no debt! This was partly due to my additional summer experiences here and there as a youth speaker and partly due to Kathleen’s skillful management of finances.

Along the way, the denomination taught us well that money is a trust from God and must be managed accordingly. It’s called stewardship. Kathleen and I, in spite of our sparse income, tithed the first money we owned jointly, setting aside ten percent for the Lord’s work. That wasn’t always easy. And several times across the years Kathleen has reminded me that she tried to treat the remainder of our funds with care because she remembered that they came from the the Lord’s people and in some cases were from sacrificial giving.

After 62 years together, we believe that one of the most unnoticed but important challenges of pastoral ministry is that of managing money to the glory of God. Because we took the challenge seriously, we are comfortable in our retirement. But how well we have done this will only be disclosed when we “all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good of bad” (2 Cor.5:10).

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The Saving of a Prodigal Spender

When I was 14, my friend, Basil, and I went to work after school for my older brother, Wilf, in his Red and White grocery store. It was 1939 and the store was on Main Street in Estevan, Saskatchewan.

We ran errands, removed sprouting potatoes from bins, filled phone-in grocery orders, and did whatever other chores we were assigned. But mostly, we weighed and bagged produce that came to the store in bulk.

That’s the way many products came from the wholesale warehouse: – sugar and potatoes in 100-pound sacks, candy in 45-pound boxes, and even peanut butter in large tubs.

Plastic had not yet made its appearance as an everyday part of life, so we weighed up candy in cellophane bags (8 -ounces, 12 -ounces, etc.) and sugar and potatoes and onions in paper sacks (3 -pounds, 5 -pounds, 10 -pounds, etc.).

We did this work in a narrow room at the back of the store. The room had a long counter along the back wall and scales, scoops, and sacks of various sizes. A window looked out on the alley.

Each Friday before we left our jobs my brother paid us each a one dollar bill, our first earned income. To me, in some primitive way, that bill represented power. It awakened in me a certain prodigality. It was mine to do with as I wanted. I usually knew in advance what it would buy.

One day after we had worked for several months Basil mentioned to me that in a drawer at home he had a roll of 35 one- dollar bills. He hadn’t spent one of them.

I met this news with silence. Did I feel jealousy or shame? Perhaps a mixture of the two. At the time, as I recall, I may at best have been able to produce four one dollar bills. It had never occurred to me that you didn’t have to spend money just because you had it.

My spendthrift ways may have been my undoing if they had carried over into my adult life. But there were counter-influences that resisted my prodigality, sometimes carrying considerable weight, and by the time I was of age I had learned to use money with more care and restraint.

I write about those influences now, starting with my parents. Josiah and Esther Jane Bastian.

My parents were immigrants to Western Canada shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. They were perhaps 20 years of age and had married in the little coal mining village of Stubbshaw Cross, Lancashire, England. My father knew that coal mining there as a lifetime job held little promise. At the same time, he and Esther Jane were drawn by the call of Canada and the offer of a free homestead in the west.

My father first mined coal at Roche Percee in southeastern Saskatchewan. Coal mining was all he had known since at 13-years-of-age he had gone into the mines with his father at Stubbshaw Cross.

After a period of time, the young couple located on their homestead in a shallow valley three miles south of Estevan. Long Creek ran through the property and they intended to raise vegetables for the market in the homestead’s rich soil.

But that alone would not have provided a survival income, so my father sold Watkin’s Products door-to-door. Some evenings to end the day he took a coal car or two of coal from the mine in the side of a hill on the property. In the new world they had had to make a life for themselves and the oncoming family from the ground up.

By all accounts it was a bone-wearying life from dawn to dusk, but they were energetic people. They were bent on “getting ahead.” and frugality was not only a necessity, it was a major strategy.

They were 42 when I was born. By the time I and a younger sister had grown to adolescence as almost a second family, they had lived through most of the Great Depression –1929-1939. I remember well the care they took with their resources, and their sparing ways that weren’t always understood or appreciated by growing children. Yet their consistency must have made inroads into my wanton tendencies, and that is benefiting me to this very day.

Although it is 43 years since their deaths and 70 years since I was 14, I still recall the nuggets of wisdom regarding money they dropped along the way. And although we were a Christian family with daily Bible reading in the home, and although Christian influences had their effect upon our home life in other ways, their teachings about money management seemed to come from another source: the sayings of Benjamin Franklin.

“A penny saved is a penny earned.” “Look after the pennies and the dollars will look after themselves.” Such sayings were repeated often enough to leave an indelible mark on the memory of a growing child. I recall that my father dropped the word with me that we should always “put a little aside for a rainy day.” I believe that comes from Ben Franklin, too. Putting a little aside for a rainy day is apparently what my parents were trying to do.

My father also chided me once when I had a dollar I was eager to spend. “That money will burn a hole in your pocket,” he said. Such little nuggets of wisdom have a way of lodging not only in the memory but in the psyche as well.

But I ponder, where and how did my parents get their ammunition from Ben Franklin, the American patriot and contributing founder of a nation? He was eighteenth century; my parents were twentieth century. He was an American colonist; they were English immigrants to Canada.

They were not wide-ranging readers but Franklin’s proverbs, analogies and aphorisms, had been published faithfully each year from 1732 to 1758 in what Franklin called Poor Richard’s Almanack. And those pithy and wise sayings had apparently saturated the English-speaking world, to make our family one of Franklin’s distant beneficiaries.

Apparently parental influences skilfully lodged do have a way of sticking — for better or for worse — and as I reflect on my first impulses toward prodigality on the issue of money management, and the influences that countered that prodigality, I am profoundly grateful to my parents and to Ben Franklin.

(I’ll continue this story in my next posting)

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Meditation for Good Health

Every day, it seems to me, I get messages from the media about what I must do to keep in the best of health. The advice has now been reduced to two points. I must (1) feed my body a proper diet – which means a broad daily spread of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and nuts, and modest portions of carbohydrates — and (2) exercise it vigorously from 30 to 60 minutes each day.

Our whole culture seems to have arrived at consensus on this. The words, “diet and exercise” have become a mantra. So, at our house we try to take the challenge seriously.

But what about that aspect of our beings which we call the soul or our spiritual natures? Man is formed by our Creator from the dust of the earth, the Scriptures tell us, but so are the lions and hippos. However, for us the Scriptures add, God breathed into that physical formation the breath of life and “man became a living soul.”

Consequently, it is not best to say: “I am a body and I have a soul,” as though our bodies are the more significant aspects of our beings and our souls are sort of attachments. It is better to say “I am a soul, and I have a body it inhabits.” In saying this I acknowledge that, as precious as our bodies are to God and to us, it is our indestructible spiritual natures that deserve our more careful attention.

So, how is that soul to be kept in health? I must (1) nourish it and (2) exercise it daily just as I do my body. With regard to nourishing it, here are words written by J. I. Packer in his book, Knowing God: “There can be no spiritual health without doctrine,” he writes. Doctrine means organized Christian teaching. So we must always be seeking to grow in Christian understanding.

After speaking to the nourishment side of things, Dr. Packer calls us to the exercise side by means of meditation. “Meditation,” he writes, “is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God.”

Meditation, like good dining, takes time. It’s often suggested that 30 minutes taken first thing in the morning is ideal. Just as the orchestra tunes its instruments before the concert, so it is better to take time for meditation at the outset of the day, rather than after the day’s concert has been played.

If we can’t make the early morning challenge work, then we must choose another time. A college student came to see me once who complained that she couldn’t make the early morning hour work because she still felt too drugged from sleep. I asked her how long she took for lunches. She was a very sociable person and replied that she usually took an-hour-and-a-half. I suggested she cut that time in half and slip away for a quiet time of Christian meditation as a daily practice. For all of us, as the saying goes, “Where there’s a will, there are twenty ways.”

Meditation usually works best when it is a time for refocusing on God, not our problems, and this can be done helpfully when we set ourselves to reflect on his attributes – that is, those revealed characteristics or features of God’s being through which with growing clarity we see who he is.

Any good Bible Dictionary will give you a list of most if not all God’s attributes. But for today, consider just one of them and take time to meditate on it. Consider the attribute, “omnipresence” – meaning our God is present everywhere.

What scripture will take us into the wonder of God’s omnipresence better than Psalm 139? This Majestic God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is familiar with all my activities (verse 3). He knows what I am about to say before I say it (verse 4). I was not hidden from his all-seeing eye even during my pre-birth existence (Verse 15). All this moves us to pray to be kept from any hidden wickedness, while at the same time being led in the ancient ways of righteousness (verses 23, 24).

In our culture we consider it important to keep on the move, so stopping to meditate may strike us as wasting time. We just want to plunge into the business of whatever we are doing – including even our praying. But, if we take time for meditation on this great truth of God’s omnipresence to nourish us, the result will be improved health for our souls, and channels will be opened for periods of effectual prayer!

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Is Meditation a Missing Ingredient?

In North America, Christianity as it is practiced tends to make little difference in people’s lives. There is too little evidence of holy living, and professing Christians often show the same symptoms of enslavement as the population at large: pornography addictions, addictions to over-spending, out-of-control anger, domestic violence, rudeness in primary relationships, and surprisingly high levels of divorce.

Explanations are offered. For example, a fog of skepticism, possibly engendered by the Enlightenment and the rise of science, is said to have hung over the western world for most of two centuries and this tends to choke out a robust faith. The allure of materialism is blamed, or the preoccupation with “stuff.” Even post-modernism with its denial of objective truth comes in for blame.

But believers in China can live out a triumphant faith in Christ while risking severe governmental punishment. Believers in Egypt can thrive knowing they may be roughed up or worse for their faith. Why can there not be an inner life in Christ in our western world that can liberate us from our addictions, sanctify our temperaments, and sustain real faith in a land of freedom and plenty?

In his book, Knowing God, J. I. Packer says there is an explanation. And the fact that this book has sold more than one million copies since it was first published in 1973 gives testimony that there are souls aplenty who want to know the key to that more abundant life.

His book sets forth a Calvinistic doctrine of God.* Packer writes, “There can be no spiritual health without doctrinal knowledge.” But his purpose is not merely to dispense doctrinal truth. His larger goal is to set forth Christian truth on this subject, making it a basis for meditation. It is to take the reader from knowing about God to actually knowing God.

“Meditation,” he writes, “is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God.”

Early on, the author explains how this is to be done: “We turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God.”

Meditation is done by Christians when they are alone, usually practicing it according to a plan and on a daily basis.

Is this a missing element in Western Christianity? Do Christians on a large scale make it a point to enrich their own experience with God every day? Do they set aside say 30 minutes or so each day to keep daily living in an eternal context? And in how many Christian homes are there family devotions that extend Sunday corporate worship to daily family worship? Furthermore, when believers come to worship on a Sunday, what spiritual energy do they bring with them?

I realize that some who come are like wounded warriors limping in from a hard-fought week. They come for renewal. Others whose faith is little more than an inherited tradition may not have much to bring. After all, a congregation is made up of people in all stages of Christian development.

But every congregation needs a core of believers who are inwardly energized daily by meditation, prayer, and praise, who bring the energy of the Spirit with them when they come to worship. This core may be found in the church board, or a Sunday School staff, or even among a number of fired-up young people, or seniors rich in faith – or all of the above. It’s this category of believers that needs to be expanded everywhere.

Years ago I read a curious story: In a sparsely-wooded area in Africa people walked from great distances to worship together on a Sunday morning. After the service it was their custom to light a large bonfire in the church yard, a sort of celebratory event. A visitor from North America witnessed this and asked how they could light such a fire when there was very little wood in the area. He was told, “All believers bring their own supply of wood with them, and that’s what makes the big fire possible.”

If we are twice-born believers, larger numbers of us need to commit or re-commit ourselves to the daily practice of meditation as a means of knowing God in personal and fresh ways. This would help greatly to deepen the faith of the church in the western world.

*I find great value in the book but I cannot square the author’s double predestination (P. 79) with the Golden Text of the Bible, John 3:16.

(Next week I’ll offer some simple suggestions for any who wish to give Christian meditation a bigger place in their lives.)

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Mending Fences

In 1956, when I was a young pastor in the Pacific Northwest Conference, the late Reverend C. W. Burbank was my conference superintendent. I had been appointed to the New Westminster church on the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, and Kathleen and I had crossed the continent from Kentucky immediately after my graduation from Asbury Seminary. Our personal belongings and four little children were packed into our turquoise colored Plymouth and a large spring-less trailer joggled along behind us every mile of the way.

Before Superintendent Burbank entered the ministry he was a logger. He had an outdoors ruggedness about him. He was not a seminary trained man; back then, seminary training for ministers was less common and more difficult to attain than now. Many pastors of earlier eras got whatever theological training they received by means of serious correspondence courses they were expected to wade through.

But he was an urgent preacher, well respected by his peers, and a man of down-to-earth common sense, something he learned or polished, as I understand, while in the logging business in the Okanagan Valley of Washington State.

During one of my first conversations with him he shared a bit of wisdom. He explained that some ministers are more skilled at mending their fences than others. He meant that when a misunderstanding or even an unintended interpersonal rift developed, such pastors seem to have a knack for restoring trusting relationships.

Others, he went on, leave the gap unaddressed and allow it to take on a certain permanence. If this happens with another family, and then another, Rev. Burbank explained, the misunderstandings accumulate sufficiently to destroy the trust of the congregation as a whole. A wall develops and the minister loses the trust of the congregation and he must move on.

Rev. Burbank didn’t say exactly how to recover healthy relationships. Nor did he mention what to do if a pastor’s efforts to keep fences mended are rejected. That is another aspect of the issue, and there are such situations. To take his counsel a step further, here are a couple more suggestions.

First, the greatest hindrance to correcting wounded relationships is pride – that dangerous quality within us that makes us tend to over-rate our worth or abilities. Pride is a point of vulnerability with all of us, Christian or not. When something is said or done from either side that injures our self esteem the rift is in danger of opening. Before repair can even be attempted pride must be acknowledged and brought to heel.

Second, once a rift happens, anger tends to follow and it invariably only clouds issues. So, no correction should be attempted until anger has been faced and dissipated. Most of us have learned this lesson by unhappy experience. In the face of breakdown of relationship and accompanying anger, only the indwelling Spirit of Christ can save us from further anger-prompted division.

Third, wise pastors will know that once in awhile, a relationship may grow cool or may even seem beyond repair. This may be due to disagreement on a particular issue. Or it may arise when a parishioner seems to have a fixed point of view about some circumstance. In these sorts of cases, when honest efforts have been made to restore relationship and fellowship—without success—ministers should labor on. As all pastors learn, in a busy growing pastorate there will be those who do not agree with the minister on issues. After honest efforts have been made to seek corrected and restored fellowship — without success — ministers should go on with their work diligently, all the while treating objectors with civility and grace. Only humility can keep the door open to the other person permanently. And it can only be hoped that the minister’s continued faithful service to the congregation will bear fruit and that eventually hearts will melt and be reconciled.

Ministers are much more likely to stay afloat in troubled waters and navigate through rocky relationships if they remember that their ultimate accountability for their efforts is to God. Their hope is that God may be pleased, since it is to him they will finally answer. Just remembering this makes them more careful to avoid missteps.

Mending fences is not only a challenge to ministers. Broken relationships are a universal peril in our fallen world. It would be hard to find someone of mature years who does not have a measure of pain over damaged relationships and even unresolved relationship issues at this point. So ministers and laymen alike need strength and grace help in the arduous task of living openly and charitably — insofar as possible — with all. Praying for increased sensitivity to the needs of others for Christ’s sake is the starting point.

Many years after our conversation, Rev. Burbank died in the pulpit while doing what he loved — preaching the gospel. I am just one of many who profited from his ministerial leadership and wise counsel. His insight regarding mending fences was a lifelong gift, not always exercised to the greatest effectiveness, but always treasured.

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How to Raise Your Happiness Levels

A lot of material that comes at me from the Internet gets a glance and then I press the delete button, but one recent item caught and held my attention.

It offered five ways to improve one’s happiness. These were not merely some psychologist’s suggestions, or points from some pastor’s “how to” sermon. They were strategies brought to light by recent research. That is, each point was backed up by information gained from studies involving large groupings of people.

Upon reading these five points, I saw immediately how fundamental they are to one’s being a happy Christian. Here they are, with my comments.

1. Be Grateful.

If one person in a wheel chair with crippling arthritis can be grateful for his blessings while another with a million dollars in the bank and a boat at the marina can find things to be grumpy about, that can only mean that gratefulness is a matter of “selective perception.” It has to do with what we choose to highlight in our living.

In one of his moments of worshipful exuberance King David exhorted himself to “Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” As an antidote to forgetting, he then listed several — forgiveness, health, rescue from disaster, God’s love and compassion, even the satisfaction of one’s holy desires and the renewal of one’s youth. Lest we forget, we all should make our lists from time to time.

2. Be Optimistic.

Perhaps our genes regulate in some measure how inclined we are to be either optimistic or pessimistic. And for this reason, some may never reach the levels of Browning’s maiden who sang, “God’s in his heavens, all’s right with the world.” Christians with biblical understandings are realists, so we know that all is not right with a fallen world. But faith in God’s sovereignty helps us face every day, saying “God’s in his heavens.” This is the basis for our unforced optimism.

3. Count Your Blessings.

When I was 13 year of age, on Sunday afternoons I sometimes attended a Salvation Army Sunday School a block from our home. The Salvationists sang exuberantly to the accompaniment of horns and tambourines, and sometimes they revised their choruses imaginatively. For example, the chorus, “Count your blessings, name them one by one” became, “Count your blessings, name them ton by ton.” Whether we measure our blessings by the tons or not, it’s good to take time daily to identify blessings that permeate our lives. They are beyond numbering, and reviewing them expands our happiness.

4. Use Your Strengths.

We all have both strengths and weaknesses. It is a simple principle of Christian effectiveness to build on our strengths while at the same time monitoring our weaknesses. I recall Alma, a Sunday School teacher assigned to teach a high school class. Her effort was a disaster. While she attempted to teach, the boys climbed in and out of a first floor classroom window and otherwise disrupted the class.

The wise Sunday School superintendent reassigned her to a small class of nine-year-old girls. It was an immediate fit. The class flourished and grew and Alma was happy with her assignment. She had a strength that matched the needs of those nine-year-olds. We do ourselves no favor if we fail to find and build upon our strengths.

5. Commit Acts of Kindness.

Paul’s advice to the Galatian church during a time of severe conflict can be a tip to us all. He wrote, “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers” (Gal. 6:10). Upon retiring from school teaching, Lila asked me for a list of shut-ins to whom she could take Sunday School papers each Monday. She developed a weekly ministry, even in some cases taking elderly folks to the store to do their grocery shopping. Happiness and service are close cousins.

We Christians know that happiness is not life’s primary goal. But we also know that when our spirits are joyful and our countenances bright our faith tends to be more contagious. So we’ll take all the help we can get to tone up our happiness.

Making Good Decisions and Sticking With Them

Our grandson, Zachary, has just finished his first semester of medical school. Recently he told me of a talk a doctor had given to a meeting of the Christian Medical Fellowship he attended. It was instructions for making good decisions.

Decisions are a key function of being human. We make them every hour of our day. There are mostly inconsequential decisions like: What shall I wear today? Or moderately consequential ones like: Shall I study or send a text message? And there are major, history-making decisions like: Is this the time to propose marriage?

Some decisions are morally-neutral like: Shall I wash the car today? And some are morally-fringed like: Shall I do business with that person, when I’m not sure of her honesty? And some decisions are morally saturated to the core like: When I discover that the cashier accidentally gave me two five dollar bills stuck together in my change, shall I return one of them or keep them both?

What you’ve read so far is my elaboration of my grandson’s report. What impressed him about the doctor’s talk was his outline and its common sense. The doctor apparently set forth two reference points that should be reckoned with when we are making important, life-shaping decisions. They are “righteousness” and “wisdom.”

As I understand it, the doctor’s point was that righteousness is fixed. The standards are given to us in the Scriptures. The commandments of God give us solid reference points about life and we are sure to make good decisions only if we act in sync with them. For example, we are to have no other gods, to reverence God’s name; we are not to steal or bear false witness, etc. Issues like these are not negotiable.

On the other hand, according to the doctor, wisdom is the application of common sense in accordance with our understanding of righteousness. We apply the two together to the specific decisions we must make. Wisdom helps us to choose our friends wisely. It saves us from becoming entangled with substance abuse. It aids us in making vocational moves. It allows us to maintain our commitments to righteousness while we wrestle with the uncertainties of life. We don’t lose our solid footing while we choose.

The point the doctor made that seemed most helpful to Zach – and would have been most helpful to me — was that when we take righteousness seriously in our deliberations but must go ahead and make a decisions for which there’s not a clear chapter-and-verse to guide us, we can go forward without fear.

And when we go ahead with the best wisdom at our disposal we are saved from the paralysis of second-guessing ourselves. We believe that the Good Lord can take our decisions and bless their outcomes because we have used the best resources at our disposal. Those resources are righteousness to which we are clearly committed and wisdom for which we earnestly pray (James 1:5).

A Conversation In a Wal-Mart Check-Out Line

Kathleen and I were standing in the twenty-items-or-less check-out line at Wal-Marts. We were there to pay for a couple of items of groceries before going on to our place of residence.

The line was long, snaking its way back and forth from the four cashiers who were checking customers through.

Kathleen whispered to me, “Look at that man up ahead eating grapes out of his bag before they’re weighed.” The man was making a snack of it.

A woman ahead of us overheard Kathleen’s comment. She too had seen the man snacking as he waited. She turned and said, “I suppose you’d call that stealing.”

Then she added, “Maybe stealing doesn’t matter for an older person in the way it might for someone younger with a fresher conscience.” But, after a pause, she corrected, “You’d think it would matter more because he’s closer to the judgment.”

It was an unexpected comment. And it identified her immediately as someone whose thinking was shaped by Christian truth.

We were total strangers, but we shared the conviction that our conduct in this life, whether good or bad, will come under judgment in the life to come (Rev. 20: 11-15).

Even hundreds of years before Christ, the Preacher wrote, “God will bring to judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time for every deed” (Ecc. 3:17).

Not all Christians think that way. There’s an idea afloat that the death Christ died on our behalf at Calvary gives us a complete pass as to any final judgment. And in one sense that is indeed true (Rom. 5:9,10). By faith we are justified — that is cleared of the penalty for our sins — because Christ has paid that penalty for us.

But there is another truth that goes with it. The Apostle Paul made this further point to a young congregation in the city of Corinth, a metropolis that was notorious for its moral looseness. He reminded young Christians there that, “… we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Cor. 5:9). His “all” includes believers.

If we take his words to heart, they mean that, although we are justified, we will nevertheless be judged for the quality of life we have lived as Christians. That is one of several reasons why Christians take the commandment against stealing seriously. And the issue turns out to be about more than a handful or two of grapes.

Think of some of the ways stealing can be a way of life. Fudging on taxes, failing to pay legitimate debts, not returning library books, stealing grades in school. The list could get long. It’s a much larger issue than a mere handful or two of grapes belonging to a large corporation.

On this matter, even the Apostle Paul did not absolve himself. He said in his defence before the Roman Governor Felix in Caesarea that at the end of time he believed there would be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked. “So” he went on, “I strive always to keep my conscience clear before God and man” (Acts 24:16).

Our brief conversation with a stranger in the WalMart check-out line was good for us. It made us freshen our thinking on the relationship between believing in Christ and behaving as Christians.